Gilded Needles (Valancourt 20th Century Classics)

by Michael McDowell

  All the evening long, while her grandfather sat up with the corpse of her brother at the manse, Helen Stallworth’s sleep was disturbed by dreams, not of her family, but rather of the inhabitants of the house that she had first visited on King Street.

  The young woman and her child in the attic were perishing of cold and hunger, and the Reverend Thankful Jones’s flesh lay in elephant-folds around his rickety black skeleton. The prostitute across the hall had lost her orange hair in disease and was destitute, the young man in the room below was about to be stabbed to the heart by a jealous male admirer. The old man and old woman on the second floor opened and shut their round black mouths like dying fish in the bottom of a boat, and in extension of that metaphor in her dream, they flopped out of the bed and twitched in sopping throes all around the room. A murderer had snuck through the window of the first floor and was about to cut out the wrists and throat of the young woman there, intent on stealing her tattooed jewels.

  Helen waked sweating in the bed, certain of nothing but that she was required in King Street. All the inhabitants of that house called out for her help. She rose trembling in the darkened room and, having no idea of the time of night and making no attempt to deaden the noise of her movements, she dressed herself hurriedly, took up her bag, made certain that she was well supplied with cash, and fled downstairs, glancing this way and that hoping for sight of some servant who could accompany her to the Black Triangle.

  A church bell tolled three, and Helen paused in the hallway, realizing that at so early an hour none of the servants would be about and that she must go on alone. She hurried into the parlor, lighted a candle and penned this note at Mrs. Taunton’s writing desk:

  I must return, my dearest Anne. I know that I am needed, and when I have done all that I can—all that is wanted—I will come back to you. Your ever affectionate daughter (I would be your daughter),

  Helen Stallworth

  Postscriptum. I am quite well now, and am anxious, oh so very anxious! to see my duty done. H.S.

  She folded the page once, scrawled Anne across it, blew out the candle, and quickly left the house.

  No cab was to be had on Eighteenth Street, and none on Fourth Avenue either. Helen, though feverish and exhausted, determined that she would walk to King Street, and so, not even bothering now to watch for some conveyance to carry her thither, she set out through the chill night in a long-striding hectic gait toward the Black Triangle. In a quarter of an hour she passed her grandfather’s house on Washington Square but did not even glance up at the windows to see if they were lighted.

  Helen hurried on, swinging her bonnet by its strings, for her head was too hot to bear even that light covering. Though awake now for an hour and more, she had lost not a whit of the virulent conviction of her dreaming, but was as firmly convinced now as when she had sat bolt upright in the bed, that all the inhabitants of the house in King Street would perish if she did not hasten to their aid.

  Helen did not remember that the young woman and her child were dead, that the old man and his wife had perished soon after. Her decreasing strength, shortness of breath, and occluded brain rather urged her toward the Black Triangle than detained her. She must reach the house on King Street before she collapsed. If she allowed herself to falter, or lingered to recoup her faculties, she would arrive to find that the inhabitants had perished of hunger or disease or been killed outright in their beds.

  Her pace increased as she came within the precincts of the Black Triangle. Those out so late upon the streets were astonished by this specter of the young gentlewoman hurrying along, ill and disheveled, gasping for her shallow breath, stumbling at every uneven place in the walk, and grabbing at posts to propel her forward.

  At last, Helen had reached MacDougal Street, and hurried along its familiar length until she reached King Street. Just at the corner, a melancholy untuned piano on the third floor of a house played “Oh, Bless Me, Mother.” And in the last, maudlin stage of a night’s debauchery, a cracked drunken duet was made of the final verse:

  I hear soft music on the air,

  Oh, cool my burning brow!

  The angels beckon from above,

  I feel so happy now;

  So bless me, mother, ere I die,

  And fold me to your heart!

  You’ll miss me, mother, very much,

  Oh, kiss me ere we part.

  Helen laughed aloud in her relief, for the house on King Street was visible to her, just visible in the darkness that prevailed in this narrow way. Helen’s strangled voice joined the cracked chorus of “Oh, Bless Me, Mother,” and she staggered toward the house. She stopped for one moment at the foot of the stoop there, pressed one clammy hand against her strangled heart, and mounted the steps.

  The door was locked, and she beat wildly upon it. “Oh please!” she cried. “I’ve come—”

  Suddenly the door was jerked open, and in its frame stood the woman whose jewelry was tattooed onto her wrists and neck. Her feet were bare, and she was clothed in a short blue shift.

  Helen cried out in joy that the young woman was not dead. “Thank heaven!” she gasped. “I’ve come—”

  Helen collapsed on the threshold. Her head struck the edge of the first step, and her cheek was scraped bloody against the bricks.

  Charlotta Kegoe stooped, lifted the insensible girl, and carried her inside the house. A moment later Rob appeared, and gathered up Helen’s bag and bonnet. He glanced quickly up and down the deserted street, then backed inside the building and kicked the door shut.

  From the house on the corner, the chorus was repeated, in lachrymose duet:

  Oh, bless me, mother,

  Bless me, ere I die;

  Oh, bless me, mother,

  Oh, bless me, ere I die.

  Mrs. General Taunton, when she had read the note that Helen Stallworth had left for her on the desk in the parlor, had assumed that her charge had returned home to the manse. Helen had evidently discovered the afflictions that prevailed in her home and departed stealthily, knowing that her friend would attempt to dissuade her from leaving. Mrs. Taunton questioned her servants carefully whether any of them had spoken to Helen of the death of her brother, or even whether they had talked of it among themselves in a place where they might have been overheard by the invalid. None of the servants would admit to such an indiscretion, and Mrs. General Taunton, knowing their loyalty, believed them. If to nothing else then, Mrs. General Taunton must ascribe Helen’s flight to the intuition of a sympathetic soul.

  The widow tactfully refrained from calling on Helen at this difficult time, and even deprived herself of the pleasure of writing to her protégée. Mrs. General Taunton knew that her intimacy with Helen was ill-regarded by the Stallworths, and she was reluctant to raise any contentious feelings in so sorrowful an hour. She regretted that Helen had left before completely recovered from her fever, but told herself that now Helen was at home, there was no point in dragging her back; she could recuperate as well in the manse as on Second Avenue.

  In the papers, Mrs. General Taunton followed the disappointing progress of the search for little Edwin and Edith and the investigation into Benjamin’s murder. In the description of the funeral that was printed in the Herald—a story that was got from the Greenwood chaplain for an undisclosed amount of gold—Mrs. General Taunton was surprised to find that Helen was not present, though she had left the house early on the morning of the interment. The widow supposed either that Helen was overcome with her own grief, or too attentive to her father’s to attend.

  Yet the next day, Friday, having no word from Helen, Mrs. General Taunton grew worried, and mistrusting that the fever had come back upon her friend with renewed vigor, sent off a short note by coach to the manse. The bearer was to wait for a reply, but the servant at the door curtly maintained that as Miss Helen was not within, no answer
could be returned.

  Mrs. General Taunton was disturbed by this, and hoped for the simplest explanation for Helen’s absence from her father’s home; that she was briefly visiting her aunt and uncle on Gramercy Park or her grandfather on Washington Square. She resigned herself to this hopeful construction for the evening, but the next day waited impatiently for a reply to her letter.

  None came. Mrs. General Taunton dispatched another messenger, who received the same reply. Late on Saturday afternoon, Mrs. General Taunton herself stood on the steps of the manse and knocked at the door. In her best mourning habit in honor of Helen’s brother she looked, on the whole, rather like the dramatized spirit of a hearse.

  The female servant, with almost a surliness of demeanor, denied that Helen was within. When Mrs. General Taunton asked if she might be allowed to speak to the minister, the servant replied that her master was overcome with grief for the death of his son and was fit to speak to no one.

  “But please to tell me,” said Mrs. General Taunton, “if Miss Stallworth is staying here. Please simply tell me when she will return.”

  “Ah sure!” cried the servant. “Only she’s not in now!” When Helen had first left the manse on Monday morning, the minister had ordered the servants to maintain to all who inquired that Helen was still a member of the household, only “not at home at present.”

  “I’m greatly relieved to hear it! Then when she does return, please give her this letter, and say that Anne anxiously awaits word from her.”

  “Certainly,” smiled the servant, pleased with the success of her deception—and withdrew.

  Mrs. General Taunton went away greatly relieved in her mind.

  At that moment Helen Stallworth lay on a narrow couch that was pushed up beneath the single window in Charlotta Kegoe’s bedchamber. Her flesh lay blotched and loose upon all her extremities, and each day Rob gathered up and braided all the hair that had fallen from her scalp. After three days, in which she had eaten nothing but a few spoonfuls of oyster stew, she was nearly bald; and was so weak that when she rolled off the couch onto the carpetless floor, she had not the strength to turn her face from the dust there.

  Fever had destroyed her intellect, and she did not know how or what or where she suffered. She could not hear when Ella read to her the account of her brother’s death and funeral, she could not feel when Rob wrote poems on her bony bare feet with a sharp quill pen and violet ink, she could not see when her niece Edith, astonished to find so familiar a face in such unfamiliar surroundings, danced a straw doll before her face and called out, “Play with me, Helen, play with me!”

  Chapter 44

  Directly after attending Benjamin’s funeral on Wednesday morning, Duncan Phair had inquired at Mulberry Street whether there was any news of the bogus nursemaid or of Benjamin’s murderers. This visit, and the visits made on succeeding mornings, were made merely pro forma, for Duncan had no doubt that it was Lena Shanks who was behind everything; and he possessed as well a belief in her almost supernatural power to escape detection. She was a black angel, and her family were devils out of a vengeful hell. Duncan had but scant hope he would ever see his children again outside a coffin.

  He spent his days on Pearl Street. Although he was little fitted for trial duty, the trivial and commonplace work of the law office soothed him somewhat and made him forget for minutes at a time what had happened to him and to his family. In the evening, it was drink that procured his oblivion. He visited his wife’s room each night, but invariably found her in a trancelike sleep, and the mute nurse indicating that she would not come out of it quickly. In the dining room after dinner, he sat and drank wine, and over and again told what was lost to him and recounted by what measures and what means his life had come to so hopeless a pass.

  He drank because after a few hours, in those long quiet evenings at home, the wine brought on insensibility, and he longed for sleep despite the nightmares that invariably accompanied his slumber. Terror-filled and irrational as those frightful dreams were, they were never worse than the reality to which they inevitably gave way.

  On Saturday afternoon, at his desk on Pearl Street, Duncan received a letter which his clerk said had been pushed under the door, the messenger not presenting himself. The letter read:

  Sat. 5 p.m.

  Duncan—

  I have heard of your recent troubles and sympathize fully. Im happy to say that Ive recv’d information that will lead you direct to Ed & Edith yr children. It will be available to us this eve. at 7 p.m. at the opium den at no 46 Mott St. When the chinaman at the door wants the word to get in just say Dollie & youll be let in. Go downstairs and ask again for Dollie. She dont want the reward because she dont want it known where shes keeping, but bring $300 or she wont talk. Ill be there too but dont wait for me outside, it wont do to have us seen together.

  Yr friend,

  S. Lightner

  The missive was perplexing but welcome. Merely from the address upon the envelope that was slipped beneath the office door, Duncan had recognized the familiar script. Had he been less pleased with the contents, Duncan might have been more puzzled by the wording of the letter, which was not in Simeon’s distinctive style; but such an incongruity was overwhelmed by the familiarity of the handwriting, and even more so by the hopefulness that Duncan attached to the letter.

  Smiling for the first time in almost a week, Duncan wrote out a draught for five hundred dollars, and sent one of the clerks to have it turned into cash. With this in his pocket, he went out to a dinner more substantial than any he had consumed in some time. His thoughts then were sanguine.

  Three hundred dollars would purchase the information that would bring back Edwin and Edith whom, in truth, Duncan loved very much; and the return of his children, Duncan told himself, would doubtless reconcile Judge Stallworth. Marian would recover, and the Stallworth wagon would once again ride in the ruts of prosperity and felicity. To avoid considering the possible complications that might thwart this simply patterned success, Duncan thought blithely of the years ahead of him, when Judge Stallworth would be dead and Marian would have inherited the greater portion of his wealth; when he would himself be a city commissioner and Marian an arbiter of fashion, when Edith would be a beautiful young woman and he would give her away at the most brilliant wedding that New York had ever seen, when Edwin, the acknowledged Stallworth heir, would be a young man over whom any father might justifiably crow. A palace opposite the park, a cottage at Newport or Saratoga, journeys to Europe and introductions at court—Duncan set out on his way to Mott Street dreaming of fortune past knowing and honor past pride.

  He did not stop to consider that if Edwin and Edith were still alive, there were two Stallworth deaths yet promised.

  Edward Stallworth dreaded sleep, for since he had been brought back to his bed from his collapse at the Bellevue morgue, all his dreams were of Benjamin—not his son alive, the callow disappointing ill-favored young man that he had grown to be, not Benjamin as a boy, disappointing and ill-favored even then, but Benjamin dead, laid out on a stone slab, his livid head hinged upon a slashed throat, his slashed throat a dull red-black line of congealed blood. In those dreams the tilted slab rose ever higher until Benjamin’s corpse was precipitated forward into Edward Stallworth’s straining, frightened arms. The lolling head was torn from the shoulders and flew off onto the yellow brick floor of the morgue. On Saturday morning, Edward drew on a quilted black robe and went downstairs, still trembling from that terrifying familiar vision of his slumber.

  On his desk, Edward found a great stack of memorial cards, still smelling of ink. On five hundred oblongs of cardboard that bore the embossed delineation of a fallen tree, symbolic of manhood cut off in its prime, was the legend: “In Affectionate Remembrance of Benjamin Stallworth Who died 15th October, 1882, Aged 22 Years. Interred at Greenwood Cemetery, 18th October.” Beside these were ten boxes of
black-bordered letter paper and envelopes. Edward supposed it was Marian who had troubled herself with these details, and he was grateful to her. He recalled only vaguely now his sister’s hysteria over her missing children and assumed that, in the somber light of his own greater grief, she would have recovered herself.

  Edward Stallworth picked up one of the memorial cards and examined it carefully; there was something indecently familiar about it. He rang for a maidservant, and just as he was giving her directions to bring him tea, he suddenly recalled the Sunday dinner—actually less than a month before—when all the family had received such cards, each card announcing his own death. Edward broke off in the midst of his direction.

  “Aggie,” he said, “have my niece and nephew been found yet?”

  “No, sir,” replied the maid, as if with shame. “No one yet knows what’s come of them.”

  “And my sister?”

  “Still took to her bed.”

  “Has Helen called? Has my daughter been here?”

  Aggie shook her head, and Edward dismissed her.

  For the remainder of the day, taking luncheon at his desk, Edward Stallworth thoughtlessly, mechanically replied to the letters of condolence. The terrible violence of Benjamin’s death and the dramatic discovery of his corpse had been brought forcibly to the attention of all New York, and many of the several hundred letters that the minister had received proved to be from persons unknown to him, or forgotten. He read over the missives briefly and, in truth, with little comprehension. His mind was beset with wondering just what had happened outside the manse in the period of his great, debilitating grief. His father had visited him twice in that time, but had only sat beside his bed, hard-visaged and silent. Edward had asked no information, and Judge Stallworth had proffered none.