Fitcher's Brides

by Gregory Frost

  The rest of the day whirled about her, as though she stood in place and everything else spun in orbits.

  Fitcher and her father went off to meet with the other ambassadors of The Word. Some members of the congregation came up to her and offered brief congratulations. Yet none of them seemed truly happy for her, as if they resented her being thrust into this union, almost as if she’d connived for it somehow.

  Amy hugged her. Lavinia looked lost. And Kate, though smiling as she embraced her, had pinched lines of concern in her brow. Vern thought dreamily that Kate was not terribly good at hiding her worry. She was such a worrier, too, and had been for the longest time. She’d worried while Mother wasted away, never letting on directly how she felt, but clearly fretting. She remembered once saying, “Kate, you think about things too much.” Poor dear.

  Preparing to leave them, Vern could think only charitable thoughts about her family. Even Lavinia, whom she’d never liked, but who said not a word to any of them after the proposal and acceptance, not even on the ride back to their house, for Reverend Fitcher said he wouldn’t hear of them going back on foot, though it was a short walk, less than an hour, hadn’t it been? Mr. Notaro, the same wild driver who’d wickedly whipped his team across the gorge a few hours before to startle them, was called upon to drive the family back—most politely and carefully—across the gorge. At the pike he drew up, climbed down, and unloaded the straw-stuffed crate full of eggs that Fitcher made them take with them.

  It was while they stood collecting themselves and young Mr. Notaro was driving away that Kate suddenly asked, “How did he get past here earlier?” Everyone stared at her—no one understood the comment. “I mean,” Kate said, “we were all on the bridge. There wasn’t anyone here to lift the pike for him. How did he get around it in a wagon?” No one had an answer, of course, and Vern shook her head, musing, “Yes, here’s my sister again, thinking too hard about nothing, worrying every event as if to pull some secret truth from it.” Kate gestured to show them how no wagon could have driven around the pike because of the stumps in the yard, but nobody was paying her much attention. Vern suspected it was Kate’s way of grabbing some of the attention away from her on this momentous day, but she was so warmly happy that she didn’t mind. Instead she thought of how unpredictable life could be. She’d come from a home in Boston, from a lovely but shy and irresolute suitor, from a world she thought had made her happy, and arrived at a new place that had looked so disappointing and hopeless only a day ago. Now she was about to forge a new life that no one could have predicted even this morning—except for Samuel, her angel. He had known what was going to occur as surely as if he had looked into the future, which of course must be what he’d done. Spirits could see in all directions, couldn’t they?

  The girls sat in the parlor with nothing to say to each other at first. Then Amy piped up, “We’ll have to make you a gown, won’t we?”

  Vern nodded. “Yes, we will, and soon. We’ll have to go into town today—I remember that Van Hollander had some nice material in his store.”

  “Do you think they’ll let you go?” Kate asked.

  “Why not?”

  “We’re supposed to be kept from town as punishment, remember?”

  “But everything is changed now. I’m to be a wife. I can’t be treated like a little girl now.” She got a sharp look from Kate, and Amy blushed. She realized what she’d said. “Oh, I don’t mean that you’re both children. In fact, just the opposite. If I’m married, then you no longer have to wait. Why, you might truly find someone now. You have half a year.”

  “Do you really think so?” asked Amy.

  “I don’t see why not. There were many men out there at Harbinger, weren’t there? That young Mr. Notaro—well, perhaps not a soaplock like him. But there are bound to be others who don’t have wives, and Reverend Fitcher puts such stock in entering the new kingdom in conjugal bliss.”

  “We sound like mail-order brides the way you tell it,” Kate remarked.

  “I want to get married,” Amy stated, as if Kate had objected to the concept itself. “I want to be married when the time comes, when we meet Jesus.”

  Mr. Charter walked in on them then. Amy turned to him and said, “Vern’s going to have to have a dress, Papa.”

  “Yes, she is. Reverend Fitcher wishes to marry you on Saturday, child. The Lord’s Day.”

  “We can’t have a new dress ready by then!”

  “No, no, that’s true enough,” answered her father. “But you might not have to.” He sat on one of the cane-seat chairs. “Though I didn’t keep the piano—and I know that upset you all, and I’m sorry it couldn’t be done—I did keep your mother’s wedding dress. It’s folded up in my cedar chest upstairs. I couldn’t even say why I did at the time, though your stepmother urged me to keep it, which I then thought peculiar, but now I see that God was directing me to bring it along for this occasion. Vern, I think, you might only have to fix it a little to make it fit—you’re much like she was in shape and size, you know. A little taller mayhap.”

  “Oh, Papa,” Vern said. She could see his eyes going shiny, filling with the memory of her mother on their wedding day, and she crossed to him, sat beside and hugged him. The other two girls came and wrapped arms around both of them.

  Mr. Charter finally drew back. He took a handkerchief out and dabbed at his eyes, then blew his nose. “Your mother would be so proud to see you in that dress. Any of you.” All his daughters smiled to him. “You’re all such fine girls, though you’re every bit as headstrong as she was. Do you know, she chose me, not the other way about. She cared nothing for how things must go. Propriety did not keep her from anything. Well.” He tucked the cloth back up his sleeve, then slapped his knees in feigned good spirits. “Now, you must go try on the dress, see how it is, and then tomorrow you’ll go into Jekyll’s Glen and get whatever you need to finish it. And by Saturday we’ll have a trousseau all prepared for you.”

  He stood as if to leave, and it was at that point that Lavinia came into the parlor, carrying a tray with cups and the china teapot on it. To the girls’ surprise, she set it on the tea table nearest the window and said, “I thought we might like a cup of tea, so I made a pot for us all. It’s getting chilly, don’t you think? We’ll need a fire tonight, Mr. Charter.” An awkward moment followed where it seemed she didn’t know what more to say or do. Suddenly she marched over to Vern, and stiffly embraced and kissed her. “Oh, my dear, I am so happy for you. Truly happy. And I know your father is, too. It’s all he’s hoped for.”

  Vern said, “Yes, I know he has. I—” She shook off whatever she’d begun to say and instead replied, “Thank you, Lavinia. And for the tea.”

  “Yes,” agreed Kate. “Thank you.”

  Vern lifted her mother’s carefully folded wedding dress out of the cedar chest at the foot of her father’s bed. When she opened it up, a handkerchief trimmed in lace and a pair of gloves fell out. She knelt and gathered them up.

  She had never seen the dress before. It was a white batiste with puffed sleeves. The bodice tied with a ribbon sash beneath the breasts; a sheet of Point de France lace was stitched onto the front beneath the sash, falling straight to the hem. There was no discernible waist. The same lace circled the hem of the full train in back. She held the dress to herself, imagining her mother wearing it twenty years earlier, and wondering if she would truly be able to fit into it. The style was out-of-date—had she been making a new dress, it would have had a narrower waist and fuller skirt—but it meant she didn’t have to concern herself with her waist. She wouldn’t need a tight corset, nor was there a need to let the dress out. She closed the chest and carried the dress across the hall. Her sisters, in the parlor with Lavinia, had set up a dressmaker’s dummy, but they had to see it on Vern first to know what had to be done with it.

  In her room she undressed. As she stepped out of her skirts, she couldn’t help sneaking a glance at the wall, imagining him there in the plaster, watching her—her angel.r />
  “Samuel,” she whispered. There was no response.

  She stepped barefoot into her mother’s dress and pulled it up over her chemise, putting her arms through the short, puffy sleeves. They tied with tiny ribbons at the bicep. The bodice fit snugly. Her mother had obviously had a smaller bust. The tied sash pushed her breasts up and together, rounding them conspicuously. The skirt rustled and swooshed when she swung about. The train wound about her like a great tail. She looked at her toes protruding from beneath the lace. It probably wasn’t too short, though she would have to see it over petticoats to be sure.

  She glanced at the wall again, secretively. How long would they wait downstairs for her to appear before someone came up to find her?

  She gathered up her train and went over to Kate’s bed where she sat down. Placing her hand against the wall, she said, “Spirit, can you hear me?”

  The lightest tap answered, weaker or possibly more distant than before—barely sensible through her hand. She heard no voice at all.

  “Oh, spirit.” She leaned her face to the wall. It was cold and felt soothing against her forehead. “Everything you told me is coming to pass. Not only a suitor, but a husband.”

  One tap answered. Was it a little stronger?

  “You promised, didn’t you? You’ll still love me even then? You’ll still be here for me when I come home to visit.”

  Tap.

  “Samuel,” she sighed. “The reverend—my husband, soon enough—he’s told us when the Day of Judgment is coming. It’s only eight months away. And then we’ll be with you. We’ll meet. We’ll see one another, won’t we?”

  Yes, Vern.

  She heard him now, his soft voice like a spell. The sound of him could lift her, carry her through the house, through life. She thought of what Reverend Fitcher had said about sin of the flesh. She was in love with a spirit, so it must be a pure love because there could be no flesh in the bargain. She’d attained spiritual love, hadn’t she, and been rewarded for it. When finally they did meet, it would be after the—

  “Vernelia!” It was Kate’s voice, and it brought her to her senses. She was on her feet, twirling as if in a dance in the middle of the room. The puffed sleeves of her wedding dress were pushed down off her shoulders, exposing more of her breasts. She couldn’t say how she had gotten there, but she felt a sweet languor as if she’d been in his embrace. She ought to have been terrified. Remotely, she knew this, but felt nothing but pleasure.

  “Vern, for the land’s sake!” Kate called again, closer, as if partway up the stairs.

  She called out, “I’m coming, Kate!” and hurried to the door, but paused at the threshold, looked back and said, “Thank you, dearest spirit,” to the wall. Then she ran to the stairs.

  Under the sound of her footsteps the wall rapped and rapped again.

  Eleven

  THE NEXT MORNING MR. CHARTER gave his daughters money and told them to go into town and purchase whatever they needed for Vern’s veil and train. She had no shoes to go with the dress, either, but that might not be something they could help. Still, they were to look for slippers or mules that would be appropriate.

  The sky was overcast, but it wasn’t raining. They dressed warmly and walked into Jekyll’s Glen.

  Although she’d noticed that Van Hollander had some nice material for a dress, Vern couldn’t recall seeing anything like the lace for a veil in his store, so she led the girls to the other store, Eggleston’s. Mrs. Eggleston helped them find suitable lace. It didn’t match the lace trimming the dress, but wouldn’t clash with it, either.

  She also served up a pair of Spanish satin slippers that would go beautifully with their mother’s dress; and some black net stockings of the kind that had been popular in Boston. They bought those, too. Mrs. Eggleston fairly cooed over Vern’s betrothal, telling the girls how excited she’d been on her own wedding day, how Vern had the whole world before her—strange, romantic stuff coming from such a large and otherwise seemingly dour woman.

  It was as Vern was paying for the goods that Kate pointed at a handbill on the wall and said, “Look, it’s today. It’s the poster you brought home before, and the demonstration of mesmerism is going to take place this noon at the home of a Mrs. Shacabac. Oh, let’s go. We’re here already, and it’s not much longer.”

  “It’s mesmerism, Kate,” said Amy, as if that should be enough to dissuade her.

  “Which is what?”

  Amy had no ready answer, but Kate would certainly not have let it go if she had, so Vern weighed in. “We’ll go. I want to hear what they have to say, these mesmerists. If they can speak with the other side.”

  “Like you do?” Amy asked.

  Vern ignored her. The truth was, in Boston where mesmerists were plentiful Lavinia would have called such a meeting “a blasphemy” and forbidden them to attend. Even though Lavinia was being nice to them today, no greater motivation than to defy her was necessary. “Can you tell us, Mrs. Eggleston,” she asked, “where this house would be?”

  Even without directions, they would have found it. Eight people were walking on the gravel at the side of the road ahead of them, on their way toward a stately brick house near the end of the road. A semicircular drive ran past the front of it. As the girls approached, a carryall with a family of six on board pulled into the drive, and those on foot scurried to the side. At the front steps the family got down, except for the father, who drove the wagon back around and out onto the road again. He eyed the sisters with a pained expression as he drove by them.

  Inside, more people milled about in the main hall and the parlor. A woman with auburn hair streaked gray, and wearing a dark green dress with a large bustle, came up to them and said, “I don’t believe I know you girls.”

  They introduced themselves.

  “Oh, my, yes,” the woman exclaimed, “the Pulaski house. Why, that poor couple, that was just a terrible thing.”

  “Ma’am?” Kate asked.

  “The way they just up and disappeared. So young, and how sweet a couple. Why, I’d spoken to Adele on the street that very day. It’s a sin to Moses.”

  The girls nodded and muttered that, indeed, it was.

  “Well, now, my name is Emma. And this is my house. You peart girls just make yourselves right at home. Have you ever seen Dr. Castleman speak before?”

  “No, ma’am,” replied Vern. “But in Boston, where we hail from, there were at least a hundred mesmerists this past year.”

  “Oh, my. A hundred? Oh, goodness. And you come from Boston? So much culture and excitement there, isn’t there? I haven’t been to Boston for quite so many years now. Well. There’s tea and cakes in there, and then Dr. Castleman will be speaking along the hall, where we have set up a lecture room. You’ll want to be sure you can see him.” She glanced away from Vern, at the entrance. “Howard, my dear!” she called, and walked between the girls to greet her new guest.

  “I should like some tea, I think,” said Amy.

  Kate sighed. “Just don’t get crumbs and jam on Vern’s veil. Better still, why don’t you give it to me to carry?”

  Amy handed her the folded material before plunging through the crowd.

  “I could do with tea, too,” Vern said. “Should I give you my things as well?”

  For a moment Kate stared at her with feigned incomprehension. Then the two of them laughed. She wasn’t being mean, Vern insisted, but Kate was right—Amy didn’t want tea half so much as she wanted to stuff herself with cakes.

  They followed her into a vast and crowded dining room.

  The lecture room was probably bigger than their parlor and dining room combined, and contained more chairs than they had sticks of wood for the stove, thought Vern. She and her sisters chose three seats on the far side of the room but near the front. By the time things started many people had to stand around the fringes. She wouldn’t have thought there were so many people in Jekyll’s Glen interested in seeing a mesmerist, and many of them looked as if they had traveled to be
here. She wondered how far away the handbills had been distributed.

  The woman in the green dress walked in front of the audience. A curly-headed man, his hair pasted forward in ringlets, walked after her. He wore a dark red waistcoat and held his hands just beneath the lapels as if holding his heart in. Everyone fell silent.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, friends and neighbors, I thank you all for coming today. This is quite exciting, isn’t it? Our dear friend Mr. Bayard has secured for us this rare opportunity to learn about a most exciting science that is going on around us right now in larger cities. Why, I was told just this day that there are over one hundred mesmerists practicing in Boston.” She glanced coyly at the girls as she said it. “Our lecturer is the eminent Dr. David Castleman, a philosopher from Philadelphia. He has studied with Charles Poyen, that famous professor of animal magnetism, who toured here some five years past.” Members of the audience shifted and whispered to each other at the sound of that name—it clearly meant something to them. “He tells me that he has recently spent time with Phineas Quimby as well. And I gather he is going to perform some feats of mesmerism to demonstrate this remarkable art to us. Dr. Castleman?”

  Light applause followed. In a clipped and erudite voice, he thanked his hostess, then waited patiently, surveying the audience, until all was quiet.

  “Each of you here today,” he began, directing a finger across the room, “has a remarkable power lying within you. A power, I might add, which can find hidden meanings, cure disease, and even—if tapped deeply enough and in the right way—allow you to hear others’ thoughts and see into the future, performing what will seem on the face of it to be parlor tricks. But they aren’t. There’s no magic at work. No devils. No illusions. There is only the incredible magnetic power of the mind.

  “I have spent now a decade as a student and five years as a practitioner of mesmerism. For most of that time, I’ve traveled quite a bit, first through England, and now to bring the knowledge I possess to communities across our young country. What I behold is a nation in chaos. Our religion is in chaos. I see a number of your pastors in the audience today, some of whom were perhaps hoping to find the devil at work here. I regret to tell you, you will not. I have no doubt some of you reverend gentlemen will concur with my…diagnosis of our worship. Go to any large city and you will find street-corner evangelists by the cartload, framing in their particular cant some absurd revelation upon the Gospels while they practice an artful hypocrisy that simply astonishes. These unlettered bipeds almost invariably predict the pending doom of mankind. It should take a learned man no effort at all to dismiss them. Any physician should be able to tell them that mankind is not doomed, but rather on the brink of an era of revelation of a different sort: one of unparalleled inner discovery. If physicians were not themselves without integrity—half of them peddling worthless nostrums and serving up superstitious cures—they would know this already. In the cities, physicians even pay beggars to pass out handbills announcing some fantastic elixir they’ve concocted, which will cure gout and whooping cough and even consumption with the very first spoonful! Travel a block farther and some other beggar working for some other fraud will be passing out news of a different curative. What is the result? It is that many have died from drinking poisons promised to them as medicines—potions for common ailments that not only don’t cure but inflict suffering—dissolving teeth, burning holes in throats and stomachs. In a word, murdering. And the most alarming element of quackery is that absolutely none of it is necessary. You have within you the ability to eradicate disease by tapping”—and he knocked a finger twice against his temple—“tapping into this private apothecary. Disease is nothing more than a contagion of belief. You hear that someone has a cold, and soon you find yourself developing the selfsame symptoms. You catch a cold because you believe in it. Cure you of your belief, and we cure you of your cold without a drop of some unholy noxious nostrum ever passing your lips.