by Jack Finney
I'd like to have been there, standing down on that Broadway sidewalk, near 573, hearing that piano. If only it were possible to spend even a few minutes at some selected place and moment of the lost past, there are a great many I'd want to visit. But for me this may be the one above all. I'd stand at the curb out of the way, unnoticed in the dark between the dim street lamps. I'd glance out often at that strange Broadway and the clattering traffic, smudged lanterns swinging under the rear axles; I'd look over at the yellow-lighted windows and entrance of the vanished Metropolitan Hotel on the other side; but I'd watch the approaching pedestrians through every moment, their faces moving into and out of the wavering light of the street lamps.
A bearded face is what I'm waiting for, but there are a lot of them passing. I watch them all, then suddenly one of them turns aside toward 573 and I see his face. I finally know who the man coming to join Emma and Augusta really is…. And when I knew that, I would know the entire answer to all the mysterious events that followed.
But when I try to imagine that moment I don't see the face. He turns out of the pedestrian flow too fast for me, and is standing there at 573, hand on the bellpull, his back to me, before I can glimpse his features. I can't grab him and swing him around, can't do that here where I don't belong at all. The door opens, I see Emily Sallenbach's young face, politely inquiring; see the man's hat removed in equal politeness, see the back of his head in the dim light from the curb. Then he steps in, never turning, the door closing, and I hurry over, and from behind the door hear their steps receding up the long staircase.
Emily brought the bearded man upstairs, and when they entered the back parlor Augusta was sitting at the piano, her mother standing beside her. "Good evening, Sir, how do you do," Mrs. Cunningham said, as Emily recalled it, and the man replied similarly.
But Augusta didn't stand up and yield her place at the piano; she asked Emily "to get her a glass of water; when I came back with it they were all three talking together intimately, but I did not know what they said." Emily back in the room, Mrs. Cunningham and the new visitor sitting on the sofa looking at "some papers which were about the size of foolscap," Emily said, Augusta began to play the piano. "She seemed as if she wanted to occupy my attention," said Emily, who now stood politely beside Augusta.
Augusta played not ballads but polkas, and rather more loudly than Emily had done, and Emily couldn't hear much of what was going on behind her on the sofa. But she thought Mrs. Cunningham and the man extremely absorbed in Mrs. Cunningham's papers, and her young interested ears were able to pick out Mrs. Cunningham's voice saying she had come from her lawyers. And she heard her ask the man "if they were prepared to go, and she said to him, 'All things are right now.' " For ten minutes, the piano keys plunking under Augusta's fingers, the two on the sofa sat murmuring. Then Emily's visitors left.
The man, Emma Cunningham later insisted, was Harvey Burdell, and Augusta said so, too: they were all on their way to a minister's house where her mother and Dr. Burdell were to be married. Why the stop at the Sallenbachs'? Well, because after leaving 31 Bond, her mother and Dr. Burdell discovered that they'd both forgotten gloves. So Mrs. Cunningham suggested that she and Augusta would wait at the Sallenbachs' corset shop while Dr. Burdell bought new gloves for them; he would meet them there.
But Emily Sallenbach remembered no gloves; she remembered papers, and murmuring whispered talk. She hadn't been introduced to the bearded man, nor had he told her his name when she let him in. But some three months later Emily was in the house at 31 Bond Street; she saw John Eckel there and "I recognized him as the person who came to our house…. His whiskers were a good deal darker when he was at [our] house," she said, but she knew him just the same by his "very peculiar eyes."
If you think I'm going to tell you what that visit to the Sallenbachs' was all about, I'll have to fail you. For if Augusta told the truth, why stop at the Sallenbachs'? Why not all go to the glove store, buy the gloves, and on to the minister's? On the other hand, if the man was John Eckel about to impersonate Harvey Burdell in a fake marriage to Emma Cunningham, we can ask the same question: Why stop at the Sallenbachs'? And risk being identified later by Emily?
I can't see a connection between that strange visit and a fake marriage or a real one either. Number 573 Broadway is a short walk from 31 Bond: if the man was Eckel, why not meet at home where, locked in Emma
Cunningham's bedroom, the canaries trilling in Eckel's adjoining room, they could confer as secretly as they liked, no piano fortissimo needed?
If this were fiction I'd have to omit that inexplicable scene at the Sallenbachs'; or at least push it around a little to make it fit in if I liked it, as I certainly do. But these are real people. They lived in New York City in 1856, and the visit to the Sallenbachs' happened. So I give you the scene—Emma Cunningham and the bearded mystery man sitting at her corset-maker's murmuring legalities as daughter Augusta hammered out polkas—as simply pure Emma Cunningham. Maybe you'll spot something I've missed.
They left, the three of them; walked out onto gaslighted Broadway, and then west across town to 623 Greenwich Street, the house of the only actual person I've ever heard of named Uriah: the Reverend Uriah Marvine. He recognized the bearded man as the man who'd been there the day before to arrange the wedding. After he'd left, Marvine had told his wife he thought the man was in disguise because "I could see daylight between his face and his whiskers." His name, he had told Marvine, was Harvey Burdell.
Now tonight here he was again with his bride-to-be and her daughter as witness. Watching silently and secretly from an unlighted adjoining room stood a servant, Sarah M'Manilen, or McManahan, and her helper, this privilege apparently one of the rewards of working at the minister's house. As the Reverend Marvine read the ceremonial words, he eyed the stranger but this time under the gaslight could detect no space between whiskers and face. Perhaps he'd been mistaken about a false beard: no one ever said John Eckel's own beard had been shaved off around this time. A false beard over his own, of another color? Or not Eckel at all? I don't know.
But Marvine did think, and the spying servant girls said much the same, that the man's "conduct was singular during the ceremony; he stood behind the woman and appeared indifferent. The woman seemed to have more interest in the case."
Marvine pronounced them man and wife, and the man handed the Reverend a ten-dollar bill, which sounds pretty substantial for the time. The couple asked that the marriage not be published in the newspapers, and Marvine agreed; people did sometimes make this request. They wanted a marriage certificate, though, and Marvine said he'd have it ready next day.
Next day the man showed up for it, and again Marvine thought he "acted strangely. He held his head down, and did not speak with a clear bell-like voice." He looked at the certificate, and said it was all right, "and left with it." But the certificate wasn't all right: the man who said he was Harvey Burdell did not seem to notice that Marvine had misspelled his name Berdell.
At home Emma Cunningham, as she continued to be called, put her certificate away and told no one she was married now; not the servants, and not even daughter Helen. And only a day or so after the secret ceremony in Uriah Marvine's living room, Dr. Burdell arrived at Saratoga Springs for a short stay. The clerk who registered him had known him for years, so it was Harvey Burdell for sure this time. But he came alone: if Harvey Burdell was a new bridegroom, he did not bring a bride along. And sitting up in his room he wrote:
"Cousin Demis: … all trouble is at an end, I think. [Mrs. Cunningham] is a designing, scheming, and artful woman. All her designs were to get me to marry her; but the old hag has failed and damned her soul to hell. I would sooner marry an old toad than to marry such a thing as she is. Sam Weller says, 'beware of the vidders,' and I think he was right.
"… Dinner is now ready and I must close with wishing you all well and happy.
"In haste, yours &c.,
Harvey Burdell."
What next with Emma Cunningham? Well
, on November 4, a few days after the wedding, she took in another new lodger. He doesn't figure much in what followed, using 31 Bond merely as a place to sleep, but odd though this seems, the new lodger was no less than the Honorable Daniel Ullman, a prominent New York lawyer, and once a candidate for governor of New York who'd come close to being elected.
A week or so later Mrs. Cunningham brought in this lively nineteen-year-old banjo-playing kid, the son of a respectable Presbyterian clergyman. The Cunninghams knew him and his family, and he'd been coming around most evenings to call on the Cunningham girls. Now Emma Cunningham invited him to move in; at no charge. Why a non-paying guest? With three unmarried daughters on her hands, Mrs. Cunningham may have seen him simply as a prospective son-in-law, and it's true that he was soon spending a lot of time with fifteen-year-old Helen. But the name George Vail Snodgrass was also "pretty well known about the saloons of the Fifteenth Ward," a reporter later said, and many people came to believe that Emma Cunningham brought him into the house as an ally in what her plans demanded next.
To Dr. Burdell things seemed quiet, the agreement of last month signed and apparently accepted; on November 13, about the time Snodgrass moved in, Burdell wrote, "Cousin Demis … There is no trouble now between me and Mrs. Cunningham. I think Mrs. C. will not make any more disturbance, and that she will be quiet and leave No. 31 Bond-street as soon as she can with a good grace.
"If you would like to come to this City, I have no objections, but it would not be proper to come to No. 31 Bond-street, as long as the old 'she devil' stays here—that is to live here…. I shall certainly get rid of Mrs. Cunningham by Spring, and I may gel rid of her now very soon, and when this monstrous b---h of Hell leaves I would like to have you come at once to New-York. I assure you, as soon as I can get her out of my house, I shall, and may the old devil take her to himself in the infernal regions.
"I will send you some more money in a short time…."
But he himself seemed closer to being out of 31 than his landlady. He was there now only to treat patients daytimes; took all his meals at the LaFarge; and he often spent his evenings out, too, coming home to go straight up to his rooms, to sleep alone behind locked doors just as though he weren't married at all.
While, without him, it was a pretty congenial group that sat down, now, around his dining room table, and at the kitchen table mornings: Emma Cunningham, I assume, at the table's head; the two girls, the two small boys, and the new men in the house—John Eckel, who enjoyed disguising himself, and the fun-loving, banjo-plinking, nineteen-year-old frequenter of saloons.
After dinner, the conviviality often continued. "Mrs. Cunningham and her daughters would ask for the pleasure of our company," George Snodgrass said, and they'd all climb the stairs to their landlady's suite. "We were all in the habit," said Snodgrass, "of going to her big sitting room." There, the gas jets lighted, they'd converse, and George would sometimes bring in his banjo and sing. He particularly liked what many people of the time thought in low taste: Negro minstrel music. Since we know Augusta was musical, it seems possible that sometimes she sang, too, and you can imagine them all joining in at times.
Occasionally they sat as late as eleven. Dr. Burdell often came home much earlier than that, having found nothing much else to do, I suppose. So it is easy to imagine him, too—though I don't know that this happened —sitting alone in his office or bedroom or lying on his bed, listening to them singing upstairs.
Snodgrass and the girls began to suspect that John Eckel was spending the nights with his new landlady; and so did a new chambermaid, Mary Donaho, a gossipy, inquisitive "little Irish woman, about 40, but neither fat nor fair." She said, "… when I went into Eckel's room I did not think that he slept there…. It seemed as if somebody ran in there, and threw the pillows about…. It was a handsome bedstead; it could be closed up like a bookcase." But Mrs. Cunningham's "large double bed," Mary Donaho thought, "looked as though two persons had slept in it."
"… I think Mrs. C. opened one of your letters," Harvey Burdell wrote to cousin Demis, November 19; and chambermaid Mary Donaho overheard an angry quarrel between the Doctor and Emma Cunningham, which seemed to be about Demis. " 'He wants to bring a woman of bad character here,' " Mrs. Cunningham told Mary later, " 'and I don't want her to associate with my daughters.' "
Mary seemed to have a nose for the action: later that same morning, after the Doctor had left the house, she was sweeping the stairs between the first and second floors, and watched Emma Cunningham appear with a key and unlock the Doctor's office door. Later Mary found occasion to come walking in, and found Augusta and her mother going through the Doctor's papers. "It was a very frequent thing," said Mary, "for Mrs. Cunningham to say that the Doctor was a very wicked bad man…." Then something more menacing began to appear in Mrs. Cunningham's remarks. " 'It was time he was out of the world,' " Mary said she heard her say of the Doctor, " 'for he was not fit to live in it,' or something like that…." And a Dr. Wilson, walking into the house and up the front stairs to use Dr. Burdell's laboratory, also overheard Emma Cunningham threaten the Doctor. Wilson's first name, incidentally, was Erastus: one of the extinct first names—Uriah, Levi, Hector, Cyrenius, Sophronia, Alvah, Silas, Phoebe, Cephas, Demis—of so many of the people in the Doctor's life.
One day in December, Dr. Burdell called Mary Donaho, and had her help him switch the furniture between his bedroom and office. This put his bedroom at the front of the house directly under Mrs. Cunningham's bedroom on the floor above. Mrs. Cunningham told Mary she thought the move was made in order that the Doctor might hear "every noise and foot" up in her room, and it does sound like it.
Why the spying, the listening to each other? Does it seem like simple jealousy? Jealousy of Harvey Burdell would hardly be consistent with Emma Cunningham's behavior with John Eckel these days, but of course she doesn't have to be consistent; she didn't know we'd be trying to puzzle out her behavior a hundred and twenty-odd years later. Is it possible that Dr. Burdell and Emma Cunningham actually shared some sort of genuine feeling at the beginning? However less creditable some of their motives might have been? That maybe it wasn't all plot and counterplot but, however fierce her determination and will to survive, at least some of their bitterness toward each other now may have sprung from a disappointment this middle-aged pair felt at their own destruction of better feelings?
There's a gap for the entire rest of December. I wish someone— George Snodgrass, one of the girls, or Hannah or Mary—had spoken about Christmas Day, though. Were greetings and gifts exchanged in that house? Were there toys for Willie and George? Did the mail bring Christmas cards, which were enormously popular then? And if we stood outside on our walk watching for clues, would we see a tree in the window? With lighted candles at night? All we know is that George Snodgrass said Dr. Burdell was at home on Christmas Day, which surprised me. Personally, I'd have headed for Demis's.
Something seems to have happened in January, and I'd walk a long mile uphill to find out what it was that made Dr. Burdell suspect that John Eckel wasn't really just a man who happened to come here for lodging, but someone Emma Cunningham had previously known. Burdell, in fact, now became afraid that they intended to kill him, and to his friend Alvah Blaisdell he said something I find chilling: "… naming Mrs. Cunningham, her daughter, Mr. Eckel and Mr. Snodgrass … he said they had been in the habit after he had gone in his room evenings, of opening his door quietly, and when he turned round to look at them, they would pull it to, and would go out and go away, and he was very much afraid…."
He went to see the Stevenses, telling them, said Cyrenius, that he had "worked hard and got a good deal of money, and, said he, I am actually afraid to stay in my own house." A man was living there now, he told them, who "appeared to be a kind of beau to Mrs. Cunningham"; and, said Sophronia Stevens, Dr. Burdell "wished us to come there and see if we could identify him as the man who came to see us, calling himself Van Dolan."
But the Stevenses had had enough of goi
ng to 31 Bond. " 'Why don't you get the people out of your house?' " Cyrenius asked Burdell. "He said he could not, because he had let it till the first of May to Mrs. Cunningham. 'Then,' says I, 'why don't you leave the house? You are a man of means; I would not stay if I feared for my life.' He said he was very cautious, and thought he would stay till May, and get the house clear. He was very urgent to have me and my wife come up … but I didn't feel disposed to go, and I never went."
Scared though he was, Harvey Burdell stayed on at 31 Bond, and in an atmosphere now heavy with rancor, mockery, and increasing threat, the last week of his life began.
Another violent quarrel between him and Emma: Burdell asked her to sign a paper promising for sure that she'd leave the house on May first. But she wouldn't do it, Augusta joining the battle and actually tearing the Doctor's hair, he said. He then ran through the house, said Mary Donaho, yelling, " 'My God what am I to do with these people, they will at last have my life!' " Over to Broadway again and back with a cop, and Burdell stood out on the sidewalk with him telling the cop his troubles until finally Helen Cunningham called, said Mary Donaho, " 'Oh, Doctor, for God's sake come in and go upstairs, and I will get my mother to give you those papers.' " That brought him in, and Mary heard no more.
He got his paper (apparently there was only one), and next day brought it to Brooklyn to show cousin Demis; but before taking the ferry over, Harvey Burdell did something else first. This is when he went to Bacon's studio where his friend Mrs. Benjamin worked, and had her take this final portrait of his life.
At Demis's he showed her his pathetic paper signed by Emma Cunningham; both she and Harvey Burdell seemed to place extraordinary faith in the power of signed promises. "She gave it to him Saturday night, he [told me] he wanted to keep it and show it to some other friends, and then he wished me to keep it for him, he was so afraid she would take it again."