Only in New England : the story of a gaslight crime (6 page)

"Wallace Ord stares at her. He can't say a word. As he tells it, 'I didn't say nothing. Nothing at all. I got up out of my chair and went to the corner. I put on my hat. I put on my coat. I put on my boots. I went out the door and closed it behind me. I picked up my bag and walked down to the road. And here I am,' he says, 'and what time does the steamer go? I'm not never comin' back to Quahog Point again.'"

And that was my informant's story. The steamer captain came up in a cab at that juncture, and Ed Brewster got out of his car to give the captain the special delivery. Wallace Ord climbed out of the coupe and started after the captain down the pier. Then, as the little man in boots and sou'wester moved off, he looked back.

He called back over his shoulder something that sounded to Ed like: "God preserve you from a stubborn woman.

CHAPTER 5

As we entered the kitchen Ed's wife exclaimed, "Men! I've been ringing the dinner bell for twenty minutes."

Ed said, forcing the door shut with his shoulder, "You know the wind in these nor'westers always comes in this direction. No use ringing a bell in the teeth of a gale."

"Well, there isn't much left on the dining table. Mr. Martin and I went right ahead. He's eaten and gone."

Ed's wife explained that Luke had called a cab to take him down to the Center to the telephone exchange. Business call to New York, and he preferred not to use a party-line phone.

"He said he might have to wait some time for an answer; would you boys meet him around four-thirty at the Anchor Saloon?"

We sat down to a feast of New England clam chowder that went far to dispel the weather's gloom.

"Hot biscuits," Ed noted with a grin.

Annette Brewster demanded, "Don't you always get them?" She said to me, "It's a fixation with my husband. If they don't melt the butter, he has a mad bird-dog fit. Men!"

After the table was cleared, Ed steered me into the parlor. There he opened the Bridewell album to the picture of a tall, square-shouldered woman posed on the front steps of a farmhouse. From the high-collared blouse and ankle-length skirt, I guessed the date to be 1900.

"That's Cornelia?"

"That's Cornelia. Abby Bridewell's side of the family. Earnest and Lionel's cousin."

Down South they would have described the relationship as

"kissing." I doubt if the adjective could have been literally applied in this instance. Cornelia Ord was not quite lamp-jawed, but her expression was formidable.

"You know," Ed observed, "I was kind of surprised to find her picture in this album. They didn't get along, her and the old lady. Especially after the auction."

Out came Ed Brewster's briar pipe, and with it another vignette of Bridewell history. It seemed that Cornelia Ord, grass-widowed by her husband's initial departure, had appealed to octogenarian Abby for a loan. Abby Bridewell held a mortgage on the Ord farm, it appeared, and in the bad season of 1909, with her husband gone and summer guests equally in absentia, Cornelia was hard-pressed.

Abby Bridewell turned a stone-deaf ear to Cornelia's appeal. Instead of offering a loan, the dowager aunt presented her niece with a demand for interest payments overdue. The demand was backed with a threat of foreclosure if Cornelia failed to meet the obligation.

"She had to meet it with this auction," Ed went on. "I can just remember it. There was a lot of stuff piled in the front yard, and to us kids it was like a circus. They bid off one of those big square grand pianos you don't see any more—it went for a song. An antique dealer from somewhere got it. I remember them carrying it aboard the steamer. It looked like a big, shiny, black coffin."

I could not help quoting: "Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal—but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven . . . for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also."

"Gospel of Matthew," Ed said quickly. "Hmm . . . The way I heard it, Cornelia Ord's heart was in that piano. Anyway, she never forgave Abby Bridewell. Especially when the old lady sent off to the city and bought the piano and had it shipped back to Quahog Point where she put it in the ballroom of the Surf and Sand for Lionel."

That, I agreed, was rubbing it in. I could readily believe Ed's recollection that there was no love lost. Stubborn Cornelia continued to sit in the Bridewell pew with her aunt and bachelor cousins. She came to the Bridewell house for Sunday dinners. As Ed suggested, "Why look a gift hen in the teeth?" But her status was plain to the townsfolk. From independent relative she had been reduced to poor relation—an embarrassment loudly and perennially advertised by the grand piano in the hotel ballroom.

"That was one place she'd never go," Ed Brewster said, chewing his pipe-stem. "Heard my father say wild horses, nor even the team they used to have at the Coast Guard, could have got Cornelia into the Surf and Sand. She was the sole and only Pointer who wouldn't attend the New Year's ball."

The New Year's ball. I gathered this was a custom dating back to the Garfield era. Year after year the Bridewells had opened the Surf and Sand for the occasion. Caterers were brought in from Newport. Hams, turkeys, pheasant, lobsters, baked goods, condiments and gallons of punch were moved in. For two days prior to the banquet the hotel furnace was stoked and the help worked overtime to put up festive decorations. It was an extravagant affair. All of Quahog Point was invited, and all of Quahog Point was expected.

"Everyone had always went." Ed made an inclusive gesture. "The whole town. Afraid not to, more or less."

"Afraid of Abby Bridewell?"

"Well, maybe some were. It wasn't just that she owned a lot of local property. She pulled strings at the Town Council and all that. Who's to be Postmaster. Who's to be dog catcher. Besides, quite a few of the townspeople owed her money. You know."

I could imagine.

So, as Ed expressed it, they "cow-tailed."

Particularly in that winter of 1910-11, after the ruinous collapse of the P. and Q. Transit Line. And most particularly with the come-down of Cornelia Ord as a local reminder of the embarrassment in store for the obligated who incurred a certain creditor's displeasure. The debtor who can't pay his bills must perforce pay his respects.

Ed went on, "Like I say, except Cornelia everybody was there that New Year's. I went with my father, who catered the lobster thermidor. I can still see, mind's eye, the tables and all the food

under a big crystal chandelier the size of an inverted Christmas tree. Earnest Bridewell's there in a dress suit. Lionel's at the piano, ready to sing a solo. Old Abby sat by the door in one of those big hotel-lobby chairs, and everyone went by her, cow-tailing."

I too could see it, mind's eye. The chatelaine greeting her subjects.

Subject: Glad to see you, Abby.

Chatelaine: Yes, yes, Cora. Another year, another dollar?

Subject: You're lookin' mighty well, Miz Bridewell.

Chatelaine: So would you be, Sam, if you ate more and drank less.

Subject: Evening, Abby; that new dress on you is becoming.

Chatelaine: Thanks, Henrietta; and I always liked that one on you.

Earnest Bridewell: Silence, please! My brother has consented to sing.

Lionel Bridewell: "I dreamed that I dah-dwell-elt in mar-arble halls. . . ."

Subject: Your Lionel certainly has a voice, Miz Bridewell.

Chatelaine: So has Earnest. You should hear his favorite.

Subject: What song is that?

Chatelaine: How he loves the dear silver that shines in my hair.

Happy New Year, everyone!

And that (as my informant phrased it) was the last "shee-bang" Abby Bridewell ever gave.

CHAPTER 6

Winter swept in. The old-fashioned Whittier-type winter.

Quahog Point was set adrift by a series of blizzards and gales that buried the peninsular road and left the village at land's end

as isolated as Nome. Community "togetherness" now mutated into household "togetherness" as neighbor became remote from neighbor, and each homestead dug in.

It was not the worst winter in local memory, but it averaged a number of weeks below zero. There were days when the natives on outlying farms could not get in to the Center. And days when villagers in the Center could not get across the street to Post Office or General Store. Pumps froze and wells solidified. A man had to dress like an esquimau to go from house to barn, and a trip to the village was like a journey to the Arctic.

Oh, those good old invigorating Currier and Ives winters of chalk-white snow and icy blue ice. To be sure, there were discomforts. The January cold petrified your wrists, and if you walked half a mile through the February drifts your ankles ached as though they were sprained. Houses lacked central heating and indoor plumbing. As Ed Brewster expressed it, a four-below night was no time to have the runs. But indoors you could be cozy. What if the feather bed became lumpy, and you cried out when your bare feet touched the floor next morning? Such minor hardships bred character.

Like Abby Bridewell's.

And Earnest Bridewell's.

And Lionel's.

Once more I could visualize them snugged in here in the parlor, elbowing each other raw. Prisoners. There was no escape. The windows were barred with icicles. The house was walled in by polar weather. Out in the vestibule you could see your breath. So you sat here by the fire counting your money, or counting your chances for money—thinking your thoughts.

Abby in her rocker. Each creak an irritant to a man whose nerves were in high tension.

Earnest pacing with hands behind his back. Cracking his knuckles as counter-irritant.

Lionel drumming on a sofa arm and wiggling a restless foot.

And by mere spontaneous combustion the quarrel explodes. About the high cost of living. About the price Lionel paid for the horse. About Earnest's proposal to sell the Trawler Company.

About anything at all, or nothing at all—a quarrel just for the sake of quarreling. But voices rise, pitching off-key. Tables are banged. Fists are shaken. Faces distort like rubber masks—the old lady's squeezed up into a clench—Earnest the color of apoplexy—Lionel squinting venom.

"I tell you, Mother, those bills were paid in full—!"

"Don't lie to me! Those accounts were padded!"

"Of course they were padded. Not only that, Lionel shorted the hotel dining room!"

"Me? Shorted the—hah!"

"Lionel! If you cheated again—!"

"Now listen to me! Why don't you ask Earnest about the Neptune stock? Ask him what happened to those New Bedford Water Bonds!"

"You know damned well why I sold those bonds!"

"Why you said you sold them, yes!"

"You're both lying!"

"That's not true!"

"Quit shouting!"

"Who's shouting?"

"Keep your voices down, you fools. Do you want the help to hear?"

So, as suddenly as it commenced, the tempest subsides, its wind expended.

Abby Bridewell rocks.

Earnest paces, cracking his knuckles.

Lionel wiggles his foot, and drums.

Something had to give.

Ed Brewster touched my arm, and I suppose I jumped. He grinned. "What were you thinking?"

"I was thinking that in the old days it took a heap of living to make a house a home. One of the virtues we have today, at least, is a chance for individual privacy. If you don't like the trend of a fireside chat, you don't have to listen just for the sake of keeping warm. You can go up to your own steamheated room and slam the door. Families aren't confined in a little, airless parlor for weeks on end like mice in a cheese."

"Cheese!" Ed snapped his fingers. "That reminds me." Abruptly

he rose from his chair.

"I couldn't possibly—" I began. "All that chowder."

He shook his head. "It's not what you think. Wait here. I

want to show you an old ledger."

He returned carrying an armload of warped books and yellowed newspapers—relics from the Bridewell attic. He said, "I got this down last night after you went to bed. Thought you might be interested, then forgot to show you. It's from one of the old trunks. Some of it's funny."

He placed the offerings on the table, then selected a large flat book, and drew up his chair.

"Take this ledger. Dates back to 1879. The Bridewells owned a part interest in Babcock's General Store. This is the old account book. I want you to see something."

He blew a mist of dust from the cover, and, opening the ledger, spread it across his knees, displaying a ruled page. The paper had gone brittle, and a corner of the page crumbled under Ed's thumb. The ink of the handwritten entries had faded to a delicate brown. One no longer sees bookkeeping artistry, and I stayed Ed's hand in order to admire the beautifully enscribed column of figures, the fine Spencerian penmanship devoted to the commerce of 1879.

Each page was like that—a model of perfect accounting penned with meticulous care. Monks would not have lavished more time and scrimshaw on an illuminated Psalm from the Scripture. What grocer today would bother to add curleycues to the capital "B" for bread, or would design a lacy "L" for lima beans, or take half a minute to draw decorative whorls around the "M" for molasses?

"Interesting, isn't it?" Ed Bridewell chuckled. "Look at the prices. Here—January 1892. Coffee, eighteen cents. Eggs, twenty a dozen. Liver, twelve cents a pound. Tobacco, ten. Here—April 16,1894. Old man Hatfield bought a pair of galluses for forty-five cents. His wife got some button shoes for two-fifty. Cal Robinson got a barrel of potatoes for four bucks."

"And steak at those prices! Look," I noted. "A flitch of bacon. You never see that term today."

"Who could afford it?" Ed grinned. "Here's something else you don't see any more. Nemo corsets. Prudence Jones bought this set, see?—whalebone—for six seventy-five. You don't see people buying quinces, any more, either. But here," he pointed, "this is what I wanted to show you. Notice this cheese?"

The purchase was charged to one Otis Purdy—eighteen pounds of cheese. Ed tapped his finger on the date—July 9,1896.