The Jews in America Trilogy (106 page)

Naturally, the person the press and public were most eager to hear testify was Washington Nathan. He arrived on the witness stand looking cool, composed, and well-tailored, carrying a gold-handled stick, gray gloves, and a tall silk hat. He described himself as “commission merchant,” with offices at 25 Water Street downtown, but his account of the evening of July 28 was nowhere near so simple. After leaving his father, he said, he spent “an hour or two” simply strolling around New York. First he walked up Fifth Avenue to the Saint James Hotel, then over to Twenty-fourth and Broadway, then into Madison Square Park—very near his home—where he listened for a while to a band concert. Meeting a friend there, he walked back to the Saint James, where each had a glass of sherry. Next he walked down Broadway to the point at which it met Fifth Avenue, where he met “these two girls”—and he waved his hand, indicating that the young ladies were in the courtroom. The three then walked to Delmonico's, and he said good-bye to them there, going into the coffee room to read the papers. For a celebrated
bon vivant,
he was having a singularly dull evening.

He then went back to the Saint James
again
—but no sherry this time—and then toward home, popping into the Fifth Avenue Hotel on the way. He met a friend there and stayed for a chat. At about nine, he left the hotel and headed for a crosstown bus. He rode down to East Fourteenth Street, near the Academy of Music, and entered a house at number 104. He stayed until around midnight—delayed slightly by the storm—and then went back uptown to Broadway and Twenty-first Street, entering Brown & Kingsley's restaurant, where he had supper: Welsh rarebit. From there he went straight home, let himself in with a
key, locked the door behind him, and went upstairs. He looked in on his father, saw him sleeping peacefully, and continued upstairs to his own room. He heard nothing during the night, saw nothing more of his father until the following morning, when he found him lying on the floor in a pool of blood—with the front door standing wide open.

He testified that it was not true that he and his father had ever had any serious quarrels. He insisted there was no foundation for reports that he spent thirty thousand dollars annually on pleasurable pursuits, and doubted that he spent more than three thousand dollars. His father, he said, had given him a five-thousand-dollar stake to start him in business, and any arguments about Wash's spending had been minor. He painted a picture of a warm relationship between father and son, and on the whole gave a confident, poised performance.

For some reason it was deemed necessary to verify Wash's account of his whereabouts between nine and twelve. The reason may have been the sheer delectation of the courtroom audience, because it was soon entertainingly clear just what sort of house it was that the young man had visited at 104 East Fourteenth Street during those three hours. A lady called Clara Dale was summoned to the stand, and a great deal of space in the press was devoted to her costume and appearance. The
Herald
reported:

Miss Dale was very gaily attired in a costly dress of green striped silk, embellished with all the usual paraphernalia of panier, flounces and trimmings. She wore light colored lavender kid gloves and over a jaunty round hat of the latest pattern was spread a green veil which hung down over her face almost completely hiding it from view. Beneath this she wore a black lace “masked battery” which totally covered the upper portion of her face.

The reporter from the
World,
meanwhile, despite the veils and masks, found that “her face was full and fair,
with large blue eyes, and her physique and carriage were stately.” It also noted her hair, in “waterfall and puffs,” and her shoes, “with preposterous high brass heels and white pearl buttons and tassels.” Miss Dale testified that Mr. Washington Nathan had been with her during the hours of nine and twelve on the fatal night—which, of course, did nothing to establish his whereabouts at the time of the murder, two hours later.

But who killed good Benjamin Nathan? As the months dragged on, the answer seemed to grow increasingly elusive. For all the suspicion that surrounded young Wash, there was not a shred of evidence. Where was he at the time? Home in bed, he said, and there was no one to prove otherwise. The New York Stock Exchange—which had lowered its flag to half staff to mourn the passing of a member—had offered a ten-thousand-dollar reward for the apprehension of the killer. The Nathan family had added to this, and presently the Nathan murder reward had mounted to over thirty thousand dollars. This led to the usual number of crank letters with offers to provide information, which proved unfounded, and to a series of false “confessions.” Several suspects were arrested, then released for lack of evidence. The months turned into years.

At one point a convict at Sing Sing named George Ellis—who could have obtained a pardon for bringing a murderer to justice, and therefore had much to gain—came forward and announced that if he could see the murder weapon he could identify the murderer. In great secrecy, Ellis was brought down to New York from prison and taken into a room where Police Chief Jourdan had assembled some twenty-five carpenters' dogs, of assorted shapes and sizes, collected from hardware stores across the city. Without hesitation, Ellis walked to the murder weapon and pointed: “This is the one.” It belonged, he said, to a burglar he knew named Billy Forrester, who had once told him
of a plan he had to rob the Nathan house. Forrester was traced to Texas, brought to New York, and subjected to intensive interrogation. One of the “witnesses” brought to confront him was Annie Keenan, the New Jersey music teacher, who immediately identified him as the man with the “crazy look” she had seen that night—despite the fact that over two years had passed, and the woman was demonstrated to be extremely nearsighted. In the end it was decided that despite Ellis' astonishing identification of the weapon—which could, of course, have been a coincidence—and Miss Keenan's testimony, these two facts did not add up to a case against Billy Forrester, and he was released. Because there never was a solid suspect, there never was a trial. Today, a hundred years later, the case remains unsolved.

A number of people have taken up the Benjamin Nathan murder, and reexamined all the confusing, contradictory evidence. One of the stranger accounts is in a book called
Recollections of a New York Chief of Police,
written seventeen years after the event by ex-Chief George Walling. Walling builds up a damaging case against Washington Nathan, and speaks of the young man “clinking glasses with the
demi-monde”
on the night of the killing. He also claims that, in the weeks following his father's death, Wash Nathan wore “a handkerchief like a bandage” around his neck, despite the fact that this was not mentioned in any of the contemporary newspaper reports, nor at the inquest. Walling implies, of course, that Wash Nathan wore the bandage to cover wounds earned in a mortal struggle with his father. But then, after all but accusing Wash—who was still living at the time, and presumably could have sued—Walling reverses himself and points to William Kelly, the housekeeper's son, who, Walling claims, admitted burglars to the house that night. Walling's final claim is equally illogical. He says that Police Chief Jourdan, the chief at
the time of the crime, failed to solve the murder because “the full horror of it was too much for him to bear.”

Most theorists on the case end up with burglary as the motive, and a number believe that Kelly—who, at the time of the inquest, was shown to have a number of unsavory friends—may have been an accomplice. They speculate that a burglar, or burglars, entered the house that night, and were in the process of opening the safe, using the carpenter's dog as a prying tool, when they were overheard by Mr. Nathan, who rose from his bed and went into the study, surprising them at their work. But it was a clumsy tool for a burglary, and a foolish time to do it, with five people in a house that was empty of furniture and rugs, where the safe had been emptied of all important valuables. Was the open safe just the killer's way to make burglary
seem
to be the motive?

One tiny fact may be significant. Benjamin Nathan, we know, suffered from extreme myopia, and was virtually blind without his thick, steel-rimmed spectacles. The first thing he did on rising each morning was to clamp his glasses across his nose. He did this before he put his feet on the floor. Would he, if he had heard strange sounds in the night from the room next door, have risen to investigate a possible burglary without putting on his glasses? The glasses were found, carefully folded, on the table beside his makeshift bed of mattresses a long way from that bloodied scene, as though their owner had been dragged out of bed with intent to kill.

In the Nathan family, there has never been a moment's suspicion that Washington Nathan could have murdered his father. To a Nathan, it would be something “not done.” And newspaper reports at the time of the tragedy, despite the grisly sensationalism attached to such a possibility, always pointed out that “Parricide is extremely rare among Jews.”

Several private facts about the case have long been available within the family. For one thing, Wash Nathan was, at the time, having a love affair with a New York society woman somewhat older than he, who happened to be married. His honor as a gentleman, and as a Nathan, would not permit him to tell his exact whereabouts that night, for that would have disgraced the lady's name. Hence his incongruous account of wandering up and down New York streets and in and out of restaurants. “Clara Dale,” in her green and purple flounces and spiky shoes, had merely been a bit of window dressing suggested—and hired—by family lawyers. The Nathans also feel that the murderer would have been found if the case had not been mishandled from the start—and by a relative, at that. Judge Albert Cardozo, Benjamin Nathan's brother-in-law (and the father of the future Supreme Court justice), had been running for political office at the time. He had immediately taken charge of things, paying great attention to what was “seemly,” and thus good for his political career. Whenever an unseemly fact turned up, the judge took pains to bury it.

The Nathans never moved back to 12 West Twenty-third. Its associations were too painful. The family used to recall, a little sadly, how proud Ben had been of his new house when he built it; he was particularly proud of the massive thickness of its walls. He wanted his house to be soundproof. If he had not been so successful, someone might have heard his cries for help.

Like so many beautiful young men of golden promise, Washington Nathan came to a sad end. He received $75,000 under his father's will, another $25,000 from a grandmother, and $10,000 from an aunt. But his life continued to be dissolute and wasteful, and in a few years he had gone through it all. He was seldom seen as a “commission merchant” down on Water Street, but more often
at Delmonico's, or the Fifth Avenue Hotel, or at Brown & Kingsley's. These lounges were his favorite haunts, and he could usually be found there, with this or that young lady “of fashion” or of the Clara Dale variety, and people commented that he was not aging well. By thirty, he looked haggard and old.

In 1879 his mother died, leaving an estate—huge for its day—of over a million Hendricks dollars, $100,000 in a trust fund for Wash. This money was tightly controlled by family lawyers and the bank, and was designed to give Wash a fixed income of a hundred dollars a week. On this skinflint sum he apparently did poorly, and the year of his mother's death his name appeared again—and unpleasantly—in the newspapers. While calling on an actress named Alice Harrison in a hotel suite, he was shot and wounded in the neck by a woman named Fanny Barrett. The bullet lodged in his jaw, and was never removed. At the time, though, one New York physician offered a unique plan. He would operate on Wash's jaw and, when he got his patient drowsy and talkative under morphine, he would dredge the truth out of him about the Nathan murder. No one took him up on his offer.

In 1884 Wash married a non-Jewish widow named Nina Mapleson Arnott, and left the United States. For a while the couple lived in London, then they went to Paris. As he moved into the Mauve Decade, Wash Nathan was often seen in the bar at the Hotel Chatham, alone and looking bewildered, and it was noted that he had grown quite fat.

In 1891, he was sued by French creditors for $1,590 and an attempt was made to break the trust in order to collect the debt. But at home in New York the courts ruled that his mother's trust could not be violated for this purpose, and the French debt went uncollected.

By the late 1880's Washington Nathan had been reported to be in poor health. In the summer of 1892, he went
to Boulogne for some sea air. On July 25—the anniversary, very nearly, of the death of his father, who, on the night of his
own
death, had remained in New York to commemorate the anniversary of yet another Nathan's death—he collapsed and died after a walk alone on the beach. He was forty-four years old. His hair, they said, had turned completely white.

18

“CARDOZOS DON'T CRY”

Uncle Albert Cardozo, the judge, continued to exert a baleful influence on the House of Nathan. He had been elected justice of the Supreme Court of the State of New York—a post his father, Michael Hart Cardozo, had been nominated for, though the senior Cardozo died before the election—and the Cardozos took themselves very seriously and lived every bit as grandly as their Nathan cousins (Albert was married to Benjamin Nathan's sister Rebecca). The Cardozo house stood at 12 West Forty-seventh Street, diagonally opposite the Jay Gould mansion, which was always bustling with the arrival and departure of carriages, footmen, and liveried servants; from their earliest days the Cardozo children were made to feel part of a world of wealth and consequence.
Cardozos were said to come by their lofty position naturally. During the Inquisition, a Cardozo had actually claimed that he was the Messiah. Refusing to convert, he was marched to the stake boldly proclaiming: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One!”