by Suzanne Weyn
It was a persuasive speech, and she seemed sincere when she told it to every one of her clients. But when I showed her the articles I was pulling out of the papers about Tesla, she was fairly uninterested. “That’s nice, Jane. Interesting, I suppose, though I don’t quite understand it,” she would say, and then go about her business without further comment.
When I was eight, I found an article in which Tesla claimed he had invented a wireless telephone. Though we had no telephones yet in Spirit Vale, the landscape of the outside world was more and more strung with ugly telephone wire, festooned from pole to pole along the main roads. When I told Mother, she was attentive and took the article from me.
By the next day she had acquired a telephone receiver. “I’m incorporating it into my…” I was sure she was about to say into my act. “…into my spirit work. It will be a fine tool for contacting the Beyond.”
Through the years, just when I decided that Mother was a complete fake, she would do something so uncanny that I was sure she had the gift. When a letter came from Gertrude Tredwell telling Mother that her sister Julia Tredwell had passed on, as Mother had predicted, Mother sighed. “The gift feels more like a curse sometimes,” she commented.
One time I listened at the door and heard a séance in which a woman and her husband sought to speak to a wealthy aunt who had passed on. There was trouble over her will that they wanted cleared up. The aunt failed to show herself, but the woman’s deceased first husband came by to reveal that the woman had once been a snake charmer in a carnival act.
My hand flew to my mouth to stifle the rising giggle this delicious and unexpected revelation inspired. There was a drawn-out pause, and I could easily imagine the poor husband gaping at his wife in stunned horror. “But, Maybelle, you told me you’d been living in a convent up until we met!” he cried at last.
I sputtered hard into my hand, clutching my mouth to stifle my laughter, desperate not to reveal that I was there eavesdropping.
Then Maybelle, the wife, broke down and admitted the truth when the spirit—speaking through Mother—began to recall details of their carnival life together. I jumped away from the door as Maybelle abruptly hurried her living husband out before her chatty spirit ex could reveal too much more.
“How did you know all that?” I asked Mother after they had left.
Mother simply stared at me, perplexed by the question. “I didn’t know it. The spirit of her late husband told me.”
Despite my confusion about the validity of its main industry, in those days Spirit Vale was a child’s dream. For one thing, folks swarmed to the town—often as a stop on their trips to see Niagara Falls, only an hour away—seeking consultations with their loved ones who had passed on and advice from spirit guides.
One time, when I was ten, I sat on the porch beside Mother as she rocked in a rocker. “Can you contact our father?” I asked.
She shook her head. “No. I’ve tried. I believe it means he’s moved on. It’s what a spirit should do. Only restless spirits with unfinished business stay behind.”
“Didn’t he want to stay with us?” I wanted to know. This was more a matter of curiosity than heartfelt longing on my part.
Mother looked down at me and smiled a little sadly. “Your father could move to the Beyond because he knew we’d be fine. You’re fine, aren’t you, Jane?”
“I suppose so,” I replied after a moment’s thought.
“You don’t sound certain,” she noted.
I shrugged. “It might be nice to live in a place where the dead stay dead and don’t speak.”
“Don’t call them dead,” she corrected me.
“Sorry. I meant those who have passed over.”
“Better.”
“I’d like to go to school, I think,” I mentioned.
“You’d be bored in school. I’ve taught the five of you to read, write, and do figures better than you’d have learned in school.” But it wasn’t the learning that appealed to me. It was the sheer ordinariness of the situation. I was slowly developing a burning desire to be normal.
“Don’t you want to get married again?” I inquired slyly, with a sidelong glance to gauge Mother’s reaction to this question.
“No, Jane, I don’t,” she said. “I’m happy with no husband to give me orders. It’s bad enough that as a woman I can’t vote. At least not being married gives me some autonomy. I am my own woman, at last.”
From June to late August every year, the town boomed with visitors and there were not enough rooms to accommodate them. Even the huge Spirit Hotel was filled to capacity. Residents of Spirit Vale pitched tents for their children in order to rent their rooms out to the tourists.
Imagine, if you can, children running freely through the summer woods in night shirts, catching fireflies in jars, not chaperoned by any adult at all, while the streets were illuminated in a carnival atmosphere of people walking from home to home, shop to shop, sampling the various mystical services offered.
Tarot and palm readings were given on the porches. In some shops, spirit photos could be purchased whereby a person had his or her picture taken with a “special” camera. More times than not—in fact, almost always—a hazy, white blur of a spirit figure would be captured by the lens as it hovered around the photographic subject.
Princess Running Deer’s husband, Wild Elk, owned one of these studios. Mimi and I ran errands for him one summer, which gave us access to the darkroom where he processed his photos. One day Mimi found his collection of spirit negatives, pictures of other people that could be superimposed on a photo to make it appear that spirits hovered in the air around the person being photographed. Some kind of wiping technique had been used to blur the distinctive features of the people in the spirit negatives so that they might be almost anyone.
In the square outside town hall, free readings would be given by several mediums at once. We would hover at the fringes of the crowd, unabashed by being dressed only in nightclothes, hugging our blinking jars with care, watching the mediums work their trade. “I’m getting a J.R.—either initials or a junior. I can’t be sure. Does this make sense to anyone? Junior or J.R. It’s a male.”
Invariably someone would respond, something like, “My son was John Robert Junior!”
“He was young when he died!”
“Yes! Yes!”
On occasions when we watched scenes such as that, Mimi would roll her eyes—something I was noticing her do with increasing frequency the older we grew—and make a droll comment, such as, “No kidding. Anyone could have figured that out. Look how young the mother is.”
That we were flitting about in the shadows like so many fairy spirits on these nights was not lost to several enterprising mediums. We were often bribed with promises of fresh-made ice cream or fried dough that was served from carts on the street for performing simple services.
One night several of us—Mimi, Amelie, Emma, me, and a number of other local children—were assigned to stand at a window and stare at the black shade covering it. We had been instructed to uncap our jars of fireflies the moment the shade went up. When we did this—releasing a rising cloud of shimmering fireflies in front of the window—shrieks erupted from the room within. Following orders, we then sped off into the woods behind, like so many escaping ghosts.
This was how I grew up.
Chapter 7
By the summer of 1911 we had moved into a larger home, a white Victorian in the center of town with a large front yard separated from the road by a picket fence. Like the others, it had a wide porch and its trim was a riot of elaborate scrollwork. It was a far cry from the small cottage we had started out in.
Mother no longer worked for Aunty Lily at the hotel because her medium business was so good, but Mimi and I had started to work there as helpers, doing whatever Aunty Lily needed. We were at the hotel the night it became the first building in Spirit Vale to be wired for electricity. After months of renovation, gas jets were capped and electric wiring was installed.
> “In 1893, Tesla demonstrated wireless electricity at the Chicago World’s Fair. Why aren’t they using that?” I asked Mimi as we stood with Emma and Amelie, looking at the hideous wires defacing our beautiful town.
“I don’t know,” Mimi replied. Suddenly, she clasped her hand over her mouth, and her eyes went wide.
She was looking at Amelie, whose hair had become electrified and stood practically on end, thousands of small wisps dancing around her face. It made her laugh.
“Amelie, you look so funny!” Emma cried as she hugged her. Instantly, Emma’s hair began to dance around her head, as well.
Mimi and I tried touching them but nothing happened. “Why didn’t our hair stand up like that?” I asked Mimi.
She shook her head, mystified. “Those two are on a wavelength all their own” was the only explanation she could offer.
Nearly everyone in town came out to see the spectacular sight of the Spirit Hotel glowing like a giant firefly in the night.
I stood there with the others and wondered at the magic of electricity. If light could travel through wires, perhaps a spirit really could find a way to move along secret paths, as well.
An article I showed Mother one day talked about how Tesla felt that disease could be cured by vibration. He claimed that if one could calculate the correct vibration of a virus, one could match it and smash the vibration in the same way he had caused the buildings to crumble years before. This sparked Mother’s interest more than the other articles.
The next thing I knew, VIBRATIONAL READER AND HEALER had been added to her list of talents on our front sign. Her “vibrational readings” became extremely popular.
Her readings were always preceded by the story of how she and her girls had been caught in the freakish earthquake of 1898 and met the great Tesla. She embellished on how the brilliant scientist Tesla had imparted to her the secret of harnessing the earth’s vibratory patterns, adding that Tesla had studied under Swami Vivekananda. She had found a picture of the swami in a magazine, framed it, and put it in our parlor beside the scientific manuals I never saw her open. I half expected her to autograph it: To my good friend, Maude, Love, Swami V. But she didn’t.
The vibrational reading consisted of Mother tracing an outline of her client at about a hand’s length from his or her body. From this she would make all sorts of predictions—most of them medical—based on the vibrations she was detecting. I couldn’t make any sense of it, but these readings became all the rage, and customers lined up in our front yard, especially during the summer months.
She was, one might say, the queen bee, in a town occupied predominantly by mostly single women. Feminist feeling was strong and it probably added to the lack of male presence. There were a few men who were practicing psychics, most of them elderly. And in terms of young men my own age—I was due to be sixteen on April fifteenth of that year—there were a few, but nobody who interested me romantically.
At eighteen, Mimi was easily the most beautiful female in Spirit Vale, with her dark, luxuriant hair piled high on her head and her dresses cinched to accentuate her tiny waist. I was still the plain brown sparrow next to her glossy raven beauty. I’d taken to wearing my shoulder-length brown hair up in a bun atop my head, as she did, but I could never have matched her dramatic, abundant locks. Just the same, I didn’t mind, content to bask in the shadow of her glory.
Men who came in with the summer crowd always looked twice when they saw her walking down the street. She claimed to pay no attention to them, but more than once I’d caught her looking back quickly before averting her eyes modestly. I couldn’t blame her. Living in Spirit Vale was like being in a convent. Mimi, I knew, couldn’t wait to leave.
I had kept up my interest in Tesla by scouring the newspapers in the dusty, small, dimly lit Spirit Vale library. I learned that after we had seen him in New York, he had moved to Colorado Springs and built a huge radio tower. He claimed that the tower had received signals he thought must be from extraterrestrial beings living on Mars or Venus. I did not find this hard to believe; in Spirit Vale, people regularly claimed to get signals from locales much farther than outer space. He had invented something called a Teslascope, meant to aid in communicating with other planets.
In a yellowing issue dated 1900, I read that he had left Colorado Springs—the article alluded to a suspicious fire in his lab—and that his equipment had all been sold because he was deeply in debt. Then, in an issue from later in 1900, I learned that he had built another huge transmission tower on Long Island, New York, in a town called Shoreham. He had found a wealthy banker and lawyer named James S. Warden to back him this time; the tower was thus called Wardenclyffe Tower. Many other wealthy financiers were funding the project, as well. I cheered silently for my hero, the father figure who had saved me from the shaking ground. He hadn’t been down for long.
In 1905 he invented something called the Tesla coil and then the Tesla turbine, but as I continued on in my reading, I saw that by the end of 1905, his tower had been shut down because his backers had lost faith in it. By 1908 the property had been foreclosed by the bank.
All these articles, the favorable and the disappointing, I clipped and kept in a scrapbook—to what purpose, I wasn’t sure. I think that secretly I harbored a fantasy of one day meeting the great man again and showing him how I’d followed his career. I also, on a more practical note, was beginning to think I might like to become a journalist someday and thought, perhaps, Tesla could be my first subject.
It was in that summer that I also discovered a tall, dusty stack of a British magazine, the Strand. The Spirit Vale library’s collection went back to 1901. While perusing it, fascinated by the comical fashions of the decade just passed, I came across the first installment of a detective story called The Hound of the Baskervilles.
I couldn’t stop staring at the color drawing on the cover of the magazine. The main part of it showed a scene from the story. But in the right-hand corner, in a red, outlined circle, was a close-up drawing of the story’s main character, Sherlock Holmes. He was Tesla—I mean, he looked just exactly like him, with sharp features and piercing eyes. I could hardly believe it!
Settling down to read, I soon discovered that the story inside did not disappoint. It featured a detective of supreme logic who noticed every thing and worked out his solutions with a cool attention to detail untainted by emotion or superstition. His name was Sherlock Holmes.
I couldn’t get enough of Sherlock Holmes. He was erudite and polite, brave, and even witty at times. And so smart! A genius! I knew that the real genius, of course, was the author, Arthur Conan Doyle, but it was not him I mooned over—it was the fictional character.
One hot afternoon in 1911, I was scanning the papers while Mother was inside trying to contact a spirit for a husband and wife client when a Haitian couple came to Spirit Vale. I was sprawled out, my legs dangling from the end of the front porch swing, when Mimi approached me at a fast clip.
I’d been distracted from my Tesla search by an article about the largest cruise ship ever built. It had been constructed in Ireland by the British White Star Line. It was to be four city blocks long, built for luxury, and remarkably unsinkable. I was so engrossed in imagining it that I didn’t notice my older sister until she was right in front of me.
Glancing up, I saw instantly that she was in a state of agitation. “What’s wrong?” I asked, laying my newspaper aside.
She plunked down on the front steps. “Oh, it was just so strange. I had to get away,” she cried.
We had become so accustomed to the strange that for Mimi to find anything this unsettlingly out of the ordinary garnered my instant attention. I came down onto the step beside her. “What’s strange?”
She told me that a couple had arrived that morning. They were dark-skinned Africans of about middle age and appeared to be husband and wife. “They were in a motorcar.”
A motorcar! Although I knew from the newspapers and magazines that automobiles had been around for
a few years, they were just starting to show up in Spirit Vale and it was still a cause for excitement. “Did you see it?” I asked, eager for every detail.
“Yes, but that wasn’t the strange part,” she replied.
The couple had parked their Model T Ford and were headed for a reading with Madam Anushka, a medium from Russia who was said to have studied magic with Rasputin himself. “They had just gotten out and I stopped, curious to see the motorcar,” Mimi said. “The woman looked over her shoulder and noticed me. She suddenly turned around and stared right at me as though I had terrified her. She clutched her husband’s arm as though she was about to faint.”
In my mind I was ticking off the details in an effort to be like Sherlock Holmes. Black African couple. They have a motorcar. Locks my sister in a piercing stare. “What happened next?” I asked.
“She kept staring at me and staring at me as though she knew me,” Mimi recalled. “I just rushed away. I can’t tell you how she unnerved me.”
“Who unnerved you?” Twelve-year-old Blythe came up the path wearing a pretty, white ruffled frock. Her blond ringlets were tied back in a pink satin ribbon. Even at twelve, Blythe believed that appearances counted, and she was determined to become someone of note.
Mimi once again relayed what she had just told me. “Oh,” Blythe said, “I know who you mean. She was asking Madam Anushka about you. They came out on Madam Anushka’s porch as I was going by. Madam asked me to come get you.”
Mimi’s hands crossed her chest in alarmed surprise. “Me?”
Just then Mother appeared on the porch with her clients. “Thank you again, Mrs. Oneida Taylor,” the woman gushed, red-eyed from crying. “Your words have been such a comfort.”
“Pleased to have helped,” Mother said as the husband handed her a stack of cash. As her clients went down the path away from the house, Mother surveyed Blythe’s and my serious expressions and Mimi’s stricken one. “What is going on?” she asked.