The Angel of Darkness - Caleb Carr [55]
An artist by religion in addition to profession, the tall, soft-spoken, kindly man with the big beard and searching eyes gave off the general impression of a monk or priest, which was why he was known as “the Reverend” or “Bishop Ryder” to his friends. He lived in rooms at Number 308 West Fifteenth Street and spent most of his nights either working or on long walks around the city—its streets, its parks, even its suburbs—studying the moonlight and shadows that filled so many of his paintings. He was a solitary soul, a recluse, by his own estimation, who’d grown up in the spooky old whaling town of New Bedford, Massachusetts. He’d had a Quaker for a mother and a collection of brothers for company—all of which meant that one of his more extreme peculiarities was his way of dealing with women. Oh, he was polite enough, in a way what would’ve seemed chivalrous if it hadn’t been so damned odd. There was the time, for instance, that he heard a beautiful singing voice floating through his building and, when he found the woman who possessed it, immediately proposed marriage to her. Now, this woman was a fine singer, sure enough, but on the street and at the local precinct house she was known to be other things, too; and it was only when a group of his friends stepped in to lower the boom on the idea that poor old Pinkie was saved from what probably would’ve been a thorough fleecing.
He liked kids; he was kind of a big, strange boy himself, and he was always happy to see me (the same could not be said for some of the Doctor’s other friends). By 1897 he was famous and successful enough, among those who understood art, to be able to live pretty much as he pleased—which was basically like a pack rat. He never threw a thing away, not a food carton or a piece of string or a pile of ashes, and his rooms really could get a little frightening at times for most people. But his gentle, quiet kindness and the definite pull of his hazy, dreamy paintings more than made up for all that, especially for me, a boy from the Lower East Side who was used to garbage piling up inside flats. That, combined with the fact that he shared my taste in food—he kept a kettle of stew always on the boil and, when out, preferred oysters, lobster, and baked beans in a waterfront restaurant—made his place a destination to which I was always happy to accompany the Doctor.
It was just the three of us—Miss Howard, the Doctor, and myself—what made the pilgrimage that night, as Cyrus (who admired Pinkie’s paintings but, like Mr. Moore, didn’t think much of his living habits) begged off to get a full night’s sleep. Pinkie’s building was just west of Eighth Avenue on Fifteenth Street, and was one of thousands like it in that neighborhood: a simple old brick row house that’d been converted into flats. We traveled by hansom, moving uptown with the thickening stream of traffic what was heading for the Tenderloin at that time of night and then branching off to find that a small kerosene lamp was burning in Pinkie’s front window.
“Ah, so he’s home,” Dr. Kreizler said. He paid off the cabbie, then took Miss Howard’s arm. “Now, Sara, I must prepare you—I know that you find courtly deference to your sex abominable, but in Ryder’s case you really must make an exception. It’s perfectly innocent, and perfectly genuine—he does not intend it as any veiled attempt to keep women fragile and weak, I assure you.”
Miss Howard nodded in a not-completely-convinced way as we climbed up the stoop of the building. “I’ll give anyone the benefit of a fair trial,” she said. “But if it becomes insulting…”
“Fair enough,” the Doctor said. “Stevie? Why don’t you run ahead, so that Ryder has some warning.”
I dashed inside the building and up the dark stairs to the door of Pinkie’s flat,