Gilded Needles (Valancourt 20th Century Classics)

by Michael McDowell

  Far more startling than their number, however, was the immediately apprehensible fact that each was in some fashion disfigured. The man who opened the door to Helen was lacking his right arm, though he dextrously managed, with a handsome swirl, to remove her cape. The maid dusting in the front parlor was a hunchback, and the girl who carried a pile of draperies up the stairs bore terrible scars across her face. The servant, crisply attired and with a pretty smile, who brought cakes and tea, had but two fingers on each hand, and the first time that Helen went out in Mrs. General Taunton’s carriage she discovered that the two footmen who rode behind had but a single pair of legs distributed evenly between them.

  When Helen had formed sufficient acquaintance with Mrs. General Taunton to remark on these peculiarities of her servants, Mrs. General Taunton replied with a sigh, “My husband had but one leg, you know, and our brief life together was so blissful, so pure, that I declared to myself upon his death that I would never marry a man who was whole. The idea of wedding a man who was whole disgusted me, in fact; and I considered at the time that I should have no difficulty in snuffling out another husband, war wounds being so plentiful in the early years of my bereavement. But I never found a man who suited me quite so well as my mourning did, so I have forgone companionship and kept to the dress.”

  “But the servants . . . ?” prompted Helen softly.

  “Oh yes, of course, all my servants are maimed, as you have probably noticed. I would not hire a man or a girl who was not disfigured. Not only do they remind me with unremitting tenderness of my husband’s affliction, but I find that they are invariably better workers than others, whose bodies may be whole but whose minds are filled with mischief and ingratitude. And what is the good of employing a girl or a man who might be employed anywhere? These men and girls I have ’round me would have a hard time of it if not in my service, and they quite know it. They are grateful and they are my children. I have adopted as many of them as my modest income will allow, and I hold to the opinion that my money is better spent in this manner than on luxuries that are worse than useless.”

  “Well,” said Helen feelingly, but only after the maid with one eye had departed the room, “it is a wonder that more people do not follow your example.”

  Helen Stallworth had discovered that Mrs. General Taunton’s charity did not end with the employment of disfigured servants; Mrs. General Taunton confided to Helen that she sometimes, in the company of a maid and a man, made excursions into the poorer sections of the city to nurse the sick and give assistance to the deserving, and when she came across those who were past such small benefits, to comfort their dying beds with religious consolations. By no means did the lady boast of these charities, but told of them only in explanation of her surprising knowledge of the streets described in the Tribune articles.

  And so, after the day when she visited the Black Triangle and viewed the unhappiness endemic to the place, Helen went to Mrs. General Taunton and at length discussed what she had witnessed.

  Mrs. General Taunton’s veil nodded slowly in sympathy with the young woman’s distress, and at the end of Helen’s description she sighed and remarked: “I regret that I must tell you that you did not see the worst of what is to be seen. You did not after all step out of your carriage. On the other side of those brick walls are torments and moral illnesses far worse than anything that parades upon the sidewalks.”

  “Marian’s committee,” said Helen softly, “will do little, I fear, to alleviate such privations as I witnessed, and it distresses me that I spend my hours in the comfortable parlor on Gramercy Park every week, that I am assigned to make a cap out of blue wool for a child that is perishing of consumption and which he will wear only in his grave, and told to stuff a pincushion for a seamstress in the hope that the gift of it will keep her undefiled.”

  “I understand,” said Mrs. General Taunton, “but there is something more that you can do.”

  “What is that?”

  “You can go with me into the Black Triangle. In the autumn I spent some time in the place, for change of air—though foul enough air it is—from my taxing endeavors along East Broadway. I have resumed my visits there since the articles began in the Tribune. Sometimes a particularly unfortunate and deserving case is mentioned in the paragraphs—though one must read carefully enough and not allow the descriptions of prevalent vice to overwhelm one’s sympathies for the underlying, perhaps causal, privations—and I do what I can to seek the unfortunate out. I’m not always successful, of course, but there’s never any lack, I can assure you, of worthy objects of charity.”

  “Shall we be safe?”

  “Not entirely,” replied Mrs. General Taunton, “it may be that God will let us slip through His protective fingers.”

  Helen was silent beneath this gentle rebuke.

  “We shall have one of my men with us, and one of my girls for a guide. She lived on Charlton Street at a time, and I took her from a cellar where she slept in a pile of water-soaked rotting straw. She looks whole, but in fact is prone to epileptic seizures.”

  “When shall we go then?” said Helen with determination. “I must own to a certain nervousness, but I know that I cannot continue in my Madison Square complacency.”

  “We shall go,” said Mrs. General Taunton, “as soon as we’ve taken a little luncheon.”

  The servant whose empty left sleeve was pinned across his livery drew open the door of the dining room and Helen and Mrs. General Taunton rose to go in.

  Chapter 18

  In the open carriage of Mrs. General Taunton, with the scrofulous driver before, and the epileptic maid, carrying in her lap a large basket of wrapped foods, Helen Stallworth and the widow of the Civil War hero drove southward from Eighteenth Street. Helen was anxious about repeating the previous day’s journey, but Mrs. General Taunton seemed so much at ease, consulting several lists that she had carefully drawn up sometime before, that the young woman was to some extent reassured.

  “Are we going to a particular place?” asked Helen diffidently, trying not to stare at the maid, who with every tremble of the carriage, Helen imagined, was about to precipitate into a shaking fit.

  “Oh yes, certainly,” replied Mrs. General Taunton, “charity ought not be gone about in a haphazard or zigzag fashion. It would not do to drive through the streets distributing largess to the most pitiful-looking person one passed. One learns quickly that the real misery remains in-of-doors. In-of-doors one finds those who are too ill to present themselves as objects of pity on the street. In-of-doors are straitened virtue and troubled decency.”

  “Then,” said Helen, schooled, “where is it that we’re going?”

  “A small lodging house on King Street. I’ve had notice of a young woman, first cousin to my second cook who, though virtuous herself, contracted an improvident marriage. She is ill just now and her child is ill and she is beat by her husband, a brute who, when not insensible with alcohol, is a sleeping-car sneak—”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “He robs persons on sleeping cars. Fortunately, he appears to be away most of the week, riding back and forth from New York to Washington, plying his trade.”

  Helen trembled. “Do you think it likely that we’ll meet him there?”

  “Possibly,” said Mrs. General Taunton, and turned back to her lists. “We shall in any case have the opportunity of visiting other inhabitants of the house and seeing what is wanted there. You must know, of course, the way that these lodging houses are set up. More expensive apartments are on the lower floors, while cheapest lodgings are obtained at the top of the house. The objects of our visit, Mrs. Leed and her child, are camped directly below the roof.”

  The carriage turned off Broadway onto Third Street and then south on MacDougal Street, with difficulty maneuvered the corner of King Street, and stopped in front of a narrow four-storied brick building. B
efore it stood a tall, sullen Irishwoman with three babies of slightly varying age, secured in a wheelbarrow with a length of coarse rope.

  Martin and Maisie, Mrs. Taunton’s driver and maid, preceded the two ladies up the steps of the house, the door of which was not only unsecured but left quite open, allowing the chill wind to bellow from the bottom of the house to the very top. Helen held tightly to the arm of Mrs. General Taunton as they stepped into the grimy, stinking hallway, which was narrow and dark, with long strips of filthy paper hanging down the walls at every height. The stairs were narrow and rotting and gave dangerously beneath the weight of a single person, so that they all were required to proceed Indian-file and very carefully: first the driver, then the maid, then Helen, and last Mrs. General Taunton, mounting with as much ease as if she had been in her own home and were only ascending to her dressing room for a fan she had left behind.

  On the first floor was but a single door, that entire space being given out to a single, relatively affluent lodger, but the second and third stories accommodated two flats each. The poor narrow attic was given over wholly to Mr. and Mrs. Leed and their unchristened infant. On the progress upward Helen was assaulted by odors that were strong, unrecognizable, probably unhealthful, and certainly disgusting. Yet the house was quiet, almost preternaturally so, with no voices to be heard distinctly, only muffled whispers and the occasional scrape and bang of furniture to give proof of habitation. Already used to the blasphemous, shrill cries and rantings that prevailed in the street, the quiet in this house touched Helen as sinister.

  The last flight of steps, narrower and more rickety than the rest, led directly up into the attic; there was no barrier to shut out the cold drafts that blew up from the street door; but perhaps these were not noticed particularly, for they were no stronger than the breezes that found entrance through the chinks in the wooden rafters. These spaces were wide and frequent enough to provide, along with ventilation, a dim and inexpensive illumination for inhabitants who could afford neither candles nor fuel to feed a lamp.

  The four visitors filled that part of the attic’s space that admitted of a person remaining entirely upright; for the sharply sloping eaves made it impossible to stand anywhere but in the center. Helen looked around her appalled. The only furnishings to be seen were two black mattresses pushed against the brick chimney and a minuscule iron stove that looked as if it hadn’t seen a match all winter long. Three broken pottery cups were neatly arranged before it, in a heartrending imitation of domestic order and sufficiency.

  Mrs. Leed sat on one of the mattresses with her back against the chimney. She was a thin pale woman with a quantity of black hair fast turning to gray, with sunken eyes, a drawn broken nose, and a parched mouth. She had a ragged filthy blanket thrown across her lap and a woolen shawl draped over her shoulders. In her arms was a puny year-old baby that twitched like a galvanized frog.

  Without hesitation Mrs. General Taunton went over to the woman, gradually stooping so as not to hit her head against the roof, and asked what was wrong with the baby.

  “He’s infected with the Michigan itch,” the woman replied in a choked voice.

  “Are you nursing him?”

  The woman nodded dully. “When I’m able to give.”

  “When was he last fed?”

  The woman shrugged and glanced over at the hole in the roof. “Night,” she replied.

  “We’ve brought you food,” said Mrs. General Taunton, and Maisie took over several small neatly tied bundles and set them on the floor beside the stove.

  “Thank you, ma’am,” said Mrs. Leed numbly.

  Mrs. General Taunton backed away and turned to her maid: “Maisie, you stay up here for a space, open the packages and set out the food for her. I think she is too tired to do it for herself now. See if the child will take any milk. Mrs. Leed,” said she, turning to the woman on the mattress, “Maisie here will help you with this food, and you may expect the visit of a physician before night.” Mrs. General Taunton turned to Helen. “There is a doctor in the neighborhood with whom I’ve made acquaintance, a drunkard by night but competent during the day. I sometimes employ him to see after the cases which simple wholesome diet will not cure.”

  Mrs. General Taunton led the way downstairs, followed by Helen and Martin carrying the basket.

  “You can tell such things yourself?” questioned Helen softly upon the stairs. “Tell when food will help, and when not?”

  “Mrs. Leed will die shortly,” said the voice from behind the black veil, “but not before the child.”

  Helen wrung her hands in distress.

  At that moment the nearer door of the third floor landing was thrown wide and in the aperture appeared an immense Negro dressed in a shiny black suit that was old and had been constructed to hang upon a man who was much smaller than the one who wore it now.

  “Who you?” he demanded in a booming voice. “What you seek in dis place?”

  Helen shrunk away, for the man’s upraised hand was as large as a Cincinnati ham, but Mrs. General Taunton replied impassively, “We have come on a charitable mission to your upstairs neighbor, Mrs. Leed, who was sorely in want of medical assistance. Her child also we found in a bad way.”

  “Oh yea!” cried the Negro vehemently, “po’ helpmeet an’ offspring o’ that chile of wraff and sin! Dat wicked man who alla time use harsh and ’busive words to the light o’ his life and the jew’l o’ his ’xistence. I t’ink on Judgment Day de Lawd’ll call me into ’count for having married dem two together in de only sometime blessed state of holy wedded married matrimony.”

  Helen’s eyes grew wide.

  “You are a minister of the gospel then?” said Mrs. General Taunton, unsurprised.

  “I am de Reverend Thankful Jones. I am shepherd to a small flock of black sheep what live in de ’mediate ’cinity. I am—”

  “Yes,” interrupted Mrs. General Taunton. “Being then a minister of the Gospel, and concerned doubtlessly with the state of men upon earth as well as their future in heaven, perhaps you could tell us if there are any others in this house who are in particular want, particular and deserving want, I mean.”

  “Dey all is, ma’am,” replied the Reverend Thankful Jones with a melancholy shake of his head; and he was about to go on, when cut off by a shrill angry chattering behind him in a language that Helen did not recognize.

  The Reverend Thankful Jones hurriedly excused himself and moved out of the way just enough to close the door—but also enough for Helen to see that in the room behind him, ill-furnished and filled with smoke, sat four Chinamen at a large round table, playing cards, smoking pipes, and crushing walnuts with their teeth. The door was closed, but behind it they heard the black preacher’s brief excoriation of “dis game of wraff and sin . . .”

  Knocking on the other door of the third floor they were admitted into the room of a large lady with red hair and a flattened nose who was just pinning a blue velvet bonnet with green and yellow feathers to her hair. Her eyes, Mrs. General Taunton later joked, were in mourning—for they had been blackened. “Peeked out,” the woman said, “saw you on your way up to the poor lady under the roof.”

  She was most evidently a prostitute—this was apparent even to Helen—but Mrs. General Taunton, instead of remonstrating with her, merely asked if she were contented with her way of life.

  “Oh cert,” replied the woman easily, “and if it’s misery you’re after, you’d best knock downstairs. Me and the Reverend Thankful is happy as pantomimes.”

  “Might I not leave this Testament with you at least?” begged Helen, gathering her courage to speak with the young woman, whose good humor astounded her, for surely prostitutes must be the most miserable and cursed of all mankind.

  “Oh cert,” replied the lady, “do what you please, but for all I can read it, it might as well be writ in Choctaw. It’s all I can
do to pick out the letters in my own name.”

  “We should knock downstairs then?” asked Mrs. General Taunton.

  The prostitute nodded and her eyes gleamed. “Sure, either door, either door. Misery enough for the whole pack of you.”

  Helen left the Testament anyway, despite the red-haired woman’s illiteracy. At the door, she paused with the suggestion that she might find someone to read aloud to her from it, and then followed Martin and Mrs. General Taunton downstairs.

  “My dear,” said that lady upon the landing, “I will knock at one door, and you must knock at the other. Martin will stay between, so you need not fear. Simply see what is needed, taking particular care to ask after the health of any children there may be.”

  The two women stepped to either end of the small landing, knocked at the doors, and received no answer. Mrs. General Taunton knocked again, called softly, turned the knob of the door, and slipped inside. Helen knew that she could do no less, and though trembling for what tableau of unimaginable distress she might witness on the other side—perhaps finding someone starved to death upon his bed or the victim of a bloody and fatal crime, or even another prostitute in the pursuance of her trade—Helen knocked again, called softly, and turned the knob of the door.

  The single chamber was much better furnished than she could have hoped, having viewed the three rooms above. There was a red carpet upon the floor and blue curtains across the window, a larger dresser strewn with bottles and boxes of powder and swatches of false hair, two open trunks filled with sumptuous—if gaudy—clothing, a box piled high with smart boots, a row of feathered hats hanging from pegs on the walls, and a green glass lamp with a painted shade. In the corner of the room, half hidden by a green curtain, was a large iron bed piled so high with soft quilts that she could not immediately see who was in it.