Gilded Needles (Valancourt 20th Century Classics) (28 page)

Chapter
42

After he had adjourned his court that unhappy Tuesday afternoon, Judge James Stallworth took a cab directly to the manse of the Madison Square Presbyterian Church. Here he was admitted by a professional mourner, whose long-practiced moroseness did not begin to rival that evinced by the judge himself.

The old man was shown directly into the parlor. The undertaker’s assistant went to the window and held back one of the draperies to provide grudging illumination to the dim chamber. The coffin sat pall-draped across mahogany trestles over the central rosette in the dusky carpet. The judge peered perfunctorily into it.

Though he had seen the dying and the dead many times before, Judge James Stallworth quickly withdrew his gaze from his grandson’s corpse. No man ever appeared less reposeful in his casket. Already the decay that had been retarded by the running spray of East River water in the Bellevue morgue had set in on Benjamin’s countenance. The drawing mouth and popping eyes strained at the sutures that barely held them closed. Benjamin’s neck was sadly shrunk inside his high collar so that now, more than ever before, his head resembled a white acorn-gourd mounted on a stick.

“I am Judge James Stallworth,” said the old man to the undertaker’s assistant, though without looking at him, “where is my son?”

“In his bedchamber, I am given to understand, sir,” murmured the assistant, and allowed the drapery to fall into place. “Mr. Duncan Phair is with him, I believe.”

Judge Stallworth stalked to the door manfully, but the glass knob rattled in his trembling grasp.

Upstairs, Edward Stallworth had been laid out, almost corpselike himself, in his bed. Sweat beaded around his scalp, and the pillow was damp beneath his burning cheek.

“Well,” said Judge Stallworth loudly, “what news then, Duncan? What news of all these troubles?”

“Father,” whispered Duncan anxiously, “come downstairs. We mustn’t speak before Edward.”

“Edward is past hope and past care, Duncan. I don’t believe it matters what is said before him now. Are Edwin and Edith yet found?”

“No. But come downstairs, Father. Edward is ill, Marian is sedated, Helen isn’t able to come. There’s no one but you and I to sit up with Benjamin. It must be done.”

Judge Stallworth made no further protest, but followed his son-in-law downstairs. Candles had been set at the head of the coffin, but Benjamin’s dead face was so ghastly and so fearful in the flickering light that Duncan drew the candelabrum away toward the front of the room. He placed it between two chairs, so that when he and the judge sat, the coffin was not visible behind them.

“Duncan,” said Judge Stallworth when the undertaker’s assistant had been dismissed, “I am as ill as Edward upstairs. These are dreadful calamities that have fallen upon us, one after the other. I have come to believe, as do you, that they are not unrelated.”

“No,” said Duncan, “I fear they are not.”

“I doubted for a while,” said the judge. “I doubted for as long as I could, but now I find myself burdened with certainty.”

“On the day that her daughter died on West Houston Street, Lena Shanks cursed our family,” said Duncan. “Three of hers were dead, she said—her husband Cornelius, Maggie Kizer, and her daughter Daisy, the abortionist. The Stallworths were responsible. She said that she’d see three of ours dead.”

“Benjamin is one,” said the judge, and glanced morosely behind him in the direction of his grandson’s casket. “And I fear that Edwin and Edith constitute the complement of that curse.”

“Oh,” cried Duncan, “we’re not certain of that!”

“Now there are three of us dead,” said Judge Stallworth ignoring Duncan’s interruptions. “Benjamin, Edwin, and Edith, three of my four grandchildren taken from me—and who can know if Helen will recover from her fever? Lena Shanks took her revenge on our three weakest—the two children and simple, silly Benjamin. Would that one of those poor victims had been you instead, Duncan!”

“Father!”

“Would that the guilty had taken the place of the innocent—for all of this must be your responsibility. It was your criminal connection with that harlot that—”

“It was you condemned Maggie to death!” protested Duncan. “And it was you hanged Black Lena’s husband, put her on the Island, attempted to take away her children! It was you—”

“Edwin and Edith are surely dead,” said Judge Stallworth in a voice that was slurred and awful. “Black Lena is now satisfied. She has murdered three Stallworths. We need no longer be concerned with her. The world may see our misery, but the world will never know that one of our number brought it upon us. I will not now institute a search for Black Lena Shanks, we will not inform the police of the identity of Benjamin’s murderer. We will allow the police to continue their search for Edwin and Edith, but we can allow ourselves no hope that they will be found.”

“Surely—” began Duncan.

“It’s a sorry pass that you’ve brought us to, Duncan! A sorry pass!”

The funeral and burial of Benjamin Stallworth was very possibly the sternest, quickest, and most secretive burial in New York in all of October
1882
. Even Maggie Kizer had been turned into her grave on Blackwell’s Island beneath the eyes of a minister, the two required witnesses, and a parcel of gravediggers from the men’s prison; a troop of squatters had watched Daisy Shanks slipped under the earth above Eightieth Street. At the bare ceremony in a bare corner of the Stallworth lot in Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn, it was only the cemetery chaplain, Judge Stallworth, and Duncan Phair who stood beside the coffin suspended on leather straps above the deep-dug grave. Cemetery gardeners had acted as pallbearers, and had gone away.

The judge wondered bitterly how short a time would pass before five more dollars would have to be expended to dig another hole within the charming cast-iron fence that demarcated the Stallworth plot in this garden of graves. Not very long, he concluded, and the only question was the name on the stone that would be raised above it.

The judge tossed a spoonful of earth across the top of the ebony coffin, flung the spoon into a dense shrubbery where the chaplain had to search half an hour before finding it again, and returned with Duncan to Gramercy Park.

Marian was worse. Her incoherencies had degenerated into ravings. The laudanum had only quieted them to an incessant, barely articulate murmur. At one moment she begged that Duncan be brought to her, and at the next she spoke harsh imprecations against Helen for having taken up with Mrs. General Taunton. In her mind, she readied the children for a walk in the park, and adjured Edwin against acrobatic displays. She feverishly addressed the ladies of the Committee for the Suppression of Urban Vice on the dangers of forged recommendations.

Judge Stallworth stood at the side of the bed and waited for Marian to recognize him. After several minutes her swollen red eyes, casting all about the room, at last lighted on him and she wailed, “Edwin! Edith! Edith!”

Marian Phair clawed at her father’s trouser legs with such violence that the cloth was shredded beneath her nails.

Rising instantly from her chair, the nurse clasped Marian’s hands—though the insane woman’s strength was wild—and crossed them forcibly upon her breast. With a shake of the red fringe of false hair that crossed her brow like a frieze, the nurse motioned for the judge to leave the room.

The judge found Amy Amyst across the hallway in Duncan’s bedchamber and questioned her concerning the nurse. Amy had only praise for the young woman. “She’s the only one”—here she hesitated to make a criticism of her mistress, but the judge nodded for her to continue—“the only one who can keep Mrs. Phair quiet. She’s the one gives her her food, and sees she don’t excite herself, and don’t hear nothing to cause her worry. She don’t leave that room no more than Mrs. Phair do. Sir, meaning no ill of Mrs. Phair, because of course now with all the trouble the whole family is under it’s no wonder she’s slid a little off her beam, but we were nearly all driven out of our heads with the screaming. . . .”

“It is well,” said the judge, “that we were able to find a nurse who is capable of taking care of Mrs. Phair.”

“That one’s strong as a brace of butchers,” remarked Amy admiringly. “And it don’t seem to make no difference that she can’t speak a word. Don’t make no difference at all.”

During that and the following two days Marian Phair was lucid only twice, but at those times—during the middle of the night—only the nurse was present. And though Marian asked of her a hundred questions concerning her children, her husband, and her own condition, she received no reply at all. She was too weak to raise herself, her voice too weary to call out; and an increased dose of laudanum, quickly administered by the mute nurse, tripped Marian’s rational mind back over into somnolence and quietude.

In these two days all New York talked of the misery of the Stallworths: Benjamin dead, the children missing, Marian thought to be insane, Helen rumored to have eloped with a penniless missionary to Syria. It was Simeon Lightner in the
Tribune
who wrote in most detail—and greatest frequency—of these misfortunes; he felt a shameful delight in enumerating the unhappinesses of the family that had kept him so long under its thumb. They were so distracted, in fact, that they did not even think to protest—and that failure to complain of his treatment of them rather lessened his pleasure.

The city was most interested in the abduction of the children, Edwin and Edith Phair—pretty creatures surrounded by mystery. Benjamin had foolishly frequented dangerous places, Marian was known for her highhandedness, the elopement of a sheltered clergyman’s daughter was hardly news—but two precious and exquisitely innocent children abducted by a bogus nursemaid caused some excitement indeed.

Judge Stallworth had trebled the reward offered for their return, and the police had sought for them with unwonted thoroughness. Their likenesses appeared in the daily papers, and copies of their Easter photographs were made up in the hundreds and outsold even those of Lily Langtry and Oscar Wilde.

The assumption that no one thought to question was that the children were still together. Whether held captive in some attic in Five Points, whether sprawled with mangled limbs at the bottom of a dry well in Connecticut, whether weepily wandering the streets of some sleepy New Jersey township, Edwin and Edith Phair were always imaginatively pictured in one another’s company.

Thus it was unlikely that the children would ever be discovered. Edith Phair had been transformed into a careless urchin, utterly devoted to Rob, who was ever so much nicer to her than Edwin had been. Every day she wore a different set of clothes, and was never told to keep herself unsoiled. Every day she saw a different part of the city, and every day she played a different game: sometimes begging money of strangers to whom she told a story of her mother being very, very ill, sometimes doing a little dance in the street to distract the attention of a beautiful young woman whose lacy handkerchief Rob coveted. She often talked of her mother and asked Rob when she would be taken home. Rob always said, “Tomorrow,” and Edith always believed him.

Edwin Phair performed three times nightly on a variety stage in Cincinnati, Ohio, walking across a line of empty milk bottles. A newspaper had already written of him, that he “could do things upon a candlestick that are more surprising than pleasant.” He vaguely comprehended that he had been stolen, and sometimes felt guilty that he did not attempt to escape and return to his parents. But he had been warned of the inadvisability of this course—the danger of it—and cagily decided that he would learn to read and write so that he might send letters to his grandfather and his mother, telling them what had become of him. He was almost certain that they would have noticed his absence by this time.

Yet the fact was that, in his captivity, he was granted a degree of freedom he had never before enjoyed. He could eat as much as he wanted, and of what he wanted; he wore terribly flashy clothing; he was dandled and darlinged by a host of very pretty ladies who also went out upon the stage, and he was given a little trunk all his own with his name painted in gold letters across the top—from Edwin Phair his name had been economically altered to “The Elfin Fair”—the contents of which were entirely his. He possessed the sole key to this trunk and kept it on a gold chain around his neck. He was not encumbered with lessons or any instruction except that which tended toward the perfection of his gymnastic prowess; and nightly he received the riotous applause of hundreds of men and women and children. Edwin thought rather frequently of his mother and father, but never asked after them. In what he thought was a very cleverly deceptive manner, he only asked each morning of the gaunt man, his master, what town it was they were in, whether they had returned to New York yet. And Edwin was not too badly disappointed that the answer was invariably, “No.”

Chapter
43

Mrs. General Taunton was certainly correct in assessing that it would be of greatly deleterious effect on Helen if she were to learn of the death of her brother and the abducting of her niece and nephew. Mrs. Taunton’s protégée suffered from a high-grade fever, a symptom of what disease the physician could not say, but one which left her at times weak and lucid and at other times lifted her to giddy heights of indomitable delirium.

Mrs. General Taunton understood that Helen’s illness was the result of her decision to leave her father’s house. For the twenty-three years of her life, Helen had never dared cross her father and grandfather’s will, even in her mind. Now to deny their opinion and their authority altogether, was a matter of no small consequence, an act that required no small tariff of courage. The fever brought on by Helen’s removal from the manse was complicated by a chill she had contracted in the damp cold air of that Sunday morning’s dawn.

Even in moments when Helen’s brain was clear, she did not ask after her family, and Mrs. General Taunton understood that this reluctance did not token any diminution of affection, but rather had its foundation in the young woman’s strong sense that she had betrayed the Stallworths, her father in particular. Gramercy Park, Washington Square, and the manse had never been closely discussed by Helen and Mrs. General Taunton, and the widow was not put to the extremity of evasion or lies, in keeping from Helen all the sorrowful tidings of the family calamities.

In those hours that she feverishly languished in her bed and watched the progress of the sun as it cast its beams first into one corner of the comfortable room and at last into the opposite, Helen’s affectionate heart did not whelm with thoughts of her family. The Black Triangle instead occupied her waking thoughts—and her dreams as well: the dozens, even hundreds of persons whom she had encountered, spoken to, assisted, prayed for, and loved. She begged Mrs. General Taunton for news of these, demanded to know whether a certain newsboy for whom they had purchased clothing was now making enough daily cash to send himself to a twenty-five-cent lodging house each night, whether the gums of a certain lace maker had healed yet, whether a carpenter for whom they had secured work on the East River bridge had yet given over strong drink. When Mrs. General Taunton could report favorably on these cases, she did so with a glad heart; and when she could not, she told of the failure as lightly as possible, and concluded that there was certainly hope in the near future for the unfortunate man, woman, child, or family. The affectionate messages directed to Annie and Jemmie on Morton Street, Mrs. General Taunton promised faithfully to deliver.

All the evening long, while her grandfather sat up with the corpse of her brother at the manse, Helen Stallworth’s sleep was disturbed by dreams, not of her family, but rather of the inhabitants of the house that she had first visited on King Street.

The young woman and her child in the attic were perishing of cold and hunger, and the Reverend Thankful Jones’s flesh lay in elephant-folds around his rickety black skeleton. The prostitute across the hall had lost her orange hair in disease and was destitute, the young man in the room below was about to be stabbed to the heart by a jealous male admirer. The old man and old woman on the second floor opened and shut their round black mouths like dying fish in the bottom of a boat, and in extension of that metaphor in her dream, they flopped out of the bed and twitched in sopping throes all around the room. A murderer had snuck through the window of the first floor and was about to cut out the wrists and throat of the young woman there, intent on stealing her tattooed jewels.

Helen waked sweating in the bed, certain of nothing but that she was required in King Street. All the inhabitants of that house called out for her help. She rose trembling in the darkened room and, having no idea of the time of night and making no attempt to deaden the noise of her movements, she dressed herself hurriedly, took up her bag, made certain that she was well supplied with cash, and fled downstairs, glancing this way and that hoping for sight of some servant who could accompany her to the Black Triangle.

A church bell tolled three, and Helen paused in the hallway, realizing that at so early an hour none of the servants would be about and that she must go on alone. She hurried into the parlor, lighted a candle and penned this note at Mrs. Taunton’s writing desk:

I must return, my dearest Anne. I know that I am needed, and when I have done all that I can—all that is wanted—I will come back to you. Your ever affectionate daughter (I
would
be your daughter),

Helen Stallworth

Postscriptum
. I am quite well now, and am anxious, oh so very anxious! to see my duty done. H.S.

She folded the page once, scrawled
Anne
across it, blew out the candle, and quickly left the house.

No cab was to be had on Eighteenth Street, and none on Fourth Avenue either. Helen, though feverish and exhausted, determined that she would walk to King Street, and so, not even bothering now to watch for some conveyance to carry her thither, she set out through the chill night in a long-striding hectic gait toward the Black Triangle. In a quarter of an hour she passed her grandfather’s house on Washington Square but did not even glance up at the windows to see if they were lighted.

Helen hurried on, swinging her bonnet by its strings, for her head was too hot to bear even that light covering. Though awake now for an hour and more, she had lost not a whit of the virulent conviction of her dreaming, but was as firmly convinced now as when she had sat bolt upright in the bed, that all the inhabitants of the house in King Street would perish if she did not hasten to their aid.

Helen did not remember that the young woman and her child were dead, that the old man and his wife had perished soon after. Her decreasing strength, shortness of breath, and occluded brain rather urged her toward the Black Triangle than detained her. She must reach the house on King Street before she collapsed. If she allowed herself to falter, or lingered to recoup her faculties, she would arrive to find that the inhabitants had perished of hunger or disease or been killed outright in their beds.

Her pace increased as she came within the precincts of the Black Triangle. Those out so late upon the streets were astonished by this specter of the young gentlewoman hurrying along, ill and disheveled, gasping for her shallow breath, stumbling at every uneven place in the walk, and grabbing at posts to propel her forward.

At last, Helen had reached MacDougal Street, and hurried along its familiar length until she reached King Street. Just at the corner, a melancholy untuned piano on the third floor of a house played “Oh, Bless Me, Mother.” And in the last, maudlin stage of a night’s debauchery, a cracked drunken duet was made of the final verse:

I hear soft music on the air,

Oh, cool my burning brow!

The angels beckon from above,

I feel so happy now;

So bless me, mother, ere I die,

And fold me to your heart!

You’ll miss me, mother, very much,

Oh, kiss me ere we part.

Helen laughed aloud in her relief, for the house on King Street was visible to her, just visible in the darkness that prevailed in this narrow way. Helen’s strangled voice joined the cracked chorus of “Oh, Bless Me, Mother,” and she staggered toward the house. She stopped for one moment at the foot of the stoop there, pressed one clammy hand against her strangled heart, and mounted the steps.

The door was locked, and she beat wildly upon it. “Oh please!” she cried. “I’ve come—”

Suddenly the door was jerked open, and in its frame stood the woman whose jewelry was tattooed onto her wrists and neck. Her feet were bare, and she was clothed in a short blue shift.

Helen cried out in joy that the young woman was not dead. “Thank heaven!” she gasped. “I’ve come—”

Helen collapsed on the threshold. Her head struck the edge of the first step, and her cheek was scraped bloody against the bricks.

Charlotta Kegoe stooped, lifted the insensible girl, and carried her inside the house. A moment later Rob appeared, and gathered up Helen’s bag and bonnet. He glanced quickly up and down the deserted street, then backed inside the building and kicked the door shut.

From the house on the corner, the chorus was repeated, in lachrymose duet:

Oh, bless me, mother,

Bless me, ere I die;

Oh, bless me, mother,

Oh, bless me, ere I die.

Mrs. General Taunton, when she had read the note that Helen Stallworth had left for her on the desk in the parlor, had assumed that her charge had returned home to the manse. Helen had evidently discovered the afflictions that prevailed in her home and departed stealthily, knowing that her friend would attempt to dissuade her from leaving. Mrs. Taunton questioned her servants carefully whether any of them had spoken to Helen of the death of her brother, or even whether they had talked of it among themselves in a place where they might have been overheard by the invalid. None of the servants would admit to such an indiscretion, and Mrs. General Taunton, knowing their loyalty, believed them. If to nothing else then, Mrs. General Taunton must ascribe Helen’s flight to the intuition of a sympathetic soul.

The widow tactfully refrained from calling on Helen at this difficult time, and even deprived herself of the pleasure of writing to her protégée. Mrs. General Taunton knew that her intimacy with Helen was ill-regarded by the Stallworths, and she was reluctant to raise any contentious feelings in so sorrowful an hour. She regretted that Helen had left before completely recovered from her fever, but told herself that now Helen was at home, there was no point in dragging her back; she could recuperate as well in the manse as on Second Avenue.

In the papers, Mrs. General Taunton followed the disappointing progress of the search for little Edwin and Edith and the investigation into Benjamin’s murder. In the description of the funeral that was printed in the
Herald
—a story that was got from the Greenwood chaplain for an undisclosed amount of gold—Mrs. General Taunton was surprised to find that Helen was not present, though she had left the house early on the morning of the interment. The widow supposed either that Helen was overcome with her own grief, or too attentive to her father’s to attend.

Yet the next day, Friday, having no word from Helen, Mrs. General Taunton grew worried, and mistrusting that the fever had come back upon her friend with renewed vigor, sent off a short note by coach to the manse. The bearer was to wait for a reply, but the servant at the door curtly maintained that as Miss Helen was not within, no answer could be returned.

Mrs. General Taunton was disturbed by this, and hoped for the simplest explanation for Helen’s absence from her father’s home; that she was briefly visiting her aunt and uncle on Gramercy Park or her grandfather on Washington Square. She resigned herself to this hopeful construction for the evening, but the next day waited impatiently for a reply to her letter.

None came. Mrs. General Taunton dispatched another messenger, who received the same reply. Late on Saturday afternoon, Mrs. General Taunton herself stood on the steps of the manse and knocked at the door. In her best mourning habit in honor of Helen’s brother she looked, on the whole, rather like the dramatized spirit of a hearse.

The female servant, with almost a surliness of demeanor, denied that Helen was within. When Mrs. General Taunton asked if she might be allowed to speak to the minister, the servant replied that her master was overcome with grief for the death of his son and was fit to speak to no one.

“But please to tell me,” said Mrs. General Taunton, “if Miss Stallworth is staying here. Please simply tell me when she will return.”

“Ah sure!” cried the servant. “Only she’s not in now!” When Helen had first left the manse on Monday morning, the minister had ordered the servants to maintain to all who inquired that Helen was still a member of the household, only “not at home at present.”

“I’m greatly relieved to hear it! Then when she does return, please give her this letter, and say that
Anne
anxiously awaits word from her.”

“Certainly,” smiled the servant, pleased with the success of her deception—and withdrew.

Mrs. General Taunton went away greatly relieved in her mind.

At that moment Helen Stallworth lay on a narrow couch that was pushed up beneath the single window in Charlotta Kegoe’s bedchamber. Her flesh lay blotched and loose upon all her extremities, and each day Rob gathered up and braided all the hair that had fallen from her scalp. After three days, in which she had eaten nothing but a few spoonfuls of oyster stew, she was nearly bald; and was so weak that when she rolled off the couch onto the carpetless floor, she had not the strength to turn her face from the dust there.

Fever had destroyed her intellect, and she did not know how or what or where she suffered. She could not hear when Ella read to her the account of her brother’s death and funeral, she could not feel when Rob wrote poems on her bony bare feet with a sharp quill pen and violet ink, she could not see when her niece Edith, astonished to find so familiar a face in such unfamiliar surroundings, danced a straw doll before her face and called out, “Play with me, Helen, play with me!”