I held my hand to Pearl’s cheek, and I felt her skin grow hot. As disappointed as I was, as frustrated and as foolish as I felt, I did pity her. In her despair she’d fallen some charlatan’s victim, willingly or otherwise. And I wasn’t so wise myself; I’d fallen too, after all.
The town was plagued with clairvoyants—like beetles and silverfish, these men and women infested attics and undergrounds. They kept dim, moonlit parlors on every city block. They were just as plentiful and just as cheap as the churchless preachers who bellyached on street corners, predicting damnation with gin on their breath. And along with the mystics with business sense, the ones with telephones and advertisements in the Evening Bee, were those only passing through, renting theaters and halls to bilk the believing for a nickel a head before packing their trunks and moving on to the next congregation of ninnies. Add to them the hobbyists, the amateur psychics and spiritualists, who followed instructions in a book to save them the cost of a proper séance. It was a sport and a religion, and in our grief, we begged to be deceived.
I’d heard tell that Omaha was particularly rife with mysticism due, in no small part, to Wakefield. For a time, after the death of his son, then the death of his first wife, he spent outrageous sums in hopes of hearing their voices again. He had sought spiritual guidance nightly.
“No clairvoyant,” I said. Pearl needed me to turn cold and skeptical to the whole to-do, even if she didn’t yet realize it. If I didn’t disapprove, if I played along a second more, she’d be making sense of her every dream and headache. “No, Pearl, I’m sorry.” But then I felt, in the small of my back, some pressure and pain, like the sole of someone’s boot. I arched my back and groaned. I turned around and, of course, no one was there. But in my ear, as clear as if she rested her chin on my shoulder to whisper, I heard Cecily’s voice. Stubborn, she said.
40.
ELLA WINNOWS, a psychic with a lisp, had been a shopgirl at Brandeis before opening her attic parlor. She answered the door to us, hugging an open book to her chest, her wispy red hair wired with static. You could practically hear it sizzle and snap. “You’re early,” she mumbled, a cigarette burning in the corner of her mouth. “I have to find my glasses before I can get anything going.”
“You’re wearing them,” I said.
She brought her fingers to the lenses in front of her eyes. “Dear God,” she said. She took the glasses off and held them up toward the skylight, checking for smudges. “Why can’t I see through them? I’m blinder with them than without them. Sit.”
The tabletop was covered with open books about the spirit world and the astral plane. She dropped her cigarette into her cup of coffee and slapped all the books closed, gathered them in her arms, and tossed them into the corner, into a wing chair so battered the springs stuck through. There was nothing about the room that would give a disbeliever faith. The wallpaper was torn and streaked with grime. Cobwebs gathered in the corners of picture frames. No one, alive or otherwise, had sat at this table in a while. I wrote Cecily’s name in the dust on the wooden arm of my chair.
“I wish you had come when it was pitch-dark,” she said, sitting down and placing her hands on ours atop the table. “You should have come when it was summer. It’s better to summon spirits in the summertime by the light from my insects and fungus.” She nodded toward a cabinet; on a shelf was a jar of dead fireflies, marked fireflies on a piece of tape, and a jar of dead glowworms, marked glowworms. There was a pot of withered mushrooms. “The mushrooms glow blue around the gills when they’re healthy,” she said. “I don’t know if any of this will work at all. Don’t blame me if nothing happens. You should come back in the summer.” Her hands fidgeted. “I really just read tea leaves, as a rule.”
We sat there, around the table, holding hands for several minutes. The room was cold, but our hands grew sweaty.
“My hands are hot,” Pearl whispered.
Ella shook her head. “Doesn’t mean anything,” she said. “Not necessarily.”
The wind picked up outside the window, so I tried to help things along. “There was no wind before,” I said.
“The wind comes, it goes,” she said. “I wouldn’t read anything into it.”
I heard a buzzing, like a short in a light, and I thought I saw, from the corner of my eye, the flicker of a firefly in the jar. When I turned to look, the jar was dark. And when I returned my eyes to the table, I thought I caught sight of the blue glow of the mushrooms. The table trembled. Ella didn’t seem to feel it.
“Sometimes nothing happens,” she said. “It’s not unusual for nothing to happen.”
My nostrils stung with the smell of a struck match. It gave me a headache between my eyes. Pearl’s grip tightened on my hand. Her grip grew so tight, I worried for my fingers and I wriggled my hand from hers.
“Pearl,” I said, as she straightened her spine, segment by segment, as if some heavy sob was working up from deep in her body. She leaned her head back and opened her mouth.
Pearl made no sound. She stood abruptly, and turned, the rustling of her skirt causing her chair to tip back and to spin on one leg before it tumbled to the floor. Blind as a sleepwalker, Pearl tripped forward into the wall. She ran her hands along it, as if feeling for a doorway. She followed the wall, whimpering and moonstruck.
I stood to take Pearl’s shoulders in my hands, to turn her to me. I was spooked but not by spirits. There was the threat of death in the room. There was damage. Pearl had fallen ill, and it was illness that terrified me.
She looked past me, her eyes wide. Her mouth gaped open, her chin shook. It was as if her jaw had locked. She clawed at the skin of my neck until I pulled away and she broke from my hold. She stumbled toward a barrister bookcase and she struggled with a glass door.
Ella came forward, her shoe lifted. “Hold her back,” she told me. “It’s a tricky latch.” She banged the heel against the latch until it came unstuck. Pearl again pulled away from me. She lifted the door and grabbed from the shelf a blue box, all the while whining and sniffling.
When she returned to the table, she opened the lid—it was a stationery kit. She took sheets of pale-blue paper from the box and an ink pot and a pen. She rocked back and forth as she wrote on the page.
The longer she took to finish the letter, the more the spell of the dingy room lifted and the more impatient I got. She wasn’t caught in the fits of a seizure, to my great relief. This was some dark theater, her every move deliberate, even when her shaking hands knocked the ink pot over. She was left to dip the nib into the stream of ink that flowed across the tabletop and drip-drip-dripped off the edge.
I held my hand gently at Pearl’s back. “Please stop,” I said. “Let’s quit this,” I said. She kept writing, so Ella and I waited.
When Pearl finished her letter, she shoved the paper across the table, and she would have pushed it right into the spilled ink had I not leaned forward to snatch the pages up. Pearl’s teeth chattered, as if she were out in the cold.
“Oh, Pearl, oh, Pearl, oh, Pearl,” Ella said, clutching Pearl’s shoulders, “you’re all right, dear, you’re all right. There’s nothing to worry about, nothing at all.”
Pearl held her hands to her face and fled the room. I headed off after her, but Ella grabbed my sleeve. “You haven’t paid,” she whispered. I took a coin from my pocket and flicked it with the top of my thumb to bounce across the tabletop. Ella grabbed my sleeve again. “And I gotta replace the ink pot in my stationery kit now.” I took all the change from my pocket and slapped it into her open palm, and I ran from the room and down the stairs. I reached the street just as the coach pulled away, Pearl’s dress caught in the door, a bit of fabric flapping at me like a taunt. I watched as the coach neared the end of the block. The door popped open enough for Pearl to pull her dress in, and then the coach turned a corner and was gone from sight.
As I walked to August’s, I read the letter. I read it more t
han once, circling the block, passing August’s door again and again. Though Pearl had written without posture, without her eyes on the page, she’d again captured Cecily’s handwriting, down to the slant of her b’s, and the short, squat loop of her l’s.
When I first read the first line, I laughed. I rolled my eyes. Dear Ferret, she’d written, Please don’t be too hard on poor Pearl. But by the next sentence, I was already hearing Cecily’s voice again. I guess we should have suspected her.
41.
SHE WAS VERY GOOD AT forging my signature, the letter continued. On the days I went to Dr. Gee Loy’s, Pearl signed my receipts at Brandeis, so Billy would think I’d gone shopping. He never suspected, and yet he studied those receipts like an accountant. I suppose if I’d developed a gift as worthless as signing a dead girl’s name, I’d be happy for the chance to put it to proper use too.
And so the mystery is solved. I don’t exist. I’m a parlor trick. I always was, I suppose. They’d chop off my head, then, lo and behold, it was back, right where it always was.
But I don’t possess people, Ferret. I didn’t slip my hand in the hand of someone else to write you this letter. I’m not a morbid entertainment. It seems to me if there’s a spirit world beyond the understanding of the material world, then in the material world the spirit world would be beyond our understanding. So how would you know how I do what I do?
Are there stains from tears on the letter you hold? And if so, could they be mine? Or were they sprinkled there, with a sleight of hand, for theatrical effect?
How is it that I felt your hand in mine at the psychic’s table?
Maybe I am only a gimmick, after all. A wire and a wheel under a sheet. I hang in a clairvoyant’s cabinet, whistling through a harmonica on cue. But there are worse eternities, I’m guessing.
And now your letters will end. And I’ll haunt strangers for a nickel.
Please write me one more time and tell me how you might be convinced. What would it take to fool you completely? How can I make you give in to my illusion?
Go to the house. Look in the room. See if I’m there.
Always,
Cecily
42.
I SLEPT ON AUGUST’S FLOOR every night that week, and spent my every day in mystics’ parlors. I saw palmists and astrologers. The Widow Gustafson ran her fingers over my skull, to read bumps and dents, and it comforted me so, I just wanted to sleep with my head in her lap as she predicted all my misery to come. Mrs. Fritz served me a flower tea that tasted of Cecily’s perfume, and when she read the leaves left in the dregs, she said she could see me tortured by lies my whole life long.
In the lounge of a defrocked Chinese nun who called herself Miss Mulberry, I wrote a letter to Cecily on paper of silver foil. The nun stirred coals in a porcelain bowl on her windowsill and we dropped the letter in the flame. We watched it burn, our eyes following the wisps of smoke as they twisted toward heaven.
I don’t believe you wrote that letter in the clairvoyant’s parlor. I don’t believe you’re reading this. I don’t know what to say. I don’t want to write you ever again. I’m only writing you now because I can’t keep myself from it. I can’t bear to be the one to stop. I write to respect your memory, not to stir up mischief. I write, under the spell of sadness.
And it was through this coven of witches I learned of Madame LeFleur and her midnight séances. She didn’t advertise in the newspapers, and she had no parlor in town. She snuck nightly onto the condemned stage still set for Heart of the White City, in the theater of the Grand Court, and she did all her seeing in the near dark.
The theater looked as if it had been abandoned in a mad rush, as if the audience had run away from the Ferris wheel as it had slipped off its axis and rolled into the aisle. The wheel now lay wrecked in the seats, leaning against a wall, creaking as it rocked. The paper flames of the fire that rose above the buildings still crinkled with the drafts that flowed through the theater. A train had jumped its tracks and into the orchestra pit. A gondola sat shipwrecked in the curve of the crescent moon that had fallen off its chains and down from the riggings to crash on the floorboards. But the buildings of the backdrop—all made of white stone—still stood as the theater fell down around them.
Madame LeFleur served as what they called an in-between—she would quiz the dead and perk her ears for their answers from the afterworld. People would bring to her the things their loved ones left behind, the ribbons and rings, the Bibles and poems, the windup toys, the tatted lace, the spectacles, the neckties, the snuff bottles, the tintypes.
These men and women, and children, would beg for any word, no matter how harsh or unwelcome, just as the men and the women of the farms had begged me. But Madame LeFleur was notorious for giving the living the dead’s worst regards. Through Madame LeFleur, the dead rekindled old feuds once settled, confessed to love affairs, aired grievances, and revealed the secrets they’d taken to the grave.
I arrived at the theater only a minute before midnight, and I took a seat in the back as an organist pumped out funeral hymns. The organ’s elaborate system of pipes reached to the domed roof, stopping just short of the hole the winter had made. Birds fluttered in and out, and wind blew in to lick the flames in the oil lamps that lined the foot of the stage. The lamps reminded me of the old theaters of Omaha, without electricity or gas, the ones I snuck into as a boy, where the saloon girls kicked their legs out from under their petticoats in the dim glow.
The audience was sparse. People alone, or in pairs, sat here and there in the dark. When the organist finished, Madame LeFleur took the stage without introduction, entering in a hooded cloak. She undid the clasp at her neck, took off the cloak, and draped it over the organist’s outstretched arms. From where I sat, she was only a shadow, despite the lamplight.
From her very first words—“Let’s burden the dead with our questions”—I recognized the gravel and bark of her voice. I even imagined I smelled her rotten-onion breath. I leaned forward.
I’d brought along August’s opera glasses, and I now held them to my eyes. The woman stepped up to the edge of the stage and bent down to take a book a man handed up to her. The light played across her face, a mask of shadow and flicker. “I’ll be damned,” I mumbled. This Madame LeFleur was Mrs. Margaret, eye patch and all.
As the automaton on the midway, she’d barely moved, but as a medium she never stopped. She spent about an hour letting the phantoms go in and out of her. She paced and wrung her hands when possessed by a woman who fretted. She whistled and skipped when a little girl slipped in. She cursed and swore as she swaggered, finding the sea legs of a soldier shot in Cuba. She wept. She pointed fingers of accusation. She was even a dog once, dropping into a squat to howl at the moon.
When the séance was over, Mrs. Margaret lowered her shoulders into a slouch. “I can’t do no more,” she said. “Get your ghosts away from me.” She left the stage, stepping into the wings, as the organist returned to blow out the flames of the lamps. Everyone left, but I lingered out front in the frozen night, the air like glass. Mrs. Margaret stepped past me, huddled in her cloak, and she paid me no notice until I said her name.
She stopped, paused. She turned to me, shaking her head.
She said, “You’re the bad penny that keeps turning up.”
“I could say the same of you,” I said.
She was like a chimney spouting smoke, vapor puffing up out of her with her heavy, labored breaths. I could hear a few squeaks of a wheeze, like from a slow accordion.
“I already grieved over you,” she said, smiling. “I figured you for dead. I heard you were in the balloon that got away.”
I slapped my left leg. “Escaped with nary a limp,” I said. “I can’t be killed, even when they drop me out of the clouds. I heard you went to Pennsylvania.”
“You heard I was sent to Pennsylvania, maybe,” she said. “When you don’t get on the train, the ticket t
akes you nowhere.”
“Why didn’t you go?”
She shrugged. “I can’t leave Doxie here,” she said, “even if she ain’t mine. Even if I ain’t welcome in the house. I promised Cecily as she breathed her last that I’d look after Doxie, and I’ll do it until I’m dead. I’ll always look after her even if I can’t never see her.”
“Wish I could work up an ounce of sympathy for you,” I said.
She hawked up some phlegm and spat on the bricks. “You pity me for even a second and I’ll take a pig snouter to your jiggling bone,” she said, nodding at my crotch.
“It’s probably talk like that that got you tossed out on your ear,” I said.
“When I’m in among a decent lot, I’m sweet as sugar back to belly,” she said. She gathered her hood tighter at her throat. She sighed, looked up at the moon. Her voice was wet. “Does anybody up at that house even know when the baby’s birthday is? She hasn’t had one yet.” She sniffled. “She’s not some mutt they saved from an alley, you know.” She looked back to me. “How’d you know it was me doing these séances?”
“I didn’t,” I said. “Why would I go looking for you? I came looking for help.”
“You’re one of them?” she said, nodding her head toward the theater, toward the audience that wasn’t there anymore.
My throat had gone sore, and I could only barely croak my words. “I have the same ghost you do.”
She turned and walked away. “There’s a saloon nearby that’s open to all hours,” she said without looking back. “It has a stove in the corner.”
The Swan Gondola Page 36