by Cat Winters
In sepia-hued and color-tinted images, his view of the world unfolded for me across glossy photographic paper. Golden clouds rolled in from the ocean’s horizon at the brink of sunset. Sandpipers waded in foamy seawater that looked as frothy as the top of a lemon meringue pie. California missions stood against a backdrop of clear skies, their adobe walls cracked and crumbling and faded with time. Fields of wild poppies brought beauty and life to the dry desert floor. Biplanes glided over the Pacific, casting wrinkled shadows across blue-tinged waves.
I also found his older photographs from Oregon, which didn’t possess the same clarity and skill as his more recent work, but they were beautiful just the same. Mighty Mount Hood with its snow capped triangle of a peak. Portland’s Steel Bridge spanning the Willamette River in the heart of the city. My eleven-year-old head, smothered beneath one of my giant white bows, while I perched on the picket fence at the edge of my front yard. Stephen had written one simple word on the back of my photograph—Shell—as if I didn’t need further explanation. I liked that. It made me feel I wasn’t as confusing and complicated as I thought.
He even included a self-portrait in his collection, taken December 1917, before his dad had died. Stephen sat on the boulders of the seawall across the street from his house and held up a sign that read A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN. Strands of his short brown hair blew across his forehead, and I could practically taste the salt on the breeze rustling around him. He smiled in that way of his that revealed the dimple I enjoyed, and his eyes looked peaceful and free.
Glass negatives also awaited inside the case, nestled in protective sleeves, as fragile as if they were his children. I imagined taking his treasures to his mother, laying them in her lap, and coaxing her back to the world through his work.
“You’re not disappearing without a trace,” I said to his face in the photograph. “Not if I can help it. Not a chance.” I ran my finger down the picture’s smooth edge. “I promise to try to stop this world from mucking up everything so badly. And you know I’m good to my word.”
I repacked his case and clicked the lid shut.
With one hand clutching the handles of my mother’s bag and the other gripping Stephen’s treasures, I left the post office and walked home through the swelling celebrations of the war’s end. Model Ts puttered down the streets, their squeaky horns honking like ecstatic ducks. Americans of all ages and sizes and colors crept out of their bolted-up houses and remembered what it was like to smile and laugh and throw their arms around one another for a kiss. Firecrackers popped and shimmered on the sidewalks. “The Star-Spangled Banner” soared out of windows. Drivers tied cans to the backs of cars and wagons, and the air filled with the joyous music of tin clattering against asphalt.
The festivities rose out of the crematorium smoke and the rambling piles of coffins and the black crepes scarring neighborhood doors, which made the bliss of victory all the sweeter. We were all survivors—every last one of us who limped our way out to the sidewalks that afternoon and spit in Death’s cold face.
I tightened my hold on Stephen’s case of photographs and my own treasures and kept plodding forward to my new home on the edge of a city that had sheltered me during the worst of the storm. The weight of the world lifted from my shoulders enough for me to raise my chin and hold my head higher. A warm breeze whispered through my hair. My own restless soul settled farther inside my bones.
I was ready to live.
Ready to come back fighting.
I BECAME INTERESTED IN THE BIZARRE AND DEVASTATING year 1918 around the age of twelve, when I saw an episode of a television show called Ripley’s Believe It or Not! I learned about two girls in England in 1917—sixteen-year-old Elsie Wright and her ten-year-old cousin, Frances Griffiths—who claimed to have photographed fairies. Several investigators, including the novelist Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes’s creator) and the photography expert Harold Snelling, deemed the girls’ fairy pictures genuine, and the two cousins became famous. The narrator of Ripley’s explained that people believed in the photographs because World War I was so horrifying. I wondered exactly how atrocious the era had been if grown, educated people were convinced fairies could be caught frolicking in the English countryside.
As an adult, I read “The Man Who Believed in Fairies,” by Tom Huntington, an article that appeared in Smithsonian magazine, and I again learned about Elsie and Frances and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and grew further intrigued by their story. The article described the Victorian era’s Spiritualism craze, which had spread like wildfire across America and Europe starting in the 1840s. Spiritualism had gained new popularity during the desperate years of the First World War.
Why was the World War I period so horrifying? For starters, innovations in war technology, such as machine guns, high-explosive shells, and mustard gas, provided new means of terror, injury, and death on the battlefields. Furthermore, the influenza pandemic of 1918 (this particular strain was known as the “Spanish flu” and the “Spanish Lady”) killed at least twenty million people worldwide. Some estimates run as high as more than one hundred million people killed. Add to that the fifteen million people who were killed as a result of World War I and you can see why the average life expectancy dropped to thirty-nine years in 1918—and why people craved séances and spirit photography.
The flu hit hard and fast in the fall of 1918, targeting the young and the healthy, including men in the training camps and trenches. The baffling illness then waned shortly after the war’s end, on November 11, leaving as mysteriously as it had arrived.
Flu vaccines were crude and scarce, so people resorted to folk remedies to save themselves from the illness. Every preventive flu measure and cure described in this book came from historical accounts of the pandemic.
The contest that Julius Embers tries to win is based upon Scientific American’s 1923–24 offer of twenty-five hundred dollars to the first person to produce authentic paranormal phenomena in front of a committee of five. Renowned escape artist and magician Harry Houdini loathed phony mediums and their use of magic tricks in the dark, so he helped judge the entries. No one ended up going home with the prize.
Dr. Duncan MacDougall truly did weigh dying tuberculosis patients on an industrial-sized scale in 1901 to explore the loss of the soul at the moment of death. Most scientists consider his work to possess very little merit due to the many weaknesses in his studies.
For more odd and fascinating forays into psychical research and Spiritualism, explore the wealth of information found in such books as Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife, by Mary Roach (W. W. Norton & Co., 2005); A Magician Among the Spirits, by Harry Houdini (Arno Press, 1972; original printing 1924); and Photography and Spirit, by John Harvey (Reaktion Books, 2007).
For more information about World War I’s devastating effects on the lives of the people who fought and on Americans back home, I recommend The Last Days of Innocence: America at War, 1917–18, by Meirion and Susie Harries (Vintage Books, 1998); Shell Shock, by Wendy Holden (Channel 4 Books, 2001); and Bonds of Loyalty: German Americans and World War I, by Frederick C. Luebke (Northern Illinois University Press, 1974). Be sure to also explore poems and books by such writers as Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Ernest Hemingway, and Katherine Anne Porter: gifted artists who were actually there.
TO MY PATIENT, OPTIMISTIC, HARDWORKING AGENT, Barbara Poelle, who swore we’d get this book published even if it meant she’d have to bruise her knuckles banging down doors: Thank you from the bottom of my heart. We did it!
To my editor, Maggie Lehrman: Thank you for your amazing, insightful, and inspiring notes and for sharing (and improving upon) my vision of this novel. I’m so incredibly grateful you took a chance on my historical tale. To everyone at Abrams who’s helped me share this book with the world (Maria T. Middleton, Laura Mihalick, and the rest of the crew): I’m honored to have your talents behind this book.
To my early readers, Carrie Raleigh, Ara Burklund, Kim Murphy, and Francesca Mil
ler: Thank you for your time, feedback, and unwavering encouragement.
To Bill Becker of PhotographyMuseum.com, Sophia Brothers and Sophie Richardson at the Science & Society Picture Library, Holly Reed at the National Archives and Records Administration, David Silver of the International Photographic Historical Organization, and Stephen Greenberg, Crystal Smith, and Douglas Atkins at the U.S. National Library of Medicine: Thank you for fielding all my historical image questions.
To Mrs. Betsy Martin and Ms. Kathie Deily, formerly of Crown Valley Elementary School: Thank you for making my writing feel special when I was a kid.
To my grandpa, Ward Proeschel, born in 1915: Thanks so much for sharing your memories of the early twentieth century with me.
To my parents, Richard and Jennifer Proeschel: Thank you for my life, and thank you for giving me the gift of the love of reading.
To my sister, Carrie Raleigh: You’ve been my first reader ever since we were children, and your love, companionship, and enthusiasm mean the world to me. I love you, Bear!
Last, but most certainly not least, thanks to my husband, Adam, and our two kids, for their steadfast patience, love, and support. This one’s for you, my loves.
CAT WINTERS WAS BORN AND RAISED IN SOUTHERN California, near Disneyland, which may explain her love of haunted mansions, bygone eras, and fantasylands. This is her first novel. She lives in Portland, Oregon, with her family. Visit her online at her main haunt, catwinters.com.
This book was designed by Maria T. Middleton. Its production was overseen by Alison Gervais and Kathy Lovisolo.
CAT WINTERS WAS BORN AND RAISED in Southern California, near Disneyland, which may explain her love of haunted mansions, bygone eras, and fantasylands. This is her first novel. She lives in Portland, oregon, with her family. Visit her online at her main haunt, catwinters.com.
JACKET PHOTOGRAPH © 2013 SYMON CHOW
JACKET DESIGN BY MARIA T. MIDDLETON
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