Mysteries of Winterthurn

by Joyce Carol Oates

  The Scent of Calla Lilies

  So few mourners, apart from their immediate families and a sprinkling of neighbors, had troubled to attend the funerals of Miss Effie Godwit, Miss Dulcie Inman, Miss Tricia Furlow, and Miss Florette Sparks,—the Godwit funeral in particular having been a most niggardly and shamefaced affair, held in a wood-frame Methodist Church, in Mt. Provenance,—that no one, not even Winterthurn’s chief of police, might have foreseen the immense crowd, numbering above two thousand persons, that attempted to attend the solemn high mass offered for the repose of the soul of Miss Eva Teal, in St. Ursula’s Roman Catholic Church, three mornings after her death. Ah, what a barrage of mourners!—of men and women, and even children, so queerly distraught, so white-faced with grief, or apprehension, or anger, or excitement, one might have imagined Eva Teal to have been a prominent member of South Winterthurn’s community, and not a sixteen-year-old mill-girl possessed of but a small circle of acquaintances in her lifetime, and no clear reputation whatsoever at her death.

  Jostling one another in the street; openly weeping or cursing; thronging into the church’s narrow aisles, to push their way into pews; gaping at the white coffin with the brass handles, and the resplendent floral displays, so dramatically placed beyond the altar railing: thus the swarm of “mourners” for Eva Teal, who had, as word of mouth suggested, and the newspapers confirmed, suffered an unspeakable sort of atrocity, at the hands of a Jew: the more outrageous in that the Jew (his name given out to be “Rosenfeld” in the Vanderpoel Sun) had not yet been arrested by the police; nor had he even been discharged from his position of sinister power by the Shaw family.

  There was even a brief flurry of a rumor,—leaping like wildfire amongst the jammed pews—that the Jew, the murderer, the “Cruel Suitor” himself, was so brazen as to be hidden there in their midst, that he might mock Christian grief firsthand: a rumor fortunately laid to rest by the vehement white-haired pastor of St. Ursula’s, before any disruption resulted. (For what a catastrophe should ensue if any innocent gentleman, swarthy of complexion, or accursèd with a “Semitic” nose, should have been mistaken for the loathsome “Rosenfeld”—! Even in this sacred place, men were openly murmuring that the Jew should be dragged from his home and hanged, and spared the formality of a trial: for thus the exclamatory banner headlines, and heart-wrenching features, and “confidential” interviews in the Sun seemed to suggest.)

  No sooner had this invidious rumor been quenched, and a modicum of calm imposed, when the black-garbed mother of the murdered girl, seated at the very front of the church between her married daughter and her flush-faced son-in-law, made a sudden effort to rise, and cried out in breathless anguish, “Eva!—O Eva!” Whereupon numberless persons in the congregation (by no means of the female sex exclusively) echoed her, and succumbed to hysterical sobbing, with here and there the threat of fainting, or actual collapse: so that the priest was once again obliged to climb to his raised podium, and restore order.

  Thus, some twenty minutes late, the somber high mass began; with two inordinately small, and clearly frightened, altar boys in attendance; and the priest, in his noble vestments, chanting his Latin in a high, quavering, yet wondrously commandeering voice,—verily a species of exotic mumbo jumbo to some of the spectators, yet withal irresistible.

  (Indeed, judging from the gaping and ill-bred manner with which a goodly percentage of the mourners comported themselves, in the church’s soot-darkened interior, very few had been acquainted with the murdered girl, or with her family; and not many more were conversant with the arcane Roman Catholic rite. The frequent ringing of an invisible bell startled them; the heavy, pungent, unwholesome scent of incense disquieted; and it was an awkward matter to be always standing when they were meant to kneel, and kneeling when they were meant to sit, and sitting when, of a sudden, like zombies, others rose unhesitating to their feet—! Sonorous and formidable the rich Latin phrases assuredly were, but utterly incomprehensible: and incomprehensible too the rapid crossing motions made by those rapt in prayer,—one or two fingers touched lightly to the forehead, to the breast bone, to the left shoulder, and to the right, with unfailing mechanical precision by children no less than adults!)

  There was no mistaking, however, the import of the white, white coffin, surrounded by banks of flowers, beyond the altar railing,—nor the impassioned message of the priest, when finally he left off his Latin to speak English, and a wondrously frank English at that,—

  “May God have mercy on the soul of Eva Teal: and may He strike His swift sword of justice against the man,—nay, the fiend—who has done this terrible, terrible crime!”

  AT THE REAR OF THE AIRLESS CHURCH, sitting on the center aisle, with his hat perched on his knee, and his white-gloved hands gripping his cane, Valentine Westergaard observed to a companion that the Popish ceremony was most impressive indeed,—for all that, it was comical; and overdone as a carnival ball; and made the bone of the skull vibrate with tedium; and the blood subside; and the nostril’s fine hairs bristle, in reaction to the stink. Yet, withal, the hoary-headed old priest was captivating, in his imitation of Jehovah speaking from out a cloud: and the altar boys in their spotless white surplices were irresistible, as Raphael’s angels. “Quite the religion in which to die, if not to live!” Valentine murmured enviously. “And how quaint to have prayers said for one’s soul,—when one has none, I am sure: or, at any rate, that poor child had none.”

  His young lady companion signaled him, with a pretty frown, to please be still: for though Miss Mary-Louise Von Goeler had consented to come with him to the Teal service, for the secular purposes of “amusement” and “edification,” she found herself now deeply moved,—indeed, pierced to the heart; and it was naughty of Valentine to say such things when all the world knew he meant not a word.

  So the handsome red-haired gentleman settled himself, with as much grace as possible, in the cramped pew; and stared hard at the costumed priest, and the charming altar boys, and the swinging chalice, and the gilt cross upon which an awkward effigy of Jesus Christ hung; and of course at the gleaming white coffin; and the profuse banks of flowers on all sides,—sent in honor of Eva Teal by a wide diversity of Winterthurn citizens who had never heard of the girl in life, nor would ever have troubled to bestow a second glance upon her. (A simple white linen card upon which Ravensworth Park had been scrawled, in Valentine’s hand, was affixed to the most exquisite floral arrangement of all: a mass of white gladioli, and white calla lilies, and white mums, and white carnations, and white multifoliate roses of faultless beauty, in the very center of which a single crimson rosebud had been placed, to great effect.)

  All surreptitiously, Valentine drew a scented handkerchief from out his vest, that he might dab lightly at his eyes,—in which tears of indeterminate origin did well—and shield the lower part of his face, in a casual hope he might be spared the grosser of the odors assailing him from certain of his fellow human beings (who failed to bathe frequently, or adequately); and from the shadowed interior of the church itself, which had witnessed, over the decades, a great deal of purposeless mourning. Withal, Valentine allowed that he found the heady scent of calla lilies most fragrant; most intoxicating; which was invariably the case. Enchanting, too, the wink and glitter of the ornate candles’ flames, as they were reflected in the “virginal” white coffin, with a look,—ah, how fearsome! how delicious!—as if the frail soul within were reviving.

  So caught up in the spirit of the ceremony was Valentine Westergaard that, by its conclusion, tears did freely flow across his smooth cheeks, and he had quite mastered, to his lady companion’s mingled surprise and disapproval, the art of “crossing” himself: two fingers touched gracefully to the forehead,—and to the breast bone,—and to the left shoulder,—and to the right. Enchanting—!

  “Our Accursèd Profession”

  In his twenty-seventh year Xavier Kilgarvan had, all unwittingly, made a modest “name” for himself, as a result of his inspired work on a certain notorio
us murder case in Manhattan (this, the Senator Halsey-Countess Wielkopolski Scandal, which quite dominated the news of that season but is now forgotten, by all but connoisseurs with an especial interest in dactyloscopy, in the history of crime detection); in his twenty-eighth year he made the curious decision to retreat, as it were, from his own success, and from an embarrassing species of renown,—promulgated with tireless energy by the New York Journal; and to hazardously seek a wider type of knowledge, in the area of crime detection, as elsewhere, by embarking upon a most ambitious journey abroad. Alone, with no experience, and very limited funds, the heroic young man chose to visit not only the British Isles and Europe, climes by tradition hospitable to American travelers, but such distant and formidable regions as Western Russia, and Turkey, and North Africa; nor had his intention been to slight the noble vastness of the East (into which, it was lately reported, his friend of schoolboy days Ringgold Peregrine had most mysteriously vanished): for, indeed, did not all the world lay before him,—beckoning to him that he should make no pretense of comprehending it, or analyzing it, or, indeed, mastering it, but only submitting himself to its wonders?

  Withal, the strenuous journey was abruptly terminated, when, of a sudden, while frowning over a letter of his mother’s, forwarded to him in a British hotel in Tangier, Xavier believed he could discern in its words a queer and unsettling malaise to which Mrs. Kilgarvan assiduously did not allude. True, she had from time to time discreetly confided in her youngest son that his father, though spending more hours in his workshop than ever, remained thwarted in terms of profits, and oft-times infuriated: for not only was the fastidious craftsman required to observe how the crudest, flimsiest, and cheapest manufactured toys outdistanced his in sales,—nay, soared quite beyond them, as an actual horse, prancing and kicking up its heels, might gallop merrily away, to leave a mere rocking horse behind!—but he was constrained to endure, often with a stoicism shading into bitterness, the reasoned arguments of his eldest son that, by taking a bank loan of sufficient magnitude (which Bradford, in his felicitous new position as a vice-president at the First National Bank of Winterthurn City, would aid him in securing), he, Lucas Kilgarvan, might join the race,—and successfully compete in the marketplace. And, too, Mrs. Kilgarvan alluded upon occasion to a certain disquiet, regarding the wildly fluctuating nature of Wolf’s fortunes at the racetrack and suspected, but not known, irregularities in his private life (for Wolf, now a handsome young man-about-town of thirty-two, lived in surprisingly luxurious “digs” facing the fashionable northern edge of Juniper Park); and was more frank in her maternal worry that Colin, long estranged from the family in certain regards, should grow more estranged still,—and vanish from their lives altogether. (Ah, the vexing riddle of Colin!—the subtly guilt-provoking riddle of Colin! Xavier never pondered upon the subject without wondering uneasily how he, Xavier, had in all innocence contributed to this queer alteration in his brother’s behavior,—nay, in his very soul: yet, torment himself as he would, and did, he had forgotten why the thought should strike him at all; and why he should feel so debilitating an emotion as guilt.)

  “For am I,—can I be—my brother’s keeper?” Xavier bethought himself, thousands of miles from home, “—the more so in that that brother, once my closest companion, has scarcely troubled to speak with me at length in a dozen years: and goes his way with the unnerving authority of a sleepwalker, never in want, and never questing.”

  Well comprehending, with a woman’s especial sensitivity, yet with a mother’s keen solicitude, how Xavier in his lonely pride yearned to hear news,—ah, any news, be it even treacherous!—of his lovely cousin Perdita, Mrs. Kilgarvan took care to intercalate, in each missive, how this or that suitor was rumored by Winterthurn society to have “advanced,” or “fallen behind,” in the prolonged competition for her hand: with the adjuratory postscript that Xavier was not to worry himself, with cousinly apprehension, that the haughty girl should err in her choice,—or, indeed, that she would finally make any choice at all. Now Osmyn Goshawk appeared to advantage; now Angus Peregrine; now a beetle-browed Annapolis graduate, of whom no one in Winterthurn had ever heard; now the wealthy Calvin Shaw; now Valentine Westergaard,—but the names were too many, and had the effect of canceling one another. (“For I think it altogether likely,” Mrs. Kilgarvan observed, “that neither of old Erasmus’s daughters shall ever marry: since a species of distaste, or actual fear, seems to have passed to them, regarding the conditions of Holy Matrimony. And now that they are given a comfortable home with the dowager Mrs. Spies, and have even come into a little money of their own, who in Winterthurn is to gainsay them—? Most unhappy of girls!”)

  “As to that,—the issue of whether Perdita shall marry, or no,” Xavier exclaimed aloud, with an irritable swipe of his hand through his hair, “Mother will be proved mistaken one day: for I quite believe it within my power, if I try but hard enough, to make her my wife; and to mend her troubled soul forevermore.”

  Never failing to include local news of a beneficent sort, and brimming with warm tidings from friends and neighbors, Mrs. Kilgarvan’s letters yet communicated, between the lines, as it were, of her perfectly executed script, that indefinable air of malaise, of which I have spoken: nor did it fail to escape her son that, in recent months, she had all mysteriously ceased urging him to return home soon. (For like many another lady of her time and social class, it worried her inordinately that her son’s “grand tour,” while assuredly not lacking in cultural richness, might awaken him to other, less agreeable pleasures and appetites; and shake the foundation of his Christian faith.) Many months before, in December, Mrs. Kilgarvan had made glancing reference to a certain crime that had occurred in Winterthurn,—or, more specifically, in that “lawless and godforsaken” region beyond the city, the Devil’s Half-Acre;—a crime perpetrated upon a young woman of sordid parentage (the illegitimate daughter, it was said, of the infamous Horace Godwit,—himself newly paroled, after having served but twelve years of his fifty-year sentence), and proven loose morals (being employed as a “chambermaid” at the Hotel Paradise, in Rivière-du-Loup). This “case,” Mrs. Kilgarvan made haste to inform her son, was not one which would prick Xavier’s interest, as it was very different, she believed, from the matter involving the Senator and the Polish Countess, to which Xavier had applied himself with such diligence, and unexpected success, the year before: as naught but riffraff were here implicated; and, more importantly, the sheriff had expressed himself as confident, only the other day, that they would soon arrest the murderer. “How odd it is, and decidedly unwholesome, that I, of all persons, should so much as take notice of ‘crime’!” Mrs. Kilgarvan ruefully exclaimed. “For such is the effect,—dear Xavier, I cannot think it but invidious—that you and your ‘career’ are having upon me.”

  In his reply, Xavier apologized for the sinister influence attributed to him; yet quietly observed that all persons, no matter their goodness and the innate purity of their hearts, must realize that “crime” is scarcely a random and isolated phenomenon in life, but one which parallels them,—and is, alas, often contiguous with them. “True, the results are commonly hidden away in the ‘Devil’s Half-Acres’ of the world,” Xavier observed, “but the origins,—ah, the origins are often far closer to home!” Thus, though he quite understood how she, and Mr. Kilgarvan, and the great majority of the relatives, disapproved of his choice of a life’s occupation, he would not apologize for that occupation, no more than he would reconsider it. For which he hoped she would forgive him!

  These matters being aired, Xavier then went on to press for additional news of the Godwit case: had the murderer been taken into custody, had the trial date been set, was it generally believed that the police had assembled strong evidence, etc. To these queries, however, Mrs. Kilgarvan, oddly, failed to reply,—which seemed but an oversight at first: and then, as it happened, two or three letters sent to Xavier were unlawfully confiscated in Turkey, which may have contained the information: until, at last, w
ith the passage of weeks, Xavier quite naturally forgot the subject, in his heady absorption with his news.

  (And, ah!—how splendid his trip was proving, how rich, how rewarding! Despite the flattering attention paid to him in New York City, where, indeed, his species of detective work was unique, Xavier knew himself but an amateur; a rank beginner; an apprentice or acolyte of sorts, who had a great deal to learn from his betters. Accordingly, he sought out professional colleagues on the Continent, and in England, with gratifying results. The renowned,—and famously eccentric—Alphonse Bertillon not only had made Xavier graciously welcome at the Paris Sûreté, but had given him an audience for many hours, explaining, with a great display of emotion, the methodology of the new science of anthropometry,—or bertillonage, as it was alternately called;—and exacting from him a promise, which he gave in a somewhat faltering voice, that he, Xavier Kilgarvan, would be the first to pioneer in the new science in America.* At Scotland Yard, Xavier found himself scarcely less welcome, for there, by an excellent stroke of luck, the young detective’s work in Manhattan was already known; and his impassioned interest in dactyloscopy,—which is to say, fingerprint detection—could not fail to gratify such persons as Sir Francis Galton, who, at Scotland Yard, had “pioneered” in this field. And numerous other new ideas and techniques, in the science of forensics, were discussed during the ten days of Xavier’s visit, proving almost too fecund for the young man to absorb. Whether death be caused by fire, or whether a person already dead has been cleverly burned; whether hanging be suicide, or homicide; how a near-decomposed corpse might be identified; newly discovered experiments in testing for the presence, in the bloodstream of a victim, of morphine, or insulin, or divers sorts of “foolproof” poisons; whether there be an actual physiology of crime,—argued most convincingly by certain men of science, in England and elsewhere; whether there may lurk within each individual,—as the great Herbert Spencer so forcibly argued—an older, incoherent, bestial, and altogether amoral “ancestor,” scarcely known or intuited by the waking mind, but parasitic upon it, and highly dangerous: indeed, capable of monstrous eructations of violence. These matters, and more beside, were discussed with Xavier Kilgarvan freely and unstintingly; for he must have impressed his English hosts as an altogether winning, and wondrously serious, young gentleman.