Mysteries of Winterthurn

by Joyce Carol Oates

  How, and why, answering to what cruel logic, did this perverse change come about?—that the second Mrs. Kilgarvan should, after a space of nearly two decades, strive to emulate the first, as if by unnatural sisterly rapport: Miss Hortense Spies, of one of Winterthurn’s oldest families, so sweetly docile, so unfailingly devout a young Christian woman, who in her virgin artlessness had rejected, it was said, any number of gentlemen her own age, as they seemed insufficiently “fired by idealism,”—she of the full soft bosom and hips, the wavy chestnut-red hair, the childlike addiction to comfits, chocolate, and honey: shading, alas, by degrees into a slovenly attired harridan with bruised eyes, her fair skin raked by her own nails, her manner oscillating betwixt a leaden despondency and a shrill shrieking hysteria—? Dr. Hatch, finding evidence of fresh bruises, scratches, and cuts on those parts of his patient’s body it was his professional duty to examine, confessed himself perplexed by the situation, for, it seems, the young Mrs. Kilgarvan had taken to punishing herself, even to the point of whipping her soft body with a riding crop!—which morbid practice, she had dully explained, “was nothing more than she deserved: being foul, sinful, and of no more worth than a piece of barnyard filth.” Dr. Hatch firmly demurred; pointing out to the wretched woman that so mistreating her body, and thereby rendering herself ill-suited for the solemn duties of wifehood and motherhood, was in itself a sin, and must displease God greatly: whereupon the patient began to sob with all the abandon of a spoiled, sickly child, and her husband, who had been pacing nearby (the examination having taken place behind a screen, in the master bedroom at Glen Mawr Manor), fell of a sudden into such despondency, he began to shout and curse at her; and so forgot his friendship of long standing with Dr. Hatch, he ordered him from the room, as if the respected physician were a common servant—!

  (Dr. Hatch afterward confided in an acquaintance, at the Corinthian Club,—which palatial retreat on Berwick Place the Judge frequented less regularly, as his marital situation presumably worsened—that he could not comprehend the sinister metamorphosis, save in terms of an hereditary malaise, in virulent union with female pathology of an undefined sort. Nor did his customary methods of treating such disorders, involving vinegar douches, vigorous daily purges,—by way of Epsom salts, laxatives, and cold-water enemas—and bloodletting,—by way of a rare subspecies of leech affixed to the female genitalia—appear to be having much salutary effect. “So mysterious is the alteration in young Mrs. Kilgarvan,” the good doctor said pensively, “that, were one not a rationalist, and fervently on the side of progress, an hypothesis of ‘demonic possession’ might well be entertained.”)

  More and more frequently, the willful young woman absented herself from society; refused to heed her weeping baby girls; refused to admit Dr. Hatch into her presence; grew feverish over the reading of meretricious female romances,—among them Villette, found beneath a cushion in her boudoir after her death; and hid away, for long hours at a time, in the cavernous unheated attic, or in the chill Honeymoon Room (where, in a happier season, she and her bridegroom had spent their wedding night), or, most perversely, in the farthest reaches of the cellar with its low-beamed ceiling, and its numberless cobwebs, and its damp earthen floor. The alarmed housekeeper, subsequently dismissed by Judge Kilgarvan, told him she had distinctly heard her mistress conversing with someone in the cellar: a woman, it seemed, who had answered her in low, languid, drawling, somewhat mocking tones! (Though, of course, there was no one in the cellar—apart from the unhappy Mrs. Kilgarvan herself.)

  As a consequence of the irresponsible tattling of servants, all of Winterthurn was to learn the tragic circumstances of Mrs. Kilgarvan’s death, but a few days before the third birthday of her elder daughter: discovered, in an airless and foul-smelling corner of the cellar, dying in retching agony of a self-administered potion (diagnosed by the county coroner as rat-poison paste, made of arsenic), with a note scrawled in a miniature childish hand pinned to her bosom: ’Tis my own doing & no other—my belovèd Husband Erasmus is blameless—O pray for him & all who remain behind in the Vale of Tears: do not pray for Hortense, as she is DAMN’D & THE DEVIL’S OWN.

  (It was poor Georgina, returned at the end of a day of teaching at the Parthian Academy, who found the wretched woman only minutes before her death,—seeming to know by panicked intuition, as the servants afterward said, as soon as she set foot in the house, that something frightful had happened. And how she did cry and carry on, surrendering to helpless spasms of tears!—the stiff and rarely yielding stepdaughter now grieving for her father’s young wife with as much selfless abandon as if it were her own mother, or sister, whom she had lost.)

  THOUGH IT WAS WIDELY CLAIMED that Judge Kilgarvan had died most unexpectedly, seized by a massive stroke that paralyzed him in midbreath, and sent him crashing to the floor before the affrighted eyes of the entire courtroom, not a few persons had quietly noted, over a twelve-month or more, the elderly gentleman’s increasing impatience with servants, and with his daughter Georgina, and a general acerbity of manner that might have betokened ill-health.

  The Kilgarvans of Wycombe Street had themselves witnessed one of the Judge’s more flamboyant outbursts, approximately three weeks before his death, when, leaving Grace Episcopal Church after the Sunday service, he had, it seems, lost his footing on a patch of icy sidewalk, and flailed out in a sudden rage against Miss Georgina, raining blows upon the abashed woman’s head and shoulders with his walking stick, and shouting epithets of such vulgarity as one would have supposed a gentleman of his breeding and character would not know: the while the “Blue Nun,” veiled as always, and encumbered by her heavy black skirts, meekly withstood the assault, until such time as Erasmus’s arm wearied, and servants hastened to their aid.

  Witnesses to this display of temper were deeply troubled, and many did their best to erase it from memory, for, in truth, this flush-faced old man with the clouded bulging eyes, and the head sleek and bald as a bullet, was not Chief Justice Erasmus Kilgarvan, in his essence: and they were hard put to interpret his spittle-flecked words,—“You are invincible! You shall conquer, in the end! You—and you—and you!”—uttered in rhythm with his blows, as tears sprang from his eyes, with as much despairing vehemence as if Miss Georgina were not one woman, but many.

  (YOUNG XAVIER KILGARVAN CARRIED away with him this shocking spectacle of his “uncle”—or, to be precise, his “half-uncle”—behaving with such brutish anger, on the very steps of Grace Church; and is to be forgiven, I think, for the satisfaction with which he pondered it. Yet even Xavier, so prescient in certain things, was quite astonished at the news of the Judge’s death—for, it seems, he had gloomily imagined the old man to be immortal.)

  AS TO THE CIRCUMSTANCES of Erasmus Kilgarvan’s death, which even his enemies could not fail to think unbefitting a person of his stature and dignity: these were especially ironic, in that, by sheer coincidence, he was handing down a sentence of some severity (upward of fifty years in the State Correctional Facility for Men at Powhatassie), when the convicted felon rose to his feet, and wildly waved his fist, and began to shout incoherent words to the effect that “God has claimed vengeance as His alone,”—whereupon Judge Kilgarvan was so stupefied at this rare act of impudence, in the hallowed marble-and-stucco interior of the domed Winterhurn County Courthouse, in his courtroom of so many years, that a weakened blood vessel in his brain snapped: and the poor man went mute in the midst of his speech: and, of a sudden bizarrely mottled (in lurid patches of crimson, pink, and white), in the face, fell to the floor clawing and tearing at his high starched collar, and at the neck of his judge’s black gown. And was never to rise again from where Fate had pitched him.

  So public a death, in so defiled a context; so cruelly timed; so ignominious as to its particulars—these factors rendered Erasmus Kilgarvan’s death especially ironic; and could not fail to provoke the more superstitious amongst the populace into claiming that the convicted man had called forth Divine wrath upon Judge Kilgarvan. Alas,
so hoary, and reasoned, and dispassionate a jurist, who had passed judgment on wrongdoers of every stripe, not excepting criminals of good and sometimes superior intelligence (which, as all practitioners of the Law will attest, adds a special challenge to the task): struck down, as it were, by the maniacal ravings of one Horace Godwit, of that tribe of poor whites who dwelt in the scrubby foothills south of Mt. Provenance, in the most wretched sort of squalor and moral debasement: how should the humiliation of it not outlive him, and taint his honor? It was the more unfortunate, that Godwit was a creature of the lowest sort, possessing, or feigning to possess, a subnormal intelligence; that his trial had involved testimony so frequently lewd, the courtroom had had to be cleared of all spectators, including men; that a most poisonous and snarled congeries of tales had emerged, involving forced prostitution in the notorious lumbermen’s brothels at Rivière-du-Loup, some ten miles northwest of Winterthurn City . . . Throughout the fifteen days of the trial, Judge Kilgarvan had exhibited an admirable formality that quite masked his abhorrence for the defendant, and for certain of the prosecution’s witnesses (one of them being a Dr. Holyrod Wilts, a physician and, it was rumored, abortionist, in the hire of the brothel owners): he had displayed very little of the sickened revulsion he must have felt, as, by degrees, it came to light that Horace Godwit, though self-defined as a farmer, was actively involved in the brothel trade, and had sold several of his daughters (both legitimate and illegitimate) into white slavery: and, beyond this, most unspeakably of all, he had committed certain gross and unnatural crimes with his very own daughters,—the youngest being but eleven years of age.

  Scarcely is it to be wondered at, then, that Erasmus Kilgarvan, interrupted in midspeech by this wretch’s vainglorious outburst,—“Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord! Vengeance is mine!”—suffered so extreme a shock to his sensibility that his strained nerves broke; and, one side of his mouth twisting upward in a grimace of commingled rage, incredulity, and grief, he fell crashing to the floor, with as much stunning weight, it almost seemed, as the bronze bust of his own likeness, in Roman style, which had, but the previous autumn, been ensconced in the high-vaulted foyer of the Courthouse, alongside likenesses of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Julius Caesar, and, not least, Moses and Solomon, in their stern-browed manly glory.

  AS REVEREND DE FORREST CONCLUDED his remarks, stressing, a second time, the unsurpassed moral integrity of the deceased, and his devotion to the commonweal (“whereby public justice was ever favored above private interest”), the keening sounds lifted yet again, light, rarefied, melodic, sweetly elusive: and this time Xavier felt so inexpressibly yearning a sensation,—ah, how potent! how heart-swelling!—he could barely force himself to remain stationary, in reverent silence.

  From whence did the haunting cries derive?—and what was their airy substance? Xavier sensed a kindred restiveness in the younger people present: his brothers Bradford, Roland (or Wolf, as he was often called), Colin—poor Colin, at nineteen as much a feckless boy as Xavier himself, and infinitely better-natured!—and, some yards away (but did he dare to look?—he must!) those altogether strange and forbidden cousins of his: Thérèse with eyes resolutely downcast, her prayerbook clasped to her meager bosom; Perdita betraying some agitation,—for surely she did hear the cries—and forgetting herself so completely, she chanced to raise her eyes, and to send darting glances about,—the which were scarcely diminished in their intensity by her veil, but, oddly, wondrously, enhanced!—or so it seemed to the lovestruck Xavier, who stared, and stared, as the sounds of an indefinable sweetness pulsed through his veins, and finely, lightly, tantalizingly, vibrated along his spinal column. And would she glance at him? And would he suffer the shock of seeing, and of knowing, as their eyes locked—?

  So it was, the young cousins seemed to discover each other for the first time: and Xavier Kilgarvan, his adolescent blood in a tumult, his heart perceptibly accelerating its beat, experienced one of those lightning-strokes of yearning,—in which desire, passion, and love of the highest degree of purity are commingled—that not only illuminate our lives with ferocious intensity, but pierce them in two, and alter them forever.

  The Spectacle in the Honeymoon Room

  By eleven o’clock in the morning of May 3, news of some “unknown and hideous catastrophe” at Glen Mawr Manor,—whether involving Simon Esdras, or the “Blue Nun,” or the young sisters (who had not arrived for classes at the Parthian Academy), or another, unnamed party—had begun to spread through Winterthurn City with such uncanny swiftness that the boys in Mr. Pitt-Davies’ mathematics class learned of it: and Xavier, being informed by a scrawled note from young Ringgold Peregrine, crudely tossed onto his desk, that MURDER had been committed at his relatives’ grand house, was so astonished, and so gripped with a sudden panic (for, it must be confessed, the phantasmal image of Perdita was rarely distant from his imagination, and, in thinking of the Manor, he thought solely of her and her well-being), that, rather more with trancelike compulsion than brash defiance, he rose at once from his seat, and paid no heed to his startled schoolmaster,—not even to mumble a word of apology or excuse—and ran from the room.

  So distressed was young Xavier, he left the Winterthurn Academy for Boys by way of the front entrance on Berwick Place, caring not a whit if he should be espied: and ran along the street, stopping passersby to inquire of them, if they knew what had happened at the Manor: with so little of his customary concern for his appearance, and for the decorum of his public behavior, that he minded not if one or two persons smiled at the spectacle of a youth dressed in the smart green blazer of the Academy, hurrying along, with his tie blown back over his shoulder, and his mop of curls all disheveled.

  Along crowded Berwick Avenue he ran, pausing breathless to inquire at the tobacconist’s, if anyone there had heard the news; bursting into the near-deserted offices of the Gazette, where the female employees stared; intruding in a private conversation betwixt a couple alighting from a carriage; threading his way through traffic along Union Avenue to make his impatient inquiry to several clerks, two Negro bootblacks, and a number of startled and offended gentlemen, in the high-domed gilded lobby of the Winterthurn Arms. But no one knew how to reply to him: and many persons quite amazed him by not knowing to which “Manor” he referred.

  Down narrow Charity Street, where he paused to make a futile inquiry at the Sweet Shoppe; down Pinckney; down Hazelwit; again crossing Union Avenue; inquiring of pedestrians, news vendors, policemen, drivers of hackney cabs, the German proprietor of a butcher’s shop on Water Street who thought him crazed,—until, panting, he flung himself through the doors of the brownstone police headquarters at Water and Railroad: where, to his near-sobbing disappointment, he was turned brusquely away, and ordered to take his leave with more restraint than he had entered.

  “But surely you can give me some information,” Xavier protested, “for I am a relative of the Kilgarvans—I am a Kilgarvan—and must know whether a murder has been committed at the Manor: and whether a young girl has been injured.”

  But the police lieutenant behind the desk reiterated his command that Xavier leave the station; for not even high-and-mighty Academy boys could burst into headquarters, and cause a commotion.

  Xavier then ran, in greater distress than before, westward along Railroad,—now approaching Wycombe Street, which, for divers reasons, he wished to avoid—in order that he might confront his brother Colin, who worked at a livery stable close by: the plan quickly formed in his fevered brain that he would borrow cash from his brother, to hire a hackney cab to take him out to the Manor, a considerable distance away. “For it may be,” the breathless youth murmured, “that she is in particular need of solace; and may even be awaiting my arrival.”

  COLIN, ALAS, WOULD PROVE incapable of lending Xavier so generous a sum,—less out of guarded frugality than as a consequence of his own indigence; so it happened that Xavier had to humble himself, and take the clattering Union Avenue trolley to the very end of the line; a
nd, after that, to hike afoot nearly three miles along the Old River Road, until he came to the great arched gate of Glen Mawr Manor—which, as he might have foreseen, was locked fast, and guarded by sheriff’s deputies.

  Though a more enterprising adventurer or “detective” might have slipped stealthily away, to scale the twelve-foot limestone wall surrounding the Manor at a sequestered place, or, even, to approach it from the river (a challenge Xavier, Colin, and numerous schoolboy acquaintances had, in fact, taken on a half-dozen times in the past),—though Xavier knew from his habitual gorging of pulp novelettes (celebrating such ambiguous heroes as Eugène François Vidocq of the Parisian Sûreté, and the Bow Street Runners, and Inspector Bucket of Scotland Yard, and America’s own George B. Jashber) that he might do better to investigate the “scene of the crime” himself, no matter the consequences,—he seems to have been sufficiently discouraged by the deputies’ remarks as to give up, for the afternoon, such hopes: and to content himself with learning, from a deputy named Clegg (an acquaintance of his brother Wolf’s), the following imperfect account of the “catastrophe” that had befallen the Glen Mawr Kilgarvans, sometime during the preceding night . . .

  BY EIGHT-THIRTY O’CLOCK the household was nervously undecided; by nine o’clock, in a tremor of alarm and apprehension, for no one, including Mrs. Whimbrel’s devoted Irish nursemaid, knew quite what to do,—whether to continue knocking, ever more forcibly, at the bolted door of the Honeymoon Room; or whether to discreetly withdraw, under the assumption that Mrs. Whimbrel simply wished to slumber the morning through, and would appear downstairs, with little Charleton, when she wished.