Gilded Needles (Valancourt 20th Century Classics) (10 page)

“Us?” questioned Lena.

“Yes,” nodded Weeping Mary mournfully, “you and me, and everybody who lives around here. He talked of Bleecker Street and he spoke of West Houston and the depravity of their inhabitants and mentioned the Cities of the Plain, and he spoke how we should all be swept into the North River. A lawyer wasn’t safe walking the streets of New York, a clergyman wasn’t safe, a lady had best stay within her own doors. He said a family of respectability might go to the top of their house—to one of the maid’s rooms or the nursery—and with a pair of field glasses gaze down on the streets of Sodom and see things they never knew existed, moral corruption that stank and burned like hell itself. Looking over the congregation, you could see ’em all getting ready to ride home post and take out their glasses and hang out the windows to see what all was going on. It was monstrous exciting, Lena, but not much of a comfort to the widow.”

“
Nee
,” said Lena.

“She looked terrible shocked, the widow,” said Weeping Mary, “just terrible shocked, I should say, and wouldn’t speak to the minister after. Went right to the carriage, and that’s when I come up behind her and pluck the handkerchief right out of her sleeve. I think I could have got her hat and her stockings too, if there hadn’t been so many by just then.”

Weeping Mary received three dollars for the handkerchiefs and scraps of lace that she had brought—rather more than she had anticipated—and was about to leave when Lena stopped her with a question:

“This preacher?
Wie heisst er?
”

“Stallworth,” replied Weeping Mary: “Edward Stallworth.”

Lena Shanks beat an angry tattoo on the counter with her stubby fingers.

Chapter
12

In
1853
, when she was no more than sixteen, Lena Kaiser and her younger brother Aleksander came penniless to New York, from Bremen. At the pier they attracted the notice of a dishonest loafer called Cornelius Shanks who, when he was not involved in schemes to defraud assurance companies, practiced smaller deceptions upon immigrants and visitors from the country. However, it proved that he had met his match in Lena Kaiser—and he shortly thereafter married her. Between that time and the Civil War, Lena bore Cornelius Shanks four children: two girls, Louisa and Daisy, and twin boys, who perished of diphtheria in their second year.

Lena Shanks did not attempt to reform her husband, but rather asked that she be instructed in some skill that would increase the family revenues. Cornelius Shanks looked at his wife, saw that she was too slow in her movements ever to achieve greatness as a pickpocket, and that her English was too halting for her ever to succeed as a confidence trickster; but the fact that she was stout and wore voluminous skirts and capacious jackets suggested that she would do well as a shoplifter—and she did. At the same time, Lena’s brother, whose name had been amended to
Alick Kizer
, was apprenticed to a house thief, with equally happy results.

All went well with the Shanks family, and in a modest way they prospered in the apartments that they occupied on Vandam Street. Then, in the last year of the Civil War, Cornelius Shanks unluckily became involved in the infamous Confederate plot to burn the six major hotels of New York. He and his five hired companions had tried the efficacy of their scheme by razing a lodging house on Twenty-third Street in which fire three unmarried women had perished. The six conspirators were apprehended the day before the Albemarle was to have been torched.

In March of
1865
, Lena Shanks attended the trial of her husband in the Incendiary Plot, as it was generally known. It was a brief trial, really, considering the magnitude of the crimes and the half dozen defendants. Shanks was judged not only an arsonist and murderer, but a traitor as well. That he maintained that all had been done for pecuniary reward—he had no political beliefs—did nothing to mitigate the severity of his sentencing. All six men were found guilty, but only two were sentenced to death: the youngest because he had killed a policeman who was attempting arrest, and Cornelius Shanks, because the presiding judge—James Stallworth, only that year elevated to the bench—had discovered that the man had also taken large part in the Draft Riots the year before.

Although Lena Shanks had been long in this country, she knew English only faultily and had with difficulty followed the proceedings. When someone explained to her in a whisper that her husband was to die as a result of the sentence that had been passed on him by the stolid, imposing, hard-visaged man in flowing black robes, Judge Stallworth had already retreated into his chamber.

Afterward, she could remember only his eyes, infernally blue and shining, and his skin, white as the starched wimple of a nun. It was those eyes and that parchment skin that she saw again when she was herself brought to trial two months later on a charge of shoplifting from the charity bazaar at Madison Square Garden. Because she had testified briefly in Cornelius’s trial, only to establish identities, her English being too rough to bear up under more detailed examinations, Lena trembled lest the judge remember her.

Two witnesses were called, the young fashionable girl whose hand-worked scarves Lena had stolen and the officer who had arrested Lena and found the goods secreted upon her person. There was no witness called for the defense. The jury, not even bothering to move from the box, debated for scarcely two minutes and returned a verdict of guilty. Some substantial portion of the twenty-minute trial had been consumed in getting the young fashionable girl into and out of the witness box, a difficult operation because of the immense circumference of her hoopskirt.

Lena’s lawyer, a seedy man who made fifteen thousand a year by defending criminals with pointedly little enthusiasm, whispered to Lena that she was probably out of luck and pointed up to Judge Stallworth, who turned his candescent blue eyes upon her full.

“Lena Shanks,” said Judge James Stallworth in a quiet rolling voice, “you have been charged with the crime of shoplifting, and a jury of twelve peers has convicted you. It is my duty now to sentence you for that crime. Now before I designate the length of your servitude, I think that I ought to address some remarks to the court at large, and of course request that such remarks be entered into the record of this trial.”

He paused and looked around the court with a slight smile. His burning blue eyes fell upon Lena again and held her gaze until she was frozen as by the Gorgon; this although she could understand but a part of what the man said.

“The court has seen you before. The court has heard you give testimony in the trial of your husband, Cornelius Shanks, who lies now under sentence of death on Blackwell’s Island for the infamous crimes of murder, incendiarism and plotting to incendiarism and murder. The court had no doubt at the time, and has no doubt now, that you were part of that plot, though never charged. Your devotion to your husband in his black hours would have been perhaps touching were it not for the criminal perversity of your lives—a marriage whose foundations were laid in the quicksand of iniquity. You have played a devilish burlesque on respectable marriage; you have made a vicious joke of the blessed and holy institution of the family—the family which alone will be the salvation of the Union in these troubled times. I doubt not but that
the United States, which long ago should have won this internecine struggle against the rebellious states of the Confederacy, should now be at peace were it not for the likes of you and your husband and your unhappy unfortunate children, who have been nurtured upon the pestilent milk of crime.”

Daisy and Louisa sat in the row of seats behind their mother, and the children cowered beneath Judge Stallworth’s stern gaze.

“As an official of this city and as a staunch upholder of the laws governing this state and this country, as a firm believer in the principles on which this nation was founded, I deem it a solemn duty in myself, to see destroyed all such depraved families as your own. This city will not be blessed with domestic security, will never attain its full stature as the greatest city in the world, until crime is rooted out—until the boggy breeding ground of virulent godless vice is drained.

“Your husband, Lena Shanks, will soon die, and in the snapping of the bones of his neck, you will be deprived of your mainstay in crime. However, I am not convinced that this will be sufficient to lead you out of the morass of vice and therefore sentence you to seven years in the females’ prison on Blackwell’s Island. You will have the comfort of knowing that you are near your husband during his last days upon the earth that he made unhappier and meaner for his existence.”

The judge paused and eyed with satisfaction the reporter from the
Tribune
, who was taking down his remarks in detail.

“The court is not so insensible that it does not see the plight of your children, your worse-than-orphans, who, having been deprived of their father already in effect, and very soon in fact—though the deprivation of such a father can only be to their improvement—now must see their mother taken from them as well. From this bench, the court observes that the two children do not appear to be hopelessly mired in corruption and they are hereby declared wards of the court. They will be well provided for in an orphanage far removed from the pestilential streets where they would quickly have learnt all the reprehensible lessons that arrant depravity can teach.”

Lena had understood none of this address, until her lawyer leaned over and whispered: “Seven years on the Island, girls taken away.”

Lena sat stupefied, with her hands pressed against her breast in agony.

“The court has little hope that your seven-year sojourn in the female penitentiary will do you lasting good, Lena Shanks,” said Judge Stallworth, “and the court would have you there longer, but the laws of the state unfortunately limit the number of years you may be sequestered for the commission of your particular crime—though the court has little doubt you’ve committed others which, if proved against you, would have laid you beneath a sentence far heavier than the one the court imposes now. The court will enjoy, however, the satisfaction of knowing it has uprooted and broken apart a black tree which would have borne no fruit but that of corruption.”

Judge Stallworth, after blinking his glowing blue eyes several times, rose and left the court. A policeman stepped forward to lead the stunned Lena away, but suddenly recollecting herself she wrenched herself loose from his grasp. She turned and spoke rapidly in German to her brother, who had accompanied her to the trial. She begged Alick to take the girls away with him so that the court could not get at them; and she would fetch them back when she was out of prison.

Lena stared at Daisy and Louisa, who had understood perhaps less of what had happened in the court than their mother, and whispered “
Vergisse mich nicht
.” Their uncle hurried the girls out before any of the court officials thought to stop him.

Lena and Cornelius Shanks were at Blackwell’s Island together during May and June of
1865
but no communication, other than a single interview on the day before his death, was allowed her. Lena was not permitted to witness her husband’s execution, though it took place only fifty yards from her cell on the other side of a high wall, but with a substantial bribe conveyed to the hangman, she secured the rope that had been wrapped around Cornelius’s throat. It was brought to her with the noose tied and the skin of her husband’s neck adhering in shreds to the coarse fiber. Lena kept that rope still, in a locked chest beneath her bed.

For a great while, as she languished on the stony island, Lena Shanks was utterly cast down by the loss of her husband. Their final meeting had been brief, laconic, and tearless; but her grief over his death was genuine and intense. Her two little girls were being kept by relatives in Philadelphia but, the entire family being illiterate, Lena had no communication with them and had no idea whether her daughters were alive or dead, in health or sickness. Alick, suspected of a series of robberies that had plagued the inhabitants of Twelfth Street, had temporarily removed himself to Boston. Lena was alone.

Gradually, however, she gave over her grief, vowing in the midst of her misery that when she got out of prison, she would be leaving never to return. She of necessity had formed an attachment to her cell mate, a murderess who acted as the midwife to the women of the prison. Lena became her assistant and received instruction in the delivering of infants, as well as training in the equally practical trade of inducing abortions. When the murderess died, deliberately choking herself on a shredded prayer book, Lena took over her duties. She had, in effect, the run of the women’s prison. From other prisoners she heard of all the various dodges and schemes that were practiced upon the simple and credulous, and listened to all the stories of thieves and pickpockets and adventuresses; and what she had not known of criminal New York when she was rowed from the shore of Manhattan to Blackwell’s Island, she knew when she made the return journey on Good Friday,
1872
.

At that time, Lena had nothing to her name but the clothes she had worn upon entering the place and the rope which had hanged her husband, but she was fortunate in that she left the prison under the protective wing of a young woman who operated a bordello on West Houston Street. This enterprising soul, who had been sentenced to a brief three months for the unintentional killing of a Negro laundress, had suddenly conceived the notion of setting Lena up as the resident abortionist and general physician to the entire neighborhood of prostitutes. Lena was given a room at the top of one of these houses and on a retaining fee she treated all the ladies in that area. A couple of years later, when her protectress decided to move to Montreal, Lena bought the house for a nominal sum and set up an expanded operation—though the little room at the top of the house remained the site for almost all her trade. Now secure in her own mind, Lena one afternoon took the cars to Philadelphia, made inquiries into the whereabouts of her relatives, and found them after a couple of days’ intensive search.

Louisa and Daisy did not remember their mother well, but they had been so ill-treated by their relatives that they made no objection when Lena announced that she was taking them back to New York. Daisy at this time was fourteen, her sister Louisa two years older. Louisa, as the result of some illness that her relatives had not thought worth the expense of treating, had been deprived of her voice and been left wholly mute. Her hard aspect and general intractability alone had saved her from being set out on the streets as a prostitute, but Daisy had already been about her occupation for three years, since she was eleven. Her mother promised her, however, that she would be trained in the gentler and more lucrative employment of abortion.

Lena Shanks lived close within the building on West Houston Street and rarely ventured out. The safe house and her discreet trade were her protection against future imprisonment. She grew sullen and fat from her sedentary existence, but had never really lost the fear that next week she might find herself once more between the gray stone walls of the prison on Blackwell’s Island. Daisy Shanks had been instructed that, in that dire event, she should prepare and administer a generous cup of poison to her mother; and Daisy had agreed.

Judge James Stallworth, Lena knew, still presided over a court; and the one thing that Lena would not do for her ladies in trouble was testify in their behalf at trials. Though she had not seen him in fifteen years, the lacquered blue eyes of Judge James Stallworth still troubled Black Lena’s dreams. She had an almost superstitious dread of him, and had been greatly disturbed when she had seen those very eyes fixed in the egg-shaped head of the young man in Harry Hill’s place. And so soon after to have the dreaded name brought to her attention by Weeping Mary! It seemed as though the man had effected a wizard’s transformations and was creeping up on her in different disguises. Lena realized that now she must be doubly vigilant: the old man had slept for almost twenty years, but now was rising again, with awesome strength, and confederates who reproduced his burning eyes, or his hated name!