Gilded Needles (Valancourt 20th Century Classics)

  Duncan knew that Maggie had other attachments, though of their identities he was ignorant. That he was not her sole support was rather a boon to him—he forwent the febrile pleasure of jealousy but was untroubled by the tiresome burden of Maggie’s complete dependence on him. So far as Duncan was concerned, Maggie Kizer was the ideal of womanhood: quiet, intelligent, undemanding, beautiful, kind, pleasant, and desirable—not the less either for her bearing the telltale marks of the racially impure.

  Maggie Kizer’s father had been a mulatto, a slave brought up as a superior servant in a fine house in Virginia. Some years before the Civil War, he had escaped to the North and, passing for white in society, had married the only woman who knew the secret of his birth—a girl from Maine who was heiress to the fortune of an Abolitionist family. The young couple lived in Kennebunkport and Maggie was raised with her two brothers in the city’s finest house. A tutor lived in the attic and a dancing master was around the corner; Maggie learned the pianoforte, recitation, and painting on velvet. But in her third year in a ladies’ seminary in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, when she was sixteen, it was made public by her father’s chance meeting on the street with the brother-in-law of his old master, that Joseph Conway was half Negro. Immediately after, Maggie’s mother was disinherited by her family, and the grandchildren disavowed. Maggie was removed from the school in ignominy and went to live with her parents in a village in Vermont. Her two brothers went to sea at that time and she had never heard from them since. After a year of penury in Vermont, Maggie’s parents died in the explosion of a paddleboat on Lake Champlain, where they had been employed as maid and waiter, and a gentleman of the town took Maggie under his care. Soon, Maggie became pregnant, and was ejected from the village. She made her way to New York in the back of a cart carrying large blocks of marble for the students at the National Academy of Fine Arts, and shortly after her arrival made a visit to Daisy Shanks in her professional capacity as abortionist.

  Maggie became addicted to opium during her period of wandering indigence in New York. It was not only that the drug-induced dreams mercifully occluded the misery of her destitution, but that opium killed the appetite—and it was cheaper than food. If one got a very little money somewhere, the piecemeal purchase of the sticky globes gave one the right to remain all the day upon the bunks in the joint; and on those soft pallets in the darkened rooms of a blind cellar, days collapsed into hours and whole weeks passed as if they had been no more than a few sulfurous days. Once, she had trekked to the joint through foot-deep snow, and when she came out again it was to find that spring was full-blown in Washington Square and Battery Park.

  But one day, in that place that did not know time, a man on the neighboring mattress shared a sandwich and coffee with Maggie—food that had been ordered in from a nearby saloon—and asked if he might not take her back to his apartments. Maggie, grateful for his offer, accepted and accompanied the man to his flat on First Street. She remained with him for two months and they indulged their habit in the bedchamber rather than in the unhealthful cellar on Mott Street. But then he was arrested for the robbery of a clergyman who was doing charitable work in Five Points and sentenced to seven years at Sing Sing. Maggie once more was alone, and supported herself and her opium habit by selling off the gifts that the thief, who had been enchanted with her, had stolen for her sake. On one of her expeditions to Lena’s pawnshop, Maggie was introduced to Alick Kizer. She soon removed to his apartments in the house let by Lady Weale, and sometime later was married to him.

  Her opium habit had abated over the years, for she was no longer a miserable woman. She had no wish any longer to be respectable, for she had learned at great expense that respectability was a bubble easily pricked. She wanted only a modicum of comfort, security, and ease—and those she had achieved. But the poppy dreams were delicious, and her system still craved the drug. She smoked at home now, but occasionally had to make trips to the drugstore or to her old joint for more opium, though she purchased the drug in such quantity that these errands were infrequent. But now she must also replace her yen hock, the sharp length of steel with which the gumlike opium is prepared for burning in the pipe. The flattened darning needle she had employed for the past few weeks was imperfect and she liked to have the proper article; her fine yen hock of gilded steel, which had served her for eight years, was the metal finger that had pressed the catch of Cyrus Butterfield’s life; and in her haste to be rid of the corpse, Maggie had not thought to extract it from his body. She rather wondered at the rapaciousness of the scavengers that had taken the murdered man’s clothes, that they had even discovered the golden nail hidden in the lawyer’s breast.

  Maggie walked down Bleecker Street to Mott and then turned south. After only a couple of streets, the number of Chinamen to be seen was marked. They all wore long queues sticking out beneath round-crowned hats with cartwheel brims, wide shapeless breeches, and blue blouses beneath colorful quilted jackets. None appeared to take notice of Maggie as she approached, though she stood out easily enough on that poor street. However, when she stopped beside a group of four, lounging before a small wooden house and talking Chinese in low voices, one of them said sharply, “Who?”

  “En she quay,” Maggie replied, words which meant “opium smoker.”

  “Who en she quay?”

  “Dark Glass,” she said, and lifted her black veil so that the Chinaman might see the spectacles beneath. The Chinaman nodded to a slatternly Irishwoman with moth-eaten eyebrows who blocked the doorway of the house, and the Chinaman’s wife moved aside to allow Maggie entrance.

  At the end of a dark hallway whose walls were papered with letters that had been received from relations in China, Maggie knocked at a rickety door. A panel flew open, and a flat yellow face peered out at her. “En she quay,” she repeated, and the door opened. Maggie stepped through onto a little platform raised high above the cellar, which was filled with drowsy layers of acrid blue smoke, palpable and—at least to the devotees of opium—delicious. The Chinaman who had allowed her entrance stood obsequiously out of the way and Maggie looked over the room. It was about thirty feet long and fifteen wide, illuminated by a single lantern suspended from the ceiling; the glass in the lantern was of blue and green, and the place was but dimly lighted. On either side of an aisle running down the center of the room was a low platform, just wide enough for a man to lie at full length. It was roughly covered with a motley collection of bolsters, pillows, blankets, cushions, and mattresses. About six feet above this platform, and reached by short attached ladders, was another platform just like it, similarly cushioned. At the far end of the aisle was a doorway, boarded up on the bottom and barred at the top. The small room behind was better lighted and two Chinamen sat in there, playing a game with many ivory counters. In a large pottery jar between them were two dozen or so long narrow pipes and on shelves behind them were sets of the opium lay-outs—the apparatus required by addicts.

  Only a few of the two dozen persons in the room were Chinamen. In the dimness, Maggie could see that some of the addicts lay sleeping with their pipes resting lightly upon an outstretched hand, some were propped on an elbow patiently working the opium over the little green-glass lamps, some smoked their pipes in contented stupefaction. A couple of men shared a plate of food and a single cup of coffee. A prosperous Chinaman, his handsome Irish wife, and their ten-year-old son lay in a reposeful triangle, passing a single pipe between them. A three hundred-pound woman from a Bowery freak show was propped in a corner with her legs spread wide, trying to make her sausage-fat arthritic fingers do their business properly with the delicate yen hock and the tiny black boluses of opium. And a young man—evidently a novice—staggered down the length of one platform, reeling and convulsive. Though he bumped over others’ lay-outs and kicked others in the legs or their stomachs, no one called out or appeared to take any notice of him. Besides the Bowery fat lady there were several women in the room—none of them
so well-dressed as Maggie—who were indifferently placed among the men.

  But despite these pockets of shifting light and movement, there prevailed in the smoky blue cellar an absolute and stupefying silence. It seemed as if in that place, the sense of smell had subsumed all of hearing and much of sight. One heard nothing, saw little, but the smell of burning opium pervaded one’s entire consciousness.

  Although the scant, colored illumination, the fearful noiselessness, the pervasive sharp odor, the torpidity of all the inhabitants of that room could not fail to make a sinister impression on the casual observer, those who frequented the place knew it to be perfectly safe. No woman was ever molested, no man injured in a fight; harsh words rarely spoken were never attended. And though the place was the frequent resort of thieves, there was honor among them here if there was honor nowhere else. No one was ever robbed, though the jeweled hand of the actress dropped insensible across the breast of the pickpocket.

  Maggie descended the short flight of steps into the room and walked slowly to the back. The head of a reclining female figure swayed languorously, and a featureless voice from an invisible mouth whispered, “Dark Glass . . .” Maggie paused and raised her gloved hand in salutation.

  “What’s it like, Dark Glass?” cried the voice, a little louder, but with no more urgency than there was curiosity in the gleaming liquid eyes that were turned on Maggie. “What’s it like out there? Are they still burying the dead?”

  Out there meant all the world except this one room, and out there was an insignificant space by comparison.

  “Yes, Dollie,” replied Maggie quietly, “wait a bit, wait a bit. . . .”

  Dollie was an actress who, when not in work, had always retreated to the dens of Mott Street. Here she had made her acquaintance with Maggie and helped the octoroon when she was in greatest need of assistance. When however, in the first days of the year, it was found out at the National Theatre that Dollie had become pregnant by a member of the house orchestra and obtained an abortion of that child in the Black Triangle, the stage manager had refused to allow her to rehearse for the next production. Dollie had fled to Mott Street and had scarcely ventured out at all in over a month now.

  At the barred window, Maggie purchased a tin of highest-grade opium, five ounces in a small oblong brass box that was painted with red Chinese characters, the best yen hock that was to be had, and a dollar’s worth of the second-best opium as a gift for Dollie. She paid a little more than ten dollars altogether.

  When Maggie returned to Dollie, she was greeted vacantly—for Maggie’s presence had already faded from the hopeless addict’s mind. Dollie had got that name from her pink dimpled cheeks and her bright blue eyes that made her resemble a fine China doll. But now her cheek was faded and her eye grown cloudy; her face had fallen slack and her luxuriant black hair was hid beneath a greasy bonnet.

  Maggie lay down beside her old friend and, taking out her newly purchased yen hock, began to heat a small pellet of the opium she had bought over Dollie’s green lamp.

  Dollie leaned over and sniffed it. “Good dope,” she breathed. Despite scant illumination in the room, the pupils of Dollie’s eyes were contracted into points and Maggie knew that Dollie probably could see nothing but the flame of the candle in the lamp. Her only other light was the mixed flowing color of her dreaming. It was a wonder she had found out Maggie’s presence in the room.

  The opium was placed in Dollie’s pipe and the two women smoked. Maggie fell quickly into a slow soft reverie, a reverie that was untroubled by remembrance of distresses past or present, reverie untouched by anxious dreaming, reverie that was nothing but solace for the care that burdens all. She stretched herself softly in her fine green dress upon the stained ticking of an old mattress and thought, when she thought at all, of this small but sufficient world of contentment and security that lay in the dark cellar of an old house at the lower end of Mott Street on the lower end of Manhattan Island. No statesman inspired by a gleaming Utopia, no cleric convinced of the possibility of heaven upon earth, no philanthropist with expansive heart and unlimited funds could have created, or even imagined, so fine an existence as this one. It was no wonder that out there was a sordid, deceptive, cold place. Out there was that other room, the rest of Mott Street, the rest of Manhattan Island, the rest of the planet—where the light glared and blinded, where the wicked and the weary beat upon the walls and cried out their misery.

  Sometime later, Maggie Kizer rose and made her way out of that place, leaving the packet of opium beside her friend. As she slowly ascended the steps to the platform at the end of the room, the obsequious Chinaman bowed continuously, but did not venture to assist her. He opened the door and pointed down the letter-papered hallway. At the other end stood the Irishwoman who moved aside again to allow her passage. Maggie paused a moment and drew her fingers over the ideograms drawn in red ink like blood. Two ragged little girls with slanted eyes and red hair huddled just inside the door, chattering to one another in a mixture of Chinese-patois and heavily brogued English—their speech as mixed as their parentage. Maggie noted only that it was now dark outside.

  Slowly, through the Mott Street that was hardly less crowded at two o’clock in the morning—by a skeleton clock that stood in the window of a jewelry shop—than at any hour of daylight, Maggie Kizer made her dreamy, careless way.

  Near the intersection with Spring Street, Maggie came upon a cab that was discharging a passenger and she requisitioned it to take her the remainder of the way home. She climbed in and then, without having the notion that any time passed at all, she found that the cab had halted before her own house. Maggie paid the driver and climbed the steps of her building.

  “Mrs. Kizer,” said a voice behind her. She turned slowly, her latchkey in hand.

  “Mrs. Kizer,” repeated another voice, from a slightly different direction.

  Maggie lifted her veil and raised her dark spectacles. Two men in frock coats had come together at the foot of the steps. In one motion, they pulled back the lapels of their coats and revealed battered tin shields the size of saucers. Behind them stood a young man in a beaver hat whose hair and whiskers were like fire. They all stared hard at Maggie and she lowered her spectacles with a fatigued hand.

  “Come along now,” said one of the men with the saucerlike shield.

  “Why?” said Maggie. “Where?”

  “We know that your husband killed Cyrus Butterfield, and that you were a witness and an accessory. Come along now,” said the other.

  The latchkey fell from Maggie’s hand and clattered on Mrs. Weale’s front steps.

  Chapter 17

  Helen Stallworth, on the morning after her visit to the Black Triangle with Marian’s Committee for the Suppression of Urban Vice, did not attend breakfast in the manse, but rather sent word down to her father and brother that she was indisposed. Benjamin of late had developed the habit of detailing at breakfast all that he had done and witnessed in the Black Triangle the night before. Edward Stallworth encouraged these revelations, for from them he garnered material for his sermons. Helen was grieved by Benjamin’s amused voice, by her father’s satisfied reception of the anecdotes of crime and destitution; and she rarely read Simeon Lightner’s articles now without irrepressible shuddering.

  On the front page of Wednesday morning’s Tribune, as she examined it alone in her bedroom over a cup of strong black tea, Helen found a story of particular horror. The facts of the case, as reported by Simeon Lightner, were quite beyond her conception. The jumbled talk of streetwalkers with amber spectacles, opium addiction, escaped convicts, blackmail, murder, and corpse-plundering was like a gothic romance. Yet even after learning the miserable circumstances under which Cyrus Butterfield had been deprived of his life, and contemplating the hard-faced malignity of the courtesan Maggie Kizer, Helen did not waver in her resolve to assist the unfortunates who were forced by
happenstance and poverty to inhabit that sink of depravity and misery called the Black Triangle; and she had not lost the conviction either that membership on Marian’s committee would do nothing in that direction. Assuring the concerned servants that she was wholly recovered, Helen Stallworth departed the manse and went to visit an acquaintance whose small but fine house was located on Eighteenth Street near Second Avenue.

  Mrs. General Taunton was the widow of a Union officer who had died in the Battle of the Wilderness, and though this melancholy event was long past, Mrs. General Taunton remained in deep mourning for her husband. In fact, though she attended all services at the Madison Square Presbyterian Church, Helen Stallworth knew the lady only by her figure and unvarying dress—a stocky short woman in finest bombazine, with large bracelets, necklaces, and earrings of gleaming jet. A large pendant on her breast contained a coil of her husband’s hair, tied into a lovers’ knot. The veil that covered the face of Mrs. General Taunton was so heavy and so black that Helen Stallworth was not certain that she would know the lady if she were to see her without it. A carte de visite that Mrs. General Taunton had made up for herself and distributed to her affectionate acquaintances showed her standing beside a pall-draped pedestal on which rested her dead husband’s sword and military cap, while she—in exquisite mourning apparel—stood with bowed head and drooping hand in an attitude of picturesque inconsolable grief.

  Edward Stallworth sometimes lightly ridiculed this particular parishioner, but Helen had been attracted by the unflagging fidelity of the lady’s costume. Helen found her not lugubrious by any means, but rather of a somberly cheerful disposition. She had enough money to live comfortably in a moderately sized house in a moderately fashionable neighborhood which, to Helen’s surprise, when she first visited the modest lady, was staffed by a mob of servants.