Trials of Passion (40 page)

Evelyn's operation, and the morphine and laudanum given to her afterwards, left her gravely weakened and as a consequence indebted to an attentive Thaw. He now made a concerted play for her, offering her and her mother a recuperative cruise on an ocean liner, topped by a trip to the European capitals Evelyn had long wanted to visit. White had sung their cultivating charms and Evelyn was keen at the prospect. Her mother, reluctant at first, accepted, not realizing that Thaw planned to accompany them, if initially on a different liner.
Despite Thaw's millions, Mrs Nesbit remained loyal to the charming Stanford White, who never proposed to her daughter, but supported her son. She would fall out with Thaw even more severely during their stay in Europe, accusing him of exhausting her daughter with his manic form of travel.

She returned home without Evelyn, despite voicing her worries about her daughter's reputation, to complain bitterly to White, who had given her and Evelyn a letter of credit in case they needed it during their travels. Mrs Nesbit's dislike of Thaw was returned by him; when he heard from an embarrassed Evelyn about White's long arm, he promptly tore up the letter of credit.

In his memoir, Thaw underscores how Mrs Nesbit continually let her daughter down, first of all in closing her eyes to her relations with Stanford White, then in abandoning her without a chaperone in Europe. Whatever his proclivities and state of mind, Thaw was ever alert to reputation, and would have been happy to blame the hapless Mrs Nesbit for a good portion of Evelyn's downfall. But since Evelyn defended her ‘naive' mother, and remained loyal at least until the trial, he couldn't condemn Mrs Nesbit outright.

Thaw had proposed to Evelyn before the voyage. Evelyn had refused, as she was to refuse again in London and again in Paris, whatever pressure a peristent Harry applied. She couldn't marry a man unless he knew everything there was to know about her, she wrote. This was a matter of common honesty, and I take no credit for desiring to be frank and above board with my future husband.' Perhaps, too, she was instinctively fearful of Thaw's obsession with virginity, which manifested itself early in their relations – though she didn't then realize that he already surmised the nature of her relations with White in his ‘lust nest', having had the architect watched even before he had formally met Evelyn. On top of that, something in Harry's manner when the bellboy incident came to light, whatever gloss he put on it, may have frightened Evelyn. Tempting as it might be to succumb to a millionaire who would provide that ever-elusive sense of security she so needed, particularly now that Stanny was less attentive, Evelyn resisted.

Whether her resistance had anything to do with spurring on the bellhop incident is unclear. The perverse Thaw had set a brutal trap for the boy. He called him to his hotel room, left money lying in a tempting heap on a table, and hid. Thinking himself alone, the duped boy dipped into the cash. Harry leapt out, heaved him into the bathtub, stripped and flogged him, perhaps more. The legal claim afterwards had Thaw settling for damages. Plaintively, he told Evelyn this was ever the fate of the millionaire: people exaggerated stories and made claims for injury.

Harry continued to hound his ‘Angel-Child', demanding to know why she wouldn't have him. Torn apart by the battling between Harry and her mother, further debilitated by Harry's frenetic partying pace and constant changing of hotels even in the same city, as well as frightened of the explosive violence he could exude in his bullying and his agitated pacing up and down, ever accompanied by wayward babble – Evelyn, primed by drink, finally gave in one night to his direct question: ‘Is it because of Stanford White?'

She then told him the story of the girl on the red velvet swing, the drink, the possible drugging, the deflowering. This was the very narrative that was later allowed into court because, despite its licentious content, it laid the ground for what purportedly had provoked Thaw to murder the older man and to avenge his by then wife's honour. For Thaw, Evelyn's story provided confirmation of everything he had imagined about White and the vicious prodigality of the ‘Beast' he both loathed and desired to be, the ‘ravisher' who ‘boasted of having taken advantage of three hundred and seventy-eight girls'.

In the course of the long, stammering, tearful narrative of her ‘filthy ruin', Evelyn revealed how she had been innocently seduced; how, when her mother had left her in White's care, he had fed her champagne; how he had ‘had his way with her' while she was unconscious; how she had then stayed with Stanhope White despite all of that. As she described it in her first memoir, Harry's response was to gape open-mouthed, to shudder, to go limp – and when she had reached the climax of her story, to rise, then plunge into a chair and
sob loudly, muttering ‘Poor child!' repeatedly. Then he began to shake uncontrollably, his face ‘ghastly' as he walked up and down the room, gesticulating and muttering. He made wounded-animal noises while she wept. He wrung his hands and gnashed his teeth. He questioned her about her mother, accusing Mrs Nesbit of terrible negligence, assuring Evelyn that no decent person hearing her story would say it was her own doing. She was not at fault. His respect for her had not lessened, he would always be her friend.

As the dark night dragged on and then turned into morning, an exhausted Evelyn clutched at her scars while Thaw cursed Stanford White, whom he had of course suspected all along of foul deeds. The more he pressed Evelyn to confess, the more he rambled on incoherently. When she had finished, he knelt at her side and took her hand. Evelyn states that she was utterly swayed by him then, ‘all that was best in Harry Thaw ... all the womanliness in him, all the Quixote that was in his composition' was then evident. In
The Traitor
, Thaw wrote that his Angel-Child's ‘hideously awful tale' was one in which she had never acted of ‘her own volition unless she had refused point blank her mother's order to obey a beast'.

But Thaw's gentleness, once he had Evelyn to himself and totally in his sway, metamorphosed in grotesque ways. His references to virginity escalated. At Joan of Arc's birthplace he wrote in the guestbook, ‘she would not have been a virgin if Stanford White had been around'. He showed Evelyn all the statues of saints and martyrs who had chosen to die rather than give in to sin. His idée fixe and his wild murmuring made her increasingly nervous. They didn't share rooms, either in Holland or on their restless travels along the Rhine to Munich and Innsbruck, a journey that did Evelyn's health no good.

Then Harry rented a lonely castle in the Tyrol, Schloss Katzenstein, for three weeks. At first Evelyn, her youthful imagination steeped in romance and musical comedy, had fantasized a romantic retreat in which her exhaustion would dissipate and she would finally be able to convalesce. Instead, the castle was up a steep mountain and remote from everywhere, made of cold stone, dimly lit, and with long drafty
corridors. It came with a staff of two who lived at one end, while Harry and Evelyn had separate rooms at the other. Evelyn had entered a Gothic horror in which the all but orphaned damsel was at the mercy of a monstrous Bluebeard.

On the second night of their stay, after a long day of sightseeing in the forest nearby, Harry dismissed the servants with ‘high-handed Teutonic severity'. Tired, Evelyn ate quickly, and having accepted the usual chaste goodnight kiss on the forehead, she went to bed. Wig off, nightie on, she fell asleep instantly, only to be abruptly woken a very short time after by an apparition. A stark-naked Harry was looming above her, a leather riding crop in his hand. Its slash across her legs was what had woken her, and now she leapt up with a scream as a raging, ‘bug-eyed' Harry tore off her clothes, all the while landing violent blows on her body with his crop.

Later, Evelyn thought that the sight of her thin naked body, so like a boy's with its shorn hair, excited him all the more. In any event, no protest or pleading could persuade him to lessen the blows. Quite the reverse. Her pleas spurred him on. His pupils were vast and he was sweating profusely. All the while, a diatribe against sin and indecency poured from his lips. Evelyn had the impression he couldn't hear her, nor always recognize her. She stood in for all nether and immoral beings, perhaps for himself too. At the end, he threw her, bleeding, back onto the bed and, pinning her down with his riding crop, raped her. His railing never stopped. Punishment, penance, retribution, Stanford White, virginity – Thaw's preoccupations were ever on his lips.

Evelyn wrote that as she faded in and out of consciousness, and wondered whether her life was about to end in Schloss Katzenstein, she also thought that this must be her punishment for what she had revealed about White and herself; and for allowing herself to accept Thaw's generosity.

Inquisition followed rape, as if she weren't sufficiently battered. ‘Did you really believe White when he told you everybody did the things you had done? Did you? Is it possible?' Evelyn, barely sixteen
when she first met White, stammered a ‘Yes'. Thaw rose to his full height and, towering above her, looked as if he were about to land more blows. Instead he raged: That was a lie, a dirty lie. There were many pure and decent women in the world – ‘his mother and his two lovely, decent sisters' prime amongst them.

The splitting of women into two – the chaste and the sullied – so pervasive at the time, is hardly altogether gone today. There are those pure women who are untouchable and to be respected and who are beyond desire; and those who are desired, desiring and thus dirty, but who alone can provide sexual satisfaction for the male. Evelyn suffered from this split at the hands of Harry Thaw. Nor would his obsession with the purity he himself so lacked cease with his punishment of her.

After Evelyn's trial by flogging and brutal rape, Harry Thaw locked her into her castle room and left her, bruised, bloodied and helpless. Without her mother, without friends or funds, she was effectively a hostage. Like so many abused women, she both felt that the punishment was somehow deserved and was terrified that the avenging Thaw would return to her room. For some three weeks, she didn't leave it. The only medication for her welts, cuts and scabs was a stinging ointment that an utterly unrepentant Harry applied. He acted as if nothing was amiss. But he did not attack her again.

At the end of that time, he took her to Zurich. There, one day, he ‘exploded' into blind rage once more. He had been accused of having pushed a carriage off the road with his rented car. As ever, he was in denial. He exonerated himself, blanked and twisted matters, so that the event became one that he had seen only from a distance. The world had it in for millionaires, forcing them to pay for everything. In fact Thaw's lawyers paid out hush money. Evelyn was reminded of the episode with the bellboy in the London hotel and of her own brutal rape. This was never mentioned by a daytime Harry, adept at splitting and defending himself against his own worst excesses.

When, worried about her lacerated body and her operation scars, Evelyn asked to see a doctor, she soon realized that the physician
knew Thaw from previous trips and was in his pay: he never commented on her scars and bruises. Trapped, apprehensive, in a state akin to shock, Evelyn was now forced to accompany Thaw on moralizing trips up the ‘virginal' Jungfrau.

In his memoir, Harry comments on her unhappiness but never attributes it to his own actions, all the while sermonizing about Stanford White: T remember poor Evelyn crying because we could not settle down to live like other people. I did too; but you know when a girl dies one is saddened to think how pretty and happy she might have been ... and yet it is a hundred times worse when it is not death but the hellish selfishness of Stanford White that ruins girls' lives.' In the murky reaches of Thaw's mind the battle of good and evil, projected outwards, puts all the evil on White's side. Death, for ravished girls at least, is better than immorality.

In Paris, Evelyn met some acquaintances. She broke down and recounted her story. They determined that she should return with them to New York. Probably realizing that if his relations with an underage girl were made public, he could be prosecuted, Harry allowed her to go, paying her fare, as well as for a chaperone.

Home in New York, life proved difficult for a strained and still suffering Evelyn. She was estranged from her mother, who was now only interested in pursuing her affair with an old admirer whom she would soon marry. Mrs Nesbit had claimed that Evelyn had been kidnapped into going to Europe with Thaw. White knew better, but pretended not to. After a chance encounter with Evelyn on the street, he insisted on seeing her and revealed what he should emphatically have told her about Thaw beforehand – that the ‘Pennsylvania pug' was dangerous, that he took morphine and other substances, that his habits were less than salubrious.

After hearing more of the same from others, Evelyn stayed away from Thaw, but it was not clear that she could rely on White either. Despite his help in finding work for her, Evelyn recognized that her charm and hold over him had waned. She was almost eighteen now, bruised, battered, no longer quite the little girl White had fallen for.
The fact that she was still legally underage, however, made her potentially dangerous to both men. White, without explaining to her what he was doing, had her see the notorious lawyer, the ‘slimy shyster' Abe Hummel, a frightening dwarf-like man, who would eventually be disbarred. Having elicited the story of her terrible adventure with Thaw, Hummel embroidered it with even greater dramatic violence and represented it to her as an affidavit to be signed. He recommended that she use it against Thaw in a breach-of- promise suit. A frightened but honest Evelyn refused, claiming she was the one who had not agreed to marry Thaw, not the other way round. Then White, who sensed that the ever truthful Evelyn could well have exposed him to a suit for immorality through her relations with Thaw, asked her if she had any letters from Harry. These, like her affidavit, would give him bargaining power, if the matter were ever revealed.