Katie

by Michael McDowell

  Accordingly, Charles Clayton turned in his resignation, this to his employers’ indignant astonishment, returned to Christopher Street, and began to pack his bags.

  Ann Clayton was no less astonished and indignant over her husband’s behavior and demanded of him why he pursued such a course of action.

  “We are going to live with your aunt in Vermont,” he said.

  She started to protest, but Charles pulled from his coat an envelope, opened it beneath her nose, and showed her a thick stack of hundred-dollar bills. He extracted five and gave them to her.

  She was silent.

  Charles said: “I’m leaving today. I’ll take the ferry to Brooklyn, and then to Rye. From there I’ll go by the cars to Brattleboro. I should be there tomorrow, and I’ll search out a house for us near your aunt. Tell no one where I’ve gone. If anyone asks, I’ve been sent to Cincinnati on business. Tomorrow, you will pack only what you need for the trip and follow me to Brattleboro. Abandon everything else – we’ll not need it. And above all, Ann—”

  “What?” she demanded in an excited whisper.

  “Do not speak to the Jepsons.”

  Five minutes later Charles had kissed his wife, taken up his bag, and opened the hallway door. Directly across the way stood Katie Slape in the doorway of her parlor, picking at one of the buttons on her dress.

  She looked up at Clayton and grinned.

  He smiled nervously back, said “Good day, Miss Katie,” and attempted to slip past her and down the stairs.

  Katie reached out and grabbed his hand.

  “Want to know what’s to become of you?” she asked with an insinuating smirk.

  He tried to pull away, but she held him fast. Suddenly her ex­pression altered and she dropped his hand with intense surprise.

  Charles Clayton ran down the stairs, but even before he could open the front door he could hear Katie’s trampling feet on the stairs. “Par, Par!” she shrieked.

  Charles Clayton ran down to Hudson Street, jumped in a pass­ing cabriolet, and was driven to the Houston Street ferry on the East River. He leaned far back in the vehicle, pressed his hand over his heart, and cursed Katie Jepson in his very soul.

  Ten minutes later there was a knock at Ann Clayton’s door. She opened it cautiously and very nearly slammed it shut again when she saw that it was Hannah Slape who stood there.

  “Mrs. Clayton,” said Hannah, “Katie and me would be very pleased if you would step up for some tea and cookies. The cook­ies was sent from over on Sixth Avenue, and they’re special good.”

  “No, thank you,” replied Ann Clayton. “I’ve just eaten, and I fear I’ve no appetite left me.”

  “Come anyway,” said Hannah. “For the tea – the tea’ll aid digestion. And for the company – Katie and me’s feeling lone­some as lepers.”

  Ann Clayton had heard Katie’s shouts on the stairs, and she suspected that they had something to do with her husband’s leaving the house with a very great sum of money in his pocket. Charles’s admonition not to speak to the Jepsons suggested that even if the money had not actually been stolen from the Jepsons the family at least had some interest in it. She decided to accept Hannah’s invitation, first because she was curious to learn more than she knew now, and second because a refusal of so polite an invitation would seem suspiciously unfriendly.

  When she turned to straighten her dress in a cheval glass, Hannah pushed the door of the room wide open. Drawers were opened, and many of her husband’s garments were strewn over the bed.

  “Mr. Clayton gone somewheres?” Hannah asked.

  “No,” said Ann quickly, then amended that too-hasty lie to another: “That is, he’s going away tomorrow. To Cincinnati, on business, for his Wall Street firm.”

  Hannah smiled unpleasantly and remarked, “Reckon it will be a long time before you see him again.”

  To this Ann Clayton knew not what to answer.

  Katie had brought up a pot of tea from the kitchen, and on a little mahogany table near the window that looked down three stories to the brick walk of Christopher Street, she had laid out the boxes that bore the name of a well-known Sixth Avenue con­fectioner.

  Ann took the seat that was proffered her, smiled nervously, and asked, “Is Mr. Jepson not here?”

  Katie laughed, and winked at her mother. “He’s out trying to catch the ferry.”

  To disguise her nervousness, Ann diligently brushed nonexistent crumbs from the bosom of her dress.

  Hannah was seated near the window. She peered out into the street and said, “Katie, one of your ladies is below.”

  “Excuse me,” said Katie to Mrs. Clayton, “I’ll be back as quick as I can.”

  “Of course,” said Ann. She smiled at both Katie and Hannah, wondering what lay beneath the Jepsons’ politeness.

  Hannah poured her tea, urged the confectionery on her, and described a reading of Shakespeare given the previous evening by a seven-year-old girl, little Ollie Goldsmith, at Chickering Hall.

  Ann grew gradually easier in her mind. Katie returned but made no comment on the session with her customer below.

  Having remained in the Jepsons’ parlor for a polite half hour, Ann was rising to take her leave when she noticed, on Katie’s collar, a little brooch of gold and jet set with diamonds. It was exactly like one that had been made up after the death of her mother and contained, on the other side, a tiny braid of her mother’s hair, clipped from her corpse.

  Ann stared at the brooch and became convinced it was her own.

  Katie Slape had not been downstairs with a guest – she had been in Ann’s room.

  Hannah and Katie smiled at Ann.

  Katie reached in her pocket and took out five hundred-dollar notes. She threw them into an opened box of cookies. “Hid behind the mirror,” she said.

  “You were in my room!” cried Ann.

  “He must have taken the rest,” said Hannah to her step­daughter. “As you said.”

  Ann Clayton rose in alarm, but Katie was quicker. She placed herself between Ann Clayton and the door.

  “John was a fool to give your husband our money,” said Hannah quietly.

  “I know nothing about it!”

  Hannah shrugged, and Katie stepped closer to the frightened woman.

  “I know nothing!” Ann cried again. “Charles went to Cincin­nati. He has no money. Miss Katie, you know we have no money!”

  “Par’ll find Mr. Clayton,” said Katie. “I told him where he should look. I said, ‘Par, go down to the Houston Street ferry.’ So that’s where Par’s gone.”

  “You were listening at our door!”

  Katie came closer, and Ann was backed against the window. During the day, because of the effluvia of the docks, windows on lower Christopher Street were kept closed. Ann pressed her hands behind her against the glass panes.

  Katie came within two feet of Ann Clayton and extended her arms so that they lightly touched the woman’s breast.

  Ann tried to brush them away, but Katie was strong and not to be moved. She pressed harder. Ann’s back was forced against the window, and she found it difficult to draw breath.

  Katie suddenly let go and stood back.

  “Can’t do it, Mar,” she said with a shrug. “Not with the window closed.”

  Ann stood with her hand against her heaving breast.

  “Use a chair,” suggested Hannah.

  Katie picked up the chair in which Ann Clayton had been sitting, lifted it high, and brought it down swiftly on the woman’s head. Ann had watched with horror, but caught between the table, the wall, and Katie, she could not escape the blow. Two legs of the chair broke, and Ann toppled against the table. The dishes and confectionery spilled out over the carpet.

  Hannah dragged the table out of the way, and Ann slipped unconscious onto the floor.

  Hannah and Katie stood over her, silent for a few moments.

  “Open the window and look out, Katie. See if anyone’s watching.”

  Katie went to th
e window, raised the sash, and peered up and down the street. Christopher Street was busy and noisy. Horses and carts, and vendors with their wares paraded and jostled one another down the center of the roadway while pedestrians on the sidewalk hurried toward the docks or away from them – but no one was bothering to look upward. And directly across the way was only the blank wall of a large warehouse.

  “No one,” said Katie, after a few moments’ examination of the street.

  Ann Clayton was moaning. She bled from a cut on her head, and there were splinters of wood embedded in her cheek. The shoulder of her dress was torn. She opened one swollen eye and looked up at Hannah. Her hand slid across the floor in suppli­cation.

  Hannah raised her booted foot and brought it down hard on Ann Clayton’s frail wrist. The sound of breaking bones was audible.

  “Mar,” said Katie doubtfully, “it’s not very far down . . .”

  Ann began to whimper.

  “Then we’ll do what we can up here,” said Hannah. She lifted her foot again and kicked Ann Clayton squarely in the face.

  The woman shrieked, but now Katie had raised her foot and brought it down squarely on Ann’s mouth with so great a force that her jaw was broken. Her dislodged teeth were scattered down her throat.

  She choked, and despite all her pain, jerked up with the panic of the obstruction of the jagged teeth in her windpipe.

  Hannah kicked her in the belly.

  Katie picked up the broken chair and brought it down three times against Ann’s bloody head.

  Ann lay still. Blood flowed onto the carpet out of a large wound on her forehead. Her jaw had become entirely dislodged and sagged far away from the remainder of her face. Her mouth had been torn at the corners and she appeared to have a grin as large as the Negro man the Slapes had once seen who could press two whole apples into his mouth.

  Katie pointed out this resemblance, and Hannah concurred.

  Katie and Hannah righted the mahogany table and moved it to the window. Then they lifted their victim’s body onto the table, and each pushing against one of Ann Clayton’s feet, they shoved her headlong out of the third-story window.

  Her head was smashed on the brick walk to such an extent that the mutilations that had occurred before the fall were never discovered.

  Chapter 20

  THE SLAPES SETTLE IN

  Neighbors came first and surrounded the mangled body of the woman who had fallen from the third-floor window of No. 251 Christopher Street. Workers and loungers on the docks, alerted by the gathering crowd, came after. And then the police appeared, pushing the curious out of the way, covering up Mrs. Clayton with a sheet provided by grinning Katie, and questioning the inhabitants of the house.

  Only Mrs. Hannah Jepson was able to explain why the woman had killed herself. “Come up to our parlor – me-and-Katie-here’s parlor – looking wild. Said Mr. Clayton had run off with all their money and was intending to leave her. Took away every­thing they had. Couldn’t live without him. Sat down at the table next the window, fanned her face, said could she have some tea and cake. Sent Katie down for tea, myself to get the cake out of the tin. Turned my back. Pulled up the sash and sailed out. Don’t know what my John will think – comes home to find that lodgers been jumping out of our windows.”

  Charles Clayton was never found. His employers’ testimony that he had quit his job quite suddenly and without sufficient or apparent motive confirmed Hannah Jepson’s story of a man bent on abandoning his spouse.

  On the day after Ann Clayton perished on the sidewalk of Christopher Street, a body was discovered in the water beneath the Brooklyn ferry pier. The unidentifiable man had died when a spike, such as might have been easily picked up in the vicinity, about eight inches long, rusting, but filed to a useful sharpness, was pounded through his right eye and deep into his brain.

  The Slapes had recovered the money John had so foolishly en­trusted to Charles Clayton, but at the dangerous expense of killing both the man and his wife, whom Hannah and Katie had rather liked than not. Hannah did not berate her husband but patiently explained that this was why she had kept the money.

  John Slape was penitent, and that night the family went out to see Bryant’s Minstrels, the Clodoche Can-Can, and Little Mac as Mark Twain’s Jumping Frog. Afterward, at a German dance hall in the neighborhood of the theater, they sat out of the way of the dance floor and the orchestra and talked of their plans.

  “Thieves and robbers,” said John. “We shouldn’t keep the money about the house.”

  “Don’t leave it on Wall Street,” Hannah warned. “Wall Street takes people like us and swallows us whole.”

  “Clayton said the savings banks give four percent. I don’t rightly understand what that’s tokened to mean, but p’haps a bank would be the place.”

  Hannah looked doubtful.

  Katie said with a grin, “I’d like to see thieves and robbers come past me!”

  “Well,” said Hannah, “can’t be on watch all the time. Might be somebody in the house wanted to steal the money – like Mr. Clayton.”

  “Maybe,” said John, “we ought to have a house ourselves.”

  Hannah and Katie considered this, and Hannah, who was the quickest of the three, agreed after only a moment. “But what house?” she asked.

  “I like the one we’re in,” said Katie. “I like being near the river. I like the noise.”

  Hannah and John agreed.

  “Why don’t we just buy it?” asked Katie. “And if she don’t want to sell . . .”

  They offered the landlady three thousand dollars for the house, which was considerably above its market value, though the Slapes had no idea of this. Having been for some time of the mind to move to Syracuse, where her son was living, and dis­tressed by Mrs. Clayton’s ugly death, Mrs. Bracken signed over the deed of the house to the Slapes, packed her belongings, and was gone before the other tenants had time to wonder who was going to cook their meals.

  Hannah wasn’t.

  Even as Mrs. Bracken was still visible on the sidewalk, walking toward the Christopher Street ferry, Hannah was knocking on the doors of the house, giving notice. The two girls who worked in the Eighth Avenue dollar store shrugged and indicated that they knew of a place on West Thirteenth where they might room together as cheaply as here – and where the company, they re­marked pointedly, was more congenial. Only the seamstress and her lame daughter expressed distress at being turned out on the street, and at their pleas, Hannah allowed them to stay for two days more, until Monday – though they would have to get their own meals in the interim.

  On Monday the seamstress walked the street with a news­paper, looking for rooms, but could find nothing suitable and sufficiently cheap. She returned to Christopher Street, deter­mined again to throw herself on the mercy of the new owners of the house, but found, when she reached Christopher Street, that all her belongings had been tossed onto the sidewalk and that her crippled daughter sat weeping on the stoop.

  A pack of dirty little boys was rummaging through the seam­stress’s trunk and scattering all the piecework which was her live­lihood. The seamstress, who was a frail woman, attempted to beat them away, but they only laughed. Finally she slammed the lid down on their hands and went and sat beside her daughter, joining her in tears.

  The Slapes had the satisfaction of being rid of the seamstress sometime on Monday night, for they returned from a play to discover her and her daughter gone and nothing but a few scraps of cloth and some empty spools littering the stoop to remind them of her. Where she went and what she did with herself they never learned or cared.

  The Slapes did not alter their manner of living. The rooms that had been vacated they simply closed off and were happy in knowing they were not being spied upon. Katie continued to see her clients in the little bare room on the second floor.

  Hannah had no intention of cooking for her family, so two servants were hired, one for the kitchen and the other for the chambers. She insisted that these two young
women do all their work in the morning and leave as soon as the dinner dishes were done. Most of Katie’s business was in the afternoon, and the Slapes had decided that they wanted the house empty then. In addition, to guard the house while they were away, John Slape purchased a large mongrel dog of vicious temperament which they called Little Dick – after the play which followed the fortunes of a New York bootblack. During the day this dog was kept tied to a ring in the cellar wall, but at night he was allowed to roam the house. He barked at nothing and everything and would leave off only when beat over the head with a stick.

  By way of experiment, Hannah took five thousand dollars and deposited it in the Seaman’s Bank around the corner on Wash­ington Street. Thereafter whenever they left the house or returned to it the Slapes would go out of their way to walk past the Seaman’s Bank, as if they suspected that the edifice, once it had swallowed their money, would pick up its foundations and saunter away in search of other gullible victims.

  All in all, the Slapes lived agreeably, and they considered that their present comfort was worth all the trouble that they had gone to in Goshen, getting the money out of that old man and preventing him from giving it away to the Draxes. They could not conceive of anything that would interfere with their present, genial enjoyments. But then, they could not know that Philo Drax was then lodging scarcely seven streets away from them and that it was only a matter of time before their paths crossed once again.

  PART V

  WEST THIRTEENTH STREET

  Chapter 21

  “WHAT WILL YOU DO?”

  Ben Gillow, the principal carpenter in town, had made coffins for New Egypt’s dead for twenty-three years; as a matter of course he had taken over other functions for the preparing of bodies for burial. He was summoned to the Drax house, took one look at Mrs. Drax on the bed, and called out the window for Dr. Slocum, who was loitering in the yard and chatting with the curious over the fence, to send for Mrs. Gillow. With her help the carpenter lifted Mrs. Drax’s mangled body onto Philo’s bed, cut away her clothing, sponged her body clean, sewed up as best they could the wide cuts in her neck and cheek, and then put her in a high-necked dress. The dress had to be slit up the back, for Mary Drax’s corpse had quickly stiffened with rigor mortis.