ELLA MAUD
A NOVEL BASED ON A TRUE STORY
Nicholas Nicastro
© Nicholas Nicastro 2018
Nicholas Nicastro has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 2018 by Endeavour Media Ltd.
Table of Contents
Prologue
The Foyer
I.
II.
III.
IV.
The Hall
I.
II.
III.
IV.
V.
VI.
VII.
The Shed
I.
II.
III.
IV.
V.
VI.
The Bedroom
I.
II.
III.
IV
V.
VI.
VII.
VIII.
IX.
Author’s Afterword
About the Author
Dedicated to Robert A. Thiel
for showing me all the tricks
Too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia,
And therefore I forbid my tears…
—Hamlet, Act IV, Scene VII
Prologue
People wondered how Ollie spent her days. She knew this because, on the few occasions when she went out, she could hear them whispering:
“There’s old Olive Cropsey. You know, the sister of poor darling Nell. Haven’t seen much of her lately. Still unmarried, I hear. What does she do with her days?”
They called her “old”, and she did not disagree. She was born in the year of Our Lord 1880. Her life, in the sense most people would call a ‘life’, ended on November 20, 1901. That was the night her sister left this world.
Everything since had been a kind of afterlife—a perfunctory addendum, unsought and unsavored. She rarely allowed herself the little gratifications of adult womanhood. She wore only the black crepe of first mourning, even on the long days she spent alone. There would never be a second or ordinary mourning for her. There was no color other than black, and she bought new clothes only when the previous wore out, or turned gray from hundreds of launderings. She had not changed her hair since the McKinley Administration, and it too had turned gray. She called on no one, and others had learned never to call on her.
When the milkman’s son came to deliver bottles, he ran to and from her door, keeping his head down lest he catch a glimpse of the dark figure that haunted the parlor.
“The poor thing. She blames herself for everything that happened,” people whispered. “A word from her, and maybe Nell would never have been alone on the porch that night with Jim Wilcox. She never would have ended up in that river! Can you imagine living with that?”
Ollie could not imagine living with that, because her inaction that one night wasn’t close to the sum of her torment. Instead, she trod an ocean of regrets, was filled and suffocated by them. She dwelled on them as she buttered her toast in the morning—the things she’d said to Nell. The horrible, horrible things. They occupied the spaces between every tick of the clock. The smut of remorse adhered to her saucepans. Her regrets were the last things she thought about when she parted the bedclothes at night, and slipped her weary body between them.
It had been different once. The Cropsey girls were handsome, but also of modest means, which placed them in the position of being both resented and pitied. Once, Ollie responded with a furious kind of invention, constantly working to set herself apart. She always experimented with some accessory or another—some embroidery for her collar, or a bit of ribbon for her hair, or a shiny bauble to sew on her blouse. She took it as a personal failure to appear in public in the same exact outfit twice. One time when she and Nell were walking by the river, Ollie found a fishing lure that was so colorfully tied that she thought about sewing it into a hat.
“And if you’re in the street and the fisherman recognizes his handiwork?” Nell posed.
“I would thank him for his compliment, and pass on!” replied Ollie.
“Yes, I believe you would.”
Nell went to the other extreme: instead of adding more, she stripped all artifice from her appearance, all sign of useless ornament. She kept her colors simple, her lines straight. If she wore any jewelry, it was the best she could find, or nothing. No glass or stone was set in competition with her eyes, which showed violet during the day and split the spectrum under lamplight, as if fashioned from shards of broken crystal. To the judgement of her ‘betters’, she presented singularity.
Such memories were Ollie’s legacy. They bubbled up at odd moments, as when she strained her tea, or dipped her hands in the washbasin. Memories and regrets with uncanny buoyancy—such as for poor Roy Crawford, who had been there the night Nell disappeared. Lord, to think of him! He shot himself in the temple in 1908. Poor hapless Roy, who had come to see Ollie, and had been courting her for months. But their relationship was a slight thing, based more on convenience than any true fondness, and it died in the aftermath, in the white-hot glare of attention he neither sought nor understood.
Her little brother Will followed; five years later, he poisoned himself with carbolic acid. It was an act as incomprehensible to her as it was heartbreaking, for Will was blameless. He was just a child when Nell was lost. In truth, his death had nothing to do with his lamented sister, but sprung from the branch of his own despair. Ollie could barely conjure an image of the adult Will, broken and frustrated by the downward arc of his life. Instead, she remembered him as a boy, delightedly grinning as he tore up his father’s plantings with his scooter.
Ollie buried her father last week. He was put to rest at Hollywood Cemetery, and the funeral was the first time in years Ollie felt like removing her mourning clothes. Onlookers wondered—why had the family chosen to bury him there, all by himself, when the rest of the Cropseys lay in Highland? Why had he not been taken back to Brooklyn, to rest beside his beloved Nell? The thought of William Cropsey spending eternity near her sister filled Ollie with disgust. The onlookers wondered, but only she knew the truth, and would go on hiding it behind the drawn curtains of her parlor, and in her silence. Video et taceo—I see, and I am silent.
She had regrets, but not about letting her sister out on that porch in 1901. Nothing would have stopped Nell from doing so, if that was what she wanted. As it clearly was.
On fall days, when the sun stopped shining on the side of the house, she ventured out to trim the roses that ran along the trellis. She went out in her black weeds, in a black straw hat and gloves so old they lacked fingers. She worked carelessly, not caring if the thorns cut her. Sometimes she glanced between the trees at the neighboring property, and saw the boys playing there. They were pretend-drilling, like soldiers, with rifles carved from wood. Indeed, Ollie heard there was another war coming. There had been one a few years earlier, she seemed to recall, but it was over too fast for it to impinge on her thoughts. She didn't read the newspapers anymore. She had a bellyful of newspapers and their lies.
The milkman’s son was on the porch. He fumbled with the box, and Ollie peered around the corner at him. Their eyes met, and she offered him a smile. It was a craggy, stiff thing, like a reptile poised to bite. To this gesture, and her appearance outside her house, he gaped in terror, and fled back to his father’s truck.
“Smart boy,” she said aloud, and sucked her bloodied fingers.
The Foyer
I asked myself— "Of all melancholy topics what, according to the universal understanding of mankind, is the most melancholy?" Death, was the obvious reply. "And when," I said, "is this most melancholy of topics most poetical
?" From what I have already explained at some length the answer here also is obvious— "When it most closely allies itself to Beauty: the death then of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world, and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover.”
― Edgar Allan Poe
“The Philosophy of Composition”
I.
“Papa, Nell is not here!”
Ollie stood at the top of the stairs, looking down at her father as she held the front of her dressing gown together. William Cropsey, who bothered with no such delicacy, stared up at her with eyes bleary and uncomprehending. He had just returned from a long sit in the privy.
“Nell is where?” he asked.
“She’s not in her bed.”
Cropsey checked the clock at the foot of the stairs. It was Thursday morning, it was chilly, and it was before dawn.
“Well, where is she?” he snapped.
“Last I saw, on the porch with Jim Wilcox.”
Cropsey went to the front hallway. By the light of his finger lamp, he found the front door standing wide open and the screen door unlatched and wavering in the breeze. He almost tripped over an object—a parasol, it turned out—left on the floor.
He went out on the porch. The lamp’s uncertain beams searched only as far as the empty porch, and a little beyond into the faint glow of the quarter moon. Further away, across the river, a few lights dipped their trails into the water. It was the kind of quiet that came in the late autumn, when the frost had killed the insects, and most of the leaves were down from the trees.
“Nell! Nell Cropsey!” he called.
Nothing answered but his own echo. He snuffed the flame, letting his eyes adjust to the deeper gloom. Now he could see the stretch of lawn in front of his house, and the scooter his son Will had left on it. But there was no sign of Nell.
“What’s going on?”
Cropsey’s brother Henry was at the door, tails of his nightshirt hanging.
“Nell hasn’t come home,” he replied. “and she’s probably with that scamp Jim Wilcox…”
“Okay,” said the other.
“…but we should probably check around here first.”
“I’ll get some drawers. And you should too.”
They stooped and peered under the porch. Around back, they checked the privy and the root cellar. They peeped into the little shed Cropsey used as a storeroom and workshop.
When he came back to the front of the house he found his wife Mary. Ollie was clinging to her.
“Did you find her?”
“Does it look like I did?” he snapped. “Olive, are you sure you didn’t see or hear from her since Wilcox left?”
“She came out with him before midnight. I never saw her come back.”
It was too dark to make out his daughter’s face. Yet Cropsey heard something in her voice—a brief hesitation, an evasive tremor.
He recognized it from the times she was a child and lied about eating an entire pie her mother had left warming on the stove, or bent the truth to cover for one of her brothers. He was about to press the matter when Henry interjected, “Best check the summer house.”
They proceeded to the banks of the Pasquotank. There was no one in the summerhouse, and no sign anyone had been inside. Cropsey walked out on the dock. The river was calm, and blacker than the night above it. He was not one to ascribe human qualities to inanimate objects, but the degree of the river’s obscurity now, like volcanic glass, struck him as malevolent.
“We’re going to need to see Jim Wilcox.”
The Wilcox place was about a mile away, on Shepard Street. They pounded on the door a good long time before a flicker of light appeared within, and the door cracked open.
“Yes?” asked the disheveled woman.
“Is Jim at home, Martha?” asked Cropsey.
“I think so. Why?”
Though the street was empty, Cropsey was loath to speak the words aloud—that he couldn’t locate his daughter at such a delicate hour.
“May we come in?”
Within, Mrs. Wilcox offered them coffee. Cropsey declined, but Henry was about to accept, until his brother jabbed him in the ribs.
“We need to ask your son about Nell,” he said.
Her brows flew up. “I see. Is she all right?”
“May we speak to him, please?”
She left them in the dark as she took the lamp upstairs. The brothers stood in the kitchen by moonlight, listening. They heard her open the bedroom door, and call Jim’s name. After that her voice was lower, and all they could hear was an indistinct murmuring. Cropsey wanted to launch himself up those steps, to pull that boy out of his comfort and throttle the truth out of him. Had he ruined his beautiful daughter? Had he left her in such a state that she would do something desperate? As the torrent of thoughts tore through his mind, he grew agitated, scarcely able to stand still. He stepped to the window, forcing himself to be interested in the view of the empty street. He believed it would dip below freezing that night; he would have to see to the pigs’ water trough before he went to bed. Cracked troughs cost money, he fretted. And he perceived the absurdity of worrying now, of all times, about such an inconsequential thing.
Martha Wilcox descended. She said nothing until she was directly before them, as if bearing a secret.
“He says he left her on your front porch,” she said.
“When? In what state?”
“I’m sorry, Bill, but that’s all I could get out of him. He works hard during the day.”
“It sure would go easier if he’d talk to me now.”
“I don’t know what to say. He’s a grown man. He makes his own decisions.”
Ollie did not help her father and uncle look for her sister. Instead, she took to the parlor with cousin Carrie and her mother as they waited for the men to return with Jim Wilcox. Mary Cropsey, née Ryder, was beside herself with worry over the virtue of her sweet Nell, who was always the most popular of her daughters among the boys. Pretty Nell, with her fine features and blue eyes that danced. Nell whose hair was a curly, lustrous brown, like Mary’s before her forty-two years and nine pregnancies. All her grown daughters — Ollie, Louise and Lettie — perceived that Nell was their mother’s favorite, and in their love for their tender, mercurial sister, did not mind. Cousin Carrie, who visited frequently when she was not at school up north, likewise bore witness to how popular she was among the boys, and could do nothing other than smile.
Olive Cropsey, known to all as Ollie, was only a couple of years Nell’s senior but seemed older. Where Nell was small and lively, like a coiled spring of nubile energy, Ollie was longer, thinner, steadier, like an illustration in a dress catalog. She was widely regarded as attractive, but made a mature impression, embodying an ideal of womanhood that was already a decade past. Younger gentlemen dreamt of Nell, but older ones envisioned Ollie as a wife. Traveling salesmen mistook her for the matron of the house, and Mary Cropsey leaned on her in times of need. She was sitting just then on her mother’s right, grasping her hand, interleaving her fingers and squeezing them.
The men returned after the clock struck three a.m. Along with Cropsey and Uncle Hen, Jim Wilcox was ushered within by Chief of Police Bill Dawson. Their faces were flushed, for it had indeed dropped below freezing that night.
“Had to get the law to drag him out of bed,” Cropsey said.
“Jim, for the Lord’s sake, where is Nell?” cried Mary.
“Mrs. Cropsey, I left her on the porch. We were out there only a few minutes. I gave her some of her things back, and she was crying. I had to meet Leo Owens before the saloons closed, so I left. You can ask him where I was at 11:30. On the life of my mother, I don’t know what Nell did after.”
“Did she walk to the gate with you?” asked Dawson.
“No.”
“You say she was crying. Did she ever speak of…doing harm to herself?”
Mary Cropsey gasped at
the articulation of this thought, and buried her face in Ollie’s shoulder.
“Not in any serious way,” replied Wilcox.
“How’s that?”
Jim looked straight to Ollie. “Her sister was there. And Carrie, too. It was more than a month ago. We were sitting here talking about how we’d like to see ourselves end, if we took it in our minds to do so. Nell said she’d rather freeze than anything else.”
“I remember that,” said Carrie. She hastened to add, “But none of us took it seriously.”
“That’s a damn strange thing to be talking about with your girl,” Cropsey snapped. He had been noosing up Wilcox with his eyes since they had entered the room. He made no secret that he’d disliked Jim Wilcox from the moment they met, and had never warmed to him during his long courtship of Nell.
“Is that true, Miss Olive?”
Ollie frowned. “Yes. But it’s ridiculous to think my sister would ever…do that, on account of someone like Jim. I just can’t believe that. No offense, Jim.”
“Did you hear her crying?”
“I heard nothing from the time they went out.”
“Hurt herself over me? She barely breathed a word to me for two weeks,” Jim said. “That’s why I returned her pictures. And the umbrella.”
Cropsey glanced at Ollie at the mention of the parasol. She avoided his gaze.
“We’re wasting time,” she said.
“One more question, Jim,” said Dawson. “Why didn’t you see Nell inside, instead of just leaving her there, in such a state?”
“I told her to go inside because it was cold. She said, ‘I don’t care.’ She wouldn’t have listened to me then if I told her to get out of the rain.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“Don’t you think I would have seen her in, if I knew I’d be standing here now?”
This was the first thing he said that smacked of any common compassion. Mary Cropsey implored him with her eyes, while Ollie and Carrie stared as if seeing him for the first time. For there was something cold about Jim Wilcox that night.
Ella Maud Page 1
