Gilded Needles

by Michael McDowell

  “Then,” said Helen, schooled, “where is it that we’re going?”

  “A small lodging house on King Street. I’ve had notice of a young woman, first cousin to my second cook who, though virtuous herself, contracted an improvident marriage. She is ill just now and her child is ill and she is beat by her husband, a brute who, when not insensible with alcohol, is a sleeping-car sneak—”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “He robs persons on sleeping cars. Fortunately, he appears to be away most of the week, riding back and forth from New York to Washington, plying his trade.”

  Helen trembled. “Do you think it likely that we’ll meet him there?”

  “Possibly,” said Mrs. General Taunton, and turned back to her lists. “We shall in any case have the opportunity of visiting other inhabitants of the house and seeing what is wanted there. You must know, of course, the way that these lodging houses are set up. More expensive apartments are on the lower floors, while cheapest lodgings are obtained at the top of the house. The objects of our visit, Mrs. Leed and her child, are camped directly below the roof.”

  The carriage turned off Broadway onto Third Street and then south on MacDougal Street, with difficulty maneuvered the corner of King Street, and stopped in front of a narrow four-­storied brick building. Before it stood a tall, sullen Irishwoman with three babies of slightly varying age, secured in a wheel­barrow with a length of coarse rope.

  Martin and Maisie, Mrs. Taunton’s driver and maid, preceded the two ladies up the steps of the house, the door of which was not only unsecured but left quite open, allowing the chill wind to bellow from the bottom of the house to the very top. Helen held tightly to the arm of Mrs. General Taunton as they stepped into the grimy, stinking hallway, which was narrow and dark, with long strips of filthy paper hanging down the walls at every height. The stairs were narrow and rotting and gave dangerously beneath the weight of a single person, so that they all were required to proceed Indian-file and very carefully: first the driver, then the maid, then Helen, and last Mrs. General Taunton, mounting with as much ease as if she had been in her own home and were only ascending to her dressing room for a fan she had left behind.

  On the first floor was but a single door, that entire space being given out to a single, relatively affluent lodger, but the second and third stories accommodated two flats each. The poor narrow attic was given over wholly to Mr. and Mrs. Leed and their unchristened infant. On the progress upward Helen was assaulted by odors that were strong, unrecognizable, probably unhealthful, and certainly disgusting. Yet the house was quiet, almost preternaturally so, with no voices to be heard distinctly, only muffled whispers and the occasional scrape and bang of furniture to give proof of habitation. Already used to the blasphemous, shrill cries and rantings that prevailed in the street, the quiet in this house touched Helen as sinister.

  The last flight of steps, narrower and more rickety than the rest, led directly up into the attic; there was no barrier to shut out the cold drafts that blew up from the street door; but perhaps these were not noticed particularly, for they were no stronger than the breezes that found entrance through the chinks in the wooden rafters. These spaces were wide and frequent enough to provide, along with ventilation, a dim and inexpensive illumination for inhabitants who could afford neither candles nor fuel to feed a lamp.

  The four visitors filled that part of the attic’s space that admitted of a person remaining entirely upright; for the sharply sloping eaves made it impossible to stand anywhere but in the center. Helen looked around her appalled. The only furnishings to be seen were two black mattresses pushed against the brick chimney and a minuscule iron stove that looked as if it hadn’t seen a match all winter long. Three broken pottery cups were neatly arranged before it, in a heartrending imitation of domestic order and sufficiency.

  Mrs. Leed sat on one of the mattresses with her back against the chimney. She was a thin pale woman with a quantity of black hair fast turning to gray, with sunken eyes, a drawn broken nose, and a parched mouth. She had a ragged filthy blanket thrown across her lap and a woolen shawl draped over her shoulders. In her arms was a puny year-old baby that twitched like a galvanized frog.

  Without hesitation Mrs. General Taunton went over to the woman, gradually stooping so as not to hit her head against the roof, and asked what was wrong with the baby.

  “He’s infected with the Michigan itch,” the woman replied in a choked voice.

  “Are you nursing him?”

  The woman nodded dully. “When I’m able to give.”

  “When was he last fed?”

  The woman shrugged and glanced over at the hole in the roof. “Night,” she replied.

  “We’ve brought you food,” said Mrs. General Taunton, and Maisie took over several small neatly tied bundles and set them on the floor beside the stove.

  “Thank you, ma’am,” said Mrs. Leed numbly.

  Mrs. General Taunton backed away and turned to her maid: “Maisie, you stay up here for a space, open the packages and set out the food for her. I think she is too tired to do it for herself now. See if the child will take any milk. Mrs. Leed,” said she, turning to the woman on the mattress, “Maisie here will help you with this food, and you may expect the visit of a physician before night.” Mrs. General Taunton turned to Helen. “There is a doctor in the neighborhood with whom I’ve made acquaintance, a drunkard by night but competent during the day. I sometimes employ him to see after the cases which simple wholesome diet will not cure.”

  Mrs. General Taunton led the way downstairs, followed by Helen and Martin carrying the basket.

  “You can tell such things yourself?” questioned Helen softly upon the stairs. “Tell when food will help, and when not?”

  “Mrs. Leed will die shortly,” said the voice from behind the black veil, “but not before the child.”

  Helen wrung her hands in distress.

  At that moment the nearer door of the third floor landing was thrown wide and in the aperture appeared an immense Negro dressed in a shiny black suit that was old and had been constructed to hang upon a man who was much smaller than the one who wore it now.

  “Who you?” he demanded in a booming voice. “What you seek in dis place?”

  Helen shrunk away, for the man’s upraised hand was as large as a Cincinnati ham, but Mrs. General Taunton replied impassively, “We have come on a charitable mission to your upstairs neighbor, Mrs. Leed, who was sorely in want of medical assistance. Her child also we found in a bad way.”

  “Oh yea!” cried the Negro vehemently, “po’ helpmeet an’ offspring o’ that chile of wraff and sin! Dat wicked man who alla time use harsh and ’busive words to the light o’ his life and the jew’l o’ his ’xistence. I t’ink on Judgment Day de Lawd’ll call me into ’count for having married dem two together in de only sometime blessed state of holy wedded married matrimony.”

  Helen’s eyes grew wide.

  “You are a minister of the gospel then?” said Mrs. General Taunton, unsurprised.

  “I am de Reverend Thankful Jones. I am shepherd to a small flock of black sheep what live in de ’mediate ’cinity. I am—”

  “Yes,” interrupted Mrs. General Taunton. “Being then a minister of the Gospel, and concerned doubtlessly with the state of men upon earth as well as their future in heaven, perhaps you could tell us if there are any others in this house who are in particular want, particular and deserving want, I mean.”

  “Dey all is, ma’am,” replied the Reverend Thankful Jones with a melancholy shake of his head; and he was about to go on, when cut off by a shrill angry chattering behind him in a language that Helen did not recognize.

  The Reverend Thankful Jones hurriedly excused himself and moved out of the way just enough to close the door—but also enough for Helen to see that in the room behind him, ill-furnished and filled with smoke, sat four Chinamen at a large round table, playing cards, smoking pipes, and crushing walnuts with their teeth. The door was closed, but behind
it they heard the black preacher’s brief excoriation of “dis game of wraff and sin . . .”

  Knocking on the other door of the third floor they were admitted into the room of a large lady with red hair and a flattened nose who was just pinning a blue velvet bonnet with green and yellow feathers to her hair. Her eyes, Mrs. General Taunton later joked, were in mourning—for they had been blackened. “Peeked out,” the woman said, “saw you on your way up to the poor lady under the roof.”

  She was most evidently a prostitute—this was apparent even to Helen—but Mrs. General Taunton, instead of remonstrating with her, merely asked if she were contented with her way of life.

  “Oh cert,” replied the woman easily, “and if it’s misery you’re after, you’d best knock downstairs. Me and the Reverend Thankful is happy as pantomimes.”

  “Might I not leave this Testament with you at least?” begged Helen, gathering her courage to speak with the young woman, whose good humor astounded her, for surely prostitutes must be the most miserable and cursed of all mankind.

  “Oh cert,” replied the lady, “do what you please, but for all I can read it, it might as well be writ in Choctaw. It’s all I can do to pick out the letters in my own name.”

  “We should knock downstairs then?” asked Mrs. General Taunton.

  The prostitute nodded and her eyes gleamed. “Sure, either door, either door. Misery enough for the whole pack of you.”

  Helen left the Testament anyway, despite the red-haired wo­man’s illiteracy. At the door, she paused with the suggestion that she might find someone to read aloud to her from it, and then followed Martin and Mrs. General Taunton downstairs.

  “My dear,” said that lady upon the landing, “I will knock at one door, and you must knock at the other. Martin will stay between, so you need not fear. Simply see what is needed, taking particular care to ask after the health of any children there may be.”

  The two women stepped to either end of the small landing, knocked at the doors, and received no answer. Mrs. General Taunton knocked again, called softly, turned the knob of the door, and slipped inside. Helen knew that she could do no less, and though trembling for what tableau of unimaginable distress she might witness on the other side—perhaps finding someone starved to death upon his bed or the victim of a bloody and fatal crime, or even another prostitute in the pursuance of her trade—Helen knocked again, called softly, and turned the knob of the door.

  The single chamber was much better furnished than she could have hoped, having viewed the three rooms above. There was a red carpet upon the floor and blue curtains across the window, a larger dresser strewn with bottles and boxes of powder and swatches of false hair, two open trunks filled with sumptuous—if gaudy—clothing, a box piled high with smart boots, a row of feathered hats hanging from pegs on the walls, and a green glass lamp with a painted shade. In the corner of the room, half hidden by a green curtain, was a large iron bed piled so high with soft quilts that she could not immediately see who was in it.

  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 sickroo
m. 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.