The Spirit Room

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by Paul, Marschel


  She slapped his hand away. “Of course I am awake.”

  “I thought you might be in a state of somnambulism.”

  The back of Izzie’s hands prickled. “Like my mother, you mean.”

  He was silent a moment. “Perhaps.”

  She felt her face crumple up as she tried to hold back tears.

  “Come, let’s light the coals in the parlor.”

  At her rocker, he picked up the gray blanket, wrapped it around her shoulders, then eased her into the chair. Her weight set the chair rocking. Squatting at the fireplace, Mac struck a match to the kindling under the coals, then bent over and blew on the small flame. Taking the bellows from its hook, he rose and began to pump air at the fire.

  “You’re down here every night. How long has this been occurring?” He kept his head down and eyes on the flames.

  Locking her knees, she stopped her rocker.

  “A good while,” she said.

  “It’s not occasional as I thought at first. This is why you are tired all the time now, why you are looking haggard.” He puffed with the bellows, sending a spurt of orange up into the coals. “Did you think I wouldn’t ever notice?”

  “I didn’t want to disturb you.” The truth was she didn’t want this moment to come, didn’t want his finding her out, his interrogating her.

  He shifted away from the fire and onto a wooden footstool near her. “I may be able to help you. That is, if you tell me what troubles you. In case you hadn’t noticed, I am a physician.”

  His kindness swept into her. She wanted to tell him about the cage she lived in, but if she did, the voices would be reality, her insanity would be truth. She took a long slow breath and let go a sigh. She was tired to death, her mind, heart, body, everything worn down. She didn’t want to drudge through another day pretending all was well, another night reading and shivering alone in the cold parlor. Mac fidgeted with the bellows. Izzie began to rock slowly. There was the excuse of worrying about Clara. She could talk to him about that again and it was certainly true. Where did worrying about Clara and worrying about her own lunacy start and end? These twin worries were slowly eating away at her soul like wood being devoured by a swarm of ravenous termites.

  “I’m going to sit here,” he said. “And wait until you are ready to tell me what troubles you, until tomorrow, or the next day. I want to help you, Isabelle.”

  The first waft of warmth from the fire reached her face and hands. She rocked faster as she silently rehearsed what to say to him…I’ve heard one voice one time…I almost thought I may have heard a voice that wasn’t real, but it may have been the neighbors…I’m not like Mamma because the voices don’t really talk to me. They just mumble on and on. I can shut them up anytime I want…It’s just nerves.

  She stilled the rocker again. The fire was beginning to comfort her. Stretching a hand toward the back of Mac’s head as he sat facing the fire, she ran her fingers lightly down his wavy hair. He was a patient angel waiting for her confidence, offering his help. And he was a physician. He was the one she spoke to about Mamma in the first place. She was being a fool. If there was anyone who could help her it was Mac and here he was at her side asking if he could. He wouldn’t put her in an asylum, would he?

  The mantle clock chimed five times. Clenching the edge of her blanket tightly, she shoved back and began to rock and to weep quietly.

  “Will you promise me something?” she asked.

  “Anything.”

  “You won’t stash me away in an asylum?”

  His shoulders rose and fell as he sighed, but he still didn’t turn to face her. “I promise.”

  She looked up at the ceiling for a moment. “I hear a crowd of voices every night. They wake me up. I come down here and light the lamp. Then they go. It’s the only way I can shut them off.” Her voice shook inside her throat as tears streamed down.

  “When did it start?”

  “September.”

  “That’s months! Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I was afraid.”

  “Of me?”

  “Of myself. That I’m insane.” Her chest began to heave, her heart flutter.

  Mac turned to her, braced his hands on the rocker and brought it to a standstill. His dark eyes were serious and tender.

  “You are not insane.”

  “What am I then? I am. I’m like Mamma. I have to admit it. Some night I’ll hear the voices clearly and they’ll lead me out into the black night and kill me.”

  Then she sobbed for what seemed like a long while. Mac stroked her hair until she finally calmed.

  “What do they say?”

  “Nothing. They aren’t clear. It’s like Corinthian Hall before a lecture when it’s full of excited people. Indistinguishable voices together, high, low. Sometimes angry, but not always.”

  He took her hand. “Do you believe they are spirits as your mother did?”

  “If they were spirits, they wouldn’t torture me like this.”

  “We can rid you of them. The water-cure can do it. I am sure of it.”

  “I don’t see how, Mac. This isn’t a pain in my back or a disease of my liver. It’s my mind that’s gone awry. I’m in terrible danger.”

  “Even a year ago I would have given you laudanum to calm you and make you sleep, but I’ve changed my views. I have seen amazing cures, heard about incredible cases that have all been resolved with nothing but pure water.”

  His grip on her hand tightened.

  “It’s hard for me to believe that a bath can expunge these voices.”

  “Harmony. It can bring you harmony. It’ll take time, undoubtedly months. I’ll get advice from Russell Trall, from the Taylor brothers. I’ll write them all.”

  “But you won’t tell them the advice is for me.” She wiped the tears from her face with her free hand.

  “No. No, of course not. We’ll make history. It’ll be a groundbreaking cure. I’ll take meticulous notes on the methods I use and write up the results for the Water-Cure Journal.” He was smiling, sparkling, the way he did when he was excited about innovative ideas.

  At least she would not be alone anymore whether he succeeded or not. She would not be alone with the voices.

  “All right. Let’s try,” she said.

  <><><>

  THE VERY NEXT MORNING AFTER IZZIE HAD CONFESSED to Mac about the voices that had been haunting her, she was with him in the back yard preparing for her first water-cure treatment. Mac held one end of a soaking wet linen sheet twisted like a rope. Izzie held the other. With aching cold hands, she rolled one way, he the opposite. Water streamed down in beads onto the dirt path that led to their kitchen garden, now hard with winter and dusted with snow.

  “Don’t twist too much. We want it wet, just not dripping wet.” Mac pulled back, stretching the sheet tight.

  According to Mac, the water-cure regimen would heal her mind. He wanted her to start right away—thirty minutes wrapped in the wet sheet every morning, and again, every evening in addition to a cool plunge bath after each session. The idea of lying still like a mummy enshrouded in a clammy wet sheet and covered by a couple of wool blankets twice a day would be uncomfortable at the least, and dreadfully time consuming. When would she get all her daily tasks done?

  “Are you sure I won’t be too chilled?”

  “Perhaps a little. We don’t want the house to be cold when you do this. When the Upper Falls Water-Cure building is further along, you can take the treatments there, and it will be a lot simpler.” Mac smiled at her. “There. That should do it.”

  They went into the parlor where Mac had spread out the gray blanket from her chair, and another spare one, by the coal fire on the floor. He directed her to fold the wet sheet in half length-wise with him, then they placed it on top of the blankets.

  “All right then, take off all your clothing and lie down.”

  She gestured toward the front windows open to the morning light. “The curtains?”

  While he closed the thr
ee curtains, she took off her boots and stockings, short dress, trousers, and undergarments and draped them over the back of her rocking chair. There she was, naked in the parlor, first thing in the morning. She felt silly, giggling as she sat on the cold sheet.

  “Oh, it’s frigid. It’s dreadful. I want my nice warm clothes back.” She lay down on the wet sheet, her body tensing from head to toe against the chill.

  Mac took the near side of the sheet and wrapped it over the top of her, then tucked it under her from ankle to shoulder.

  “That’s worse. It’s freezing.”

  “Be patient.” He crouched over, grabbed the far side of the sheet and drew it back over her, tucking it under her as well.

  “I can’t move. I feel like a cut of beef in butcher paper.”

  Laughing, Mac bent over and kissed her lips. “You are my sweet little cut of beef.”

  She did feel trapped, but somehow it was a delicious, absurd game that meant having Mac home in the morning.

  “When you commence your notes for your article about my cure, write down that it is horridly cold at first. Have you ever done this yourself?” Shivers ran along her spine as Mac draped the two blankets around her.

  “No, but be patient. It only takes a moment to warm up. Your body’s heat will warm the sheet.” He retrieved a notebook and pen and ink from his bookshelf, then placed them on the floor and sat on a footstool near her shoulders. “I’ll stay here this first time to make sure you are all right.”

  He took the stopper from the inkbottle, dipped his pen, and opened the book. As he scratched away on the page, he said slowly, “The patient is chilled at first.”

  She had the urge to smooth out his long and unruly eyebrows, but ensnared in the sheet, her hands were not free to reach for him. He continued to write without speaking. Lawk-a-mercy, he was right. The chill was indeed subsiding.

  He looked up from his notebook. “Do you think the voices could be spirits, dead people? Isn’t that what your mother believed?”

  Izzie sighed. “Ever since I can remember, she called the voices she heard spirit voices. Some of them even had names. The colonel. Great Uncle Lyle. There was one she called Sister. When I was a child I believed she could talk to spirits, that she was special. Once in a while someone would call her ‘witch’. I didn’t like that.” Izzie squirmed inside the sheet. “I knocked more than one young boy in the nose over that. I didn’t think there was a name for what Mamma could do or who she was. I never heard the word medium or Spiritualist until those Fox sisters came along. Papa would read about the Fox girls in the newspapers and tell us Mamma was like them and maybe one day she’d be famous too.”

  “Are you comfortable yet?”

  “Yes.”

  Mac looked at the mantle clock and made a note.

  “Do you believe your mother was really some kind of medium?”

  An itch prickled at the back of her neck. She tucked in her chin trying to scratch it against the wool blanket. “I did back then. But slowly, Mamma changed. She would be present with us in body, but not in mind. The children would play in a mean way sometimes, saying things to her when they were sure she couldn’t hear. I would usually stop them. I told them they had to be polite to Mamma all the time, no matter what state she was in. She was our Mamma.”

  “Warm enough?”

  Izzie nodded while Mac scribbled out a note. “But, one day, I had been sitting at the spinning wheel. It was a hot summer evening and Mamma was in her rocker staring at the wall. She and I were the only ones inside. Everyone else was outside trying to stay cool. I was spinning and spinning. It seemed like hours and Mamma simply rocked and stared at the wall the entire time. My foot grew tired on the pedal so I knew it was a long spell to just stare, even for her. She got up and walked to the kitchen worktable without even a smidgen of expression on her face.

  “She didn’t seem hot either, whereas I was sticky and flushed. She picked up our biggest knife and looked it up and down. I called out to her, but she didn’t hear me. She touched the sharp edge of the knife with a finger. That made me nervous so I got up and walked over to her. ‘Mamma? Put the knife down,’ I told her. She laid her hand out flat on the table in front of her, spread her fingers open, and raised the knife up high like she was about to sling it down and chop hard. Like a meat cleaver. My heart stopped cold just as the knife started to come down. I lunged and grabbed her wrist with both my hands and steered the blade so it wedged into the table. It just missed her hand.”

  Jaw quivering, Izzie felt a tear roll down her temple. She turned her head toward Mac and the sound of his pen rushing furiously across the page of his notebook. “Mamma blinked at me a few times and said, ‘When did you come home? Weren’t you at Julianna’s?’ I was scared. I screamed at her, demanding she tell me what she intended to do with the knife. I plucked it out of the wood. She said, ‘I ain’t doin’ nothing with the knife. I was getting myself a nice cool glass of water. Do you want one too?’ That’s when I decided she wasn’t right in her mind. She wasn’t a medium, a witch, a Spiritualist. She was insane.”

  Mac slapped his notebook closed. “You never told me that story.”

  “I never told anyone, ever, in my whole life. I was afraid someone might put her in an asylum and take her away from us.”

  Mac stroked her hair for a few moments, then began to unwrap the top blanket. “You must take the cool bath now.”

  She wasn’t sure at all how any of this was going to rid her of her voices, but she was relieved to take Mac into her confidence. At least now she wasn’t alone.

  Thirty

  1860

  THAT FRIDAY NIGHT AFTER WESTON LEFT CLARA at the Spirit Room, she was alone for a while. This was the part of Friday she liked. She liked how long it would be until the next Friday. She liked her gifts from Sam. This time two gold dollars. He’d said, “I didn’t have time this week to properly select a gift for you. Here is an extra dollar. This does not mean my affection for you has waned.” She liked the sound of the two coins clinking into her palm. On Friday evenings, she never hid her coins away in her bandbox after Weston left because she didn’t know when Papa would arrive from his taverns.

  A month of Fridays had gone by and Papa had been silent on each walk home. This was the fifth Friday and Clara and Papa were setting off for their boardinghouse in the snow. Clara had been waiting for him to speak to her these past weeks, maybe even ask her forgiveness for making her do the other thing with Sam. Usually they were both a little drunk as they strolled in silence up snow-plowed Seneca Street, and this night was no different. She knew Papa was ashamed of her. Maybe that’s why he was stone silent. But, didn’t he have to be ashamed of himself, too? No father in the history of the world ever made his daughter do the things he was making her do. Would he ever apologize?

  She loved Papa more than anyone in the family loved him. Sometimes she thought she even loved him more than Mamma did, but ever since he hit Billy so hard in the face, and then made her take Sam Weston as her paramour, she felt a hardness toward him growing inside her. It was like a brick wall being raised slowly by a mason, one brick, then another, then another. It wasn’t a wall yet, just a couple of rows. But if Papa didn’t change things soon, the wall would be finished. She would be finished.

  The snow was falling hard, whipping cold and wet into her face and she was looking forward to her warm bed.

  “I’m prouder of you than you can know, Little Plum.” Papa said softly.

  Clara had longed for this moment so badly, she was afraid to speak. They each walked seven more strides in dreadful quiet.

  Hands plunged deep in his greatcoat pockets, eyes down, Papa’s footsteps crunched along the packed snow. “Some feller is goin’ ta be the luckiest man on this whole earth when he marries you. You had beauty all along. Now you know how to run a millinery business and you can sew nice, too. I ain’t never goin’ to forget this time and how hard you been workin’ for the family.”

  He sounded tender the way
he used to, years ago, when he would put Billy on one of his knees and her on the other and bounce them both up and down. He used to call her and Billy his deuces. He’d kiss them both on the head and tuck them into bed with Izzie and little Euphora.

  “Papa, I think Mrs. Beattie is suspicious of me and Sam. She was asking me a lot of questions at work this morning about whether I was alone with a man on Friday nights. She said she could hear a voice that wasn’t yours and that she couldn’t hear any others as she did when we had the spirit circles.”

  “It’s none of her business who she hears in there.”

  “She says it isn’t right for me to be alone with a grown man without your being there.”

 

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