The Wife, the Maid, and the Mistress

Chapter Eleven





ORCHARD STREET, LOWER EAST SIDE, SUNDAY, AUGUST 31, 1930



JUDE hadn’t moved from a supine position by the time Maria finished dressing for Mass. She brushed a knot of tangled hair away from his forehead and kissed his temple. He lay stretched across the bed, arms and legs askew, and she stood back to look at his half-naked body. The sheet was wrapped around his waist, his head beneath one arm. Maria ran her finger over his parted lips, feeling the warmth of his breath and then the stubble on his chin. Any other day she would have crawled back into bed and made love to him. Instead, she left a note—Gone to Mass, be back soon—and slipped out the door.

The sun had scarcely risen over Midtown as Maria walked toward the spired Gothic beast that was St. Patrick’s Cathedral. She had given up her dream of a wedding there when she married Jude, but she still adored every marbled, gilded inch of the place. It was the church of her childhood: confirmation, confession, First Communion  . Her father had insisted they attend the elaborate cathedral instead of their smaller, humbler parish in Queens. In time, she learned that his decision had less to do with piety and more to do with business. The wealthy went to St. Patrick’s. Maria’s father secured a job as a tailor at Smithson’s within six months of their first Mass. Irreverent as it seemed, Maria could never argue the wisdom of his decision. The church had been kind to them. It was the place where she first understood that prayers were holy and that God wasn’t some other thing out there, but the most important thing anywhere.

She tugged on one of the ornate handles attached to the double doors and stepped inside. Mass would not start for an hour. The sanctuary was filled with silence and splashes of indigo light from the sun filtering through a stained-glass kaleidoscope above the altar. She kept to the shadows and slid into a wooden pew at the back of the church to wait.

The confessionals on each side of the nave were discreetly tucked behind towering marble columns. None of them were occupied. The repentant had not yet risen, apparently. Except for Maria. And she made no move toward the red-velvet-draped booths. Instead, she watched a handful of parishioners light candles at the side altars and kneel, whispering over clasped hands, filling the church with the scent of prayer: incense and candle smoke. Some settled into the pews. Others tiptoed from St. Patrick’s, their business with God tended for now.

After several minutes, a small door creaked open inside the chancel and a weathered priest limped out. Maria relaxed in her seat. She watched him shuffle toward the altar and down three steps into the sanctuary. She was struck by his ruined body, how he took a step and then lifted his other leg, dragging a crooked foot along the floor—a dilapidated man in vestments. The priest lowered himself into the front pew and sat with his back to her, head bowed in reverence.


Maria took a quick breath through her nose. The scent of wood polish, floor wax, and the cracked leather of old Bibles gave her the courage she needed to rise and walk down the nave toward the confessional nearest the waiting priest. She cleared her throat as she slipped behind the red curtain and drew it shut.

The booth was small and oddly comforting. She sat, back straight and eyes on the cloth-covered ceiling. After several moments, there was a rustle of fabric on the other side of the screen partition. The click of wooden rosary beads knocking against one another. A whispered prayer in Latin. Then silence—her invitation to begin.

“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned,” she said, her words drifting away as it occurred to her that she did not know how to say what she’d come to confess.

More silence.

“It’s been many months since my last confession.” Maria wiped her sweaty palms across the fabric of her dress. “I don’t know how long.”

A melancholy sigh, and then the partition slid back.

Startled, Maria looked at the priest and saw the familiar face with its kind gray eyes and tender smile. She smiled. “Hello, Father Donnegal.”

“Maria.”

She looked at the wedge of partition tucked into the wall between them. “This is …”

“One friend speaking to another.”

Finn Donnegal had taken the cloth five years before Maria was born, when her parents were still newlyweds living in Barcelona. He’d always been a staple in her life. Family friend. Counselor. Adopted uncle. He had secretly defied her parents to attend her wedding to Jude at City Hall—his support for their union   stopping short only at performing the ceremony himself. She hadn’t had the heart to ask.

“I came here to confess,” she said.

“Did you, now?” A skeptical twitch of his eyebrow.

Maria opened her mouth and then snapped it shut again, abashed. She sank farther into the seat. “I’ve done something I shouldn’t have.”

Father Donnegal leaned back against the wall, allowing space for her confession. A note of doubt laced his voice. He would always believe her to be a wide-eyed innocent. “What have you done?”

When Maria could see just the edge of his profile, she said, “I stole money from my employer.” It was more than that, of course, but the story was not entirely hers to share.

She was absurdly pleased to hear the surprise in his voice.

“Why?”

A complicated answer. She sighed. Maria wanted to tell him about that day in the apartment and about Jude and the envelopes. Her raging curiosity. Yet she’d come that morning to hear secrets, not to tell them, so she offered only a thin slice of the truth.

“Mr. Crater is missing,” she said. “A reporter came to his home while I was cleaning and told me. And I thought … I don’t know … that there might not be any more paychecks. The last one is three weeks late already.”

“Many of God’s children have been tempted by less.”

“But I don’t do that kind of thing.”

“Apparently, you do.” Finn clasped the gold crucifix that hung around his neck. “Does he know what you have done?”

“No.”

“Do you still have the money?”

“Yes.”

The booth settled into a solemn hush. Finn seemed perfectly comfortable in the silence, but Maria squirmed beneath its weight. “What is my penance?”

“You must return the money.”

“Should I tell him what I’ve done?”

Finn tipped his head to one side. “Do you know the difficult thing about God, Maria?”

At the moment, everything about God seemed difficult. “There’s just one thing?”

“He can only deal with the truth.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means the truth is more important than protecting yourself. Regardless of the consequences.”

Maria groaned. “I will lose my job.”

“Perhaps.”

Never one to rush the repentant, he waited while she considered that possibility. Only when she shifted her weight and sighed again did he say, “This is the first time you’ve ever come to me for confession. Why now?”

“It’s awkward. You’re practically family. It’s like a brother reading your diary.”

Father Donnegal pressed her with silence.

“You’re the one I need to speak with,” she finally said.

“Why?”

Maria wanted to give a different answer, but she couldn’t lie to him. “Jude came to see you a few weeks ago.”

“So now we get to the truth of your visit.”

“I’m not here under false pretenses.” Not completely, at any rate. She had wanted to confess her theft.

His face settled into a look of patient disbelief.

“He told me that he came,” Maria continued. She played with her purse strap, coiling it around her fingers, wishing for her rosary and suppressing a sudden rage at Jude. She wouldn’t be here if not for him. “I was hoping you’d tell me what the two of you spoke about.”

“You know I can’t do that.” Finn gripped the edge of the partition with knobby, arthritic fingers and slid it shut. “Not even for you.”

She winced. “But—”

“Let us pray.”

Maria leaned forward, straining to hear his quiet absolution. She cleared her throat, ashamed. “Amen.”

“Give thanks to the Lord,” he added.

“For his mercies endure forever,” she answered in a whisper. Maria pushed back the curtain and hurried from the church. The heat of embarrassment was still bright on her cheeks as she fled St. Patrick’s.

GRAND STREET, LOWER EAST SIDE,

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 5, 1930

Maria laughed. “Careful, that’s the curb.”

She wrapped Jude’s arm around her shoulders and dragged him back onto the sidewalk. He struggled to find his balance, as though it were the ground that spun.

“I’m drunk.”

“No,” she said, “you were drunk hours ago. Now you’re outright pickled.”

“Rotgut.”

“I warned you not to drink that stuff.”

Jude didn’t so much slur as stumble over his words, each syllable seemingly independent of all the others. “Had. No. Choice.”

Maria wedged her shoulder into his rib cage and pushed against him at an angle. One block left. Her only goal right then was getting him back to the apartment before he fell unconscious to the pavement. Jude outweighed her by fifty pounds and was a good six inches taller. There was no way she could lift him if he went down—she would have to fetch a blanket and stay with him until dawn. A miserable prospect for both of them on such a cold night.

Eight hours earlier, he’d been promoted to detective, and the two of them had been coerced into joining the boys from his department at some lousy gin mill near Chinatown. Bad hooch, cigar smoke, and lewd jokes had filled their evening. Maria abstained from all of it, while Jude, growing ever more uncomfortable at what she had to endure, kept a protective arm around her shoulders. He had a perpetual flush of embarrassment on his cheeks, but he didn’t refuse the liquor—felt it would be rude, considering his new partner, Leo Lowenthall, bought the rounds. So he’d knocked them back, one after the other, until he could barely stand and would have lost a bet on his mother’s maiden name.

Only after he’d gone to the bathroom and left her at the mercy of Leo’s roaming gaze had she convinced him to leave. At three in the morning, Grand Street was deserted. Even the streetlamps looked exhausted, dim and sputtering in protest, as they shuffled back to their Orchard Street apartment.


“What’s that?” Maria asked in response to a long string of mumbling. She peered up at the distressed look on his face.

“Said he’ll bleed me.”

“Bleed?”

“Pay up. Earn my keep.” Jude tried to laugh but only produced a strangled bark. He pointed his finger at Maria’s face in some forced imitation. “ ‘Job comes with strings, you know. One day they’ll be pulled. Prepare to dance, Pinocchio. Or your family pays.’ ”

He went on like this for several minutes before she realized he was trying to relay some conversation he’d had. “Who said that?”

“Mooney,” he said, and shook his head. “Rooney.” Jude tried again, forcing tongue and mind to communicate. “Mulrooney.”

“The police commissioner?”

He belched in affirmation, and she stopped right there in the middle of the sidewalk, turning him to face her, a steadying hand on each of his shoulders. “When?”

“Tonight.”

At six o’clock, Jude had stood on a platform with ten other offers during a promotion ceremony. She’d watched Commissioner Mulrooney hand him the detective’s badge that finally got Jude off the vice squad. They both gave wooden smiles amid the press flashbulbs. Maria had been overwhelmed with pride, imagining how she’d seek out the papers the following day to save the headlines and show them to their children years from now: A CROP OF NEW YORK’S FINEST!

At one point in the evening, she’d noticed Mulrooney ease Jude away from the crowd. They’d had a private conversation at the back of the room. Jude had looked so serious, so stoic. And she’d assumed that he was overcome by the opportunity, humbled to be singled out by such an important man. But now she wondered if she had misread the exchange. Perhaps it was not congratulations but stipulations that Mulrooney imparted to her husband.

Jude crushed her lips flat with the same finger he’d pointed at her earlier. “Shhhh,” he said. “ ’S’all off the record.”

Her mind lit on one thought after another, realizations so scattered and erratic she felt drunk as well. The favor she’d asked of Joseph Crater. Jude’s promotion. Mulrooney’s warning. Jude drinking himself under the table.

This was her fault.

She’d opened Pandora’s box. He was no better off as a detective than he was on the vice squad.

It was March and still cold enough for both of them to be in long coats. And though their breath had been swirling before their faces the entire walk home, Maria only then began to feel truly cold.

She reached up and set her hand against Jude’s cheek. “I’m so sorry.”

He leaned into her palm and rubbed against it like a kitten. The movements made him stumble forward, and she had to throw her weight against him to stop him from flopping to the ground. “Home it is,” she grunted.

Maria steered him down the street, around the corner, and into the entrance of 97 Orchard Street, one of the nicer tenements in the highly populated immigrant section of Manhattan. She did not undress Jude or yank back the covers, merely deposited him as gently as possible onto their bed. She did take his shoes off, however, and then lay beside him, fretting until both mind and body surrendered to exhaustion.

When Jude woke at noon the following day, he remembered nothing, not how much he’d had to drink or who had been with them at the bar or their conversation on the way home. Maria would have been tempted to write it all off as the intoxicated ramblings of an inexperienced drinker were it not for his reaction when she asked about his conversation with Mulrooney at the ceremony.

“It looked like he was saying something really important,” she said.

That conversation, he clearly remembered. Jude’s face settled into the controlled, emotionless expression he reserved for her mother and her repeated attempts to convince him that converting to Catholicism was the only way to save his soul. “Nothing to worry about,” he said. “Mulrooney was only making sure I fully understood the obligations of this new job.”

EMMA occupied herself with cooking breakfast while Stella thumbed through Joe’s address book, searching for any associates who might know his whereabouts. Most didn’t answer so early on a Sunday morning; those who did couldn’t tell her where he might be. As Stella left Joe’s office, a swift knock rattled the front door.

“Shouldn’t you freshen up before answering that?” Emma called from the kitchen.

“Why?” Stella glanced down at the wrinkled navy dress and the stockings that sagged a bit around her ankles.

“You look rumpled.”

“Would you prefer to answer it?”

Emma turned back to her poached eggs with a sniff.

Stella peered through the peephole, breathed a sigh of relief, and opened the door.

Leo Lowenthall stood in the doorway, hat in hand. “I heard the news, Mrs. Crater. I’m so sorry.” He motioned to a second detective. “This is my partner, Jude Simon.”

Stella led them into the kitchen.

“Mother, this is Detective Lowenthall with the NYPD. And his partner, Jude Simon. Gentlemen, my mother, Emma Wheeler.” They shook hands.

“Simon Rifkind called me yesterday and asked me to look around,” Leo said. “I’ve checked out all the hospitals and morgues, but there’s no trace of him.”

Detective Simon took off his fedora and ran his fingers along the brim. He glanced around the apartment expectantly, as though looking for someone.

“I don’t know what to do,” Stella said.

“There isn’t much you can do. Except wait.” Leo offered her a patient smile. “When did you get back?”

“Friday night.”

“And have you found anything here that might shed some light on where he went?”

“No. But I haven’t looked around much.” Stella had a hard time keeping her voice light and wondered if the truth was written across her face.

“Mind if we look around?”

“Please do.”

The detectives led Stella and her mother through the apartment, opening closets and checking coat pockets. They rifled through drawers and inside cupboards but found nothing. After a while, their interest turned to the bedroom.

“Quite the clotheshorse, isn’t he?” Leo asked, thumbing through Joe’s closet.

Emma stood in the doorway, nodding her approval. “My son-in-law is a well-tailored man. Every bit the judge.”

“Does everything look in order, Mrs. Crater?” Detective Simon asked.

Stella joined them at the closet and took stock of Joe’s summer suits, mostly lightweight cotton and linen. She lifted a brown vest that seemed to have misplaced its companions. “There’s a brown pinstriped suit that’s missing. His favorite.”

All of Joe’s traveling bags were in place at the back of the closet, and most of his personal items sat on top of the bureau: a monogrammed pocket watch, a fountain pen, and a card case.

Leo wandered over to the bureau and inspected each of the orphaned items. “Does he usually carry these with him?”

“Yes.”

“Any idea why he’d leave them behind?”

“I have no idea about any of this,” Stella said as she watched Leo lift the edge of the bureau scarf.

He motioned to the small gold key that stuck out from the lock. “May I?”

“Certainly.”

His eyes crinkled at the corners. “No personal items in there?”

“My underwear is well hidden, I assure you.”


Stella sat on the bench at the foot of her bed as they moved toward the bureau. She feigned disinterest and plucked at the tassels on a throw pillow. They stared into the empty drawer. Leo tapped a squared-off fingernail against the wooden bottom. Jude popped the knuckles on his left hand one by one. Emma rummaged through a shelf at the back of the closet. Stella noted all of this in the silence that filled the bedroom.

“I’m a little puzzled,” Leo said after a few long seconds, “that Joe didn’t leave anything behind indicating his whereabouts.”

“I’ve spent the last month puzzled about a great deal more than that,” she said. Her voice broke on the last word, but no one seemed to notice.

An uneasy glance passed between the two detectives, and then Leo shut the drawer. “Here’s the situation,” he said. “I don’t think anything should be done for the time being. Maybe you should go back to Maine? Let us look around a bit more.”

Stella tossed the throw pillow onto the bed. “Joe’s already been missing almost a month. And all I’ve done is sit up there and wait.”

“What if he comes back and you’re not there? Besides, I can keep you informed if anything happens here.”

Jude rested against the bureau, unease etched across his face. He watched the exchange but offered no input.

“Perhaps that is best,” Stella said.

Emma led the detectives to the door, Stella trailing behind. “If you don’t mind, I’m going to lie down. I don’t feel well,” she said. “Good day, gentlemen. Thank you for checking on Joe.”

Emma clicked her tongue. “But you haven’t eaten breakfast.”

“I’m not hungry anymore.”

While Emma saw the detectives out, Stella returned to her bedroom and locked the door. Joe’s Victrola stood beside the window, and she turned it on low. The room filled with jazz music and the faint rustle of static. She peeled the stockings from her legs and tossed them in the hamper, along with her dress. Stella lifted her slip above her knees and knelt on the hardwood floor. She reached into the darkness below the bed, her back stretching with the movement, and fumbled around before pulling out the leather satchel. Inside lay the four manila envelopes she’d found in the bureau drawer. Each addressed to her in Joe’s handwriting. Each containing something that she could not let anyone discover.