As she began again, Harry, who was still on the other side of the room pacing with nervous agitation back and forth, walked toward her and laid his large, soft, and clammy hands on her slim shoulders. He looked straight into her frightened eyes with a lemurlike stare and asked (as if he didn’t know), “Is it because of Stanford White?”
Evelyn hesitated, then nodded in the affirmative. He prompted her: “It’s all right, you can tell me about your relationship with Stanford White. . . . Tell me everything,” he said, in a strange, panting voice filled with dread and anticipation.
“All right,” Evelyn said, again faltering. “Sit down and I will tell you everything.”
The moment Harry had feared, obsessed over, squirmed about, and prayed for was upon him. Finally he would have incontrovertible proof of White’s reprehensible behavior with vulnerable, unsuspecting young girls. And he would have the Angel-Child, White’s most prized possession, as his trump card. A wave of ecstasy washed over him.
As she described it in 1915, Evelyn told him the tale of her ruination slowly and with great deliberation, unintentionally fanning Harry’s already smoldering torment. It was a difficult story to tell, not only because she remained with White as his mistress after his disgraceful seduction of her, but because she feared what Harry’s reaction would be once she confirmed his worst fears. The frequent pauses, while not calculated, teased and goaded him. He gaped, openmouthed; would shudder, then go limp; he rose and fell with each tortured sentence and hung, moist-eyed, on every word. But as Evelyn described it, “[I made] no excuse for myself, giving no place to prejudice against White,” which was not what Harry wanted to hear. Once she started, she found she could not stop: “I told him all that had happened since the very beginning.”
As she proceeded with her narrative, Evelyn sat stiff-backed on the edge of her chair, her hands in her lap nervously working into tight knots an Irish lace handkerchief Harry had given her. Evelyn told Harry how her mother had been convinced to go out of town by White, who assured her he would watch over her (even though family on her father’s side had offered to take both Evelyn and Howard in with them). She described the mirrored room and bed, and how White had given her several glasses of champagne. How the next thing she knew, he had “had his way with her” while she remained unconscious. The moment she reached the climax of her tale, Evelyn watched in amazement as Harry rose slowly, then pitched himself with his full force into a chair; he buried his face in his hands, and began to paw at his cheeks and sob hysterically.
“Poor child!” he muttered repeatedly. “Poor child!”
Then, instead of spontaneously combusting, Harry’s body went momentarily limp. His hands began to shake uncontrollably. His face “was ghastly. . . . He rose and walked up and down the room, gesticulating as he muttered.” Affected by the vehemence and apparent sincerity of Harry’s distress over her ordeal and her own overwhelming cathartic turmoil at having finally told someone about that night, Evelyn also burst into hot tears. She held her stomach, fearful of becoming sick or rupturing her stitches. Periodically Harry would get up and prowl across the room, biting his thick bottom lip and emitting loud moans. He walked back toward her, crying, “Oh, God! Oh, God!” and then prompted her with, “Go on, go on, and tell me the whole thing.”
The two of them sat up all night, with Evelyn crying off and on for hours, until the hour arrived when her tongue turned to sandpaper. Then she fell silent. At first, Harry whimpered almost imperceptibly. Then he began to make wounded-animal noises eerily reminiscent of the sounds her mother used to make during her “attacks of grief.” He began to wring his hands like a ham actor in a cheap melodrama. He gnashed his teeth, pulled at his hair from the roots, and then turned his anger on Mrs. Nesbit.
He accused Evelyn’s mother of horrifying negligence and sinful abuse. Evelyn tried to defend her mother, saying that her only fault was naiveté. She told Harry that she had willfully deceived her mother in accordance with White’s orders since that awful night (and perhaps began to consider how she had obeyed her mother’s orders that night as well). Then she fell silent again. Harry, too, finally became quiet, and Evelyn began to mull over what he had said about her mother’s foolish, self-serving neglect. Evelyn knew that she had frequently felt her mother silly, which in turn caused the hardheaded girl to act with deliberate impudence. A nearly spent Harry breathed heavily as if on the verge of a stroke, yet continued to question Evelyn as to her mother’s knowledge of the “horrid affair.” Did she know anything about her child’s maidenly downfall at the hands of a satyr? he asked several times. Evelyn put her head down, but insisted her mother did not know. Harry then assured his Angel-Child that any decent person who heard this story would say that it was not her fault, and that he didn’t think any less of her because of it. But he wasn’t as sure as he sounded. Nor was he decent.
Evelyn looked at Harry, who made for a pious picture on his knees, his hands folded together like Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane. His red-rimmmed eyes stared heavenward as he began to speak out loud, but in curses rather than prayers. He had known all along that he was right about Stanford White. He had been horribly yet triumphantly vindicated. He rambled incoherently at times, as if speaking in tongues, then knelt at Evelyn’s side as he had when they first met and as he had just before she went under the surgeon’s knife. He gently took her hand and stroked it in sympathy. Evelyn was overwhelmed and saw Harry in a significantly sympathetic light—“all that was best in Harry Thaw . . . all the womanliness in him, all the Quixote that was in his composition . . . a shining light.” But it was a ghost light, and in her own confused and turbulent state, Evelyn did not see how her story also excited Harry in a very different way.
Harry assured her that he would always be her friend. He said that at that moment in the huge drawing room, in her long blond wig tied loosely with a ribbon, Evelyn looked to him like Alice in Wonderland, “so lovely and truly so innocent, it singed one’s soul.” He told himself that, “all would have been so natural if her father had lived,” that her mother was guilty of hideous negligence, and that her mother’s behavior in response to White was “unnatural” (a word that would reappear with frequency during the trials). He also said he believed that poor little Evelyn had never acted “[of] her own volition unless she had refused point blank her mother’s order to obey a beast.”
In his own account of his reaction to Evelyn’s “hideously awful tale,” Harry claims (disingenuously) that he tried “again and again, moment by moment to find some possible excuse” for White’s behavior, but realized once and for all that the admired and fêted architect was a vicious sexual predator.
Throughout the marathon confession, Harry pressed Evelyn to tell him every detail she could ever remember about White. As the night wore on and Evelyn stared out the window, the fabled lights of the city of love seemed to dissolve. Neither she nor Harry heard the rumblings of carriages or the sounds of an occasional motorcar, which gradually faded, then returned with the first light of day.
After the harrowing night of Evelyn’s admission to “filthy ruin,” the other unpleasant situation, the stewing Mrs. Nesbit in London, had approached its boiling point. Having been “stranded” for almost a week, with the faithful Bedford acting as gentleman-in-waiting for her and Harry paying $1,000 for expenses that had been run up in that week alone, Mrs. Nesbit took matters into her hands the only way she knew how—she cabled Stanford White for money to come home.
Mrs. Nesbit also began official proceedings to charge Thaw with the crime of “corrupting the morals of a minor,” whom he had transported from country to country. Insinuating that Thaw had kidnapped her daughter, Mrs. Nesbit found herself in a position of power, if only temporarily. Initially, Harry laughed and tried to pass it all off as a “tempest in a teacup.” Then he called his business lawyer, a Mr. Longfellow, who said he would look into it, but that Harry should be very cautious of criminal charges, especially in a foreign country. Since technically Evelyn wa
s “seventeen and three-quarters old,” the charge Mrs. Nesbit made against Harry was valid. And if he continued on his present course, there would an armory full of legal ammunition aimed against him. He needed to be scrupulously careful “while traveling with the girl on the Continent.” He told Harry in no uncertain terms that he could not cross any more lines. It fell, of course, on wild, deaf ears.
Back in New York, after receiving Mamma Nesbit’s angry request for passage home, and after some calculations regarding his own risk (and more than a few curses), White, fearful that his illicit relations with Evelyn would somehow become public if the matter of her irate mother wasn’t handled quietly, decided to send Mrs. Nesbit the funds to return to America. The charge she finally lodged against Harry was, in effect, kidnapping a minor. Of course, Craig Wadsworth was unaware that both Harry and Stanny feared the same thing—exposure on an international level with regard to their unwholesome involvement with the still-underage Evelyn. But, once Mamma Nesbit was safely back in New York, Thaw would interpret White’s intervention as further proof of the architect’s guilt and misdeeds with regard to “the minor child” and her mother’s complicity.
So Mamma Nesbit left her teenage daughter. Again. This time in another country and in the hands of a man she knew could easily come unhinged and was prone to violence. With her thankless and wearying mother out of the picture, an exasperated Evelyn decided to make the best of the situation. An alternately euphoric and tortured Harry was now free to continue the European holiday with his Angel-Child unencumbered, all the while letting the image of her sexual ruination fester, then run through the murky channels of his brain.
At first Evelyn’s emotions ran the gamut from elation to relief to cautious apprehension to anxiety, waiting instinctively for the sword of Damocles to come down on her pretty neck in retribution for her own shameful behavior in her affair with Stanny. Although he hadn’t expressed it, Evelyn knew that Harry must have harbored some ill feeling toward her, however much an innocent victim he said he believed she was when White plied her with alcohol and stole her virginity. But in place of anger or chastisement or punishment, Harry seemed doggedly determined to fill their days with a frenetic and expensive agenda. Just as before, they snaked their way through countries. They crossed the Channel back to England and visited the cathedrals in Lincoln and York. As they studied one magnificent series of stained-glass windows, Evelyn considered mentioning how she had posed as an angel for Violet Oakley on several occasions. She decided not to mention it.
GRIMMER THAN GRIMM
Almost imperceptibly at first, then far more noticeably, Harry shed layer after layer of his solicitous demeanor. He began to make oblique references to Evelyn’s “deflowering.” Wherever they went, if the opportunity presented itself, Harry would sidle up behind her and point out the statues or icons of the Virgin Mother, virtuous saints, and young girl martyrs who chose to die rather than give in to sin and temptation. In Domrémy, France, the birthplace of Joan of Arc, Harry wrote in the guestbook, “she would not have been a virgin if Stanford White had been around.” There were fleeting moments when his sharp gaze and occasional incoherent murmuring made the hairs on the back of Evelyn’s neck tingle, even though “he had done nothing untoward at that time.” Wherever they traveled, Harry maintained separate rooms, in accordance with proper custom and a show of respectful decency, unable, he said, to find a suitable chaperone in each city, particularly given their almost frantic pace. They crossed to Holland, went up the Rhine to Munich, moved on to Innsbruck—and then came to a bona fide castle in the Tyrol. It was anything but enchanted.
After following Harry’s ridiculously frenetic and tiring itinerary, visiting a new city nearly every two days, Evelyn discovered that Harry, in his usual display of entitled excess, had rented a castle, the Schloss-Katzenstein (and its serving staff of two), for three full weeks. After such a frenzied pace, Evelyn was grateful for the idea of an extended respite and imagined something with storybook charm, something that might look like the “quaint backdrop of a musical comedy. Or a Brueghel.” Instead, wholly isolated a third of the way up a steep mountain, the ancient structure was a huge Gothic nightmare of cold stones and dimly lit, drafty passageways, grimmer than anything in the Grimm brothers’ tales, and for the last two hundred yards or so reachable only by a narrow footpath.
Acting fully the part of the meister, with straight-backed “Teutonic severity,” from the minute they arrived, Harry ordered the servants to carry out his every wish, as if he were right at home. After a day or two of somewhat strenuous sightseeing in the surrounding densely forested countryside, the couple returned to the castle. Harry casually mentioned that he had dismissed the staff for the night. Fatigued and preoccupied that her hair, while growing back beneath her wig, was still extremely short and positively unfeminine, Evelyn did not give any thought to the fact that she and Harry would be utterly alone in their remote part of the castle. She decided to go to bed before the flush of Harry’s good mood disappeared and his thoughts turned to Stanford White. Immediately after finishing the dinner that had been prepared and left for them, Evelyn said that she was retiring for the night. Harry raised no objections, kissed her chastely on the forehead as he had throughout their European holiday, and sent her off to bed in her room where, having barely taken off her wig, she fell into a deep sleep almost immediately, her head characteristically beneath her pillow.
Since the fallen Angel-Child had folded herself so quickly into sleep, she did not hear the lock turning only fifteen minutes or so later. Nor did she see the shaft of bluish white light that was thrown across her room. Before she had any idea what was happening, a bug-eyed, seething, and startlingly naked Harry, who loomed directly in the light, threw the pillow and covers aside and woke Evelyn with an angry slashing blow across her legs with a leather riding crop. A startled Evelyn sprang up with a scream, whereupon Harry tore furiously at her nightgown. He broke off the small, pearly buttons and tossed the gown to the floor, next to where her pillow and some of the buttons had landed.
Before she could even react, he pulled at, then ripped apart her delicately made underclothes with one hand while hitting her repeatedly with the other, wielding the small whip with a savage and practiced dexterity. The stripped and cowering Evelyn, looking so much like a prepubescent boy with her slender figure and cropped hair, seemed to both agitate and excite Harry, whose not-so-deeply buried affinity for boys had already emerged in London (it had been discussed in hushed tones among certain of the darkest circles he traveled in since his late teens).
With each bruising lash to her soft skin, Evelyn pleaded with Harry to stop, but the more she protested and tried to fend off his blows, the harder he came at her, railing about sinfulness and shameful indecency. He seemed completely insensible to her panicked distress, and afterward she would swear there were moments when he didn’t recognize her at all, his pupils unnaturally marked and dilated. At one point, the sweat-covered Thaw stopped, but only to catch his breath and regain his momentum. And then what was already terrible turned horrible.
Harry, whose chest was nearly hairless and shining with moisture, pinned the stunned and bleeding once-golden girl on her back. Holding her down with the riding crop across her narrow shoulders, he proceeded to rape her. Throughout the incident, as she tightened her eyes and every muscle in her body, she fought against the smothering acrid cigarette smell of his breath and overpowering heaviness as he pushed on her small frame. Evelyn’s mind raced as she also struggled against consciousness. She wondered irrationally in blurred flashes if this was punishment she deserved for her wicked and immoral behavior as Stanny’s mistress. She wondered if this was her fault for taking advantage of Harry’s generosity under false pretenses. She wondered if, in her post-operative condition, her life was going to end in a castle in Bavaria—or if she would be able somehow to obliterate this awful scene from her mind if she did survive. As the rib-bruising episode jerked forward with its own insane force in ruptures
of light and dark, Harry pressed grossly and awkwardly upon her, grunting garbled phrases and screaming about penance and retribution, Stanford White, and blackened innocence.
After his fit of divine wrath passed as quickly as it came, a suddenly and disturbingly calm Harry pushed himself off the shaking girl and proceeded to interrogate her, swollen, then spent with his domination. The entire nightmarish assault had taken all of seven minutes. As more sweat dripped from his chin onto the chaotic heap of bedding and torn clothing, he bent over Evelyn, who was in an embryonic curl. He was vehement, his face corkscrewed in disbelief, asking, “Did you really believe White when he told you everybody did the things you had done? Did you? Is it possible?” When she stammered back “Yes,” an outraged Harry reared up to his full height and she put up her hands, thinking he was about to repeat his attack. Instead, he shouted angrily that it was not true, that it was a filthy lie. He screamed again into her face that there were lots of decent women in the world, “like his mother and two lovely, decent sisters.”
He towered over the bed where Evelyn lay whimpering, wholly defenseless, grabbing instinctively at the pitiful short ends of her hair, which he seemed to be fixated on. She shook convulsively and stared in disbelief at the streaks of blood on her outer thighs and arms, where she had tried to deflect Harry’s blows. After several more minutes of interrogation, which seemed an eternity, Harry left the room as suddenly as he had entered, without saying another word. And locked the door behind him. It was a pointless gesture, since with no Mamma, no Stanny, no chaperone, no money, no friends, no servants, and no way to contact anyone even if she could speak German, Evelyn was already a hostage to Harry as well as to her own fears and near hysterical confusion.
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