Ella Maud

by Nicholas Nicastro

  “Ollie,” he said, and lapsed.

  “I’m going to have to change these sheets again.”

  “Ollie, what could I do?”

  She wrung a cloth from the washbasin and dabbed at the stains. “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “Ollie, what could I do? Let you go too? What could I do? What could I do? What could I have done?”

  She stared into his eyes, gauging if he was in any condition to hear an answer.

  “Don’t fret about it. There’s nothing you need say to me.”

  She would have left it at that. But something in her—something with a pretension to truth but more likely just malice—compelled her to add, “I’m not the one you should be speaking to. That one is gone.”

  He turned his head away and entreated the curtains, “What could I have done?”

  “Hush now,” she said. “It’s almost over.”

  William Cropsey died in one of the few moments when Ollie was out of the room. That always struck her funny, his timing. People said the dying would wait until they were alone to slip away, to spare their loved ones the pain of watching their passage. She was not used to thinking of her father as considerate in that way. “Better late than never,” she thought, and shut his eyes against the dawn light. She supposed that, in his way, he had always wanted to spare her.

  It was her idea to bury him in Hollywood Cemetery, not far from where Jim Wilcox lay. She picked out a solitary plot for him, well away from any other Cropseys. He got a small headstone, no bigger than a footstool, that lay close to the ground, with no prayers or affiliations chiseled into it. It was the memorial he deserved.

  She didn’t make this decision out of any resentment—or at least none that she ascribed to him alone. When her time came, Ollie would be buried under exactly the same kind of stone. The three of them, Jim, William Cropsey, and she, would be forever united in the same ground, under the same terms. And nowhere near Nell.

  IX.

  In the fall of 1900, Nell and Carrie spent a Sunday afternoon at Coney Island. As the sun poured down through the leafy byways of southern Brooklyn, the girls walked to the station to catch the trolley. On the way they passed their school, Bath Beach No. 1, and showed their high spirits by jeering it together. Then they linked hands and skipped and sang like girls half their age, because Nell had always been more comfortable with her cousin than with Ollie, who loomed over her and adopted the superiority of the elder sister. They wore straw boaters for the occasion, with black felt bands that hung down among the curls of their hair, and comfortable shoes and knock-about dresses they didn’t mind rolling around in. An afternoon at the amusements meant they would be spending much time off their feet.

  “I’ve got a mind to enroll in fashion classes, no matter what he says,” proclaimed Nell. “I’m made of more determined stuff than you!”

  “Determined but still obedient!” Carrie replied, giving her cousin a light shove. “Daddy’s little girl…”

  “If I was ‘Daddy’s little girl’ would I still be seeing Jim?”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t. There are some of those Brooklyn boys.”

  “Swells, you mean.”

  “Oh, pshaw! Not all of them.”

  “Oh really? Such as?”

  Carrie smiled. “You can try, but I’ll never say!”

  They went on like this as they boarded the trolley, and were whisked away by electric traction. Settlement was left behind, the tracks leading among fields, and pastures, and farmhouses connected to trees by lines of fluttering laundry. With each stop, more passengers got on, many as high-spirited as Nell and Carrie. On this day of the week, at this time of the day, all of them were headed to the same place.

  The towers of Steeplechase Park were soon visible above the trees. First, the Revolving Airship Tower, girdered and flagged like the younger brother of that more famous structure in Paris. Then the Ferris wheel, metal rim glinting in the sun, square cars rising and falling in their orbits. Whether or not the passengers had been to the Park before, they gaped from the windows, anticipation mounting. Nell and Carrie shared it, grasping each other’s hands. And with the excitement, their first whiff of ocean breeze.

  There was a byway in Brooklyn named after their family: Cropsey Avenue. As her Uncle Andrew never tired of explaining, the Cropseys were among the oldest Dutch families in New Utrecht, active both in the fight for independence and the building of its first landmarks. But to Nell and the other youths of the family, Cropsey Avenue was significant only for leading to the Coney Island amusements. This far from settled parts, the thoroughfare was a mere country lane. The trolley, elevated on its line of rickety pilings, followed “their” avenue, until they were mere minutes away from what—on warm summer days—was one of the most bustling places in the city.

  “Do you know who had a hand in building the first hotel on Coney Island?” her uncle once asked her.

  “I’m sure you will tell me,” she replied.

  “It was none other than James W. Cropsey, your great-grand-uncle on your father’s side. So you see, our family started that too.”

  When the car stopped, the brakeman announced “Bridge Station!”, and every passenger got off. From there the girls followed the throng across Neptune Avenue. Children in knee britches and sun hats ascended adult shoulders. Wheeled traffic was backed up for blocks as the surge of pedestrians crossed the street, horses stamping as their drivers glowered. The odors of popcorn and horse piss and creosote rose, as did the cries of sidewalk touts selling peanuts and roasted meats. It was always the same, and the sense of familiarity tempered the butterflies in Nell’s stomach.

  “You ladies on your way to Steeplechase?” a voice asked.

  Turning, the girls found a young man walking just behind them. He was dressed in a three-piece brown and white seersucker suit, spatted shoes, straw hat, and an elegant ebony cane with ivory handle. The perfect outfit for an afternoon sipping Tom Collinses at Saratoga. In the brief moment she spared to inspect the dude, Nell found his face—clean-shaven, with dark, prominent eyebrows—not unhandsome. She shot Carrie a sidelong glance as they walked.

  “We are going where everyone else is going,” Carrie said.

  “If I might be so forward,” he replied, “I am well known to the management, and can get two pretty girls like yourselves through the gates for free.”

  “My, is he forward!”

  “Where is your courtesy, dear cousin?” said Nell, who slowed to let the man walk beside them. The dandy took the opportunity to doff his hat.

  “Charles Whittier, at your service. And your names, my lovelies?”

  “Do you always accost young women in the street, Mr. Charles?”

  He smiled. “Only at the most alluring provocation. But you should know that a male companion has his uses here. There are rough characters about, even inside the Park.”

  “And what do you expect for this chivalry?” Carrie asked.

  “Nothing but what a proper young woman might extend a man like myself. Her company and her friendship. A companionable moment in a vast, impersonal city.”

  Nell looked at Carrie again, with an expression that her cousin knew well. Carrie, alarmed, shook her head, lips silently forming the word “No!”. But Nell would not be deterred. Since her family’s move to North Carolina, she had stopped seeing visits to Brooklyn as homecomings, and more as liberations. There were never crowds like this in Elizabeth City, never this sort of anonymity. And the dandy’s brows were so fetchingly arched.

  “My name is Evelyn,” said Nell. “And this is my cousin, Carol.”

  Charles Whittier smiled.

  The line at the ticket booth ran a hundred yards down the boardwalk. As the Cropsey girls and their new friend waited, he regaled them with stories from his time in Cuba, when he fought Spanish troops at Santiago. “The experience marks me still,” he said, and unbuttoned his left cuff to reveal a long, deep scar across the back of his wrist. The girls stared; Carrie whistled. But in fact
it was hard to tell if the scar was the result of combat, or an accidental encounter with a barber’s razor.

  A boy, dressed stiflingly in a full woolen suit, worked the line selling carnations from a bucket. Whittier called him over to purchase two pink blooms. He presented them to the girls, and Carrie followed Nell’s lead in accepting them. For what else could they do, when so gallantly presented, and in front of so many people? Nell planted the stem through a buttonhole in her jacket. Carrie just held hers, looking troubled.

  Whittier, gaiety exuding, boldly took hold of Nell’s forearm, as if he were her regular beau. Carrie’s eyes widened at the presumption. Nell let him lead her, a smile on her lips and a look of cool malevolence in her eyes. For he wasn’t the first stranger to assume such liberties, in a crowd where it would be awkward to make a scene.

  Why she might resent his attentions, she would have struggled to say. They clashed with her instincts, of course, which were properly modest. But she was also becoming conscious of a certain power rising in her—the kind that made strange gentlemen rein up in the street, and turn their heads to have a look at her. With each year, men seemed to be at greater pains to please her, though in her own mind she was just another girl who couldn’t keep her pinafores clean. It was bewildering and exhilarating, and made her both pity the men who gave it, and yearn to know what it was they saw in her. For lack of clear feelings on the subject, she tended to a certain passivity—as far as propriety allowed.

  When they reached the head of the ticket line, Whittier got them into the park by paying for them — 25 cents for 25 rides. So much, thought Nell, for him “knowing the management”.

  Visitors entering Steeplechase first had to negotiate the “Barrel of Love”. This was a fifteen-foot-long rotating tube, through which adults had to pass in bent-over fashion. The challenge was to walk through without losing balance. This was the challenge but not the fun: most visitors happily failed to keep their feet, splaying themselves against the inside of the barrel. Young ladies and gentlemen would land on top of their friends, or find their legs and arms braided together. Girls would find their skirts thrown up, their stockinged ankles and even knees showing. Some ladies became so engrossed in defending their modesty they forgot to exit the barrel, going round and round as onlookers laughed.

  Charles Whittier placed himself between the cousins as they entered the Barrel. Nell was in the lead, and passed through it in six smooth steps. Carrie was doing fine, suffering only a small bobble, until Whittier—with a theatrical cry of “Oh goodness!”—flopped in front of her, and she tripped over him. She was face-down over his lap as he made perfunctory attempts to help her. When she finally escaped, she came out bare-headed and red-faced. The smiling Whittier emerged with her hat. She snatched it back.

  “I fear I will never master that!” he cried, triumphant in his failure.

  The lines at the Steeplechase ride were too long at that moment, so they tried some of the smaller amusements first. Nell always enjoyed the Dew Drop, which required them to climb a gangway to the top of a fifty-foot tower. They slung down a spiral slide, which was smooth and fast from the passage of so many thickly clad bottoms. They were disgorged on a rubber mattress that, upon impact, gave a groaning fart. This time Carrie made sure she wasn’t next to Whittier, and didn’t get tangled with him. Nell, for her part, alighted from the slide precisely on her feet, and stepped off with not a hair out of place.

  “How long do we have to stay with him?” Carrie whispered as they waited for Whittier to spiral down.

  “Just follow my lead,” replied Nell.

  From the landing zone they proceeded to the concessions for sausages and beer. They enjoyed these standing up, as all the tables were jammed. The dandy, to his credit, paid for their lunch, and was more than ready to pay for more rounds of beer. But Carrie declared, “A bellyful of drink and a plunge down the Steeplechase does not a fine combination make.”

  “What makes a fine combination,” the fellow replied, “is fun and friends. I know a fellow who’d dearly love to meet you girls. If you’d permit me to introduce you…?”

  “Sounds divine,” said Nell over her half-eaten roll. “Why don’t you fetch him?”

  “I will!”

  And the dandy, after collecting his cane, headed off into the crowd. Then he turned, and with mocking admonishment, wagged his finger at them. “Now don’t you go anywhere!”

  “Wouldn’t think of it!”

  The second he disappeared, Nell grabbed Carrie’s arm. They made straight to the ladies’ powder room. There, Nell installed herself in front of the mirror, and removed her hat to check her hair. Carrie needed the primping far more after her tumble in the Barrel of Love, but had barely the patience to glance at herself. She was about to mash her hat back on her head when Nell warned, “You better take your time. You don’t want to run into him again.”

  “I don’t know how you do it,” said the other. “Can you lend me a pin, at least?”

  Nell pulled one from her bun and handed it over. As she fumbled, Carrie looked into the mirror at Nell’s face, which was bright from a sheen of excitement, and handsomely flushed under her cheekbones. Her blue eyes were dark as indigo, her chestnut hair aflame under the sunbeams streaming from the skylights. Carrie perceived, with an unsettling suddenness, that the cousin she had known for years, since they had hopscotched on the sidewalks of New Utrecht, was no longer just beautiful in the way of some children. She was becoming comely in the way of a grown woman.

  “What are you staring at?” asked Nell.

  “You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?”

  “Enjoying what?”

  “None of this is fun for me. This hiding out in toilets from strange men. It’s not worth it.”

  “You didn’t complain when you saved the money.”

  “When can we get out of here?”

  “Patience…Carol.”

  When Nell thought the time was right, they emerged. There was a lull in the rush to ride the Steeplechase—a gravity-driven plunge on wooden horses down a thousand-foot track. Within ten minutes, they were whooshing along on adjacent mounts, simultaneously trying to keep their hats on their heads and their skirts down. The thrill put her in mind of one of Uncle Andrew’s other stories, about how her grand-uncle, William J. Cropsey, rode in the Kings County Troop during the War. He pantomimed the thrill of the charge, sabres drawn, and about how his grand-uncle knew Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. He said a lot of things she didn’t remember. But the detail that delighted Nell the most was the fact that William Cropsey.’s uniform was so splendid, his epaulets alone cost forty dollars.

  “Forty dollar epaulets!” she cried, delirious with velocity.

  “What?!”

  Distracted, Carrie nearly flew off her seat as she went over one of the ‘jumps’—a quick up and down incline of the track. She had a clear vision of her death. Yet this scare, and her survival of it, made her reckless.

  “Let’s go again!”

  “Yes, later. Let’s try the big wheel!”

  She followed Nell to the Ferris wheel, where they got a car to themselves. There they sat, arm-in-arm, as they ascended a hundred feet into the sky. The Park and the rest of Coney Island was spread beneath them, a great heaving mass of humanity and frivolity. The roar of it all disappeared as their car mounted to the top; it always impressed her how fast the cacophony faded with height. And just as they reached the apex, the wheel slowed to a brief stop, as it often did for children and old folks to enter or exit the cars—or to clean up the messes of patrons who had overindulged in eats and drinks.

  Nell was gazing out at the ocean, over the glittering water and canvas triangles of ships rounding Seagate. Whence had they come, she wondered, and with what cargo? Would she ever sail on such a ship herself, to some far continent? And on her way to such adventures, would she look back at this giant, absurd wheel, taking its passengers round and round but never anywhere new?

  So high did they ascend
that Nell imagined she could glimpse her future. At the age of nineteen, and with a little luck, she could look forward to seeing the middle of the 20th century. She would have children—but unlike her mother, only four or five. In her home, she would enjoy a flush toilet. Train trips at a hundred miles an hour. Kitchen ranges run on electricity, and needles that threaded themselves. Horseless carriages run on coal. Buildings forty stories tall. Submarine excursions, and dirigible trips beyond the atmosphere and the Moon. Such a vast, exciting world, and somewhere in it, a place for her to watch it all.

  “Nell, look here…” breathed Carrie.

  Her cousin was gazing into the crowd below. And there, utterly distinct in his brown-and-white seersucker, stood Charles Whittier. He was looking straight back up at them.

  “Get back, for God’s sake, or he’ll see you!” Carrie tugged at her elbow.

  “He already has. Oh, look at that face! He’s not a happy boy, is he?”

  She blew him a kiss. The dandy’s face darkened.

  Nell plucked the carnation from her buttonhole.

  “Here, take this!” she called to him.

  She leaned out, and like Ellen Terry casting a boon from the stage, tossed the carnation. It spun, fluttered, and plunged stem-first, to land at his feet. Nell, at comfort with her cruelty, unfurled a smile so unabashed it made him forget his wounded pride. His frown vanished, and along with a circle of other men, he stood entranced at the vision hanging in the sky above.

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  Author’s Afterword

  The Nell Cropsey story is a familiar one today: an attractive, middle-class white girl disappears, triggering a frenzy of media coverage that culminates in a high-profile trial. In many similar cases before and since, the disappearances are less remarkable than the selective attention—by media and law-enforcement—paid to some and not to others.