Gilded Needles

by Michael McDowell

  Only a few of the two dozen persons in the room were Chinamen. In the dimness, Maggie could see that some of the addicts lay sleeping with their pipes resting lightly upon an outstretched hand, some were propped on an elbow patiently working the opium over the little green-glass lamps, some smoked their pipes in contented stupefaction. A couple of men shared a plate of food and a single cup of coffee. A prosperous Chinaman, his handsome Irish wife, and their ten-year-old son lay in a reposeful triangle, passing a single pipe between them. A three hundred-pound woman from a Bowery freak show was propped in a corner with her legs spread wide, trying to make her sausage-fat arthritic fingers do their business properly with the delicate yen hock and the tiny black boluses of opium. And a young man—evidently a novice—staggered down the length of one platform, reeling and convulsive. Though he bumped over others’ lay-outs and kicked others in the legs or their stomachs, no one called out or appeared to take any notice of him. Besides the Bowery fat lady there were several women in the room—none of them so well-dressed as Maggie—who were indifferently placed among the men.

  But despite these pockets of shifting light and movement, there prevailed in the smoky blue cellar an absolute and stupefying silence. It seemed as if in that place, the sense of smell had subsumed all of hearing and much of sight. One heard nothing, saw little, but the smell of burning opium pervaded one’s entire consciousness.

  Although the scant, colored illumination, the fearful noiselessness, the pervasive sharp odor, the torpidity of all the inhabitants of that room could not fail to make a sinister impression on the casual observer, those who frequented the place knew it to be perfectly safe. No woman was ever molested, no man injured in a fight; harsh words rarely spoken were never attended. And though the place was the frequent resort of thieves, there was honor among them here if there was honor nowhere else. No one was ever robbed, though the jeweled hand of the actress dropped insensible across the breast of the pickpocket.

  Maggie descended the short flight of steps into the room and walked slowly to the back. The head of a reclining female figure swayed languorously, and a featureless voice from an invisible mouth whispered, “Dark Glass . . .” Maggie paused and raised her gloved hand in salutation.

  “What’s it like, Dark Glass?” cried the voice, a little louder, but with no more urgency than there was curiosity in the gleaming liquid eyes that were turned on Maggie. “What’s it like out there? Are they still burying the dead?”

  Out there meant all the world except this one room, and out there was an insignificant space by comparison.

  “Yes, Dollie,” replied Maggie quietly, “wait a bit, wait a bit. . . .”

  Dollie was an actress who, when not in work, had always retreated to the dens of Mott Street. Here she had made her acquaintance with Maggie and helped the octoroon when she was in greatest need of assistance. When however, in the first days of the year, it was found out at the National Theatre that Dollie had become pregnant by a member of the house orchestra and obtained an abortion of that child in the Black Triangle, the stage manager had refused to allow her to rehearse for the next production. Dollie had fled to Mott Street and had scarcely ventured out at all in over a month now.

  At the barred window, Maggie purchased a tin of highest-grade opium, five ounces in a small oblong brass box that was painted with red Chinese characters, the best yen hock that was to be had, and a dollar’s worth of the second-best opium as a gift for Dollie. She paid a little more than ten dollars altogether.

  When Maggie returned to Dollie, she was greeted vacantly—for Maggie’s presence had already faded from the hopeless addict’s mind. Dollie had got that name from her pink dimpled cheeks and her bright blue eyes that made her resemble a fine China doll. But now her cheek was faded and her eye grown cloudy; her face had fallen slack and her luxuriant black hair was hid beneath a greasy bonnet.

  Maggie lay down beside her old friend and, taking out her newly purchased yen hock, began to heat a small pellet of the opium she had bought over Dollie’s green lamp.

  Dollie leaned over and sniffed it. “Good dope,” she breathed. Despite scant illumination in the room, the pupils of Dollie’s eyes were contracted into points and Maggie knew that Dollie probably could see nothing but the flame of the candle in the lamp. Her only other light was the mixed flowing color of her dreaming. It was a wonder she had found out Maggie’s presence in the room.

  The opium was placed in Dollie’s pipe and the two women smoked. Maggie fell quickly into a slow soft reverie, a reverie that was untroubled by remembrance of distresses past or present, reverie untouched by anxious dreaming, reverie that was nothing but solace for the care that burdens all. She stretched herself softly in her fine green dress upon the stained ticking of an old mattress and thought, when she thought at all, of this small but sufficient world of contentment and security that lay in the dark cellar of an old house at the lower end of Mott Street on the lower end of Manhattan Island. No statesman inspired by a gleaming Utopia, no cleric convinced of the possibility of heaven upon earth, no philanthropist with expansive heart and unlimited funds could have created, or even imagined, so fine an existence as this one. It was no wonder that out there was a sordid, deceptive, cold place. Out there was that other room, the rest of Mott Street, the rest of Manhattan Island, the rest of the planet—where the light glared and blinded, where the wicked and the weary beat upon the walls and cried out their misery.

  Sometime later, Maggie Kizer rose and made her way out of that place, leaving the packet of opium beside her friend. As she slowly ascended the steps to the platform at the end of the room, the obsequious Chinaman bowed continuously, but did not venture to assist her. He opened the door and pointed down the letter-­papered hallway. At the other end stood the Irishwoman who moved aside again to allow her passage. Maggie paused a moment and drew her fingers over the ideograms drawn in red ink like blood. Two ragged little girls with slanted eyes and red hair huddled just inside the door, chattering to one another in a mixture of Chinese-patois and heavily brogued English—their speech as mixed as their parentage. Maggie noted only that it was now dark outside.

  Slowly, through the Mott Street that was hardly less crowded at two o’clock in the morning—by a skeleton clock that stood in the window of a jewelry shop—than at any hour of daylight, Maggie Kizer made her dreamy, careless way.

  Near the intersection with Spring Street, Maggie came upon a cab that was discharging a passenger and she requisitioned it to take her the remainder of the way home. She climbed in and then, without having the notion that any time passed at all, she found that the cab had halted before her own house. Maggie paid the driver and climbed the steps of her building.

  “Mrs. Kizer,” said a voice behind her. She turned slowly, her latchkey in hand.

  “Mrs. Kizer,” repeated another voice, from a slightly different direction.

  Maggie lifted her veil and raised her dark spectacles. Two men in frock coats had come together at the foot of the steps. In one motion, they pulled back the lapels of their coats and revealed battered tin shields the size of saucers. Behind them stood a young man in a beaver hat whose hair and whiskers were like fire. They all stared hard at Maggie and she lowered her spectacles with a fatigued hand.

  “Come along now,” said one of the men with the saucerlike shield.

  “Why?” said Maggie. “Where?”

  “We know that your husband killed Cyrus Butterfield, and that you were a witness and an accessory. Come along now,” said the other.

  The latchkey fell from Maggie’s hand and clattered on Mrs. Weale’s front steps.

  Chapter 17

  Helen Stallworth, on the morning after her visit to the Black Triangle with Marian’s Committee for the Suppression of Urban Vice, did not attend breakfast in the manse, but rather sent word down to her father and brother that she was indisposed. Benjamin of late had developed the habit of detailing at breakfast all that he had done and witnessed in the Black Triangle the night
before. Edward Stallworth encouraged these revelations, for from them he garnered material for his sermons. Helen was grieved by Benjamin’s amused voice, by her father’s satisfied reception of the anecdotes of crime and destitution; and she rarely read Simeon Lightner’s articles now without irrepressible shuddering.

  On the front page of Wednesday morning’s Tribune, as she examined it alone in her bedroom over a cup of strong black tea, Helen found a story of particular horror. The facts of the case, as reported by Simeon Lightner, were quite beyond her conception. The jumbled talk of streetwalkers with amber spectacles, opium addiction, escaped convicts, blackmail, murder, and corpse-­plundering was like a gothic romance. Yet even after learning the miserable circumstances under which Cyrus Butterfield had been deprived of his life, and contemplating the hard-faced malignity of the courtesan Maggie Kizer, Helen did not waver in her resolve to assist the unfortunates who were forced by happenstance and poverty to inhabit that sink of depravity and misery called the Black Triangle; and she had not lost the conviction either that membership on Marian’s committee would do nothing in that direction. Assuring the concerned servants that she was wholly recovered, Helen Stallworth departed the manse and went to visit an acquaintance whose small but fine house was located on Eighteenth Street near Second Avenue.

  Mrs. General Taunton was the widow of a Union officer who had died in the Battle of the Wilderness, and though this melancholy event was long past, Mrs. General Taunton remained in deep mourning for her husband. In fact, though she attended all services at the Madison Square Presbyterian Church, Helen Stallworth knew the lady only by her figure and unvarying dress—a stocky short woman in finest bombazine, with large bracelets, necklaces, and earrings of gleaming jet. A large pendant on her breast contained a coil of her husband’s hair, tied into a lovers’ knot. The veil that covered the face of Mrs. General Taunton was so heavy and so black that Helen Stallworth was not certain that she would know the lady if she were to see her without it. A carte de visite that Mrs. General Taunton had made up for herself and distributed to her affectionate acquaintances showed her standing beside a pall-draped pedestal on which rested her dead husband’s sword and military cap, while she—in exquisite mourning apparel—stood with bowed head and drooping hand in an attitude of picturesque inconsolable grief.

  Edward Stallworth sometimes lightly ridiculed this particular parishioner, but Helen had been attracted by the unflagging fidel­ity of the lady’s costume. Helen found her not lugubrious by any means, but rather of a somberly cheerful disposition. She had enough money to live comfortably in a moderately sized house in a moderately fashionable neighborhood which, to Helen’s surprise, when she first visited the modest lady, was staffed by a mob of servants.

  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.”