Gilded Needles

by Michael McDowell

  “Send Peter Wish,” said Judge Stallworth cruelly, “send Peter Wish to learn if Benjamin has indeed come back. . . .”

  “No, no,” whispered Edward Stallworth, “we might want Peter here to fetch medicine for Marian or deliver some message. I’m sure when I return home tonight, it will be to find Benjamin asleep in his bed. Perhaps Helen will have come back too. . . .”

  Judge Stallworth turned his face away, disgusted. “Then go home, Edward. If you’re so hopeful of finding them there, go home and send word to us of your good fortune. We might do with such a word on this day.”

  But Edward Stallworth, who knew in his heart that neither Benjamin nor Helen would be in the manse, tarried and tarried, and would have slept on Gramercy Park if a bed had been offered him, or if he had not been too ashamed to ask for one.

  At last came midnight, however, and Edward Stallworth must return home. The manse was dark, silent, and empty. The minister sat out the night in his study, with his chair drawn up to the window that overlooked Twenty-fifth Street. He held back a corner of the drapery and peered out into the empty street. For all his hectic patience, he saw no more than a single carriage pass, in the last hour before dawn.

  The next morning he dressed wearily and made a slow progress back to Gramercy Park. In the night, there had been no news of Edwin and Edith.

  “I’m returning to the Bureau of Lost Children,” said Duncan. “I would advise you, Edward, to come along and report Benjamin missing.”

  “Yes,” replied Edward softly, “I have brought along a photograph of Benjamin for the purpose.”

  After ascertaining that neither Edwin nor Edith had been found, Duncan managed for his brother-in-law the terrible business in the Lost Persons Bureau. The cab that the two men then took back uptown was directed neither to Gramercy Park nor to the manse—but to Bellevue Hospital.

  Here at the admitting desk they learned that no unidentified children—and no one fitting Benjamin’s description—had been brought to the hospital within the past week. A child had perished of consumption the night before, but it had been at least ten years old and the parents had claimed the corpse.

  When they emerged from the building, Edward would have started out for his own home five squares away, but that Duncan detained him with a word.

  Edward turned and Duncan pointed out to him a little low door in the front of the gray-stone hospital. Over it, in letters that glinted gold in the bright early morning sunlight was the single word: MORGUE.

  “No,” cried Edward. “We mustn’t go in there! They’re not there! If . . . if the worst had happened, the police would surely know. The police would have already sent descriptions. The police—”

  Duncan, without reply, moved toward the small door in the iron-gray facade and his brother-in-law followed, his protests growing inarticulate and finally ceasing altogether.

  The New York morgue, where unidentified corpses found within the precincts of the city were left on display for forty-eight hours in hopes that they might be identified, was a single room, not larger than twenty feet square. The forward portion was a corridor five feet in width, with a scrubbed yellow brick floor. Near the door was a desk behind which sat a hospital attendant, whose function was principally to see that the idly curious and the morbid, who were often drawn to this place, kept proper respect for the anonymous deceased. A couple of stray chairs were leaned against the wainscoting in some kind of mockery of hospitality—as if persons came there by chance and might want a place to rest or converse before moving on.

  A glass wall divided this narrow viewing corridor from the remainder of the room. There the slanted floor gradually descended into a metal trough at the base of the glass wall. On this raked floor stood four stone tables with ornate wrought-iron bases. Upon these slabs the dead were laid out, their heads propped upon large bricks, and their feet pressed against a high metal lip at the base of each slab to prevent their sliding off. Though separated by glass, the dead lay not more than a few inches from the spectators.

  A fine spray of water pumped from the East River just outside cascaded over the head of each table constantly; and served to preserve the features of the corpses from decay, at least when decay had not already set in. The water flowed over the corpse into the grooves that edged the slabs, spilled down onto the floor through a hole in the slab, and disappeared into the drains at either end of the metal trough. It was the sound of trickling gurgling water rather than the odor of death that was most oppressive there.

  As Duncan spoke to the morgue attendant, Edward glanced nervously over the rough dark walls and the uneven brick floor of the place.

  “There are no children here,” said the attendant. “We’ve had no dead children for a week, except for a couple of Chinese babies that were left in a flour sack in Shinbone Alley, but—”

  Edward Stallworth, unable to restrain himself, moved past the desk and up to the glass. From here his view of the four stone tables on their mockingly ornate wrought-iron frames was unobstructed.

  On the first table lay the corpse of a young woman with black hair. Hers was a coarse rubbery visage that seemed to vibrate with muted expression beneath the stream of water that plashed over it.

  On the second table lay an old man, the sheet that had modestly covered the woman having been folded over to the waist. The water that poured over the old man’s face ran in rivulets through the thick, matted gray hair on his chest and continually—and needlessly—cleansed the two bluish bullet holes in his belly.

  The third table was empty, and the water flowed down its length in gray sheets. When he saw the figure on the fourth table, Edward Stallworth cried out inarticulately and fell clawing against the glass.

  The attendant rose, his chair clattering onto the bricks. Duncan Phair hurried to the minister and tried to draw him away.

  “Benjamin,” cried Edward.

  He pointed in mute horror. On the fourth table, the wet sheet tucked about his slashed neck, lay Benjamin Stallworth.

  Edward had not at first recognized the strained apoplectic visage of his son, the blue lips parted in a grimace so that the spray splashed off his teeth—those teeth that seemed unnaturally long because his gums had shrunk far back into his mouth. His bulbous eyes popped beneath sutured lids, as if straining to open for the last look at his father. The skin of his cheeks was drawn and green. His lank wet hair was brushed far back from his brow and secured with a black string that had been tied around his head.

  “Benjamin!” the minister cried, and pressed his burning forehead against the cool glass that separated him from the dead.

  Chapter 42

  After he had adjourned his court that unhappy Tuesday afternoon, Judge James Stallworth took a cab directly to the manse of the Madison Square Presbyterian Church. Here he was admitted by a professional mourner, whose long-practiced moroseness did not begin to rival that evinced by the judge himself.

  The old man was shown directly into the parlor. The undertaker’s assistant went to the window and held back one of the draperies to provide grudging illumination to the dim chamber. The coffin sat pall-draped across mahogany trestles over the central rosette in the dusky carpet. The judge peered perfunctorily into it.

  Though he had seen the dying and the dead many times before, Judge James Stallworth quickly withdrew his gaze from his grandson’s corpse. No man ever appeared less reposeful in his casket. Already the decay that had been retarded by the running spray of East River water in the Bellevue morgue had set in on Benjamin’s countenance. The drawing mouth and popping eyes strained at the sutures that barely held them closed. Benjamin’s neck was sadly shrunk inside his high collar so that now, more than ever before, his head resembled a white acorn-gourd mounted on a stick.

  “I am Judge James Stallworth,” said the old man to the undertaker’s assistant, though without looking at him, “where is my son?”

  “In his bedchamber, I am given to understand, sir,” murmured the assistant, and allowed the drapery t
o fall into place. “Mr. Duncan Phair is with him, I believe.”

  Judge Stallworth stalked to the door manfully, but the glass knob rattled in his trembling grasp.

  Upstairs, Edward Stallworth had been laid out, almost corpse­like himself, in his bed. Sweat beaded around his scalp, and the pillow was damp beneath his burning cheek.

  “Well,” said Judge Stallworth loudly, “what news then, Duncan? What news of all these troubles?”

  “Father,” whispered Duncan anxiously, “come downstairs. We mustn’t speak before Edward.”

  “Edward is past hope and past care, Duncan. I don’t believe it matters what is said before him now. Are Edwin and Edith yet found?”

  “No. But come downstairs, Father. Edward is ill, Marian is sedated, Helen isn’t able to come. There’s no one but you and I to sit up with Benjamin. It must be done.”

  Judge Stallworth made no further protest, but followed his son-in-law downstairs. Candles had been set at the head of the coffin, but Benjamin’s dead face was so ghastly and so fearful in the flickering light that Duncan drew the candelabrum away toward the front of the room. He placed it between two chairs, so that when he and the judge sat, the coffin was not visible behind them.

  “Duncan,” said Judge Stallworth when the undertaker’s assistant had been dismissed, “I am as ill as Edward upstairs. These are dreadful calamities that have fallen upon us, one after the other. I have come to believe, as do you, that they are not unrelated.”

  “No,” said Duncan, “I fear they are not.”

  “I doubted for a while,” said the judge. “I doubted for as long as I could, but now I find myself burdened with certainty.”

  “On the day that her daughter died on West Houston Street, Lena Shanks cursed our family,” said Duncan. “Three of hers were dead, she said—her husband Cornelius, Maggie Kizer, and her daughter Daisy, the abortionist. The Stallworths were responsible. She said that she’d see three of ours dead.”

  “Benjamin is one,” said the judge, and glanced morosely behind him in the direction of his grandson’s casket. “And I fear that Edwin and Edith constitute the complement of that curse.”

  “Oh,” cried Duncan, “we’re not certain of that!”

  “Now there are three of us dead,” said Judge Stallworth ignoring Duncan’s interruptions. “Benjamin, Edwin, and Edith, three of my four grandchildren taken from me—and who can know if Helen will recover from her fever? Lena Shanks took her revenge on our three weakest—the two children and simple, silly Benjamin. Would that one of those poor victims had been you instead, Duncan!”

  “Father!”

  “Would that the guilty had taken the place of the innocent—for all of this must be your responsibility. It was your criminal connection with that harlot that—”

  “It was you condemned Maggie to death!” protested Duncan. “And it was you hanged Black Lena’s husband, put her on the Island, attempted to take away her children! It was you—”

  “Edwin and Edith are surely dead,” said Judge Stallworth in a voice that was slurred and awful. “Black Lena is now satisfied. She has murdered three Stallworths. We need no longer be concerned with her. The world may see our misery, but the world will never know that one of our number brought it upon us. I will not now institute a search for Black Lena Shanks, we will not inform the police of the identity of Benjamin’s murderer. We will allow the police to continue their search for Edwin and Edith, but we can allow ourselves no hope that they will be found.”

  “Surely—” began Duncan.

  “It’s a sorry pass that you’ve brought us to, Duncan! A sorry pass!”

  The funeral and burial of Benjamin Stallworth was very possibly the sternest, quickest, and most secretive burial in New York in all of October 1882. Even Maggie Kizer had been turned into her grave on Blackwell’s Island beneath the eyes of a minister, the two required witnesses, and a parcel of gravediggers from the men’s prison; a troop of squatters had watched Daisy Shanks slipped under the earth above Eightieth Street. At the bare ceremony in a bare corner of the Stallworth lot in Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn, it was only the cemetery chaplain, Judge Stallworth, and Duncan Phair who stood beside the coffin suspended on leather straps above the deep-dug grave. Cemetery gardeners had acted as pallbearers, and had gone away.

  The judge wondered bitterly how short a time would pass before five more dollars would have to be expended to dig another hole within the charming cast-iron fence that demarcated the Stallworth plot in this garden of graves. Not very long, he concluded, and the only question was the name on the stone that would be raised above it.

  The judge tossed a spoonful of earth across the top of the ebony coffin, flung the spoon into a dense shrubbery where the chaplain had to search half an hour before finding it again, and returned with Duncan to Gramercy Park.

  Marian was worse. Her incoherencies had degenerated into ravings. The laudanum had only quieted them to an incessant, barely articulate murmur. At one moment she begged that Duncan be brought to her, and at the next she spoke harsh imprecations against Helen for having taken up with Mrs. General Taunton. In her mind, she readied the children for a walk in the park, and adjured Edwin against acrobatic displays. She feverishly addressed the ladies of the Committee for the Suppression of Urban Vice on the dangers of forged recommendations.

  Judge Stallworth stood at the side of the bed and waited for Marian to recognize him. After several minutes her swollen red eyes, casting all about the room, at last lighted on him and she wailed, “Edwin! Edith! Edith!”

  Marian Phair clawed at her father’s trouser legs with such violence that the cloth was shredded beneath her nails.

  Rising instantly from her chair, the nurse clasped Marian’s hands—though the insane woman’s strength was wild—and crossed them forcibly upon her breast. With a shake of the red fringe of false hair that crossed her brow like a frieze, the nurse motioned for the judge to leave the room.

  The judge found Amy Amyst across the hallway in Duncan’s bedchamber and questioned her concerning the nurse. Amy had only praise for the young woman. “She’s the only one”—here she hesitated to make a criticism of her mistress, but the judge nodded for her to continue—“the only one who can keep Mrs. Phair quiet. She’s the one gives her her food, and sees she don’t excite herself, and don’t hear nothing to cause her worry. She don’t leave that room no more than Mrs. Phair do. Sir, meaning no ill of Mrs. Phair, because of course now with all the trouble the whole family is under it’s no wonder she’s slid a little off her beam, but we were nearly all driven out of our heads with the screaming. . . .”

  “It is well,” said the judge, “that we were able to find a nurse who is capable of taking care of Mrs. Phair.”

  “That one’s strong as a brace of butchers,” remarked Amy admiringly. “And it don’t seem to make no difference that she can’t speak a word. Don’t make no difference at all.”

  During that and the following two days Marian Phair was lucid only twice, but at those times—during the middle of the night—only the nurse was present. And though Marian asked of her a hundred questions concerning her children, her husband, and her own condition, she received no reply at all. She was too weak to raise herself, her voice too weary to call out; and an increased dose of laudanum, quickly administered by the mute nurse, tripped Marian’s rational mind back over into somnolence and quietude.

  In these two days all New York talked of the misery of the Stallworths: Benjamin dead, the children missing, Marian thought to be insane, Helen rumored to have eloped with a penniless missionary to Syria. It was Simeon Lightner in the Tribune who wrote in most detail—and greatest frequency—of these misfortunes; he felt a shameful delight in enumerating the unhappinesses of the family that had kept him so long under its thumb. They were so distracted, in fact, that they did not even think to protest—and that failure to complain of his treatment of them rather lessened his pleasure.

  The city was most interested in the abduction
of the children, Edwin and Edith Phair—pretty creatures surrounded by mystery. Benjamin had foolishly frequented dangerous places, Marian was known for her highhandedness, the elopement of a sheltered clergy­man’s daughter was hardly news—but two precious and exquisitely innocent children abducted by a bogus nursemaid caused some excitement indeed.

  Judge Stallworth had trebled the reward offered for their return, and the police had sought for them with unwonted thoroughness. Their likenesses appeared in the daily papers, and copies of their Easter photographs were made up in the hundreds and outsold even those of Lily Langtry and Oscar Wilde.

  The assumption that no one thought to question was that the children were still together. Whether held captive in some attic in Five Points, whether sprawled with mangled limbs at the bottom of a dry well in Connecticut, whether weepily wandering the streets of some sleepy New Jersey township, Edwin and Edith Phair were always imaginatively pictured in one another’s company.

  Thus it was unlikely that the children would ever be discovered. Edith Phair had been transformed into a careless urchin, utterly devoted to Rob, who was ever so much nicer to her than Edwin had been. Every day she wore a different set of clothes, and was never told to keep herself unsoiled. Every day she saw a different part of the city, and every day she played a different game: sometimes begging money of strangers to whom she told a story of her mother being very, very ill, sometimes doing a little dance in the street to distract the attention of a beautiful young woman whose lacy handkerchief Rob coveted. She often talked of her mother and asked Rob when she would be taken home. Rob always said, “Tomorrow,” and Edith always believed him.

  Edwin Phair performed three times nightly on a variety stage in Cincinnati, Ohio, walking across a line of empty milk bottles. A newspaper had already written of him, that he “could do things upon a candlestick that are more surprising than pleasant.” He vaguely comprehended that he had been stolen, and sometimes felt guilty that he did not attempt to escape and return to his parents. But he had been warned of the inadvisability of this course—the danger of it—and cagily decided that he would learn to read and write so that he might send letters to his grandfather and his mother, telling them what had become of him. He was almost certain that they would have noticed his absence by this time.