Gilded Needles

by Michael McDowell

Chapter 5

  As a family, the Stallworths kept their private faces turned away from the world. Though Benjamin’s conduct had soured for them the inceptive hopefulness of the new year, neither their expression nor their conversation betrayed their discomfiture to strangers or to friends.

  Only Benjamin appeared troubled, even more anxious than usual, with red teary eyes and sweating giddy hands. Before the group departed Gramercy Park, Judge Stallworth demanded that he be sent directly home so that his apparent agitation might not disgrace the family in their prominently situated pew. Helen’s low-voiced protest to this banishment was ignored and Benjamin was dropped at a corner. The two carriages rolled onward toward the church without anyone but Helen bothering to say good-evening to the young man.

  Cold, but also feverish and clammy beneath his rumpled clothing, Benjamin Stallworth stumbled home to the Presbyterian manse on Twenty-fifth Street. It was not the first time that he had been made to feel that he had dishonored the family. His father often remarked that Benjamin gave substance to the adage that a minister’s son was ungovernable, and his grandfather noted coldly that Benjamin hadn’t even the stamina or the stomach to be a proper black sheep. Benjamin was little better than a feebleminded child who inspired not a respectable horror but only contempt.

  Benjamin had been enrolled in the freshman class of Columbia College but hadn’t had the aptitude to finish out a single year of courses. He had been given to understand that he would be asked to leave if he did not withdraw of his own volition. After that he had been employed as a kind of superior clerk in the firm of Phair & Peerce, not because he was suited to the work—for he certainly wasn’t—but so that Duncan might keep a close eye upon him. The job had a certain titular respectability, but the fact was, Benjamin did little but run the simplest errands and occasionally copy out a letter that was of no importance whatsoever. He arrived late, left early, and was an object of derision to the other clerks in the office who were, to a man, competent, ambitious, and prepossessing.

  Benjamin Stallworth understood his shortcomings and was rendered unhappy by that understanding. He was upright enough to wish for correction but too weak to enforce it upon himself. At times, when he had particularly annoyed his father and his family, Benjamin would retire, fold up—never smile and never speak but under compulsion. This abnegating contrition always disturbed his sister. Helen interceded for him, made his promises for future improved conduct, and undertook to see that nothing else befell him. But Helen’s surveillance was limited and Benjamin always stumbled once more.

  Benjamin knew that he would be alone in the manse on Twenty-fifth Street, for the servants had the afternoon and evening off and would not return before the morning. Benjamin also knew that Helen kept a certain amount of cash, usually about fifty dollars or so, in a little tooled box behind certain books in the case in her room. Helen’s overbred propriety assured Benjamin that he would find the money secreted behind secular not religious volumes. This small horde was kept for emergencies, and Helen’s life was such that emergencies arose only rarely, and for half-years at a time she never touched the box. On previous occasions, Benjamin had taken the money there and replaced it as much as a month later without his sister ever being the wiser. If he had been so unlucky at the tables today, it stood to reason that he would have good fortune tonight, especially, he considered, if he played in a different place, at a different game, surrounded by different players, and taking different odds. Benjamin constructed a fervid little fantasy in which, on the next morning, he presented Duncan Phair with the eight hundred dollars that had been paid to Morrissey’s. He imagined apologies forthcoming from Duncan, his father, his grandfather, and his aunt. They all would look on him with increased respect, and having once won, he would never lose at the gaming tables again.

  Benjamin entered the manse and climbed the stairs directly to his sister’s room. He easily found the box. Not wanting to turn up the gas, he stood at the window and counted out sixty-five dollars in small gold pieces. He would have liked to leave the last five-­dollar gold piece, but after several moments’ hesitation he pocketed this too, to cover the incidental expenses of the evening. Then he went to his own room and changed into a suit of clothing that was neither new nor flashy. Benjamin’s apprehension that his absence from the house would be discovered was only habit. There was little danger, in fact, for on those occasions when he had disgraced himself, his father would have nothing to do with him and would even try to discourage Helen from administering comfort. It was possible that Helen might knock softly at the locked door, but if there were no response, she would assume that he was asleep or too depressed even for consolation and would silently retreat.

  He left by the back door of the house, taking with him a key so that he might regain entrance that way. It would be necessary to remain out well past midnight, so that he might reenter the house confident that his sister and his father slept.

  Benjamin struck out south along Fourth Avenue, avoiding Madison Square altogether. Although his family were all in church, he didn’t want to risk running into any latecomers to the service, who might mention later that they had seen him.

  At the corner of Gramercy Park he turned west onto Twenty-first Street, and continued until he came to Sixth Avenue. Several times in his short journey Benjamin had been accosted by reeling pairs and groups of well-dressed men who, having finished their visits some hours before, had settled down to the more serious business of sampling the liquors of different saloons in town. But Benjamin, glowing with a fever quite different from that produced by inebriation, had easily avoided them.

  Benjamin took the Sixth Avenue el and twenty minutes later was deposited at the corner of West Houston Street and Broadway. He was unfamiliar with the neighborhood, of which his first impression was one of danger underlying strident gaiety, of garishly lighted corners alternating with alleys that were desperately dark—it seemed a crowded urban forest of predator and prey. He hurried along West Houston Street in search of Harry Hill’s place, lately recommended to him for the fights that took place in a back room, but which he had never visited. His fist, thrust deep into his pocket, held tight his sister’s gold, for he was fearful that it should chink loudly enough to draw the attention of thieves.

  He stopped at a large frame house where an enormous red and blue lantern was suspended between two doors. Three women, whom Benjamin considered might just as well have been carrying sandwich boards that read “Whore” on the front and “For Sale” on the back, stumbled through the smaller of these entrances in a tumult of coarse laughter and obscene banter. At the larger door, Benjamin was stopped by a burly porter who wore a large pearl in the place of his left eye; but the half dollar that Benjamin placed in the man’s grimy palm allowed him entrance.

  After passing down a constricted unlighted evil-smelling passageway, rather like what Benjamin imagined a coal mine to be, he emerged into a wooden-floored room where fifty or so dancing couples flew about with obstreperous inebriated spirits. It was apparent that partitioning walls had been removed to provide so large a space, for the ceiling consisted of squares and rectangles of different heights and different textures, some wooden, some painted plaster, some with lights, some badly sagging. There was no bar, but five men stood behind a long wooden counter all along one side of the room, dispensing liquor that was brought up from the cellar.

  Benjamin was thrilled by the waiter-girls in their short skirts and their tiny polished boots, for he had never seen a woman in tights off the variety stage. One of these smirking young women came immediately up to Benjamin, opened wide her painted mouth, and screamed at him to know his pleasure—screamed, for it was otherwise impossible to be heard over the five-piece orchestra that played on a tiny platform just to their right. Considering that abstinence would only draw attention to himself in such a place, Benjamin ordered a schooner of beer.

  Skirting the dancers, Benjamin moved around the room. Beneath a large Punch and Judy booth in a far corner
, he spoke to a man who stood guard over a green-curtained doorway just to the side.

  “Fights tonight, aren’t there?” remarked Benjamin deferentially.

  “Nine o’clock. Cost you a quarter to get in.”

  It was half past eight. Benjamin ordered another schooner of beer, and stood as far out of the way as was possible in that crowded cramped place. He thought he had never seen a place more economically inhabited—there was not a board, not a corner, not a recess where one wasn’t likely to be jostled and jabbed. He gazed at the dancers who whirled before him and was so flustered with the strangeness and the shocking license of the place that he made no reply to—and often did not even understand—the unflattering remarks that were directed at him by the passing dancers, some because of his rude open-mouthed staring and some simply on account of his risible appearance. He had come so far afield this evening because he wanted to make certain that he would not meet anyone who knew him; and as he looked about, he realized that indeed, if nothing else, he was at least safe from discovery.

  Benjamin Stallworth was not a young man of wide experience, and he had never been in the same room with a prostitute before. Here, directly before him, assignations were openly made, and the woman who had entered free of charge at one door exited through the other in the company of a man whom she had never seen before that night. It was one thing to see such a woman on the street, quite another to find himself in-of-doors in her company, where a different etiquette must prevail. He wondered distressfully if he would be required to dance with one of these fallen women if she had the effrontery to ask. Benjamin anxiously considered whether his presence in such a place was tantamount to purchasing the feminine favors that were so openly declared for sale. He felt at once exhilarated and soiled, and might have remained rooted beneath the Punch and Judy box all evening, gaping at the gaudy dancers: the women in violet skirts and orange jackets, the men in tight striped trousers with rings in their ears.

  At last, however, the curtains across the way into the back room were pulled aside and the doorkeeper took the half dollar that Benjamin proffered, but gave no change. Deciding against making an issue of the overcharging, Benjamin was the first inside; but immediately after came a great rush of men from the dance floor, and some number of women as well. This room was much smaller than the other, no more than thirty feet square with an eight-foot ceiling. Two odd windows were boarded across from the outside. In the middle of the floor was a wooden platform no more than a foot high, with wooden posts at each corner upholding a double cordon of thick sea-rope. Benjamin hurried to the far side of the ring, and secured a place right against the platform; in a few minutes more he was hemmed in by other spectators and bettors, to the extent that any decision to leave now could have been implemented only with difficulty. The gas-lit room quickly filled with cigar smoke, and Benjamin had to order more beer just to keep from choking—despite the fact that he didn’t like the taste of it, that it was almost twice as expensive as any beer he had ever bought, and that he was already feeling the effects of having drunk too much. Only for the waiter-girls did the crowd momentarily make room.

  While waiting for something more to happen, and as he sipped at his beer, Benjamin looked over the tightly packed expectant crowd. He was pushed so hard against the platform that splinters from the end of a rough-hewn board punctured his trousers and shin. He still held his gold feverishly in one fist inside his trousers, for he had already felt light prying fingers in a couple of his other pockets. He dared not turn around, for he knew that he hadn’t the courage to confront a thief in a territory where thieves were the common citizens and he the suffered immigrant. He directed his curious attention rather to the persons crowded against the other three sides of the ring, as snugly trapped into their places as himself.

  Passing quickly over several gentlemen in plug hats whose faces were obscured by the smoke that billowed in brown clouds from their cigars, and pausing only with horror at a physical impropriety initiated by a young woman with a cabbage rose on her hat upon a young man in a shimmering green waistcoat, Benjamin observed an old coarse-featured woman who stood just opposite him on the far side of the ring. To Benjamin’s discomfort she returned his gaze. The expression on the old woman’s face he could interpret only as hate, but he could posit no cause for such malevolence. The woman was fat; she wore a black jacket with black lace trimming, and a wide necklace of jet around her throat. To one side of her stood a boy and a girl, and just behind them were two young women, one a delicious flaxen-haired woman in a bottle-green satin frock, and the other a stern heavy-eyed woman with crimped black hair in a hideous orange dress.

  After his initial surprise, Benjamin averted his gaze, but irresistibly his eyes turned back to the fat woman. She stared at him still, and with a disconcerting fixity. Benjamin glanced furtively to either side, hoping to find that she was actually directing her attention to another, but then her slowly gathered menacing smile confirmed that he alone was her study.

  His discomfort was allayed by a great commotion in the room. The crowd between the curtained doorway and the ring was wedged apart by the approach of several persons.

  A fat bald smooth-shaven man pushed up to the platform first. He struggled for a few seconds with the ropes, but at last with the help of some facetiously violent shoves by the spectators, he was propelled into the center of the ring. He was followed immediately by two young women who were rather small—not what Benjamin had had in mind when he had first heard of the girl-fighters that might be found on West Houston Street. It was the prospect of this novelty that had lured him to Harry Hill’s, rather than to some other lower-class establishment.

  Both women wore white boots, black tights that exposed the entirety of their heavily sinewed legs, short tunics of black velvet with trimming of gold and green fringe. Little lace collars rose high upon their thick necks, but the women’s arms were entirely bare. Their long hair was knotted like a Chinaman’s queue and hung down their backs. Neither of the women was handsome in the face and one was particularly disfigured by a broken nose.

  The introduction of the woman with the broken nose—the Indomitable and Puissant Annie Leech—provoked such a cheer from the crowd that it was immediately apparent that she was their favorite. Her opponent—Charlotta Kegoe, the Sapphic Pugilist—was greeted with less enthusiasm. However, Benjamin was fascinated by this second lady, not only because of her title and her legs—hard pillars of muscle that nearly burst their black stockings—but because of the nature of her jewelry. Since it would be imprudent in the extreme for a female fighter to wear any sort of ornament in the ring, Miss Kegoe had had numerous necklaces, bracelets, and rings tattooed onto the skin of her neck, wrists, and fingers. They comprised an eccentricity exciting to Benjamin.

  The two women paced restlessly around the ring, calling out to their friends in the crowd of spectators, shaking hands over the ropes in a strangely masculine fashion, and giving insult for insult back to their detractors. They smacked the palms of their hands loudly against the low ceiling for emphasis and ignored one another completely.

  The fat gentleman in the center of the ring—Harry Hill himself, Benjamin heard it whispered—explained that the first fight would take place as soon as all the bets were made. Four apprentices would circulate through the crowd, two holding red slips of paper and two holding blue. Those wishing to back Charlotta Kegoe purchased red slips for any desired amount, and those wishing to bet upon Annie Leech should go with the blue. Odds would be calculated immediately, and announced before the beginning of the fight.

  The four apprentices, who were distinguished by the large blue or red feathers that sprouted from their caps, were immediately mobbed by those wishing to place bets, but so efficient were they at their task that in very little time all the wagers were taken. Benjamin, who at first had determined to back the favorite, changed his mind. He had watched the baleful woman in the black jacket, and she and her companions had each placed a bet on Charlotta Kegoe,
the lady of the tattooed jewels. So Benjamin, in a vague effort to circumvent the evil effect of the old woman’s gaze, placed sixty dollars on the head of the Sapphic Pugilist. The red slip, with the figure sixty scrawled on it, he folded and thrust deep into his waistcoat pocket, which he then plugged with his thumb. If he won, and the odds proved substantial, he might go a long way toward repaying his uncle. And if he lost, he would have—if nothing else—adequate excuse for departing Harry Hill’s establishment, where he found himself very uncomfortable.

  The announcement that the odds were four to one in favor of Annie Leech over Charlotta Kegoe brought up a cheer and a surge forward in the crowd. Harry Hill withdrew from the ring and a great bell, struck by a man perched on a high stool in the corner of the room, marked the beginning of the match. Annie Leech and Charlotta Kegoe suddenly turned and fell upon one another in a growling fury. A series of vicious fisted blows left their bare skin first red, then blue with bruising. They cracked one another’s jaws and pulled one another’s queues; they screamed inarticulately and pushed one another painfully against the ropes.

  The crowd from the beginning cheered vociferously, and their noses rose yet higher when the first blood appeared—as Charlotta Kegoe was injured just below the right eye by a well-timed poke from Annie Leech. Another terrible blow stunned Charlotta, and as she reeled against the ropes Annie did a little savage dance of triumph while three-quarters of the crowd urged her on to greater mayhem; the other fourth began to groan loudly, mourning the loss of its stakes.

  For these five minutes, Benjamin worried for the fate of his sister’s sixty dollars, five dollars of the sum he had borrowed being already consumed; and losing concentration on the fight that was taking place sometimes no more than inches from his face, tried to think of a way to replace that money before his sister discovered that it was missing. He realized suddenly that he had been foolish in taking the gold: his family thought badly enough of his indiscretion at Morrissey’s, but that at least had not been outright theft. Benjamin’s sole hope now was that Charlotta Kegoe would win after all and that, at the least, Helen’s money could be replaced.