Gilded Needles (Valancourt 20th Century Classics)

by Michael McDowell

  “Thank you, ma’am,” said Katie Cooley, and blushed. “My mother was an upper servant in Lord Coombe’s house in Dublin. She reared me right. I beg your pardon, ma’am, but do you perhaps know of a position that wants filling for a nursemaid, in a respectable household?”

  “Yes,” said Marian, “I do. Mine.”

  “Ma’am!” she whispered. Tears welled in her eyes.

  “Yes. Would you be willing to take on Edwin and Edith for me—supposing of course, that your references are sufficient? You have references, I suppose?”

  Katie opened her bag and drew out three carefully folded letters, which she gave to Marian. “Here they are. I always have them with me.”

  Marian smiled and took the letters. “If you would be willing to walk Edwin and Edith about for a bit, I will sit here and read these through. The business may be concluded then in a matter of moments.”

  Katie gratefully took the two children by their hands and quietly urged them down the walk. When she returned several minutes later, Marian sat smiling serenely upon the bench.

  “These are sufficient for my purposes,” said Marian, returning the letters.

  “Oh, ma’am! I’m so glad then!”

  “Before you agree to take the position, Katie, we must speak of terms—”

  “Anything you wish, ma’am. For two such children as these, I think I should almost work for gratis.”

  Marian smiled. “My husband and I can afford a little better wages than that.” She directed the children away from the bench, and when they were out of earshot she said to Katie, “Sixteen dollars a week, half holidays on Sundays, every other Thursday or Saturday off, if you prefer—”

  “Oh, at your convenience, ma’am.”

  “Saturday is my convenience then. You have a room next to the nursery, where Edwin sleeps. Edith will sleep with you. My husband and I are often out very late and occupied during the day, so the children will for the most part be left to your complete charge. The letters that you showed me indicate that you are not averse to such responsibility, and I shall be happy to leave Edwin and Edith in your care.”

  “When shall I begin, ma’am?”

  “Immediately, if you wish.”

  “Oh, yes, ma’am.”

  “Good. Then you may accompany us back to Gramercy Park. And your things will be sent for this afternoon.”

  When she returned home, Marian Phair instructed Peter Wish to inform all applicants who came to the door that the position of nursemaid had already been filled.

  Chapter 34

  In Madison Square, Helen had found Edwin and Edith leaning against a tree, watching with envy as half a dozen children played a boisterous game that soiled their clothing. She kissed them farewells, and went back to Twenty-fifth Street again. She changed into the simple black outfit that she had come to call her “visiting dress,” and set out for the home of Mrs. General Taunton, carefully avoiding the streets on which she might encounter Marian on her way home. Marian would doubtless upbraid her for wearing so poor and dismal a frock when out visiting—even a widow.

  As usual, Mrs. General Taunton received her companion with utmost graciousness, intimacy, and affection. The woman in black had grown very fond of Helen in the past months and much admired her energy in dealing with the poor and the unfortunate. There was now no hesitation, no condescension, no discomfiture in Helen’s manner when she ministered to the needs of the Black Triangle.

  Yet though Helen had convinced herself that her motives were selfless—and how could she doubt her disinterestedness when no one but Mrs. General Taunton knew of her taxing endeavors?—Helen was full of pride, over that very selflessness. She burst sometimes wanting to tell her family of her work, so that she might show them that theirs was a perverted misunderstanding of the Black Triangle, while hers was the Christian, the good, and the only right view of the place. But knowing that the Stallworths would never conform to her view of charity, she dared say nothing, for fear that her visits would be interfered with or stopped altogether.

  Helen was offered and accepted a place at Mrs. General Taunton’s table. While waited upon by the one-eyed maid, on whom Helen could now smile without dwelling upon or even really recalling the girl’s affliction, she and Mrs. General Taunton discussed the progress of the cases that had occupied them over the past couple of weeks.

  “The Fale child that we saw on Monday,” said Mrs. General Taunton, “you remember that pretty, pretty infant not yet given a name, has died of the consumption that looks soon to take their father too.”

  “It has been buried?” asked Helen, cutting into her chop.

  “After a fashion. To save burial expense, the mother wrapped it in a blanket, pretended it was asleep, and took the cars up to the Central Park. There she scooped a hole in the earth with her own hands and placed the child in it.”

  “Oh!” protested Helen, putting down her fork.

  “I remonstrated with her of course. ‘Mrs. Fale,’ I said, ‘your daughter deserves burial in consecrated ground.’ She said she thought so too, but burials were such an expense, and all their money was wanted to keep her husband supplied with physic. I gave her money for the burial of the child and have sent the carriage to her this morning, to return to the Central Park and show Dick the place she buried it.”

  “I’m glad you did that, Anne, so very glad!”

  “I do not believe that the child would have been denied entrance into heaven only because it had been interred in the Central Park, but I think it will make the mother feel better to know that her precious daughter lies within the precincts of a sanctified churchyard.”

  “Oh doubtless!” cried Helen.

  After their dinner, Mrs. General Taunton invited Helen to accompany her on an expedition to visit a boy with one leg whose father had committed suicide with Paris green and whose mother had absconded with a Chinese cigar maker to set up a laundry in Brooklyn. But Helen declined, and asked only that she be allowed to ride so far as Varick Street—there was an indigent seamstress in that neighborhood to whom she had promised a commission of employment, and it was her plan to pass the remainder of the afternoon there.

  “I am happy,” said Mrs. General Taunton, “that you are going out on your own, dear. Not that I would not have you by me always, of course, but it is good that you appear sometimes without my protection.”

  “Yes,” smiled Helen, and just as she spoke this, the coach turned off MacDougal Street onto King and rolled past the house where Helen had made her first visit to the Black Triangle nine months past.

  She pointed it out to Mrs. General Taunton. “I regard that house with affection now, though I was so frightened then, Anne, I don’t think I can say just how frightened I was.”

  “The woman and her baby are dead,” sighed Mrs. General Taunton. “And the husband is in Sing Sing. He tried to rob a United States senator. The old couple on the second story are dead too. It’s a hard uncertain life that’s led in the Black Triangle.”

  Out of the windowed door of the building, the little slender face of a boy was peering at the carriage as it drove past. Helen smiled and waved, but the child dropped immediately out of sight.

  “I should return,” mused Helen. “Revisit the scene of my first embarrassments, and prove—only to myself, of course—that now I’m beyond such personal discomfort, where charity is concerned. Those we tried to help now are dead, but perhaps others, equally unfortunate, have acceded to their place.”

  There was one piece of charitable work that Helen kept secret, even from Mrs. General Taunton. Early in September, on an afternoon when the widow had been indisposed, Helen had gone alone into the Black Triangle and visited, at Mrs. Taunton’s suggestion, a ladies’ hat maker living in quite a respectable little house on Morton Street. The ladies’ hat maker’s consumption appeared, even to Helen’s inexp
erienced eye, to be hopeless; but she left a Testament interleaved with the address of a doctor on a scrap of cardboard, and a five-dollar note. In the hallway downstairs she encountered a young woman who wept copiously; and when Helen inquired the reason for her distress, the young woman—a pretty girl called Jemmie—replied that she had just had an argument with her friend. Helen volunteered to listen to the girl’s story at greater length, and was accordingly invited into first floor apartments that were furnished with more enthusiasm than taste.

  Here Helen attended to a tearful, disjointed tale of imagined jealousy on the part of the girl’s friend. “Oh p’rhaps you’ve seen Annie—she’s the best fighting girl in New York! Annie’s always been good to me. It’s Annie, you see, who pays for my lodging here and it’s Annie that buys me things every day, but she gets terrible jealous when she thinks I talk to other girls, and it don’t make no matter that even when I’m talking to ’em—and sometimes I gets lonely, you see—I’m all the time thinking only about Annie, but she don’t believe it.”

  Helen tried to assure Jemmie of Annie’s affection, and told her that it was certainly only a matter of time before Annie came to see that Jemmie’s love was real and undivided. It was in the midst of this lengthy speech that Annie Leech herself appeared in the room, glowering at Jemmie and threatening Helen with grievous bodily harm.

  Helen was amazed by the construction that the Amazon in the doorway put upon her presence in the apartments of her friend Jemmie, and was at terrible pains to demonstrate the innocence of her visit. This was accomplished only when she emptied out her reticule of the eight red-letter Testaments that it contained and Annie Leech had interrogated the ladies’ hat maker upstairs. She returned to Jemmie and Helen mollified, and though Helen at this juncture would happily have taken her leave, Annie Leech insisted that she remain and take a glass of wine in apology.

  As she consumed her small glass, it occurred to Helen suddenly that the relationship of these two women might be called by some word less innocent than “friendship.” Yet she could have only admiration for the sincere solicitude that Jemmie felt for her friend’s feelings, and rested in wonder at the passion of Annie Leech that could excite such terrible jealousy. She was too nervous to say much to the two women, for she feared offending them; but when it was time to take her leave, Helen found herself engineering an excuse to herself to return to Morton Street. Yet no excuse was needed: Annie Leech herself invited Helen to come back the following Saturday—and though Helen could fathom no reason for this invitation, she accepted it with an alacrity she disguised only with difficulty.

  She had indeed returned—and every week after that—so that she looked forward eagerly to the Saturday afternoons spent on Morton Street. Helen built up a strange intimacy with the two female friends. She found them anxious for companionship that was of a better sort than either was used to, and Helen was in the novel position of representing polite society. She gently corrected their manners, suggested small improvements in the furnishings of their rooms (suggestions that were always effected by the time of her next visit), and listened with eager ears to all the gossip of their strange society of female pugilists and their female friends.

  It was to Morton Street then that Helen Stallworth directed her steps when Mrs. General Taunton’s carriage deposited her at the corner of King and Varick streets. There she found Annie Leech and Jemmie, and Jemmie’s young niece fearful and wide-eyed between them on the sofa. Helen greeted her new friends with a warmth she had never been able to lavish on anyone in her life. She accepted tea, she questioned Jemmie’s niece on the subjects of her occupations and recreations, she wanted to know of all Annie’s pugilistic exploits in the past week, and studied carefully Jemmie’s account books. She advised Jemmie to visit a butcher who was almost certainly honest, and whose meat was almost certainly unspoiled; and smiling, she listened to Annie’s earnest entreaty that she witness but a single bout in Harry Hill’s place.

  “Oh,” cried Annie, “we’ll get you up the longest veil you ever did see, we’ll get you a veil to sweep the streets with, and we’ll put Jemmie on one arm, and we’ll put ’Ralda here on the other arm, won’t nobody know you, won’t nobody touch you, and in that place, in Harry Hill’s place, you won’t be seeing nothing you haven’t seen worse of in a hundred other places in this neighborhood!”

  “Do go with me one evening,” pleaded Jemmie. “There’s nothing that’s so exciting as seeing Annie lay one of her friends on the boards and jump up and down on her face!”

  “Oh,” laughed Helen, “I’m sure there’s nothing like it! Not tonight, I couldn’t go tonight, but—”

  “Saturday next!” cried Annie Leech. “Saturday next! Then I’m taking on Michigan Sally again, and see if I don’t tear her heart out of her bosom and toss it to you for keepsake!”

  Helen laughed at the extravagance of Annie Leech’s speech, but in her heart she was very happy for the affection that prompted it.

  Chapter 35

  When Helen Stallworth returned home that Saturday afternoon at dusk, she was very much surprised to find her grandfather seated stiffly in the front parlor of the manse.

  “Oh!” she exclaimed softly, “is Father not here?”

  “Edward is in his study. I have asked him to remain there while I pursue a conversation with you, Helen.”

  The sternness of his voice alarmed Helen, and she seated herself near him with some trepidation.

  “Grandfather,” she whispered, “what is it you wish to discuss with me?”

  Judge Stallworth fixed a petrifying gaze upon his granddaughter and said, “As head of the Stallworth family, I am desirous to learn in detail of the work that you have performed over the past nine months—in the Black Triangle of all places. Your reputation, Helen, has at last passed beyond the boundaries of those invidious acres and reached the ears of your ignorant family. Please explain to me, Helen, how it is that you have gained so great a name for yourself in that interesting neighborhood.” His white, bony hands lay folded in his narrow lap.

  Helen turned away amazed. “If I’ve a . . . a . . . reputation,” she stammered, “it is only for charitable work performed always with love, I hope. A reputation—”

  “Behind our backs!” shouted Judge Stallworth, erupting into white anger. “For months you’ve done this! It’s no wonder you chafed so at Saratoga! You’ve become as familiar with the streets and alleys of the place as any common streetwalker, exposing yourself to danger and moral outrage with every step you take! Breathing pestilential atmospheres! Ministering with your own hands to contagion one hour, and the next you’re visiting Gramercy Park, fondling Edwin and Edith! It’s a wonder that my grandchildren aren’t writhing in their beds with boils and blisters brought up from that place on the tips of your fingers! It’s a wonder we’ve not all died of contagion! It’s—”

  “I have never knowingly exposed myself to contagion,” answered Helen. “I have always been careful. I—”

  “Careful!” cried Judge Stallworth. “Were you careful of our reputations? Were you careful of the Stallworth name? Helen Stallworth, representing the family, wandering the streets of the Black Triangle, followed by a gimlet-eyed coachman and a grotesque old woman who could make her fortune in a Bowery show—is that what you call being careful?”

  “How did you . . .” began Helen, but could not complete her question for hot tears.

  “How did we discover your perfidy?” said Judge Stallworth with scorn. “How did we learn of your months-long devilments? From Simeon Lightner, who once saw you in an open carriage, made inquiries, and now with some glee, has reported to Duncan. It has been only with the greatest difficulty that we have persuaded him not to publish your exploits. Duncan is amazed, Marian is prostrate, your father’s head is bowed with horror. I am angry and I am disgusted. There is no defense for your reprehensible conduct, but please tell me what there is
to be told, tell me all—we do not wish for further surprises in this matter.”

  Helen then, weeping the while, told her grandfather of her demoralizing dissatisfactions with Marian’s committee, of her talks with Mrs. General Taunton, of her first frightened visit to the Black Triangle, of subsequent easier visits, of her becoming acquainted with the streets, the people, the ways of the place, of her little schemes and devices for the alleviation of want and suffering; and with a little pride, of the growing acceptance of her presence by the people of the Black Triangle. “Oh Grandfather,” she cried, with some scant hope that he would be moved by her words, “sometimes now, when we drive through, on our way to and from delivering a basket or visiting the sick, the people call out to us! They call us the widow and her daughter, and have made up fantastic stories of Mrs. General Taunton’s husband, supposedly my father, and of the great wealth we’re supposed to be possessed of! These trips have come to mean so much to me. They’ve filled my whole life. I never realized before how much one or two persons acting simply and alone, could accomplish. Not that I’m proud—I have no right to be—but I’m made glad to the core of my being when I see a child playing on the walks who might have died a month before if we had not brought a doctor to his bedside. It was Father’s sermons that inspired me! He painted such misery there, such want and such privation, that I felt my heart would break if I didn’t do something to help those poor unfortunate people.”

  “Those poor unfortunate people are full of criminal wickedness,” said Judge Stallworth, “and their very breath is tainting.”

  “No!” protested Helen. “They are made evil only by circumstance. By inclination, they would lead honest, industrious, gentle lives. I have spoken with them, and predilections to goodness fall from the mouths of all. Oh, Grandfather, and I’ve seen as bad as ever appeared before your bench!”