Gilded Needles

  “You do not believe that to raze the Black Triangle and all other such areas would be a species of improvement to this city, Helen?”

  “Father,” cried Helen with earnest intensity, “I believe that our purpose ought to be to alleviate the misery and poverty of these people. If we could only insure them enough to eat and give them proper medical care; if we found jobs for the men and educated and clothed their children—why then there wouldn’t be any need for them to engage in criminal activity.”

  “It’s a novel idea, Helen, but I think that it ignores the basic disagreeableness of the human character. You’ve memorized your catechism, I believe, so you must know the definition of Original Sin, even if you haven’t applied its precept to the machinations of human society.”

  Helen was silent.

  “You don’t wish to argue?” said her father with raised eyebrows, holding out his cup to be replenished.

  “No,” said Helen, taking the cup, “you are an ordained minister of the Presbyterian Church in the United States and my theology I know is faulty. I only wish,” said she softly, turning her back momentarily to fill his cup again, but more so that she would not have to face him while she voiced a criticism, “that you concentrated more on matters of doctrine and interpretation in your sermons. I was very sorry when you abandoned the exegesis of Isaiah. I hope it will not be long before you return to it.” Her voice was plaintive.

  Edward Stallworth paused a moment before answering, and when he did speak his voice was sharp and ironical: “There are fifty-two Sundays in the year, with which fact I suppose that you are acquainted, Helen. And I suppose that you also are well enough informed on matters of church procedure to know that I preach two sermons each Sunday. Considering that I am generally absent on two Sundays in June taking rest at the seashore, I preach one hundred sermons a year. I have thus far delivered five sermons on the wickedness of the city of New York, I may prepare a dozen more. That is less than twenty percent of the number of sermons I shall preach in the course of 1882. It is insignificant when compared to the number of sermons I have preached in my sixteen years as shepherd to my Madison Avenue flock. I hope that you do not imagine that I do this for my own aggrandizement—”

  He paused for a denial from his daughter who, in truth, had feared just that, but she only weakly shook her head no.

  “You are correct, Helen, I do not. I have seen the opportunity to do some good in this city by drawing the attention of members of our congregation to the vice and criminality—and, as you say, to the poverty and wretchedness—that lie upon our doorstep. I do not do it toward the social or political or financial uplifting of myself or any members of my family, I hope you understand.”

  Helen nodded tremulously, for her father’s stern and cold voice made her now, as always, unhappy, and she was sorry that she had said anything.

  “You did not object last year when I preached on the African mission, I believe. In fact, I believe that you yourself composed prayers for the continued safety and health of our Presbyterian missionaries in the Congo. I see no reason to distinguish the natives of Africa from the denizens of the Black Triangle, which peoples are equally ignorant, equally vicious, equally unhappy, and equally in danger of eternal damnation.”

  “No,” agreed Helen.

  “No,” repeated her father, “and I do not know why you set yourself up against the ladies of Marian’s committee either, whose only purpose is to do good by eradicating evil. If the evil is brushed away, Helen, why then the good is sure to shine through. I do not understand why you cannot grasp this really very simple concept, which a child of three years would unquestionably embrace as a tenet for the operation of all the societies of mankind, past and present and to come.

  “So,” concluded Edward Stallworth, “I hope that you will go to the meeting of the Committee for the Suppression of Urban Vice with a different cast of mind; with an eagerness, I may say, to do what you can for this desperately wicked place we call the Black Triangle.”

  Helen nodded obediently, having allowed herself to be defeated, not by her father’s arguments so much as merely by his will to conquer; for Helen felt that she would be remiss in filial obedience if she did not prostrate herself before her father’s inclinations.

  “Yes, Father,” said Helen, after a moment’s sad reflection, “of course I shall go to Marian’s tomorrow and take the minutes of the meeting and do all that I can to further the committee’s laudable schemes.”

  And, true to her word, on the following day Helen was at her aunt’s house ensconced in a corner with a small tablet and a sharpened pencil. At the end of two hours she had noted only the observation of the fifteen ladies in attendance that “vice was a bad thing and ought to be suppressed” and the resolution that four carriages ought to be hired to drive them through the Black Triangle on the following afternoon. Fully half an hour was taken up in discussion of what sort of dress was most appropriate for viewing misery and crime, and nothing was of consensus but that each lady ought to be equipped with a heavy black veil, smelling salts, and plenty of pennies to distribute to children. Recalling her father’s injunction, Helen went along with this scheme without protest, but with inward misgiving.

  At three o’clock on the next afternoon, four closed black carriages made their way south from Gramercy Park to MacDougal Street, and began a small tour of the Black Triangle. Some of the streets were too narrow to admit the carriages, being blocked with evil-smelling refuse, the carts of vendors of rotten merchandise, heaps of burning rubbish which warmed the itinerant beggars, or simply with milling crowds of the poor who had nowhere to live but the back streets themselves. The progress of the vehicles was slow, being constantly interrupted by wagons that would not move and crowds that would not get out of the way and idlers who seemed to take some delight in annoying this caravan of overdressed ladies from uptown. More than two hours were required to make a circuit around the scant two hundred acres of the Black Triangle.

  The ladies, for their part, were almost immediately sorry that they had come. The odors were so noxious and powerful that they kept their handkerchiefs before their faces for the duration of the trip. The cries and shouts directed at them were profane and obscene. Nothing was colorful and nothing was picturesque and nothing was quaint; all was black grimy wretchedness and foul stinking misery. The children that they had thought they would toss pennies to ran up against the carriages with sticks which they broke off in the spokes of the wheels, or they tossed missiles of hard mud—and worse—against the sides of the vehicles. The sixteen ladies saw men sitting against the sides of buildings, in frozen puddles of their own sickness, and they saw babies—little bundles of filthy rag and bloodshot gristle—lined up in rows on the stone steps of a house while their mothers reeled in and out of a saloon hard by. They saw dogs tortured by laughing children, and a man’s skull broken open with a brickbat. And their drivers assured them that they had not seen the worst; but when the sun fell behind the houses along MacDougal Street, the ladies grew anxious, for the unfriendly faces in the street began to look positively fiendish. The caravan turned onto Broadway and made as swift a journey back to Gramercy Park as possible.

  The ladies gratefully accepted tea at Marian’s table and sat stonily silent in the parlor as they drank it. No one talked of what she had seen, and no one suggested any method to effect the suppression of vice in the streets they had driven through. The ladies, even Marian Phair herself, who knew more than the rest, had expected something else, had imagined a world that was more or less like their own, except only dingy and tawdry and dull. No one had expected that crime and violence, destitution and horribly degrading poverty would stare back at them with grinning toothless mouths and infernal gleaming eyes, like fantastical medieval emblems. The suppression of vice in a place where vice seemed the very foundation of life suddenly seemed to be too much of an undertaking for sixteen women who had nearly fainted from the effluvia of the streets alone.

  At last, when most
had had two cups of strong bolstering tea, one lady mentioned having seen a trained dog performing on a board held across the arms of its owner and another declared that she was sure she heard someone playing “In the Garden” on an untuned piano; and they felt better for these remembrances. Then Marian suggested that all meet again the following Monday and that every­one should bring a list of three things that might be done toward the suppression of vice in such a place as they had just seen. The ladies, a little recovered, took their leave; and Helen Stallworth, who on any other occasion would have remained behind with her aunt a while longer, departed also.

  Helen walked home alone. Though it was dark, the manse was only two squares away and she was known in most of the houses she passed. She had been appalled, frightened, and struck dumb by what she had seen that afternoon and she had come away with the conviction that she had been right and her father and all the rest had been wrong. There was no way to suppress vice in a place of such poverty and wretchedness. Crime was a material not a spiritual evil, and the only hope for the Black Triangle lay in the alleviation of its material misery.

  She had done her duty by her father and attended Marian’s meeting. She would continue to attend and take the scanty minutes of the gathering, but she had no hope that anything would come of the Committee for the Suppression of Urban Vice—certainly no more than a few indignant letters directed to the daily and the religious journals and perhaps a nominal subscription to help fund some charity for the improvement of redeemed Magdalens. Helen’s heart was punctured and bled for those who lived in the Black Triangle. And she knew that if she wanted to do any good for that unhappy place she would have to return there alone, but not protected by a carriage, a heavy black veil, and a bottle of smelling salts.

  Chapter 15

  Many citizens of New York were outraged by the Tribune’s having brought to their attention the existence of the Black Triangle, although they may for twenty years have lived within less than a mile of those ungoverned, ungovernable streets. Marian Phair’s Committee for the Suppression of Urban Vice was only the first of many such small, earnest, ineffectual organizations that knew more or less what they were against, but had no conception of how to scourge iniquity from the metropolis.

  A couple of days after the Tribune had set up the reward for information leading to the arrest of those responsible for Cyrus Butterfield’s death, an anonymous correspondent sent to the paper a ten-dollar note, which he requested be added to the sum. The Tribune printed the short accompanying letter in a black-bordered square on the front page as a laudable example of public-spiritedness, and within three weeks the reward was swollen to over three thousand dollars and rose with the arrival of every mail.

  On the morning of Tuesday, February 21, when the reward was at $3,340, Simeon Lightner received a note directed to the “Blak Tryangele Genntleman” at his desk on the seventh floor of the Tribune Building. The letter inside the soiled envelope was scrawled in a thick-leaded pencil, composed without much regard to the usual proprieties of spelling and punctuation:

  Dear Sire Ive envormashune fore yue abowwt Misster But­ter­feld meete mee 2day at hungree Charlys place in Washingetonn Streete at 2 Ime a ladye and yue can tele me bye mye yalowe kercheefe I wante the monye

  It was not the first such note that Simeon had received, and although he had appeared at all the places named and precisely at the times mentioned, he had learned nothing of value. Mostly, he had found, it was petty criminals who had written the notes in hope that he would show up with the money in his pocket and that he might be robbed or diddled out of it. But Simeon made these expeditions always in the company of either Duncan Phair or Benjamin Stallworth, and made it clear that he was armed. Then the informant either slunk away or else proffered information that was pointless or patently fabricated.

  This meeting did not promise to be any different, but Hungry Charley’s was a semi-respectable establishment on the river edge of the Black Triangle and not the sort of place in which he would be set upon. And since he was only going to meet “a lady with a yellow kerchief,” the reporter decided to dispense with escort.

  Simeon Lightner was not entirely pleased with the manner in which the Tribune’s undertaking had proceeded. Although he couldn’t object to its sterling success, nor to the increase in prestige and salary he had gained by it, he had the uneasy unpleasant feeling that he was being led about by Duncan Phair. The articles appeared in what order and with what emphases Duncan thought best, and were of rather a different consistency and tone than what Simeon would have produced had he been on his own. But since every­one else seemed pleased and since the credit redounded on him and Duncan took none of it for himself, Simeon felt he had not the right of objection. Besides, Duncan Phair, who was at all events a pleasurable companion, never made suggestions that were not well considered or that did not tend toward the improvement of the articles. Simeon tugged at his wiry red whiskers in exasperation over the fact that he could find no real reason for the distrust he felt for the handsome young lawyer.

  Simeon arrived at Hungry Charley’s half an hour before his appointed time. The restaurant was long and narrow, with walls and floor of red-veined marble. Twenty long narrow tables, sitting six on a side, were set with one end against the wall, leaving only a pinched walk space. The high ceiling was of white tile and a single lamp was suspended over every table. In the middle of Tuesday afternoon there were no more than fifteen persons dining, and Simeon had no trouble in getting a place that commanded a view of the entrance. He ordered a chop and lager and fell to his luncheon without any nervous hope that by the coming interview he would discover the murderer of Cyrus Butterfield.

  He had finished his chop and beer, ordered coffee, finished that, and been served another beer, before the “lady” came in, some minutes late. She was short, thin, with a sallow mean-spirited face, and had—as promised—a yellow kerchief tied around her head, as if she were suffering from a toothache.

  The woman looked around her uncertainly, and it was only when she appeared in imminent danger of being shown the sidewalk by a waiter, that Simeon stood and motioned her over. The woman with the yellow kerchief nervously pointed Simeon out to the waiter who, receiving a nod from the reporter, allowed her to pass.

  Simeon directed her to a seat at the end of the table, against the marble wall. He moved himself, and they were then some distance removed from any other diners.

  “What will you have?” Simeon asked.

  “Lager,” replied the woman.

  Simeon ordered two lagers from the waiter and in a few moments they were brought, with a plate of cheese and bread.

  “Bring the money?” asked the woman.

  “What’s your name?” demanded Simeon Lightner.

  “Lady Weale,” the woman replied mistrustfully.

  “Lady Weale?”

  “That’s my name, that’s the name my ma give me, ’cause I was born a girl: Lady.”

  “Well, M’Lady, tell me what you know and then we’ll speak of money.”

  “You bring the money?” she demanded again.

  “M’Lady, you are speaking to the personification of the New York Tribune. If you’re deserving of the money that is offered in reward, you will receive the money that is offered in reward.”

  Lady Weale looked sourly away, and sipped at her lager.

  “Now,” said Simeon Lightner, “what do you know of the murder of Cyrus Butterfield?” He spoke the question as if he had no idea of receiving any answer that might be of use or interest.

  “I know who did it.”

  “Who did it?”

  “Maggie Kizer and her husband Alick.”

  “Well,” said Simeon, “is Maggie Kizer a duchess that I’m supposed to know of her?”

  “What?”

  “Who is Maggie Kizer, I said?”

  “Maggie Kizer is the lady who lodges in my house. I live on the ground floor, Maggie Kizer lives on the second story.”

  “And one evening
, I suppose, Maggie Kizer and her husband strolled out, passed Mr. Butterfield on the street, who perhaps asked them for directions, and so, taking the question as an insult, they forced him to strip to the skin and then stabbed him through the heart?”

  “No,” said Lady Weale, who had not understood the ironic intent of Simeon’s imagination, “that’s not how it happened.”

  “How did it happen then?”

  “Maggie is a lady who receives gentlemen, you see what I mean?”

  Simeon nodded and Lady Weale went on: “And her husband was in jail—up at Sing Sing—and Maggie was entertaining Mr. Butterfield one night. I let him in the house myself, and she was entertaining him in the bedroom—if you see what I mean—and her husband, who was being let out of Sing Sing, came in and found ’em. . . .”

  “Yes?” prompted Simeon, who already found the tale more interesting than he had anticipated.

  “Entertaining one another in the bedroom, if you see what I mean.”

  “I do, M’Lady. Go on please. Madame Kizer then, I take it, didn’t know to expect her husband back from his extended visit in the northern provinces?”

  “She didn’t know he was to get out, if that’s what you mean, and perhaps he wasn’t, perhaps he ’scaped, if you see what I mean, so he comes a-knocking at the door, and I open the door to tell him that Maggie’s not receiving, for that’s what I’m ’bliged to say when she’s entertaining, but he pushed right on past me and goes up the stairs taking ’em three at the time and goes right through the door and I’m using my lungs, if you see what I mean, and Maggie I suppose jumps up, but Mr. Butterfield’s not quick enough and Maggie’s husband comes in—”

  “And stabs Mr. Butterfield to the heart in a fit of jealousy!”

  “No,” said Lady Weale, “not at the first. First he’s just going in, sly-like, and talks about duties of a wife and rights of a husband—”

  “You were by?” questioned Simeon, with a wry smile. “You were by for these edifying remarks?”