by Jack Finney
Burdell said they met at "a watering place" in 1854: Saratoga Springs, I expect, because he went there a lot. He thought she was "pleasant, ladylike in her appearance and conduct," he told another of his many cousins, and for a time all was circumspect: he'd stay at Congress Hall, while she went to a boardinghouse—and school—run by Dr. Luther F. Beecher, cousin to Henry Ward Beecher.
There has been some ridiculous fiction written about people traveling back in time to earlier days, but absurd though such books are, I wish they were true. Because my wife and I are mild fanatics about the Saratoga Springs of the last century, and when the Time Machine is invented we're going to nineteenth-century Paris and New York City, including a visit to Bond Street; and to Saratoga Springs, a gorgeous place then. Meanwhile we've made our pilgrimage to today's Saratoga to see what's left. Of course the magnificent old hotels are gone, one of them replaced—a requirement of the twentieth century—by a most ordinary shopping center, with asphalt parking lot, where women once strolled under parasols.
But Congress Hall Park is still marvelously there, many things to be seen in old photos like this, incredibly still there like this.
So again I was able to follow Harvey Burdell's steps, this time as he walked the paths of Congress Hall Park with Emma Cunningham. As they strolled—I picture them arm in arm—I believe she was thinking about marriage, because she would presently show in a variety of startling ways that she did desperately want to marry Harvey Burdell. Out of greed, maybe, for it seemed to be common knowledge that he was rich. Or possibly simply as a haven for her widowed self and five children. Or even from love or affection, no one can say otherwise, and he seemed to be attractive to women. I wonder also if for his own purposes Harvey Burdell didn't at least hint at marriage as they wandered that park and lovely town.
If he did, it's almost impossible to think he meant it, for some of his acquaintances told a Tribune reporter that "he was a confirmed bachelor. He was frequently in the habit of denouncing the sex in the most bitter terms; it was a favorite maxim of his … that no man who owned real estate ought to marry." The Trib man reported also that Burdell was a "man of large frame, full habit [which I take to mean good physique], very strong, fond of wine and women, and a frequent visitor at houses of pleasure."
So we have a rich, forty-five-year-old, man-of-the-world bachelor who, whatever he did or didn't hint or promise, seems dead set against marriage … walking the shady paths of Congress Hall Park with a smiling, attentive woman almost ferociously determined that he will marry her. The stage is set though there is no script; what now began happening to Harvey Burdell was improvised all the way, generally badly. Whoever was first responsible for thoughts of marriage, Dr. Burdell never dreamed where the pleasant paths of Congress Hall Park were leading him.
Back in New York, Mrs. Cunningham pushed the friendship; came to 31 Bond to have the Doctor fix her teeth; brought teenage daughter Augusta to have her teeth fixed. And presently Harvey Burdell was calling regularly at the house Mrs. Cunningham rented on Twenty-fourth Street between Eighth and Ninth. Living with her were two small sons, Willie (or Willy) and George, nine and ten; another teenage daughter, Helen; and two servants. Augusta was away, I don't know why. So Emma Cunningham had six people to feed; wages to pay; a boarding-school bill for Georgiana, her youngest daughter; and possibly she had to send money to Augusta. A man and his wife rented rooms in the house.
All this, incidentally, from the New York Times and Tribune, but I'll stop naming sources now unless there seems a reason to do it, because nearly everything in this account, and every direct quotation, is from one of those two papers or Harper's Weekly and Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper. When it isn't, I'll say so.
To me the reported facts of Mrs. Cunningham's life just now suggest that her money could have been running low. She'd received five thousand dollars' insurance at her husband's death, but that was several years ago. Anyway, she gave up the Twenty-fourth Street house, boarded at a Dr. Willington's, then, presently, told Dr. Burdell she had to find other quarters. Meanwhile, she'd need a place to stay temporarily.
That was easy. Burdell leased 31 Bond to a Mrs. Margaret Jones, who ran it as a boarding and lodging house, the Doctor continuing to live and conduct his practice there. Could Mrs. Jones accommodate a friend and her family for a few days? Certainly: Mrs. Jones's livelihood was renting out rooms, and she had several available.
So Emma Cunningham moved into Harvey Burdell's house, taking three attic rooms: for the boys, herself, and Helen. This arrangement of leasing a portion of one's house to a landlady sounds strange now but doesn't seem to have been then. It made sense: Burdell was rich but frugal, even stingy according to his servants, complaining of wasted coal and gas; and the arrangement was convenient and profitable. He collected several hundred dollars' annual rent; retained two large rooms on the second floor, a bedroom and his dental office; had a bathroom, which other rooms did not; and a dental laboratory, the use of which he also rented out: to other dentists of the neighborhood, Bond Street being a street of dentists and doctors. His bed was made daily, linen changed, clothes washed, rooms cleaned. And now, after only a day or so, Mrs. Cunningham said she was so happy here at 31 Bond that she didn't want to leave at all.
This was fine with landlady Jones, and so in addition to all the other benefits, Dr. Burdell had Emma Cunningham living snugly here in his own house. He must have thought he had it made.
I think some understanding is due Mrs. Cunningham. Even today it would be tough for a widow in her mid-thirties with five children on her hands. How was it in 1856? Infinitely tougher, I would suppose, and snaring this well-to-do man she'd met at Saratoga Springs may have seemed her last hope of any bearable future. And he'd promised to marry her, she always said. Installing herself under his roof meanwhile could have seemed the way to make sure he did.
It wasn't. She was under Burdell's roof, but right up under it: in the attic. While among the half-dozen other lodgers and boarders—and living right down on the Doctor's own floor, in the only other bedroom there —was his young cousin, a good-looking twenty-three-year-old separated from her husband and about to be divorced, to resume her name of Demis Hubbard. Mrs. Cunningham came to suspect the nature of the cousins' relationship, and saw Demis as a threat.
So she got herself pregnant, if that's the way to put it. Became pregnant, anyway, I don't know when. There's a lot we won't know of the queer developments of the next few months: it's as though we're seldom allowed inside 31 Bond but must stand waiting outside on the walk. Now and then a window is suddenly raised just long enough to overhear a sentence or two, a few angry words or a fragment of servants' gossip, before it is slammed shut again. Or the front door opens momentarily, and we see a departure or entrance or catch a glimpse of what's happening inside.
These holes and gaps could be filled: with imagined scenes, dialogue invented. But you can do that yourself, so I'll give you fact only and occasionally some surmise. Fact to the extent that I've been able to mine it from what has come down to us; if you read that Mrs. Cunningham's eyes are gray it's because a contemporary said so, and if I say it snowed it's because it did. And the surmise either labeled as such or obviously such. And supported; no idle speculation.
So not until Thanksgiving Day does the white-painted front door of number 31 open for us; and Dr. Burdell walks down the steps, turns east toward the Bowery, and Brooklyn, on an errand of some sort.
Inside the house, we learn from the newly hired cook, Emma Cunningham presently became ill. Helen Cunningham seems to have been out, and if the boys were home they were too young to help. The new cook was Hannah Conlon, described as "a genuine-looking Irish girl, of the most intense kind." Resting in her attic room, she heard Emma Cunningham call out from hers: " 'Oh, Doctor [or 'Oh, daughter!'], where are you!' "
The new girl said nothing. Silence for a time. Then it got dark, when things get worse, and Emma Cunningham appeared at Hannah Conlon's door. " 'My God, are you going to let
me die here!' " she cried out, as Hannah recalled it: her face was smeared with blood, her nose bleeding, Hannah said. She had fallen against the stove, Mrs. Cunningham told her, and cut herself. Hannah got a basin of water, Mrs. Cunningham washed herself, but by now Hannah seems to have understood what was really the matter. "I ran for a doctor," she said.
We're hearing very close to Hannah Conlon's actual words, I think, because both the Times's and Tribune's accounts jibe about as closely as we could expect of two reporters listening to Hannah Conlon as she described that day, getting her words down as accurately as they could.
But their editors had different notions of what was fit for their readers' eyes. "I ran for a doctor," Hannah tells us in the Tribune, "and when I came back, [the chambermaid] and myself perceived that she had miscarried. She said the child belonged to the Doctor." I don't quite believe "perceived that she had miscarried"; and in the Times Hannah says, which sounds a little more like it to me, "I ran for a doctor, and when I returned the other girl and myself saw that a fetus was in the chamber. She said that the child belonged to the doctor." Dr. Burdell came home, and—a physician, too—he took over from the doctor Hannah had called in.
So Emma Cunningham had failed, if that pregnancy was planned. But she often failed, usually failed: she simply never gave up. It took a month before she could even come downstairs for meals, Hannah said; but once she was up and around again, she and Harvey Burdell resumed going out together; were seen, for example, at Niblo's Garden, a theater. And since he didn't board with Mrs. Jones, taking his meals at a hotel, Emma Cunningham sometimes invited Dr. Burdell here for dinner. Had him there for dinner that Christmas.
But things weren't really the same, I suspect. I wonder if now, after the miscarriage, Harvey Burdell might have considered himself no longer bound, if he had, in fact, promised marriage. Because—another glimpse inside 31—Mrs. Cunningham now began complaining to landlady Jones that the conversation of some of the Doctor's patients "was not refined and ladylike; she said she thought they came here to laugh and to joke instead of for professional services." Some people said that among his patients Dr. Burdell had more than his share of young prostitutes; maybe Emma Cunningham heard more giggling behind the closed doors of his office than is customary in filling teeth.
But she never quit, and now she said she no longer liked her attic room, and arranged—which must mean she'd made a friend of her—to share Demis Hubbard's room down on the Doctor's floor. Enabling her, of course, to keep an eye on comings and goings there.
People who persevere often get a break. Mrs. Jones now decided not to renew her lease when it expired in the spring, on May 1, so Emma told Harvey she'd like to take over as landlady. That was okay with him, she signed a year's lease, and thus, from temporary resident up in the attic … then permanent resident down on the Doctor's own floor … Mrs. Cunningham now took over the entire house.
Jones left, and: "The Doctor fixed up the house very nicely, and got new carpets," a friend said. He also took Mrs. Cunningham's note for the annual rental; began taking his meals at the new landlady's table; and they continued going out together, the Broadway Theatre being one at which they were seen.
But Demis was still there. And the Doctor had another female cousin, Lucy Ann Williams; how young or good-looking I don't know, but a widow, and she and Dr. Burdell visited each other often. And then a third threat appeared on the front stoop. The Doctor had just hired the latest of a succession of boys he employed to answer the door for patients, run errands, lay fires, and so on. He was Samuel Ashton, fourteen or fifteen, who had to work, he said, because his father was "out West." The doorbell rang, young Sam answered it, and opened the door on what must have been a startling sight: a handsomely figured woman with a green head—eyes lost behind green-tinted spectacles, features blurred by a green veil. She'd come to see Dr. Burdell, and Sam led the mysterious lady upstairs, where Harvey Burdell took her into his office, and locked the door.
Mrs. Cunningham knew or learned who this visitor was: Sophronia Stevens, wife of Cyrenius Stevens, given names which I think belong in the same league as Demis. And whenever she came to 31 thereafter, which was often, Mrs. Cunningham set Sam to eavesdropping at the closed door of the Doctor's office, and reporting to her. He didn't hear much, but Mrs. Cunningham added Sophronia to the names on her hit list.
And one by one took care of them all. Each in a characteristically nutty way. For along with a determination so unwavering that it would soon astonish the city, the country, and most of Europe, Mrs. Cunningham demonstrated an equally persistent capacity for bungling. She is surely one of the classic screw-ups of all time, and one of the luckiest.
Lucy Ann Williams was first. One day, visiting 31 Bond, she was taken aside by Emma, who told her some disturbing news. They all knew a member of Congress from New Jersey, a Senator Vail; I don't know how. The Senator—actually a representative, says the Biographical Directory of the U. S. Congress, but they seemed to call him "Senator"—had received an anonymous letter, Emma told Lucy Ann, which said Mrs. Williams was not a lady of good character. Naturally Mrs. Williams went home, and wrote the Senator asking about this letter. He replied that it was true he'd received an anonymous letter saying bad things about her, but the odd thing was that he had never shown it to Mrs. Cunningham or told her what it said.
It didn't take Lucy Ann long to puzzle that out, and back she came to 31 Bond to accuse Mrs. Cunningham of writing the letter herself. Who denied it, there was a big blowup, and Burdell calmed things down: said he believed Emma Cunningham because she couldn't have known some of the things mentioned in the letter (which suggests, doesn't it, that they were factual?). He said he suspected one of his relatives had sent it.
Now, this goofy letter could hardly have fooled anyone, assuming, as I certainly do, that Mrs. Cunningham sent it. Yet it worked: Mrs. Williams "dropped Mrs. Cunningham's acquaintance," she said, and kept away from 31 Bond Street.
Demis got it over the Fourth of July. The Fourth came on Friday, Demis went to the country for the long weekend, and when she came back, her former roommate and present landlady simply wouldn't let her into the house. Standing on the stoop arguing, Demis finally had to turn away, walk back down the stairs, and go look for another place to live.
But these awkward victories seem to have come at a price. When eighteen-year-old Augusta, oldest of the three daughters, returned to New York to join her family at 31 Bond, Dr. Burdell and her mother were no longer getting along well; quarreling often, Augusta said. She didn't say what about, but it is a fact that Harvey Burdell said he didn't like the summary ousting of Demis; and it seems impossible that he didn't understand who had written the poison-pen letter about Lucy Ann.
The front door of 31 Bond opens again for us, and Mrs. Cunningham comes down the steps. Women wore hoopskirts then, or puffed out their skirts with layers of starched petticoats, so we can almost see her. Which way she turned I don't know, but quite possibly toward Broadway: lawyers often had offices on this main street of the town. Now—persuasion having failed to make her Mrs. Harvey Burdell—Mrs. Cunningham turned to the law.
In the office of an attorney named B. C. Thayer, who would eventually do far more legal work for this client than either now imagined, she instructed him in what she wanted. He was to prepare the papers for a breach of promise suit, for which she had some spicy material.
Thayer listened, then turned over the actual drawing of the affidavit to another lawyer, Levi Chatfield. This affidavit was later lost, but Chatfield remembered what it said. Emma Cunningham swore that "a contract of marriage," he said, "existed between her and Dr. Burdell sometime in 1855, in the summer or fall, to be performed about the first of June [1856]." What's more, "soon after the contract between them, Dr. Burdell stated to her that he had some property in real estate in New Jersey … my recollection is Elizabethtown…. That he invited her to go down and see it with him. She went … they were engaged in looking at the premises, as I recollect, until af
ter the train left Elizabethtown … by design on his part, making it necessary for them to remain overnight…. They stopped at the hotel, he came into her room, and … after much resistance she finally yielded to his persuasions."
Breach of promise suits were taken seriously, and she had the Thanksgiving Day miscarriage to back up her story, but again she bungled. Someone suggested to her that a complaint of seduction by a thirty-five-year-old woman with nearly grown children might not be impressive. So she brought her affidavit back to Chatfield, "and that part of it was stricken out, so as to leave the matter on the face of the paper as being a forcible thing altogether." She added that Harvey Burdell insisted on examining her as a physician, and that he produced the abortion—not what Hannah Conlon would testify later.
The suit seems to have been an ace in the hole, however, affidavit all signed, a summons on Dr. Burdell, dated September 16, prepared but unserved; she may still have had some lingering hope of marrying Dr. Burdell through persuasion. But now it looks as though possibly he began pressing her for money she couldn't pay. Because only four days later, on September 20, around seven in the evening, the front door of 31 Bond flew open, and Harvey Burdell ran down the steps and over to Broadway—it was this Broadway, the view here photographed in 1859—to call the cops.
When he returned with some cops he'd found there, Dr. Burdell told them that while he'd been napping, Mrs. Cunningham had sneaked in, taken the key to his safe from "his pantaloons pocket," one cop quoted him, unlocked the safe, and stolen back her own note for the annual rent of the house. In the house, the cop said, Mrs. Cunningham came rushing out of the parlor "in a tremendous rage," telling him not to believe the Doctor, that he had ruined her family and her, and—one of the first threats of violence we know of—that she'd have his "heart's blood, or something to that effect." Another cop arrived, and to him Emma Cunningham said "she was [Burdell's] wife by every tie that could be," and struck Burdell in the chest. "The Doctor replied," said the cop, "that she had been seen with men in a house of assignation, she then stated that he had upstairs instruments for producing abortion, he retorted that if he had them there, she had used them." Then as now in domestic disputes, the cops passed the buck, advising them to settle this between themselves, and got out.