Forgotten News

by Jack Finney

  At about the time Harvey Burdell sat there with Demis, Mrs. Cunningham did something odd: she'd also done it the night before. In the still-early middle of the evening she went down to the kitchen, and to their puzzlement ordered Mary and Hannah upstairs to bed. Why did she want the servants out of the way? As we'll see very soon, there is strong reason to wonder if it was not to wait—with Eckel? And perhaps Augusta?—for Dr. Burdell's return; wait for him to unlock the front door, and step into the dark and silent house. If so, I don't know what happened the first night the servants were sent early to bed, but on this second night, returning from his visit to Demis with his newly signed paper, Dr. Burdell did come into a darkened but far from silent house.

  "It was a severe night," said Mary Donaho, meaning that it was stormy. "We [she and Hannah] were in bed … and there was no light burning …"; but although they had been sent early to bed by Mrs. Cunningham, they weren't asleep. "I heard a noise downstairs at the door": it was a sudden shouting, cursing, and hammering at the street door, and it scared her. Then the doorbell rang, she knew it was the Doctor, and called to Snodgrass in the attic front room, asking him to please go down.

  George didn't much want to go down there either, but he did; taking along with him, however, the Cunningham boys, nine and ten, and his visiting brother, still young enough to be called "little Tom Snodgrass." Down the four boys went, three flights through the darkened house, or perhaps with candles, and Snodgrass let the enraged Doctor in, cursing at Snodgrass because, he said, the door of his own house had been deliberately bolted against him, though Snodgrass said that the patent lock had merely slipped, as it sometimes did.

  Next morning at the kitchen breakfast table—John Eckel, Emma Cunningham, her two boys and Helen, with Mary Donaho standing by to serve them—they discussed last night's ruckus at the front door. "They were talking about the Doctor being an ugly man," said Mary—meaning his disposition—and as Mary continues we suddenly see them there at that table, Tuesday morning, January 27, 1857.

  "Mr. Eckel was eating cakes at the time, and laughing," said Mary, "when, putting down his knife and fork, he rubbed his hands together just so, like making fun, and saying, 'By jingo! Shouldn't I like to be at the stringing up of that old fellow, if I would not have too hard a pull at the cord!' " A little laugh from Mrs. Cunningham, then "she told me I need not remain in the room any longer." Eckel, said Mary, "looked so leer-ingly at [Emma Cunningham], I hated to look at him at the same time…."

  On that same Tuesday morning Dr. Burdell was so disturbed that to a mere acquaintance—the wife of a dentist he knew who had come here to see him on a business matter—"He stated to me that he had let his house to a lady, and that she was the most horrible woman he ever met. He said she was very artful, and she was capable of doing anything to accomplish what she undertook. He told me he suspected foul play, and that he did not like the way they were prowling about the house at night… ."

  So frantic had Dr. Burdell become to get free of these people that he now made what may have been literally a fatal mistake. In this same week, with over three months to go until the blessed May Day when he could at least turn Mrs. Cunningham out of his house, he nevertheless showed two women, a Mrs. Stansbury and her mother, through 31 Bond, offering it for lease when May should finally come.

  Hannah Conlon, the cook, was present as the ladies and Harvey Burdell moved from room to room; and Mrs. Cunningham stood listening in the kitchen. What did these women want? she asked when Hannah came in. They were looking over the house, Hannah replied; she thought Dr. Burdell was going to lease the house to them, and sign a paper. " 'Perhaps he will not live to let the house, or sign either,' " Emma Cunningham replied, said Hannah.

  A day or so later Mrs. Cunningham instructed Mary Donaho to lay a fire—for what purpose she didn't explain—in a seldom used fireplace of an unoccupied attic room. It would not be used immediately, she said, but she wanted it ready to light. In these same last days Mary overheard Mrs. Cunningham say that Dr. Burdell was " 'a very bad man; it was time he was out of the world.' " And on one of these days Mary left 31 Bond: fired for drunkenness, George Snodgrass later said, though Mary denied it.

  We have a glimpse of Harvey Burdell in his final despondency. Dr. Samuel Parmly, who lived directly across the street, saw him; he walked past Parmly on the sidewalk, and: "His head was so low that when I recognized and addressed him he did not observe me."

  Friday, at about twelve-thirty, Helen went out for her music lesson … about half-past one an old friend of the Doctor's, Alvah Blaisdell, came to the house on business. He and the Doctor stood in the front hall talking, and at first it was the old litany from the Doctor: Mrs. Cunningham, Augusta, Eckel, Snodgrass had locked him out of the house one night; had "abused" him, telling him it was nothing more than he deserved; that "he ought to have his head broke." They went through his papers when he was out, had opened his safe—and this was also the occasion when he told Blaisdell of their fearful trick of opening his door to stare at him.

  But now came something new. "He wished me to come here," said Blaisdell, "and remain with him till May…." The Doctor always spoke loudly in his odd barking manner, never lowering his voice in conversation, Blaisdell said, and it was his impression that, as they stood in the hall, their entire conversation had been overheard by Mrs. Cunningham on the floor above.

  What Blaisdell replied I don't know, but soon after he left, Catherine Stansbury arrived. They sat down in the front parlor, and she said she and her husband had made up their minds: they'd like to lease the house. The two then discussed the terms of the lease, agreed on them, and Dr. Burdell said he'd have it ready to sign in the morning. Then Catherine Stansbury asked: Does Mrs. Cunningham know we are taking the house? Yes, the Doctor replied, and apparently that worried Mrs. Stansbury, for "I asked him if he had told her where we lived. He said not, but that makes no difference, for she would go to every Stansbury in New-York until she found the right one. I suddenly opened the door," said Mrs. Stansbury. "Mrs. Cunningham was going away from the door."

  Harvey Burdell was actually a timid man, said a friend: "I don't think he would fight a boy ten years old." And as he sat with Mrs. Stansbury watching Mrs. Cunningham walk away from the door at which she had apparently been listening to them, I wonder if the prospect of overcoming the force of this woman's will with legalistic pieces of paper didn't shrivel. For when Mrs. Stansbury left, he sent word to Alvah Blaisdell to come back—right away! Told Hannah that the instant a tall man arrived he was to be informed. Around four, Helen returned from her music lesson … lodger Daniel Ullman came home, went up to his room, and left again soon after … and around four-thirty Blaisdell did return, and what his frightened friend said to him now is pathetic. "He said this: 'I want you to come tonight. I am afraid to stay. I am very melancholy and I don't know the reason….'"

  But the best his friend Blaisdell could offer was, "I said I would come in the evening, but could not spend the night with him, that circumstances were such I could not leave home." If he'd kept even that promise, things might have been different, but: "Circumstances prevented me," said Blaisdell, "from keeping my appointment…."

  He wasn't prevented at all: he was afraid of garroters, as he later admitted when pressed. "When I got home, I had been gone all day, and had been gone for a number of days before," he explained in the rambling way, it sounds to me, of a man who is embarrassed, "and I found some friends at the house, and they remonstrated against my going out. There have been remonstrances against my going out ever since the garroters have been about. I am very much afraid of them. I started once and intended to have come, but so much was said about it that I declined." Anyway, he added, he hadn't really promised: "I told the Doctor I would come if possible."

  I think he heard some unfavorable comment on this excuse, because the next day he changed his story. "I have no fears," he now said, "of going anywhere in this or any other city, night or day—not myself. I have no fears of that—of no ma
n living or dead." But when he finished, the people who heard him laughed.

  So Harvey Burdell was left alone, among his enemies, as he believed. The day continued routinely. Dr. Luther Beecher came to call … and Mrs. Van Ness, Emma Cunningham's dressmaker and longtime friend. Cousin Demis stopped by. A seamstress, Susan Carey, was there all afternoon, possibly helping to get Helen ready for her return to school in Saratoga Springs the next morning; and she stayed for dinner. In the late afternoon Augusta went down the street to Dr. Roberts to get a tooth fixed. At four-thirty the Doctor's newest boy-of-all-work, John Burchell, left for the day. And at about five, Alvah Blaisdell having promised to return around seven, Dr. Burdell went out for his dinner alone.

  Then he came home to wait for his friend. And finally, Blaisdell never having showed up, Dr. Burdell went out again. It's not certain where. He may have visited his cousin Lucy Ann Williams that evening, on "Carrol Place" in Brooklyn. Or he may have just wandered around, because a First Avenue druggist who knew him said he "saw him standing on the northwest corner of Bond Street and the Bowery between nine and nine-thirty." He was alone, "dressed in his usual manner; he had on his shawl and coat … a black hat… a common silk hat." From George Snodgrass we learn that he also wore "indiarubbers," and he carried something, either a cane or an umbrella. It is also known that he wore a black neckerchief.

  Inside 31 Bond, in the back parlor of the first floor, Mrs. Cunningham, George Snodgrass, and her family were busy packing trunks and in general preparing for Helen's journey to boarding school at twelve-thirty tomorrow. We can see them fairly well. Little Willie and George Cunningham sat "marking" their sister's clothes; with her name, I assume is meant. Mrs. Cunningham wore black, as Augusta remembered it: "blade silk basque and skirt," or possibly the material was "black bombazine." Augusta, who, as Snodgrass recalled, wore a red plaid dress, spoke of how sorry she was that Helen was leaving, saying she didn't know what she'd do without her. Helen discovered that she didn't have any writing paper, and that she needed a veil, too, so she and George Snodgrass walked out to buy them: "Up Broadway, over to Fourth-street and down the Bowery," George said. They came back, and Helen "brought in the veil," she said, "showed it to mother, and then folded up some of my clothes, putting them into the trunk." Presently John Eckel came home to join them, having remembered as requested to bring some "figs, oranges, and candy," for Helen, or Ellen as she was sometimes called, to take along to school.

  As some of the participants described it, it has almost the sound of a festive evening in a quiet way: the girls chattering; the little boys helping a bit and, no doubt, playing a lot; the men watching, and helping a little; the mother busy herself and overseeing the others, as the long dresses and the capes, the shoes and hats, undergarments, and heavy stockings were folded and laid into the traveling trunks—a mid-nineteenth-century kind of evening of a lost innocence and charm.

  Around eight a man named Smith Ely, Jr., a business associate of John Eckel's, came to the front door and gave Mrs. Cunningham a written message for Eckel. Later that evening she remembered it, took it to Eckel's door, and gave it to him.

  The packing was finished about half-past eight, and the group then went up, as so often, to Mrs. Cunningham's sitting room, third floor front: "Mrs. Cunningham," Snodgrass recalled, "her two daughters, her two sons, Mr. Eckel, and myself." Around nine or nine-thirty the boys were sent up to bed. John Eckel dozed in a rocking chair, boots slipped off.

  But then around ten o'clock, once more, and oddly, Mrs. Cunningham—and this time Eckel came with her—went down to the kitchen and mysteriously ordered Hannah early to her attic bed again; and Eckel joined in the order. Hannah went, she said, "as soon as I washed some clothes out." On her way to her attic bedroom she stopped at Mrs. Cunningham's sitting room to ask what they all wanted for breakfast. "Mr. Eckel was sitting in the rocking chair," she remembered, "and Mr. Snodgrass was sitting at the table, I think writing something or other."

  A little before eleven Snodgrass was sent down to the kitchen, he said, to bring back some cider. He took a pitcher from its basin and made his way down. The house was completely dark, he said, so when he reached the second floor he ignited a match and lit the wall gas jet just outside Dr. Burdell's door to light his way on down to the kitchen. In its light he happened to notice, he said, that no key protruded from the lock of Dr. Burdell's office door—which was as it should be. Whether or not the Doctor had yet come home Snodgrass said he didn't know. In the kitchen he found the cider locked up, couldn't find the key, so he brought water upstairs instead—turning off the second-floor gas jet on his way back up. Both daughters had a drink from the pitcher, he said, so did he, but the "old lady" did not. Mrs. Cunningham said she was tired and suggested that they all retire; this was at exactly eleven by her mantel clock, Snodgrass observed. He went up to the attic bedroom where he and the boys slept, and Hannah—still lying awake—heard him say good night to Helen. He went to bed, and all three boys said they slept right through till morning, hearing nothing all night long. Hannah, too, said she slept all night, hearing nothing. Everyone else said the same; no one heard a thing.

  But some of the sleeping arrangements were peculiar. Mrs. Cunningham later explained that Helen wasn't feeling well, so she had her bring her things down from her attic bedroom and sleep with her. Augusta then said that she, too, wanted to sleep down here; and for a time she and Helen lay in bed talking. They had never before all slept in the one bed, Augusta said, but did so now because her sister was going away next day. But she agreed that Helen could not have been sick or they would not have planned to let her go away. Whatever the reason, the two girls and their mother all slept in Mrs. Cunningham's bed, Mrs. Cunningham in the middle. It doesn't sound comfortable, and if Mrs. Cunningham had to get up for any reason, she could hardly have done so without waking one of the girls. But they all said that didn't happen; that all night long none of them awakened. And Eckel said neither did he.

  Wherever Harvey Burdell spent that evening, wherever he went or wandered from the corner of Bond Street where he was last seen at nine-thirty, the time came when, the dread still in him, this despondent man finally turned toward home.

  You wonder why he didn't stay where he was. Or go to Demis's. Or, walking off the night ferry from Brooklyn, if, in fact, he'd been with cousin Lucy Ann Williams, he didn't just walk on over to the Metropolitan or LaFarge, take a room, and stay there. Till May first. Going to the Bond Street house only in the daytime to treat his patients, leaving the house with the last of them. You want to shout at him over the intervening century: Stay away from this house!

  Why didn't he? Blaisdell said, "Nearly all his difficulties have grown out of money matters. He was one of the most extremely penurious men, perhaps, that ever lived: a penny looked bigger in his eyes than a $20 gold piece to some people." It sounds right: it could be what kept him from marrying. Possibly Harvey Burdell couldn't bring himself to contract a three months' hotel bill when he owned a house of his own; and to abandon a valuable piece of property to those who occupied it now.

  In spite of his terror at being in this house, Harvey Burdell walked toward it now: along late-at-night Bond Street, possibly hearing his own reluctant steps muffled by the indiarubbers we know he was wearing, along with coat and shawl, black neckerchief, and common black silk hat, and carrying either cane or umbrella. It was a warm night for January, other people who came along Bond Street that night tell us; partly overcast and foggy, with a suggestion of rain to come, the sidewalks damp but clear, and snow and ice, packed hard, remaining in the street.

  We have these details of his appearance and that of the street, but still it isn't easy to see Dr. Burdell just now. The houses he is walking past are of a kind our eyes have never seen except as antiques, yet here and now they are comparatively new. There are winter trees set in the walk; they're easy to picture. But the light that touches their bare branches and the wet sidewalk and the iron fencing he is passing is gaslight, and what does th
at really look like? We have to see him as best we can, moving along that winter street of New York City in 1857—walking slowly, I would think —toward number 31; then turning in to climb the six white steps of his marble stoop; bending slightly to unlock the door, which is painted white —he'd be silhouetted against it as he stooped—then stepping into the dark house; turning to close and then lock the door behind him.

  He climbed the dark staircase to his rooms. Whether he had to unlock his door I don't know, but if he did, it seems to me he would have removed the key and, I would also think, have locked his door from the inside. In his office—large dental chair near one end, instruments in a case —he lighted the gas jet over his desk and took off his outer clothes, laying his coat and shawl on the sofa, but did not remove his black neckerchief. He lighted the fire, which he always laid himself, said his work-boy, John Burchell. Then he opened his desk, sat down before it, and brought out some papers, including a bankbook.

  It is not quite impossible that this is not what happened; that, instead, he had brought someone home with him who sat with him now discussing those papers, possibly, before betraying him. But there was never any reason to think that, and no one really did think so; in fact, he may even have been seen entering his house alone. And what happened now, everything suggested, is that as he sat at his desk looking over his papers under the gas jet, Dr. Burdell's door was silently unlocked with a stolen key, the key then left protruding from the hall side of the door, to be found there in the morning. And then as on other nights, someone eased his door open to stare in at the back of Burdell's bowed head. Or someone who'd been hiding in the Doctor's adjoining bedroom, or in a closet, now silently opened its door.