The Boy from Tomorrow

by Camille DeAngelis

  Josie could not believe the woman who stood at the podium was the mother who would not suffer a kiss upon the cheek, nor was she the mother who had humiliated her under the pretense of making her own mistakes. This was not even the mother who’d locked the study door to rehearse that selfsame speech well into the night.

  There was a whiff of winter in the air, and the ladies in the crowd pulled their wool coats and furs snug around their necks as they lifted their faces to the stage beside the bandstand. “Our sisters in several of the western states have been given the right to vote, but what of the rest of us? Are we to sit politely by until we are too old to walk to the polls?” Lavinia Clifford’s eyes shone, and her voice rang out like a victory bell. “Yes, the men who make the laws in Washington have asked us to wait. They say now is not the time, that we cannot press for our rights while the war in all its atrocity creeps across the European continent. They say it is only a matter of time before our nation is drawn into the conflict, and so we must wait.

  “Wait? Pray, wait for what? If you would put us off for this war, you will certainly put us off for the next; for there will be a next war, and another. We women, the givers of life, know that war robs us of our sons, and the sons of those whom we would call our enemy, and that their sons are no less dear to them than ours are to us. We know, too, that the machines of war make other men wealthy beyond the grandest imaginings of we ordinary folk. We shall not believe what is convenient for them to tell us!

  “Why, will our daughters be waiting, too? Our granddaughters? A century from now, will we still gather to demand our rights? I tell you, we shall not wait!”

  As Josie listened, an unfamiliar feeling stole over her, something more complicated than excitement. The applause broke out—roaring and continuous, dotted with hoots and whistles from the otherwise ladylike—and it occurred to her that she was proud to be the daughter of the woman who stood on that stage beneath the red, white, and blue festoons, smiling serenely as the cheers went on and on.

  The whole household had come out to the rally, and together they walked home from the park under a bright full moon. In between yawns, Cassie chattered about the women and their sashes and hats and their fancy words, and Emily’s face glowed with the light of inspiration, and even Mrs. Pike and Mrs. Dowd went arm in arm like schoolgirls. As they opened the front door and filed inside, Josie listened to their laughter echoing in the cold, dark house. Mrs. Dowd lit the burner for cocoa, and Cass danced in anticipation while the milk warmed on the stove.

  When the cocoa was ready, even Merritt accepted a mug, which he cradled between his broad white hands as if to warm them, though Josie noticed he did not take a drink. Her mother pointed to the high shelf where the spirits were kept, and Merritt rose, took down a bottle of whiskey, and poured a dollop into his mistress’s cup.

  The girls had only taken a few sips when Mrs. Clifford ordered them up to bed—the mother of the stage was well and truly gone now—and they scalded their throats trying to finish as much of the cocoa as they could. This had been the sort of evening that would not come again, and to have one’s treat so rescinded merely confirmed it.

  They changed into their nightgowns, weary limbs still thrumming with the excitement of the rally, and raced into their tutor’s room to vault themselves onto the bed. “My!” said Emily, who waited for them with a finger marking her place in The Brown Fairy Book. “This bed seems so much smaller than it was a moment ago.” Cassie laughed as she propped Mrs. Gubbins atop the headboard. She laid her head in Emily’s lap as Josie nestled herself beside them under the pinwheel quilt. Emily washed with lavender soap, and always smelled so sweet and grown up. She kept her toiletries in an elfin cupboard in the wall, and whenever she left it open Josie would marvel at the trappings of womanhood, the witch hazel and cold cream in glass bottles and the pearl-topped hatpins on the little velvet cushion.

  Lately they’d been reading their way through The Brown Fairy Book. “The Enchanted Head” was the story Emily would read tonight, and she did the voices with great panache. It told of a man’s head on a silver dish—still alive, mind—and how the man came to marry the sultan’s daughter. “I will never marry my daughter to such a monster!” Emily roared, knowing it would thrill and frighten them in equal measure.

  “. . . When the merry-making was done, and the young couple were alone, the head suddenly disappeared, or, rather, a body was added to it, and one of the handsomest young men that ever was seen stood before the princess.

  ‘A wicked fairy enchanted me at my birth,’ he said, ‘and for the rest of the world I must always be a head only. But for you, and you only, I am a man like other men.’

  ‘And that is all I care about,’ said the princess.”

  “But why?” Cassie asked as Emily closed the book. “Why didn’t the princess care? They couldn’t ever go for a walk in the park. And she would have to feed him at every meal.”

  “I don’t think the princess was concerned with having to spoon feed him. They had servants for that.”

  “But how could she be happy with a husband who hardly ever had a body?”

  “I have an inkling.” Emily smiled to herself as she laid the book on the bedside table. “Someday you’ll understand.”

  Cassie pondered this. “Are you going to get married, Em?”

  Their tutor gave her a sideways look. “Why, Cass! Are you trying to get rid of me?”

  For a moment Cass mulled this over, and once she understood, she replied, “Oh, but why couldn’t you and your husband go on living here with us?”

  “I don’t know that your mother would approve of such an arrangement.”

  “If Emily ever marries,” Josie said, “she’ll have to go to work for her husband instead, cooking his dinners and scrubbing the floors. That’s what you do when you’re married.”

  Cass frowned. “Did Mother ever cook dinners or scrub floors?”

  Josie scoffed. “Hah! Never in her life.”

  “You’re fortunate in that your family can afford to hire help,” Emily said diplomatically.

  “Then I’ll have help, too,” Cass declared. “I’ll have a dozen butlers and a hundred maids because my husband will be the inventor of the . . . hmm . . . the sewing machine!”

  “Somebody’s already invented the sewing machine,” said Josie, “and he’s at least a hundred years old.”

  “Think of something that hasn’t been invented yet,” said Emily.

  “But how can I do that if . . .” Josie loved to watch her sister thinking hard about something. It was only a matter of time before she cracked the problem and a light came shining through. “I know! We could ask Alec! He’s from the future, you know. Mrs. Gubbins says so. We can ask him anything we want.”

  “I’d rather he was a time traveler than a ghost, that’s for certain.” Emily regarded the little girl with sober curiosity. “What would you ask him?”

  “Oh, anything. What I look like when I grow up, and what Josie looks like, and about the flying ships, and the name of the man I’m going to marry . . .”

  With gentle fingers Emily brushed a lock of hair out of Cassie’s eyes. “Do you think it would be good for you to know what’s to come?”

  “Of course it would! Then I wouldn’t have to waste any time fretting about it. I could just sit back and look forward to it all.”

  “But what if he told you something that would make you unhappy? Or—consider this, little one—perhaps the act of him telling you would actually change what happens. It could change, if you were to know about it beforehand.”

  Cassie gazed up at her tutor with a conflicted countenance. Should she cling to what was comfortable to believe, or what might be nearer the truth?

  “What if he told you,” Emily went on, “that you were to marry a man named Maurice who worked in fertilizer, and you said to yourself, ‘Oh no, I’d never marry a man who sells manure
for a living,’ so that when you met your Maurice, you spurned him without giving yourself the chance to fall madly in love. What then?”

  “Don’t toss him aside too soon, Cass,” Josie said, mock serious. “Especially if his surname is Fitzmaurice. There could be a lot of money in manure.”

  Cassie wrinkled her nose. “Maurice Fitzmaurice?”

  Josie and Cassie dissolved into giggles, and Emily shushed them. “Or else we’ll have Merritt knocking at the door. And I don’t know about you girls, but I don’t want to see what his face looks like in the dark.”

  “What of your parents, Em?” Josie rested her head on her elbow. “Were they very much in love?”

  “I don’t know. My mother passed away when I was three, and my father was in the Merchant Marine. I was lucky if I saw him once a year. I never felt as though I knew him well enough to ask those important questions.”

  “You always lived with your aunt and uncle?”

  Emily nodded. “They have been as good to me as a mother and father could ever be. Someday you must come down to New York and meet them.”

  Cassie yawned. “I want to see a musical and go to the castle in the park and eat a strawberry ice cream in a hotel.”

  “Did you have any beaux when you lived in the city?”

  Their tutor smiled. “A few.”

  “But why didn’t you marry any of them?” Josie asked.

  “They were nice enough young men. But I was on my way to college, and if I’d had any thoughts of marriage and children, I had to push them from my mind. You know, don’t you girls, how important your education is? There was no question for me of giving it up.” She paused. “More to the point, I did not love either of them.” Their tutor played with the binding on her quilt, pensively running a finger along the old hand stitching. “You two are very fortunate. Your education will be provided for—perhaps you could go to Vassar, as I did, or to Smith or Wellesley—and when the time comes, you will begin your married life with an independent income. You will never want for anything.”

  In the blink of an eye their tutor had assumed the aura of a fortune-teller—much more authoritative than the mechanical soothsayer downstairs—and Josie felt a flicker of excitement in the pit of her stomach.

  “Mother told you that?”

  Emily nodded.

  “I can have my twenty butlers, regardless,” Cassie said with satisfaction. Then there came a peaceful silence, which the little girl ended by blurting out, “Mrs. Gubbins never married. She says she had heaps of beaux, and I asked her why she didn’t marry any of them, and she said there was one she liked enough to marry, but whenever he came around to see her she couldn’t stop sneezing.”

  “Stop talking nonsense,” Josie sighed happily.

  “I think it would be awful to have a husband who didn’t agree with you,” Cass went on.

  “It was a good thing she didn’t marry him, then,” said Emily, with a twitching mouth.

  “Mrs. Gubbins says I’m going to get married someday but Josie won’t.”

  Josie sat up abruptly. There had been such a warm, contented feeling between them as they cuddled under Emily’s quilt, and now it was gone.

  Emily, too, was no longer smiling. “What could make you say a thing like that, Cassie?”

  Cass shrugged. “I didn’t say it. Mrs. Gubbins did.”

  “Oh, will you hush up about that silly old doll!” Josie cried. “Mrs. Gubbins doesn’t say anything. She’s only a toy.”

  “You’re wrong,” Cass said in a small voice.

  “What if I said you were going to be an old maid? How would you like it?”

  “I wouldn’t. Because you’d only be saying it to spite me.”

  “Me, spite you!”

  “Let it go,” Emily broke in. “You said it yourself: she’s talking nonsense.”

  The look on Cassie’s face was as grave as if someone had died. It was this solemn attitude of no one believes me that pushed Josie to full-blown tears. She threw back the quilt and got to her feet, and did not turn when Emily called softly, “Josie, dear! Come and kiss me goodnight, at least.”

  She went into the nursery, burrowed under her quilts like a woodland animal in the dead of winter, and cried. Through her tears she was dimly aware of the murmuring going on behind the door, and she knew that Emily was gently—too gently!—admonishing Cassie for what she had said. Eventually the door opened and the light fall of little feet came slowly across the carpet.

  “I’m sorry, Josie,” Cassie whispered. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

  Josie did not reply, not even when Cass reached out a finger and poked her through the blankets. She had spoiled this marvelous evening, and no apology could bring back that rare contentment. All the next day Josie spoke to her sister only when it was absolutely necessary, and did not look her in the eye even once.

  * * *

  Two days after the rally, the girls were seated at their school table, at work on their respective assignments while Emily sat by the window reading Upton Sinclair; rather, Josie was at work on her French composition while Cass drew a winged horse in her copy-book. She kept turning the copy-book around and pushing it to Josie’s side of the desk, and Josie would push it away again, ignoring Cassie’s whispered pleas for her to admire what she’d made.

  But Josie noticed when the little girl looked at her doll, which was propped up on the bookshelf, and paused as if she were listening. “Mrs. Gubbins says I shouldn’t tell you everything she tells me. She says I hurt your feelings, but even so you’re being terribly petty.”

  Josie sighed. “What did I tell you about Mrs.-Gubbinsing everything you say?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yes, you do. It’s supremely irritating. If you think I’m being petty, then for heaven’s sake, just say it.”

  “Does this mean you’re not angry anymore?”

  Josie tried to suppress a smile, and failed.

  Seek and Ye Shall Find

  8.

  The boys did a Google search for “Clifford” and “Edwardstown, NY,” and only two names showed up in the search results: William Clifford, mentioned as a businessman in New York City newspapers Alec had never heard of, and Lavinia Clifford, “The Edwardstown Sibyl.”

  “What’s a sibyl?” Alec asked.

  “It’s like a fortune teller,” Danny said. “But from a long time ago. Like ancient Greece.”

  The reading room of the Edwardstown public library had tall arched windows, geometric floor-tiles, and carved oak furniture, like a church of books. A red-haired woman, somewhere between college and his mom’s age, was reading a newspaper behind the reference desk. She looked up as the boys approached the desk. “Hey there. How can I help you guys?”

  “I just moved here,” Alec began, “and we live in an old house, and the real estate agent said it was built by a famous actress. I think her last name may have been Clifford?”

  “First name Lavinia, probably,” Danny cut in.

  The name tag pinned to the librarian’s sweater read Bernice, and when she smiled at him encouragingly he felt a mild spell of shyness. “I was wondering . . . if you could tell me more about her?”

  The librarian’s eyes sparkled, as if she were about to let them in on yet another secret worth keeping. “You might say Lavinia Clifford was a kind of actress. She was a psychic medium back in the early twentieth century. She gave readings for people who’d lost their sons in World War I.”

  Alec and Danny traded a look. The talking board! It made perfect sense.

  “You’re very lucky to live in her house,” Bernice was saying. “It’s a wonderful piece of local history. It’s on the corner of Sparrow and Hemlock, right?” Alec nodded, and Bernice rose from her chair and gestured for them to follow her. “Let’s go back to the records room. I’ve got something you two will definitely be interes
ted in.”

  Golden afternoon light spilled through the tall windows onto desks where people worked on laptops or leafed through the newspaper. She led them through an archway into a much smaller space with two long tables and three walls of gray archival boxes, all neatly labeled. No one else was there.

  Bernice mounted a footstool to pull a carton off the top shelf. LAVINIA CLIFFORD, said the yellowed typewritten label. 1901-1927. Danny lifted the lid and peered inside. “Wow!”

  “Lots of goodies in there,” Bernice said happily. “Just be careful, okay? Some of this stuff is really fragile.” Danny rolled his eyes as the librarian left the room, and Alec chuckled under his breath.

  Inside the carton they found a stack of magazines, each of them individually sealed in clear plastic, and a scrapbook with an embossed leather cover bursting with newspaper clippings. There was also a small wooden recipe box, but when they opened it they found a collection of tiny black-and-white photographs sorted by tabs: theater/early years; spirit photography; Henry Jennings; suffrage activities; Clifford family; testimonials. This last section turned out to be portraits sent by grateful sitters—portraits, that is, of the deceased loved ones with whom they believed Lavinia Clifford had allowed them to communicate.

  Danny spread out the stack of plastic-sealed magazines. “These are Spiritualist mags. I’ve seen them in my dad’s shop. They’re good for a laugh.”

  Alec chose the first magazine in the stack and gently pulled it out of the plastic. The Night Side was printed on the cover in bold, ornate type that looked a bit like the letters on the talking board. The table of contents included “Guidelines for the Construction of a Psychomanteum,” “Some Verses Composed Through Automatic Writing,” and “Fortune-Telling with an Ordinary Deck of Playing Cards.”

  “You think people actually took this stuff seriously?”

  His friend shrugged as he flipped through the photograph file. “Lots of people did.”

  The magazine was falling apart, but Alec could tell it had been well produced, with detailed illustrations of the “ghost box,” the various sectors of one’s palm, and all that. It was too elaborate to be a joke.