The Devil in the White City

Cuckoldry

AT THE HOLMES BUILDING at Sixty-third and Wallace, now known widely in the neighborhood as “the castle,” the Conner family was in turmoil. Lovely, dark Gertrude—Ned’s sister—one day came to Ned in tears and told him she could not stay in the house another moment. She vowed to catch the first train back to Muscatine, Iowa. Ned begged her to tell him what had occurred, but she refused.

Ned knew that she and a young man had begun courting, and he believed her tears must have resulted from something he had said or done. Possibly the two had been “indiscreet,” although he did not think Gertrude capable of so drastic a moral lapse. The more he pressed her for an explanation, the more troubled and adamant she became. She wished she had never come to Chicago. It was a blighted, hellish place full of noise and dust and smoke and inhuman towers that blocked the sun, and she hated it—hated especially this gloomy building and the ceaseless clamor of construction.

When Holmes came by, she would not look at him. Her color rose. Ned did not notice.

Ned hired an express company to collect her trunk and saw her to the station. Still she would not explain. Through tears, she said good-bye. The train huffed from the station.

In Iowa—in safe, bland Muscatine—Gertrude fell ill, an accident of nature. The disease proved fatal. Holmes told Ned how sorry he was to hear of her passing, but in his eyes there was only a flat blue calm, like the lake on a still August morning.

With Gertrude gone, the tension between Ned and Julia increased. Their marriage never had been tranquil. Back in Iowa they had come close to separating. Now, again, their relationship was crumbling. Their daughter, Pearl, became commensurately more difficult to manage, her behavior marked by periods of sullen withdrawal and eruptions of anger. Ned understood none of it. He was “of an easy-going innocent nature,” a reporter later observed, “he mistrusted nothing.” He did not see what even his friends and regular customers saw. “Some of my friends told me there was something between Holmes and my wife,” he said later. “At first I did not believe it.”

Despite the warnings and his own mounting uneasiness, Ned admired Holmes. While he, Ned, was but a jeweler in someone else’s store, Holmes controlled a small empire—and had yet to turn thirty years old. Holmes’s energy and success made Ned feel even smaller than he already was inclined to feel, especially now that Julia had begun looking at him as if he had just emerged from a rendering vat at the stockyards.

Thus Ned was particularly susceptible to an offer from Holmes that seemed likely to increase his own stature in Julia’s eyes. Holmes proposed to sell Ned the entire pharmacy, under terms that Ned—naïve Ned—found generous beyond all expectation. Holmes would increase his salary from twelve to eighteen dollars a week, so that Ned could pay Holmes six dollars a week to cover the purchase. Ned wouldn’t even have to worry about handling the six dollars—Holmes would deduct it from the new eighteen-dollar salary each week, automatically. Holmes promised also to take care of all the legal details and to record the transfer with city officials. Ned would get his twelve dollars a week just as always, but now he would be the owner of a fine store in a prosperous neighborhood destined to become even wealthier once the world’s fair began operation.

Ned accepted, giving no thought to why Holmes would wish to shed such a healthy business. The offer eased his concerns about Holmes and Julia. If Holmes and she were involved in an indiscreet liaison, would he offer Ned the jewel of his Englewood empire?

To Ned’s sorrow, he soon found that his new status did nothing to ease the tension between himself and Julia. The ferocity of their arguments only increased, as did the length of the cold silences that filled whatever other time they spent together. Holmes was sympathetic. He bought Ned lunch at the first-floor restaurant and told Ned how certain he was that the marriage would be salvaged. Julia was an ambitious woman and clearly a very beautiful one, but she would come to her senses in short order.

Holmes’s sympathy was disarming. The idea that Holmes might be the cause of Julia’s discontent seemed more and more improbable. Holmes even wanted Ned to buy life insurance, for surely once his marital strife subsided, he would want to protect Julia and Pearl from destitution in the event of his death. He recommended that Ned also consider insuring Pearl’s life and offered to pay the initial premiums. He brought an insurance man, C. W. Arnold, to meet with Ned.

Arnold explained that he was building a new agency and wanted to sell as many policies as possible in order to attract the attention of the biggest insurance companies. To secure a policy, all Ned had to pay was a dollar, Arnold said—just one dollar to begin protecting his family forever.

But Ned did not want a policy. Arnold tried to change his mind. Ned refused and refused and finally told Arnold that if he really needed a dollar, Ned would simply give him one.

Arnold and Holmes looked at each other, their eyes empty of all expression.

Soon creditors began appearing at the pharmacy demanding repayment of mortgages secured by the store’s furnishings and its stock of salves and ointments and other goods. Ned was unaware of the existence of these debts and believed the creditors were trying to defraud him—until they presented documents signed by the previous owner, H. H. Holmes. Convinced now that these were bona-fide debts, Ned promised to pay them as soon as he was able.

Here too Holmes was sympathetic, but there was nothing he could do. Any thriving venture accumulated debts. He had assumed that Ned understood at least that much about business. At any rate it was something to which Ned would now have to become accustomed. The sale, he reminded Ned, was final.

This latest disappointment rekindled Ned’s uneasiness about Holmes and Julia. He began to suspect that his friends might indeed be correct in believing that Holmes and Julia were engaged in an illicit affair. It would explain the change in Julia, certainly, and might even explain Holmes’s sale of the pharmacy—an unstated trade: the store in exchange for Julia.

Ned did not yet confront Julia with his suspicions. He told her simply that if her behavior toward him did not change, if her coldness and hostility continued, he and she would have to separate.

She snapped, “Separation couldn’t come too soon to suit me.”

But they remained together a short while longer. Their battles became more frequent. Finally Ned shouted that he was done, the marriage was over. He spent the night in the barbershop on the first floor, directly below their apartment. He heard her footsteps as she moved about on the floor above.

The next morning he told Holmes he was leaving and would abandon his interest in the store. When Holmes urged him to reconsider, Ned merely laughed. He moved out and took a new job with a jewelry store in downtown Chicago, H. Purdy & Co. Pearl remained with Julia and Holmes.

Ned made one more attempt to win back his wife. “I told her after I left the building that if she would return to me and stop her quarreling we would live together again, but she refused to come back.”

Ned vowed that one day he would return for Pearl. Soon he left Chicago and moved to Gilman, Illinois, where he met a young woman and began a formal courtship, which compelled him to visit Holmes’s building one more time, to seek a divorce decree. He got it but failed to gain custody of Pearl.

With Ned gone and the divorce final, Holmes’s interest in Julia began to dissipate. He had promised her repeatedly that he would marry her once the decree was confirmed, but now he found the prospect repulsive. Pearl’s sullen, accusing presence had become especially unappealing.

At night, after the first-floor stores had closed and Julia and Pearl and the building’s other tenants were asleep, he sometimes would descend to the basement, careful to lock the door behind him, and there ignite the flames of his kiln and marvel at its extraordinary heat.