Gilded Needles (Valancourt 20th Century Classics)

by Michael McDowell

  The room was filled with a delicate, dusty light filtered through the blue curtains and there was a pervasive scent of pomade à la rose.

  Emboldened by the relative respectability of the room, Helen cautiously approached the foot of the bed; but when a board beneath the carpet creaked under her weight, two figures rose up suddenly from beneath the quilts—a gentleman about forty years of age with a thick black beard and thick black eyebrows but very little hair on the top of his head, and a young boy, so softly featured and with such long curling hair that had not his chest been bare, Helen would have taken him certainly for a female.

  “Who the devil—” cried the older man.

  “Get out!” screeched the boy, pulling the sheet up to his neck, “get out of my room!”

  Helen fled, and did not even leave a testament.

  She ran past Martin and into the other chamber on the floor. In the small comfortless room, she found Mrs. General Taunton standing beside a narrow iron bed on which lay two emaciated persons of advanced age. A thin coverlet was pulled up around their scrawny necks, and their clouded eyes gaped uncomprehendingly up at their visitors. The two persons in the bed were chiefly distinguishable by their gasping mouths, one being yellow from many years of chewing tobacco, and the other quite black with toothless scaly gums. Both were bald, and their wrinkled pock-marked skin was stretched tight across their skulls.

  Mrs. General Taunton said that they were man and wife, both just under seventy years of age, and both suffering markedly from cold and hunger. “They must be fed now or I feel they will die. Please call Martin.”

  Martin was already inside, and held the basket for Mrs. General Taunton to take out some small packages of soft food that had been prepared against just such a case as this.

  “How did you succeed across the way?” she asked Helen.

  “Not very well, I fear,” blushed Helen. For one thing, it had been the first time she had ever seen a male bare-chested.

  “What happened?”

  Helen hung her head, too ashamed to describe what she had seen and fearing to be confirmed in her dismayed interpretation; but Mrs. General Taunton did not press her. “Very well dear, but you must not think that we shall always be received with perfect politeness and very often our only reward will be the knowledge that we have done a little good somewhere. Now, while I sit here”—she was spooning mashed vegetables into the yellow mouth, which was, to Helen, a repellent operation—“please to go downstairs and knock. It is not likely that those living on the first floor will be in tremendous want—for they are the aristocracy of such houses as these—but we should be remiss if we did not at the least inquire.”

  Helen nodded, and though she feared a repetition of the scene across the hall, she had rather go downstairs than remain to watch the gasping yellow mouth and the ulcerous black mouth receiving food at Mrs. General Taunton’s charitable and fearless hand.

  Chapter 19

  The Sapphic Pugilist, Charlotta Kegoe, had been ill for four days, prostrated with a fever that had been contracted when she went too quickly out into the cold night air after a match in a damp cellar on Broome Street. She took to her bed and sent for Louisa Shanks, whose ministrations to her friend were ungrudging and ceaseless. On this particular afternoon, Ella had accompanied her grandmother on her visit to the ailing Charlotta. Charlotta was sensible of the honor bestowed upon her in this, for she knew that Lena had not left the buildings on West Houston Street at all since the first night of the new year.

  Charlotta’s apartments, though by far the best in that house, were by no means grand. The furnishings of the room at the front were scanty and poor, a small rickety round table covered with a threadbare cloth, a couple of wobbly chairs pulled up to it, a bare floor with knotholes, a cracked mirror upon the painted wall, two closed and locked trunks, a basket filled with soiled clothing, and a stack of hatboxes in a corner. Pasted on the walls were pages ripped from the yellow journals, representing prominent female fighters. Ella amused herself here with attempting to pick the lock of one of the trunks. A double door, closed off by a louvered screen, separated this from the back room.

  That chamber was smaller and darker and even more poorly furnished, with the single exception that a patched, much-worn flowered carpet covered a portion of the floor. There was a painted washstand with a bowl and pitcher that were tolerably new set upon it, a cedar wardrobe against one wall, and a small iron bedstead with an upended crate beside it.

  In the iron bed lay Charlotta Kegoe. Her eyes were sunken with illness and she breathed noisily and with difficulty through her mouth. Her nightdress was cut low on the neck and her tattooed arms lay outside the heavy covers.

  Louisa Shanks was occupied in pouring a scoopful of coal upon the fire in the grate and Lena sat solidly in a chair that was much too narrow for her ample girth, next to the chamber’s only window. The thin dark curtains had been drawn, for the comfort of the invalid.

  This was by no means a cheerful sickroom. Lena Shanks was not adept in the administering of comfort, even to those of whom she was fond; Charlotta Kegoe was not constituted to make a happy or resigned patient; and Louisa Shanks, rather a gruff nurse, was of course entirely silent. For some minutes the only sound in the room had been Charlotta’s low-pitched groans of discomfort as she attempted to rearrange herself in the bed; all three women were startled by a knock at the door of the front room.

  “Wer ist’s?” demanded Lena.

  Louisa shrugged her shoulders and Charlotta, not knowing, did not bother to answer at all.

  Louisa slipped past the louvered screen into the front room and motioned Ella to open the door. The girl slowly turned the knob, then suddenly pulled the door open wide. A young woman, simply but expensively dressed, stood there with a decidedly nervous manner and apprehensive eyes.

  “Pardon me,” she said with trembling diffidence, “but I and a companion of mine were visiting Mrs. Leed in the attic of this house—she is in great distress—and stopped here to see if there were anyone needful of . . . comfort or succor.”

  Louisa perforce made no reply and Ella, receiving no sign that she should speak, said nothing to the young woman.

  “I’m sorry to have troubled you,” she faltered, and backed out into the hallway.

  “Wer ist’s?” cried Lena again.

  “She don’t talk,” said Ella, pointing at Louisa, who had turned and was gesturing to Lena in the darkened room behind.

  Louisa turned back around to face the young woman, pushed the screen out of the way, and waved her into the smaller chamber.

  The young woman hesitated, but Ella urged her: “Go on! ’Lotta’s ill, in back there!”

  She crept through the doorway, nervously brushing against the mute woman. When her eyes had accustomed to the dimness, she moved to the bed, drew her fingers softly across the coverlet—she was reluctant to grasp the tattooed hand—and asked if there were anything that might be provided to relieve the intensity or the tedium of her illness and whether, in fact, that illness had yet been treated.

  “She’ll live,” said Lena gruffly.

  The young woman looked up startled. She had been so arrested by the strange figure in the bed that she had not seen Lena sitting at the window. “I’m very glad of it,” replied the young woman earnestly. “Is it certain that there is nothing I can do to alleviate the discomfort of this unwelcome season?”

  No one made reply to this stiff speech.

  “Perhaps I ought to go then, and leave you to your rest,” she said quietly.

  Charlotta raised herself painfully in the bed, gasped “Water!” and fell back again. Louisa hurried forward, poured out some cloudy liquid into a tumbler, and pressed it to the ill woman’s lips. She gulped it thirstily and then turned her head aside.

  “Tastes like it washed over a corpse,” she whispered, an
d then twitched with a spasm of pain.

  “Has . . . has she sufficient funds that a doctor might be called in?” asked the young woman. “One will be sent for Mrs. Leed, ought he be told to look in here as well?”

  “We take care of ’Lotta,” said Lena.

  “Of course,” replied the young woman hastily, and moved as if to take her leave, mumbling a farewell and a wish for the speedy recovery of the patient. But evidently thinking better of her fearfulness, she stopped suddenly, turned around and stepped quickly to Lena’s side.

  “Here,” she said, handing Lena a red-letter Testament, “please take this, for her benefit,” indicating the woman groaning upon the bed, “or for your own.”

  Lena Shanks looked up at the anxious young woman who proffered the slim volume. She stood just before the window, and in the motion of raising her arm, the sleeve of her dress had caught the hem of the curtain and drawn it aside. A shaft of watery sunlight fell upon her face and illuminated a pair of shining blue eyes in a field of parchment skin.

  Lena drew back sharply. “Wer bist du denn?” she cried out, and with one hand she knocked the Testament away. It scudded across the floor; but before it had even come to rest, Ella had snatched it up and thrust it into the pocket of her skirt.

  The young woman drew back alarmed. The curtain fell into place, the sunlight was extinguished, and the brilliant blue eyes were no more to be seen in their shadowed sockets.

  “Wer bist du denn?” Lena demanded again, waving her cane in menace. “What’s your name?”

  “Helen Stallworth,” she trembled.

  The cane clattered to the floor.

  “Was willst du denn hier?” Lena hissed. “What do you want?”

  “I simply came in to see if anyone needed assistance, if anyone here were in want of . . . of . . . anything at all. I’m in the company,” she added, in case these persons were contemplating some mischief, “of Mrs. General Taunton and her servants, her several servants, who just now are in the rooms above this one.”

  Lena nodded to her granddaughter, who skipped out of the room. Helen a moment later heard the door into the hallway opened. She understood that the child had been sent to determine the accuracy of her statement and she was anxious for what this might portend.

  “Name again,” demanded Lena.

  “Helen Stallworth.”

  Lena jerked aside the curtain and once more the sunlight fell upon Helen, but she had turned her back.

  “This way!” shouted Lena. Louisa Shanks had moved closer and was an ominous hovering presence. Very much discomposed, Helen looked down at the old woman, in whose gaze she seemed to discern an admixture of malevolence and fear.

  “Cornelius,” whispered Lena, “you took away Cornelius and hanged him, and you put me away at the Island. You tried to take my girls. Now Alick is gone too, and Maggie’s in the Tombs—”

  “Who is it you think I am?” cried Helen. “I know none—”

  “Stallworth!”

  Helen was held immobile by the basilisk gaze of the old woman, and understood in that terrified moment to what extent her grandfather’s reputation as a stern judge must have vilified their family name in the Black Triangle.

  “Please—” said Helen, but before she could speak further, the little girl ran back in and nodded shortly.

  Lena Shanks jerked the curtain closed. “Get out!” she cried.

  Helen all but ran from the chamber and through the poorly furnished parlor. She reached the hallway just as Mrs. General Taunton was coming down the stairs, followed by Maisie and Martin.

  “Yes, dear,” said the voice behind the black veil, “and were you more fortunate this time?”

  Chapter 20

  Following her arrest, at the police station Maggie Kizer was quietly recalcitrant. She gave her name and address, but entirely refused to answer any question concerning the death of Cyrus Butterfield. Her apparent unconcern for the gravity of her situation, which partly was the tag end of the opium trance and partly an aggrieved despair over her plight, infuriated the police. She was thrown into a cell without ceremony.

  It was a chamber of stone, seven feet by nine, with a single slash barred window in the far wall that looked out on a blank expanse of brick a couple of yards away. The damp floor was strewn with rotted straw and the entire furnishings were a narrow cot with a grubby blanket and a dented pewter chamber pot. A penny candle was stuck onto a crossbar in the narrow door of the cell, but only guards were allowed matches.

  When the warder took away the light and disappeared down the long stone passageway, leaving Maggie in the dark, there came whispers from the neighboring cells, low guttural voices demanding her identity and her crime, high cajoling voices that solicited a particular kind of companionship, irrational strident voices that accused her of setting up conspiracies to strangle Irish infants and assassinate the Pope.

  Alone in the dark cell, Maggie turned and felt out the compass of the walls, frigidly cold and damp. She sat on the edge of the low, vermin-infested cot and removed from her bosom the two packets of luck—a cocaine mixture—that she always carried about with her. Her small bag containing the opium tin and the yen hock had been taken from her.

  After inhaling the cocaine slowly, she lay upon her back, threw one arm across her face, and listened to the murmuring voices of all the women incarcerated around her. She lay many hours in an untroubled reverie. In the morning she was roused by the guard. Through the metal flap at the bottom of her cell door he pushed a tin tray of cold biscuits swimming in a gelatinous black gravy.

  When he returned an hour later to retrieve the untouched tray, the guard told Maggie that she would be arraigned on the following day, in the court of Judge James Stallworth, and ventured his own opinion that she would be very fortunate if she got away with her life.

  Maggie made no reply.

  A little before noon, several men came to the door of the cell and peered in at her. Among them, Maggie noted the man with hair like fire who had been present at her arrest. She sat demurely on the edge of the cot, quite composed and as neat as she could make herself, but she responded to none of their numerous, increasingly querulous questions. At last, the reporters went away, exclaiming against her silence and demanding of no one in particular that she be forced to talk to them; but their anger could hardly be heard beneath the shrill demands of the other female prisoners, who screamed for assistance, yelled in derision, and shrieked insinuations and invitations so obscene that the reporters stopped to laugh or take up the banter.

  When they were gone, Maggie turned a little on her cot so that her back was to the narrow door of the cell and withdrew the second packet of cocaine from her dress.

  Her dinner arrived at three o’clock in the afternoon, but this she ignored also. Hope was a commodity Maggie Kizer had entirely given over. She had realized, in the moment of her arrest, that all the slight comforts of her existence that had sustained her in the few years past had melted away and would never be recovered by her. She did not think, “I have been betrayed,” and she did not hope, “I shall be rescued.” She simply judged that her life was over. At sixteen she had been plunged into a sea of misery and ignominy, and though her head had been raised above those turbulent black waters for a time, she understood that now she was sunk entirely beneath the waves, not to rise again.

  If this were her situation, why then there was no reason to eat, no reason to think of escape, no reason to beg for assistance, or mercy or pity; there was no reason to think at all. If Maggie could have devised a way to kill herself at that moment, she would have done so without qualm or hesitation.

  Maggie had stared at the blank stone wall at the back of her cell for she knew not how long when she turned, merely for the sake of movement, and saw Daisy Shanks standing at the barred door. The abortionist wore a mauve dress festooned with p
ink ribbons that was drawn disconcertingly tight across her breast and down her sides. She carried a basket in the crook of her folded arm and grinned at Maggie as if they had just chanced to meet before the mermaid case at Barnum’s Museum or strolling upon the beach at Coney Island.

  “Daisy!” whispered Maggie Kizer, through parched lips.

  The woman blocked the entire narrow doorway of the cell, but suddenly Rob sidled between his mother and the barred door. He stared intently at Maggie, with his little delicate fingers wrapped around the iron bars.

  “I’ve brought your boy to see you, Maggie,” laughed Daisy Shanks.

  Maggie stared without comprehension.

  “Nana says I’m to be your boy so long as you’re here,” said the child in an earnest whisper.

  Maggie looked up at this, a flicker of interest in her eyes.

  “I’m your boy,” the child repeated, as if it were a lesson that it was important Maggie Kizer learn. “And I’ve brought you something.”

  “I don’t want food,” replied Maggie weakly.

  “No food,” said Rob.

  Daisy Shanks turned her beaming face to the guard at the far end of the corridor while Rob softly lifted the lid of the basket and withdrew a bulky packet done up in yellow paper and yellow string. He pushed it through the panel at the bottom of the door. Maggie automatically reached forward to shove her tin tray of food out of the way.

  “It’s a lay-out,” whispered Rob.

  Maggie snatched the package from the floor, nervously untied the string, and found a cheap, but complete layout for opium in it, with several dollars of second-grade dope. “Thank you,” she breathed.