Only in New England : the story of a gaslight crime (14 page)

It jumps into a manure pile. It jumps to the end of the yard. It jumps the back fence and is found lying flat on its face. Doubtless it would have jumped over the moon had the gaslighters come as far as the mid-Twentieth Century.

Nevertheless, the phenomenon did all right. It made the contemporary press. It won mention in at least one history of the area (I looked it up). People flocked to Quahog Point in wide-eyed wonder. After several seasons of jumping, the Indian was sent to Brown or Yale or somewhere. To go on the track team? Not a bit of it. To go into a laboratory where grave Professors made elaborate studies of weights and balances which might be swayed by laws of gravity.

And finally comes the pseudo-erudite pronouncement, wrapped in the vaporous wordage of "official explanation." The sea voyage. Weeks on the rolling ocean must have imparted some mysterious pulsation to the wooden figure's center of gravity. The kind of wood—high tide and low tide—the location of Quahog Point— these are doubtless contributory factors. In time the impulse will probably evaporate, and-Sitting Bull will come to a standstill. End of phenomenon. End of legend.

Of course, the legend is funny. But behind it, something isn't. The trouble with that kind of mishmash is that it emanates from the minds of seemingly reasonable men. Listening to Needles Thorn, I had to ask myself: If Ph.D's could indulge such nonsense, what chance had light and reason in a place like Quahog Point?

Then I heard the Gero story.

Needles got around to it after I trumpeted some leading ques-

tions in his ear. Yes, he said, he had once worked for a spell for Senator Bridewell. At the Bridewell house? No, at the Kelp Company. The hired help at the Bridewell house was a couple named Gero. Who were they? A man and his daughter who worked there for a time. Man was maybe a Portuguee. Something happened (seemed like) to the daughter. What happened? "Well, nobody knows for sure, but . . ."

The story did not emerge in continuity. I had to clear it of digressive deadwood, tangled colloquialisms and much tobacco juice. Some of Needles' pauses and shrugs I may have misinterpreted. I am certain his deaf ear missed some of my queries—in particular, those he did not care to hear.

But here is the substance as best I could put it together.

The Gero story is not a long one. I am glad to make it brief.

The man's name was Joe. Joe Gero. Maybe he was a Portuguee. Maybe he wasn't. But the "Pointers" took him for a foreigner. There were numerous Portuguese drifters in the area, so it seems consistent with the background to make of him a surly peasant in corduroy whose Old World name was Joao.

The girl was called Lena. Joao's daughter, she had probably been christened Magdalena. Needles said he could not recall what she looked like—just a girl. A young girl? Well, youngish. Fifteen? Maybe. Sixteen or seventeen? Needles couldn't say. Trying to visualize her, I saw Lena as a shy, thin, pathetic little slavey with enormous eyes under a straggle of hair.

It would not be overdoing it to picture a Cinderella in the Bridewell household. Joao would have been the hired man, tending the garden and stable yard. Lena, the hired girl in the kitchen. Old Abby needed servitors, what with Captain Nathan a paralytic to be waited on hand and foot, and the Bridewell boys no less demanding.

So Magdalena is up with the chickens. She goes to bed when the last dish is done. In addition to the routine daily tasks, she

does the Monday washing and the Tuesday ironing, the Wednesday baking and the Thursday canning, the Friday sewing, the Saturday housecleaning and the Sunday dinner. She is paid three dollars a week, and she dutifully hands the money over to her Old World father.

It is not to be supposed that Lena's probable lot as a household drudge would have been abnormally Bridewellian or unusual. We have forgotten that fifty years ago many of our sovereign States were without humane child labor laws.

Little orphant Annie's come To our house to stay, To wash the cups and saucers up, And put the things away. . . .

An entire generation of schoolchildren recited James Whitcomb Riley to fond parents who, at graduation exercises, felt a twinge of sympathy for Orphan Annie. Yet never gave a thought to eight-year-old urchins in coal mines and little girls in pigtails slaving in sweat shops.

The golf links lie so near the mill That nearly every day, The laboring children can look out And see the men at play.

The lady humanist who wrote those lines early in the present century was considered an agitator. Nevertheless, I was surprised to learn that in New England, in the year 1910, children were still "bound out"—a condition I had always associated with servitude in the day of Nicholas Nickleby and Oliver Twist. So, to give Abby Bridewell her due, she was no worse than the contemporary pork-barrel politicians and tycoon industrialists who did their best to scuttle child labor legislation. Besides, work was considered good for children. Kept them out of mischief.

If the Bridewell establishment ran true to custom, Joao probably slept on a straw tick in the loft of the Bridewell barn. He would have smelled too much like a horse blanket to be permitted the house.

Indoors, Lena doubtless had the cubby off the washroom behind the kitchen. Not a bedroom (I inspected it), but a store room with space for a cot. From this nook a back stairway, narrow as a secret passage, went up to the second floor. I believe such recessed covert-ways used to be called the "servants' stair." But Needles Thorn seemed to know nothing of the quartering arrangements, and that detail concerning Lena derives from deduction. If she lived in the house, as was probable, those were the servants' quarters.

And so, in the autumn of 1909, Abby Bridewell finds the girl weeping over the laundry tubs, and discovers she is pregnant. That, too, derives from deduction. Not mine, so much as the town's. As Needles Thorn told it, "something happened." What? He was not sure. How would he know, he asked, blinking watery eyes. He wasn't there.

"It was just that Gero and his daughter up and left Quahog Point. All the sudden like."

"Did Old Abby fire them?" I had to shout it twice.

Needles' manner became evasive. "Don't ask me. Maybe they quit. Young fella named Cudworth—Hobart Cudworth—got the job as hired man. Next year Earnest fetched a lad, just a kid, down from Marblehead or somewhere. Had him bound out. Orphan boy name of Walter Jones." Needles squinted at the light bulb over his head. "Seems like the Bridewells didn't want another girl around the place."

"Why not?"

"Eh?"

"Why?'

"Don't know." Needles paused to ruminate. Then he arched a thoughtful squirt of tobacco juice at the water. He said with a headshake, "Unless it had somethin' to do with a rumor about rape."

"Rape? Who got raped?"

He looked at me, innocent-eyed. "Maybe nobody did. But it was funny, Gero and the girl leaving all the sudden like that. Someone said there was a baby born in Boston or somewheres. And Lionel leaving town."

"Lionel!" I exclaimed. "Did he leave Quahog Point?"

"Yessir, he sure did. Right around that time. Packed up and

went to an inland town north of Newport to live. . . . You can see how it might have been."

I certainly could. Magdalena weeping at the tubs one autumn day, and Old Abby standing over her like the wrath of God in black alpaca.

Old Abby (pointing a condemning finger): When did it happen? Tell me!

Lena (sobbing): Last summer.

Abby: Wicked child! Your father shall hear of this. Right now!

Enter Joao Gero, bowing over an obsequious hat to the chatelaine of the manor. He stands stunned as Abby tells him the news. Then, as realization sweeps over him, he rages at the daughter who has now deprived him of her weekly stipend.

Gero: Cachorra! You are a bad, bad girl!

Lena: No, Papa! No!

Gero: Mother of Heaven! That you should bring such disgrace upon the name of Gero! God will punish you!

They played it heavily in those days. Striding and gesturing. Bellowing about Sin and Hell's Fire and Judgment. Storming, of course, at the girl, the descendant of Eve, originator of man's downfall. Until someone—in this case presumably Gero—remembers that Adam was held partly responsible.

Gero: Who did it? Name the man! He must [in good Old World tradition] marry you immediately!

In spite of her desperate plight, Magdalena refuses to tell. Blows, buffets and promises of Purgatorio cannot force the name from her.

Gero: Who was he? Tell me, girl!

Lena: He made me do it! He made me swear by the Blessed Virgin never to speak!

Gero: Speak, or I will beat it out of you!

Lena: No, Papa! No! I couldn't stop him! I couldn't help it! He caught me on the stairs, and—

The terrorized girl goes into hysteria.

Conjecture that far, and it is easy to imagine a subsequent scene in the Bridewell parlor. Poor Cinderella has refused to name the man who victimized her, but the possibilities are strictly limited. It could hardly have been an outsider, for the girl would have told

the invader's name. An insider, then . . . and the possibilities narrow down to two.

There must have been a stormy interview between Abby Bridewell and the sons. I could almost hear the dignified shouts of wrathful denial from the outraged State Senator. "What? That common girl?" And the desperate disclaimers from Brother Lionel. "Girl in trouble? I swear to God I don't know anything about it!"

Conjecture. Entirely conjecture. Naturally the Bridewells would not have advertised it; Old Abby would have done her best to keep it quiet. In the end, it would have been necessary to hustle the girl, and her father with her, out of the picture. Everything must be swept under the rug. Nevertheless, such a business would take some doing. One can squelch a possible blackmailer, but you cannot hush a rape case if pregnancy is the consequence.

So rumor whispered around Quahog Point with the speed of mercury. Rumor that an infant was born in Boston "or somewhere" early in 1910. Rumor that the mother died in childbirth. Rumor that one of the Bridewells had been forced to pay. And if one of the Bridewells was a rapist, it wasn't hard to recognize the one. Earnest had his faults, perhaps, but he was, after all, a State Senator. And it was Lionel who moved to another town.

"Mr. Thorn," I queried, "do you think this rape actually occurred? Or was it just backfence gossip?"

He did not hear me.

One cannot shout the word "rape" across a waterfront, but I tried again.

The old man on the barrel gave me his final answer.

"Can't prove it by me. Wasn't there."

At which juncture Luke Martin burst in from the outer darkness. His face was crimson with cold and elation. He shouted, "Hey, I caught a beaut! Striper! Where's the scales?" Without waiting for an answer, he charged off down the wharf to weigh his fish.

On the drive back to the Bridewell house, I saw the road ahead of the carlights without seeing it. I was visualizing a scene in that

mean cubby behind the washroom back of the kitchen. A Prince of Darkness clutching white-faced Cinderella by the wrists, and no Guardian Angel to come to her rescue.

When we got back to the house, Ed Brewster handed me a drink. "Feeling all right?" he asked. "You look kind of bleak."

I did not tell him the story I had heard. But I could not repress the opinion that Lionel Bridewell must have been an unmitigated rat. It gave me pleasure to say so in his mother's parlor.

CHAPTER 10

That night sleep eluded me. I'm no insomniac—the infernal Bridewells kept me awake. A wind was up, so I could hear them moving around in the house, creaking the floorboards, trying the doors. Then, wakeful in the dark, I could see their faces. On the ceiling, on the wall, and under my eyelids.

I decided that I detested Abby. Earnest I had come to despise. As for Lionel, had he been downstairs, I am sure I could have joined any lynching party that gathered in the moonlight outside.

So far as crime writing is concerned, this was over-identification with the subject matter. It's not good. You lose your objectivity (or what story men used to call the "omniscient observer's angle").

A reporter should never lose his objectivity. He should remain as aloof as a camera. If he doesn't, he becomes an editorial writer or a propagandist. The one expresses opinion, and the other doctors the facts to suit opinions.

But the omniscient observer must never observe too closely. The absolute truth could be entirely too distressing.

And the writer of case histories should retain a sense of humor about crime. Such atrocities as the Bridewell case ought to be handled with the kid gloves of literary savoir-faire. Treated in

the light and almost whimsical style of an Edmund Pearson, or with the mordant detachment of a Roughead. Or in the scholarly manner of Rebecca West, who can discuss the most sordid homicide in such marvelously impeccable English that the reader forgets the crime in his admiration for the prose.

No, the true-crime story, like the Hollywood fairy tale—or for that matter, like so-called history—must be made palatable. Something we can swallow with large chasers of chocolate and popcorn. Much of published history is a euphemism, and for peace of mind it is probably better to serve it up with candy and cereal. . . .

Good Lord! All this because of a villainous rape that may never have occurred. It had me wound up like the alarm clock Luke had set for some 5:00 A.M. surf casting.

I groped to a bedside chair for my trousers. I found my lighter, and snapped the flare. The clock on the bureau said 2:18. I had been asleep for twenty minutes, and—

Someone was moving around downstairs.

Was that a faint smell of smoke?

I put on my trousers, found my bathrobe and went down.

Ed Brewster sat in his undershirt on the parlor sofa. He was dangling a poker between his knees, and staring dully at the fireplace. I noticed smoke reeling from a mound of charred papers— the smell I had detected upstairs.

Only the table lamp was lighted. With his face half in shadow Ed looked a little drunk. A pint of Old Taylor rested at his elbow. It was down a scant three inches, so I saw I was wrong.