Now You See Her

by Cecelia Tishy

  “Forget Jeffrey. Ghostwise, it’s all about Tania.”

  On my radar screen, it’s about Jeffrey warning me off. It’s about tracing the Eldridge history to Henry Faiser’s arrest for Peter Wald’s murder and the whole street engulfed in flames. But Igloo Sue’s research on the house is also on my to-do list because it can pacify Tania as well as help Meg. A calmer Tania means a less stormy Jeffrey and keeps my path clear so I can see if there’s a trail from him to the lethal Eldridge fire. I need to know how a scrappy black city kid made it to the Back Bay and an office limo and partnership in a high-end real estate development.

  By 11:30 a.m., I have made my way to the Boston Public Library, “the People’s Palace.” Founded in 1848 and the first publicly supported library in America, it’s a city treasure with its Sargent murals and courtyard garden. The garden benches beckon with shade and sun, but I march straight to the catalog, enter “Boston” as keyword, and get swamped. Whole forests have been sacrificed to the city’s recorded obsession with itself.

  How can an amateur possibly pick and choose from these hundreds and hundreds of titles? What documents did Igloo Sue research before being swept off her feet to thaw and live happily ever after in Dallas? Everyone working in the catalog this morning seems expert and savvy. Skilled hunters, they click, they jot. I eye the pale, stern woman beside me with a Bean tote and note cards. She’s researching brooms. Straw Brooms of New England, Broom Pedlars in Vermont and New Hampshire, The Economy of the Corn Broom. Beside her I’m a bumbling novice.

  I ask myself what will satisfy Tania and let me find out more about Jeffrey. Picking titles at random is like flea market browsing, but that’s what I do. My consumer picks: Boston: A Social History, Boston Bohemia, and Lost Boston, plus Delinquents and Reformers in Boston and a dozen others.

  It’s dizzying—and distracting too, because it’s tight quarters, despite the fact that I’ve moved to the main reading room with its high-vaulted ceilings. Seated to my left at our shared oak trestle table, a gaunt, bearded man surrounded by Russian tomes mumbles in cadences memorable from Doctor Zhivago. To my right, a twenty-something guy with mismatched socks and black nail polish snaps the pages of Car and Driver. The room is crowded. I can’t move because my seat number tells the staff where to bring more books from the stacks—into which, thank heaven, library patrons cannot go, or else I’d surely disappear into the labyrinth. Not to mention my claustrophobia.

  I open a chapter about the prestigious Back Bay and learn something jarring: that the area was once a sewage basin, a dreadful city health hazard called “a great cesspool.” Surprise, surprise, “the neighborhood smelled like the hold of a ship after a three years’ voyage.” By 1849, in the interests of public health, the Health Department required the area to be filled in. Amazingly, the aristocracy of Old Boston paid a premium to live atop a city sewer—a pre-EPA cleanup to turn a toxic swamp into luxury housing for city aristocrats. I reject the notion of telling Tania that the residents of neighboring Beacon Hill had “put their handkerchiefs to their noses” when visiting new Back Bay construction. She’d be revolted and furious and take it out on Meg.

  Here, however, is a more Tania-friendly fact, which Jeffrey Arnot will also appreciate: 580 acres of “brand new land” were brought to Boston in railcars from “the lure of real estate profits,” whereupon “Beacon Street extended westward. Two new streets were developed: Newbury and Marlborough.” Bingo!

  Better yet, here’s a French twist: “In the 1860s, Boston suddenly surrendered to all things French… Second Empire style. From the very start, the Back Bay was clearly to be the most fashionable and luxurious residential section in an expanding city.”

  The Arnots’ house, according to one of these books, was built in 1881 in the newly fashionable Medieval style, its first owner Mr. Edmund Wight. An architectural writer celebrates the house for its “forward thrust of gable” and “inward pull of the deep and spacious entrance porch.”

  Pure spin, this praise for a house that’d give anyone the Gothic creeps in the brightest moonlight. I’d bet nineteenth-century little children in knickerbockers and sailor straws streaked past that house in terror. My Jack and Molly would’ve called it a Witch House and skipped it on Halloween, assuming they trick-or-treated in the 1880s.

  Yet it’s bonbons for Tania if I can link the French Second Empire with the paranormal—or whatever they called it back then. Animal magnetism? Or perhaps it was mesmerism, named for Franz Anton Mesmer, who put subjects into “a sleeplike condition, a state of trance” in which “jars of ammonia passed under their noses failed to evoke even the slightest response.” I say that anybody who’s beyond rousing with ammonia fumes is scary.

  Had Edmund Wight been a follower of mesmerism?

  My book of the hour is The Gentle Bostonians: Biography of the Back Bay Breed, a memoir by one Frances “Fannie” Fantrell, who grew up on Clarendon Street in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The dates fit the Arnot house, and the location is perfect for neighborhood lore on Wight. “Home for me is always the Back Bay,” wrote Fannie, “where houses breathe an air of comfort and conformity.” And here’s Marlborough: “Henry James stood with Father at the head of Marlborough Street, looked down its long expanse, and sighed.”

  My pulse quickens. Surely, Edmund Wight will make an appearance in this old-fashioned book, in its own way a version of People, with nonstop news makers and celebs of Boston history’s Who’s Who. Maybe Wight went to the Pole with Captain Scott and froze and has haunted his own house ever since.

  I’m midway through the book and getting hungry for lunch when Wight makes his entrance. “Father and Mr. Wight took their customary stroll.” Bingo again! Mr. Wight, according to Fannie, is “a compact man, in sober clothes, round faced, with grizzled, close-cropped mustache and eyes twinkling benignly behind steel rimmed spectacles.” In springtime, “he wears a ‘Boston Leghorn’ hat, his walking stick swinging forward before it touches the bricks of the sidewalk.”

  Wight’s valet, or maybe coachman, is named Boyle. “Boyle brought the coach round, and Mr. Wight took leave of us.”

  “Boyle” is Irish, isn’t it? Moments ago I read that “hauling gravel and filling in the Back Bay furnished employment for Irish laborers.” If I can’t find scandal or mesmerism, can I concoct a notion of a ghostly Irish servant?

  I read on. Mr. Wight, it seems, courted Miss Clara Eddington of Beacon Hill, “a pretty girl with a classic nose and delicious warm voice, a flowered hat high on her wavy hair, and velvet ribbons on her bodice.” She was “the fixed maypole around which Mr. W. circled as if ’twere perpetual springtime.”

  It seems that Miss Eddington was courted by countless suitors. Trolleys full of Harvard men made pilgrimages to her family home on Beacon Hill. To foil rivals, Wight made his big bold move, which was to build the Marlborough house. The neighborhood was reportedly atwitter when the architect, Charles Dehmer, persuaded his client to forgo the Academic French style in favor of the captivating newer fashion, Medieval.

  Did Miss Clara Eddington of Beacon Hill thus live happily ever afterward on Marlborough as the wife of Edmund Wight, who was, after all, a Brahmin serving on boards of trustees and faithfully attending dinner meetings of the Monday Club, of which he was secretary?

  No. Somehow his new Marlborough house affronted her. There are references to Miss E’s “tragicomic dislike” of the stone of Mr. Wight’s house and “intractable aversion” to the New Land. Fannie Fantrell recounts a crushing moment, a promenade when Mr. Wight proposed marriage to Miss Eddington, then “watched the tip of her parasol trace out two letters: N-O.”

  Why did she turn Wight down flat? Was this “compact” man more friend than lover, or his pedigree not pure enough? Was that house really the insurmountable obstacle? Maybe Clara set her sights on a big-bucks robber baron in the Gilded Age. Fannie does not venture a guess.

  Within a year, the spurned Wight is said to be “storm-tossed” and “heartbroken,” while Mr
. and Mrs. G. A. Eddington announce the engagement of their daughter, Clara, to Mr. Charles Dehmer.

  Dehmer! I can’t believe it, the architect. What a twist! Dehmer hasn’t figured in the picture at all except for the house. Following a spring wedding, the couple will live on Louisburg Square, Beacon Hill. Her home turf.

  I smell a plot as thick as blood pudding—the architect Dehmer conniving to wreck his client’s courtship. He must have known that Wight, not the Harvard boys, was his real competition. Had he drawn up blueprints calling for a house style and a location that Clara Eddington was certain to loathe? Was Dehmer a Machiavelli and Casanova combined? A snake, that’s what I think. Fannie speculates on none of this, although she soon refers to “Mr. Wight, the bachelor of Marlborough Street” and regrets that “he has fallen heir to his family’s fatal weakness.”

  What fatal weakness? “Fevered accusations” and “dreadful dislocation of nature” conceal the specifics. But 1886 brings the “horrid” news that Mrs. Charles Dehmer, née Clara Eddington, has been widowed, the Dehmers’ little boy, Charles Jr., left fatherless. The Dehmers had been in residence on Louisburg Square just two years when Mr. Dehmer died of fatal injuries in a pedestrian accident on Beacon Street. The accident involved a carriage horse driven by—“O cruelest of Fate’s twists”—Mr. Wight’s man, Boyle.

  I see the words “crushed” and “skull,” and suddenly, the “Gentle Bostonians” are as Gothic as the Marlborough house.

  Here’s how I read the story. First, imagine Wight brooding in his brand-new Medieval house while Clara honeymoons with Dehmer. Imagine this Boston gentleman trying his best not to conjure the newlyweds’ boudoir scenes. Imagine him fighting depression and fury while Clara and Dehmer travel, for weren’t wedding trips back then months long—steamship and rail journeys to distant resorts and watering holes? Imagine his reaction on learning of the birth of the Dehmers’ son, Charles.

  All the while, picture the bereft Wight in Boston faithfully attending board meetings and Monday Club dinners but succumbing to his family’s “fatal weakness.” Did Wight direct his man Boyle to kill Dehmer? Was he jealous and enraged enough to become homicidal? Not that he’d act in the open, of course. A gentleman of Wight’s standing in the “Back Bay Breed” would not so crudely make his hired man a hit man.

  But if hints were dropped… Suppose Boyle took his cue from a master whose every breath the servant could anticipate and must obey without question? After the fact, Boyle would be absolved of responsibility, “consoled” and “forgiven.” Accidents will happen, horses startle, and pedestrians misjudge distance curb-to-curb. The less said the better.

  I plod on, the task now so grim. My appetite’s gone, and it’s somehow par for the course to come upon an abrupt reference to “Mr. Edmund Wight’s sudden and untimely death” in 1888.

  “Oh—”

  “You okay?” The Car and Driver guy is now into Road & Track. “I’m fine. Something upsetting in this book.” I lift it to show the front.

  “The Gentle Bostonians?”

  “They’re not. I mean, they weren’t gentle.”

  He half smiles and shifts his chair away.

  I sink into Fannie’s account of Edmund Wight’s funeral at Mount Auburn Cemetery on March 20, 1888, complete with references to “the calamitous season, so vexatious in spirit to all, as if Nature herself would humble the proud at heart.” What killed him? The “grippe” and “a weakening attack of bronchitis” are mentioned. I’d vote for remorse and guilt. At the funeral, “all were inconsolable,” and Mrs. Dehmer, “achingly lovely in mourning silks and jet,” was said to be “thrice near fainting. The servants, too, as if their own kin were struck down.”

  Including Boyle?

  Fannie does not say. Page after page, I find no more aftershocks. There’s one mention of “the star-crossed Marlborough house,” but mainly, the charmed lives resume, the symphony concerts, Sunday sermons, candlelit Christmas trees, seasonal travel to lakes and shore. It’s as though the passions and deaths are but ripples in time. They subside. Nothing rocks the Back Bay boat.

  But why, well over a century later, does every new owner leave the Marlborough house in short order? What drives them out? Why the freezing drafts and night noises? Is it the ghost of Edmund Wight?

  What to tell Tania? A tale of the loyal Irish servant, Boyle, whose spirit mourns Mr. Wight, himself a man devoted to all things French. The household noises are not to be taken as signs of anger, but as catastrophic sadness. Not rage, not conspiracy to commit murder. Sadness, in fact, could be new and novel enough to hold Tania while I try to learn whether the Marlborough house is specially “star-crossed” in this twenty-first century. Assuming “star-crossed” is the apt term for a house purchased with money traceable to the Eldridge Street fire in which the bodies of homeless squatters were found. All of which makes it a probable criminal act of arson and murder. The guilty could be at large while Henry Faiser serves hard time for a murder of which he may well be innocent.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The fashion show at the Newton Home and Garden Alliance looms this Friday like a huge nuisance. My library book report is written up, a piece of hackwork to appease Tania. Meanwhile, a new “Ticked Off” deadline nears, Nicole is edgy, and I’m slated to spend extra hours at StyleSmart pressing suits and stuffing tissue paper into shoulders and sleeves and zippering garment bags.

  Devaney had called to report that Alan Tegier had been strangled, probably with a coated wire. On Faiser, he was silent. I need to know whether he has got hold of additional stored evidence from Peter Wald’s murder, specifically the gun that killed him. These days, however, it’s touchy between Devaney and me, sort of “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

  Meg and I meet late this morning, Tuesday, in a Tremont café for coffee and a swap. A silent TV on a back wall shows the city’s chief of police being interviewed, the closed-captioning saying extra personnel have been assigned to the Dempsey case and that the public is invited to phone in leads on a hotline. A sure sign the case is stalled and that Devaney is more preoccupied than ever.

  Meg scans my Marlborough Street “psychic” docudrama about Boyle and Edmund Wight while I finger the Eldridge Place II brochure, an ebony calfskin folio with thick cream papers, lavish margins, and engraved script seductively announcing the latest in elegant living.

  “This is perfect, Reggie—the devoted Irish manservant who mourns his gentleman.”

  “Glad you approve.” I glance out the window, where Biscuit is tied to a parking meter and licks every stranger’s proffered hand. Back to Eldridge II with its Palladian design, parquetry flooring, gallery walls, clerestory fenestration, master thermal mineral spas, private elevators, valet garaging, and on and on. Worthy of Louis XIV, the cursive sweep says that Eldridge Place II is developed by the Bevington Partners Group.

  “I love the walking stick and Leghorn hat,” Meg declares. “Good.” But at the moment, I’m in the grip of a utopian fantasyland. “All the amenities,” I say aloud. Imagine a waltz on that parquetry flooring, beautifully finished, with nary a dust fuzz rolling like a tumbleweed over the barren plain of sloping floorboards. And no tenant complaint about a dripping faucet.

  Meg folds the pages of my ghostly sad melodrama and tucks them into her bag. “This will go to Tania today. And, Reggie, if you’re really serious about a move to a deluxe high-rise, Eldridge II is a good bet. Trust me, by the time the foundation is dug, most units will be sold. Barlow Square is a good location, so your condo ought to fetch a nice price.”

  “Probably still too pricey for me.” But my voice lacks conviction, and I pause a split second too long.

  Meg mistakes this for encouragement. “I printed these from the Bevington Partners’ Web site, the usual developer stuff about experience and innovation. They underwrite and execute development opportunities. Here you go.”

  She hands me the sheets. Guilt dampens my palms. Meg Givens thinks I’m really house-hunting. I try to stall her. “But th
ey haven’t even broken ground. Eighteen months for such major construction? Doubtful.”

  “They’re fast. Bevington’s subcontractors have sweet incentives and stupendous penalty clauses. Carrots and sticks, Reggie. We all marveled when Eldridge Place rose like the Empire State Building, one floor per week. Of course, the fire was a lucky break.”

  “The Eldridge fire?”

  “Horrible to say this, but that fire saved them demolition and hauling. It probably cut red tape too. Zoning fights are a moot point when whole blocks lie in ashes.”

  I swirl my coffee. “Meg, let me ask you, were there rumors about that property?”

  “Nothing I ever heard. But, Reggie, those were slum blocks at the time. We did no business there. Eldridge Place transformed the area.”

  “Slum blocks have slumlords.”

  Now Meg’s eyes narrow, and the expression on her heart-shaped face shifts from piquant to shrewd to suspicious. She says, “You’re not really considering a move, are you? You’re not house-hunting.”

  For decency’s sake, I have to say, “Not exactly.”

  “So that pink love nest that Stu showed so late at night—that was wasting Stu’s time?” Her eyes flicker with anger and bewilderment. “And mine?”

  Guilt settles in like black molasses. My gaze drops. “Meg, I owe you an apology on this. I’m acting in connection with a psychic message. No, it’s not Marlborough, and I can’t give you specifics, except you do know that people died in the Eldridge fire?”

  “They were accident victims, Reggie, hoboes or druggies. Your aunt had her psychic projects, but she never used people.”

  “WWJD—What Would Jo Do?”

  Meg rises with a chilly smile. “I have a showing at one. I’m disappointed, Reggie. People make Realtor jokes, but we work hard and have our pride. This is breach of faith.”

  Meg exits. The coffee’s cold, and maybe I’ve wrecked a friendship in the making. One thing I know: guilt can be a useless emotion, an apology can fall on deaf ears, and my sainted aunt is an impossible act to follow.