Shadows in Summerland Page 4

  “Vashti is receptive,” she continued with a groan.

  “And is Vashti alone?” said Mrs. Lucretia.

  “Vashti is never alone,” answered Fanny. “Vashti has come here arm in arm with a spirit of exceeding purity.”

  “Is it male or female?” said LaRoy over-loudly, tilting his funnel toward Miss Conant.

  “One rap for no. Three raps for yes. And two if the spirit cannot answer. I ask on behalf of LaRoy Sunderland, is the attendant spirit male?”

  One rap was heard.

  “Is it female?” said Fanny.

  Three this time.

  “Female, then,” she said serenely. “Of what relation is the spirit under inquiry,” she said, “to persons sitting round this table? A mother?” (One rap) “A sister?” (One rap) “A daughter?” (One rap) “A friend?”

  Here three.

  These raps I discerned every second more keenly were coming from under the small parlour table, though by what trick or agency I couldn’t then hazard a guess, I must say. I scanned the darkness at my feet, saw only my thighs, Mr. Child’s and the Reverend’s. Our chairs had been set very close at the table and no one had thought to move his back.

  “And what did Madam do in life?” said LaRoy Sunderland with still more animation.

  “One of us wants to know,” said Fanny, “what was your station in life, oh spirit? Were you a mother?” (One rap) “A seamstress?” (One rap) “A reformer?” said Fanny. (One rap again)

  “A poet?” said LaRoy. (Three raps) “Hark she is a poet, friends!”

  The actor, Mr. Jefferson, shifted in his chair, his dusky eyelids firmly closed.

  “Kindly ask Vooshti,” he said to the medium, “if her poetry translates one sphere to the next? Will she privilege us with a couplet or two?”

  “Vashti has come and gone,” said Fanny. “A summer’s breeze laden with pollen, is Vashti. It is just your familiar that speaks. Ask of her.”

  “Oh eloquent spirit,” the actor pronounced. “Oh Poetess Most Byronesque! Might I have the morbid privilege of hearing how it was you died?”

  Fanny betrayed the slightest frown. “An actor begs your leave, oh spirit, to hear in what manner you quit this existence? Did you die by so-called natural causes or did you die by violent ones?”

  “Why must the spirit take care I’m an actor? What has that to do with the way that it died?”

  “Perhaps,” said Lucretia, eyes still closed, a smile melting across her face, “the spirit wishes to keep track of when you are speaking your lines, and when earnest.”

  There came in the wake of her words three raps and the actor stood up from his chair in surprise; he sat just as quickly, as though he’d been stretching.

  “Natural causes, then,” said Fanny. “If ever they can be to those they afflict. Tell us oh righteous, benevolent spirit, not only your manner of death but its name.”

  A whooshing sound was heard off-stage; it was like someone breathing in a sickly, laboured way. Its origin was somewhere behind Fanny Conant’s shoulders. This I could tell on account of her hair, which was very gently blowing in the airstream.

  “I died with ground glass in my lungs, says the spirit. I died of a chill that spread all through me. But it is beautiful to pass from this earth, says the spirit. Beautiful to be here among you, she says. And yet all the same I don’t wish to come back unless it were to die again. LaRoy, I am here, says the spirit. Am happy. And please—oh, please—wish Moses well.”

  Joining the whooshing there came, all around us, the ringing of one and then two bells and yet a third and fourth in concert, until all four both high and low were ringing in the darkness with a staggered regularity, changing their distance and height ring to ring. For a couple of us, this proved too much. Neighbours’ hands at once were dropped, eyes pried open, heads thrown back and laughing delight projected up to hear those tinny imps of sound.

  Lucretia emitted a long, sultry giggle, and touched the flesh below her throat.

  Mr. Sunderland was sitting with his elbows on the table, weeping and smiling at once, like a madman.

  “Her name,” he announced, “is Mabel Warren. The heart of Mr. Moses Dow, she worked for a time at his Waverley Magazine. Died of lung fever. A ghastly affair. Moses almost gone to ruin. Oh welcome, thrice welcome, most pined-for of spirits! Welcome, Mabel Warren, to the dayside,” he cried.

  And LaRoy Sunderland threw up his hands. And Brockton and Spear laughed deep in their throats. And Bly looked up with feeble awe, rotating his head after objects unseen. Lucretia pretended to swoon in her seat and J. Jefferson made to hold her.

  Fanny never broke composure. And never broke the chain of hands. She nodded serenely round the group as if we had all of us risen and thanked her.

  She was, so far as I could tell, an expert, unabashed hoax.

  “Done,” said Miss Conant. “Our Vashti takes flight, the cherished Mabel Warren with her. Resurrect me not, she says, unless it were to die again. Resurrect only this night’s revelation. Embosom it deep within your soul.”

  Q

  Since neither Child nor I had funds to hire a cab to take downtown, we decided to split the annoyance by walking, Algernon to Blackstone Square and I to the workshop on Newspaper Row.

  At Algernon’s door we went up for a brandy.

  I noticed at once that his rooms were more modest—partly based in where he lived but also the surfeit of books and wall-hangings that made his walls seem close upon.

  The hangings were all of them camera portraits; original negatives most likely.

  An arrangement of triplets, all grown men, the selfsame widow’s peak and necktie.

  An earthbound trapezist who looked to be wearing a spotted pair of lady’s bloomers.

  A beautiful woman with long dark hair, parting and brushing it a la Madonna.

  A trim pair of dandies with mutton-chop whiskers lighting each the other’s pipe.

  A duck-hunting party.

  An actor in blackface.

  A man giving a temperance pledge.

  An angelic maiden no older than ten lying in state on a bed pocked with roses, the roses themselves—which were coloured somehow—making out the edges of a latticed, gilt frame.

  And especially pretty, dear reader, this last. It bore a resemblance to Cora Christine, though nowhere even half as lovely—erotic locus of my days, as cousins are, when boys are small.

  Had I told you of Cora? Well, maybe I didn’t.

  Cora Christine was my cousin, you see. She drowned when she was ten years old. Unluckily, I had been there. My father had been drunk of course, as he so often was on the weekends those days, my mother sodden with her syrup. My Uncle Asa, too, was there but he’d been dozing at the time and I was the only one out on the water to see the spot where she went down. There’d been no body, only fragments: the bright purple bow that she’d worn in her hair; her Godey Lady’s book, still tented. More terrible even than her being dead was the fact that my cousin had ceased to exist, for I had seen her heaving head blinking out of existence beneath the dark waves. A short and unfussy tchau had been hers in the Lutheran church where she’d gone as a girl, while out in the churchyard our family had watched as Cora’s stainless, unplaned box had gone in its sling of guy-ropes to the bottom and how Cora, not in it, had seemed so exposed, so naked to all those watching eyes that I had been the first one there to rain a handful on her coffin. While this print of the girl more or less Cora’s age in her tiny white coffin surrounded by flowers had revealed to me, whether I knew it or not, a sight that I had longed to see: a flesh and blood person respectfully dead and laid to rest in sainted ground.

  Though the roses, too bloody, seemed gaudy to me. And the funeral dress was much too busy. And the angle at which the portrait had been taken would probably have been much better had the portraitist arranged himself to give the box a b
ird’s eyes view.

  This would have achieved the intended effect of her soul taking leave of her body.

  It’s said that artists know their art—can remember, precisely, the moment it touched them—when it approached and took their hands with promise shining in its eyes.

  I cannot boast of such romance. And yet, in certain ways, I can.

  That picture of the sweet dead girl—the picture promised more, you see.

  It was my favourite of the bunch and turning away from the wall I confessed it.

  “Thank you, Willy, yes,” he said, approaching my chair with two glasses of brandy. “This was a girl who had died in her sleep. Not sixteen and simply died—what you might call a tragic mystery. Her parents commissioned a number of copies to hand out to guests at the lip of her grave.”

  “How much did you charge?”

  “For the cartes de visite?”

  “If that is the word for reproductions.”

  “Six dollars, usually, face to face. Price breaks for the larger orders.”

  “You could charge more,” I said and rose and toured the pictures, sipping brandy.

  “Thank you?” Child shrugged. “I aspire to, of course.”

  “You are quite welcome, sir. But you could. And you must.”

  “I’ll charge as much when I have earned it.”

  “And your pictures will sell themselves short, I should say.”

  “How much do you charge? For a necklace,” he said.

  “As much or as little as seems advantageous.”

  “And yet you are one to tell me,” said Child, “to overcharge someone right there, eye to eye.”

  “You may undercharge him, too,” I said. “You may feasibly charge any sum that you wish. It is the smallest asking price that yields, in time, the greatest gain.”

  I drained my glass and looked at him with calculated vagueness.

  “Will you tutor me in this?” I said. “What with your talent and my acumen, we’d reinvent the game completely.”

  “No, not I,” he said. “I can’t. I was never so much as taught myself.”

  “Self-taught, then?” I said. “Impressive.”

  Algernon declined to speak.

  “Then how, man?” I said. “You sound like me. Enough damned evading. Come out with it then.”

  “I came up under Abraham Bogardus of New York. He is president now of the PSAI. Here was a man who taught me much by assisting me, you might say, in comparatively little. And in that, sir, I must abide. If you wish to go it, you’ll go it alone.”

  “That is what he’d want, would he, this Abraham Bogardus of the PSAI?”

  “I am altogether certain of that.” Child nodded. “Mr. Bogardus,” he said, “was a prodigy. He had what is called the lambent eye.”

  “A smirking tyrant was your master. And yet you are the better man.”

  “Be careful what you say,” said Child. “You pay me a backhanded compliment, sir.”

  “I pay you only what is due. Pity it should be backhanded.”

  “You and your quipping again,” said Child. “I do say, sir, it tires one out.”

  “Yes,” I allowed. “I can see how it might. Clearly, you mean me to forfeit this round.”

  When I spoke I was facing the wall of framed portraits and Algernon couldn’t see my face—or could he, perhaps, in the glare of the panes, see the curl of my lip and the flare of my nostrils, which were not so much signs of defeat, I should say, as the throes of a need to regroup and revalue.

  “Forfeit and yet . . .” I turned around. “I would very much like to still be friends.”

  “It goes without saying, I hope,” he smiled, “that I should want the very same.”

  “Then all I will ask you is this,” I said. “What is the best kind of glass for the plates?”

  After some hesitation, he said, “Patent British. Now let us talk of other things.”

  And talk we did, for several hours, into the watches of the night: of the slavery question, of the rumblings of war, of P.T. Barnum’s Feejee Mermaid, of aperitifs and cordials, of garters and bustles, of Hawthorne and Melville and E.A. Poe, of the slow decline of Child’s South End and the precipitate rise of the Back Bay. When finally I stood to leave Child shadowed me, on a swerve, to the door. I was drunk too, and exceedingly tired, the sort that claims you all at once, and my coat was leaden on my shoulders on my way down the stairs and out into the street.

  Child stood in the doorway, smiling weakly, one arm hid behind his back. The pavement of Athens was starting to grey in the first of the mid-summer morning.

  “Willy, I want you to have this,” he said.

  He handed me a pamphlet-book, with the following thinly printed title: A Practical Guide to the Collodion Process: Describing the Method of Obtaining Collodion Negatives and of Printing Them by George Washington Wilson.

  “Willy, I want you to keep it,” he said, pronouncing “keep” like “sheep,” poor man, and thrusting the book between my hands as if I might elsewise refuse it. “I am glad, sir, most glad, to have met you tonight.”

  And giving my shoulder a squeeze, shut the door.

  I wandered Boston in a haze. Early-shifters everywhere. A woman with a basket struggling through her front door. At the end of their rounds, a few plainclothes policemen. Labourers whistling in the mist. A couple of shabby young Micks in their cups. I felt the ragged pull of drink and lung-smoke caking up in me, but this time the emptied-out feeling was different, for there was something in beside it: the skinny book beneath my coat—the images that I had seen.

  Miss Conant in Captivity

  March, 1850

  At night they would empty the schoolhouse of children and have me up upon the stage. The stage, in this case, was a dining room table pushed against the schoolhouse wall.

  They brought in coal-lanterns and lined the walls with them so nothing would escape their eyes.

  The chair that I sat in on top of the table was hard and high-backed to encourage my posture. Below the chair’s seat there were two pillows, on which they said to rest my feet.

  The gentlemen lurked below the stage, some of them sitting and some of them standing. Certain of the standers had their hips tilted forward, their arms folded over their chests, their lips pursed.

  “Permission to work the rap is granted,” said a man toward the front named Shadrach Barnes.

  He was shaggy-haired and blond and big—a healthy urgent country dog.

  He was also a Professor at the College of Troy. He had come all the way to Roundot just to meet me.

  “Permission to work the rap,” he said, “has been granted the lady, assuming she’s able.”

  He started to walk toward the head of the table, his stethoscope swinging on his chest. I let him get a foot away before I gave a single rap. He froze for a moment, assessing the sound, then began to come toward me again with new purpose. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, I rapped in succession to make him walk faster, though I’d rested the muscles in my feet before his hands could get at me.

  “Do it one more time,” he said.

  I shook my head that I would not.

  “Surely, Miss Conant can give us reason explaining why she cannot rap.”

  “The spirits won’t speak on command,” I explained. “The spirits resent such ultimatums.”

  “The test conditions are not right?”

  “The test conditions are too much.”

  “The spirits are prone to stage-fright, then? The spirits are seized by performance anxiety? Why the spirits are not unlike an actress, struggling to recite her lines.”

  “The spirits will not humour you if you persist in making fun.”

  “The spirits will not or you will not?”

  “The spirits respond through the medium, sir.”

  “Not of, but through. N
ot will not, but cannot. Such muddy distinctions want candor, Miss Conant.”

  At a loss, I shook my head.

  “Confess then,” said Barnes, stepping back from the table, gesturing with the hand he’d withdrawn from my foot.

  Q

  The sessions went on for a week in that schoolroom. They happened long after the classes let out, somewhat past the supper hour. Shadrach Barnes was always there with the likes of the Minister Willets and others: a county judge, some aldermen, a man who’d gotten rich in coal.

  Roundot was black with coal dust to the elbows. The mountains and gorges were crisscrossed with chutes. The lives of the miners, our fathers, were hard. Everyone had to do her part. I had heard of the raps from a friend of a friend, and that latter friend from the friend of another, the travelling word come down from Hydesville, courtesy of the sisters Fox.

  The following sessions went much like the first. I sat there on the table on the chair beneath the pillow. People came to hear the rap, leaning in close at the top of the table. They leaned in and listened intently and long, like men listening for the sea in a shell. Some of them would smell the air, the space around my feet and legs, breathing in as much of me as decency permitted.

  The men called themselves an “impartial committee”—convened in faith to break my will. Other girls who worked the rap had drawn other committees that went on for weeks but I was the first one in all of Roundot who had summoned a college professor from Troy.

  Before the fourth session they took me to the basement of the school. A pack of women waited there. These were the wives of the well-to-do men heading up the inquiry. They guided me into a small anteroom that was furnished to look like a janitor’s bedroom and had me lie down on a small iron bed where they started to paw beneath my clothes. They were weak pecking hens and they found nothing on me. Two of them drifted away to report. When these two returned, they conferred with the rest, too far away for me to hear.