When the boy was ten years old, the family acquired a piano—Mister Bishop had learned to play in his youth—and although all the children were given lessons, it was Edward who demonstrated the most talent and natural skill. “It seemed to quiet something within him,” Missus Bishop said, adding that she and her husband were “relieved” that their son might have found an affinity for something. They engaged additional tutors for him, and were gratified to see Edward at last applying himself so diligently to something.
As Edward grew older, the Bishops’ difficulties with him increased. He was, his mother notes, something of a conundrum for them; though capable, he was bored by school and began to skip classes, and was again caught committing a series of petty thefts—pencils and small change and the like—from his classmates, which bewildered his parents, as they had never denied him anything he wished. After he was expelled from his third preparatory school in as many years, his parents hired a private tutor so that he might finish his education; he managed to earn his degree, barely, and thence attended a conservatory of little prestige in western Massachusetts, where he completed only one year before taking a small inheritance he had from one of his uncles and decamping for New York City, where he moved into the Harlem house of his maternal great-aunt Bethesda. Both of his parents approved of the situation: Since she became widowed nine years prior, Bethesda’s mind had slipped considerably, and though she had plenty of attendants—she was quite wealthy—they felt that Edward’s presence would be soothing for her; she had always been deeply fond of him, and, being childless, had considered him as her own son.
The first autumn after leaving school, Edward returned to visit his family for Thanksgiving, where they all spent a pleasant weekend. After Edward had left for New York, and his sisters to their homes—Laura and Margaret, who was newly married, were living in Burlington, near their parents, and Belle was preparing to attend nursing school in New Hampshire—Missus Bishop decided she would do some tidying. It was then, in her bedroom, that she discovered that her favorite necklace, a pearl on a gold strand that her husband had given her for their anniversary, was missing. She immediately set to searching, but after many hours, after checking every place it could possibly be, she was still not able to locate it. It was then that she realized where it might have disappeared to, or, rather, who might have disappeared it, and as if to banish the thought from her mind, she embarked upon a resorting and refolding of all of her husband’s handkerchiefs, which she did not of course need to do but felt she must.
She was too frightened to ask Edward if he had taken her necklace, and she dared not mention it to her husband, who was far less tolerant of their son than she was and, she knew, would say something he would later regret. She promised herself she would not suspect her son, but after Christmas came and went, and with it, her children, and with them, or one of them, rather—as she later discovered—a silver filigree bracelet, she was forced to confront her suspicions again. She did not know why Edward would not just tell her that he needed money, for she would have given it to him, even if her husband would not. But the next time he came to visit, she hid everything he might be able to easily locate in a box deep within the locked trunk she kept in her closet, secreting her valuables from her own child.
Of Edward’s present life, she knew very little. She had heard from acquaintances that he was singing in a nightclub, which worried her—not for her family’s reputation but because her son, though intelligent, was so young and could, she felt, be easily influenced. She wrote him letters, but he rarely responded, and in his silence, she tried not to wonder whether she knew him at all. But at least she knew he was with her aunt, and although Bethesda’s mind continued to deteriorate, she would receive an occasional lucid letter in which Bethesda would write warmly and appreciatively of her grand-nephew and his presence.
Then, a little more than two years ago, her associations with Edward came to an end. She received one day a frantic telegram from her aunt’s attorney informing her that he had been alerted by Aunt Bethesda’s bank that large amounts of money had been withdrawn from her account. Missus Bishop left immediately for New York, where a dismaying round of meetings revealed that, over the past twelvemonth, Edward himself had signed for increasingly substantial sums from his aunt’s trust; an investigation by the bank （one of your competitors, you will be relieved to hear） revealed that Edward had seduced Bethesda Carroll’s trustee’s assistant, a plain and gullible young man, who gulpingly confessed that he had knowingly violated company bylaws in order to help Edward secure the funds—thousands of dollars, though Missus Bishop declined to specify an exact number—that he desired. Back at the house, Missus Bishop discovered her aunt cared for but completely unaware of her surroundings or even who Edward was; she discovered as well that small things—pieces of silver and china, her aunt’s diamond necklace—were also missing. I asked her how she could be certain it was her son, and not one of her aunt’s many attendants or staff, who had taken it, and here she began to cry and said that they had been in her aunt’s employ for years, and nothing had ever vanished—the only new addition to her aunt’s life was, she admitted through tears, her son.
But where was her son? He seemed to have disappeared. Missus Bishop searched for him and even hired an investigator, but he had not been recovered by the time she was forced to return to Burlington.
All along, she had successfully concealed from her husband Edward’s lapses. Now, though, that Edward’s activities had crossed into the criminal, she was forced to confess. As she feared, her husband reacted violently, disowning Edward entirely, and, after summoning his daughters to tell them of their brother’s wickedness, forbidding them from speaking to him again. All three wept, for they loved their brother, with Belle especially distraught.
But Mister Bishop remained unmoved: They were never to speak to him again, and if he should try to contact them, they must ignore him. “We made a mistake,” his wife remembers him saying, and although he hastened to add, “Not you, Belle,” Missus Bishop says, “I saw her face and knew it was too late.”
Even if they had been allowed to contact Edward, however, they would have been unable, for he seemed to have vanished completely. The investigator his mother had hired continued to search but concluded he must have left the city, and likely the state, and, perhaps, the Free States altogether. For almost a year, there was silence. And then, about six months ago, the investigator wrote once more to Missus Bishop: Edward had been located. He was in New York and playing piano in a nightclub near Wall Street, one popular with moneyed young society people, and living in a single room in a boardinghouse on Bethune Street. Missus Bishop was perplexed by this revelation: A boardinghouse! But where had the money gone, the monies he had taken from her aunt? Was Edward a gambler, as his late father had been? There had been no signs of such behavior, but, given how much she apparently did not know about her son, it did not seem implausible. She ordered the investigator to monitor Edward’s comings and goings for a week to see if she might glean more information from his daily movements, but these too proved frustrating: Edward never went into a bank, nor did he visit any gambling dens. Instead, his movements were restricted to his room and to a grand house near Gramercy Park. Upon further investigation, this was determined to be the residence of a Mister Christopher D. （I have struck his name from this record to protect his and his family’s privacy）， a well-born man of nine-and-twenty who lived with his aging parents, Mister and Missus D., who own a trading concern and are of considerable wealth. The young Mister D. was described by the investigator as “lonely” and “homely,” and it appears that Edward Bishop was able to quickly seduce him, to such an extent that Mister D. proposed marriage—and was accepted—three months into their acquaintance. It appears, though, that his parents, learning of their son’s proposal and strongly disapproving, called upon Edward for a meeting, during which they offered to secure him a job as a teacher at a charitable foundation of which they knew, as well as a quantity of cash, in return for his promise that he would conclusively end all relations with their son and heir. Edward agreed, the monies were delivered, and he ceased contact with young Mister D., who is said to this day to be “bereft,” and, the Bishops’ investigator told me, has made regular and increasingly desperate attempts to contact his former fiancé. （The charitable foundation, I am sorry to report, is The Hiram Bingham Charitable School and Institution, where until February Edward Bishop was employed as a music teacher.）