Gilded Needles (Valancourt 20th Century Classics)

by Michael McDowell

  “Thank you, Lena,” said the octoroon. “It was important that this be done tonight. . . .”

  Lena nodded, and leaned forward heavily on her cane. “You’ll send the money?”

  “Tomorrow morning. But I’ll say to you, Lena: I hope never to see him again!”

  “Das versteh’ ich,” replied Lena gravely.

  “The watch has an inscription in the case—”

  “Melted down tonight—” Lena assured her. “Wiederseh’n, Maggie.”

  After the octoroon had turned her back on them once more in order to secrete the money she had received, she nodded briefly and swept out the door with a sure and determined step.

  While Ella bolted the door after Maggie Kizer, Lena Shanks lumbered around to the back of the counter, heaved herself up onto the higher stool, and spread out a large sheet of brown paper. Upon this she emptied the bag of masculine jewelry.

  From a drawer in the counter, Lena took out a jeweler’s pick, and pried the sapphires from their gold settings. As these were removed, Ella placed them into an envelope taken from the open safe, which contained other stones indistinguishable from them. All the diamonds went into another envelope, and the gold settings were pushed aside into a little gleaming heap.

  Only the watch remained. It was a valuable piece—of Swiss manufacture—and on the inside of the case was engraved CYRUS WESTON BUTTERFIELD, FROM HIS DEVOTED WIFE. TEMPUS FUGIT, 1871.

  Lena wound the watch with its key, turned its hands to the hour, and listened to the sweet melodic chimes. She smiled slightly, reset the watch, and played the chimes again, holding the watch close to Ella’s ear. Then she put the watch down upon the counter, and with a small iron mallet smashed the workings to bits. She pried the case loose and gave it, with the chain and seals and fob, to Ella. All the broken workings were swept into a brown envelope which she flung into a crate of trash in the corner.

  Ella assisted her grandmother down from her perch, and with the tiny horde of gold cupped in their hands, descended to the cellar. Here, from a bar that had been driven into the stonework of the large hearth hung two crucibles over a steadily burning coal fire. With tongs, Lena lifted the lid of the small one and Ella poured in the broken gold jewelry.

  Lena smiled, drew a key from her pocket and handing it to Ella, said, “Fetch me the silver box.”

  Ella disappeared around a jerry-built wall into the dark maze of rooms, closets, and cupboards that lay beneath Lena Shanks’s two houses. In a couple of minutes, shivering from the cold, she returned with a heavy wooden box that was a foot deep in plate: small vases, trays, ornaments, and much tableware.

  “Some pieces, girl,” said Lena, “and throw them in.”

  Melting the silver was always a treat for Ella. She took up half a dozen forks from the box, of different patterns but all bearing monograms, and dropped them into the crucible. Her grandmother replaced the lid and then sat in a straight-backed chair near the fire. Ella knelt at the side of the box and rummaged through the silver, picking out the pieces she thought prettiest and setting them aside to be melted down. Every few minutes she took the tongs and lifted the lids of the crucibles to check the progress of liquefaction.

  Rob and Ella had been carefully brought up. The children of most criminals in New York ran wild about the streets in gangs sycophantic of older ruffian groups, calling themselves, for instance, “The Little Dead Rabbits” and “The Forty Little Thieves.” They learned to rob dead men on the street, and attack drunken revelers, and set up distractions in crowds so that pickpockets might work more easily. But Rob and Ella were being trained in their family’s occupations. Rob, well versed in the secrets of the female anatomy, was continually delighted with the succession of ladies in and out of the tiny room on the fourth floor of the house. Ella spent most of her day in the pawnshop, close at her grandmother’s hand. At eight years of age, she could tell silver plate from real silver at a glance, grade silks to a nicety, swiftly knot a new fringe for a stolen cambric shawl, and make fair appraisals of glass, plate, jewelry, and feminine clothing.

  For companions, Rob and Ella had only one another, but they never seemed to want to know other children; the thousands of Arabs and urchins who enjoyed the freedom of the street were frivolous, doomed creatures in the critical eyes of the young twins. In a part of the city full of want and misery and sickness they appreciated the superfluities of their existence, the health and prosperity of their own family: their mother, their aunt, and their grandmother. Louisa and Lena’s occasional harshness toward them was nothing compared to what they glimpsed on the street, in cellar dives, and in tenement rooms. They had been made to understand that their well-being was due to their family’s diligence; and to avoid the misery that moaned on every side of the two buildings on West Houston Street, Rob and Ella early settled into little lives of strange industriousness. They never, however, gained any sense that what they did might be considered wrong—their understanding of the law was imperfect. Judgments and jails, though certainly they knew of them, seemed afflictions as arbitrary as disease and death. It was the fortunate and the hardworking, not the good, who survived these vicissitudes.

  After Ella had set two small salvers chased with patterns of twining grapevines into the crucible, she brought a blanket from the corner of the small bare room in which they sat, spread it at her grandmother’s feet, and lay down upon it. The noise of the fire and the gentle sound of the bubbling silver soon sent her off to sleep.

  Lena Shanks, however, sat bolt upright in her chair, staring into the fire; though she was close to the bright flames, she neither felt their heat nor traced their dancing patterns. The news that Maggie Kizer had brought that evening had been of a serious and unfortunate nature; but it was not upon this trouble that Lena’s thoughts were fixed. She was cold, quite cold, because her mind irresistibly pictured a pair of brilliant light-blue eyes. They had seemed out of place in the sallow face of the weak young man at Harry Hill’s, for Lena remembered those eyes as belonging to another—to one whom she hated more than any other man upon earth, the man responsible for her husband’s death.

  Chapter 7

  When she left Lena Shanks’s pawnshop, Maggie Kizer went back along West Houston in the direction of Harry Hill’s place. She paid no attention to the insults that were directed at her by the gaudily dressed women who lounged in the ground floor windows of the whorehouses along the way. These prostitutes might direct a remark at anyone who came within their sight, but they seemed to take particular umbrage at this well-dressed, well-deported woman, who could pass for a lady but for the very fact of her being on such a street at such a time.

  Her amber spectacles had been removed and her white-gloved hands with the numerous rings she kept tight within her muff, to deflect attention from herself, but her carriage and her habit stood forth plainly in that street of license and dishabille. She was spoken to by several gentlemen, but their flattering remarks she ignored as studiously as she had the insults. One tall, drunken, bearded gentleman in a long fur coat placed his hand on her arm and wondered thickly if she were in need of protection for the remainder of her journey home—he would be honored to serve as her escort.

  “Pardon me,” replied Maggie, in a voice that charmed him when it was meant only to discourage. She broke away and continued down the street, but he lurched after, undaunted. She did not hurry her pace, but a few numbers down, turned suddenly into a small drugstore, which was placed between two of the cheapest whorehouses on the street—a favorable location since the bulk of the apothecary’s business was with the prostitutes. Women who could not afford Daisy Shanks came to him for remedies for unwanted pregnancies, and he dealt in substantial quantities of opium, chloroform, and morphia.

  The gentleman hard upon Maggie’s heels did not follow her in, for he was not so drunk that he forgot the danger often attendant upon a gentleman’s entering a store al
one. He crossed the street, walked a space, crossed the street again, and then lounged outside the door, waiting for Maggie to emerge. But standing there, he was so much taunted by the women hanging out the windows of the neighboring establishment that he gave over the game and stumbled away, out of reach of their shrill abuse.

  In the drugstore, which was neither larger nor brighter nor appreciably cleaner than Lena Shanks’s pawnshop, three fat, gaudy whores, whose vermilion lay half a dollar deep upon their cheeks, huddled at a small low table, on which stood three large glasses of absinthe. There was a short candle jammed in the mouth of a bottle and its guttering flame shining through the liquid in their glasses cast green shadows onto their pallid, pudgy hands. Their gossip hushed when Maggie entered and they watched her closely and with evident mistrust.

  The shop was run by a young man whose hair had fallen out, whose skin was scarred with the smallpox, and whose eyes worked at cross purposes.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said slyly to Maggie, “what can I get for you?”

  “Powdered opiate,” replied Maggie. “Three ounces.”

  “Twelve dollars,” the druggist replied and, plucking out of a little wooden box his one- and two-ounce weights, dropped them onto one side of his scales. Then from a large jar filled with white powder he measured the opium, slipped it into a pink envelope, and slid it across the counter to Maggie. “Can’t sleep?” he inquired in an oily voice. “Bad dreams? Pain in the tooth?” Mischievously he had listed the common lies of the addict.

  “No,” replied Maggie, coolly, handing him the money in notes and silver, “it’s for my aged mother who is dying of a cancer of the breast.” There was some sharpness in her voice, as though she expected him to disbelieve her and did not care what he thought. The druggist’s leer abandoned him as he stared at the jewels on her white-gloved hands. But almost immediately the red and green jewels, the white hand, and the pink envelope disappeared beneath the blue cloak. Maggie plunged out of the shop, not even hesitating at the door to see whether the gentleman in the fur coat lay in wait for her.

  The whispers of the three fat whores at the very small table rose suddenly in pitch and volume and they loudly debated who she was, and what she was doing on West Houston Street, and whether she really imagined that she had gouged anyone into believing that she was a real lady. Their admiration for her clothing, however, was genuine if grudging, and they listened intently when the druggist, coming over with the bottle of absinthe—Death’s Green Wine—and replenishing their tall glasses, smirkingly described the jeweled rings on her white-gloved hands.

  “She’d best be careful!” cried one whore.

  “She’d best stay away!” cried another.

  “If she takes her dainty hands out of her muff on this street,” cried the third, “someone’ll do her the favor of chopping ’em off!”

  Maggie followed the route that the twins had taken when they carried the corpse of the young girl to the medical students the night before. But she went up Bleecker in the other direction, all the way to Downing Street, where a latchkey let her into a small, well-kept brick house. She walked up a single flight of the blue-carpeted steps and with another key unlocked a large set of double doors. These she opened quietly and just enough to pass through. She slipped inside and pulled them shut behind her.

  Light from the streetlamp shining through the front windows was sufficient for her to move about without stumbling and she did not turn up the gas. Laying aside her muff, she unfastened the silver chain at her throat and folded the cloak over the back of a chair. She unpinned her hat and placed it carefully atop the cloak. The money she had got that night she slipped into the drawer of an ornamental table beside the door.

  Holding the pink envelope, she was just about to move toward her bedroom, when she detected a slight movement at the far end of the room—a rustle of cloth, the fall of a foot against the double-laid carpets. Without saying anything, Maggie turned the key of the gas and brought the lights of the brass chandelier up just enough to dispel the obscurity.

  The small chamber was fashionably decorated in deep rose and dark blue. The furniture was quite expensive and the fabrics and the upholstery and the papering were all sumptuous and soft and deep. At the far side of the room, on a high-backed couch covered in a heavily napped blue velvet, sat a handsome gentleman with short brown hair and a thick brown beard. He was modestly but quite elegantly dressed in a brown-checked suit.

  “Hello, Maggie,” he said easily, “Mrs. Weale let me in.”

  “I told her she might,” said Maggie, slipping the pink envelope beneath the lid of her desk.

  “I’ve brought you something—my New Year’s gift. Look on the mantel.”

  The octoroon glided to the hearth, which was of a deeply veined pink marble, and there beside the blood-red Bavarian vase which held a mass of blue campanulas, was a small red box tied up with a blue ribbon. She untied the ribbon and opened the box; it contained a gold ring set with a circle of small but brilliant rubies.

  “Do you like it?” said the man, who rose from the couch and came near the cold hearth.

  Maggie, with voluptuous weariness, threw her arms about his neck, kissed him, and then rubbed her cheek tenderly against his beard.

  “Oh yes, Duncan, very much.” She clasped her white-gloved hands behind his neck. “I’ve a weakness for rubies, such a weakness.”

  When Maggie turned her head beneath the chandelier, Duncan Phair searched out the slight flaw of blackness in each of her fine green eyes. “You seem very tired tonight,” he said.

  “Oh no,” she protested, “no no, earlier I was tired, but you’re here now, and I feel that everything’s come right.” She pulled back, and smiled with a ravishing tenderness. “Everything’s come right,” she whispered.

  Chapter 8

  Judge James Stallworth lived alone now in his large, old-fashioned mansion on Washington Square, at the southern extremity of Fifth Avenue. This had been one of the most fashionable addresses in New York when he had built the house in 1840; but the well-to-do of New York, always restlessly pushing northward, had paused only a couple of decades in Greenwich Village and around Washington Square. By the time of Judge Stallworth’s second marriage, to Marian’s mother, the rich had built up Fifth Avenue as far as Thirty-Fifth Street, and created for themselves the exclusivities of Madison Square and Gramercy Park. Washington Square, whose well-groomed acres had once been the burying ground for the city’s paupers and criminals, and covered the moldering bones of a hundred thousand and more of the socially insignificant, now entombed the city’s unfashionable rich.

  The Stallworth family was known to be “well-fixed,” but in fact they were much more than that. During the Civil War, when he was already a well-established lawyer, James Stallworth got a great deal of money by the selling of commodities: dried meat and flour mostly, with occasional large transactions in captured cotton. At that time he was already twice widowed: his first wife had died in giving birth to their son Edward, and his second wife had succumbed to influenza when their daughter Marian was only six, in 1859.

  Now a little more than seventy years of age, Judge James Stallworth was the best-known Republican judge in a city completely controlled by Democrats. He did not take bribes, and was known for his severity in sentencing. He had never become important in the politics of the city as much because of his unyielding temperament as his political affiliation—for places were sometimes found for obliging members of the opposition—but that same inflexibility had probably also saved him from being removed from office.

  Judge James Stallworth had possibly a single weakness, and that was the affection he bore his dogs—or rather, his dog, for he never had more than one at a time. This was invariably a black-and-tan, and whether male or female, it was invariably called Pompey. The first of this long succession of animals the judge had possessed when he was a
law student at Columbia, and he had grieved severely when that dog had been run down in the street by a vegetable wagon. Ashamed of the depth of the feeling that had been drawn out of him, as it were by surprise, he determined never to allow himself to be so touched again. He purchased another black-and-tan as near to like the first as he could find, called it Pompey and pretended that the first had not died. This little self-deception he had carried on now for five decades, and Pompeys came and went. But whether Pompey lived three weeks or thirteen years, the judge never lamented his death, for he was certain another could be got to take his place on the morrow. Something of this feeling probably carried over into his acceptance of the death of both his wives, and the very guarantee of Pompey’s immortality made it possible for him to forgo the pleasure of a third helpmeet after Marian’s mother died.

  It had been a disappointment to the judge that his son Edward has chosen the ministry as his life’s work, for he had designed for Edward a career in the law and politics. But his ambitious hopes had been fanned to life again when Marian married Duncan Phair, a young lawyer who had assisted in the prosecution at Tweed’s second trial. Judge Stallworth had encouraged this liaison, and when Marian was told of the generous settlement that her father would provide if she married Duncan Phair, she was easily persuaded to accept the man’s proposal. Judge Stallworth was too old to aspire to much higher place or greater prestige and had decided to expend his energies toward the aggrandizement of his son-in-law, who was not yet much above thirty. James Stallworth wanted to insure that, by the turn of the century, Duncan Phair would be mayor of a Republican city, perhaps even governor of a Republican state.