by Suzanne Weyn
Blythe excitedly told her what had happened. As she spoke, Mother slowly grew so pale that she could have been a spirit herself. “Come inside, Mimi,” Mother said firmly, bending to pull my sister up. “There’s no need to see this woman. Stay home until she’s gone.”
“But Madam Anushka said for her to come,” Blythe protested. “What should I tell her?”
“Tell her your sister went to Niagara Falls on a sightseeing trip,” Mother replied with an agitated wave of her hand. “Tell her she’ll be gone for the rest of the month.”
Mimi resisted my mother’s pulls on her arm. “Mother, what is going on?” she demanded.
“It’s nothing you need to know,” Mother insisted. “Nothing at all. Come inside. You, too, Jane. Inside right now and go straight to your room. Do not come out until I say you may. And Blythe, gather Amelie and Emma, then return here as soon as you give the message to Madam Anushka.”
“Why are we being punished?” Blythe demanded. “It’s not fair.”
“I have my reasons.”
Mother marched us inside. We were full of questions, but she silenced us by turning away and pointing to the stairs. We obediently ascended, though in minutes we had crawled out our window and were sitting side by side on the back porch roof outside the bedroom we shared.
“I have to know,” Mimi said, restless.
“Mother is dead set against it,” I reminded her as I wrapped my arms around my knees.
“Why should she be?” Mimi demanded.
I furrowed my brow thoughtfully. “I wonder why this stranger wants to see you so badly.”
“Why does Mother not want her to see me so badly?”
Emma came out onto the roof with Amelie behind her. “There you are,” said Emma, seating herself beside Mimi. At fourteen, the twins were willowy and long limbed with straight, blond brown hair that would never hold a curl no matter how long they wrapped it in rags or wound it around hot curling tongs. Their greatest beauty was their four identical, limpid, violet blue eyes, surrounded by incredibly long, dark lashes.
After some time, Blythe climbed out to join us. “Mother is arguing with Madam Anushka,” she reported. “She and her clients are in front now with Mother.”
That was it. We had to know what this was about. One by one, the five of us descended the rose trellis that was attached from the ground to the porch roof, fairly well demolishing Mother’s yellow roses, and scurried along the side of the house to peer around the corner and try to see what was happening.
“Eef it is true, she has de right to know,” Madam Anushka was insisting in her thick Russian accent.
The black woman was dressed elegantly in a yellow dress with black lace trim. She wore a quite spectacular matching hat above a dark, attractive face. Her husband seemed somewhat older than her. He, too, was dressed well in a summer suit.
The woman spoke with a melodious French accent. “I would only like to see the girl for the briefest moment,” she pleaded.
“I have told you, she is gone.” Mother held fast to her lie.
Mimi shocked us all by stepping forward from our hiding spot. Mother placed her hand on her cheek and hung her head, beaten.
The moment Mimi stood beside the woman in the yellow dress, I drew in a sharp gasp of surprise. Except for the difference in the color of their skin, Mimi was a younger version of this woman. They shared the same luxuriant mane of black hair; they were very close in height and of a similar slim build; the large, black eyes were exactly the same.
“Marguerite?” the woman asked, calling Mimi by her given name.
Mimi nodded cautiously.
The woman turned to her husband and spoke excitedly in French. Then she turned back to Mimi. “Marguerite, you do not know me because I have not seen you since you were an infant.”
“You know me?” Mimi asked.
The woman nodded. “When I saw you on the street, I thought I had seen the ghost of my sister.” She laughed in an embarrassed way. “I thought you were so pale because you were dead. But by the time I reached Madam Anushka’s, I had done the mathematics and figured it out. I came here to find my sister’s spirit, and her spirit led me to you. I am your aunt Yvonne. Your mother was my sister.”
Mimi’s head snapped around to find Mother. We all looked at her as she stood with tears overbrimming her eyes.
“It’s true,” she whispered.
Chapter 8
“Here’s the truth,” Mother said about an hour later. She and Mimi were seated in the front parlor, side by side on the window seat. Both of them had eyes puffed and red from crying.
Emma, Amelie, Blythe, and I hovered outside the room, crushed together behind the narrow right-hand wall of the arched entry, holding our breath for fear of being discovered. We all felt guilty about listening in on their private talk, but we had to know what they were saying. Our entire reality had been rocked. Mimi had a different mother? It just didn’t seem possible.
“Your father had a first wife whom he married while doing missionary work on the island of Haiti in the Caribbean. The wife was named Louise, and she was a black Haitian. She died of malaria when you were an infant. Father returned to America with you.”
My sisters and I looked at each other, our eyes wide with amazement. Father had a first wife? A black wife?
“You were less than a year old when I married your father. I had known and loved him ever since I was a girl, so the decision was easy for me. You were such a sweet and lovely baby that it was easy to love you as my own, as well,” Mother went on. “And you are my own daughter in every way but biology.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Mimi asked quietly.
“We thought it would be better if you grew up thinking of me as your mother. Your complexion was so fair that it was possible that you were mine by birth.”
“Does anyone else know?”
Mother shook her head. “My parents knew before they passed. Grandmother Taylor never approved of the marriage, so Father didn’t tell her about you until after he and I were married and living in Massachusetts.”
“He was ashamed of me,” Mimi deduced sadly.
“He didn’t want her to know that…” Here Mother’s voice trailed off as though she wasn’t sure how to express what she wanted to say.
“That I’m black,” Mimi supplied.
“Half black.”
From behind, Blythe tugged on my sleeve. “How can she be black when she looks white?” she whispered.
“Shhh,” I replied sharply.
I’d tried to be quiet, but both Mother and Mimi looked in our direction. “Show yourselves, ladies,” Mother commanded.
Sheepishly, we emerged from our hiding place. Then, seized by an overwhelming rush of love for my older sister, I dashed forward and threw my arms around her. Emma, Amelie, and Blythe followed my lead.
“Nothing has changed,” I gushed. “Nothing at all!”
We clung together there, rocking, a pile of teary-eyed females, consumed with sisterly love for one another, desperate to assure Mimi that it didn’t matter if she was a half sister. Our love for her was whole, complete, and unconditional.
After several minutes of this, we loosened our grips and settled into our own seats, apart yet still sitting close together. “It can be our secret,” Blythe suggested. “No one need ever know.”
An expression of indignation swept across Mimi’s face. “Why should it be kept secret?”
“I wouldn’t tell anyone I was black if I didn’t have to,” Blythe replied. “No one would ever know unless you told them.”
“It might make your life harder if people knew,” I said, thinking only of Mimi’s happiness. “You know how things are in this country.”
“Then maybe I shouldn’t live in this country,” Mimi countered, a note of anger creeping into her voice.
“Not live in America!” Emma said with a gasp. “Where else would you live? How would you even get there? How would we see you?” Amelie, too, appeared stricken
by the very idea.
“I don’t know yet,” Mimi admitted.
It was the word yet that struck fear in us. When Mimi set her mind to something, she made it happen. She might not have our mother’s blood in her veins, but she had spent her life observing the mistress of self-actualizing determination, and she’d learned well.
Mother’s eyes glistened as she stood. “Jane’s right, Mimi,” she said. “Nothing has changed.”
Mimi nodded in agreement but I saw something in her eyes—a confusion, a distance—that had changed already.
The rest of that season was a summer of reading. My involvement with Sherlock Holmes grew ever deeper as I finished The Hound of the Baskervilles, devouring a year’s worth of Strand back issues in just weeks. Then I moved on to “The Adventure of the Empty House,” “The Adventure of the Norwood Builder,” and “The Adventure of the Dancing Men.” I gleaned from my reading, and also from talking to other people in town, that the character of Holmes had been killed off back in 1893, but the demand for the sharp-witted detective was so great that he had to be revived. Given my circumstances in Spirit Vale, where the dead routinely returned, this did not strike me as odd.
Emma and Amelie were also engrossed in reading. They would sit side by side and read The Way of an Eagle, a new romance by Ethel M. Dell. Blythe was sobbing her way contentedly through Anne of Avonlea, the sequel to her favorite book, Anne of Green Gables.
For her part, Mother had discovered a treasure trove of back issues in the library, as well. Borderland was a quarterly newsletter that had been published in Britain by the famous journalist W. T. Stead. He had made his reputation as a straight-ahead reporter but had come to believe in contact with the spirit world. He was also a psychic who made predictions about the future.
In Borderland, W. T. Stead spoke about his spirit guide, a young woman named Julia. Julia had warned Stead to be wary of ice, so he rarely went out in winter, fearing that he would slip and die by hitting his head.
By the time Mother had read every single issue of Borderland, she’d decided Stead had misunderstood Julia. The threat, she was sure from reading Julia’s words, was that Stead might freeze to death, not that he would slip. She sent him a lengthy letter stating why she felt that way, and was thrown into a state of near-delirious joy when she received a response. From that moment on, Mother adored W. T. Stead as much as she revered the Fox sisters.
After the Haitian couple left, Mimi no longer wanted to work for Aunty Lily at the hotel. “It’s too much like being a maid” was her only explanation, but it wasn’t hard to tell what was on Mimi’s mind from her reading list. She put her head into Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave and hardly took it out all through July. By the end of August she was onto the brand-new work by Booker T. Washington, My Larger Education. Then she went to a collection of essays that had been published in 1903 called The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois. One hot early September afternoon, while we were both reading on the porch, she lifted her head to tell me, “Du Bois says, ‘The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line.’”
“But it’s not a problem here,” I pointed out. Spirit Vale had been an active abolitionist town just as it was now full of sympathy for the women’s movement. Frederick Douglass had even visited seventeen years earlier in 1894 with his second wife, a radical white feminist named Eva Pitts. They both spoke at the town center, and their speeches had been met with the warmest applause. It was a fact of which the town was very proud.
“It’s fine that this town isn’t racist, but I won’t be staying here forever,” Mimi stated with calm firmness.
“Well, me, neither,” I agreed uncertainly. I was determined to go at the first chance, but where to or how I was going to accomplish this was still a mystery. Plus, I wasn’t really ready to wrench myself away from my mother and sisters, or even from the town itself, truth be told. Weird though it was, it was still the only home I knew.
“That reminds me,” Mimi said as she took a torn-out square of a newspaper from the back of The Souls of Black Folk. “This morning I found this item in a paper one of Mother’s clients left on the porch. You weren’t around, so I tore it out and stuck it in my book. I can’t believe I nearly forgot to give it to you.”
I read over the advertisement she handed to me. It was a notice of a journalism contest sponsored by the Sun. The winner would receive five hundred dollars and an internship at the Sun, complete with board “at the home of a family of impeccable repute.”
Mimi and I looked at each other, bursting with possibilities. “But Mother would never let me go, even if I did win,” I pointed out.
“I’d go with you,” Mimi said.
“You would?”
She nodded vigorously. “Think of what fun we’d have on our own in New York City. And there are all sorts of different people in the city: black, white, people of all shades. I could discover how I want to deal with this new news about my…heritage. Not telling anyone just seems so…wrong. It’s deceitful. Inauthentic.”
“What could you do differently in the city?” I asked.
“In a city like New York, I could figure things out. I could tell people who I really am, maybe get to know other black people.”
“I suppose,” I conceded. I didn’t really understand why she couldn’t go on just as she was, but I wasn’t in her shoes and couldn’t feel it as she did.
“You’re a great writer, Jane, and you say you want to write for a newspaper someday. You have to enter this contest. I know you could win it,” Mimi insisted. “I don’t want either of us to stay in this town forever.”
Her confidence was contagious but I still wasn’t sure.
Did I have the nerve to try for this? Was I really good enough?
“I’ve been wanting to write an article about Tesla,” I admitted to Mimi. “But I’d need to interview him, and I have no idea where to find him. He’s not on Houston Street anymore, and I read that he had a Fifth Avenue lab but it also burned down. His project on Long Island is closed.”
Mimi’s eyes lit with excitement. “I can’t believe this! I know where he is. It was meant to be!”
“How do you know?”
Mimi got to her feet. The Sun was still on the porch table, held from blowing off by a rock. She retrieved it and paged through until she found the article she sought in the society page. She handed it to me with a triumphant smile.
The photo showed Tesla inside eating alone at a round table in a gorgeous dining room complete with high windows and enormous, lavish bouquets of shining porcelain flowers. The mention of Tesla in the gossipy article was very short, and I scanned it quickly.
September, 1911. Scientist and inventor Nikola Tesla was spotted looking dapper but dining solo at the world’s tallest hotel, the swanky Waldorf-Astoria on 34th Street in New York City today. The creator of the Tesla coil and famed rival of Thomas Edison has lived at the Waldorf-Astoria for some years now. It’s rumored that despite several recent crushing financial setbacks, the eccentric genius is able to afford such posh digs due to his long-standing friendship with his occasional financial backer, the hotel’s co-owner and the world’s richest man, John Jacob Astor. The two men met back in 1893 at the Chicago World’s Fair and have been fast friends ever since.
I gazed at Mimi blankly. What good was this information when he was hundreds of miles away? “I couldn’t even get a letter to him in time,” I pointed out.
“This town is so backward we don’t even have phone service yet,” she said.
“Even if we called him at the hotel from Buffalo, what would we say?”
“You’re right—I’m sure he would never remember us. That’s why we have to go there to talk to him as he leaves the hotel or has a meal in the dining room,” she said, as if it should have been obvious.
“Go there?” Had she lost her mind?
She hooked her arm through mine conspiratorially. “We have to leave immediately. I have some mo
ney saved from working at the Spirit. Do you have any?”
“Yes, but Mother will never let us go off to New York City on our own,” I reminded her.
“I know. That’s why we’re not going to tell her.”
Chapter 9
Seventeen hours later, Mimi and I were in the palatial lobby of the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York City.
We had taken a ride to Buffalo with Aunty Lily in her new automobile, a crank model of which she was very proud. Mimi misled her to think we were going with Mother’s blessing. Mother was in the midst of another heartfelt letter to W. T. Stead and paid no notice of anything else when she was involved in this correspondence. We wrote her a hasty note that we left on the front porch table, assuring her we’d be fine.
We’d slept for the whole trip down, so we weren’t feeling too tired when we arrived. Even if we had stayed awake the entire time, we were so high-strung with excitement we’d have barely noticed the fatigue.
We encamped on two of the velvet-upholstered chairs in the Waldorf-Astoria’s lobby. We had decided that Tesla had to come down at some point to eat; we would connect with him when he did.
I didn’t exactly mind waiting there, fascinated as I was by this grand hotel. The lobby couches and square chairs were exquisitely rich and vibrant in color, their walnut-wood arms and backs gleaming with high polish set off by their gold details. The elaborate wooden moldings on the ceiling were illuminated by the glowing white globes of chandeliers set in a long row. A mixture of cinnamon and rose petal fragrances infused every inch of the lobby.
An hour passed quickly as Mimi and I goggled at the parade of high-fashion guests who passed by, dressed in the latest styles. Not far off, the desk manager started stealing suspicious glances in our direction. My stomach growled. We’d eaten cheese sandwiches on the train, but it was getting close to lunchtime. “I don’t think they’d let us eat here, but maybe I could sneak a snack in,” Mimi proposed. “You watch for Tesla. I’ll go see what I can find.”
I was once again observing the dazzlingly rich saunter through and marking each face to make sure Tesla didn’t slip past unnoticed when a young man rushed by. I guessed him to be in his late teens, maybe early twenties. He caught my attention because…well, to be absolutely honest, it was because he was so good-looking. He had short, sort of tousled, light brown hair and a slim, athletic build. His pants were gray and his summer jacket was light blue. Although he was neat, his attire did not bespeak the kind of wealth that typified the place.