Authors: Elizabeth Gaffney
She clamped her eyes shut. “It’s a coincidence, that’s all. They may have had the same cane, but Johnny’s cane was found with traces of blood on it. There was hair in his boots. He killed someone. Mr. Noe was killed. It doesn’t mean a thing that they had the same cane.”
“Yeah, it’s just a coincidence.”
“Did you look hard?”
“I looked everywhere.”
“Harris—”
Both of them were thinking it through. If Johnny wasn’t guilty, they were the ones who could prove it. They could weaken the case against him by telling the police about the second cane. But if he went free, he’d surely do his best to do away with both of them. Harris didn’t know what to do with the feelings that roiled within him. Someone had killed Mr. Noe. Wasn’t the actual killer the one who should hang? But letting Johnny hang would solve so many of their problems. He looked down at her. She was beautiful, even with the broken nose.
“Even if Johnny didn’t do it,” she said, “I’m going to make sure he hangs. I’m never going back.”
“What about the real killer?”
“Shhh.”
Harris got up and went to close the parlor door. When he came back to the couch, he slipped his arm around her. For a long time, he just explored the contours of her waist. Finally, she pulled away and turned her back to him.
“Help me with these.” As he began to work the hooks and buttons of her dress, unwanted images of Maria flashed in his mind, the last woman he’d been with. But beyond the buttons and the stays, Beatrice was not like Maria. She had her own ideas. She said, “No, not like that—like this.” And the surprise of that—or when she flipped him over, pushed him to a different angle and, once, simply leaned forward, buried her face in his chest and breathed him in—was the fulfillment of the fantasy that had remained beyond reach for so long, the one in which he was confident she wanted him, too, loved him, too. It was a half an hour before Beatrice gripped her toes and writhed. Harris saw flashes of carmine red, magenta and deepest blue. They had known this once and then lost it. How could they have lost it? he wondered. But of course, he remembered. They might lose it again, too, and more.
“Harris,” she murmured, but she couldn’t formulate her thought. It was the second time now he’d made love to her without beating her up. She was amazed to realize that maybe that was the way it would always be with him.
“I wish I were the only man you ever knew,” he said.
“Don’t. It doesn’t matter now.”
He tried to smile, but it came out strained.
“Don’t keep thinking of Johnny, Harris,” she said, as if she knew his thoughts. “We’re going to be rid of him for good soon. It never amounted to anything between him and me, just business, a very strange sort of business. He never even liked me, just liked to keep me in my place.”
Harris sat up. Something had dawned on him. If Johnny wasn’t in love with her, if it hadn’t been his cane and he wasn’t jealous, then someone else had truly killed Mr. Noe. And Harris suddenly had someone in mind, someone as irrational as Johnny, as ruthlessly efficient in his violence, someone who had been plaguing him almost since he arrived, someone who appeared able to hold a grudge for years: Undertoe. There was no evidence for it except the strange theft of the letter, but Harris was suddenly certain that Undertoe had killed Mr. Noe. He didn’t believe it could have been random.
“Beanie—”
“Harris, don’t call me that. It’s what
they
all call me, Johnny, the Whyos. Just say Beatrice, like you always do. It’s hardly any longer, you know.”
He thought of his own real name, what he might ask her to call him, but the question was so wide and hopeless, and the thing he’d wanted to say so much more pressing, that he let it pass.
“What about
Bea
?”
“All right,
Bea,
” she said. “My ma called me that.”
At which point, Harris’s desire to explain his insight to Beatrice was suddenly dwarfed by another one: He thought to ask her to marry him. He braced himself and was on the verge of saying it when he remembered she was already married, and he blushed deeply. He twisted his lips around and managed to tell her what he’d been thinking about Undertoe.
She agreed with him that it made sense—but not about trying to prove it. “Does it help Mr. Noe?” she asked. “No. And think what it would mean if Johnny went free. I’m going to have a hard time preventing that anyway.”
“Can you let him hang for something he definitely didn’t do? He’s your husband.”
“Harris, come on, don’t remind me of that. I can’t help that. He’s an evil bastard.”
“Can I let Undertoe go free if he’s the one who really did it?”
“Johnny’s killed so many men, Harris. Who cares if he hangs for the wrong one? If Johnny gets off, we’re next.”
“But Undertoe?”
“Undertoe I can handle. Or the Whyos can. I’ll make sure you get your justice, Harris. The Jimster’d probably enjoy doing it.” Beatrice was quiet for a moment, then got up and stepped into her petticoat and her dress and turned her back to him.
“Yes, I think I’ve got an idea,” she said as he did up the buttons.
He drove her to her new home in the buggy, and at the very end of the ride, when he took her hand to help her down, he managed a watered-down version of the question he’d stumbled over earlier: He told her that as soon as she could do it without the Whyos knowing or minding, she must come to Mr. Noe’s house and live with him. She opened her eyes wide in mock horror.
“I’d like that, but what would the cook say?”
“The cook? Who cares? But I think she’d get used to it. There are a lot of rooms. You can have your own.”
A week later, Beatrice returned to Mr. Noe’s. It was just Harris to welcome her—he had given the cook the day off so she wouldn’t be scandalized again so soon. Harris and Beatrice went through the bedrooms of the big house one by one, and finally chose for her a large and sunny one in the rear.
“It’s your room, whenever you want to stay here, as often as you want.”
“Where’s your room going to be?” she asked, and he told her he preferred the stable. And thus it was that Beatrice had the pleasure of inviting Harris to stay in his own house.
In the morning, he got up and said good-bye to her, not knowing when she would be back—they had agreed she would keep her visits irregular and err on the side of caution if she thought she’d been observed by a Whyo—but he was certain that she would be back before too long. At work, he was almost afraid to go up the footbridge, he was so giddy. His mind swung from the ether of love to the abysmal recollection of all that had had to take place to congeal his affair with Beatrice. And in between that high and that low, there was still the very real anxiety that Undertoe or Johnny or the Whyos would somehow interfere and end it all before it had truly begun. He tried to occupy his mind instead with the work at hand and with the concept of profit sharing, which Beatrice had described to him as the principle that distinguished the Whyos from other gangs, though not enough. He was captivated by the idea. He went home that evening not expecting her to be there, but she was, and not just she but the Henleys and Sarah Blacksall and Dr. Smith. She had invited them all over, and the cook had produced a chicken pie in spite of herself, though she was none too pleased about the trollop who was acting like the mistress of the house or the quality of the company, blacks and nobodies and loose women. She was thinking of moving on. Then Harris put his head through the kitchen doorway and asked her to set herself a place and join them.
“Well, I never,” she objected, but a short time later she emerged with a place setting and sat down.
Over dinner, Harris told the others a little of what he’d learned about Mrs. Dolan’s vision of a collective gang. Smith and Blacksall nodded. They knew all about communes and collectives. But no one knew what to say when Harris explained that he wanted to turn Noe Brush into a collective. It was a radical idea but in keeping with Mr. Noe’s politics, that much was clear.
“Not a corrupt collective, a real one, right?” Beatrice asked. “Where you really give everyone their share of the take?”
They all laughed, but she was serious. So was Harris. He said he was planning to meet with Mr. Noe’s banker and his lawyer to see if it was possible. “I don’t want to run the company. I don’t know how. This way, I won’t have to, but I won’t have to sell it either. We’ll work out a system so the people who do run it and do work there really share in the profit of the business.”
Harris asked John-Henry, who’d been there for just a couple of weeks, who the most important people in running the plant were. Beatrice suggested giving each of the floor managers and the general manager shares in the company and described the way that profits had been divvied up among Whyos.
When Harris approached the lawyer about the idea, the man was surprised at how well Mr. Noe’s otherwise rather ignorant-seeming heir appeared to understand so much about industrial economics, in particular the radical new profit-sharing model, which had recently been tried at several well-known progressive factories. Apparently, Mr. Noe had taught this man more than the lawyer realized, and from then on he granted Harris increased respect. It was just as well that the lawyer didn’t realize one of the major partners was a black man until the day they all showed up in his office to sign the papers, for he might have been more reluctant to arrange it, but by then it was too late. There was no legal barrier to allowing a black into a white business, and the deal was made.
Beatrice came to Harris’s just a couple of nights a week, usually unannounced, often late at night. But every night he waited hopefully in the room they both still called her room. It turned out he’d spent his last night in the stable, for even when she wasn’t there he loved sleeping in her bed, just for the whiff of her that dwelled in the sheets.
One night, shortly after the factory had been reorganized, Harris suggested that she should go to work at the company, maybe in accounting. They needed help, and she had devised the whole plan, after all. She laughed.
“Working at the brush factory was too boring for you, Harris. You think I’m going to like it?”
He had to admit he did not.
“But aren’t you getting bored doing nothing? I don’t want you to get so bored you miss the Whyos.”
“I’ll still have some work to do when the trial starts,” she said, but the truth was, he was right. Earlier that week, she’d arranged for a part-time job working at the Smith-Blacksall clinic. And there was something else: “I was hoping to work full-time, but Sarah and Susan encouraged me not to.” Instead, they had urged her to apply to Erasmus Hall, an academic high school that catered to immigrant and unconventional students in particular.
“Really, school?” Harris was thinking of her old insistence that she hadn’t come to America for education.
“I told Susan I wished I was a doctor. I didn’t mean anything much by it, but she said, ‘What are you talking about,
wish
? You’re not paying
rent,
are you? To Harris or my folks. What do you need a job for? You want to be a doctor, all you need is an education.’ ” Beatrice blushed as she described it—and Beatrice never blushed. “So, what do you think?”
“I like it.
Dr. O’Gamhna.
”
“One step at a time, Harris.”
She was accepted on a rolling basis and began classes in the middle of the term. For six weeks, Harris took the ferry to the Manhattan side of the bridge every morning and Beatrice copied down grammar rules and mathematical formulas. Some nights, she went home to him, but mostly, out of caution, she went all the way back to Weeksville. On weekends, she worked in the clinic. Beatrice was neither the oldest nor the unlikeliest student at Erasmus Hall. She was largely ignorant of history and literature, but she was good at math and languages. She already knew how to do complicated bookkeeping and was fluent in Gaelic, Whyo and English, after all. German wasn’t hard, with Harris as a tutor. Latin was worse, but she applied herself, since it was the language of medicine.
When she spent the evening with Harris, she read aloud to him, and she encouraged him to do the homework with her, so that he got a thinned-out version of her education. He liked the math and physics, especially. He was eager to understand exactly how the improbable bridge he was building could stand. On those nights, they usually fell asleep together over her books in the parlor. Then, sometime in the middle of the night, they awoke on the Turkish carpet in front of the dying fire and stripped off their clothes, pushed the books to one side, and made Dandy Johnny Dolan a cuckold once again.
39.
EXTREME UNCTION
B
eatrice made it all the way to the trial, two months from the date of Piker and Johnny’s arrest, without missing a day of school. It was a pretty good attendance record for a gangster’s moll, but she was saving up, since she planned to be entirely absent during the trial. Her life and Harris’s were riding on what she did or didn’t do there. She sent word to her teacher that she’d been taken ill, and in a sense it was true: It did turn her stomach, all of it.
The first morning, she met Harris at the ferry and traveled across with him. Before they parted, he pulled her very tightly to him, leaned down as if to whisper something but merely pressed his mouth against her ear. The anxiety and turmoil so overcame her that she actually spit up her tea in the bushes outside the court building before she could bring herself to enter. But then she thought of Harris, his lumpy, benevolent face, his black eyes, his naïvely guilty conscience, and she gathered herself and went to take her place in the gallery beside the Jimster and Fiona. She didn’t know what was harder, seeing Johnny across the room after having received Harris’s silent kiss, or sitting next to Fiona, lying to her while hoping her husband and fellow Whyo would be hanged. It was strange to be with the Whyos again, like coming home. Their community, their laughter, their collective manner were all incredibly seductive to her. She didn’t want it back, exactly, but yes, she missed it.
From that same seat, she looked at Dandy Johnny hard, continuously, all day, day after day, all week. She had a one-quarter view of his face most of the time—the jawline, the cheekbone, the tip of the nose, the edge of the brow—but if he shifted slightly, she could see his eyes. She did not respond to his one or two attempts at subvocal communication, rebuffing them with a very low frequency emanation of her own, something between a protracted exhalation and a hum. No Whyo could fault her for that. It showed she was in control, and control, as they all knew, was essential. Control was what they wanted from their leader and his First Girl. In the brief moments they had alone with Beatrice, Fiona and the Jimster told her they were doing fine. All the Whyos were confident that everything would work out; Johnny would get off on what would seem to the world at large to be a surprise jury decision. She tried not to think about what would happen if they were right. Some mornings, the absurd riskiness of what Beatrice was trying to pull brought on stomach cramps. Once, she actually had to be sick into her handbag.
What the Whyos in the courtroom—including Dandy Johnny—knew about Beatrice was that she had gone inactive since Johnny and Piker were taken in, which seemed reasonable and cautious. The wife of a murder suspect might, after all, fall under extra police scrutiny. They also knew that Beanie had informed Fiona that Undertoe had actually committed the murder and set Johnny up. It made sense to them, whether it was vengeance for the Barnum’s job or the Old Bowery drunk dump or both—especially considering the way that the Noe murder had affected Harris. The word on the street was that Undertoe had specifically selected a cane that matched one of Johnny’s and had made a point of using it in a murder, then tipped off the police. Some members of the gang, especially Maggie, had been in favor of meting out a little swift Whyo justice to settle that score, but the Jimster and Beatrice had made it clear that they wanted Undertoe left alone so Johnny could have the pleasure of doing it himself when he got off. Among the things the Whyos did
not
know were that Beatrice was sleeping with Frank Harris again and that she dreamed far-fetchedly of becoming a doctor. They also did not know the great subtlety and range of her whyoing. She had concealed the full extent of her abilities from even Fiona and the Jimster. But there was one thing the Whyos—and the Why Nots in particular—did know that Beatrice did not: She was pregnant. They could see it, and they could smell it. The girls were excited at the idea of Dandy Johnny having a baby, and there was talk of other girls wanting to have babies, too, now, so their daughters could grow up to be First Girl to Dandy Johnny’s boy.
On the last day of testimony, the defense attorney introduced a surprise piece of evidence: a second cane. He didn’t much like John Dolan or Peter Ryan or the trashy little wife who had hired him, but the case was purely circumstantial. He’d gone out several times to search the city for another, similar cane, merely to illustrate his point to the jury, and at the last possible moment he had stumbled upon one in the shop window of Marm Mandelbaum’s, a vast pawnshop on the corner of Clinton and Rivington. It was no more the cane that killed Mr. Noe than the one that had been entered into evidence already—the true weapon was still entombed in the shaft of dumbwaiter number 3 at the Noe Brush works. But the cane matched the first one in evidence—Johnny’s—in every detail. The attorney told the jury that the emporium at Barnum’s had had six dozen of the monkey-head models, half of which had sold by the time the Hippodrome burned. The judge admitted it to evidence, though it proved only how little the first cane had proved. Several character witnesses, all Whyos, were called to buttress the defense’s arguments. The police and medical experts described Mr. Noe’s wounds and also the bits of hair and flesh that had been found under the blades in Piker’s and Dandy Johnny’s boots. The fact that both defendants had clearly kicked
someone
in the head repeatedly on the night of the crime was the most damning fact of all.
When the defense rested, despite the second—or rather the third—cane, there were only four people in the courtroom who still believed Johnny and Piker were innocent: the defendants, the perpetrator and Beatrice. Even the Whyos believed the case had been made. But they weren’t worried about a little detail like that.
As the jury received its charge, the Whyos and Why Nots began their work, each one transmitting his or her message to a specific jury member via signals that were barely audible, barely even distinguishable from their breath. It was silent, but it created such an air of agitation in the room that the judge banged his gavel for order. Undertoe, who had arrived early and taken a seat in an obscure corner of the upper balcony, shrank into the wooden backrest of his chair, agitated by the familiar vocalizations. He remembered the feeling all too well from Mother Dolan’s funeral and began to wish he had passed up the spectacle of the trial’s final day. He had never learned the important lesson that gloating is unwise.
Beatrice sat stiller than any of the Whyos, transmitting so subtly that none of them even realized she was doing it, and yet she cast her voice more loudly and intently than any other Whyo. She was leveling the messages of the Whyos, so that what reached the jury, which had been dismissed to an adjacent deliberation chamber, was just empty sound, void of content, indistinct from the distant sound of the actual wind, the rustling of real skirts, the grinding of genuine carriage wheels outside or the buzzing of true flies against the window. All the Whyos’ work she reduced to white noise. Beatrice’s plan was to allow the jury to come to their own conclusion. She felt confident enough of the verdict not to do anything more active. The case against Johnny and Piker may have been weak, legally, and possibly the extra cane should have introduced reasonable doubt in the minds of the jury, but Beatrice was no lawyer—she was just an average New Yorker—and she knew without question that to the men of the jury, Johnny and Piker were vermin who had killed an upstanding citizen in cold blood; they deserved to die. And so as long as she could pull off this final feat of whyoing, she knew which way it would go.
The Whyos quickly understood what was happening, and they thought they knew its source. To put it mildly, they were baffled. One after another, their jaws lolled in dismay and they fell quiet, truly quiet. They ceased their whyoing as if they’d been commanded to do so. For Beatrice was doing more than just negating their voices—she was doing it in Dandy Johnny’s own voice, using his signature vibrato and his most secret codes. She was casting her voice across the room in such a way that it seemed for all the world to anyone who knew how to whyo to emanate from him. She was using every trick Mother Dolan had ever conceived of to keep control of both the sheepdogs and the sheep.
Johnny had turned in his chair and was staring straight at Beatrice. What the Whyos saw was this: Dandy Johnny, sweating and intensely agitated for the first time during the trial. They saw love in his eyes. They saw pain. They saw him look longingly at Beatrice and sacrifice himself for the good of the gang. A few times he seemed to waver in his resolve—almost to speak in two voices, at once joining in and negating their message to the jury—but not for long. What they heard was their leader committing suicide. They could never have guessed what only Johnny and Beatrice understood: that she was faking this suicide, impersonating him, while overriding the control the gang could have had over the jury. And then, after a few protests, it really was suicide—he let her do it.
Above all, Beatrice had feared a duel with him. She knew that her voice was in practice, whereas his was out of it, but she had thought it through and was aware that Johnny’s urge for self-preservation might lend him some decisive power, sufficient either to drown her out or expose her fraud. But she needn’t have worried. To the gang, she now sounded more like Johnny than he did. She was the one they’d been talking to, beginning when the
Westfield
blew all the way till Johnny’s arrest. It’s a complex business to debunk a competent imposter. There was something else that constrained Johnny, and this she had been counting on: his ego. For to expose her fraud would be for Johnny to admit that Beatrice had been speaking for him all that time. It would abnegate all his authority, amounting to just another, slower, more painful kind of suicide. He saw this, and he didn’t even try.
Piker Ryan sat at the table next to Dandy Johnny in a state of shock. There were
two
lives on the block, after all. He gaped as all the other Whyos first whyoed in desperate confusion and then gradually fell silent. Finally, he spoke—in English.
“Johnny, what are you doing? What the Hell are you doing, Johnny?”
He asked it again and again, but Johnny wouldn’t look at him. Johnny couldn’t take his eyes off Beatrice’s expressionless face—Beatrice, whom he’d come increasingly to admire and then, quite irrationally, to adore during his incarceration, Beatrice, whom he’d kept hoping would finally relent and come to see him, to tell him she wasn’t mad anymore, Beatrice, who, from her new plumpness and her spitting up in her bag, even he’d begun to think might be carrying his child. He had plans for making it all up to her, how rough he’d been, what he’d done to her nose. What had happened to Johnny was this: He’d fallen in love with her while he languished in the Tombs, but it was late for that. Now he watched her put wordless words in his mouth, words that would hang him, and he cried like a child, because he knew that somehow, indirectly, he really was their author after all.
The verdicts came back quickly, based on the preponderance of the evidence. There had been doubt in some jurors’ minds at first. The matter of the two canes, exhibits A and Q, was puzzling. But exhibits E and F, the two pair of ax-tipped boots belonging to Ryan and Dolan, respectively, had convinced them that even if no one had seen the accused men kill Mr. Noe, they very probably had. At the very least, they’d killed someone. In the end, it was unanimous: guilty and guilty. John Dolan and Peter Ryan were sentenced to hang.
Beatrice was given a brief private audience with Johnny before he was taken away. She was his wife. He could have said a lot of things, but what he did was reach out his hand, which was in shackles, and touch the side of her nose. It hadn’t healed very elegantly this time.
“Forgive me, Beanie,” he said.
She felt compelled to brush away a drop of sweat that was beading on his forehead before it could roll into his eyes, but she didn’t have to brush away her own tears, because she wouldn’t admit to herself that she was crying. She looked at him and saw an incredibly handsome man who was obviously in love with her. She had sent him to his death. She could almost have kissed him, have taken it all back.
“What is it, you want to run them all by yourself now? Is that it—modern times, women’s suffrage?”
“No, Johnny, I’m getting out. I’m sorry. I’m sorry about everything.” Then the lump in her throat met the one that was rising from her stomach, and she ran from the room.
The Whyos streamed down the white marble steps of the courthouse. They were so distraught, so disarmed by what had happened that they’d abandoned even the vestiges of their usual discretion about gathering overtly in public. They were crying on the street, hugging and talking to one another, drawing undue attention to themselves. They were struggling to find an interpretation for what had just happened, and the only thing they could come up with was that it was a noble sacrifice: Johnny’s refusal to let them bring notice to the gang by forcing an unexpected, implausible acquittal. At the same time as they wept, they rallied around the Jimster as Johnny’s chosen successor. Beatrice came out a little after the others and couldn’t stand to watch them. It was a queer, solitary feeling, not having anyone but a soon-to-be-dead man understand what she’d just done: the enormity of the feat and of the betrayal. She wanted Harris—she could tell Harris everything. But the truth was, even Harris would never really understand. And first she had one last important task to do, for Harris, for Johnny, for herself, and above all for a man she’d never met: Mr. Noe. She found Maggie the Dove in the crowd and drew her attention to Undertoe as he slunk along the far edge of the wide courthouse steps. Maggie would have the right amount of fury, she thought.
“Johnny can’t take care of it himself now,” she said. “Let’s do it.” That was all it took. Then she slipped away from the Whyos and headed for the Manhattan yard of the bridge to find her man. He was at work, waiting to hear the verdict. She would tell him, and they would go home. She could go home with him now. And then she had a week’s worth of neglected homework to do. She was thinking,
Boring is fine, boring will be wonderful, give me boring, please.
She was imagining Harris’s remarkable arms.