The New York Herald-Times, June 2, 1922

TIT AND TATTLE, BY PATTY CAKE

Well! It seems your humble correspondent still possesses the capacity to be surprised, after all. We all filed into the courtroom this morning, expecting to be regaled with blood and gore courtesy of the much-risen-in-the-world Mrs. Lumley, and instead the prosecution—with a decided air of triumph—called the splendidly named Mr. Giuseppe Magnifico to the attention of the court.

Who is Mr. Magnifico, you ask? Why, none other than the gardener, about whom much has been rumored but never proved, for the simple fact that he could not be found. Well, he’s been found, dear readers, and I must urge you to dismiss any small children and otherwise delicate minds from the room, for the substance of his testimony proved more shocking and morally degenerate than we newspapermen could have dared to hope.

He is a colorful character, Mr. Magnifico, and fully worthy of his name. He plays to type with extraordinary precision, down to his baroque black mustache and his extremely slick hair. He seemed, of all things, to desire the admiration of the court stenographer, a most stern and high-necked lady of perhaps thirty-five or forty, and bent himself to this task with utmost charm, though the lady (to her credit) gave him no encouragement whatever.

Possibly she was too busy transcribing Mr. Magnifico’s sentences, for there were many of them, often long and tangled, and always entertaining. I am afraid I shall have to summarize, or I shall never meet the six o’clock deadline mandated by my long-suffering editor.

Mr. Magnifico, I am sorry to report, was indeed engaged in a friendship of an immoral and adulterous nature with the victim, Mrs. Virginia Claire Faninal. I must admit that I cannot blame her entirely, when I compare the earthy—if rather viscous—charm of Mr. Magnifico with the charm entirely absent in the accused, he of the Wright Brothers ears. It was Mr. Magnifico’s belief (confirmed, so he claims, by Mrs. Faninal herself) that the child she was shortly to deliver redounded not to the credit of Mr. Faninal, but to that of his humble gardener, who, by virtue of his profession, apparently knew a thing or two about planting seeds.

Now, these revelations are not altogether surprising in themselves. You will remember that we, the curious public, suspected as much, following those hints that made their way into the fact-hungry press when some enterprising reporter first obtained notes from the interviews given to the Greenwich police department by the now-Mrs. Lumley, in the days after the murder itself. (Let it be a warning to all persons contemplating the sin of adultery, that the kitchen maid will inevitably know your secret.) But Mr. Magnifico has now confirmed before the court what was previously mere speculation, on the part of Mrs. Lumley and the investigators themselves, and what is more, Mr. Magnifico explained, shaking his head, he did not believe that he was the only person enjoying the favor of Mrs. Faninal’s fair company.

At this, the accused himself did not wait for his attorney, but rose to his own feet and objected to Mr. Magnifico’s claims as speculation.

No, Mr. Magnifico insisted. He himself had witnessed Mrs. Faninal so engaged while Mr. Faninal was away from the house, though, out of respect, he would refuse to name publicly the occasion or the man. But he would say this: that he believed Mrs. Faninal was neither morally corrupt nor weak-willed, and that her actions were the result of some sickness of her mind. He had, in fact, ended the liaison for that reason, and he was afraid for Mrs. Faninal’s health when he did, so dramatic was her reaction to this dismissal.

Mr. Magnifico said much more, of course, but those were the points most relevant to this case, and as I still have the contributions of Mr. and Mrs. Lumley to relate, I am afraid I must refer you to the rest of this newspaper for a more comprehensive account of Mr. Magnifico and his testimony.

After such exhausting entertainment, I suppose we were grateful for the evidence of the next witness, Mr. Lumley, the husband of the one-time kitchen maid, whose ascent into respectable matrimony and motherhood should be applauded as the very apex of the American Dream.

A small, plain man, Mr. Lumley seemed to have been called by the prosecution to vouch for the respectability of his wife, an office he performed admirably, if rather snorishly. Under questioning, he asserted that which we already knew: that he met her some two weeks after the murder, when she dined alone at the Bluebeard Restaurant in Scarsdale, an establishment owned by him at the time. As he had not followed the case in the newspapers—he is not, it seems, a man interested in sensational news, preferring instead to fix his attention on the business pages, poor fellow—he did not recognize her face. He was, however, struck by the air of fetching distress that surrounded her (her pretty face, one presumes, had nothing to do with it) and upon learning of her role in the affair, was moved to do the chivalrous thing and marry her. (His face, as he regarded his wife, contained a commendable trace of tenderness, which did him much credit in the eyes of the courtroom.) Had she ever spoken of the events of that day? the prosecution delicately inquired, and he said that of course she had, at the outset of their friendship, but she had scarcely ever referred to it since. She had wanted to put such a distressing affair behind her, and he had quite understood her reluctance. A terrible affair, he said, shaking his head, and I believe I caught an extremely quick glance directed at the accused: one sharp with rebuke.

He seemed to be speaking the truth, too, for Mrs. Lumley, who made her entrance after the noontime recess, appeared reluctant in the extreme to discuss her recollections of that fateful day. She glanced often in the direction of the accused, though under her brow and in such a manner that communicated her unwillingness actually to meet his eye. Nonetheless, she answered the questions put to her without additional prompting, and so we learned how, on the morning in question, after cleaning the upstairs rooms, she came down to discover the body of Mrs. Faninal lying on the kitchen floor, and the pathetic figure of the youngest Miss Faninal, smeared with blood, kneeling next to her mother, urging her to wake.

Mrs. Lumley maintained her composure throughout this description, though her face was pale, and I believe her fingers shook. Her husband, now sitting in one of the rear benches, fixed a sympathetic eye on her throughout. She confirmed her suspicion that Mrs. Faninal had indeed seduced the gardener, Mr. Magnifico, into an adulterous association, but she would not speculate on the parentage of the unborn child. She insisted, however, that Mrs. Faninal was an excellent mother in all respects, almost too doting, especially on the younger child. At this point, she seemed to seek out the faces of the accused’s daughters in the crowd, and her expression of agony is impossible to describe, leading one to comprehend some inkling of the dreadful scene in the Faninal kitchen that morning.

The prosecution then gently steered her toward the facts of the discovery: the kitchen door left ajar, the kettle left whistling on the stove. Mr. Faninal had left for his workshop early that morning, as was his habit, and to her knowledge he had not returned, though as she was upstairs, in the rooms facing away from the street and the front drive, it was, she agreed, possible that she hadn’t noticed.

The defense then climbed to its feet. In her opinion, asked the accused’s attorney, was Mr. Faninal aware of his wife’s adultery? Did he ever display any hint of jealousy?

Mrs. Lumley’s plump face softened into compassion. She had no way of knowing, for Mr. Faninal was in all ways solicitous of his wife and her welfare, and his obvious grief upon learning of the tragedy had struck Mrs. Lumley’s heart with deep force.

You may well be astonished by this revelation, for the court certainly was. Until now, we had heard nothing—and seen nothing—to dispute the notion that Mr. Faninal was a cold, determined, charmless man, and a father who kept his daughters under the most rigorous control. But Mrs. Lumley, as she spoke, regarded the accused with true feeling, though Mr. Faninal sat with bowed head and did not make any sign that he comprehended her.

We were thus left, on this extraordinary day, with the most extraordinary surprise of all: the possibility that Mr. Faninal might not prove the cold-hearted murderer we imagined.

Or perhaps he will. In a week or two, I suppose, we’ll have the final verdict.