Mysteries of Winterthurn

by Joyce Carol Oates

  “But has anyone approached you, to join?” Xavier asked, with some concern. “Who has approached you?”

  Whereupon Colin rudely thumped Xavier on his shoulder, rather more by way of dismissing the question, and bidding him farewell, than wishing to impart actual pain,—though actual pain was imparted.

  IT WAS A FEW DAYS AFTER the grand jury’s decision, when the atmosphere about Courthouse Green had slightly calmed, that Xavier received, to his surprise, permission to speak with the accused man,—which had been refused numberless times since his arrival in Winterthurn, on the grounds that he was not a relative of Rosenwald, nor “professionally” involved in the case.

  Having steeled himself against the discomfiture of meeting a man greatly demoralized by his plight, and, withal, brutishly ugly, Xavier was inwardly shocked to discover that Isaac Rosenwald was gracious, and eagerly cooperative, and so far from resembling an ape or monkey, that Xavier could not possibly have recognized him from the “likenesses” the newspapers had published! Indeed, apart from his cruel-puckered eyes, which blinked incessantly (for, it seemed, his glasses had been broken, and there was no possibility of their being replaced), and the drawn and haggard appearance of his face, and one or another nervous tic, Rosenwald struck Xavier as quite personable, and even fairly attractive: very much, in fact, the kind of gentleman with whom he might wish to cultivate a friendship, if circumstances allowed.

  As Xavier had been granted but a half-hour visit, and this beneath the beetle-browed scrutiny of the jailkeeper, he wasted no time in introducing himself; and stating the aim of his interview; and explaining that his interest in the case was purely that of an amateur,—he was no employee of Pinkerton’s,* and no police informer, and, he hoped, no meddlesome crank who would make things worse by his attentions. Nor was he, he hastened to make clear, a reporter for any newspaper, or one who hoped to exploit his meeting with Rosenwald by selling his story to the highest bidder.

  Thus the air was cleared, after some initial awkwardness; and the accused began earnestly to recount all he knew,—which was in truth very nearly nothing Xavier did not already know, from his own perusal of the transcripts, and his questioning of the divers witnesses. Again, Rosenwald’s account of his slight acquaintance with Eva Teal; his account of the accident in the mill, and the bloodied towel, and the ill-advised trip to the doctor; and his wandering about,—ah, how unfortunately!—on the night of June 7, instead of going, as he assuredly ought to have done, to the home of his friends. From time to time Rosenwald’s voice cracked, or ascended to a reproachful whine; but for the most part it was as well modulated as Xavier’s own, and his manner wondrously reasonable,—indeed, Xavier began uneasily to think, as their conversation continued, was it not too reasonable?—for the prisoner gave evidence of knowing very little of the newspaper campaign being waged against him: a consequence, Xavier supposed, of the jailer’s censorship. Nor did the unhappy man know the extent to which the invidious term ritual murder was being bandied about, by persons who scarcely knew what they were saying, but knew, assuredly, what they felt—!

  (By the by, Xavier had traveled all the way to Cambridge, to spend several days at the Harvard library, doing research into the subject of “ritual murder” as allegedly practiced by Jews, against Christians: and came away quite sickened with his findings, which spoke very badly for Christendom, and did not augur well for Isaac Rosenwald. Though he had thoroughly satisfied himself that “ritual murder” in this context was but a fictional notion, he could not pretend to believe that his argument, or, indeed, that of any informed and conscientious person, would prove persuasive against local sentiment. Why, the atmosphere in Winterthurn City had grown so subtly contaminated of late, even the ladies in Mrs. Kilgarvan’s circle now alluded in whispers to this arcane ritual, as if they knew whereof they spoke—!)

  As he spoke with Isaac Rosenwald, and saw how the pitiable man warmed to him, and clearly wished to grasp his arm, or his hand, had not the jailkeeper retained his frowning vigilance, Xavier came to feel that it was just as well,—ah, it was just as well!—that Rosenwald’s few visitors, and his attorney, had shrunk from informing him of the gravity of the situation. For, after all, what could the poor man do in his solitary jail cell? (It was said the other prisoners shunned him, and that, after a number of threats, he had had to be locked away in the oldest and most remote corner of the jail, for his own protection.) As it was, though near-blind without his glasses, Rosenwald spent hours each day penning letters,—to persons in authority, like the Governor of the State, and, indeed, the President of the United States; and to newspapers; and to divers Jewish organizations. (As to whether these impassioned missives were mailed,—Xavier had discreetly inquired of several persons; and, having received only evasive replies, did not doubt that the letters were being withheld; or even assembled by the prosecution, to build its case against Rosenwald.) He was occupied furthermore, he told Xavier, in writing a “frontal attack on the glaringly inept police work” he had encountered; and in preparing an article on “rank anti-Semitism in America, in the 1890s,” to be submitted to the prestigious McClure’s, or The Atlantic Monthly.

  Alas, Xavier thought, to accuse bigots of bigotry!—so frontal an attack, he feared, could not fail to inflame them the more. (It might be mentioned that, by this time, even Frank Shearwater had “come round” to supporting the grand jury’s decision: indicating to Xavier, in a manner both vexed and mysterious, that there was “more to the case than he knew,” which would be revealed at the trial.)

  Nonetheless, Isaac Rosenwald assured Xavier that he had confidence, withal, that things would turn out favorably for him. For, after all, he was innocent, which meant that another was guilty, and might at any time be apprehended; and he had faith in the court system; and in justice; and in the common sense of most men. To this, Xavier murmuringly assented, though it moved his heart that, sickly as he appeared, and thin to the point of emaciation, Rosenwald should state his position in such optimistic terms. Why, as he was not guilty, how could the prosecution prove that he was?—a logical impossibility, Rosenwald declared, with a snort of derision. “And should my captors force me to confess,” he said in a lowered voice, as Xavier rose to take leave, “I will take advantage of the public’s attention at my trial, to deny the confession, and to proclaim to the world how I have been mistreated. And should I be sentenced to death,” Rosenwald continued, in a louder and more vigorous voice, his reddened eyes now rapidly blinking, and his hands trembling, with the desire to reach out, and to clutch Xavier’s own, “why, even then, as I am marched to the scaffold, I shall continue to protest my innocence: and use Winterthurn’s very scaffold as a platform for announcing my plight to all of America.”

  THUS IT WAS, the detective came away from his long-sought interview more deeply troubled, and shaken, than he had anticipated: and broke his habit of a long, brisk, rambling walk at dusk, to go instead to the gentlemen’s bar of the Winterthurn Arms, and down a glass of bitters,—or two: a most uncharacteristic gesture, I am bound to say. His harried brain reviewed the case yet again, and again he stumbled upon the issue of the span of time during which Eva Teal must have been killed: and the most exasperating point, that Mrs. Teal refused to consent to have her daughter’s body exhumed (“For has the poor girl not suffered enough at the hands of ‘gentlemen’?”), and that Hans Deck, Frank Shearwater, Munck, Hollingshead, et al., could see no reason for it. Alas, the obduracy of such persons!—and their willful, and, it almost seemed, spiteful, ignorance, in resisting Xavier Kilgarvan’s proffered aid!

  “Still,” he consoled himself, his spirits rising by degrees, as the tankard of bitters was depleted, “still, I shall triumph, eventually: for, as the great Hans Gross has told us, ‘Every crime engenders clues’; and when I at last come upon an actual clue, I will snatch it up to my bosom, as if it were the rarest jewel.”

  “Too Fast Have Those Young Days Faded”

  As Valentine Westergaard had been acquainted, however
obliquely, with each of the “Damsels of the Half-Acre,” it did not surprise those who knew of the young gentleman’s generosity (and, as his friends laughingly charged, his penchant for rank sentimentality) that, after their tragic deaths, he quietly arranged for lilies of divers species to be placed at their graves; and masses to be said for the repose of their souls,—four of the five girls having been, quite by happenstance, Roman Catholic. Obeying, doubtless, an inbred sense of noblesse oblige (for the Westergaards were one of the very oldest families in Winterthurn,—indeed, in the New World itself: their fortune having been made in the eighteenth century, in the brisk shipping trade between the West Indies and West Africa, where rum was exchanged for slaves, at enormous profit)—and obeying too a dictum of the heart which his drawing-room manner could never suggest, Valentine personally saw to it that small sums of money were sent, now and then, to the victims’ families; or, at any rate, to those still residing in Winterthurn. (For, in addition to the seven members of the Furlow family, who had quite disappeared from their slum dwelling on Railroad Street, it seemed that the ne’er-do-well father of Dulcie Inman had similarly vanished: to no one’s regret, assuredly, as Inman, a slaughterhouse worker, was both a drunkard and a bully, and had taken to staggering up to the front gate of the Westergaards’ Ravensworth Park, at any hour of the day or night, demanding to see the “young master.”)

  Undeserving though they doubtless were, both the Godwit and the Sparks families had received unspecified gifts from Valentine; whose daughters had spoken of him, to them, as the gentleman who sang with the voice of an angel,—played a most exquisite instrument called the dulcimer, and sang, ah! how beautifully!—such songs of love, and parting, and nightingales, and springtime, and Death, as they had never heard before: a gentleman inordinately handsome, and wondrously attired, with curled hair, and the slightest suggestion of a lisp; who could be most grave, like a preacher,—then again gay and witty and charming; and never quite predictable. It was said that Valentine had been particularly attentive to both Mrs. Teal and her married daughter Iris, in the weeks following Eva’s death, and had even sent one of the menservants from Ravensworth Park down to Cadwaller Street, to be of assistance in the early days of grief and confusion; and to provide the distraught women with food and drink,—alas, Mrs. Teal soon proved inordinately fond of Jamaican rum!—when, for some days, it appeared that the shock of the brutal murder, and the noisome attention it drew, had brought them to the very edge of collapse. And this protracted generosity was in defiance, as it were, of Valentine’s own sense that Mother Teal should like nothing better than to “sink her talons into him, and her sharp greedy beak”: and his fastidious aversion to a female of her low breeding, and propensity for emotional displays. “Yet she is sweet Eva’s mother,—or shall I say was?” Valentine murmured wonderingly, “and sometimes it is possible,—I do not say it is easily managed—to see the daughter in the mother: the dear ‘naughty angel’ in the old harridan with her gross flaccid face.”

  (For in such mock-cynical asides,—as all of Valentine’s friends and social acquaintances, and, not least, his admiring relatives knew—the young gentleman played at rousing himself from his predilection for sentiment, and melancholy, and all the softer emotions. “There was never a more gracious and kind-hearted young man in all of Winterthurn than your Valentine,” Miss Verity Peregrine assured Valentine’s mother, at the time of the embarrassment caused by the chambermaid Molly O’Reilly, when Valentine was but a youth of twenty-six. “Yet one wishes he were not quite so witty!—albeit we know he means not a word he says, and is but a small child at heart.”)

  Though Valentine and his impetuous older sister Imogene had never been close,—indeed, in Imogene’s succinct phrase, each had “grated upon the other, like a knifeblade against a grindstone”—it was noted by all how violently her death shook him; how deep, and protracted, and, as it were, poetical, was his mourning; and how adamant the brother was that the sister had wrongfully died,—for, had the headstrong young woman not insisted upon walking her terriers near accursèd Glen Mawr Manor (for so the inhabitants of Ravensworth Park were wont to speak of their neighbors’ estate, amongst themselves), she should be living still, and brightening the house with her high, gay, nervous laughter, and her strident voice, and, withal, her magnificent presence. Alas, had she not been warned to avoid the vicinity of Glen Mawr a dozen times?—had she not seen, or fancied she had seen, “preternatural” shapes, in that area near the river? “How ironical that, though it was Imogene’s willfulness for which we all adored her,” Valentine moodily observed, “it was that very willfulness that brought about her death.” For upward of a year afterward Valentine sighed, and slunk about, and secreted himself away in his bedchamber, that he might apply himself to Holy Writ; he took on certain airs and mannerisms of Hamlet, and, indeed, directed his tailor to fashion Hamlet-like mourning costumes for him,—these, of the finest black velvet, that, in certain lights, yielded a wondrous grape-maroon sheen; and silky black shirts, with flowing collars and ruffled cuffs, and oft an embroidered design, in dark crimson, across the breast; and a most arresting winter coat, of exquisite black cashmere, in “Cossack” style, trimmed with sable,—in which outfit Valentine had his portrait painted by the Philadelphia artist Thomas Eakins. (Though he pronounced the painting a “slanderous failure” afterward, as Eakins had given his likeness,—for what perverse reason, Valentine could not guess—an insipid weak chin, and a pointed nose, and eyes of so unnaturally bright and hard a green, they brought to mind the iridescent hues of certain huge carrion flies!—and were assuredly not Valentine’s own.)

  It may have been at this time that Valentine composed several of his sweetest and most melancholy songs, which, some years later, so pierced the hearts of his female listeners, of all ages, at the Winterthurn Armory Musicale. Though his tenor voice was perhaps somewhat thin, and inclined to waver, and his long beringed fingers on the dulcimer frequently stroked an infelicitous note, there was no faulting the potency of his art, and the heart-rending loveliness of his words,—

  One kind kiss before we part,

  Drop, drop a tear,—and bid adieu!

  Tho’ we sever, my fond heart

  Till we meet shall part for you!

  One kind kiss before we part

  Drop, drop a tear,—and bid adieu!

  And again, a yet more haunting lyric, composed, the young man claimed, at Imogene’s very bier,—

  She cried, “O Love! is this thy doom?

  O light of youth’s resplendent day!

  Must ye then lose your golden bloom,

  And thus, like sunshine, die away?”*

  As to the little chambermaid Molly O’Reilly, employed some years previous by the Westergaards,—she who was to acquire, throughout Winterthurn, an unenviable species of “fame”: this precocious girl, not fifteen years old at the time of her death (as the Colonel recalled), but a mere fourteen, had so affixed her amorous musings upon the young master of Ravensworth Park, and had so lewdly abandoned herself to daydreams featuring him, that, all incredibly, she fancied herself with child by him. (That the reader of genteel background is both shocked and puzzled by this assertion, I can well imagine: for it is against our inclination to believe, or to wish to believe, that a girl of so tender an age, whether of the working classes or no, should convince herself of such a matter,—nay, that she should be sullied enough, by the crude facts of the physical life, to be capable of such conviction. Yet it is perhaps not out of place here, in this discussion, to mark that such morbid and febrific imaginings on the part of girls scarcely past childhood,—indeed, such purulent phantasms of naked and unmasked wish—had frequently been noted by Dr. Colney Hatch, who had been assembling, for upward of twenty years, a treasure trove of evidence pertaining to the divers weaknesses of Woman, and the general inferiority of the sex: thus, one can conclude that the O’Reilly delusion, if not its sordid aftermath, did not surprise him greatly, when it was brought to his attention. I think it a
pity, if not an actual tragedy, however, that Winterthurn’s most eminent physician so wore himself out with his practice, in ministering unto the area’s numberless female invalids, that he had no time to present his theory in book form; and suppose it must have been a painful surprise to him when, later in life, he discovered that findings precisely analogous to his own had been published by two gentlemen writing in the German language: the famed Dr. Hans Gross, whose Criminal Psychology: A Manual for Judges, Practitioners, and Students Xavier frequently consulted, and the yet more renowned Sigmund Freud, whose musings on the moral inferiority of Woman, and the fantastical nature of her psyche, have been studied throughout the world.)