Gilded Needles (Valancourt 20th Century Classics)

by Michael McDowell

  Edward had no idea whether Benjamin’s murderer had been discovered, and he had not dared to ask so important a question of the maidservant. He could not know even whether Helen had been informed of her brother’s death; he must suppose that in fact she had not, since she had not returned to the manse, not even to compare their grief.

  Now, Edward Stallworth’s grief for his son was a problematical thing; it was an emotion that he had not anatomized himself. The shock of finding his son in the morgue had caused the first great rift in Edward’s brain, and that single shock had incapacitated him for an entire day. Many hours passed before he came to think of his son as dead, removed from earth, lost to him and to Helen. Only then did the needles of grief begin to prick at his extremities, and this while the great arrow of shock was still lodged in his breast. But quickly the discomfort of those needles and that arrow were subsumed in his realization of the meaning of Benjamin’s death.

  Benjamin had been murdered, his throat slit from ear to ear. He had lain twenty-four hours unclaimed in the city morgue. Edward feared that the discovery of the man or men who had done away with Benjamin would expose the fact that his son had been disporting himself in some disreputable part of the city, gambling in Five Points, whoring in the Black Triangle. It would be said that Benjamin Stallworth had got no worse than he deserved, and he would be held up as an unfortunate example of what fell to undisciplined young men let loose in the city. What then would become of Edward Stallworth’s reputation as God’s champion against depravity? Who would listen to the inveighing against vice of a minister whose only son had been slaughtered in an alley behind a house of evil?

  As he worked mechanically at the stack of letters before him, opening each, glancing at the signature without even bothering to read through the sentiments to which that signature was appended, and writing out a brief unemotional unspecific acknowledgment, Edward Stallworth grew more and more restive with wondering just how much was known about the circumstances of Benjamin’s death. He realized that he knew only that his son was dead, and that knowledge came solely of having seen him on the stone slab in the morgue. When he had come downstairs that morning he had not even known whether Benjamin was yet buried, and dreaded to think that the burial was a trial still before him. Perhaps Benjamin lay high-collared in the house on Washington Square, and the services had only awaited his recovery. The notation on the memorial card that Benjamin had already been laid to rest at Greenwood was considerably relieving.

  Edward was anxious to know who had been in attendance, to what extent the funeral had been covered in the newspapers—Benjamin after all had been a colleague of sorts to Simeon Lightner, and it could not be expected that the ravenous Tribune would fail to turn to account the death of one who was, after a fashion, one of their own reporters. He feared to see the columns, feared to be told what was said of Benjamin, and of him—feared to know the extent of his falling. At the same time he became ever more troubled by his ignorance of his situation.

  He directed a message to his father, called in the maid, and sent her out to the telegraph office on Madison Square. Judge Stallworth he begged to come to him as quickly as possible; that he was as well as could be expected, but had matters of urgency to discuss with him.

  Shortly after the maid departed on this errand, the bell of the house was pulled. Edward Stallworth instinctively rose from the desk and peered out the bay window to see who called. Finding it was only a small child holding a letter prominently before him, Edward allowed himself to go to the door. The child thrust the letter into the minister’s hand and was gone before Edward could question him.

  Assuming that the letter was merely another message of condolence, Edward returned to his study, resumed his chair, and only after sealing and addressing the letter he had just finished, did he slit open the hand-delivered missive.

  He read trembling:

  Saturday, 6 P.m.

  Dear Rev. Stallworth,

  I regret to inform you that your daughter lies very ill, at no 2 King St. A physician is in attendance, but she sinks. She asks for your presence continually, please come at once. The doctor advises that you will come alone, as excitement would be hurteful to your daughter. Come at once.

  Yrs most sincerely,

  Mrs. A. R. (Anne) Taunton

  Without giving thought to the puzzling crudeness of the letter, the minister readied himself to go to his daughter. “I’ve gone to fetch Helen. Return as quickly as possible,” was the note that he left for his father on the marble table beside the street door.

  Chapter 45

  During the ride in the hackney cab to the Black Triangle, Edward Stallworth wrung his hands, and beneath his breath swore at all the vehicles that blocked every street and crossing early on a Saturday evening. The minister was certain that he could maintain his sanity only with the help of his daughter Helen. His resentment that she had secretly engineered charitable work in the Black Triangle had disappeared in the days of his sick horror over the death of his son, and now he wanted her quiet presence in the manse again. It was no longer a question of forgiveness, no longer a question of who had been in the right. She should not be upbraided, she should not be denied her endeavors with Mrs. General Taunton, if only she would consent to return to him. Now the poor girl lay ill in some close vile room in the Black Triangle, and he must be her rescue.

  Edward Stallworth felt the sleeve of his coat and examined his hat and realized that in dressing himself so quickly, he had come away without any symbol of mourning for his son. He flung his hat toward the wall of the carriage and fell back muttering. The perspiration that poured from his forehead stung and blinded his eyes, yet he did not wipe it away, only murmured to himself the louder, so that at last, the driver leaned down and asked if he meant any change in his directions.

  The bells of the city chimed seven o’clock just as the hackney cab was passing within sight of Judge James Stallworth’s house on Washington Square. Edward wiped his eyes with his kerchief and leaned out of the window of the hackney, looking for lights in the mansion and wondering if he ought not stop there and ask his father’s company. But no lights were visible, and it would not do to postpone the reunion with his daughter.

  A few minutes later Edward Stallworth, shaky on his feet, was deposited before a small brick house on King Street. He gave the driver seventy-five cents and asked that he wait; he might be as much as a quarter of an hour within. The driver nodded, and exchanged a wink with a prostitute who, leaning out of a second-floor window of the house adjoining, was within a dozen feet of him.

  Edward Stallworth nervously mounted the steps of the building, whose windows were uniformly black and betrayed no trace of occupation. He knocked at the door softly, then immediately more loudly and waited for a few moments, wondering whether he ought not simply go in. Helen was probably in a back room, perhaps on an upper floor; her attendants might not hear his summons.

  He turned the knob, and found the door unlocked. But just as he pushed, it was jerked back wide by a little girl wearing a plain gray dress. Her head was a mass of tightly wound side curls.

  “My daughter—” whispered the minister. “I’m looking for my daughter Helen.”

  The little girl nodded, and pointed up a flight of stairs that was so dark Edward had difficulty in making out even its position in the hallway.

  “How many flights up? What room? Is she well?”

  “Three flights up,” said the little girl. She knelt on the floor, struck a match, lighted a candle on a cheap tin stand, and handed it to the minister.

  “Three flights up—” she repeated. “Door on the right.”

  Edward took the candle. The flame trembled in his hand. He waved it before him and uneasily marked the troubled banister and the uncarpeted steps. Slowly he mounted the stairs, slowly although he was desperate to find his daughter in the room above.

&
nbsp; At the first landing he turned and saw the little girl’s head blackly outlined against the grimy glass of the front door. He went hesitantly on, holding the candle in his left hand and convulsively grasping the banister in his right, never minding the grime that caked upon his moist skin.

  At last, even the dim light from the front door had disappeared and Edward Stallworth found himself on what appeared an endless stairway, close and creaking. The air was vile and hot, and only the fact that he was ascending kept his imagination from likening the progress to a journey into Hell. Garishly painted doors, awry in their jambs, stood three on the landing and mocked him to try their handles. Behind one he thought he heard labored breathing, but silence otherwise prevailed in the house.

  At last the fourth story was attained and Edward Stallworth turned to the door on his right, which led evidently to the room that was at the back of the house. He paused before it, leaned close so that the candle flame in his hand singed the lapel of his jacket, but still he could hear nothing inside. He cautiously turned the knob and stepped into the back chamber.

  The room was empty but for a pine coffin set on high trestles in the center of the floor. Six tall lighted candles were stuck upon the joints of the box.

  “Helen!” cried Edward Stallworth, and fell heavily to his knees on the rough deal floor. “Helen,” he groaned, and rubbed his soiled hands violently on the legs of his trousers.

  He knelt choking and weeping for perhaps half a minute with his head bowed, the muscles of his body taut and straining; and only then became aware of a slight rustling movement in the room.

  He looked up quickly. The candle flames wavered and the unpainted coffin trembled on its trestles.

  Edward Stallworth tried to jump up, but his constricted posture wouldn’t allow the movement, and he fell over at full length upon the floor. “Helen!” he cried out, all but mindless now, with grief and the horror of this place.

  Edward Stallworth again cried out his daughter’s name, and struggled to his feet. He lurched toward the coffin and grasped its sides, shaking it.

  The girl inside sniggered. She was fourteen, with tangled dark hair, yellow teeth and a black tongue. There was a large purple bruise on her belly and she was entirely naked.

  Edward Stallworth cried out and fell backward. But his convulsive hands had not released the coffin and it tumbled to the floor. The girl inside was thrown out and knocked her head against one of the upset trestles. The six candles went out, all but one.

  Cursing, the young girl flung out her hand and broke the tall candle in half. The last flame was extinguished and the room foundered in darkness.

  A few moments after Edward Stallworth had disappeared around the first landing, Ella opened the front door and went out to the hackney cab. She called to get the driver’s attention.

  “Mister,” she said, “the gentleman inside said not to wait. He said you were to have this”—she lifted a half-dollar piece high into the air—“and to drive on.”

  The driver nodded, took the coin, and with a wink to the whore still in her window, drove his hack on down dark narrow King Street.

  Mott Street early on a Saturday evening was a crowded, noisy place, and Duncan Phair was a well-dressed anomaly among so many Chinamen and slatternly Irishwomen. There were other white loiterers, those who had come to try the stuperous embrace of opium, those who had never before seen a real heathen except for the Indians that sold trinkets around Niagara Falls, those inveterate gamblers who had learned enough Chinese to play at fan-tan because they supposed that the Chinese ran honest games. None of these, however, moved with the quickness or the purpose of Duncan Phair, who impatiently counted off the numbers of the buildings until he reached number 46. Two Chinamen of indeterminate age and sallow complexion stood with their crossed arms hidden in their jacket sleeves, smoking long clay pipes of tobacco. Behind them on the stoop two white children were playing an amorphous unintelligible game with marbles, that would roll off the stoop.

  “Who?” demanded one of the men softly of Duncan, when he attempted to pass between them on the stoop.

  “I’ve come to see Dollie,” replied Duncan in a low voice.

  “Who?” repeated the other.

  One of the children peered around the green robe of the second Chinaman and cast her glance over Duncan. She tugged slightly at the Chinaman’s skirt, and he stood aside.

  Duncan stepped between them, but as he did so, the second child rose, took his hand, and placed over his smallest finger a ruby ring. With an exclamation of surprise, Duncan Phair brought the ring close to his face and turned it this way and that in the meager streetlight.

  It appeared identical to the ring he had presented Maggie Kizer on the occasion of the New Year.

  “Boy,” he cried, “how did you come by this?”

  “Shhh!” said the child with a smile. “Go inside, ask for Dollie.” He opened the door for Duncan, and made a little bow as the lawyer passed inside.

  Much wondering at the incomprehensible circumstance of the child having the ring that had belonged to Maggie, the lawyer cautiously treaded the hallway papered with red-inked letters from China, and knocked at the little door at the end of the curious passage.

  The slot was pulled open with a bang, and an unseen guardian cried, “Who?”

  “Dollie,” whispered Duncan.

  The door was opened, and Duncan stood silent for a few moments at the top of the platform. The attendant, a short Chinaman with a bandaged eye, waited until Duncan’s sight had adjusted to the obscurity, then plucked at his sleeve and led him down among the opium dreamers.

  Past slumbrous and slow-moving shadowed forms along the double row of bunks, Duncan Phair moved with silent astonishment. The dim red and blue light from the shaded lamps above made the place unearthly; he had seen much in the Black Triangle, but he had never found anything to match this heady silence, this sinister indolence, this dense atmosphere of smoke and dreams. He had thought to look out for Simeon Lightner, but forms were indistinct, faces hidden.

  His attendant paused at last in the farthest, deepest corner of the place and pointed to a pale white face in a frame of black hair. The opium smoker’s form was softly illumined by a tiny candlewick in a green glass lamp. Darkly attired, she lay on her side upon a thin pallet. Smoke exhaled between thin colorless lips veiled the face suddenly, like a spirit at a seance, and the waxen lids drooped over the black expressionless eyes.

  “Dollie?” whispered Duncan Phair, and knelt beside the recumbent figure.

  “I’m Dollie,” she said slowly, and smoke enveloped her face once more.

  “I’m Duncan Phair, what do you know of my children? The two—”

  The dreamer’s eyes had slowly opened. “Dark Glass,” she said softly, with a smile.

  “Edwin and Edith are my children,” he repeated in a rushed whisper. “I’ve brought money, the money you requested,” he said, and took the bills from his pocket. He laid them beside the little lamp, expecting that she would take them up and count them.

  “Dark Glass,” she said again. “Dark Glass asked to be remembered to you.”

  “You have information!” Duncan Phair cried, still in the whisper, for his eyes had grown aware that other dreamers lay close around them. Just beyond Dollie, ensconced in even deeper shadow, was another woman—great and fat—whose pudgy hand held the lighted green lamp far from her face. Beside her, in those black shadows, moved the figure of a small child, the most restless thing in that dim, enclosed, slow-moving world. “Dollie—”

  “It’s not for your children you’re here,” said Dollie, and smiled. “It’s for the sake of Dark Glass.”

  “Who the devil is Dark Glass?” cried Duncan, in his exasperation.

  “Maggie Kizer,” whispered a voice behind him.

  Duncan turned and saw, no
t five feet away, the hideous grinning face of Lena Shanks, staring at him just as she had stared on the afternoon that her daughter was killed on West Houston Street.

  “Papa!” cried Edith, and he saw—for a moment—her smiling face emerge from the obscurity behind Lena Shanks.

  “Edith! You’re—”

  “Shhh!” cried Lena Shanks, and pushed Edith back into the shadows, “it’s for Maggie you’re here, not for the girl. . . .”

  “No,” whispered Duncan, suddenly alarmed. “I’m not to blame for Maggie, I knew nothing, it was Father who—”

  “Stallworth!”

  “Yes! It was Judge Stallworth who—”

  “There’s three of us dead,” said Lena Shanks grimly, and nodded to Dolly.

  “Oh—” cried Duncan, but that single exclamation must do for surprise, and wonder, and fear, and pain, for Dollie had plunged the gilded length of her yen hock deep into his throat.

  The blood that spurted out of Duncan’s neck extinguished Dollie’s lamp, and he thrashed in darkness. Those who attended to the gurgling in that black corner of the vast room took it for the common sound of a beginner at the game falling sick from his first pipe.

  Lena Shanks placed five more gilded opium needles into Dollie’s blood-drenched hand and, patiently feeling out for her victim’s invisible mouth and eyes and ears, she plunged them one by one into the writhing man’s head, until a few minutes later, in the sweet dimness of the opium den, he had ceased to struggle.

  Chapter 45

  As she had sat at the side of Marian Phair’s bed and watched over the delirious woman, Louisa Shanks propped a large and well-stocked writing desk upon her lap and was forever busy about it. She wrote constantly with a great variety of pens and inks and papers, and always smoothly hid her work at each knock upon the door of the room. The servants in the Phair household variously assumed that she was writing her mother, her sweetheart, or a sensational novel. Occasionally, a little boy appeared at the kitchen door and asked if he might be allowed to confer with his sister for a few moments; and the servants, rather than taking the trouble of bringing Louisa down to Rob, brought Rob up to Louisa. With their mistress quite out of her head and their master either away or drunk, the servants did much as they pleased in these lax, troubled days.