Gilded Needles (Valancourt 20th Century Classics) (31 page)

Chapter
48

The Phair household was now greatly reduced in size and consequence. The second maid had been let go, and the cook, whose principal duty lately had been to provide meals for Amy Amyst, Peter Wish, and the mute nurse, left each afternoon by four o’clock. Marian Phair took but scant nourishment, clarified broths and the blandest white breads soaked in milk.

Duncan Phair had been missing since Saturday afternoon. Judge Stallworth learned that he had taken himself off in high spirits after the arrival of a letter of unknown content, but that neither he nor the five hundred dollars that he carried with him had been heard of since. Judge Stallworth kept this information from Marian, and merely told her that Duncan was on important business in Philadelphia and would return as quickly as possible; but the judge’s unease over his son-in-law’s disappearance was overwhelmed by the revelation of Edward Stallworth’s discovery in the bed of an infantile prostitute in the Black Triangle. The Stallworths knew no end of trouble.

So that he could be near his daughter, and because he felt unprotected living alone in Washington Square, Judge Stallworth stayed his nights on Gramercy Park. Peter Wish packed several bags of clothing for him and brought them uptown; and Pompey, now the judge’s sole comfort in life, found new quarters in Duncan Phair’s bedchamber.

On Friday afternoon at four o’clock, while Edward Stallworth’s suicide was being heatedly discussed the city over, the mute nurse in Marian Phair’s room rang for Amy Amyst. That sounding bell coincided with the cook’s farewell before she departed the house for the day.

Amy came upstairs, and received a short note from Louisa that instructed her to travel to a little shop very near the Battery Park where she was to procure a specified quantity of a certain medicine; she must insist that this powder be pounded on the spot. Amy wondered why she must travel so far when competent apothecaries abounded on Fifth Avenue, but did not presume to question the directive; instead, she said only, “You know you’ll be here alone, don’t you? Peter is packing the rest of the judge’s things on Washington Square. There’s no one else in the house.”

The nurse nodded her satisfaction, indicating perhaps that despite her speechlessness, she intended to get along quite well. Amy spoke softly to Marian Phair, who responded not at all, and crept softly from the room.

A quarter of an hour after Amy departed the house on her errand, a cart, driven by a little Chinaman’s child—half Chinese and half Irish—drew up before the Phair house. Presently and stealthily, two Chinamen with blue quilted caps surmounting the queues that hung down their backs like anchors, jumped out of the peaked tent that was raised upon the back of the vehicle and lowered to the street a great square tea chest. It was painted quaintly over in red, blue, and gold with scenes of domestic life in Peiping and its lid was secured with a large chased brass latch. They carried it up the front steps of the Phair house, but were not put to the trouble of knocking, for Louisa Shanks opened the door and guided the two men to the apartment of Marian Phair.

The sick woman looked up when the Chinamen, nodding eagerly at her and smiling imbecilically, placed the tea chest close beside her bed. It smelt headily of camphor.

“Nurse,” cried Marian, for Louisa appeared in the doorway directly after the Chinamen had spasmodically bowed themselves out of the room, “what is this?” Her voice was strained and scarcely audible, and her smile was of the most clouded perplexity, for she was not even certain that she did not dream. When had Chinamen ever visited Gramercy Park on any errand whatsoever?

Louisa crossed to the window, saw the Chinamen spring into the cart, even as the boy was driving it off. She turned to Marian, smiled, and helped to raise her in the bed. Propped against her pillows, Marian gazed with languid expectation at the staid figures that struck indecipherable poses over the surfaces of the mysterious painted chest.

When, late on Thursday night, news had been brought him that his son had committed suicide, Judge James Stallworth evinced no apparent emotion. He thanked the reluctant, apologetic messengers, saw them out himself, and then retreated to Duncan’s study that overlooked Gramercy Park. He sat in a chair by the window, shivering with cold for no fire had been lighted. All night long, with Pompey sleeping at his feet, he watched the last of autumn’s leaves blow against the amber streetlights.

He decided to give over his judgeship. For future greatness of his family he had now no thought: Benjamin and Edward were dead, Helen was in the keeping of a deranged widow, Duncan was gone who knew where! Edwin and Edith, who might have recouped the Stallworth name and fortunes in a third generation, had been abducted and doubtlessly slain.

Only he and Marian were left, and Marian was perilously close to insanity. If ever she were well again, they would take refuge at Saratoga Springs, far away from New York and its tribulations, and there they would comfort one another.

It was a dismal prospect, and that there was plenty of money to keep them was a meager consolation for all the dreams and golden hopes that had been broken—and all broken within a single month’s time. The old man sat at the window until the rising sun had blotted out the illumination of the streetlamps, and only then, as if he had feared that morning would not come if he did not station himself against its arrival, did he lay himself upon Duncan’s canopied bed. Yet even then it was not to sleep.

On that Friday, Judge Stallworth attended to many things: Edward’s funeral, to take place on Sunday; his own resignation from the bench, immediately effective; and the closing up of the house on Washington Square. Late in the afternoon he took a hackney cab from the Criminal Courts Building, which deposited him at the end of Twenty-first Street, a weary and hopeless old man.

He walked slowly toward the Phair residence, and marked with some trepidation the large black carriage that was pulled up before it. Stopping abreast of the horses, he tried discreetly to peer into the black-curtained windows, but he could see nothing of those within. The coachman stared straight ahead and did not glance at the judge.

Just then, the mute nurse appeared at the street door of the house with a black veil over her face and a large carpetbag in her hand. She hurried down the steps and the carriage door was flung open to accept her.

Judge Stallworth rushed forward and clutched her arm. “My daughter!” he protested. “Why have you left her?”

Louisa grinned, wrenched her arm free, and climbed into the carriage. Open-mouthed with indignation and astonishment, the judge stared after her into the black interior of the vehicle. There, upon one side, sat two women, both dressed in deepest black, one of them tall and large-boned, the other grossly fat; across from them, also in fine black clothes, were three children, two of them the same size, and one much smaller. All five faces peered out at him calmly and without expression.

Just as the nurse climbed in, to seat herself beside the children, the smallest child giggled convulsively—a tiny laugh that startled the already astonished judge by its familiarity—and the door was slammed shut.

The carriage rolled off, but though the wheels were loud upon the cobblestones, they did not cover the screams of Marian Phair in the bedroom upstairs when, with the little strength that insatiate curiosity had afforded her feeble frame, she had lifted the lid of the painted tea chest and found her missing husband inside, carefully packed in shredded camphor leaves, with a hangman’s rope draped loosely around his neck and six gilded needles protruding from the livid wounds in his head.

Epilogue at Noon

No city has a shorter memory than New York. Two months passed—November with the last vestiges of autumn, December the harbinger of winter—and the Stallworths and the Shanks were forgotten. The newspapers, even the
Tribune
, wrote of other families, other crimes, and other sorrows. Dead or dispersed, the Stallworths and the Shankses were united in their rapidly acquired anonymity.

The buildings that had housed the Shankses knew them and of them no more. West Houston Street had been abandoned for the past eight months to a group of mulatto prostitutes, and Weeping Mary, who went no more by that name and had abandoned her old profession, was now the landlady of numbers
1
and
2
King Street, and made a sufficiency of income by gouging her tenants.

The Stallworths had fared scarcely better. The Twenty-fifth Street manse was given over to the new minister of the Madison Square Presbyterian Church; all of Edward Stallworth’s furniture and effects had been sold at an auction a week after his funeral, and the proceeds—Helen Stallworth’s whereabouts being then unknown, and the judge and Marian already departed from the city—purchased a handsome carved pulpit for the church. The house on Washington Square had been sold to a philanthropic organization, and each day several dozen crippled children played upon its square flat roof.

Only in the house on Gramercy Park, now owned by a steel industrialist recently moved to New York from Pittsburgh, was there the shadow of remembrance of the Stallworths. On New Year’s Day
1883
, visitors to the former Phair residence remarked to one another, “We were here last year this time, this house belonged to Duncan Phair. Terrible death, you know, murder never solved. What became of his wife? Handsome, stiff woman. And her father the judge, where is he now?” But no one could say, with any certainty, what had become of Judge Stallworth and the young lawyer’s widow. And those who ventured to reply to so idle a question made merest guesses: they were at Saratoga, at the Great Divide, at the bottom of the sea in the latest ship disaster.

New Year’s Day, by Marian Phair and her father, was spent in a small frame house in the Carolina mountains, at a hot springs resort that was scarcely habited in the winter. The judge and his daughter sat in a rough little parlor before a blazing oak fire and listened to Marian’s canaries singing in their cage. On the table before them stood two large pitchers of the water for which the place was known; and through the windows they could see nothing but the slender trunks of pine, the low spreading green needles of these trees, and the snow that had fallen incessantly since the day before. Pompey curled before the fire, and Marian read to her father out of the Bible: the Lamentations of Jeremiah.

Only a couple of hundred miles away, in a small house in Arlington, Virginia, two young women with their arms around one another’s waists stood at the foot of a bed and quietly toasted the new year with tiny glasses of wine. In the bed, Helen Stallworth, with a thick soft white cap covering her head, smiled weakly, and replied, “Thank you, Annie, thank you, Jemmie—I know that we’ll all be happy. . . .” Helen’s own small fortune, and what she inherited from her father as his sole heir, was more than sufficient to keep her and her two devoted nurses in genteel recuperation and indolence. Annie fought no longer in the ring, nor with her friend Jemmie; and no child was ever more devoted than was Jemmie’s niece ’Ralda to the slightest wishes of her benefactors. The only shadow upon this small household was Annie Leech’s terrible knowledge, kept both from Helen and Jemmie, that Mrs. General Taunton (who had procured the house for them) had been murdered in a Water Street tenement house on Christmas Day, beat to death with a cooking pot by an Irishman suffering with delirium tremens.

The Elfin Fair that New Year’s afternoon was in Sylacauga, Alabama, performing his newest trick, in which he tossed, alternately, five saucers and five cups, from his right foot onto the top of his head; when the astonishing pyramid was complete, he finished off by depositing a teaspoon and a lump of sugar in the topmost cup with an elegant switch of his tiny foot.

The Stallworth family, that had begun the year of
1882
with such arrogant complacency, was scattered to the four winds. Edith was the farthest removed—she was the darling of a small but elegant hotel on the bleak coast of the North Sea at Dagebuell, near the German border with Denmark.

Here Lena Shanks had taken up a residence in two very fine suites of rooms. In one she lived herself, with Rob and Edith; and the other was occupied by Louisa, Charlotta Kegoe, and Ella. Some of the guests wondered how it was that the hotel had been persuaded to accept guests that, although exhibiting quiet, retiring, unexceptionable behavior, were still obviously of an inferior social class. It was only the manager of the hotel and the hotel’s lawyer who knew that Lena Shanks had bought the place outright, on the third day of November.

A great New Year’s feast was prepared in the vast kitchens of the hotel, and served in the small dining room that was attached to Lena’s suite. Here the Shanks family gathered, closed the velvet draperies against the glare of the midday sun upon the gray North sea, and toasted the coming new year. For them was no more labor, and no more trouble.

After their dinner, all the family wrapped themselves in furs and walked out upon the beach. Lena sat in a great wheeled chair and was pushed by Charlotta Kegoe—who now wore real jewelry to hide that which was tattooed onto her skin. Louisa preceded them at a distance, giving a hand to each of the twins. Edith Phair moved at the side of the wheeled chair, searching for perfect shells which, when found, she dropped into a basket Lena Shanks held in her lap.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Michael McDowell was born in
1950
in Enterprise, Alabama and attended public schools in southern Alabama until
1968
. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in English from Harvard, and in
1978
he was awarded his Ph.D. in English and American Literature from Brandeis.

His seventh novel written and first to be sold,
The Amulet
, was published in
1979
and would be followed by over thirty additional volumes of fiction written under his own name or the pseudonyms Nathan Aldyne, Axel Young, Mike McCray, and Preston MacAdam. His notable works include the Southern Gothic horror novel
The Elementals
(
1981
), the serial novel
Blackwater
(
1983
), which was first published in a series of six paperback volumes, and the trilogy of “Jack & Susan” books.

By
1985
McDowell was writing screenplays for television, including episodes for a number of anthology series such as
Tales from the Darkside, Amazing Stories, Tales from the Crypt
, and
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
. He went on to write the screenplays for Tim Burton’s
Beetlejuice
(
1988
) and
The Nightmare Before Christmas
(
1993
), as well as the script for
Thinner
(
1996
). McDowell died in
1999
from AIDS-related illness. Tabitha King, wife of author Stephen King, completed an unfinished McDowell novel,
Candles Burning
, which was published in
2006
.