Gilded Needles (Valancourt 20th Century Classics)

by Michael McDowell

  As Duncan spoke to the morgue attendant, Edward glanced nervously over the rough dark walls and the uneven brick floor of the place.

  “There are no children here,” said the attendant. “We’ve had no dead children for a week, except for a couple of Chinese babies that were left in a flour sack in Shinbone Alley, but—”

  Edward Stallworth, unable to restrain himself, moved past the desk and up to the glass. From here his view of the four stone tables on their mockingly ornate wrought-iron frames was unobstructed.

  On the first table lay the corpse of a young woman with black hair. Hers was a coarse rubbery visage that seemed to vibrate with muted expression beneath the stream of water that plashed over it.

  On the second table lay an old man, the sheet that had modestly covered the woman having been folded over to the waist. The water that poured over the old man’s face ran in rivulets through the thick, matted gray hair on his chest and continually—and needlessly—cleansed the two bluish bullet holes in his belly.

  The third table was empty, and the water flowed down its length in gray sheets. When he saw the figure on the fourth table, Edward Stallworth cried out inarticulately and fell clawing against the glass.

  The attendant rose, his chair clattering onto the bricks. Duncan Phair hurried to the minister and tried to draw him away.

  “Benjamin,” cried Edward.

  He pointed in mute horror. On the fourth table, the wet sheet tucked about his slashed neck, lay Benjamin Stallworth.

  Edward had not at first recognized the strained apoplectic visage of his son, the blue lips parted in a grimace so that the spray splashed off his teeth—those teeth that seemed unnaturally long because his gums had shrunk far back into his mouth. His bulbous eyes popped beneath sutured lids, as if straining to open for the last look at his father. The skin of his cheeks was drawn and green. His lank wet hair was brushed far back from his brow and secured with a black string that had been tied around his head.

  “Benjamin!” the minister cried, and pressed his burning forehead against the cool glass that separated him from the dead.

  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.