Gilded Needles

by Michael McDowell

  When the bells of the Presbyterian church steeple struck the hour of one o’clock, Helen asked her aunt if she might be excused, that she had promised to pay a visit to one of her father’s parishioners early in the afternoon. Marian, who approved of anything that propelled her niece further into society, graciously assented, and asked upon whom she intended to call.

  “Mrs. General Taunton.”

  Marian did not know her, and asked for a description, so that she might identify the woman from the church congregation.

  Helen was vague, and mentioned neither her mourning garb nor her maimed servants. “She’s plump, I think you might say, of middle age, and possessed of a singularly sweet nature.”

  Marian still could not identify Mrs. General Taunton, but let the matter pass. She kissed Helen on the cheek and waved her off with a smile. Then she withdrew an advertising circular from her reticule and began minutely to examine and contrast the new hats of the season. Occasionally she looked up to nod at women of distant acquaintance who passed by. Now and then one would stop beside her and speak for a few moments.

  After half an hour more, Marian felt that she had had quite enough of air. Most women had already returned home to dress for their dinners—most fashionably served at three o’clock—and although Marian would not dine until five, thought she might as well give the impression that she was required home at the more genteel hour.

  She stood, turned toward the park, and called out sweetly for Edwin and Edith. There was no response to her summons.

  She glanced over the crowd of children playing among the shrubbery on both sides of her and before her, but could make out neither among the roaring infants. She was distressed, for she realized that they had been out of her sight for more than an hour, long enough to involve themselves in any amount of mischief or danger. Marian suddenly recalled mourning cards that had been addressed to Edwin and Edith, and Duncan’s earnest entreaty that the children be watched closely at all times.

  She moved a little farther into the square and arched her neck inelegantly in trying to descry Edwin and Edith, but her children appeared in none of the swirling groups that she came across. She began to hurry along the shaded paths, taking one or another without thought or system, and lightly touching the trunks of trees with her fine gray kid gloves in continued expectation and disappointment of finding them.

  She came out on the southern side of the square, and with mounting disquiet set out—with some real distraction—toward the eastern end, which was clothed in denser greenery and where Edith and Edwin might possibly have hid themselves deliberately from her view. She passed recklessly along, peering into every clump of greenery and behind every thick-trunked tree, pausing without breath only to ask nursemaids if they had seen her children, who could be recognized by their fine blue pinafores.

  Marian had reached the eastern edge of the square, and noted with something very close to fear the amount of traffic along Madison Avenue. Children might easily be trampled beneath the horses’ hooves there or, crossing safely, would fall prey to kidnappers or worse. On a bench that faced the street, a few dozen yards from Marian, sat a solitary nursemaid with her charges and Marian hurried toward her to ask if she had seen Edwin and Edith.

  Very great was Marian’s relief when, coming closer, she found the nursemaid’s charges were none other than Edwin and Edith themselves, placidly seated on the bench and eating grape ices. The nursemaid very carefully wiped their faces to keep the liquid from splashing their finely starched tunics.

  “Oh Edwin! Edith! Where have you been! You’ve made me frantic! Frantic!”

  “Mama!” cried Edith, and attempted to struggle down from the bench, which was high for her stubby little legs.

  The nursemaid held her back and snatched the ice from her hands. “Oh no!” she cried with acute dismay. “You’ll spoil your nice new outfit! Be careful!” The nursemaid turned to Marian and smiled sadly, “I found them wandering along the sidewalk about to run into the street, so I bought them ices and kept them here till their mother or nurse came along.”

  “Oh!” cried Marian, “I’m ever so obliged to you! They could have been killed! Edwin! Edith! Pray give your thanks to this young woman for preserving you from the hooves of the horses!”

  “Thank you,” said Edwin politely. “Oh, Mama, she bought us ices too!”

  “Thank you,” said Edith, but wistfully, for her own ice had been plucked away.

  The young woman looked to be about twenty-five. She was just over five feet in height, with brown hair and a fair, Irish complexion. Her melancholy face was full and round, and her gray eyes were red-lidded, as if she had recently wept, and copiously.

  “Are you a nurse?” asked Marian. “I suppose you are here with other children in your charge.”

  “No, ma’am,” she replied with a deep sigh, “that is to say, I’m a nurse, but I’ve no position just at present. The family I worked for went to San Francisco this Tuesday past and wanted me to come with them, but my mother is here and I could not find it in my heart to desert her.”

  “Very commendable,” said Marian graciously. She and the nursemaid had exchanged places. Marian dabbed a lace handkerchief to her lips and forehead and sought to recover from her excitement. The nursemaid stood respectfully before her.

  “I used to come here with little Emma and Jerome every day and grew very fond of the square; and just now, without employment, it seemed very pleasant to return,” the nursemaid said sadly. “I saw your children, ma’am, and thought them the most splendid children I had ever come across, superior even to little Emma and Jerome, though Emma and Jerome were splendid children too.” She sighed again, then picked up more energetically: “But they hadn’t the grace and beauty of yours, if I may say so. . . .”

  “Oh, Edwin and Edith are very lovely children, are they not?”

  “Very,” said the nursemaid, kneeling before Edwin and wiping his mouth dry with her own white handkerchief.

  “What is your name?” asked Marian.

  “Katie Cooley, ma’am.”

  “And you’re looking for a position as a nurse?”

  “Oh yes!” cried Katie. “Do you know of any? I’ve been searching the papers every evening for a place, but places are so quickly taken, and not every­one will employ an Irish girl.”

  “No,” said Marian thoughtfully, “not if she is like the general run of Irish girls, who are coarse and illiterate and whose red hair will invariably clash with all the furnishings of every room of the house. But,” she said more kindly, “you do not seem the ordinary Irish girl. You seem considerably more refined.”

  “Thank you, ma’am,” said Katie Cooley, and blushed. “My mother was an upper servant in Lord Coombe’s house in Dublin. She reared me right. I beg your pardon, ma’am, but do you perhaps know of a position that wants filling for a nursemaid, in a respectable household?”

  “Yes,” said Marian, “I do. Mine.”

  “Ma’am!” she whispered. Tears welled in her eyes.

  “Yes. Would you be willing to take on Edwin and Edith for me—supposing of course, that your references are sufficient? You have references, I suppose?”

  Katie opened her bag and drew out three carefully folded letters, which she gave to Marian. “Here they are. I always have them with me.”

  Marian smiled and took the letters. “If you would be willing to walk Edwin and Edith about for a bit, I will sit here and read these through. The business may be concluded then in a matter of moments.”

  Katie gratefully took the two children by their hands and quietly urged them down the walk. When she returned several minutes later, Marian sat smiling serenely upon the bench.

  “These are sufficient for my purposes,” said Marian, returning the letters.

  “Oh, ma’am! I’m so glad then!”

  “Before you agree to take the position, Katie, we must speak of terms—”

  “Anything you wish, ma’am. For two such children as these, I think I should alm
ost work for gratis.”

  Marian smiled. “My husband and I can afford a little better wages than that.” She directed the children away from the bench, and when they were out of earshot she said to Katie, “Sixteen dollars a week, half holidays on Sundays, every other Thursday or Saturday off, if you prefer—”

  “Oh, at your convenience, ma’am.”

  “Saturday is my convenience then. You have a room next to the nursery, where Edwin sleeps. Edith will sleep with you. My husband and I are often out very late and occupied during the day, so the children will for the most part be left to your complete charge. The letters that you showed me indicate that you are not averse to such responsibility, and I shall be happy to leave Edwin and Edith in your care.”

  “When shall I begin, ma’am?”

  “Immediately, if you wish.”

  “Oh, yes, ma’am.”

  “Good. Then you may accompany us back to Gramercy Park. And your things will be sent for this afternoon.”

  When she returned home, Marian Phair instructed Peter Wish to inform all applicants who came to the door that the position of nursemaid had already been filled.

  Chapter 34

  In Madison Square, Helen had found Edwin and Edith leaning against a tree, watching with envy as half a dozen children played a boisterous game that soiled their clothing. She kissed them farewells, and went back to Twenty-fifth Street again. She changed into the simple black outfit that she had come to call her “visiting dress,” and set out for the home of Mrs. General Taunton, carefully avoiding the streets on which she might encounter Marian on her way home. Marian would doubtless upbraid her for wearing so poor and dismal a frock when out visiting—even a widow.

  As usual, Mrs. General Taunton received her companion with utmost graciousness, intimacy, and affection. The woman in black had grown very fond of Helen in the past months and much admired her energy in dealing with the poor and the unfortunate. There was now no hesitation, no condescension, no discomfiture in Helen’s manner when she ministered to the needs of the Black Triangle.

  Yet though Helen had convinced herself that her motives were selfless—and how could she doubt her disinterestedness when no one but Mrs. General Taunton knew of her taxing endeavors?—Helen was full of pride, over that very selflessness. She burst sometimes wanting to tell her family of her work, so that she might show them that theirs was a perverted misunderstanding of the Black Triangle, while hers was the Christian, the good, and the only right view of the place. But knowing that the Stallworths would never conform to her view of charity, she dared say nothing, for fear that her visits would be interfered with or stopped altogether.

  Helen was offered and accepted a place at Mrs. General Taun­ton’s table. While waited upon by the one-eyed maid, on whom Helen could now smile without dwelling upon or even really re­calling the girl’s affliction, she and Mrs. General Taunton discussed the progress of the cases that had occupied them over the past couple of weeks.

  “The Fale child that we saw on Monday,” said Mrs. General Taunton, “you remember that pretty, pretty infant not yet given a name, has died of the consumption that looks soon to take their father too.”

  “It has been buried?” asked Helen, cutting into her chop.

  “After a fashion. To save burial expense, the mother wrapped it in a blanket, pretended it was asleep, and took the cars up to the Central Park. There she scooped a hole in the earth with her own hands and placed the child in it.”

  “Oh!” protested Helen, putting down her fork.

  “I remonstrated with her of course. ‘Mrs. Fale,’ I said, ‘your daughter deserves burial in consecrated ground.’ She said she thought so too, but burials were such an expense, and all their money was wanted to keep her husband supplied with physic. I gave her money for the burial of the child and have sent the carriage to her this morning, to return to the Central Park and show Dick the place she buried it.”

  “I’m glad you did that, Anne, so very glad!”

  “I do not believe that the child would have been denied entrance into heaven only because it had been interred in the Central Park, but I think it will make the mother feel better to know that her precious daughter lies within the precincts of a sanctified churchyard.”

  “Oh doubtless!” cried Helen.

  After their dinner, Mrs. General Taunton invited Helen to accompany her on an expedition to visit a boy with one leg whose father had committed suicide with Paris green and whose mother had absconded with a Chinese cigar maker to set up a laundry in Brooklyn. But Helen declined, and asked only that she be allowed to ride so far as Varick Street—there was an indigent seamstress in that neighborhood to whom she had promised a commission of employment, and it was her plan to pass the remainder of the afternoon there.

  “I am happy,” said Mrs. General Taunton, “that you are going out on your own, dear. Not that I would not have you by me always, of course, but it is good that you appear sometimes without my protection.”

  “Yes,” smiled Helen, and just as she spoke this, the coach turned off MacDougal Street onto King and rolled past the house where Helen had made her first visit to the Black Triangle nine months past.

  She pointed it out to Mrs. General Taunton. “I regard that house with affection now, though I was so frightened then, Anne, I don’t think I can say just how frightened I was.”

  “The woman and her baby are dead,” sighed Mrs. General Taunton. “And the husband is in Sing Sing. He tried to rob a United States senator. The old couple on the second story are dead too. It’s a hard uncertain life that’s led in the Black Triangle.”

  Out of the windowed door of the building, the little slender face of a boy was peering at the carriage as it drove past. Helen smiled and waved, but the child dropped immediately out of sight.

  “I should return,” mused Helen. “Revisit the scene of my first embarrassments, and prove—only to myself, of course—that now I’m beyond such personal discomfort, where charity is concerned. Those we tried to help now are dead, but perhaps others, equally unfortunate, have acceded to their place.”

  There was one piece of charitable work that Helen kept secret, even from Mrs. General Taunton. Early in September, on an afternoon when the widow had been indisposed, Helen had gone alone into the Black Triangle and visited, at Mrs. Taunton’s suggestion, a ladies’ hat maker living in quite a respectable little house on Morton Street. The ladies’ hat maker’s consumption appeared, even to Helen’s inexperienced eye, to be hopeless; but she left a Testament interleaved with the address of a doctor on a scrap of cardboard, and a five-dollar note. In the hallway downstairs she encountered a young woman who wept copiously; and when Helen inquired the reason for her distress, the young woman—a pretty girl called Jemmie—replied that she had just had an argument with her friend. Helen volunteered to listen to the girl’s story at greater length, and was accordingly invited into first floor apartments that were furnished with more enthusiasm than taste.

  Here Helen attended to a tearful, disjointed tale of imagined jealousy on the part of the girl’s friend. “Oh p’rhaps you’ve seen Annie—she’s the best fighting girl in New York! Annie’s always been good to me. It’s Annie, you see, who pays for my lodging here and it’s Annie that buys me things every day, but she gets terrible jealous when she thinks I talk to other girls, and it don’t make no matter that even when I’m talking to ’em—and sometimes I gets lonely, you see—I’m all the time thinking only about Annie, but she don’t believe it.”

  Helen tried to assure Jemmie of Annie’s affection, and told her that it was certainly only a matter of time before Annie came to see that Jemmie’s love was real and undivided. It was in the midst of this lengthy speech that Annie Leech herself appeared in the room, glowering at Jemmie and threatening Helen with grievous bodily harm.

  Helen was amazed by the construction that the Amazon in the doorway put upon her presence in the apartments of her friend Jemmie, and was at terrible pains to demonstrate the innocence of
her visit. This was accomplished only when she emptied out her reticule of the eight red-letter Testaments that it contained and Annie Leech had interrogated the ladies’ hat maker upstairs. She returned to Jemmie and Helen mollified, and though Helen at this juncture would happily have taken her leave, Annie Leech insisted that she remain and take a glass of wine in apology.

  As she consumed her small glass, it occurred to Helen suddenly that the relationship of these two women might be called by some word less innocent than “friendship.” Yet she could have only admiration for the sincere solicitude that Jemmie felt for her friend’s feelings, and rested in wonder at the passion of Annie Leech that could excite such terrible jealousy. She was too nervous to say much to the two women, for she feared offending them; but when it was time to take her leave, Helen found herself engineering an excuse to herself to return to Morton Street. Yet no excuse was needed: Annie Leech herself invited Helen to come back the following Saturday—and though Helen could fathom no reason for this invitation, she accepted it with an alacrity she disguised only with difficulty.

  She had indeed returned—and every week after that—so that she looked forward eagerly to the Saturday afternoons spent on Morton Street. Helen built up a strange intimacy with the two female friends. She found them anxious for companionship that was of a better sort than either was used to, and Helen was in the novel position of representing polite society. She gently corrected their manners, suggested small improvements in the furnishings of their rooms (suggestions that were always effected by the time of her next visit), and listened with eager ears to all the gossip of their strange society of female pugilists and their female friends.

  It was to Morton Street then that Helen Stallworth directed her steps when Mrs. General Taunton’s carriage deposited her at the corner of King and Varick streets. There she found Annie Leech and Jemmie, and Jemmie’s young niece fearful and wide-eyed between them on the sofa. Helen greeted her new friends with a warmth she had never been able to lavish on anyone in her life. She accepted tea, she questioned Jemmie’s niece on the subjects of her occupations and recreations, she wanted to know of all Annie’s pugilistic exploits in the past week, and studied carefully Jemmie’s account books. She advised Jemmie to visit a butcher who was almost certainly honest, and whose meat was almost certainly unspoiled; and smiling, she listened to Annie’s earnest entreaty that she witness but a single bout in Harry Hill’s place.