The Seduction of Water

by Carol Goodman

  By the time I’ve arrived at the entrance to John Jay I feel like I’ve been walking one of those labyrinths set up in cloisters for meditation—that I’m following a path set out by unseen hands. There’s nothing calming in following this path, though; I feel dizzy.

  Charles Baum has left a pass for me at the security desk as he promised. Of all the colleges I’ve taught at—except for the prison, of course—John Jay maintains the highest level of security. I suppose it’s inherent in the culture of an institution that’s the leading criminal justice college in the country—most of the New York City police officers who go to college go here. It also has one of the best criminology libraries in the city, which is why I’m here today.

  I take the escalators down to the lobby, past a row of flags that makes me feel like I’m entering the UN, and glass cases featuring a display on The Irish in New York City Police History, to the security desk at the entrance to the library. Then I go back up to the first floor (the library is self-contained within the building and can only be entered from the lobby) to find a free computer with access to LexisNexis.

  When I took my class to the library Charles Baum had explained how to use LexisNexis to look up a specific court case. Unfortunately, I spent more time monitoring my students’ attention level than paying attention myself. I flail about for a bit and then notice a printed flyer that describes in detail how to look up case law in LexisNexis. I click on Legal Research, then State Case Law, and then program a search for “John McGlynn” and “Crown Hotel” and then hold my breath. I vaguely recall that the case will only appear if it had been appealed and I don’t remember Elspeth McCrory of the Poughkeepsie Journal saying anything about an appeal.

  As it turns out, John McGlynn had a fairly compelling reason to appeal. Through the maze of legal terms in the Disposition and Headnotes, I glean that his appeal was based on the premise that the testimony of one of the main witnesses at his trial was considered tainted because she had previously proven incapable of identifying the accused in a lineup and she had changed her testimony several times during the course of the trial.

  I scroll through the Syllabus, which summarizes the main points of the appeal, to the Opinion that elaborates on the circumstances of the trial. On the night of August 21, 1948, the night clerk at the Crown Hotel was asked to open the safe so that Vera Nix, who occupied the penthouse suite and was the sister-in-law of the hotel’s owner, could retrieve a diamond necklace that she had placed in the safe earlier that evening. At that time the clerk discovered that the safe was completely empty. Miss Nix told the police that when she had put the necklace in the safe at eight-thirty that evening—“just before going out to a party at the Plaza”—the defendant, John McGlynn, had been “hanging around the front desk flirting with one of the maids.”

  “I’d seen him before, you couldn’t miss him because he’s a very handsome young man—in a wild Heathcliff-on-the-moors sort of way—and quite popular with the young Irish girls who worked at the hotel. I believe his sister worked at the hotel. Well, I noticed that when I passed him to go into the office to put my necklace in the safe he was looking at my necklace.”

  Based on this flimsy evidence, the police had gone in search of John McGlynn at his residence in Coney Island but were told by his landlady that he had vacated his rooms that morning—“even though he was paid up for the next week”—and left town without giving a forwarding address. This was enough, apparently, to convince the police that they had their thief. A week later John McGlynn was found at a motel near Saratoga Springs, New York. He’d been spotted placing a bet at the nearby racetrack. The police followed him back to his motel room where they found the jewelry that had been stolen from the Crown safe.

  The fact that John McGlynn had been caught with stolen property in his possession had been enough to convict him. His appeal was based on additional evidence that came to light after his conviction. Apparently, six months before the safe robbery Vera Nix had reported some jewelry missing from her room. At that time she had told the police that she had surprised a maid “entertaining a young man” in the living room of her suite and she suspected that the maid had worked in collusion with the young man to steal her jewelry. She’d said that she thought that the man was the brother of the hotel’s assistant manager and that the maid, “according to that little tag they all wear,” was Katherine Morrissey.

  I’ve been scrolling through the lines quickly, but when I see my mother’s name I pause the cursor and lean back in my chair. I try to picture my mother, in a maid’s uniform, caught with a young man in a guest’s room. When I try to picture John McGlynn—handsome in a “wild Heathcliff-on-the-moors sort of way”—I see Aidan. The black hair and dark-lashed blue-green eyes, the pale skin that tinges pink in the open air. But I can’t see my mother. I just can’t imagine her caught in a compromising position, jumping to her feet and straightening her uniform—I can’t imagine her in a uniform at all—and blushing and curtseying in front of the grand lady, Vera Nix. Maybe it’s just because no one likes to think of their mother in a sexual context, but I think it has more to do with my mother’s dignity, the way she held herself.

  What I do remember, though, is that whenever a maid was accused of stealing something by a guest my mother would insist that my father keep the guest in his office while she went up to the guest’s room to conduct her own search. Often she would discover the “stolen item” in the carpet or caught in the blankets, or lying carelessly beneath a book on the night table. Once, when a society dowager from Boston named Caroline Minton had the audacity to suggest that the maid must have given her garnet brooch back to my mother so that she could place it back in the room, my mother had silently left the office and ordered the bellhop to have Mrs. Minton’s luggage removed from her suite and have her car brought up from the parking lot and packed. The hotel bill had been discharged and Mrs. Minton had been asked to seek other accommodations should she ever find herself in the region again. I can’t imagine the woman who coolly ousted Mrs. Minton from the Hotel Equinox cowering in front of Vera Nix. Maybe I just don’t want to. I have to admit that if my mother had been falsely accused by Vera Nix of stealing, it might explain why she was so vigilant in defending her own employees against similar fraudulent charges.

  I go back to the screen to see what had come of this earlier accusation and feel vindicated by the outcome. When Vera Nix had been asked to identify the maid she’d caught in flagrante delicto in a police lineup she’d picked the wrong woman. She was given three opportunities to pick Katherine Morrissey from a lineup and failed every time. The charges had been dropped. When this incident came to light after John McGlynn’s conviction it was considered sufficient cause to bring Mrs. Nix’s testimony at his trial into question. Apparently, Vera Nix had a poor memory for faces—or at least the faces of the many maids, bellhops, valets, hairdressers, manicurists, secretaries, and waiters who attended to her regularly at the Crown Hotel. Although she claimed that John McGlynn’s good looks made him memorable, she was unable to correctly pick him out from recent photographs. The picture she identified as John McGlynn turned out to be of the screen star Laurence Olivier, who had played Heathcliff in 1939.

  So maybe it wasn’t my mother caught with her boyfriend in the Nix’s suite. Maybe it was some other unfortunate Irish girl—or maybe Vera Nix made up the whole thing. But why? She named my mother. She might not have known what my mother looked like, but she knew her name. She must have wanted to get her in trouble.

  I stare at the blinking cursor on the screen in front of me until I notice that a vein above my right eye is pulsing to the same rhythm. The only thing that occurs to me is that if Vera Nix had been told by someone that her husband was having an affair with a maid by the name of Katherine Morrissey she might fabricate the whole episode to get the girl fired. And why not throw in a boyfriend at the same time to show her husband that he wasn’t the only light in his girlfriend’s life?

  The remainder of the case file doesn
’t tell me much. Although Vera Nix’s testimony was dismissed there was still sufficient evidence—possession of stolen property, fleeing the crime scene, prior history of small thefts—to uphold John McGlynn’s conviction. I print out the case file and head back into the periodical stacks to look up the newspaper coverage of the trial.

  Under “Crown Hotel Robbery” I find seven references in the New York Times, four in the Herald Tribune, and twelve in the Daily News. I also find that I’m getting hungry. I check my watch and see that it’s after noon. I didn’t have any breakfast—not having the heart to scramble eggs again after the uneaten eggs that I’d made for Aidan and myself the night before—and I’d been too anxious to get to the library to stop on the way. I don’t want to stop now either. Beyond the dull, buzzing pain in my right eye and the haze of fatigue and hunger, a picture is beginning to slowly take shape in my mind. It’s just too much of a coincidence that it was Vera Nix whose testimony first directed the police to John McGlynn and that she had tried to implicate him and my mother in a theft even before the safe robbery. Clearly, Vera Nix had some vendetta against my mother—whether justifiably or not, she must have believed that my mother was having an affair with her husband.

  Operating the microfiche viewer doesn’t help my headache. Scanning through the old newsprint, the words blur into a gray slurry as the film unfurls. It reminds me of the story of Little Sambo—before Little Sambo got p.c.’d out of print—when the tigers race around and around in a circle and turn into butter. I skim through the earliest articles about the robbery and trial because they don’t tell me anything new. It’s only when I get to the appeal that I stop to read more closely. Once Vera Nix’s testimony was discredited, there were several unflattering articles about her. There’s a column on the society page of the Tribune criticizing Vera Nix for wearing the Kron family pearls to a coffeehouse in Greenwich Village and a particularly cruel cartoon of her in evening dress, dripping with jewels, reading a copy of The Daily Worker with her feet, in fur-tufted mules, resting on the back of a crouching, uniformed maid. I can see why Phoebe is bitter about how her mother was portrayed by the press, but honestly, what surprises me is that there isn’t more. The last article that mentions Vera Nix pointedly denies the rumor that she had been accused in court of setting up the robbery. After that her name disappears from accounts of the trial.

  The last article I look up is headlined “Sister Pleads for Leniency in Brother’s Sentencing.” I’d been hoping for a picture of Rose McGlynn, but instead there’s a picture of John McGlynn in a uniform and peaked cap, leaning against a drum emblazoned with the words ST. CHRISTOPHER’S HOME BAND. I remember that Elspeth McCrory had mentioned in her article that Rose McGlynn’s younger brothers had been handed over to the Catholic orphanage and surmise that Rose’s plea for leniency featured this sad episode in her brother’s history. I start to read it, but by now I’m so lightheaded I feel as if my brain, like Sambo’s tigers, is turning into butter. I decide to copy this one and take it with me to the Greek diner across the street.

  Passing back through the lobby, I find myself pausing over the black-and-white photographs of generations of young Irish police officers in the display case, perhaps because they remind me of that last picture of John McGlynn. It’s funny, I think, how the Irish seem to be cropping up everywhere in my life just now. I’ve never thought much of my mother’s Irish heritage—except for the selkie story she told me, she never made much of it herself. She didn’t raise me as a Catholic (except for that one trip to Brooklyn to have me baptized), or speak of her relatives. Once she was gone it was easy, especially with a name like Greenfeder, to forget I had any Irish in me at all.

  At the diner I order a BLT and iced tea and take out Rose McGlynn’s plea for her brother, which the Times had transcribed verbatim.

  “Our mother died when John was just fourteen,” she told the court:

  and as bad as it was for me, at least I was old enough to take care of myself. John and my two younger brothers, Allen and Arden, still needed a mother. My father was not able to care for them. He was that broke up about my mother’s death that though he’d never taken a drop before the day she died he soon took to drinking. There’d been hard feelings between my mother’s family and him so none of them would take on three young boys to raise. My father’s sisters said they would have me, but not the younger ones. I wish now I’d thought of some way to keep them with me, but I could barely take care of myself. Still, I blame myself. It’s a pitiful thing to have a family separated like we were.

  I’ll never forget the day we took them to St. Christopher’s. Mind you, the Dominican sisters were kind and the monsignor himself came to speak to my father and me in the chapel. He said many a family had left their sons to St. Christopher’s during the hard times when they could not care for them themselves. He said it was nothing to feel ashamed of, but when we left the boys there, in that great cold building without a soul who knew them, I felt as if we’d dropped them off the edge of a pier—like they do to kittens. My father would never look me in the eye from that day on and my brothers, well, I visited with them every Sunday. They looked well enough—they were probably eating better than they had at home—but there was always something missing in their eyes. And when it was time to leave, the younger ones, Allen and Arden, would cry and hang on to my legs. Not John, though. You could tell he tried to keep a brave face for the sake of the younger ones and it’s that would break my heart even more. He was so young, but he’d grown into an old man in that place. He’d even developed a curve in his back, which the nuns said came from poor nutrition as a baby.

  Then Arden died. He’d had polio as a baby and had never been strong and they said he died of pneumonia. I could tell John blamed himself for that. Now, I’m not saying St. Christopher’s didn’t do all they could for him, but when John got out it was like there was a piece of him missing. I tried to do what I could. I got him a job at the hotel—Mr. Kron, the owner, was very kind about hiring him—but now I wish I’d never gotten him the job. He’d had nothing for so long, he shouldn’t have been around people who had so much. I don’t know if he took Mrs. Nix’s jewelry or not, but I know he’d never hurt anyone. Maybe the safe was left open and he couldn’t help himself. Maybe Mrs. Nix said something to him about his selling the jewelry for her and he misunderstood. I don’t know. But I do know that my brother’s a good man, that he’s been a good brother to me and to our two younger brothers, and that he’s never had much luck. So I’m here to ask you respectfully to go easy on him, to remember he’s a boy who lost his mother young and who deserves better than what this world’s had to offer him so far.

  Rose McGlynn made her appeal in May 1949 at her brother’s retrial. The judge said in his sentencing that he’d considered the defendant’s unfortunate family history, but that he didn’t regard it as an excuse for criminal behavior. “Miss McGlynn herself is an argument against such excuses. She lost her mother at a tender age and had to leave her high school at St. Mary Star of the Sea before graduating, and yet she has, through perseverance and keeping to the straight and narrow, lifted herself out of poverty to a position of responsibility and trust at the Crown Hotel. If she could do it, why couldn’t her brother?”

  I imagine how bitter the judge’s verdict must have been to Rose McGlynn. To have her success held up as proof of her brother’s culpability must have been galling. No wonder she decided to leave the city. Then I remember too Harry’s suggestion that Rose gave her brother the combination to the safe. If that were really true, her guilt must have been unbearable. No wonder she ended up throwing herself in front of a train after seeing her brother in prison that last time.

  I read back over the newspaper story until I get to the judge’s verdict—the spot where he talks about Rose McGlynn dropping out of her high school, St. Mary Star of the Sea. It’s the same name as the church where I was baptized. My mother told me that she took me there because it was where she was baptized, but she’d never mentioned tha
t it was also the name of a Catholic girls’ school; it must be where she went to school, though, along with Rose McGlynn. Rose McGlynn and my mother must have been friends since they were children, which meant that my mother had known John McGlynn all those years as well. She must have watched the McGlynn family fall apart, the boys put in an orphanage, their sister vainly trying to keep them from sinking into a life of crime. The story is not only pitiable, it’s familiar. I recognize it from my mother’s fantasy world, which she called Tirra Glynn, and the story of Naoise who stole the net of tears from the evil king Connachar and was banished to a fortress on the banks of the drowned river. When Deirdre visits Naoise at the prison and she sees the other selkies shedding their skins in the river some of them are ripped apart by the current, just as Rose McGlynn’s body was crushed by an oncoming train.

  My mother must have felt like she was the sole survivor of some awful tempest. In the book Deirdre makes her way to the Palace of the Two Moons, clad in a green dress woven of the pollen that falls on her in the forest. My mother too made her way to the Hotel Equinox carrying her secrets . . . and what else?

  I tap my finger on the name of the school. St. Mary Star of the Sea. The net of tears. I remember Gordon’s slide lecture, the fifteenth-century portrait of the Virgin Mary, seated on a rock by the sea, crowned with a diamond-and-pearl wreath that looked just like the necklace described in my mother’s books. What if the necklace—what had Gordon called it? A ferronière?—what if it had survived the war and somehow ended up in Vera Nix’s possession? I think back to Gordon’s lecture and remember him mentioning the possibility that the ferronière had been hidden by a descendant of the della Rosas. I also remember that according to Harry, Peter Kron had hidden out in an Italian villa after escaping from a POW camp. If he stole the ferronière and let Vera wear it, it could have been one of the pieces John McGlynn stole. It must not have been with the recovered jewels—Gordon would know if it had been recovered—but maybe John McGlynn, knowing this piece was both especially valuable and that it wouldn’t be listed in the police report, hid it someplace special. And then he told his sister, when she visited him in prison, where it was. Could she have told my mother before throwing herself under the train at Rip Van Winkle?