Gilded Needles

by Michael McDowell

  Benjamin Stallworth had never had connection with a woman before, and his suspicion that this was to be the culmination of the evening (as he had hardly dared hope before) grew stronger even than his love of the game. His attention to the jeweled white hand that was gently laid over his became greater than that to the fall of the cards from the gnarled talons of Pet Margery’s father. Benjamin grinned suddenly with the notion that the old man must be in certain difficulty to allow him, who was so distracted, to win at so many hands.

  “Oh, perhaps I ought to stop now,” whispered Benjamin to Pet Margery, “I’m a little dizzy and can’t concentrate on the cards. . . .” She had just brought his fifth glass of sloe gin.

  “You’ve won over two hundred dollars,” whispered her father. “I couldn’t keep long in business if you came very often, mister. No, sir, I swear I couldn’t.” And he laughed a shrill laugh that echoed in his ribs.

  “Oh,” cried Pet Margery, “one more glass—”

  “No!”

  “One more glass,” she repeated cajolingly, “and while you’re drinking it, I’ll change your chips for you.”

  Benjamin nodded dumbly and slouched back against the wall. He peered oddly at the man who sat beside him until the man took offense and retorted with an obscene epithet.

  “No, no,” whispered Pet Margery’s father, “he’ll be leaving soon, just let him finish his glass. He won’t be bothering you, let him finish his glass, that’s all.”

  Benjamin swallowed the remainder of the dark liquid and stood woozily. Pet Margery was suddenly there to support him. Gold chinked in her hands and she spilled it into his pocket—so much gold that he was tilted beneath its sudden weight on that side.

  “Two hundred thirty-seven dollars,” she whispered. “You’re beholden to me, Ben. . . .”

  “Oh yes,” he murmured, and smiled drunkenly. “Oh yes, what . . . what can I do . . . to . . . to discharge that debt, Pet? Tell me, Pet, what can . . . what can I do?”

  He turned and clumsily attempted to embrace her in his gratitude and had some confused idea that if he returned to this place every night for the next six months he would emerge from that habitude a rich man.

  He slipped on the worn floor, and would certainly have fallen on his face had not Pet Margery caught him up and steadied him.

  “I should take you out of this place,” she said, “you’re not fit for the games anymore.”

  “Where are we going?” he whispered, with a crooked smile.

  “Oh I’ll just take you to my place and feed you some tea, that’s what I’ll do—boil water and feed you some tea.”

  “Oh,” laughed Benjamin, as he was led through the door. “Your place. I’d like to see your place.”

  “Shhh!” cried Pet Margery. “Act sober,” she said, “the ladies are watching.”

  Benjamin made a valiant but entirely ineffectual attempt to appear uninebriated as they passed through the groggery. The ladies sitting at the little marble-topped tables nodded knowingly at Pet Margery, who returned their greetings with a bland smile.

  “Oh! Which way?” cried Benjamin, as they emerged into the much cooler night air. It was nearly midnight. “What way is your room?”

  “This way,” said Pet Margery, helping him back across Varick Street. “I live just a few houses down there. . . .”

  “Oh,” cried Benjamin with almost weepy tenderness, “I won two hundred dollars tonight. I never got so much in all my life at the tables! It’s because of you, Pet, because . . . all because of you!”

  “That’s right,” said Pet Margery, carefully guiding the drunken young man down the street. “You’ve a lot to thank me for.”

  “Oh, Pet!” cried Benjamin, “do you have a bed?”

  Chapter 37

  “Oh, it’s a fine soft bed,” replied Pet Margery, “and it’s waiting for us right at the very top of the stairs.” She pushed him through the doorway of the small brick house at number 2 King Street. “Hush!” she cried, “all the way to the top, Benjamin.”

  Benjamin stumblingly climbed the three narrow flights of stairs to the attic of the house. Pet Margery opened a door he could scarcely see and pushed him inside. Here darkness prevailed and he wobbled a little, waiting for Pet Margery to light a candle. The lack of light brought dizziness on, and he thrust out his hands to catch his balance; to his surprise they struck the low slanting beams of the room and came away painfully with splinters. “Oh!” he cried.

  Pet Margery whispered, “Hush! Not so loudly, Benjamin, not so loudly!”

  Benjamin reached out for Pet Margery, trying to drag her into his embrace, but his falling hand only slapped against her cheek. “Oh,” she cried sharply, “watch out, will you? It’s dark as a stack of black cats in here!”

  She struck a match and lit the candle.

  Benjamin was momentarily appalled, despite his drunkenness, by the poverty of the chamber. In the middle of the room, a couple of feet from where he stood, was an unpainted iron bed covered with a filthy sheet. Beneath the window, which was masked with a man’s shirt pinned up by the sleeves, was a rickety table with a couple of bottles of liquor and a wooden tumbler upon it.

  This was all. Neither the roof nor the floor was painted nor improved with ornament.

  “You live here?” cried Benjamin.

  “No!” laughed Pet Margery. “I live downstairs. Nobody lives up here. Does it look it now?”

  “No,” stammered Benjamin. “Why are we here then?”

  “Don’t want anyone breaking in on us, you see?”

  Benjamin nodded dully, and attempted a salacious smile.

  “You lay on the bed there and I’ll bring another something.” She moved toward the window.

  “Don’t need another. Had too many.”

  “No, you haven’t. Just one more—to loosen your collar, Ben, you’ll take another with me, won’t you?”

  “Yes, s’pose so, yes, I will,” he murmured, and lay back gratefully on the bed.

  “Here,” said Pet Margery, slipping the tumbler carefully into his hand, “you sip at this, and you’ll feel a deal better.”

  He propped himself up in the bed a little, sidling up so that his head was pressed against an iron rosette for support and brought the rough tumbler to his lips. Over the rim he smiled at Pet Margery, who sat on the edge of the bed and tenderly patted his knee. The candle on the floor beside the bed was the only illumination in the room, and it cast flattering light over the woman’s face.

  “Oh,” he cried, reaching for her.

  She playfully struck away his hand. “The gin first,” she laughed, “I won’t have naught to do with a sober man!”

  Benjamin swallowed off the last of the liquor, which tasted to be of far inferior manufacture to that which he had been served at the gambling hall, which itself had been none of the best. There was a distinct undertaste of impurity in it, but he had swallowed so much he did not think that this much more would harm him. And even if he had imagined so, he would have drunk anyway as a requisite to the favors of Pet Margery.

  He watched as she moved from the covered window back toward the bed—watched as her feet seemed to fly up in the air. “Pet!” he cried—but no more.

  Pet Margery’s feet had not flown up into the air, but rather Benjamin himself slumped over into unconsciousness on top of the soiled sheet. The gold coins rolled out of his pocket and formed a little mound in a depression of the mattress.

  Pet Margery shook Benjamin, at first gently, but then with increasing violence. Finding that he was beyond waking, and listening closely at his stertorous breathing which told of pressure on the heart, she retrieved the two bottles of liquor from beneath the window. Taking up the candle, she quietly descended the stairs, leaving Benjamin Stallworth alone in the dark attic room.

  On the second story of the house she knocked at a door, which was immediately opened by a young hard-faced woman with dyed hair and wearing a crimson dress with a black apron. Pet Margery thrust the two bottles in
to her hand, nodded once in the direction of the attic, and hurriedly descended the last flight to the street door.

  She peered up and down the street before stepping out, but at a moment when the attention of the several passersby seemed occupied elsewhere, she opened the door and slipped down to the walk. She proceeded with a measured tread down MacDougal to Spring Street, crossed over and came back up again. At last, when no one appeared to be watching, she entered the house that was directly across the way from the one where Benjamin Stallworth lay insensible.

  There was a little girl in the hallway, plainly dressed in a black frock, and she whispered, “Pet, Pet, come up.”

  Pet Margery followed Ella to the second floor and was admitted into the room occupied by Lena Shanks. The old woman sat in her wicker chair behind the curtain. Her mirror was trained on the house opposite. Louisa Shanks stood behind her mother in a position which afforded her the same view through the mirror. The room was dark.

  Louisa drew the curtains at the same time that Ella lighted the lamp beside the bed.

  “I saw you carry him in,” said Lena, nodding approval.

  “Were we seen?” asked Pet Margery.

  “No,” said Lena, “no one saw.” And Louisa shook her head in confirmation.

  “It’s bad business to be seen going into strange houses with well-dressed gentlemen—especially if something’s going to happen to ’em later.”

  “No one saw. . . .” repeated Lena with a smile. “And you told the girls?”

  Pet nodded. “I knocked on their door. They won’t have any trouble with that one.”

  “How much on him?” asked Lena.

  “Two hundred and thirty-seven. That’s how much Pa ’lowed him to get at the table.”

  “That’s their price. . . .” smiled Lena, turning toward Louisa. Louisa noted the figure in her tablets.

  Pet Margery patted her powdered cheeks gently in an emotion that was somewhat between amusement and distress.

  “Good work,” said Lena to Pet Margery. “What’s owed to you?”

  “Two hundred and thirty-seven to pay back Pa, except for forty that went for his chips at the first, that’s one hundred ninety-seven. Four doses of chloral hydrate, one dollar, that’s one hundred ninety-eight. And make it two hundred fifty even for my time and the risk.”

  Lena laughed. “No risk, no risk,” but Louisa was already counting out the two hundred fifty in eagles and double eagles. She dropped them one by one into Pet Margery’s outstretched hands.

  When Pet Margery had pocketed them, Lena called her over, took her hand, and slipped two more double eagles into her palm. “Not a word, Pet, not a word. Tell your pa: not a word.”

  “Oh no!” cried Pet Margery, “ ’course not. Who’s to tell, Lena? Who’s to tell?”

  “That’s right, that’s right,” said Lena.

  “What’s to tell?” cried Pet Margery. “Young man wins money at Pa’s table, asks to take me out for a walk. I go, he ’tices me up to a room, and then falls insensible ’cross the bed—what’s to tell? I don’t know what happens to him then, I don’t know nothing but that he falls insensible ’cross the bed!”

  Two teaspoonsful of chloral hydrate had been poured into the glass of sloe gin that Benjamin Stallworth had drunk in the attic room on King Street. He consumed roughly eighty or ninety grains of the medicine, enough to stop the hearts of a small platoon of guardsmen and paralyze the lungs of a brace of trumpeters.

  The woman in the crimson dress and black apron sat on the bed beside Benjamin and slapped his face. He did not respond, and she glanced up at her friend in the green gown who held a lamp. She slapped again, harder. Benjamin’s shoulder twitched.

  He was not quite dead when the woman in the crimson dress and black apron slit his throat from ear to ear with a barber’s razor. She and her friend in the dark green gown jumped out of the way of the spurting blood, and when it had subsided, cursed one another for not having first gathered up the gold coins that had spilled from Benjamin’s pocket.

  The lamp chimney was speckled with sizzling Stallworth blood, and the pile of gold coins upon the mattress lay a gleaming island in that crimson sea.

  Chapter 38

  The Stallworth pew was curiously underpopulated the following Sunday morning, with both Helen and Benjamin Stallworth missing. Benjamin’s hours had always been irregular, and Saturday nights in particular he was often out late in the company of Duncan Phair and Simeon Lightner, so Edward did not think it strange that he did not see his son before it was time to leave that morning for the church. It was probable, Edward Stallworth considered, that Benjamin had overslept, or that he had had a sick headache—the result of too much lager beer perhaps. In any case, he would doubtless make his appearance at the family dinner on Gramercy Park later in the day.

  Although Benjamin’s absence was lightly considered, Helen’s was not. The Stallworth in the pulpit and the Stallworths in the pew looked anxiously throughout the service for the entrance of Mrs. General Taunton and her protégée, for they were determined to demand Helen’s return to the manse. And when neither Helen nor Mrs. General Taunton appeared in the church, Marian, with grim satisfaction, judged that it was shame over their inexcusable conduct that kept them away. Helen’s sudden departure from the manse occupied all their minds and the congregation went away disappointed that morning from the Madison Square Presbyterian Church—Edward Stallworth had been distracted, and his sermon decidedly inferior.

  It was really only at dinner that afternoon that Benjamin’s absence became as marked as his sister’s. Judge Stallworth alone remained unperturbed: “I do not intend to allow my digestion to be impaired on Benjamin’s account,” he said. “No doubt he will sidle through the doorway at the very moment we have given up expecting him.”

  “Benjamin is probably in the company of Simeon Lightner,” said Duncan Phair, “investigating Sunday openings of the gambling houses south of Bleecker.” Marian merely thought it tiresome of her nephew that he so disregarded their feelings in remaining away so long without a word.

  After dinner, Judge Stallworth and Marian, notwithstanding their pique at Benjamin’s failure to present himself in the last twenty-four hours, went to the theater to witness a special performance of the only small-footed Chinese lady in the world who sang coon songs. They told Duncan sternly—as if it were a matter under his jurisdiction—that they expected better news by the time that they returned home.

  In their absence, Duncan visited the lodgings of Simeon Lightner. The reporter had no idea where Benjamin might be—he had neither seen nor heard from him since they parted company at the door of The Jolly Tar’s Tavern on Friday night.

  Even the desertion of her niece, and the unaccountable disappearance of her nephew had not disturbed the equanimity and good feeling that Marian Phair had gained by the acquisition of Katie Cooley as a nursemaid to Edwin and Edith. Marian had spoken to the nurse a quarter of an hour longer, to strengthen her fine first impression—for Marian realized that to hire a girl in the park, and an Irish one at that, within the course of a five-minute conversation, was hardly the way that responsible society procured its servants. But then Marian reflected that she might boast of Katie Cooley to her friends, and yet tell them only that she had been obtained through the newspaper advertisement.

  What Marian did not know about Katie Cooley, however, was that this demure young woman of melancholy aspect actually encouraged Edwin’s feats of tumbling and athleticism. These had always been forbidden on Gramercy Park, since Edwin had shown his mother what acrobatics he was capable of by exactly imitating the tricks and pratfalls of the clowns in a pantomime she had taken him to see. Marian had been shocked by Edwin’s performance and warned him severely that young boys of his class could not do such things with their bodies. Yet Katie Cooley delighted in all his miraculous contortions and strange dexterities. Cautioning Edith to silence, she laid double mats across the nursery floor and allowed him to entertain them to his heart’s content
.

  When Marian and Judge Stallworth returned from the theater on Sunday night, Marian went upstairs to remove her wraps and gloves. She peered into the nursery and, by the light of the third-quarter moon shining through the window, saw Edith warmly enfolded in the arms of Katie Cooley in the nursery bed. Marian nodded her silent approval of Katie’s ruffled nightdress and her soft white cap. A girl who dressed so neatly, even in sleep, was a treasure, without doubt.

  In the morning, over breakfast, Marian declared to Duncan her intention of restoring Helen to the manse. Marian was fearful that Helen’s work in the Black Triangle was already known to half the city. She imagined hotly that her friends and acquaintances must have been at great pains to hide their pity and their laughter in the past months.

  “I will visit Edward, and enlist his aid,” she said. “The woman who has bewitched Helen is after all a member of his congregation, and doubtless stands in awe of him—or is at least in love with him. If he appears at her door, she will hardly fail to render Helen up. Helen will be back on Twenty-fifth Street in time for dinner.”

  Duncan Phair made no objection to his wife’s plan, and after breakfast, Marian hurried upstairs to dress. A quarter of an hour later, just as she was pinning her hat, there was a soft knock at her dressing room door.

  “Yes?” cried Marian impatiently.

  Katie Cooley entered, and presented Edwin and Edith for their mother’s inspection. “Ma’am,” she said, “I’ve promised the children that if you gave your permission I would take them this morning up to Madison Square to play.”

  “Why should they not play in Gramercy Park, Katie? It is closer, it is protected, the company is select. Why go to Madison Square?”