Excited whispers ran through the congregation as Parkhurst ascended the Frenchified pulpit set, after the continental style, halfway into the nave. In rimless glasses, his graying brown hair falling limp to his neck, he cut a modest figure. Yet with his shoulders flung back and his beard trimmed to a Mephistophelean point, he exuded an animal energy. Off to the side, the Reverend Weems was showing his formidable teeth, basking in reflected glory. Max was prepared to pounce on the Holy Trinity minister and extract a statement as soon as Parkhurst finished his sermon. Taking out his pad, he sighed, ready to record the usual bombast.
The Reverend Dr. Parkhurst didn’t disappoint. His piercing voice, abraded from roaring speeches day after day, still penetrated the soaring, gray stone vaults.
“Christ came into this world aflame with a purpose. His attempt, burning and all-engrossing, was to take this world as it was and make it into what it was not. To clean it, to beautify it, to make it over from a damnable world into a blessed world. And the first step Christ took in his career was to quit Heaven.”
A buzz ran through the pews. When the Reverend Dr. Parkhurst quit heaven, he usually ended up in odious, thrilling places. “The world’s salvation costs, and we are too comfortable to pay for it. It is expensive work, self-immolating work, it is Heaven-abandonment work, and there is no getting around it. Sometimes the fires of Hell penetrate humble places. For instance, a soda fountain on Ridge Street. Do you know where Ridge Street is? Not far from the Essex Street Courthouse.”
Max scanned the uncomprehending faces. Parkhurst was right. None of them had seen the anthill of Ridge Street, or the cattle-pen courthouse where judges settled evictions in sixty seconds.
Parkhurst fussed with his clerical tie, pausing until every last whisper had died away.
“A widow named Celia Urchittel, with her three surviving children, opened a modest shop there. She had fruit gums, malt balls, and toffees in glass jars, she sold cigars, and she slept in the back of the store with her little ones. One day a ward detective from the Eldridge Street station came to this store and took a paper of tobacco. When he said he would pay sometime in the future, Mrs. Urchittel demanded he give back her goods. At midnight this reprobate of a detective returned, and not with the paltry nickel he owed, but with a warrant for her arrest. Mrs. Urchittel, who came from a country where the police were as powerful as gods, and who no longer enjoyed the protection of a husband, was terrified.”
Surveying his rapt audience, the clergyman milked the nervous silence. Max marveled at the minister’s talent. The man was a brilliant storyteller, and a genius of outrage to boot. Max was transfixed.
“But the detective was a merciful man. He offered to withdraw the warrant if she paid him fifty dollars. Despite her terror, Mrs. Urchittel mastered her fears and chased the scoundrel out with a broom. This, my dear friends, was the beginning of a nightmare that will illustrate exactly why bribery and police corruption are not material for satire, but the stuff of human tragedy. Our guardians of the public safety are not mere passive receptors of a benign system of tribute, but aggressive predators who seek to strip bare the most vulnerable among us. What happened to this immigrant woman, who cannot speak our language, who does not know our laws, who is used to being ground into the dust by the Cossack’s bootheel?
“She was dragged two blocks from her store, where the detective introduced her to a man named Max Hochstim. For those of you not familiar with this reptile, he is a bail bondsman who holds the power of life and death at the Essex Street Courthouse. Mrs. Urchittel begged Hochstim, a fellow countryman, to save her, but he told her he had already helped her beyond measure, having reduced her payment from seventy-five dollars. These are crippling sums for a woman who can barely meet her rent obligations every month, but the two men browbeat her, threatened to toss her into a cell that night, and when she expressed fear for her children’s safety, they told her the authorities would take care of her little ones.”
Parkhurst’s hoarse voice descended to hushed tones. In a rustle of crinoline, the parishioners shifted to the edge of their benches. “How would you feel if your home was invaded by armed marauders promising to ‘protect’ your children? And how would you feel if you didn’t have the money to buy their freedom? How did this fairy tale turn out? Did some prince intercede, vanquish the wicked, and raise up the oppressed? Did our city fathers, our police commissioners, our Police Superintendent strike back in the name of justice? Or was this woman arrested, accused of soliciting and convicted by trumped-up, perjured testimony? Did she lose her children who are to this day, a year after this wretched affair began, still in the custody of an agency that refuses to surrender them? And in the course of these events, did Mr. Hochstim and his friend Captain Devery rise higher in the municipal firmament, did they enrich themselves, and are they still in power?”
Everyone in the vaulted chamber knew the answers to these bitter questions. Max wrote furiously in his private shorthand, taking down Parkhurst’s accusations in fine detail. The Urchittel story turned his stomach. It was one thing for Mrs. Jabonne to buy a little peace of mind for her brothel. That seemed only natural: she and the police were in the same business. But the Urchittel affair was like rape by an occupying army, and Parkhurst was shrewd enough to seize upon it.
Despite his professional detachment, Max couldn’t deny the power of the minister’s oratory. Having witnessed the third degree in a half dozen precinct houses, he still flinched when a nightstick artist painted a skull blue. When his friend Schreiber slammed a drunk’s mug with the back of his hand, Max always winced inwardly, yet he prided himself on keeping a straight face too. Usually, the buttons were dealing with creatures who only understood the language of knuckles and boots. Unorganized brutality had a human face.
But Parkhurst went on, evoking a crushing and cold machine, financial arrangements that had a life of their own, hungry and dead at the same time. This vision of underlying, unspoken rules, of choking forces and secret arrangements, was a part of the shadow world Max had always sensed just under the city’s skin. Its eruption, in the Urchittel case, affected him. Weren’t these the same pressures that kept him on the space-rater’s bench and smothered the Holy Trinity story before it saw the light of day?
Lost in these speculations, Max was barely aware that the Reverend Weems had taken the pulpit. Weems thanked Parkhurst profusely, and when the crusading minister apologized about his pressing business elsewhere, Weems said, “We are eternally grateful that you found the time to address our humble assembly.”
Light applause, and the tapping of walking sticks accompanied Parkhurst as he made his exit. Max found a seat closer to the younger clergyman who, all toothy smiles, launched into his own homily. The Reverend Weems held his own fascinations.
“I am sure we have all been touched by Dr. Parkhurst’s exhortations. It is inspiring to see a Christian soldier so full of compassion and so dedicated to good works. But I don’t think it was lost on us that the central actors in his tale came to us courtesy of foreign countries that could no longer endure them. Mrs. Urchittel landed here penniless and proceeded to produce three children she could not support. The execrable Mr. Hochstim, a Jew from the Pale who only preys on the weakest among us, found her a perfect target. The police captain, whose antecedents never mastered the mysteries of subsistence farming, found a good harvest of misery among our illiterate immigrants.”
Max sat up. Weems’s remarks made him squirm. Of course Max knew that he was himself an immigrant, but he didn’t feel like & foreigner. His accent was perfect. He knew everything there was to know about the Giants, politics, and the latest shows and crazes. In point of fact, he was more up-to-date, and more American, than half of the dusty creatures in Weems’s congregation.
Distracted, he had to remind himself of his original purpose, to extract a juicy quote from Weems about Holy Trinity’s property. Let him ride his hobbyhorse.
Weems injected a quiet fury into his next remarks.
“Is this misery our fault? Or is it being imported in steerage every day? Did we create it, or are we the victims of rotten regimes that prefer to regurgitate their castoffs onto our shores? The philosopher Herbert Spencer teaches us that through God’s beneficence, we are moving ever closer to His image. Yet when we see the struggle to survive, particularly in our suffering tenement wards, we wonder, how can we say God is good? How can we say God is charitable when we see our city filling daily with Europe’s failed men and ruined races?”
An approving murmur swept through the pews. They had had enough of Dr. Parkhurst’s hair shirt.
Max knew which failed men and which ruined races Weems was singling out. As much as he loathed his father’s superstitious rituals, his rocking, prayer-shawled mutterings, he loathed this particular streak of reforming zeal more. A target of Weems’s chilly disgust, he shrank to the hard pit of himself. He was barely a Jew, but the minister wanted to spit him out no matter what, and Max could think of nothing more satisfying than sticking in this goo-goo’s throat. He flipped a page and strangled the pencil in his fist.
A satisfied smile played on Weems’s lips. “Today, science is giving us the answer to this age-old question. It lies not in spurious philanthropy, which only succeeds in prolonging strains of weak blood, but in the understanding that God is making man more perfect every day by winnowing away the congenital criminal, the feeble-minded, the damaged issue of sin factories, and the dumb brute who cannot comprehend modern machinery. Spurious philanthropy saves the least equipped to survive, willing to our children a terrible burden and prolonging the misery of the weakest among us.”
Max’s eye strayed to the elegant crucifix mounted behind the altar. Agony distilled in his twisted body, a scrawny Jesus displayed his ribs. Did Christians ever wonder why they worshipped such a tortured symbol? Or how barbarous their fixation seemed to the Jews, inventors of a purified, immaterial God?
“However paradoxical it may sound, we must make ourselves hard to dispense compassion. Two thirds of Manhattan Island is now covered with tenements. I do not want to offend any delicate sensibilities, but our immigrant population is breeding out of control in these hovels. It behooves us to protect these unfortunate people by keeping them out, and this will protect the genius of Anglo-Saxon civilization as well. I do hope you will join with me in supporting our new Immigration Restriction League. I will be speaking more on this subject, and more frankly still, because if we do not face this disaster head on, we will be overrun.”
He couldn’t get over it. Parkhurst and Weems had drawn diametrically opposed lessons from the Urchittel affair. He had been moved by Parkhust’s oration, affected despite his distaste for clergymen and reform. Without question Tammany was a rapacious tiger. Yet Weems’s ideals repelled him even more. Howe’s seductive formulation that there were no sides was too clever by half. Every side had sides.
While Weems was receiving thanks from his grateful parishioners, Max waited in the transept, biding his time. Finally, the minister made his way to the chancery, where Max caught up with him.
“Reverend Weems, Max Greengrass, New York Herald. May I have a word with you?”
The clergyman stopped dead in his tracks. A bony six-footer, he was more imposing than Max had realized. “You already spoke with Colonel Fisk, didn’t you?”
“Yes, but I thought as minister—”
Weems cut him off. “The corporation must be the judge of its ability to do all that might be done,” he said, his tone pure ice.
“What about conditions in church property? You don’t condone them, do you?”
“That is for the corporation to decide, Mr. Greengrass. Colonel Fisk has my complete trust. If you’ll excuse me.”
Before he could fire another question, Max found himself staring at a heavy oak door.
Still, he’d extracted just enough. If the Holy Trinity story ever saw the light of day, Weems’s mealy-mouthed answer would say more than any invective a reporter could muster. Meanwhile, he comforted himself with the fresh material he’d stumbled on.
Parkhurst’s fiery accusations would make a pretty headline. Max knew exactly where to find Hochstim, too: at a saloon where the walls, the floors, and the ceiling flashed with silver dollars. Enterprising patrons had been trying to pry the coins free for years, but Silver Dollar Smith used plenty of solder.
Two hours later Max had transformed his notes into eight tight grafs.
“H’mm. Parkhurst versus Hochstim? Cute,” Parnell muttered before calling for the copy boy.
Max bit his tongue. He stopped himself from pestering his editor about the Holy Trinity article, or where Bennett was sailing his steam yacht. He was back in the game. Rolling home, he directed his thoughts into more optimistic channels. Let the higher-ups fight over Holy Trinity. If they didn’t want to let the story out, he could peddle it elsewhere. Who could stop him? Weren’t there magazines? And what about the World? Wouldn’t Pulitzer eat the real-estate scandal up? He could ring up that cowboy Hearst, too. Garvey wanted to step on his neck? The hell with him, and his playboy publisher too.
Mounting Mrs. DeVogt’s front steps, he barely noticed the milkman lounging at the door above him. Then dimly it registered. What was a milkman delivering near midnight? Thrusting an envelope in Max’s face, the man flashed a yellow grin before trotting back down to the sidewalk.
“Consider yourself served,” the messenger hooted over his shoulder. Without even opening it, Max knew what lay inside.
chapter thirty-four
Finned to the subpoena, a hand-written note read: “We are at your service in this matter. Late evenings best.”
His insides in spasms, he stood frozen in the vestibule. Were Howe and Hummel simply practicing their usual trade, or were they trying to scare him off the story? They had represented Mrs. Edwards: why not Colonel Fisk and Holy Trinity’s corporation? Worse still, they were squeezing Parnell. Perhaps, under pressure, the city editor, while playing the innocent, was gumming up the works along with Garvey, and suppressing the article against Bennett’s wishes.
The legal document filled him with terror, but with a perverse pride as well. Branded by Howe and Hummel’s most devious instrument, he had finally arrived. Then the sickness gripped him again. Weren’t his arrival and departure taking place simultaneously? Stuffing the thick papers into his jacket pocket, he stumbled into the living room.
Her hands arranged in her lap, Gretta sat staring out the window. She looked so composed, so lovely in the soft gaslight. Her lavender gown’s scalloped decolletage was modest, but still revealing enough to make him forget to breathe. She touched the hollow of her white throat. “You’re so late,” she said.
“You were waiting up for me?”
“La Forza del Destino.” Sensing his confusion, she added: “I can’t stand opera.”
The opera. How could he be so thick? Had she replaced Mourtone so quickly? Did she have another rich toff waiting in the wings? “Some people swear by it.”
“My aunt is back, and she always makes a beeline for the Met.”
She seemed to be reassuring him. Why did it matter so much? Didn’t he already have Belle? The answer was right before him—Gretta’s naked shoulders, her smoke-blue eyes, her lush mouth, her thrilling voice. He hadn’t made any promises to Belle, had he? She was invading his life, getting mixed up with Faye’s machinations. He hadn’t invited her to join his demented family.
The blood rushed to his face. When Gretta patted the divan, he sat on her skirt. Embarrassed, he hopped back off the horsehair sofa and waited for her to gather the cascade of silk around her. Then he decorously took a spot a safe distance away.
“Sorry, my head’s spinning.”
“Hard day?”
“Big-time dog story.” He meant it as a joke, but she didn’t react. Why was it so hard to find the right words with her?
“Gertrude had me chained to the enlarger. Then I came home late, but I couldn’t go up to my room.” His eyes looked a bit mad
to her. Since Martin had died, her craving to be by herself had intensified. To see no one, to stare out at the harbor, to escape the tyranny of speech—what bliss. She didn’t dislike Max exactly. Far from it. But he was like some sort of grasshopper. Then she envisioned the weekend stretching out like a featureless landscape, days when she and her mother would barely exchange three words. “Oh, I have something funny for you. The Kodaks came back. Wait right there.”
While she rusded up the stairs, he lit the stub of a cigar and pulled out his flask. A dram of brandy would smooth his nerves. He prayed she wouldn’t wake Belle. Well, so what? Didn’t he have a right to talk to another woman? As if Gretta could ever be just “another woman.”
“Here they are!” she said, running her thumb over the stack of small prints. “What a failure. I must have wasted half the exposures. Either that, or this new process is a fraud. All I ended up with were a bunch of rusty old buildings. Except this one. Isn’t that your sister? In the corner there? I didn’t realize it when I was shooting. I only met her that once when she stopped by here to see you.”
Faye was the last thing on his mind. Without much interest, he gazed at the crude image. Flattened into two dimensions, his sister’s face had a smeared quality. Dusty white, her features lacked detail, but her thick-painted eyebrows and mouth were all he needed. She was talking to an older woman, an austere matron in a hat shaped exactly like an inverted flowerpot. Was it possible? He snatched the picture and squinted. “Where’d you take this?”
“Is there something the matter?”
“Do you remember?”
“Sullivan Street. Between Bleecker and Third. Martin’s route….”
“Do you know the other woman? Did you hear what they were saying?”
“Of course not. It was an accident. I barely knew they were in the shot. What are you so upset about?” His eyebrows bobbed, his eyes seemed to wink independently. Such unusual expressions raced across his face.
The Midnight Band of Mercy Page 33