Only in New England : the story of a gaslight crime (29 page)

However, "Hold your horses," I advised myself. "Once bitten, twice shy. What do you know about the real Earnest?"

Then I came to the surprising letters. There were two of them. As though by contrived suspense, the last of the packet. At the tag end of the condolence missives. Held together by a rotted rubber band.

The rotted band fell away, and I examined the time-browned envelopes. One ordinary envelope, one legal-sized envelope. Both letters were addressed to Earnest.

The first was postmarked May 1910, the year before Abby's death. Content as follows:

Provincetown, Mass. May 7, 1910 Mr. Earnest Bridewell Quahog Point Dear Sir:

This is to certify that I have this day examined the infant born March 13, 1910, at the house of L. N. Gotch in Provincetown.

Height 19 inches. Good growth of hair. Bones of head ossified, in contact at sutures. Fingers and toenails fully developed. Baby sound. Cried loudly. In my opinion this is a full term baby.

The infant has been placed in a home.

Respectfully,

H. 2. Rauschbush, M.D.

So there was a baby! And it must have been Earnest who—!

"Good God!" I said aloud.

The rape had been blamed on Lionel. Earnest had held silent, had let Lionel bear the obloquy. How wrong could a public image get?

And no wonder Lionel had taken the stand against his brother. He must have known Earnest had ravaged the girl, since he himself had not done it (who else was there?). Yet he, Lionel had been forced into semi-exile. What a chance to repay the injury when Earnest faced a charge of matricide!

Tense, I examined the second letter. The legal envelope was postmarked August 1915. The letter read:

HASKINS, HASKINS 6- ARKWRIGHT

ATTORNEYS AND COUNSELLORS AT LAW

404 WATER STREET

NEWPORT

August 2, 1915 Earnest Bridewell, Esq. Quahog Point Dear Mr. Bridewell:

In reply to your query of recent date in behalf of you and your brother, I beg to state that, inas-

much as you and your brother are the inheritors of the estate formerly belonging to your mother, this property became yours at the time of your mothers death, and you have an absolute right to take possession as legal heirs and pint owners, you are right in assuming that tax liens must be satisfied by the inheritors. Our assessor concurs with your estimate that the estate's value, after taxes, is approximately $500.

Yours very truly,

H. H. Haskins, Att'y.

Scuttled! I was back to Nowhere! The Bridewell brothers now applying for joint ownership! Earnest and Lionel, arm in arm, hand in glove, in mutual and fraternal effort to acquire the Bridewell inheritance.

It was all wrong. It did not add up. I could not believe that a flve-hundred-dollar estate could be salve enough to compensate Lionel for the odium sloughed on him by Earnest; quittance enough to requite Earnest for the perfidy attributed to him by Lionel. To forgive is surely divine, but I could not imagine five hundred dollars endowing Earnest and Lionel with that much divinity.

Five hundred dollars!

It came to me that this meager inheritance was hardly enough to incite a man to his mother's murder. The sons must have known that house and grounds were virtually at pawn. That the estate, after taxes, would look like a turkey after Thanksgiving. Kill Mother Hubbard when you knew what was in the cupboard? Risk the gallows for five hundred dollars?

There went the murder-for-profit motive. At least, so far as Earnest and Lionel were concerned.

But someone else, someone who did not know. . . .

"An outsider," I said aloud, staring at the letter. "Someone deceived by the public image. . . ."

A voice behind me said, "So you found the letters."

Startled, I wheeled about-face.

Ed Brewster was standing at the top of the attic stair. He

regarded me with a sleepy smile. From his big right fist dangled a small, brown, pear-shaped bag.

CHAPTER 19

"Have some more saltwater taffy," Ed said.

We sat in the dining room with coffee cups before us. He extended the brown paper bag.

"No thanks," I said.

He peeled the colored tissue from three or four taffys and tucked them into an amiable smile.

With his cheek pouched, he said, "Sorry we was so late at the movie. Double feature. Film broke just when Ava Gardener was kissing this hunter—he wasn't her husband—there in the jungle. Took them twenty minutes to fix it. The film, I mean. . . . No more taffy?"

"No, really."

Ed bellowed toward the kitchen, "How the fritters doing, Nan?"

Annette called, "Coming."

Ed said, "I always like a midnight snack if we're up." He ricked a thumb, wiped his hand on his woollen shirt, and squinted. "You look kind of peaked. Find anything m-tresting in the attic?"

"I always like old papers and things."

He chuckled, and said he did too.

Annette brought in the fritters, coffee, butter and sirup. "Men!" she said accusingly. "Food!" She took the complaint back with a cheerful smile, and bid us goodnight. At the stair door she paused to ask if I wanted an early breakfast; was I going fishing?

"I'm afraid I can't, Mrs. Brewster. I have to go back tomorrow. I thought I'd take the early boat."

When she had gone, Ed said regretfully, "I thought you were staying over to Sunday."

"I cant. I remembered some things I have to do."

We ate in silence for several minutes. Wonderful flapjacks. Pure maple sirup. And I seemed to be swallowing mouthfuls of flannel.

Then Ed said, "You could take the steamer goes at four P.M. and make almost as good time as the two o'clock. The early one stops Stonington, and Groton, and New London."

"I know. I thought I'd like to see Groton."

"You city guys," Ed said. "Come here Friday and go back Saturday. All alike. Luke Martin can't wait to leave the minute he gets here. Ants in his pants! Business! ... I'd really like to take you out in my fishing boat. Just the two of us."

I said, coughing, "I'd like to sometime."

He stood up.

"Well," he sighed, "see you in the morning. I got to go turn up the water heater. A new one I just put in . . . Want to see it? It's in the cellar."

"I'm rather fagged, Ed. If you'll excuse me, I'll go on up to bed."

Four rye on aspirins finally solved the sleep problem. And when I woke up with the morning sun streaming through starched curtains, and saw the chair I had wedged under the doorknob, I felt a considerable fool.

Against whom or what had I reared the barricade? Ghosts? Earnest Bridewell? Lionel? Cornelia Ord? Cudworth? An evil house spirit—some poltergeist? But underneath my skin I knew.

There was no lock on the door (country people seem to think a lock inhospitable) and I had been too uneasy to sleep. It was nonsensical of me. Ridiculous. Uneasy was not the word for it, either. The person underneath my skin had been scared. Not physically frightened, exactly. Mentally scared. What was the line from Macbeth about fear? ... A dagger of the mind; a false creation proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain.

Then I saw the chair had been forced a little askew. Someone had tried to open the door. . . .

Down in the dining room Annette was clearing breakfast dishes. She greeted me with hospitality and domesticity.

"Ed's eaten and gone into town to get the car fixed. Do you want your eggs scrambled or sunnyside?"

"Thank you, Mrs. Brewster. Just toast and coffee."

"French toast, then," she insisted. She started out, then paused. "I hope Ed didn't wake you. He thought you might like to drive into the Center with him. He went up to call you a while ago and found your door fastened."

A dagger of the mind.

I had to get out of the house. Out into the sun-bathed morning, the sea-washed wind. Away from the Bridewell parlor, the Bridewell attic, the lurking poltergeists of murder, hatred, trickery, mendacity, secrecy, suspicion.

After breakfast, I walked.

Under shade trees that were bowers of springtime leafage, between banks of elderberry, chinaberry and beach plum, the road wandered pleasantly villageward.

But I could not get away from the Bridewell case.

Smeizer said the first mailbox down the road.

Grimes said a box farther on.

Before I realized it I was in the Center striding past Babcock's Grocery and General Store (still in business!), Ord's Seafood House (something new), Horatio Meek, Jr., Fine Liquors (a variant of embalming fluid), and Hatfield's Beach Shop.

The Seagull Hotel sprawled half the length of Main Street. I passed the dry fountain. I passed the shabby facade of the Scenic Palace. It was not shabby, nor did it wear a plaintive sign insisting "Movies Are Better Than Ever" when Hobart Cudworth and Walter Jones went there on the long-ago evening that was Abby Bridewell's last.

Lodge Hall—abandoned, boarded up. Center Church—carpenters repairing the steeple. The Bayberry House—a teetering relic with the roofline sagging. On a slope beyond, the Surf and Sand with its long, and now rickety, verandah.

I took a side road to avoid the Surf and Sand. I wanted to get away from the good old days—Victorianism—the remnants of the Gaslight Era that clung to this remote landfall like driftwood half buried on a beach. So I hurried on up a hill, strode over a crest that gave view to open sea, and walked into a cemetery.

Headland Cemetery.

At Quahog Point, it seemed, there was no getting away from yesterday and its people. Here they were, all of them, in family groups and uneven hedgerows.

And since I was there, I might as well go ahead and meet them —the entire lot of them facing me with their final public images. . . .

A pause, there, Stranger as You Pass By, As You are Now, So Once was I. As I am Now, So You will Be. Prepare for Death, and Follow Me.

That was Isaiah Robinson, "b. 1794, d. 1869." A cheerful prog-nosticator, to say the least. "Prepare for Death." Most of the older headstones, the slabs of flaky, reddish sandstone, offered that somber advice.

Our very hopes belied our fears,

Our fears our hopes belied,

We thought him dying when he slept,

And sleeping when he died.

That was one Uriah Purdy who "passed away of a flux" in 1875 "while in the very flower of his youth."

Dust, to its narrow house beneath, Soul, to its place on high, Toll the Knell for Lily Belle. She too was born to die.

Yes, she too. Probably they had reminded Lily Belle Ross of that fact from the day she was a little girl in the 1840's to the day she died in 1900. Death is coming. Dissolution is nigh. Life was a prolonged preparation for the grave in the Victorian period. The only compensation lay in the assurance that when you died you

made an exit from this vale of mortal misery and woe wherein you were constantly reminded that Death had your number. The tomb was an escape hatch.

Two hands upon the breast, And labours done; Two pale feet crossed in rest, The race is won.

So Abigail Goodbody was compensated for a long sprint that had kept her ahead of the Grim Reaper for a lifetime. How inconsistent all this was. You won when he caught you, yet you did your mortal best to outrun him.

At least, Prudence Jones had made a brisk and almost cheerful "departure from this life."

In Eighteen Hundred and Ninety-two

The heavens opened, and Prue went through.

That was all right. I could see where Cornelia's practicality had come from. She was there beside her mother in an assortment of Joneses. Cornelia Jones Ord, "b. 1851, d. 1917." No epitaph. Enough said.

Eustace Meek had more to say, borrowing some lines from Hamlet.

Who builds stronger than a mason, a shipwright or a carpenter? When you are asked this question next, say 'a grave-maker.' The houses that he makes last till doomsday.

Posthumous advertisement. The realtor in the midst of his suburban development. But some of Meck's "houses" were already tumbling down, going to seed. I found Grampa Bryce's monument standing a-tilt in a patch of brambles. Naturally, local legend had exaggerated this small granite trylon into a marble cenotaph. The legend on the pedestal was equally exaggerative, referring as it did to the departed's naval service in 1847.

Nor shall your glory be forgot While Fame her record keeps,

Or Honor points the hallowed spot Where Valor proudly sleeps.

And who today, I wondered, ever thinks of Churubusco, Cha-pultepec, Molina del Rey? Our modern histories tend to skip the Mexican War.

I came across the Ords behind a castiron picket fence, their name lettered on the base of a stone angel which had a bird's nest for a halo. I noticed an undated "Lost at Sea" for Wallace Ord. Had Cornelia preferred to rest in the Jones lot, fearing another Enoch Arden return?

Poe was engraved on a neighboring stone to "Little Gloria Hatfield."

Come, let the burial rite be read, The funeral song be sung — A dirge for her that doubly died In that she died so young.

By all means, read the rite and sing the dirge. Life is fleeting. The graveyard waits. And if youVe come this far up the cemetery path and don't believe it, keep walking.

Here is the word from Junius Grimes, "gored by a bull."

Life is not as idle ore, But iron dug from central gloom And heated hot with burning fears And dipt in baths of hissing tears, And batter d with the shocks of doom.

And from Letitia Grimes, widow of Junius Grimes.

So vanishes our state, so pass our days, So life but opens now, and now decays. The cradle and the tomb, alas! so nigh, To live is scarce distinguished from to die.

Truly the Gaslight Era was incredible. What had come over these people? And not just these hardshell "Pointers." This acute morbidity had been epidemic in America throughout most of the Nineteenth Century. It had been cultivated as a part of the way

of life. If it was not sheer hypocrisy, then it was certainly a manifestation of schizophrenia. A national personality split in two. On the one hand bustling, building, expanding, shooting it up, living it up—going like a steam calliope. On the other hand glooming, sighing, sermonizing, brooding over dirges and death-knells—mourning like the Miserere.