The Spirit Room

by Paul, Marschel

  “Mac is going to move to Rochester. I would go with him.”

  Clara shot up onto her feet. “Rochester? Holy rolling Moses, Izzie. That’s far.”

  “It’s not very far. There are trains, stagecoaches, packet boats on the canals.”

  “But it’s not Geneva. We would never see you. You can’t leave now.”

  “I’m seventeen. I have to leave sometime.”

  “You don’t have to leave. You could marry someone here. We could find someone here. What about a young medical student from the Geneva Medical College? We could easily find one for you.”

  “I’m sorry, Little Plum. You’ll still have Billy and Euphora with you. If anything terrible happens with Papa, I will come back and get you, all of you. I promise.”

  Clara thrust the fistful of rocks at the lake. Water splashed up at Izzie’s dangling feet.

  “How will I do the séances without you?”

  “You can do them on your own with Papa’s sneaky information. I’ve watched the seekers. You dazzle them. You are uncanny, Clara.”

  “I need you, though. We have to be together, like the Davenport Brothers or the Fox sisters.”

  “I have to make my own choices.” Izzie took Clara’s hand and pulled her back down next to her. “We knew this day would come.”

  “What if Papa refuses permission? He hates doctors.”

  As Izzie softly stroked the back of Clara’s hand, Clara imagined all the big holes Izzie would leave in her life. There were already all the holes Mamma had left…in her rocking chair, at Mrs. Purcell’s dining table, next to Papa in bed. Now there would be more and more holes, everywhere empty holes, everywhere, but worst of all, in the Spirit Room. The chair directly across from Clara at the séance table would be a sorrowful chair no matter who sat in it. Clara sighed deeply.

  And besides that, whenever Papa tried to force Izzie into, or out of, anything, it was trouble. If Papa forbid the marriage, it would be muskets and cannons firing off, the War of 1812 all over again.

  “Let’s skip stones.” Izzie rose and started back down the dock.

  “I don’t know how, Izzie.” Scrambling up, Clara grabbed the front of her dress and bolted to catch up.

  “I’ll teach you.”

  Once down on the shore, Izzie began searching. “There are a thousand skippers here. They have to be flat like little buckwheat cakes.” She shoved up her dress sleeves and knelt by the water.

  Clara reached her at the shore, knelt nearby. The muck smelled like fish, frogs, stinky wet earth. Dipping her hand into the water, Izzie brought out a shiny gray stone with flecks of pink.

  “Get as many like this as you can, then I’ll show you.”

  Clara rolled up her sleeve. When she reached into the water, the cold bit her like a snapping dog, but she didn’t flinch. She clenched her teeth down and started rounding up the buckwheat stones and filling her pockets, twelve in one, fourteen in the other until her dress was heavy and the wet rocks soaked through her petticoat, chilling her legs.

  A few minutes later they were standing on the shore, each with a small pile of stones. Clara jammed her red, tingling hand under her armpit to warm it.

  Turning her shoulder to the lake, Izzie released the stone so that it sailed perfectly low and true, like the mallards. It touched the glassy surface once, popped up magically into the air, then touched down again, then up again, four, five, six and finally it sank into the lake and was gone, leaving a trail of six sets of circles.

  “See? Try it,” Izzie said.

  For a long time, Izzie demonstrated, instructed, guided, and encouraged her, but one after another Clara’s stones plummeted into the lake. But Clara wasn’t going to give up. If Izzie could do this skipping, and she knew Billy could do it, she could too. When her heap of rocks was depleted, she found more. She kept trying. Izzie was patient like an angel, never yelling, never calling her names.

  Izzie had always been in Clara’s life because she was the oldest. It couldn’t be any other way. Izzie always protected her, led the way, and stood up to Papa when he needed standing up to. And sometimes when he didn’t.

  “Izzie, if Papa disappears or hurts Billy more than a rough slap, you’ll come help us? Will you promise?”

  Izzie slowly lowered her eyelids as though she were deep in thought, then raised them and looked Clara straight in the eye. “Yes, Little Plum. If Papa goes wrong, I’ll come and fix things.”

  Clara let her arms hang down and glanced around at her strewn stones. There. That one would fit her hand nicely. She picked it up. Taking her sideways position, shoulder to the water, she took a deep breath and held it. As she drew back her arm and then swung it around, she felt the rhythm, the angle, the speed, the flow she had seen on Izzie and she let go. The stone swept out over the lake into the glare of the sun and landed delicately like a miniature weightless platter on the water. But then it rose up, and dipped down, again, again, three, six, eight, nine, ten before drifting under the water’s skin.

  She beamed at Izzie. “There. I’m a dabster at it. You could never do ten.”

  Fourteen

  ON SUNDAY, IZZIE WOKE EARLY and prepared for her day with Mac. Billy and Euphora were downstairs doing chores, but Clara was just waking in bed in the Blue Room. Izzie leaned over her sister. “I might be some time. It’s a splendid day and I think I will go for a long, long walk on my own,” she said.

  Clara eyed her with a suspicious arched brow and she was right to do so. Izzie had arranged to go on a carriage ride with Mac and didn’t want to explain herself. She knew she couldn’t keep her plans from Clara forever, but she’d tell her later. Turning and bounding down the front stairs, Izzie set off so quickly that no one in the house had the chance to ask where she was going.

  Mac was waiting for her in front of the Geneva Hygienic Institute with an open cabriolet and dapple mare. Tipping his hat slightly, he smiled at her as she approached.

  “Good morning, Izzie. We have a beautiful day for our ride.”

  “Good morning, Mac.”

  He was handsome, contrary to what Clara thought, but not in an ordinary way. He was confident, finely dressed in black and gray striped trousers, stovepipe hat, leather driving gloves, a blue silk tie, black wool greatcoat, and underneath, a deep blue waistcoat. During the night, a light spring rain had fallen, leaving a sheen on everything. It was a glorious morning.

  Izzie took Mac’s hand and climbed onto the seat. Settling herself, she shifted and straightened the skirt of her good dress, her gray and blue plaid, and the two petticoats underneath. Mac walked around behind the cabriolet and then hoisted himself onto the seat next to her, taking the whip and reins. He moved, perhaps not gracefully, but carefully.

  Izzie had only been in a carriage this fancy a handful of times back in Ohio with her friend Julianna’s father and mother.

  “Do you have everything you need?”

  “What do I need?”

  She held out her empty hands, palms up.

  “Nothing.” He grinned and flicked the leather reins.

  As the dapple trotted ahead, Izzie felt a shiver of excitement. Not only was this her first courtship with a man, but it was a man who might soon be her fiancé.

  “Would you like to visit Silver Thread Falls? It’s several hours to get there. It’s on the east side of the lake.” His low voice carried over the din of the horse hooves clomping in the mud, the harness jangling and the rumbling of the wheels. “I’d like to take you there. We have enough daylight to get there and back.”

  “Yes, lovely.”

  They rode without speaking for some time, down along the Geneva waterfront, by shops, hotels, foundries, Long Pier with two steamboats in dock, the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad Station, a coal yard, lumber yard, and then over the canal bridge. The rented dapple was dutiful, slowing when Mac pulled the reins and speeding when he slapped her back. They passed single horseback riders and other open carriages coming from the opposite direction with men,
women, children in twos, threes, fours, dressed in their Sunday clothes, fancy bonnets, capes, stovepipe hats. Izzie hoped she wouldn’t see anyone she knew and, when they turned south toward Lodi, she was relieved that there weren’t as many travelers.

  She especially didn’t want Papa to hear about her excursion. She wanted to see Mac at least a few times to find out if she was truly interested in him as a husband before they spoke to Papa about an engagement. She didn’t want to fight Papa every inch of the way when, in the end, she might decide not to marry Mac.

  “Are you an admirer of Elizabeth Cady Stanton? She lives just east of here, in Seneca Falls, you know.”

  “I have seen her name mentioned in the newspaper. My landlady, Mrs. Purcell, speaks of her once in a while, but I don’t know much about her.”

  He looked over at her, surprised.

  “You’re a young woman with an intellect, an appetite for books, and you haven’t come across her writings, her ideas?”

  Cringing, Izzie shook her head. Now he would realize that her self-education, as he called it, was greatly lacking.

  He laughed. “Well, that may be just as well for me. Mrs. Stanton and her allies are determined to get married women the rights to their own wages and every woman the right to vote. I haven’t decided yet whether that’s going to be a good thing for society or whether it will put us in a big fat pickle. What do you think?” He gave the horse a flick of the reins.

  She buried her hands under her shawl, chilled by the breeze of the speeding carriage.

  “Well, I don’t see how women having more authority over their own lives in a democratic society could turn the world into a pickle. What if we could vote? What if we could attend college? How would this harm society?”

  “Then you are in sympathy with Stanton. But you haven’t read her addresses?”

  “No, no. You are the first person who has asked me what I know and don’t know, what I think about things.”

  “I doubt I’ll be the last. You’re the first young woman I’ve met who has educated herself as broadly as you have.”

  That didn’t seem possible, she thought. Surely there were many others like her and surely he would have met them.

  <><><>

  THEY DROVE SOUTH FOR SEVERAL HOURS. Mac talked a lot about his dream of building his own water-cure institution, but also asked Izzie more about her thoughts on freeing slaves and women voting like men. He told her what he’d heard about Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to graduate from medical school, and right in Geneva at the Geneva Medical College. Blackwell had started something called the New York Infirmary for Women and Children in New York City and he said he hoped to meet her one day. Maybe they both would.

  After a long while, Mac turned the cabriolet along Mill Creek. The sound of rushing water came from ahead as he stopped the carriage. She started to climb down.

  “Wait.” Mac darted around the back of the carriage and escorted her out of the gig.

  She’d seen men doing this her whole life, but it was the first time she’d been offered a hand down like that. In the bright sunlight, as she lowered herself, she noticed his face, the fine lines around his eyes, and his skin, a bit rough. Clara was right. He was old, but not as old as Clara claimed. He wasn’t as old as Papa. A boy, even a young man, wouldn’t admire her the way he did and no young man she knew—the baker’s son, the neighbor boys up on Williams Street, the older boys Billy brought home from Maxwell’s Nursery—none of them thought about talking to her about abolition or Mrs. Stanton’s ideas about women’s rights or immortality. But Mac did. He was asking her so many things.

  “Let’s take the path around and down to the pool at the bottom of the waterfall,” Mac said.

  He tossed his stovepipe hat under the seat of the cabriolet and retrieved a blanket and basket. Izzie followed him down a steep, wooded path. When they arrived at the bottom of the falls, they stood together and watched it in silence for a few moments. The silver thread of water looked like thousands of tiny glass beads cascading downward. Spray rose into a mist over the pool. The splash of it was thrilling.

  Mac smiled at her. In the daylight his hair was one kind of brown, a rich color like chocolate, his mustache somewhat lighter, and his curly eyebrows darkest of all.

  They stayed there a long while not speaking, only listening to the crashing water. Eventually Mac left her side and spread the picnic blanket some distance away in a clearing under a pair of oak trees.

  What joy to be away from the Spirit Room, the Blue Room, Papa, the children. It was her own private holiday. She wanted to stay here forever in the sweet sunshine with the new green oak leaves above and the waterfall flooding down, and this kind man. This kind man.

  She would marry him. Why not? As long as she could understand why he hadn’t married sooner. That was her one question. But if he had a reasonable answer, she’d marry him and go to Rochester and start her life, her own new life. She would be free of Papa and all the hoax medium nonsense.

  “Are you warm enough?” Mac put the wicker basket on the corner of the gray blanket.

  “Yes. Don’t you know how these dresses and petticoats pile up like quilts?” She patted her layer-covered legs, tucked under her to one side.

  Laughing, he knelt down. “I can’t say that I have thought about it. Are you hungry?”

  She nodded and he proceeded to set a picnic out with white ceramic plates, sturdy glasses, linen napkins, then two cheeses, a loaf of bread, and a bottle of red wine.

  Izzie had tasted wine once, and Papa’s whiskeys a few times when he was out and she and the children were being mischievous, but she had never consumed a full glass of wine. Mac poured, then held his glass up to toast. Mimicking him, she raised hers.

  “To a spring day of great beauty spent together and…” He glanced up toward the waterfall, then back at her, “…to many more moments and days and years as delightful as this one.”

  Then they clinked glasses and she took a small sip. She tasted the sweet grapes and, as the wine slid over her tongue and into her throat, it left a tiny soft flame, not a burning fire like whiskey.

  Mac didn’t need to know it was her first real glass of wine. He didn’t need to know it was her first picnic with a man. He was years and years ahead of her with picnics and women and waterfalls.

  “Now, are you going to tell me about immortality? I’ve kept your family secret about the séances. You can tell me what you really believe.”

  She wasn’t sure she should entirely trust him yet. What if he did say something to someone in town? What if the engagement didn’t work out and the gossip he generated ruined the reputation of the Benton Sisters? Papa would be unbearable.

  “Seal up your lips and give no words but mum,” she said. “Shakespeare.”

  “I should have known you could quote Shakespeare.” Rolling his eyes up, Mac set his glass down on the blanket. “All right, I promise to be mum for the sake of the Benton Sisters.”

  “Well, I do believe that people’s spirits go on after death and have enough form to speak to some of us.”

  “To you?”

  “No. But I believe some people do have the gift. The girl, Anna, who gave my sister and me lessons. Maybe my mother. I’ll never truly know about her.” She took a linen napkin from him. “Do you think the Benton Sisters are awful? Humbugs for money?”

  “Awful is too much. I’m not a believer in this Spiritualism trend, tables tilting, tapping, rapping. I’m not convinced about the girl or your mother either.” He took a knife from the basket and cut several slices of pale, hard cheese. “I must tell you now so that there will be no misunderstanding later.” He held her eyes. “If you become my wife, a Rochester physician’s wife, I cannot allow you to continue as a humbug medium. My Water-Cure Institute will require respectability. There can’t be any spirit rousing associated with me or my office.”

  He couldn’t have said anything more perfect. By mandate, she would be free of the hoax once and for all. He placed
some cheese and a piece of bread on a plate and offered it to her.

  “I am relieved. I don’t want to continue. I have fought my father since the beginning, but we rely on the income now.”

  “What about your father’s income?”

  “He hasn’t had any since we arrived in Geneva, at least that we know of.”

  Looking pensive, Mac ate a sliver of cheese and was quiet a moment.

  “I won’t have much at first. I have to invest in the facility and staff, but perhaps I could send a small compensation to your father for a short period to make up for your absence. After all, if I would be whisking you away on short notice and you are indeed critical to the family wages, it only seems fair.”