Empire of Sin (32 page)

But Miss Mary Deubler—for now she could be known by her real name—just grew sicker. And when it became clear that the matriarch was not going to recover from her illness, it occurred to Anna’s parents that the future of their family was hardly assured. Mary Deubler had always been secretive and rather grudging about her financial affairs—“Miss Deubler was a very tight proposition,” as Tom Brady would later put it—and the contents of her will were unknown. Deubler had told several friends that she intended to leave her entire estate to Anna. But in early 1913 she had signed papers to transfer ownership of the Esplanade mansion to Brady, ostensibly in exchange for $25,000 in cash that Brady had given her “at various times during the last twenty years.” Worried that the ailing woman might also have left the rest of her estate to her longtime inamorato, Anna’s mother began to concoct a plan whereby the Deubler family might ensure their future prosperity. One day in late 1913 or early 1914, she broached a sensitive topic with her daughter. Wouldn’t it be a “wonderful thing,” she said, if Anna were to marry Tom Brady after Aunt Mary died? That way she would guarantee that everyone could continue to live together in the Esplanade house—as one extended family—the way they had been living until now.

Anna at first found the whole idea outrageous. Could it be that her mother actually wanted her to marry the man she had regarded as an uncle for her entire life? A man twenty-one years her senior? The man who had been living and sleeping with her dear aunt for well over a decade?

One can certainly understand the young woman’s initial aversion to the proposal. (Tom Brady, apparently, had no objection to it.) But Anna—sheltered as she had been all her life, and perhaps intimidated by the prospect of facing the world without the bulwark of her aunt’s fortune—was susceptible to persuasion. Over the next weeks, she talked with other members of the household about it. “Mrs. Jackson,” Anna said to the nurse one day. “Isn’t it awful? They are talking about me marrying Mr. Brady as soon as Auntie dies.” Mrs. Jackson confessed to being surprised, but didn’t necessarily think the idea was all that awful. “Mr. Brady can do you no good, but you can do Mr. Brady a world of good,” she said. “You cannot take Mr. Brady from the sphere he has been in and raise him to your level … but you can do him a world of good.” Mrs. Jackson also agreed with Anna’s mother that the marriage would keep the family together, and make it respectable for all of them to be living together under one roof.

The two priests Anna then consulted also saw wisdom in the plan. Father Anselm Maenner and Father Philip Murphy both felt that, under the circumstances, Anna would protect herself from scandal by marrying Brady. “If you love him and he loves you,” Father Murphy said, somewhat disingenuously perhaps, “I think it is the best thing to do.”

Eventually, Anna was convinced that she needed a protector, and that Brady would serve admirably. “I needed someone who would guide me,” she later explained, “and since Mr. Brady, all during my childhood, had shielded me and protected me, I thought he was the one most capable of doing it.”

At six
P.M.
on February 14, 1914 (Valentine’s Day, appropriately enough), Mary Deubler, aka Josie Arlington, aka Mrs. Thomas Brady, died, eight days before her fiftieth birthday. Her funeral that Sunday was an elaborate affair, with “
a line of flower-freighted carriages” winding from the Esplanade house to nearby St. Boniface Church, where the service was conducted by Fathers Maenner and Murphy. In attendance were many members of New Orleans’ political and sporting circles—including, of course, Tom Anderson, her longtime friend and business partner. But as the
Daily Item
pointed out, “
Though her life had been spent among the women of the demimonde, none attended the funeral. The only homage received at the hands of her companions were wreaths of flowers sent to the home and laid upon the tomb.”

Exactly one week after Mary Deubler’s death, Anna Deubler and John Thomas Brady were married at their home on Esplanade (with Tom Anderson again in attendance). Anna’s father, Henry, who later claimed that he was presented with the marriage plan as a fait accompli, was not happy, and he apparently showed up at the ceremony quite drunk. But he was eventually persuaded to give his daughter away at the appropriate time. (“
Take her, Tom,” he allegedly said to the groom. “You helped spoil her, now take your own medicine.”)

Mary Deubler’s will had been read the day before, after a locksmith broke open the safe whose combination had gone with the deceased to her grave. In that document, dated June 29, 1903, Mary Deubler left small bequests to her brother Henry, her cousin Margaret, and their children. But everything else, including the brothel on Basin Street, went to Anna—and so to Tom Brady as well.

The will, however, would not go uncontested. Three weeks later, Henry Deubler, claiming that he was “
done up in this deal” between Brady and his daughter, would file suit to nullify not just the will but also the earlier transfer of the Esplanade mansion to Brady. Apparently, the prospect of having a wealthy daughter was not enough for the man; he wanted his fair share of his sister’s treasure. He did not win his challenge, however, and the estate eventually went as dictated to the new Mrs. Brady. She and her aging husband went on to enjoy a seemingly happy marriage that soon produced two children. But the Bradys apparently spent through Mary Deubler’s fortune quite rapidly. By 1918, they were already being sued by their old friend Tom Anderson for failure to pay back some loans he had guaranteed for them. High moral standards, it would seem, could be very expensive to uphold.

In the meantime, Storyville had lost its reluctant queen. And on the very same day as her death, the District had suffered another blow. The
Daily Item
published a pointed editorial that day under the title
NO NECESSARY EVIL
. In it, the paper expressed the city’s growing discontent with the whole idea on which Storyville had been predicated—that prostitution and vice were necessary evils that could safely be segregated and regulated rather than prohibited. “
Segregation of immoral women has always failed,” the paper contended. “The result has been a worldwide awakening to the fact that the wages of sin is death, and that the welfare of the race is threatened by the widespread indulgence in vice.”

The message was clear: Just “putting the lid” on vice in New Orleans was no longer enough. The campaign to abolish the segregated district entirely would now begin in earnest.

SHORTLY AFTER SIX P.M. ON A TUESDAY EVENING IN February 1915, a stout, bespectacled man stepped down from the car of a local train at the tiny station of North Shore, Louisiana. The man had come to spend the night at the Queen and Crescent camp, a rustic country lodge owned by the exclusive New Orleans social club of the same name. The camp—located amid the marshlands and piney woods of the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain, some thirty-five miles northeast of the city—was a popular retreat for well-heeled urbanites in certain seasons. But now, midweek in February, it was all but deserted. Aside from the caretaker of the place, Walter Santa Cruz, no one else was there.

The arriving guest was W. S. Parkerson, and he was not looking well. “
I’m tired,” the now fifty-seven-year-old reformer said to Santa Cruz. “I haven’t slept in three nights, and I need rest.” Refusing the offer of dinner, Parkerson requested nothing but a cot in the dormitory with “three or four blankets,” and asked that he not be disturbed until morning. Santa Cruz quickly made up the bed and then left him alone.

At eleven the next morning, the caretaker went to the dormitory to light a fire and awaken his only guest. Parkerson was still in bed, wrapped in blankets. “Never mind about the fire,” Parkerson said when the caretaker moved toward the fireplace. Asked if he would come down to the dining room for breakfast, Parkerson demurred. “I’ll be off soon,” he said. “I don’t want breakfast.”

The remark was puzzling. No train was scheduled to leave the North Shore station for several hours, so where would Parkerson be off to? But Santa Cruz said nothing. He merely left the dormitory and went about his duties.

Three hours later, however, Parkerson had still not emerged from his room. Concerned that his guest might be late for the train going back to the city, the caretaker returned to the dormitory to rouse him. He found Parkerson awake but in desperate condition. “He looked as if he was bleeding to death,” Santa Cruz later told reporters. “Blood was all over the bedclothes. He was cut in the neck, and he held an ordinary two-bladed pocketknife in his right hand. I tried to take the knife away from him, but he wouldn’t let it go.”

“I’m full of blood,” Parkerson whispered. When Santa Cruz asked him what he had done to himself, the lawyer just repeated, “I’m full of blood.”

Santa Cruz ran to the telephone and called the sheriff in nearby Slidell. Within an hour, the sheriff was at the camp with a local physician, Dr. Outlaw. As the doctor attempted to staunch the bleeding, Parkerson admitted that he had inflicted the wound himself. Several months earlier, apparently, his young daughter had died of asphyxiation when a bathroom gas fixture in their home had malfunctioned. Parkerson’s grief at her loss had been unbearable. For months afterward, he’d lost interest in his job and everything else, and now he just wanted to die.

Dr. Outlaw and the sheriff rushed Parkerson to the North Shore station, where a train to the city had been delayed for his transport. They arrived in New Orleans at 4:45
P.M.
and were met by an ambulance, which carried the patient to Touro Infirmary. There he was put under the care of his family physician, Dr. Parnham, who pronounced the wound “trivial,” though he admitted that the lawyer had lost a good deal of blood. “Unless aggravated by unforeseen complications,” the doctor announced, “I think the wound will have no bad effects.”

But complications did set in. Over the next few days, Parkerson developed a lung infection, apparently as a result of the neck wound being left untreated for so long. He took a turn for the worse over the weekend, and at four
A.M.
on the morning of Sunday, February 14 (exactly one year after Josie Arlington’s demise), he died in his bed at Touro Infirmary. The cause of death, according to Dr. Parnham, was “an edema of the lungs, caused by septic broncho-pneumonia.”

In one respect, the death of W. S. Parkerson at this point in New Orleans’ vice war was symbolic. By the mid-teens, Parkerson and the earlier generation of reformers had all but ceded the field of battle to what might be called the new prohibitionists—the clergymen, social puritans, and club women who had risen to prominence in the wake of Carrie Nation’s late-1907 visit. Unlike their predecessors of the 1890s, who were open to negotiation with the forces of the demimonde, this new crop of moral warriors were absolutely uncompromising. They demanded outright interdiction of all vices, including drugs, alcohol, prostitution, gambling, and even tobacco. As a sop to these more stubborn opponents, Mayor Behrman (now serving his third term and in full command of the Ring political machinery) had taken on
a new commissioner for public safety in 1912. Harold Newman, an ex-lawyer and businessman from a prominent New Orleans family, came to the job with impeccable credentials as a reformer, so Behrman hoped that his installation as the city’s chief moral watchdog would deflect some of the mounting criticism of his administration. It was a shrewd move. Politically, Newman was something of a neophyte, and whenever his insistence on strict enforcement of vice laws became too cumbersome, Behrman had ways of circumventing his orders—as when, by special permit from the mayor’s office, Tom Anderson was allowed to employ a female singer when all other cabaret owners could not.

Unfortunately for the mayor, however, the city’s reformers soon saw through the ruse, and their honeymoon with the new commissioner did not last long. They were soon attacking the ineffectual Newman with a vehemence—and a condescending sarcasm—usually reserved for members of the demimonde themselves.
Two figures in particular proved to be consistent critics of the commissioner’s feeble attempts to clean up New Orleans. Kate and Jean Gordon, irrepressible daughters of a Scottish émigré schoolmaster, had come to reform as young women in the 1880s. Born to privilege, they had given up early on the idea of marriage and motherhood and turned their substantial energies to public service—mainly, to hear Kate tell it, “
because we never cared what people thought.” Such defiant confidence was apparently a legacy from their mother, a teacher from a socially prominent New Orleans family. “[Our mother] believed it was all right for a lady to go up to City Hall or a newspaper office,” Kate once explained. “In fact, she believed that a lady might do anything, if it were for good.”

As with many self-styled moral champions of the day, however, their idea of “good” was often distorted by class and racial prejudice. So while the two sisters fought for such laudable aims as female suffrage, public-health improvements, and child-labor regulation, they also lent their support to the cause of racial purity as embodied in Jim Crow legislation and the disenfranchisement of Louisiana’s black population. Worse, they held some astounding beliefs about eugenics. As heads of the Milne Asylum for Destitute Girls, they advocated for the forced sterilization of children who showed signs of a future in crime, prostitution, or alcoholism: “
Took Lucille Decoux to the Women’s Dispensary July 17 [for an appendectomy follow-up],” Jean once wrote in her diary. “This was an excellent opportunity to have her sterilized … and thus end any feeble-minded progeny coming from Lucille.”