April in Paris

by John J. Healey

  “I know the family of Mrs. and Mr. Anderson. They lived in 1075. I also know a family named Conlan. They lived in 1077 on the third floor. I know the defendant. He lived with the Conlans. The Andersons lived on the third-floor rear of 1075.

  “I remember the day and night of June 6, 1916. I had heard about the Anderson girl being missing. I went down to the cellar to fix the hot water heater around ten. Something attracted my attention. The door to the coal room was open about five inches. I saw part of a shoe. When I opened the door, I saw the child lying there partly covered with an old quilt that belonged to me and which I stored there. The covering came down to the breast. The lower part of her body and legs were uncovered. The head had been shoved between the stove and the wall, and that left the legs hanging together, but crossways to the door. I did not remove the covering at the time. I ran out and told my wife and Mrs. Buckley. She was on the 1075 stoop. She is one of the tenants and lives in 1075. Then I went over to the firehouse across the street to telephone the police.”

  – 6 –

  I was interrupted at this point by a phone call from Shanghai. It was a German woman I had dated earlier that year. She was coming back to Paris and hoped to see me again. She was lovely to look at but devoted to international finance—I’d found her more taxing to talk to than I had originally hoped when I first approached her at a gallery opening. I made excuses, trying to be as friendly as I could, and then I went right back to the transcript.

  “I am Dr. Daniel Black. I reside at 1046 Ogden Avenue. I am a physician. I remember the night of June 6, 1916, when I was summoned to 1077 Ogden Avenue. It was about ten o’clock. I went down to the cellar from the street. There were a number of people present, but I can’t remember who they were. I looked into the coal room and saw the body of a child lying on its right side, with its face toward the stove, in between the stove and the wall.

  “I removed the quilt and pulled the child’s body out just far enough to listen to its heart. I placed it on its back. I discovered that the child was dead, that there was mucus and saliva and a little blood coming from the nose and mouth, and marks on the throat. There was a large bruise, I think on the left side, just above the larynx, and on the other side there were two or three marks which looked like fingerprints. On the right side of the throat, I saw some marks that looked like the imprint of fingernails.

  “I made a further examination of the body and the clothing. I had to lift up the skirt to do so. When I lifted up the skirt, I saw the privates. I only examined the condition of the underclothes. Outside of that I made no examination, although at the time I lifted the skirt, I had that in mind. I did not make a further examination for rape because I did not think it the proper place to do it. The drawers were down far enough to expose the privates. And she had soiled herself—the bowels had moved. It is usual, by death ensuing and the relaxation of the system, that anything in the bowels is exuded. That is almost always the case. After I saw this, I turned the skirt down again, and put the quilt under the body, so that it would not rest on the cellar floor.”

  “I am John August Anderson. I reside at 214 West 148th Street. I was born in Sweden. I have been in this country twelve years. I am a metal worker and have been employed by the Consolidated Gas Company for about nine years. I am married. In June 1916, I was living with my wife and family at 1075 Ogden Avenue. At that time, I had two children. My oldest child’s name was Ingrid Anderson. She was eleven years seven months old in June. The younger child’s name is Adranaxa Anderson. He is nine years and seven months old. I lived at that address since March 15, 1916.

  “I remember the evening of June 6. I arrived home at ten minutes to seven. My children usually met me as I came up the street. On this evening my children did not meet me. I found the little boy in the kitchen. My wife was home. The little girl was not there.

  “After supper I went out to look for the girl. I went around the block, where there are some empty lots, and I looked there. Every place I saw children playing I asked if they had seen the child. At eight I went home again. She was not there. We then went down Ogden Avenue to Central Bridge that cuts across the Harlem River there. There is a park there. We did not find her. Then we went to the house again. We learned nothing there. All the people around were neighbors. None of them had seen her.

  “Then I went to the police station. From the station house I went home again, a little after ten. There was a crowd there. I went down into the cellar. The officers and the doctors were down in the cellar. I saw my little girl, Ingrid. The dress was up, and the drawers were down, and she was dead. She had a white dress on and a red sweater.”

  “I am John Cupperman, MD. I am a coroner’s physician in the borough of the Bronx. On Friday, June 7, 1916, I performed an autopsy on the body of the child identified to me as Ingrid Anderson, at her residence, 1075 Ogden Avenue, Highbridge.

  “The apparent age of the child was ten or eleven years, rather small build, slightly developed, blonde. She was female. We removed the clothing and I examined the body for external evidences of death. The usual evidences of death were there, but in addition to that, there were some marks upon the back of the neck that consisted of bruises. The bruises were of the size and shape such as could have been made by an adult’s hand.

  “I opened the body from the chin down to the pubes, that is the point at the pelvic bone; made one incision right through the structures and laid the structures bare. The several structures of the throat I removed in mass, that is the tongue, posterior wall of the pharynx, and the larynx and the trachea, all of the structures of mastication and respiration in the pharynx, and then carefully dissected them apart to observe their relation and any change there was from the normal. The lungs were also removed at the same time, and the heart.

  “I found upon examination that the hyoid bone, which is situated at the base of the tongue, had been broken. In my opinion the cause of the breaking of this bone was a traumatism of some kind. The lungs were removed and examined and found to be very much congested and edematous. That means in plain English that the little air vesicles in the lungs were filled up with a watery, serous fluid that exudes from the blood vessels.

  “The heart was normal, kidneys normal, all of the organs of the body were normal. I have not the slightest doubt but what her death was caused by strangulation. It would take a period of at least two or three minutes, the very minimum, to cause the condition that I found here, namely this broken bone, these marks on the throat, the condition of the tongue, the blood, the mucus and the mouth and the edema of the lungs.

  “I also found evidence of violence with reference to rape. I examined the body for that purpose. The genital organs were not intact and there was evidence of bleeding. I didn’t make a microscopic examination at that time. I looked for that purpose in the genital organs and found disturbing evidence.”

  – 7 –

  My father, I realized, was born the same year as Ingrid Anderson. A midwife delivered him to the world in the same house where Ingrid lived and died. 1075 Ogden Avenue is near the corner of West 165th Street, the one I ran to in my dream. I was headed for Anderson Avenue when I woke up. Was the girl in my dream Ingrid Anderson? It was difficult to believe.

  My father surely knew her and might have played with her. My paternal grandparents, Nana and Pop Kerry, both of them born in Ireland, had stored some of their things in the basement where Ingrid was raped and strangled. They knew the neighbors, the Conlans where this MacBride fellow lived, Mrs. Buckley, and the janitor, Albert Boulder. It was more than likely that Doctor Black was their physician. Their apartment faced the backyard of 1075 and was two stories tall, which is to say, they lived directly under the Andersons.

  I knew the house. I had visited it many times. I had slept there. Nana and Pop lived there until they died in the early 1970s. It was near my mother’s house on Woodycrest. How did this grisly murder affect my father and his parents and brothers? The United States had just entered World War I. My mother was you
ng, but surely the case was well known to everyone in the neighborhood. It happened the same year the Judge’s wife died. How had it affected Luigino Colossi Jr.— Gino—who’d driven me to school for so many years? I would have sworn I’d never been told about it. But the dream indicated that I had.

  I remembered my father’s parents reading gruesome stories from the newspapers out loud to each other in their thick Irish accents, grisly tales from the Daily News and the Daily Mirror. Maybe they told me about Ingrid. There were many opportunities. I’d sit with them at the kitchen table that was covered with oilcloth, shiny white with little green shamrocks on it, stained with tea mug rings. When I was Ingrid’s age Pop Kerry took me on walks down by the New York Central train tracks that ran along the Bronx side of the Harlem River. Nana would sometimes sequester me in her bedroom to tell me stories about her childhood in County Clare and share her favorite snack of raisins with butter.

  It was shocking to read how the Bronx coroner’s physician performed the autopsy in the children’s bedroom while the girl’s parents and little brother sat in the adjacent parlor. It was almost as invasive, indecent, and perverse as the crime that killed her. Removing her clothes, opening her up with his scalpel “from the chin to the pubes,” pulling out her tongue, larynx, and pharynx with a single grasp, then her trachea and lungs, cutting out her heart and kidneys. Where were these severed, glistening organs—or “structures” as he called them—placed? On the bed? A table? On the scuffed wooden floor? There was no bathroom nearby, no scrubbed tiles or rubber gloves, no sterilized aluminum trays. It was June in a building with scant ventilation. I found it appalling.

  The testimony referring to the manner of death was equally macabre. Strangulation is always abbreviated in the movies. One becomes accustomed to theatrical shorthand. Reading the declarative sentences of the transcript describing how it would have taken two to three minutes to murder the girl—an eternity for victim and assassin —pressing upon her little throat so intensely that the hyoid bone broke, that the killer’s fingernails left bloody wounds, was revolting. I wondered if he’d done it looking at her face or from behind.

  And the father, John August Anderson, had worked for the Consolidated Gas Company. That name sounded familiar. I ran a search and discovered it was basically owned by Thomas E. Cuddihy, my stepmother Caro’s multimillionaire father, the man whose widow got the Judge and my parents into the Beach Club, the head of the Cuddihy-Woodward clan in Southampton that owned almost all the land south of Wickapogue Road. Might there be a connection between the Cuddihys and this grisly murder? The possibility freaked me out.

  I scrambled eggs for lunch and remembered something else— and thought it curious I’d forgotten—a book given to me by a friend on my arrival in Paris in January, when my sabbatical started. L’Age d’homme, by Michel Leiris. My friend gave it to me because its final chapter is a rumination inspired by The Raft of the Medusa, the painting by Theodore Géricault that I was writing about. I’d been commissioned to contribute a chapter in a catalog for the Louvre to accompany an exhibition planned for the 200th anniversary of when the painting was first shown there.

  I retrieved the book from my bedside table and found the part pertinent to the dream:

  One of the earliest memories I have is of the following scene:

  I am ten or eleven years old and at school; on the same bench with me is a girl in a gray velvet dress, with long curly blonde hair; we are studying a lesson together in the same Sacred History text. I still see quite clearly the illustration we were looking at; it represented Abraham’s sacrifice; above a kneeling child with clasped hands and exposed throat hovers the patriarch’s arm, wielding an enormous knife, and the old man raises his eyes to heaven, seeking the approval of the wicked God to whom he is sacrificing his son.

  – 8 –

  I made an effort to put the entire morbid business of the trial behind me and worked for a couple of hours. Later I rewarded myself with an afternoon walk. If you leave my place and cross the Seine onto the right bank and head northeast toward the Bastille or the Gare de Nord, it’s unsightly. If you cross to the left bank and head east toward the Gare de Austerlitz, you fight your way against racing cars and taxis or hug a drab slice of river. What I mostly did, and had been doing the past few days, was to cross the Pont Marie and head into the Marais.

  Though its narrow sidewalks, jammed with pedestrians streaming past expensive boutiques, hip bars, and specialty shops were unfriendly to foot traffic, the generally chic and attractive appearance of almost everyone and everything made up for it. Orthodox Jews also lived in the neighborhood, and there was the Shoah Memorial, the exquisite dimensions of the Place des Vosges, and the noble architecture of the National Archives with its graveled paths and sculpted Last Year at Marienbad fir trees. I mostly went to the Marais to buy wine at the Caves du Marais, then salmon and pasta at the Autour Saumon, or to grab a light lunch at Le Café Suédois across from the little park, the George Cain Square, where young mothers looking like fashion models were inevitably glued to their phones sitting next to thousand-euro baby carriages.

  But on that afternoon, I opted for another route. I crossed over the Seine to the Left Bank and took the Rue de Pontoise to the Boulevard Saint-Germain. Then I went up the Boulevard Saint-Michel toward the Luxembourg Gardens. My impressions of the Boulevards Saint-Germain and Saint-Michel had evolved over time. At first, in my teens, they were iconic, literary avenues, romantically imagined before I ever crossed the Atlantic. I envisioned them, inspired by Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn, and Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, as wide streets that, along with the Tulleries and the Eiffel Tower, evoked a sepia-toned, eroticized Paris. The power of these reveries was such that, even as I first began to walk along them, I continued to see them as I wished. Although brief sections rose to the level of my fabrications—the block encompassing the immutable Café Flore, for instance, and the now tragically extinct La Hune bookstore, or the polychrome architecture of the Saint-Michel fountain and the no-nonsense staff at the Café Le Luxembourg—by my fourth or fifth visit I could no longer maintain any illusions regarding these streets. They were a disappointment. As had happened on the Ile, and to so much of Paris, with the exception of a few restaurants and classic stores managing to hang in there, most of the storefronts on these boulevards had been taken over by high-end franchises and eateries aimed at tourists. I was so used to it by then I hardly noticed. It was simply Paris.

  The Luxembourg Gardens, on the other hand, preserved and conserved with old-school Gallic severity, continued to be a reliable and consoling destination.

  I’d been drawn to its gardens, a bastion of civilization, since my late teens. The temperature and the light that day were ideal. Everything felt fresh and green from the morning rain. The bronze statue of Pan cheered me. The chestnut trees were in blossom. I sat in one of the chairs, the kind Henry James called “penny chairs,” on the terrace overlooking the grand circular fountain where toy sailboats skimmed about.

  I stretched my legs, relaxed, and looked forward to the evening. Unattached for more than a year and disillusioned from what had been an initial spurt of dating that winter, I’d gotten used to savoring my time alone. But a dinner party now and then was much appreciated, and one awaited me a few hours later. My hosts lived two doors down the Quay; perfect for someone like me who was lazy about traversing Paris at night. I didn’t know them that well, they were more friends of friends, but we kept running into each other at the food shops and one thing had led to another. He was a well-known filmmaker from New York, Dirk Salisbury, a sort of uber preppie, married to an heiress from Spain. I wondered what “Dirk” came from, whether it was his real name or stolen from Dirk Bogarde, whom he slightly resembled. I also associated the name with an old-fashioned dagger, an image that suited him. His wife was named Consuelo and they had a young daughter, Lucia, who attended school on the Ile. It was to be an evening of relaxed conversation and good
food.

  Back at the apartment that evening, after I’d dressed for dinner, I poured myself a glass of wine and found myself being drawn back into the trial transcript.

  ***

  “I am Fred Hulberg. I am an undertaker. I was called in to take care of the remains of Ingrid Anderson. I went to the premises at 1075 Ogden Avenue. She was in a side room, a bedroom. I folded the clothes she’d been found in right on the floor near the window and the wardrobe. I made no alterations to them or put anything on them. We dressed the child’s body with a dress the mother provided and placed the child in the casket. The father and mother were present at the time. I went to the house again on Sunday, the day of the funeral. The funeral was to take place at a church. The body was taken out from the parlor.”

  “I am Elsa Anderson. I reside at 214 West 148th Street. I am the mother of Ingrid Anderson. I have been married to my husband for twelve years. At the time of her death Ingrid was eleven years and seven months and fifteen days. I bought or made and took care of her clothes. I was acquainted with the child’s clothing.

  “On the night of her death I did not go down into the cellar. I went as far as the stairs, but my husband would not let me in. The first time I saw my girl’s body was on Saturday when she was in the casket. I did not see her when she was brought up that night, nor when she was put in the bedroom. The funeral took place on Sunday. On Monday I went back to the flat with my husband. I saw the clothes she’d been wearing when they found her folded in the corner of the room where the undertaker had put them. My husband and I put them in the laundry bag. They were in the bag until the next day, when they were given to the officer. Before I put the clothes in the bag, I looked at them, and I saw that the buttonholes of the petticoat and the drawers were torn.