American Eve (31 page)

Back in New York, after receiving Mamma Nesbit’s angry request for passage home, and after some calculations regarding his own risk (and more than a few curses), White, fearful that his illicit relations with Evelyn would somehow become public if the matter of her irate mother wasn’t handled quietly, decided to send Mrs. Nesbit the funds to return to America. The charge she finally lodged against Harry was, in effect, kidnapping a minor. Of course, Craig Wadsworth was unaware that both Harry and Stanny feared the same thing—exposure on an international level with regard to their unwholesome involvement with the still-underage Evelyn. But, once Mamma Nesbit was safely back in New York, Thaw would interpret White’s intervention as further proof of the architect’s guilt and misdeeds with regard to “the minor child” and her mother’s complicity.

So Mamma Nesbit left her teenage daughter. Again. This time in another country and in the hands of a man she knew could easily come unhinged and was prone to violence. With her thankless and wearying mother out of the picture, an exasperated Evelyn decided to make the best of the situation. An alternately euphoric and tortured Harry was now free to continue the European holiday with his Angel-Child unencumbered, all the while letting the image of her sexual ruination fester, then run through the murky channels of his brain.

At first Evelyn’s emotions ran the gamut from elation to relief to cautious apprehension to anxiety, waiting instinctively for the sword of Damocles to come down on her pretty neck in retribution for her own shameful behavior in her affair with Stanny. Although he hadn’t expressed it, Evelyn knew that Harry must have harbored some ill feeling toward her, however much an innocent victim he said he believed she was when White plied her with alcohol and stole her virginity. But in place of anger or chastisement or punishment, Harry seemed doggedly determined to fill their days with a frenetic and expensive agenda. Just as before, they snaked their way through countries. They crossed the Channel back to England and visited the cathedrals in Lincoln and York. As they studied one magnificent series of stained-glass windows, Evelyn considered mentioning how she had posed as an angel for Violet Oakley on several occasions. She decided not to mention it.

GRIMMER THAN GRIMM

Almost imperceptibly at first, then far more noticeably, Harry shed layer after layer of his solicitous demeanor. He began to make oblique references to Evelyn’s “deflowering.” Wherever they went, if the opportunity presented itself, Harry would sidle up behind her and point out the statues or icons of the Virgin Mother, virtuous saints, and young girl martyrs who chose to die rather than give in to sin and temptation. In Domrémy, France, the birthplace of Joan of Arc, Harry wrote in the guestbook, “she would not have been a virgin if Stanford White had been around.” There were fleeting moments when his sharp gaze and occasional incoherent murmuring made the hairs on the back of Evelyn’s neck tingle, even though “he had done nothing untoward at that time.” Wherever they traveled, Harry maintained separate rooms, in accordance with proper custom and a show of respectful decency, unable, he said, to find a suitable chaperone in each city, particularly given their almost frantic pace. They crossed to Holland, went up the Rhine to Munich, moved on to Innsbruck—and then came to a bona fide castle in the Tyrol. It was anything but enchanted.

After following Harry’s ridiculously frenetic and tiring itinerary, visiting a new city nearly every two days, Evelyn discovered that Harry, in his usual display of entitled excess, had rented a castle, the Schloss-Katzenstein (and its serving staff of two), for three full weeks. After such a frenzied pace, Evelyn was grateful for the idea of an extended respite and imagined something with storybook charm, something that might look like the “quaint backdrop of a musical comedy. Or a Brueghel.” Instead, wholly isolated a third of the way up a steep mountain, the ancient structure was a huge Gothic nightmare of cold stones and dimly lit, drafty passageways, grimmer than anything in the Grimm brothers’ tales, and for the last two hundred yards or so reachable only by a narrow footpath.

Acting fully the part of the meister, with straight-backed “Teutonic severity,” from the minute they arrived, Harry ordered the servants to carry out his every wish, as if he were right at home. After a day or two of somewhat strenuous sightseeing in the surrounding densely forested countryside, the couple returned to the castle. Harry casually mentioned that he had dismissed the staff for the night. Fatigued and preoccupied that her hair, while growing back beneath her wig, was still extremely short and positively unfeminine, Evelyn did not give any thought to the fact that she and Harry would be utterly alone in their remote part of the castle. She decided to go to bed before the flush of Harry’s good mood disappeared and his thoughts turned to Stanford White. Immediately after finishing the dinner that had been prepared and left for them, Evelyn said that she was retiring for the night. Harry raised no objections, kissed her chastely on the forehead as he had throughout their European holiday, and sent her off to bed in her room where, having barely taken off her wig, she fell into a deep sleep almost immediately, her head characteristically beneath her pillow.

Since the fallen Angel-Child had folded herself so quickly into sleep, she did not hear the lock turning only fifteen minutes or so later. Nor did she see the shaft of bluish white light that was thrown across her room. Before she had any idea what was happening, a bug-eyed, seething, and startlingly naked Harry, who loomed directly in the light, threw the pillow and covers aside and woke Evelyn with an angry slashing blow across her legs with a leather riding crop. A startled Evelyn sprang up with a scream, whereupon Harry tore furiously at her nightgown. He broke off the small, pearly buttons and tossed the gown to the floor, next to where her pillow and some of the buttons had landed.

Before she could even react, he pulled at, then ripped apart her delicately made underclothes with one hand while hitting her repeatedly with the other, wielding the small whip with a savage and practiced dexterity. The stripped and cowering Evelyn, looking so much like a prepubescent boy with her slender figure and cropped hair, seemed to both agitate and excite Harry, whose not-so-deeply buried affinity for boys had already emerged in London (it had been discussed in hushed tones among certain of the darkest circles he traveled in since his late teens).

With each bruising lash to her soft skin, Evelyn pleaded with Harry to stop, but the more she protested and tried to fend off his blows, the harder he came at her, railing about sinfulness and shameful indecency. He seemed completely insensible to her panicked distress, and afterward she would swear there were moments when he didn’t recognize her at all, his pupils unnaturally marked and dilated. At one point, the sweat-covered Thaw stopped, but only to catch his breath and regain his momentum. And then what was already terrible turned horrible.

Harry, whose chest was nearly hairless and shining with moisture, pinned the stunned and bleeding once-golden girl on her back. Holding her down with the riding crop across her narrow shoulders, he proceeded to rape her. Throughout the incident, as she tightened her eyes and every muscle in her body, she fought against the smothering acrid cigarette smell of his breath and overpowering heaviness as he pushed on her small frame. Evelyn’s mind raced as she also struggled against consciousness. She wondered irrationally in blurred flashes if this was punishment she deserved for her wicked and immoral behavior as Stanny’s mistress. She wondered if this was her fault for taking advantage of Harry’s generosity under false pretenses. She wondered if, in her post-operative condition, her life was going to end in a castle in Bavaria—or if she would be able somehow to obliterate this awful scene from her mind if she did survive. As the rib-bruising episode jerked forward with its own insane force in ruptures of light and dark, Harry pressed grossly and awkwardly upon her, grunting garbled phrases and screaming about penance and retribution, Stanford White, and blackened innocence.

After his fit of divine wrath passed as quickly as it came, a suddenly and disturbingly calm Harry pushed himself off the shaking girl and proceeded to interrogate her, swollen, then spent with his domination. The entire nightmarish assault had taken all of seven minutes. As more sweat dripped from his chin onto the chaotic heap of bedding and torn clothing, he bent over Evelyn, who was in an embryonic curl. He was vehement, his face corkscrewed in disbelief, asking, “Did you really believe White when he told you everybody did the things you had done? Did you? Is it possible?” When she stammered back “Yes,” an outraged Harry reared up to his full height and she put up her hands, thinking he was about to repeat his attack. Instead, he shouted angrily that it was not true, that it was a filthy lie. He screamed again into her face that there were lots of decent women in the world, “like his mother and two lovely, decent sisters.”

He towered over the bed where Evelyn lay whimpering, wholly defenseless, grabbing instinctively at the pitiful short ends of her hair, which he seemed to be fixated on. She shook convulsively and stared in disbelief at the streaks of blood on her outer thighs and arms, where she had tried to deflect Harry’s blows. After several more minutes of interrogation, which seemed an eternity, Harry left the room as suddenly as he had entered, without saying another word. And locked the door behind him. It was a pointless gesture, since with no Mamma, no Stanny, no chaperone, no money, no friends, no servants, and no way to contact anyone even if she could speak German, Evelyn was already a hostage to Harry as well as to her own fears and near hysterical confusion.

His deliberate barefoot steps made a heavy, hollow thrum as he disappeared into the blackness of the hallway. Evelyn writhed on the bed, exposed to the chilled air and tattooed with scratches, her stomach, hips, and buttocks striped with welts. Seeking some rational explanation, she wondered if there was something she had said at dinner to provoke the vicious attack, since it had been more than two weeks since Harry had pried the guilty confession from her. Her brain kept burning with the same questions: Was she to blame? Had she asked for it? Didn’t she deserve punishment for having kept the truth of her lost maidenhood from the charitable and dutiful and virgin-obsessed Harry? She then began to wonder, did Harry mean to disfigure her and ruin her career? What would she do if he came back? Or if he didn’t? Overwhelmed by the severity of his repulsion and frightened by the speed of his self-appointed justice, Evelyn shivered all night uncovered, not wanting the sheets to adhere to her lacerated skin once the blood dried. As she stared for several hours into the deafening silence that surrounded her, the sparks of pain gradually subsided and settled into a kind of electric numbness, while the absolute darkness outside gaped at her through the lone leaded window high in the room. Nothing she had ever read, not even the most ridiculous dime novel, could have prepared her for such an unbelievable scenario.

The next day and for the next two weeks, Evelyn simply sat pale and still in her room, as if turned into a pillar of salt. The telltale scabbed-over marks of the Angel-Child’s all-too-mortal sins lingered. Although not visible unless she was totally undressed, her usually pliant and unblemished torso and legs formed a sick, stiffened mosaic of faint pinkish welts, greenish blue bruises, and threadlike reddish-brown scratches (to which Harry had applied stinging ointment). At the end of the third week, a desolate Evelyn was informed that they were leaving the castle. She had already come to the conclusion that Harry had either premeditated this attack or taken advantage of the situation, knowing in either case that he would be safe from discovery in the secluded castle for a full fortnight.

Acting as if nothing happened, a chipper and garrulous Harry took her to Zurich, where she immediately asked to see a doctor. He complied, sending to her room a physician by the name of Mendes-Ernst, with whom he was acquainted from previous trips to the area. It was clear to Evelyn that Harry felt no remorse for his brutish cruelty, nor did she have an ally in this doctor, who, like so many others, was obviously on Harry’s long payroll.

In the middle of the week, while out for a drive alone, Harry was accused by one of the locals of having run the man’s horse-drawn Victoria carriage off the road and into a ditch with his rented automobile. According to Harry, the accident happened before his car ever arrived on the scene. Nonetheless, those at the scene claimed it was Harry’s fault. He ended up paying 2,000 francs to settle the matter. Evelyn, meanwhile, confined to her hotel room, was immediately reminded of the flogging incident in London, which Harry also had dismissed as nonsense and motivated by blackmail. She thought about the poor bellboy and his defenseless position in an incident so easily “taken care of.” Unable to move about much and trying to figure out how to free herself from Harry’s grossly but effectively wrought web, Evelyn remembered feeling like “a firefly caught in a Mason jar by a cruel and wicked schoolboy.”

So the trip continued into September, and Evelyn came to see that Harry’s route included sites of symbolic significance. One such instance was when he insisted they make a special side-trip miles out of their way to see the Jungfrau. The highest peak of a series of mountains located in the Swiss Alps, the name in German means “virgin.” The couple returned to Zurich via Bern, then Lucerne. Evelyn saw the same doctor, who pronounced her healed and well—from her appendix operation. He said nothing about the vestigial signs of her vicious assault, where small patches on her body still looked like too-tender bruised fruit.

A solemn and at times virtually catatonic Evelyn spoke very little during the next week; she was only half-aware of the magnificent scenery that passed before her eyes from a string of carriages, railroad cars, and rented autos. Catching Evelyn crying quietly at times, which increased as the week progressed, an oblivious and deluded Harry offered his own explanation for the distraught and silent seventeen-year-old’s black mood. He wrote, “Yet even when we were going along beautiful roads, I remember poor Evelyn crying because we could not settle down and live like other people. I did too; but you know when a girl dies one is saddened to think how pretty and happy she might have been . . . and yet it is a hundred times worse when it is not death but the hellish selfishness of Stanford White that ruins girls’ lives.”