Mansions Of The Dead (39 page)

“Putnam, thirty-four, had gone for a short walk, when she was struck down sometime after nine P.M. Around ten P.M. Providence resident Michael Mabee, twenty-one, was returning to a friend’s home on Harrison Avenue when he found Mrs. Putnam unconscious by the side of the road. He called 911 from his cell phone, and the victim was taken to Newport Hospital with facial lacerations and head injuries. She is in stable condition this morning at the hospital. Police will be questioning her today, according to a source.”

Sweeney tried to picture Ocean Drive at night. There wasn’t much of a shoulder and hardly any light; it would be very dangerous to walk there without a reflective vest or a flashlight. Sweeney had been to the Putnams’ house. There was plenty of lawn to walk around on. So what had Melissa been doing up on Ocean Drive after nine?

She showered as best she could with Anna’s spartan shower supplies, which consisted of an old bottle of Pert shampoo and a tiny bar of Ivory soap, and put on a red-polka-dotted sundress she’d found at a thrift shop, a white cardigan, and sandals, and walked down Bellevue Avenue toward the old part of town.

It was a brilliantly sunny day, the kind of early spring morning when the sunny side of the street is warm and the shade side is chilly. Sweeney was glad to be outside, and the sun and Anna’s strong coffee gave the day a sense of promise and good fortune. She sensed that the answer to this mystery lay somewhere in Newport, somewhere in the winter of 1863. And she was going to figure out where.

The Newport Historical Society was located on Touro Street, just off Bellevue Avenue in the old part of town. It was fairly shabby inside, with a few offices for historical society employees and a small collection of paintings depicting various important Newport residents. But it wasn’t really a place for the public to visit, and Sweeney was struck by
how the functional interior contrasted with the historical society’s public persona—the grand houses on Bellevue Avenue, owned by the historical society, and even the patrician exterior of the building.

She introduced herself to the harried-looking woman behind the desk and asked if there was anyone who specialized in the history of Newport in the 1860s. “I was wondering if you had any information on a woman named Belinda Putnam—Belinda Cogswell, her maiden name was—having been in Newport in the winter of 1863. I don’t know where or what it would be, maybe a reference in a letter or something. She wasn’t from here, but I think that her family may have started spending summers in Newport starting in the 1850s or so. I’m looking for any evidence that she came down here in the off-season.

“Oh, that’s George you want,” the woman said. “Hold on.” She disappeared for a moment and came back with a middle-aged man dressed in bermuda shorts and a “Newport Mansions” T-shirt. He looked up shyly as Sweeney explained what she wanted.

“It’s interesting, you know,” the man said. “How Newport developed as a summer destination. We had our heyday in the 1750s, before the British occupation during the Revolutionary War. We fell on hard times after the war, of course, but it was as a summer destination that we had our second heyday. It had always been the custom for wealthy Southern plantation owners to bring their families up in the summer months. The air was considered healthier and they were familiar with the area because they had been up for the slave markets. But Easterners didn’t come until the mid-1800s. Our first tourist hotel was built in the 1820s and then more went up in the 1840s. That was when Newport became a destination for Boston intellectuals.”

“That’s when I imagine Belinda Cogswell’s family started coming,” Sweeney said.

“Well, let’s see. I have an index of some of the materials we have here, but I don’t know that we’ll come up with anything.” He went to a brand-new Macintosh on the desk and started typing.

“Well, we’ve got a lot of references to the Putnams, of course. Let’s
see, B. . . . B. Belinda. There’s one reference, but it doesn’t look promising. It just says gift to Newport Ladies’ Society. 1880. That’s much later than you’re looking for, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. What was the gift?”

“A set of framed sketches. By the donor, it says. But there’s a note that says the Ladies’ Society gave them back to the family in the 1950s when they lost their meetinghouse.”

“Hmmm. What about under Belinda Cogswell?” Sweeney asked.

“Cogswell, Cogswell. I’ve got Nathaniel Cogswell, but no Belinda.”

“That’s okay. It’s kind of a long shot anyway. Is there any chance that there’s material that isn’t cataloged?”

“Well . . . I suppose if there was a reference to her that wasn’t indexed, maybe because her name wasn’t used, or wasn’t correct. I don’t know.” He took a stack of books down from a shelf. “You can look through these if you want. I’m sorry we can’t be more helpful.”

“No, no. I think you might be on to something.” Of course. She wouldn’t have used her name, would she, if she were hiding out, waiting to deliver her baby? “Is there a place I could spread out a bit?”

“Sure.” Carrying the books for her, he showed her into an empty office and pulled the desk chair out for her. “Take your time, and let me know if there’s anything else you need.”

“Thanks.” He shut the door behind him and Sweeney took quick stock of the books he’d given her. There were a couple of general histories of Newport, published by academic presses, and then one trade history with a picture of the Viking Hotel on the front cover,
Newport: America’s Summer Holiday
.

The histories proved useless, but she was more hopeful about the summer vacation spot book.

Sweeney started searching the index for anything vaguely related to the Putnams. When she struck out there, she searched the chapter titles, and chose a few that looked promising that focused on the building of the big tourist hotels from the 1840s on.

But there wasn’t anything on the off-season, and Sweeney didn’t
find any references to a woman, pregnant or otherwise, who came to Newport in the winter of 1863.

She looked through the last of the books and, striking out again, leaned back in her chair and looked around the little office. The walls were covered with posters advertising the Newport mansions, Rosecliff and Marble House and The Breakers, and The Elms. The room had mostly been cleared out but there were a few books and papers lying around. As she looked at them, Sweeney decided that the former inhabitant of the office must have been interested in the history of African-Americans in Newport. Sweeney had always been interested in this aspect of Newport’s history too. She knew that the town had had a substantial population of African-Americans before the Civil War and then more had moved to the town to work in the burgeoning tourist trade. There had been black hotels and boardinghouses and many black institutions had sprung up in town, beauty parlors and restaurants and banks.

It gave her an idea.

“Can I ask you something?” George was working in his office again and he looked up when she poked her head in. “I didn’t find anything at the fancy places, but I’m wondering about the less fancy places. There must have been boardinghouses for the people who worked at the big hotels. Places that were more out of the way. Do you have any information about those?”

George grinned. “I’ve always found that part of Newport’s history interesting. Unfortunately, most of what we’ve got on the workers’ residences is either self-published or in manuscript form.” He winked. “The tourists aren’t interested in glossy coffee table books unless they have pictures of the Vanderbilts’ living room. But I’ll get you what we’ve got on the boardinghouses.”

He reached up and took a selection of thin books and pamphlets down from his bookshelf and handed them to Sweeney. “Have fun.”

She skimmed three or four of the books in the pile, reading about the cramped and drafty budget hotels and apartment buildings where
the people who served the summer residents of Newport lived, before she came to a small book unimaginatively titled
An Interesting Life: Recollections of a Boardinghouse Owner
. The text was a transcription of an oral history recorded in the 1920s, and had been self-published a few years before as part of a series on African-American life in Newport. The boardinghouse owner, one Harold J. Johnson, had a bland and unap-pealing storytelling style, and it was a tough slog through the accounts of “interesting” guests (none of whom seemed the least bit interesting to Sweeney) who had stayed at the boardinghouse over the years.

She was about to put it back when she came upon a chapter titled “A Mysterious Visitor” and was finally rewarded with what she had been looking for all along. “In December 1863,” Harold J. Johnson recounted, “we had a curious event at the boardinghouse that I have never forgotten. I had just gone to bed when I heard knocking at the door and a young woman, who appeared to be with child, though not heavily so, appeared on my doorstep and asked if she could have a room.

“I looked at her and asked if she was in the right place and she said, ‘Sir, I assume you are referring to the color of my skin. I can only tell you that this is the only place I feel I can come. I will ask you not to make much of it.’

“Well, we had never had a white woman stay before and I was concerned about how she would find our little boardinghouse. But she seemed quite comfortable and she settled in, telling me she wanted to stay for about three months. On the third day, she took me aside and asked me if I could do her a great favor. If anyone came looking for her, she said, would it be possible for me to pretend that she was not here. She did not think this would happen, she said, because it was unlikely that it should be guessed that this is where she was staying.

“It never came to pass that I had to tell my lie, for which I was exceedingly grateful. She lived with us unmolested for the three months, as she grew heavier and heavier with child.

“In all this time, she never told us what she was fleeing. Every once in a while, she would post a letter—to London, I saw when she asked
me to post them for her once—but she seemed not to have any contact with anyone, other than the letters.”

“Finally, in the third month of her stay, one of the chambermaids heard her moaning in her room and went in to see what was the matter. She found her in the throes of childbirth and asked if she could send for a doctor. But the lady said that she did not want a doctor. I sent my wife, who had some experience with childbirth, and my wife helped the lady to deliver a healthy baby, a boy. She stayed with us for two weeks more, hardly ever venturing out of the boardinghouse, and we all became quite attached to the little boy, who she called Eddie.

“I will not ever forget this strange episode in the history of John-son’s boardinghouse. I never asked the lady her name, but the day she left, I told her that I wanted to remember her and her little son and I will never forget what she told me.

“ ‘You can call me Hatty Hope,’ she said. And that is how I have always thought of her.”

Sweeney sat back in the chair, her heart thudding, her stomach suddenly queasy. It was what she’d been hoping she would find—proof that Belinda Putnam had come down to Newport in the winter of 1863 and carried out exactly the kind of subterfuge that Sweeney had pictured.

Those letters to London suggested something like what Sweeney had suspected all along. She must have told her family that she was going to London for her confinement, but instead had gone down to Newport, a place she knew well. She had posted letters to someone she knew in London, who in turn posted them back to her family in Boston, and no one was the wiser.

She must have written a letter in December, announcing the birth of the child. How had she done so without knowing what sex the child would be? Had she taken her chances and assumed it would be a boy? There were old wives’ tales about these kinds of things. How the pregnant woman was carrying, how hungry she was. It had been an audacious
act. But of course the alternative was much worse and people had done far crazier things out of desperation, Sweeney thought.

And if anybody secretly thought that the baby looked younger than he should when she returned home, people would have been willing to let it go and believe her story.

Still shaking, she replaced the books on the shelf and brought the stack of books that George had given her back out into the main office.

He was bent over a file cabinet, flipping through index cards and when Sweeney said, “Thanks so much for these,” he stood up too quickly and knocked his head on the top file cabinet drawer, which was pulled out. The file cards he’d left sitting on top of it fluttered to the ground.

“Ow!”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“No, no. Oh, you can just put them on that desk. Did you find anything?”

“Not really,” Sweeney said, feeling guilty. “There’s some interesting stuff there, but not exactly what I was looking for.”

“Well,” he said, still rubbing his head. “I took the liberty of going through our cemetery records. We got a grant a few years ago to catalog everyone buried in cemeteries within Newport city limits. It’s not computerized yet, but we’ve got a nice card index, and I found an entry for Belinda Cogswell Putnam. 1840–1925. That’s her, right?”

“Yes, it has to be. Thank you so much!” Sweeney could hardly believe her luck. He handed the card over and she copied down the name of the cemetery, the Island Cemetery, one she knew well, and copied out the little grid that someone had photocopied onto the card, as well as the little star indicating where the stone was located. “You can’t imagine how helpful this is. I was planning on walking around every cemetery between here and Boston and just looking for it.”

“No problem,” he said. “That’s Putnam as in Putnam, right?” Sweeney nodded. “I just heard about the hit-and-run. That poor family. As if they hadn’t been through enough, huh?”

“Yeah. Well, thanks for this. I’m going to walk up there right now and see if I can find it.”

He blinked at her. The bump on his forehead was starting to show. “Feel free to come back and visit,” he said shyly. “Anytime.”