Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 46, No. 6. Whole No. 265, December 1965

Final Entry by Priscilla W. Armstrong

This is the 289th “first story” to be published by Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine... and like so many stories that appear in EQMM, this one has an interesting background...

Mrs. Armstrong’s “first story” was sent to us by an old and valued friend, Dorothy Gardiner, author of WHAT CRIME IS IT? THE SEVENTH MOURNER, LION IN WAIT, and one of the towers of strength and common sense during the formative years of MWA (Mystery Writers of America). In her accompanying letter Dorothy Gardiner told us how she discovered one day that she needed a change in her daily living, a lift in her morale. Before she fully realized what she had done about it, she found herself involved (that’s the only word for it) in a truly wonderful project. To her surprise, and to the surprise of all others concerned, she became a volunteer worker in the Presbyterian Senior Services.

The PSS has a Center on Madison Avenue in New York City. Its program and objectives are to help elderly people, of both sexes and all religions and races — “senior citizens” whose lives have fallen apart and who are having difficulties adjusting to changed and still-changing conditions: women whose husbands have died and whose children are married and living their own complicated lives; men who have retired and are totally unprepared for leisure, suddenly having nothing to do with their time.

The PSS Center has as Director a young, energetic, and understanding clergyman, the Reverend Robert Armstrong, and under his general supervision the Center embraces all kinds of stimulating and therapeutic endeavors: classes, for example, in painting and piano playing for men and women who haven’t picked up a brush or sat down at a piano in 50 years, or who haven’t played the piano or painted all their lives.

Well, Dorothy Gardiner, that good and generous soul, undertook to teach a class in Creative Writing. She has nearly a dozen pupils — “Old Gals” mostly, a charming group, the oldest 81 and definitely “the belle of the ball.” Her youngest pupil is the wife of the Director; she has always wanted to write, but with two children, a busy husband, and a four-room apartment to take care of without outside help — well, there haven’t been too many spare hours to devote to the luxury of writing.

Dorothy Gardiner ended her letter by saying that her new work-interest has proved “the best thing in the world for me, whatever it may be doing to my pupils.” It is blessed to give; it is blessed to receive...

Mrs. Armstrong’s “first story” is written in a semidocumentary style that is particularly appropriate to the “case history” feeling of her subject matter — which is as it should be in this instance; even more important, the “case history” style projects a convincing authenticity: you believe, without question, that the author knows what she is writing about — knows the background, the procedures, and most promising in a new writer, the hearts and minds of her characters...

If the newspaper had not carried the picture of Angela Scarlatti, I probably would never have thought of her again. She would have stayed in the closed file of my mind, along with so many others. It is a strange thing, that one can feel so strongly for another human being, and yet forget her, often in a day or two, in the crowd of others.

But this time I heard the end of the story; in fact, it had several endings, and this is unusual, for those of us who worked in Intake seldom witnessed the endings of stories. Sometimes I felt as impersonal as a funnel, with my pen and my mimeographed interview form and the little scrap, of paper clipped onto the case record: Case Assigned.

I first met Angela Scarlatti in the way I met hundreds of other women — in a tiny pale-green cubicle called an Interview Room. She was only one of several appointments that morning; fall was a busy time for us in Adoption Intake because there always seemed to be a big crop of babies in late summer. The magazines and television portray the process of adoption as a lovely thing, with babies and prospective parents carefully matched; there is generally a tender scene at the end when the kindly social worker hands the eager parents their lovely six-month-old child.

That is all well and good, but I am here to tell you that most adoptions do not happen that way at all. Generally, the mother of the child hands the baby over to the adoptive mother or to an intermediary as she leaves the hospital. The doctor or the lawyer has made all the arrangements, and various fees have been paid out by the adoptive parents, most of which are legal, some of which are not. Then the natural mother is brought by her attorney to sign the papers giving her consent for the adoption, and giving up forever any claim to her child.

In our County, the Court has made provisions for the investigation of each adoptive home before granting the interview, and our agency was the one assigned to this task, thus affording both adoptive parents and infants the maximum protection under the circumstances. It is not an ideal arrangement, of course, but it is better than the “black market” practices it was designed to control and eliminate, and we prided ourselves on doing the very best possible job on behalf of the future of each infant.

Those of us who interviewed the natural mothers never saw the infants, and the home investigators never met the natural mothers. Our job in Intake was to elicit as much objective information as possible before turning the case over to an investigator.

Angela Scarlatti gave me all the objective information we needed, and a good deal of subjective information as well. I was considered very good at getting the facts despite emotional scenes and tears, and Natural Mother Scarlatti was full of tears, and in the end refused to sign the consent for adoption. When she went to court to demand the return of her child from the prospective adoptive parents, their attorneys and Angela’s parents accused me of having influenced her to keep her love child — which I righteously denied under oath, thereby committing perjury and concealing the fact that I had committed the cardinal sin of the social worker: I had got myself emotionally involved with a client.

I remember how little and scared Angela looked as she faced me across the table in that green room. The pale autumn sun washed the room and the girl with a milky light, softening the harshness of the surroundings and making her dark brown hair smoky-black. Her little sallow face was still blurred and indistinct with the softness of childhood, but her young figure already looked overripe, like a hothouse fruit forced too soon to maturity. I remember thinking that one day she would be a round fat dumpling of a woman, and I wondered what was in store for her: the rosy, cheerful life of an Italian wife with a houseful of children, or the blowsy, slatternly life of a semi-tramp, like the woman of Samaria at the well, who had “had five husbands and the one you have now is not your husband.”

According to the interview, Angela was 17, the youngest child in an old-style, patriarchal, Italian-American family. There were several brothers and sisters older than she, all of whom were married and busy producing grandchildren for their parents by the time Angela was graduated from high school. She was 16 then, and her family was duly impressed with her rapid journey through school, but distressed about her lack of boy friends.

Angela was a quiet, obedient daughter, and she told me that her many skills about the house had brought her offers of marriage from some of her father’s unmarried friends. These she had consistently refused, although her parents would have liked to see her settled down and raising a family of her own, and an older man has a great deal to offer. “The money and home were tempting,” she told me, “but I wanted to marry for love.”

Then she met the young man who was to become the father of her child, and found love, but without marriage.

Angela never told her parents where she had met him — she felt they would disapprove, and she desperately wanted their approval of Rip Phillips. She met him the night she went to visit a little Pentecostal Church which had just opened in the neighborhood; the Scarlattis were Catholic, but Angela sometimes attended the churches of her friends, with a feeling of wonder and sympathy for them.

Rip played his guitar for the service that night, and the congregation sang the ancient hymn-tunes. He was tall and good-looking, lean and sandy-haired, and he walked like a king. Perhaps it was because he was so different from the men she knew in the neighborhood that Angela was so attracted to him. “We were like night and day,” she said. “He was so fair and I am so dark.”

Rip began to call for her, to go to movies, to go dancing, to attend the little church where he played his guitar. At last her parents invited him to a meal, and soon he was spending a good deal of time at the Scarlatti home. Mr. and Mrs. Scarlatti made an honest effort to like this lanky stranger, and Angela was the first to admit this. But Rip disliked Italian cooking, laughed at their melodious songs, and sang his own mountain tunes in a loud nasal voice.

He argued with Mr. Scarlatti, and his gallantry toward Mrs. Scarlatti was of a kind to which she was unaccustomed, and by which she was offended. Furthermore, he drank, and drank hard. He disliked their homemade Italian wine, and brought his own whiskey, pro-claiming that his homemade whiskey, back home, was far superior to anything available here.

But it was Rip’s lack of responsibility that finally convinced the Scarlattis that their daughter should have nothing further to do with him. He changed jobs often, almost as frequently as he changed his shirt, and he had no intention of settling down to a steady job and a home. He had a farm, he said, back home in the mountains. He only wanted to earn some cash money, buy a car, go home, and pay off his mortgage.

He never suggested that Angela share his life with him; but Mr. and Mrs. Scarlatti were afraid he would make the offer and that Angela would accept, and they forbade him their home.

Angela and Rip continued to meet, however, and Angela became proud and defiant in the face of her parents’ disapproval, until they ordered her not to see him again. Then they met in secret — in little bars and taverns where they spent their time drinking and singing with the other patrons. Angela became silent and withdrawn, and gave up looking for a job.

When she knew she was pregnant, she asked Rip to marry her and take her with him to his farm. He refused. “I’m free, and I can’t be tied down to no woman. I come and go as I please. I hunt, I fish, and I don’t wear shoes. It’s a good life for me, but it ain’t no kind of a life for a woman. Womenfolks get dried up and die, like my mother did. You have that baby, and you keep him, and you raise him up. When he gets big enough, I will come and fetch him, and teach him to live free, too.”

Angela was too proud to beg, but she began to cry, and Rip hated a woman’s tears. But he tried to comfort her. “He said the oddest thing to me,” she said. “He said, ‘You find a nice Italian boy to marry — a cop, a good cop — and one day your good policeman husband will kill my young son and me.’ That gave me cold chills,” she went on, “and I asked him where he ever got such a notion. He told me it was from an old song, a real old one, but he wouldn’t sing it for me, or tell me the words. He just laughed,” — in a way she would never forget.

Rip went away, and Angela had to tell her parents about the baby.

Mr. Scarlatti beat her, of course — she had expected that — and her mother wept. Then they began to think of arrangements. She would, of course, give the child up for adoption. Angela wanted to keep the baby, but since she was legally a minor, her parents told her the choice was not hers to make.

Mrs. Scarlatti made all the arrangements with the doctor, and in time they were notified that adoptive parents had been found who were well-to-do, would pay all costs and fees, and maybe give a little extra to Mr. Scarlatti for Angela’s “living expenses.”

Angela’s baby was born healthy and beautiful with sandy hair and black eyes, and Angela named him Matthew because it was not an Italian name and because it meant “Gift of God.” On the third day she handed him over to a veiled woman on a street near the hospital, then came home with her parents and attorney to sign her consent to the adoption.

When I first heard the story of “a veiled woman on a street” or the “strange woman in the front seat of the attorney’s car,” I was skeptical, but years of experience had taught me that this is frequently the way it is done, and I accepted without question Angela’s account of handing over her son.

I went on with the interview. We covered all the usual questions: health of Natural Mother, health of Natural Father, physical characteristics of each, special talents, and so on. Then I asked, “Why did you decide to place the child in adoption?”

“It will be better for the child to have rich parents,” said Angela.

I always challenged that kind of answer. The tears began again, and I pushed a box of tissues toward her and waited. Finally she said that she would really like to keep little Matthew, but that it would be hard for her and for her parents. When she called her baby by name, I knew that she needed him more than the adoptive parents did.

Then I asked the printed question, “Is it your own desire to sign consent for this adoption?” and explained that although she was legally a minor, the law required that the decision be her own — that no one could coerce her into signing if she did not really want to. She dried her tears then, and smiled for the first time, a beautiful smile; she lifted her small pointed chin and refused to sign.

In the waiting room her parents stormed and wept when I told them of Angela’s decision, and they stormed and wept in the Supervisor’s Office, and in the Director’s Office, and in the lawyer’s office, and later, in the courtroom and in the Judge’s Chambers, but in the end Angela had her son and also a job as a night waitress, and a shabby room where the seedy old landlady would listen for the baby while Angela was at work.

We closed our file on the Phillips-Scarlatti case.

In time the boy grew old enough to attend a day nursery while Angela worked at a daytime job, and it was at the nursery school that I saw her again, for my own little son attended the same nursery. Angela was as pretty as before, but she had changed. She no longer had the soft, long-haired childish beauty of two years ago, nor had she become the fat dumpling I had predicted. Now she wore her dark hair pulled back severely, showing to advantage the lines of her small face, and the pale olive skin and great black eyes.

She was thin, too thin, I thought, but she had great chic, and I learned that she did some occasional modeling to supplement her income as a waitress. She was cool now — no flicker of emotion showed on her lovely face. She might have been carved of aged ivory.

Little Matthew was handsome and sturdy, and he too “walked like a king.” Angela was obviously proud of him, but treated him with a reserve and dignity unusual in the mother of a young child. It was almost as if he had already a secret self which she was not privileged to know, or on which she feared to intrude.

A couple of years passed during which I saw her often as we left our children or picked them up after the day’s work; I did not encourage closer acquaintance as I felt that our former professional relationship might cause embarrassment for both of us.

Then, one day, I missed her at the school and after a week had passed without my seeing her, I asked the director if something was wrong. She told me that Matthew was no longer registered at the school, that his father had come from Kentucky and taken the boy home with him.

Rip had come several times to the fence around the school playground and had watched the boy at play, and finally had appeared with Angela to tell the Director that he was taking Matthew home to his farm. Angela had let the boy go directly from the school.

“She was very funny about the whole thing,” said the Director. “She said something about a promise made long ago, and about learning to live free. The boy? He accepted his father right away, and went off with him in an old car. They looked as if they had always been together. In fact, Matt seemed to belong more to his father than he ever had to his mother.”

I thought again that I had heard the last of Angela Scarlatti, and that her story, so far as I was concerned, was over. My own children began to grow up, my husband changed jobs, and we moved to another city. Then I saw Angela’s picture in the paper, identified as the wife of the young policeman at her side. There was a story, too:

“Tragedy struck last night in a Northside tavern. According to witnesses, an argument developed between two patrons, Jack Barth and Rip Phillips. Several other men engaged in the brawl, and at the height of the melee, Barth was fatally stabbed by Phillips.

“At this point Anthony Brindiso, a policeman off duty, entered the tavern and attempted to stop the fight. As he bent to offer first aid to the dying Barth, Phillips attacked him with his knife. Brindiso drew his gun and fired twice, felling his assailant. The second shot went wild and struck Matt Phillips, 8-year-old son of Rip, killing the boy instantly. Phillips died in the ambulance. Brindiso was treated for shock and released.

“According to witnesses, Brindiso shot in self-defense, and the death of the boy was an accident. George Johnson, proprietor of the tavern, placed damage to fixtures and stock at $200. Funeral services for Barth are scheduled for Monday, and for Phillips and his son for Tuesday. Neither man has any family.”

So Angela had married her nice Italian boy after all, and he was a good cop, and he had, indeed, killed both her lover and her son, as Rip had foretold, and Tony Brindiso never even knew who they were. I know Angela — she would never have told him.

I cut the story from the paper and mailed it to my former Supervisor, marked: