Mysteries of Winterthurn

by Joyce Carol Oates

  The most luridly publicized of the numberless cases tried before Erasmus Kilgarvan was, as the reader might recall, that of Miss (or Mrs., as she titled herself) Hester Vaugh, a good many years before the time of our present narrative. This painful, and, indeed, still controversial case, studied in law schools until the present day, brought Erasmus Kilgarvan to the attention of the populace; and subjected him to numerous charges and insults delivered by a particularly noisome gaggle of “Suffragettes,” led by Miss Elizabeth Cady Stanton. (Indeed, the Hester Vaugh case, and Judge Kilgarvan’s refusal to alter his stand on it, was very likely the initial cause of the rift betwixt him and his young half-brother, Lucas.) The young woman, Vaugh, seventeen years of age at the time of her arrest for infanticide, had been a common housemaid in the domestic establishment of a family named Poindexter, in South Winterthurn; evidently of loose and unformed morals, she allowed herself to be seduced by her employer, and was impregnated; and, after being evicted from the household by her gravely offended mistress, she possessed no more presence of mind than to illegally trespass on property owned by the Empire State-Chesapeake Railroad,—giving birth to her bastard offspring in an unheated tenement building, in such crude and filthy conditions that it was not to be wondered at, that the infant survived a scant hour or two.

  All of Winterthurn was outraged, though the more proper sort of lady did not wish to acknowledge her awareness of the scandal; several gentlemen of the cloth made Hester Vaugh the subject of their sermons, on the tragic fruits of sin and the ever-growing immoralism of the times. After a much-publicized trial of some ten days, attended by hundreds of persons and presided over by Associate Justice Erasmus Kilgarvan (at that time but a youthful figure of thirty-eight), a jury of twelve Winterthurn citizens found the defendant guilty of murder in the first degree: guilty, indeed, of an “unnatural dereliction of maternal duty, in bringing about, by failing to prevent, the death of a helpless infant.”

  The Vaugh person was duly sentenced to death by hanging, in compliance with the statute: but, before the execution could be carried out, one or another muckraking journalist from downriver seized upon the lurid tale, and inflated its significance (with such emboldened headlines as A WINTERTHURN TRAGEDY: FALLEN MAIDEN & DOOMED BABE), bringing it to the attention of the idle and captious throughout the Northeast,—including, as it turned out, the rabble-rousing Suffragette group headed by the Stanton woman. What a misfortune for Winterthurn City, and for the earnest young Judge Kilgarvan—! Where the twelve gentlemen of the jury had seen a murderess of the most loathsome sort, compounding brutality with immorality, the free-thinking women saw a hapless victim; where Associate Justice Erasmus Kilgarvan had seen an unrepentant criminal who must be hanged by the neck until dead, certain overliberal persons saw a heroine who deserved freedom and the opportunity to “remake her young life,”—if not, indeed, sentimental pity and acclaim in the gutter press.

  Was there ever such a perturbation in all the annals of Justice of Winterthurn!—with aroused and oft-uninformed passions on both sides; and families divided in sentiment; and meddlesome editorials and articles not only splashed across the Northeast but featured in England and on the Continent,—where, it is to be assumed, native-born criminals were in short supply.

  The State Supreme Court, however, was not to be intimidated by the picketing of its stately halls, by free-thinking women and their hangers-on; or by a particularly meretricious series of articles entitled MALE JUSTICE & FEMALE SUFFERING, which appeared under the by-line of “Nellie Bly” (one Elizabeth Cochrane) for the New York Tribune. After due consideration of the original conviction and sentencing, and a close examination of the trial’s proceedings under Erasmus Kilgarvan, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled to uphold the conviction; and issued a solemn statement, in which all the Justices concurred, that as death on the gallows commonly followed a conviction of murder in the first degree, Hester Vaugh’s sentence was altogether just: and the Supreme Court saw no reason to interfere in the transactions of the lower court in this instance.

  So it was, upon a pleasantly sunny day in June, by happenstance on Erasmus Kilgarvan’s thirty-ninth birthday, the Vaugh murderess went to the gallows at the state prison in Powhatassie: so emaciated and broken she had to be carried to the platform in a chair (for, to compound her sin of infanticide, the unrepentant woman had attempted, in clumsy wise, to commit suicide by refusing to eat): so lost to all sense of decorum and Christian honor, she screamed at the chaplain who attended her, and vowed that she would return,—“in what guise I know not”—to take her revenge. Despite her weakened condition she was said to have put up a considerable struggle, and did not expire for some minutes, though her neck was snapped at once.

  Thus, the notorious Hester Vaugh case, or scandal,—which had the unlooked-to effect of enhancing Erasmus Kilgarvan in the eyes of certain citizens: though that gentleman never ceased to explain that he had but followed the recommendation of the jury, and harbored no especial rancor for the defendant, any more than he harbored a stealthy sympathy. “Justice is duty,” the youthful judge often said, “and the precise calibration of justice is a most exacting duty. But no man of the Law shrinks from such a task.”

  (THE READER MAY be interested to learn that, despite her coarse threats of revenge, Hester Vaugh assuredly did not return to Winterthurn in any guise: nor did the Poindexter family, or the twelve jurors, or, indeed, Erasmus Kilgarvan himself, suffer any unusual consequences as a result of the trial and its sordid publicity,—beyond, that is, the ordeal of embarrassment itself, which, many of the principals said, was punishment enough. For the better sort of Winterthurn citizen, then as now, rightly shuns the vulgar glare of publicity.)

  AS FOR THE MORE RECENT CASE of the contested will of Phillips Goode Kilgarvan, which had taken place some three years before Xavier’s birth: evidently it happened that, on his deathbed, the eighty-seven-year-old gentleman had taken it into his head to disinherit his youngest son, for what specific reason or reasons was never altogether clear (though Lucas had angered and disappointed him numberless times, by failing to establish a career for himself, and by marrying with precipitate haste, and by neglecting to show proper filial regard): this decision being made of a sudden, with, it seems, his very dying breath, in the company of four upstanding witnesses,—Erasmus, Simon Esdras, Dr. Colney Hatch, and the Kilgarvans’ attorney, Mr. Henry Peregrine. That the dictated will which was to negate all pre-existing wills possessed an air of the febrile, the disordered, and the rash; that Phillips Goode’s signature was decidedly shaky, and granted to be his only by the sworn insistence of the witnesses; that certain abusive remarks pertaining to “tainted blood” and “half-bred blood” were not excised,—these troubling factors should not, I hope, sway our thinking on the matter, for, though the litigious young Lucas Kilgarvan fought the will up to the highest court in the State, and went about town sorely abusing both his brothers, and swore that his father had been coerced, or that the entire will was a fabrication, the final judgment was against him and for his brothers: the Justices of the Supreme Court ruling unanimously that a father has the privilege of disinheriting an unruly son, up to the very moment of death, provided he is, as the witnesses swore Phillips Goode assuredly was, “of sound mind and body.”

  A most disagreeable case, which caused many a tongue to wag in Winterthurn and elsewhere: but, in truth, an altogether simple one, in which fairly clear principles of law were evoked. (As to the whispered innuendos regarding Lucas Kilgarvan’s “tainted blood,”—and the reader will recall that Georgina spoke of Lucas as a “half-breed” as well—this relates to the fact that Phillips Goode’s second wife, Miriam D’Ivers of Mt. Moriah, was said to have been very distantly related to a French settler by the name of Camille D’Ivers, who had, in the early 1700s, taken for a mistress, or actually wed, an Oneida Indian squaw, which unfortunate union evidently resulted in issue. So many generations later, after the passage of so many turbulent decades, one might well conclude that t
he “taint” of mixed blood had been entirely dissolved, in Anglo-Saxon solution: but this supposition Phillips Goode did not make, it seems, once the fiery passions of romantic love had ebbed, and the flaws in the woman he had wed became distinct. Whether the old tale of tainted blood, or, indeed, the “blood” itself, had any actual influence on Lucas Kilgarvan’s behavior, one cannot presume to judge: but it was a matter that Xavier, of all the Kilgarvan sons, took most to heart, and rarely allowed himself to speak of, for his adolescent pride was sorely wounded; and he could not abide it, that any of his schoolmates might pity him for so ambiguous a connection . . .)

  OF WINTERTHURN MYSTERIES of a minor and domestic sort, none excited sympathetic comment more frequently amongst persons of society,—not excluding even Erasmus Kilgarvan’s most intimate male companions, who had known him all their lives—or aroused more speculation, than why, and how, a man of such superior intelligence and proven canniness (at forty-three the youngest Chief Justice, at the county level, in the State’s judicial history) chanced to marry not one, but two, women of inferior mettle,—leaving the luckless man a widower twice over, with three daughters on his hands.

  The first wife, Miss Vivian Battenberg, who died when Georgina was but ten years of age, had been so self-absorbed, neurasthenic, and negligent in her household duties as to have failed to appear downstairs at the Manor, fully clothed, for the last several years of her life; the second, Miss Hortense Spies, was a yet more pathetic presence at the Manor, dying under clouded circumstances (the consequence, it was said, of a spiritual malaise of an hereditary sort) when Thérèse was not yet three years of age, and Perdita a sickly babe of ten months.

  Indeed, even Erasmus Kilgarvan’s detractors could not fail to feel some pity for him, tinged with a measure of impatience, that he should twice err in choosing a mate: and, withal, prove incapable of siring a male heir to propagate his name. (Doubtless it angered him greatly that his half-brother, Lucas, should prove so very manly as to have fathered four sons: and these lads, by way of a young woman no more physically robust, it would seem, than either of Erasmus’s wives.)

  That a young man in his twenties might succumb to the blandishments of a beguiling face and figure (Miss Battenberg of Contracouer being as pretty a débutante, in her season, as the Valley boasted), or the yet more subtle temptations of a considerable fortune (for the Battenbergs had invested, like the Kilgarvans, in munitions manufacturing and related enterprises, at that most fortuitous of times in our history,—the late 1850s),—that, in short, he might precipitously fall in love, to repent at leisure, was not, in itself, puzzling: for, certainly, a number of Winterthurn marriages, embarked upon with touching idealism, soon ran aground upon the hardscrabble realities of daily life; and the riddlesome failure of charming young ladies to mature into worthy wives and mothers. (As an aside, I should mention here that Dr. Colney Hatch, the physician most frequently employed by the leading families of Winterthurn,—the Kilgarvans, the Westergaards, the Von Goelers, the De Forrests, the Peregrines, etc.—had oft expressed the intention of publishing a scientific study on this troublesome subject, closely investigating female incapacities as they are exposed in divers stages: childhood, puberty, early marriage and motherhood, menopause, and senility. He had hoped to establish an actual correlation betwixt the anatomy of the sex and its social, moral, and intellectual destiny: but, so overworked was this zealous gentleman, so frequently was he called, oft-times in the middle of the night, to the boudoirs of hypochondriacal ladies who feared they were dying, and who must have him, that, I am afraid, he dissipated his energies; and, like many another dedicated physician of the older type, he surrendered all hope of fame, in the service of an indefatigable round of patients—!)

  The melancholy love match betwixt Erasmus Kilgarvan and Vivian Battenberg, ending in the virtual disappearance, or “fading away,” of the once-lively beauty, was, as I say, scarcely remarkable in itself. What puzzled Erasmus’s relatives and small circle of intimate acquaintances was the poor man’s misfortune, after an interval of seventeen sobering years, to marry yet another weak-minded, childish, and chronically neurasthenic woman in Hortense Spies: as prone to idiopathic disorders, household mishaps, and day-and night-time chimeras of the most morbid sort as the first Mrs. Kilgarvan. Phillips Goode threw up his hands in despair, as it were, over his eldest son’s perplexing taste in women. “To sire sons who will survive for more than a few days,” he said, “it is necessary to marry more than a pretty face, or a bewitching instep.” The old gentleman was said to have been more broken in spirit than his son, after the premature birth, and death within a week, of a baby boy baptized Phillips Goode Kilgarvan II,—this piteous infant born after a labor of some twenty-odd hours, of the second wife Hortense. (At this time Thérèse was not twelve months old; and Perdita, of course, had not yet been born.)

  Dr. Colney Hatch, whose experience with the Kilgarvan household was authoritative, thought it a tragedy for Erasmus that both wives, in their differing ways, were poorly suited for childbearing, and, indeed, for conjugal relations of the most conservative sort: the one being of a meager, bony frame, and inclining toward anemia and light-headedness; the other, of a spongy sort of plumpness, and inclining toward hemophobia. In addition to the common admixture of female complaints, originating in the uterus, each young woman suffered from a propensity for respiratory and digestive upsets; unforeseen allergies to those medications Dr. Hatch most frequently prescribed; fits of hysteria brought on by needless speculation upon the nature of salvation, damnation, Heaven, Hell, etc., which their brains were ill-equipped to ponder; insomnia; neuralgia; hypesthesia; bouts of hyperpnea; postpartum depression, the more exacerbated by sore, inflamed, easily bruised breasts, whose maternal milk was tainted by watery blood; and, most enigmatic of all, a veritable cornucopia of minor injuries, brought about, it seems, by sheer clumsiness of comportment—for there was never anyone in all of Winterthurn City like the mistresses of Glen Mawr Manor for toppling downstairs, colliding with doors, shelves, partitions, headboards, and the like!

  Alas, that such gentle, pretty, sweet-natured creatures should prove so awkward, and so prone to accident, as to be forever bruising and banging their heads, torsos, pelvic regions, and thighs; cracking their ribs and blacking their eyes, in nocturnal tumbles from bed (caused, it was thought, by paroxysms of night-time terror); scratching, cutting, and even stabbing themselves, with letter-openers, hatpins, carving knives, and the like; loosening their teeth; dislocating their fingers; spraining their wrists and ankles; even rupturing their spleens, in falls into the cellar that would have been comical had they been less pathetic. The first Mrs. Kilgarvan had accidentally set fire to her lovely brown hair, by leaning too near a candle; the second Mrs. Kilgarvan had so roughly shut her smallest finger in a closet door, the nail had turned black and fallen off. The one lost all appetite, and would have starved herself had not her husband and her physician forcibly intervened; the other acquired wild, exotic, ungovernable tastes, and would have gobbled down glue, starch, raw beans, berries, pen nibs, etc., had not the same gentlemen kept watch. Shortly after Georgina’s birth, the first Mrs. Kilgarvan expressed so deranged a horror of nursing (for, she claimed, her infant girl was insatiable in her hunger, and wanted not merely mother’s milk, but mother’s very blood), and of cohabiting with her lawfully wed spouse, that she took to hiding in remote corners of the Manor, not excepting the “dungeon” in the oldest section of the cellar, which, in Colonial days, had been used as a sort of informal prison for misbehaving slaves, tenant farmers, and the like—! (Upon one shameful occasion, when a number of the Judge’s associates were gathering in the drawing room, for an evening of whiskey, cigars, and forthright political discussion, the distraught Vivian Kilgarvan, at first nowhere to be found, was finally tracked down, so to speak, by the incensed husband himself, in a fetid corner of the cellar, where, naked inside her fur-lined traveling cloak, she sang to herself, and rocked to and fro, holding against her bosom not her
own flesh-and-blood babe Georgina but a mere porcelain doll—!)

  After the death of the first Mrs. Kilgarvan, the household quieted considerably: there being, apart from the numerous domestic staff, only Erasmus and his brother Simon Esdras (who, deeply absorbed in the writing of his Treatise, rarely troubled to come downstairs to dine), and the motherless waif Georgina,—a diminished family, assuredly, yet not, it seems, an entirely unhappy one. Sober, subdued, retiring, but contented: a halcyon period that came to a rude end when a meddlesome Battenberg dowager, visiting the Manor unannounced, declared that it was “unwholesome” for a thirteen-year-old girl to live alone with her father and her eccentric uncle, in a household bereft of feminine influence. Far from being insulted or enraged at this intrusion into his domestic affairs, Erasmus Kilgarvan seems to have conceded the Battenberg lady’s point, and to have agreed to send his daughter away to school,—to the Canandaigua Episcopal Female Seminary, in a bucolic region some two hundred miles to the west; and though the widower must have suffered pangs of inordinate loneliness in the great house, he did not seek remarriage for nearly two decades.

  As for Miss Hortense Spies, the second Mrs. Kilgarvan,—the marriage seems to have been ill-advised from the start, for Erasmus was some twenty-five years older than his comely young spouse; and his ever-increasing judicial responsibilities, as well as a certain crankiness and irascibility of manner, militated against an idyllic household. (All of Winterthurn speculated, too, as to the nervous hostility betwixt wife and stepdaughter—for were they not, Hortense and Georgina, very nearly the same age?) An early pregnancy; the birth of Thérèse; a second pregnancy, resulting in the death of the infant Phillips Goode II; yet another pregnancy, perhaps following too closely upon the others, resulting in the birth of the undersized Perdita,—and soon afterward a lapse into such wayward and unpredictable behavior, her distraught husband could no longer allow her to appear in public.