The town boys sometimes swam within the town limits naked after dark, after eight o’clock when there weren’t any fines. But she wanted to swim right now and get rid of her sodden undergarments. She could leave them all on a branch in the hot breeze to dry while she floated on her back in the cold clean water in nothing but the white dress.
When she got to Water Street, two boys, hooting and laughing, were riding a seesaw, a big plank set on a barrel. Up one boy, then down, up the other boy, then down. The seesaw creaked and wobbled. Two other boys, waiting their turn, watched. They all ignored her, but an older boy, standing in the open doorway of a tenement building, one of those places her family might be living if it weren’t for Mrs. Purcell, smiled at her, tipped his cap and said, “Lovely evening, Miss.”
She crumpled the skirt of her dress where it was stained to hide Weston’s spot and smiled back at him. Eyes straight ahead on her destination, she kept going. When she got to the end of the street, she walked a short while along a rubble path until she was just beneath the mansions high above on Main Street. No one was around. Nestling herself behind a huckleberry shrub, she wrenched off her boots and coaxed off her sweaty stockings. She tugged off her white dress, shimmy, petticoat, and pantalettes and dropped them all on the ground, then scrambled back into the dress. Finally she left the shrub draped with her clothing.
The rocks were cool and soothing under her feet as she made her way to the water. The rippling water slurped over her toes. What if she got caught? What if the Constable or one of his young deputies came by looking for illegal swimmers? They did that sometimes on hot days. Two dollars. Two dollars for a bath. That would be a fair part of Papa’s five dollars from Weston.
Weston. A picture of him burst into her mind, with his red hard prick, his pumping hand, his slack face, his voice calling out her name, Clara, Clara. She covered her ears and stepped forward into the water. At first, her ankles were shocked by the cold. Clara, Clara. She stumbled, banged a toe on a rock. “Ouch.” She caught her balance, waded in a few more steps, stumbled again, caught herself again. The water rose up to her calves, her knees, her thighs. She shivered, wrapped her arms around her waist and stared down at her dress floating around her legs. Leaning over, she stretched out her hands and dove out flat into the surface of the lake. Chilled from scalp to toe, she glided out. She swam toward the opposite shore, which was miles and miles away. His voice still echoed inside her ears. Clara, my Clara. If she filled her ears with water, that would shut him up.
She took a huge breath, held it in, and dove deep toward the bottom. She stroked hard. The water below was yellowish, green, full of moving shadows, shafts of light, floating specks and plants that looked like wiggling cornhusks. She stroked harder, pulled herself deeper. A school of minnows scattered into four smaller schools and darted away. Her lungs begged for air, but she kept her mouth and throat clamped tight. The beams of light and colors were so pretty, the minnows so fast, the cold water so clean.
Is this what Mamma wanted? Did she want to live under the water with her ears plugged so she couldn’t hear her spirit voices? Did she want to live where no one could see whether she was naked or clothed? Mamma, is this what you wanted?
She grabbed a stalk of the billowy husk plant. It slid from her grip. She hit a pocket of icy water. Golden-eyed, and with silver sparkling scales, a fish hovered near her and stared at her. She stared back. It flitted off into the shadows.
Her lungs were about to explode. If she opened her mouth now, she could drink in the lake. The lake would quench her. She could be with Mamma, in the lake with Mamma. Air. Air. Air. She needed to climb. Tucking, she turned herself, pointed hands up, arms up to the bright, the sky. She kicked hard.
She wasn’t going to make it. It was too far. She was about to burst. She’d waited too long, swam too far down. She stroked. The water was heavy, wouldn’t get out of her way. One more pull. That was two. One more. That was three. Her mouth was going to open against her will. She’d drown like Mamma. No. Mamma, don’t let me.Please. She clenched her teeth as hard as she could. Just one more stroke, four, and five, six, seven, eight, nine, then her hands broke the surface. Her head burst out of the water. Air. Mouth gaping open wide, she sucked loudly. She sucked again and again. A sledge hammer beat at her chest. She was all right. Not drowned. The blue sky, sunshine, and wispy clouds were hers, hers. Her heart began to slow from its frantic pounding.
Gradually, treading became easier, breathing easier. Like a traveler on a boat she was out some distance in the lake.
On the shore, near her clothing on the shrub, there was a young man approaching the water. He was wearing a constable’s hat she realized. He was a deputy. Hell-fire. She’d have to talk him out of the two dollar fine. He watched her as he scrambled along the rocks. Maybe he’d like a free séance, she thought.
<><><>
THE CONSTABLE’S DEPUTY WAS POLITE, even shy. When she climbed out of the lake, dripping like a just-caught bass on a hook, he mentioned the fine more like a gentle threat. “You know you are breaking the village ordinance even in that dress,” but then he looked her up and down and asked her if she wanted him to walk her home. When she declined his offer, he wished her a good evening without mentioning the fine again, and walked down the rubble path toward town. Her dress was clean of Weston’s stain, but had turned a little yellow from the lake water. She shoveled her wet feet into her boots, rolled up her undergarments into a ball, and tucked them under her arm. As much as she could, to keep away from being seen in the clinging, dripping dress, she took alleys and footpaths up the hill to get home.
Later on, in the candle-lit kitchen, Clara held the wet séance dress across her arms, ready to hang it out on the line. As she reached the back door, lightning snapped and a giant roll of thunder boomed and rain flooded from the sky. She opened the door and stood listening to the thunder crashing and rain pelting. After a short while, the rain eased and drifted off. The trees and roof continued to spit down noisy streams. That’s it, she thought. That’s the end of summer. And that’s the end of Sam Weston, too. She would talk to Papa in the morning about him.
She took the candle lantern with her outside and set it down on the soaked grass near the laundry line. She hoisted the dress over the line and raised a wooden pin to clip it tight.
“I brought you a gift.”
“Oh!” Clara’s heart hopped like a cricket. But it was only Papa. “You scared me.”
“I got you these. Here.” He held out something small and black, draped over his palm. “It’s those lace mitts.”
It was a pair of black gloves, the lace kind with open fingertips that girls and women wore when they dressed up. How did he know she wanted a pair of those?
After taking them from him, she immediately inserted a hand and tugged one on. The lace was snug and reached half way up her forearm. Bending down toward the candlelight, she admired her delicate, grown-up hand.
“They’re beautiful. Thank you, Papa.”
Dang. This was going to make it harder to tell him she didn’t want to go on with Weston. She took a deep breath and stood up straight. If she was going to tell him, it had better be now.
“Papa, I want to stop Mr. Weston’s courting arrangement. I don’t like it.”
“He hurt you?” Papa’s voice climbed fast like he was about to rile.
“No, he didn’t hit me or break anything, but he made me do something I didn’t want to do and that hurt me. In a way, it did.”
Papa’s eyes bulged. He looked like he might explode. “He kiss you?”
“No.”
“Make you embrace him?”
“No.”
“Make you take any clothing off?”
“No.”
That seemed to calm him. He turned his eyes down toward the candle lantern and stared at it a while. He swayed a little. He had been drinking some, maybe with Weston.
“I said if you were hurt, you could stop.”
Was all the hurt Papa kn
ew being clobbered or knocked down or getting a bone broken? Weren’t there other kinds of hurt, like Mamma dying? He should know that kind of pain.
“What’s hurt, Papa? What about being a prisoner to someone?”
“You’re no one’s prisoner. If anything, it’s the other way. He’s yours.” He snickered quietly, stroked his dundrearies. “Think of it. In one day, for less than one hour, you got yourself a new dress from him, five dollars for the family, and some purty gloves from me. Now, what prisoner has all that?” Placing his hands on her shoulders, he smiled at her and looked straight into her eyes. “You are my Little Sweet Plum. I am prouder of you than any of my children. You did somethin’ hard, somethin’ brave and you’re helpin’ the family.”
Brave, proud. She took another deep breath. He was right about the five dollars. It was a lot of money. With that kind of money, the family would be clothed, housed, fed, and maybe more. And maybe Papa would slow down his liquor again, like he did before, and lay off Billy too, and then Billy would stay home and not run off with his friends to join up with that rebel John Brown down in Kansas or wherever he was.
“Put the other mitt on.”
She raised her bare hand, the one holding the other glove, and looked down at it. She had crumpled the lace glove up in her hand and hadn’t realized that she was squeezing it so hard her fingers were cramped.
“I want something too, Papa,” she said as she put the other glove on. “If I do keep up with Sam Weston, I want you to never hit Billy.”
He chuckled. “A father has to discipline his boy, Clara. That’s how it is.”
“You know what I mean. You go far past discipline. You have to stop that or I won’t go on with Sam. It’s only fair.”
“I’m the Papa here. I say what’s fair.” He studied her a moment. “But I want you to be happy, my little one. I’ll do as you ask.”
She sighed and clasped her gloved hands together.
“There’s somethin’ else, Little Plum. This arrangement between you and me and Weston has got to be a secret, the biggest, most fierce, kind of secret. You can’t ever tell a soul about it, even your sisters. They wouldn’t understand. It’s private. It ain’t anyone else’s business anyway.” He kissed the top of her head, then looked into her eyes again, candlelight glinting off his spectacles. “It’s just between us.”
The truth of it was that she didn’t want to tell anyone. People, especially her sisters, might think something awful about her.
“All right, Papa.”
Twenty-Two
AFTER THREE MONTHS IN THE NEW HOME with Mac, Izzie’s furnishings were still very modest and their only pots, pans, and dishes were the ones purchased on their honeymoon day. Izzie had thought there’d be more by now—a desk, a wool rug perhaps—but Mac had his priorities and nearly every penny was going into building his Upper Falls Water-Cure Institute. Even so, he bought her a book every week and he had scraped together the money to buy her a small cherry side table, an oil lamp, and a rocking chair for the parlor. “This will be your first reading chair. It’s a perfect design from the Shakers,” he’d said.
Izzie had visited across the street at the Mead’s home a few times. Their parlor and dining room were full to the ceilings with things she’d never seen before: a side cabinet with flowers painted on the drawers and doors, a lacquered corner cupboard, a walnut card table with ornately carved legs, a mahogany wine cooler, and there wasn’t just one desk, but several.
Although the pieces were lovely and Mrs. Mead called them by specific names that sounded English or German, Izzie was still happy to write her letters to Clara at their simple pine table, the dining table she shared with Mac. Her walls were entirely bare, without wallpaper or paintings, but they were freshly painted white. There wasn’t a scrap of clutter.
She’d been sewing all day and it felt good to stop a moment and lean back into the rocker. Her fingers ached from jamming the needle in and out of the calico trousers. Mac wanted two dozen American Costumes for women patients when his institute opened in the coming spring—different sizes, different materials. He’d told her that all the best water-cure establishments offered women the reform dress with short skirts, straight trousers, and a comfortable bodice to wear during treatment. He’d said, “Women should not be constricted where they shouldn’t be constricted, especially the lungs and uterus. The weight of those senseless long dresses with their useless underskirts and hoops, and those preposterous corsets pressure vital organs. All that clothing ruins circulation and makes women ill. I’ve seen terrible things, terrible.”
Izzie had been amazed. Even though she had spent nearly as much time as Clara looking at the Godey’s Lady’s Book and Peterson’s Magazine at Mrs. Beattie’s millinery shop and longing for the very garments that Mac was railing against, once he explained what dress reformers wanted to do—free the body to breathe and move in a natural state—it made utter sense. Mac told her that hydrotherapists, both men and women, were leading a movement to transform the way women dressed for improved health. That meant he wanted to go along with it and it meant she would too. “We’ll join the National Dress Reform Association and go to the conventions. All the important reformers do,” he’d said.
So now it seemed that not only were they to become reformers, but important reformers as well. Mac’s ambition was swelling by the day. She’d never met anyone like him. He was electrifying and more interesting than she could ever have imagined when she met him back in Geneva. She was finishing her third American Costume, a smallish one. She didn’t mind doing the seamstress work. It was one way she could aid Mac in getting his Upper Falls Water-Cure ready.
Digging the needle into the blue trousers one more time, she slackened her pace in the rocker. Having a rocking chair of her own reminded her of Mamma, even though her own chair was taller, narrower, and a lighter color wood than Mamma’s. Sometimes, when she rocked gently, the rhythmic sound of wood on wood brought back a vivid memory of Mamma, holding her Bible, whispering to herself. Sometimes the whispers were the words on the page she was reading, and sometimes they were a conversation she was having with herself or her spirit voices.
Now Mamma’s chair was Clara’s. Izzie sighed. Poor little Clara, she thought, still stuck with Papa fabricating spirits for the innocent.
Letting the blue trousers fall into her lap, Izzie looked out the windows at the green lushness of summer. She was free of Papa’s shenanigans, free of worrying that she might hear voices like Mamma did. Those few times she heard something mysterious had only come from her own fears, she had decided. The combination of fear and imagination was a potent mix. That’s all it was.
Having a fever while pretending the spirits were at their séances made her conjure up things the way a child would, a child who concentrated on her own midnight terror so deeply that she saw real goblins, full-sized and horrifying, at the foot of her bed or on the ceiling. Izzie stood and took the American Costume into the dining room and set it on the table. Thank goodness that hoax spirit nonsense was over for her. Maybe Clara would be free of it soon as well. Papa was going to have to come up with something new eventually and hopefully it wouldn’t be as awful as the Spiritualism idea. Summer was coming to an end. Perhaps she would take a coach or train down to Geneva and visit the children.
Izzie walked back into the parlor to the bookcase opposite the fireplace. She had her own shelf, the bottom one, below Mac’s five shelves of medical books and stacks of journals. His biggest pile was the Water-Cure Journal, issues going back to 1851, all worn, corners tattered. She squatted down and ran her hand over the spines of her own books—red, green, brown, and black. She smelled the paper and ink. She already had nine books, each one a gift from Mac. It had always been her dream to own books. She never believed she really would.
“You’re the only thing worth spending money on besides the new institute. We’ll never be hungry if we have our minds and our bodies in their most perfect state,” he’d said one night.
; There was the book he gave her for their wedding, Leaves of Grass, and then one for every week they were married. He said the books celebrated their new life together and the union of their spirits. He’d given her Madame Bovary because that was what she was looking for in the bookshop in Geneva the day he met her by chance and invited her to tea. Even though she hadn’t realized it, he’d decided that was the beginning of their courtship. And then came Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Stowe and Blithedale Romance by Hawthorne and Moby Dick by Melville. It had been a week since that one. Would there be a new one coming today or tomorrow? She smiled to herself. What would he bring this time? Austen? Dickens? He had mentioned something about Thoreau the other day.
The front door flew open, letting in a shaft of evening sun. Mac strode through the light toward her.
The Spirit Room Page 21