Only in New England : the story of a gaslight crime Read online

  Ed Brewster, our host-to-be and guide, met us at the pier. A wide man with an amiable face, he stepped out of a 1920 Kissel that suited the atmosphere, and came over to pick up our gear. Luke had fished with him for several seasons, and the previous autumn they had caught a record tuna.

  Ed inspected the sky, frowning. "I don't like it," he said. "My crystal set says rain tomorrow, and so does my knee."

  His crystal set and his knee forecast truly. The sundown grew smoky as we drove out to his house. By the time we got there, a damp wind was whipping the undergrowth at roadside.

  My introduction to the house was memorable. It seemed a big place in the windy twilight. Elms in the side yard were bowing and creaking. A tall hedge of scraggly boxwood was in motion. Shadows were weaving across the drive, and dead leaves flew. The lamp-lit fanlight over the front door looked inviting. As we scuttled in, a few drops chased our heels.

  We were welcomed in by Ed's wife, a French Canadian girl with a hospitable bosom and generous heart. There was a cramped

  vestibule with doors admitting to a front parlor, an inner hall, a side dining room. We went into the dining room.

  Doors opened into a kitchen, a pantry, a stairway going up. At the stairtop another door. Two doors opened into our front room, a capacious bedroom. My first impression of the house: a lot of rooms and an extraordinary number of doors.

  At dinner (supper in the colloquial), Ed Brewster told us about the place. But the topic developed from a discourse on Quahog Point. In the course of which I learned that Ed Brewster had been reared there but not born there. So he wasn't, strictly speaking, a "Pointer." His father had worked as head chef at one of the Point hotels, and Ed had come there as a boy, and stayed. He had gone to the little red schoolhouse with the "Pointer" fry. Had worked his way up on the fishing boats. Had finally acquired a boat of his own, and, recently, this house.

  "Been on the Point most of my life, but I'm still not one of them" He chuckled. "That's all right with me."

  His wife? He laughed. "Annette's from Nova Scotia. Strictly a foreigner."

  Not that they didn't get along with the "Pointers." Everybody liked Annette. The "Pointers" liked (and, I gathered, respected) Ed. It was just that at times they ignored him at Town Council, or wouldn't let him in on some local proposition. As he put it, "still treated him clannish."

  "I think," Ed's wife offered, "maybe it's because of this house."

  "It was long before I got this house," Ed said.

  "But some of them do not like to come here."

  "Who cares?" Ed looked mildly annoyed. Then he tilted back in his chair, listening. It had begun to rain.

  Luke Martin, happily fed, pointed a cigar. "You've done a good job on this house," he said, looking around. To me, "You ought to have seen it before Ed took it over."

  "Two years ago," Ed nodded. "It was a mess." He saw my interest, and enlarged, "Windows broken. Part of the roof gone. Rats. I got it for taxes."

  Annette Brewster sighed. "It was a ruin. Plaster falling everywhere. Fieldmice in the furniture. It took a lot of work."

  I looked around at the fumed oak. The fine old corner cupboard. The polished brass. "You mean this furniture was in it?"

  "Everything," Ed Brewster said. "Pictures. Carpets. The works. We even found a lot of plate silver. But the place was a wreck. Nobody'd lived in it for nearly twenty years."

  "They just went away and left it? All these things?"

  "See, the family died out," Ed said. "And the natives wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole."

  "Superstitious mutton-heads!" Luke Martin snapped.

  "Well, not exactly," Ed said tolerantly. "You see," he explained to me, "there was a murder here."

  "Tell him, Ed," Luke Martin said. "He's been writing true crimes for the Munsey Company."

  "Secrets of the French police," I deprecated modestly. But I could hardly disguise the eager tone. Our host's statement had brought the fire-horse neighing out of me.

  Ed Brewster said, "It was a long time back. Before the World War. They say there's only been two murders here at the Point. Since the old ship-wreckin' days, that is. One of the cases: a musician at the Bayberry was shot. He'd been fiddling around with one of the local girls. It wasn't much of a case."

  "Is there a lot of such fiddling here in the summer?"

  Ed thought a minute. "Yes, there is," he said. "And in the winter, too. But these days it's pretty much taken for granted. That shooting was back in the Nineties. Only other murder was the one in this house."

  Of course, we were in the Bridewell mansion. The old homestead. But I'd never heard of the Bridewells until that moment. Ed Brewster donated the rest of that evening to the case history.

  I heard about Captain Nathan Bridewell and how his ship came in. About the cumulative family fortune. About the uncles, cousins, and aunts. But the story centered around Abby Bridewell, the Captain's widow, and about the two bachelor sons, Earnest

  and Lionel, who lived with the aged mother here in the house.

  "They lived here together, the three of them," Ed Brewster said. "Earnest and Lionel were unmarried. I expect the old lady didn't encourage them to marry—she'd have figured the girls was after the family money. Anyway, they didn't, and when I knew them as a kid, Lionel, he was about forty-five, and Earnest Bridewell was pushing sixty. The old lady was in her eighties. Look, would you like to see them?"

  "See them?"

  Ed laughed at my surprise. "When we moved in here, I found this album. There's an attic full of stuff. Old books. Saratoga trunks. Everything. Come on up."

  Ed's wife protested about the dust. But I was thoroughly intrigued. The house was growing on me, and I was curious about its story. Ed hurried into the kitchen for an oil lamp, and we followed him up the stairs. A back room, a back hall—more doors everywhere—and a ladder up to the third-floor loft.

  "Here we are," Ed said.

  We stood in a nest of lamplight and shadow with rain drumming on the roof overhead. We might have been in a second-hand shop on Third Avenue. All kinds of rummage was crammed under the eaves. Wonderful things. Bird cages, three-legged chairs, carpet bags, dress forms, boxes, trunks, books, broken parlor lamps, a headless statue of Napoleon.

  While our host rummaged in a leather trunk, I examined some of the books. A first edition of Horatio Alger— Sink or Swim. A copy of Paradise Lost. The Calf Path by Sam Walter Foss. Whit-tier's Snowbound. The Prisoner of Zenda. A fabulous booklet entitled From the Ballroom to Hell; Facts About Dancing (Glad Tidings Publishing Co., 1894). An old Bible wherein someone had scrawled on the flyleaf: "Matthew, Mark, Luke, John; saddle the cats, and I'll get on." The book covers were sooty and the spines were warped.

  I observed that you could sometimes tell about people by what they read.

  Ed said, "You'll notice nearly all these books were gifts. Except in the Algers and that old Bible, the leaves are uncut."

  I reversed the English on my observation to say you might tell about people by what they didn't read.

  "Well, the Bridewells didn't read much," Ed remarked. "But as you can see, the old lady wouldn't throw nothing away. . . . Here's the album."

  So I met the Bridewells as preserved between covers of brown plush, brass-bound and embossed with hearts and flowers. They were a numerous clan. Stern uncles and lanky maiden aunts. Little boys posed with elbow on parlor table, and solemn little girls seated on tuffets.

  "Those were back in the eighties," Ed said. "The one with the derby is Captain Nathan Bridewell. He had a stroke and was paralyzed for years. Died in 1910."

  The deceased sea captain resembled a character straight out of Eugene O'Neill. Chubby features framed with side-whiskers. Button eyes and buttoned-up mouth. He was holding a telescope propped on one knee.

  "Here's the last of the Bridewells," Ed said, turning a page. "The ones we're talking about."

  Earnest, the State Senator. He was posed like a statue, with hands gripping the lapels of his coat, in a stance
of oratory. A gaunt man with a lean face, the stalk of his neck accentuated by a high stiff collar with wings wide open to accommodate the jut of a blade-thin Adam's apple. He wore a pompadour of dark hair, heavily-browed eyes, and a black horseshoe mustache. The flanks of his cheeks were sunken. His eyes, fixed on the camera, had little pouchy hammocks under them. One was informed by the pose that he took himself seriously. He might have been one of the humorless statesmen immortalized in the steel engraving, "Lincoln and his Cabinet."

  Lionel, the junior brother, had stepped from the Currier and Ives period into the Turn of the Century. His close-up, circa 1905, bore the imprint of a fashionable Newport photographer. He faced the camera with folded arms and the intense self-interest of a theatrical portrait. His features possessed the clean-shaven, strong-jawed vacuity favored by the nickelodeon heroes of that day. He might have been the aging leading man of a smalltown

  stock company. His handsomeness was marred by the weathering of middle age and something tricky in the eyes. I was reminded of certain portraits of William McKinley.

  Abby Bridewell was a perfect Brady. Although her latest portrait was dated 1907, it might have been taken by Alexander Gardener. She was posed in a mahogany rocker. She wore a black lace cap, a black velvet choker, and a dress that looked as if it were fashioned of black bombazine. Her eyes were direct and uncompromising. Her mouth was a tight little line between dumpling jowls that would have suited one of Disney's dwarfs. But the grumpy, curmudgeon expression was, it seemed, deceptively folksy. I was to learn that this old lady embodied the temper, the sharp acumen, the willpowered determination of a German baroness. It came to me that somewhere I had seen her portrait before. Then I remembered. Pictures of old Queen Victoria.

  We took the album down to the dining room.

  "Here's where they ate," Ed said. "At this same round table. The room is just as it was, except I took down a big old hanging gas fixture and put in electric lights."

  I said, "I suppose after dinner they moved into the parlor."

  Ed said, '111 show you."

  He guided us through the puzzle of the three-door vestibule. The parlor was a tight little pentagon which seemed somehow apart from the rest of the house. With its horsehair sofa, its black marble fireplace, its Turkey carpet, mahogany chairs, bric-a-brac, whatnot and needlepoint samplers, it resembled a stage set. Today's decorators generally deplore dark interiors, and the maroon and blue motif of this little parlor proved at once somber and oppressive. The mood was heightened by the picture over the mantel—the framed lithograph of a large and veiny human eye staring starkly over the legend: International Order of Ancient Knights, Lodge No. 46.

  Meeting mine, the Eye challenged my presence in the house

  and made me feel uninvited. It followed me as I crossed to look at the steel engraving of Morning, Noon and Night —the child in the bow of the rowboat, the handsome couple at the oars, and the ancient gaffer in the stern, standing upright and pointing at the sad, dim shore in misty distance. In keeping with this gloomy portrayal of man's junket from cradle to grave was the massive volume on the marbletop table beside the sofa. Gustave Dore's Night Scenes from the Bible. Tabourets, footstools, wax fruit under glass, an obsidian vase, a statuette of Chief Massasoit, a model of the Marie Celeste and a stuffed owl added an ostentatious confusion to the parlor's solemnity.

  Ed's wife said from the door, "That eye has to go. It oggles me when I come in here to clean . . . Ed insists on leaving it."

  I said, "But the parlor is wonderful. Genuine Americana."

  "I've put everything back," Ed said, "the way they had it. Notice the gramophone. I found that out in the barn."

  It dominated a window corner. A big, bell-mouthed morning glory sprouting from a little oak-veneer box with a crank handle. It sat on a cabinet containing shelves of small black cylinders— the forerunners of the victrola platter. We tried one later. Out oame a scratchy rendition of "Daisy Belle." A voice spoke in preamble: This is an Edison reck-ord.

  Evidently the Bridewells had junked the gramophone. It interrupted their talk.

  "I remember glimpsing them in here talking," Ed recalled, "and wondering what they found, all the time, to talk about. I'd be peddling papers. Coming up to the house, I'd see Earnest with his back to the window, flailing his arms like he's practicing a speech. Lionel would be yapping and the old lady carrying on. I didn't get wise till later that they were quarreling."

  "Tell how they went to church," Ed's wife said.

  "Oh, yes. Every Sunday. Down to the Primitive Sabbatarian that used to be here. Real Fundamentalist. They'd go in the old lady's surrey pulled by the matched bays. She always drove. Sitting up stiff, like a coachman. Otherwise, they never went out together, unless on business."

  "Was that what they quarreled about?"

  "All the time. You see, the old lady held the reins, and she wouldn't let go."

  Luke Martin had begun to pace the carpet. "Tell about the murder, Ed," he urged.

  "Wait," I said. "Ed's doing all right. We're just getting acquainted with the Dramatis Personae."

  "How's that?" Ed inquired.

  "You're giving us the cast of characters." I was thinking that these Bridewells were walking stereotypes of gaslight Yankee-dom. Of course, the old mother and the elder son were pillars of the church. As befitted conventional tycoonery and conservatism. Even handsome Lionel had found it expedient to follow the styles in conformist respectability. But the faces registered by the camera suggested that the fundamentals of Cromwellian doctrine neither softened the heart nor purged the soul of egocentric selfishness.

  "Well, of course, I don't actually know they rowed all the time," Ed conceded. He added, "You know some people enjoy squabbling. It gets to be kind of a habit. They like a good after-dinner bone to pick ... I guess the Bridewells got along well enough except about money."

  "What else is there?" Luke Martin asked.

  Ed's wife chuckled, and Ed looked at her affectionately. Then, "But I guess you're right so far as the Bridewells were concerned. They had—at least for these parts—a lot of money. Root of the trouble, I expect. The old lady sat on it, and the boys wanted it."

  The oldest plot situation in the hackney repertoire—the Have holding out on the Have-nots. Also the world's oldest casus belli. Inciter of wars and revolutions, it had generated the overthrow of nations and the dissolution of empires since the day of the Rosetta Stone. Now I was to see its disruptive workings in Bride-wellia (surely the world's smallest domain) here in the microcosm of Quahog Point.

  As Ed Brewster outlined this particle of history, Captain Bridewell had left his entire estate to his widow, enjoining her to make such disposition of the properties to the sons as she saw fit. Abby Bridewell did not see fit. Although willing to delegate

  certain management duties to the sons, the dowager mother refused to sign over a dollar's worth of property, and she ruled the family treasury with an unyielding soepter.

  Ed said, "She owned everything. The hotel and the other businesses. If the sons made any money, they had to hand it over. She wouldn't let go of a dime."

  And I could not help but visualize the old lady in her rocker as resembling one of those period-piece, castiron penny banks whose only gesture was to make a deposit. Give her a coin, and the automatic response was to pop it into her mouth (or perhaps a slot in her bosom) whence it would be swallowed with a tiny clank. Thereupon she would settle back with a fixed expression of satisfaction. You couldn't get a cent out of her without resort to a hammer or a screw driver.

  Coupled with her penury was a relentless determination to direct the lives of her sons. Our narrator opened the album to an early picture of Earnest Bridewell standing, hand in bosom, on white steps in front of a granite pillar. Earnest, it seemed, had attended college—Ed thought, perhaps, Bates. As a young man, then, he had practiced law for a spell.

  "I guess there was never much law to practice here at the Point, though," Ed said. "They say Earnest was a p
retty good lawyer in his salad days, but there wasn't any salad. I've heard old-timers say the old lady wouldn't let him set up in the city. Wanted him to tend family affairs at home. After the old Captain was paralyzed, she installed him—Earnest—as manager of the Trawler and Kelp Companies."

  It was Abby Bridewell and her money that originally put him in the State Senate, and voted him to the board of the P. and Q. But Abby told him how to vote when in the Senate and on the Board—of that, Ed Brewster was certain. "She had him under her thumb, I'll warrant that."

  "What about the other one—Lionel?"

  "I've heard my father tell," Ed said, "that Lionel Bridewell wanted to go into opera. Back when he was in his twenties. Abby let him study for a time up in Boston."

  He displayed an early picture of Lionel posed in profile, chin

  in palm. The man had the build and features of an American Apollo—and knew it.

  "He had a voice," Ed said, "but it seems he didn't have no talent. There was some kind of trouble up in Boston—woman, apparently —and the old lady ordered him home. He got the management desk at the Surf and Sand. Just a clerk's job, really. The old lady kept the say about the hotel."

  Ed confided that he had gleaned most of these biographic details from a box of letters up in the attic. "The old lady saved her correspondence by the bushel. Some of it dates back to the Civil War."

  "Did you read it all?"

  "Most of it. And then I heard talk in the village. . . . But you get the picture."

  I did. The mother-ridden politico. The frustrated baritone. Romulus and Remus, middle-aged, bound by maternal cordage to the ancient She Wolf. But the apron strings in this case were purse strings.