Shadows in Summerland

  They said to wait there on the bed. The six or so women went upstairs.

  Shadrach Barnes came through the door. He was in his shirtsleeves with the stethoscope hanging. He stood in the door peering at me intently before turning around to shoot the chain. At last he sat down at the end of the bed. All of me tensed at him being so near. The bed was child-sized, almost too short to hold me, even shorter with a body perched there at the end. He readied up his stethoscope. And then, gently, he found my heart. He listened a minute, moved down to my lungs.

  He drove his hand between my legs.

  I gasped at the pressure and tried to fold inward, my instinct to pull, to shrink away, but the strong hand continued to grope at my lap. I made a sort of whining sound I didn’t recognize as me, and again and again tried to jackknife my body against Barnes’ hands, which were holding me down. I slowly retreated from what was occurring, so queer and unreal it was happening to me. I tired of kicking out my legs and lowered them onto the mattress again. And I felt a sort of warming or a summons settle in beneath the terror and the shame. The mortification of this man, touching me where no one touched, where I had scarcely touched myself, not for never wanting to but rather because I had never known how. I hated the feeling and willed it away but it was like a far off bell—at once too faint to scrutinize and too persistent dismiss.

  Shadrach did not make a sound. He seemed intent that I should feel him. He worked as if it pained him to—to cause me this, to cause on me.

  Sharply, he removed his hand and folded it beneath his thigh.

  “I allow that you’re clever,” he told me abruptly. “Cleverer than most, perhaps. But sure as I sit before you now, I am every bit your match.”

  “You will find me out?” I said.

  Shadrach Barnes did not respond.

  “You will find me out,” I gasped. “Yes, you, good sir, will find me out. I suppose in the meantime that I’m not to speak of what you did to me tonight?”

  I waited a moment for him to respond. Instead, he stowed his instruments and rose and drew his coat about him.

  “Do you like it?” he said.

  “I despise it,” I answered.

  “Not me,” he said and spread his arms to take in the bedframe, the walls. “Your new room.”

  Hannah in Her Perfect Innocence

  February, 1859

  Twenty-two rooms in the New Shoreham Inn. Thresholds to lintels, mine and Grace’s. Though the Fanshawes were hopeful their logbook would fill when news of the inn’s better qualities carried. To Providence, Boston, wherever it was that people left to end up here.

  A typical room in the inn was as follows. A carved oaken door with a knob of tooled brass. Pushed open, a dusk of untenanted air. Half the time smelling of wax or glass polish, at which Grace and I pinched our noses and clucked.

  Continuing, we closed our eyes, not wanting to exhaust the room. And just through the door would encounter the coat-hook. Dipping, then rising again from the wall. So different, I thought, from the one in my house where father hung his fishing tackle. Our hook for hanging, the Shoreham’s for show—an elegant, curtailing spiral.

  The best coat-hooks, we both agreed, were in rooms 3, 14 and 20.

  Now on to the couch. Of the fainting variety. Brocaded pillows ranged across. The cushions themselves not much for sitting: a kind of flimsy tautness, not soft and not hard. Hands clamped on the arms, we pressed our bottoms, twisted and ground them down onto the satin. And when we rose would count away how long it took the mark to fade.

  The best fainting couches for making designs were in rooms 8 and 11.

  The vanity with the clearest mirror an unbreakable tie between rooms 6 and 12.

  From morning to evening, empty rooms. Each emptier than the next one, it seemed. Their air vibratory with people that could, if only they chose to, be in them.

  Once, from New Hampshire, a land-speculator, hoping to build some kind of mill.

  Once, heading home to its native Nantucket, a whaler with salt-stains from faraway seas.

  And once, above the vanity amidst the chill of room 16, a skinny, old woman in only a nightdress, writing her nephew a letter.

  The woman’s hair like shreds of cloud. Pitted, yellow scalp beneath. Wrote with her nose nearly touching the page. The interstices of her spine. The top of one onion-skinned, lace-slippered foot was juddering upon the boards.

  “Oh come, Hannah, come!” shouted Grace behind me.

  She ran toward the woman. Breath caught in my throat.

  Grace flounced, laughing, on the bed: “A wooden bed! It barely creaks!”

  The woman’s shoulders seizing, dropping. Her metal point pen falling onto the desk. It rolled with a dark, hollow sound off the edge.

  “To the best of your knowledge,” began the old woman, “what time can a lady expect the Express?”

  “The Express?” said I.

  “The mail carrier, dear? We are distant out here but the Orient, hardly.”

  “I couldn’t say the time for sure.”

  “Then know you,” said she, “Mr. Stuart of Quincy? Or know you my sister, Amelia Stuart?”

  “No ma’am, I am sorry,” I said to the woman.

  “Mr. Stuart, you might be aware, is my nephew? Amelia Stuart’s only boy? And mightn’t you guess we are scheduled to meet upon the wharf at six o’clock? Oh what will he think when he comes there, sweet boy, and his old Auntie Reeves isn’t waiting to meet him?”

  “Who are you talking to, Hannah?” said Grace.

  Didn’t answer her at first but drifted closer to the woman. My shadow, taller, moved ahead. It seemed to be attracted to the woman in the nightdress. And her face, which had been slurred at first and altogether indistinct, grew sharper the closer my shadow advanced until, all at once, it was painfully so.

  Some fever gripped her. Soaked and trembling. A U-shape of sweat on the front of her gown. Behold her red and haggard eyes. And a knob of a chin—a malicious chin, even—drawing the composite of those features like a funnel.

  An ache began to heighten in the lining of my lungs.

  “Which is why, don’t you see, I must catch the Express? To notify my nephew David? Does that not . . . . resonate with you, child?” said the woman. “Do I still seem to you such a dotty old fool?”

  “There is a woman,” said I. “Over there, at the mirror.”

  “A woman?” said Grace. Getting up from the bed. Hanging on the nearest post.

  “An older sort,” said I. “She is writing her nephew a letter.”

  “Is she terribly, terribly old?” said Grace. “Say, is she a hag or a sort of grand dame?”

  “Her face is . . . distinguished. A very fine face.”

  “What’s our grand dame’s name?” said Grace.

  The old woman seemed to hear Grace but her eyes stayed on me.

  “Lutheria E. K. Reeves?” said she. “Have you not heard my name said round? How my husband Mr. Chesterton Reeves owns the dandiest tailor’s in all of the Hub? You are familiar with him then? I trust your fathers wear his hats?”

  “Lutheria . . . E.K. . . . Reeves,” said I.

  The ache boiling up from my lungs to my chest and from there to my throat and up into my nose. Amassing itself, like the eye of a storm, around a fixed point in my forehead.

  “Hannah, are you all right?” asked Grace.

  “I think I might sit down.”

  “Would you like to sit here?” said Lutheria Reeves. Getting up from her seat with a curious spryness.

  And yet I found I could not budge.

  “Is my chair so distasteful to you?” said the woman. “Faint, then, wherever you wish, foolish girl!”

  How long I slept I could not say. Though it must have been two or more minutes at least. Grace had that look to her, you see: panic shading over into quiet dejection
. Thirty seconds was one thing, but two minutes, three. Who could be said to return from three minutes.

  What I saw first: two large, damp eyes, surmounted by a coil of hair.

  “Hannah—oh Hannah, you’re back,” shouted Grace. “Where in the world did you go, you queer thing?”

  The pain I felt had lessened some. An unspecific aching at the margins of my head.

  “You feared I were dead,” I said to Grace. “You feared I were dead and it made you so sad.”

  “Why of course I was, Hannah. Irreparably sad! What would you have me be, you goose?”

  And then I looked down at my dress. Web of snot was on the front. Or what I figured must be snot. But this was white and thicker stuff, like you might use to bake a cake. It was hanging in ropes from my bust to my bodice, trembling beneath my breath.

  “Grace. Oh Grace. I am disgusting.”

  “You,” she said, “are Grace’s goose.”

  Did I manage to smile. Then I said, “So I am.”

  “And a goose must think well of itself,” said my friend, “if it wants to be more than a bird, after all. A goose, Hannah Maier, must look in the mirror and ruffle its feathers, grey and white.”

  Q

  Thomas Unger, stable-boy. Trampled to death by a spooked draft horse. A garland of hoof-shaped dents and bruises. Gleaming spots among the gore.

  Mr. Isaac Hardy, prospector in fishes. Stung by an eel as he strolled on our reefs. The bottoms of his trousers cut away to vent the swelling. Mumbling, shivering. Red-nosed with ague.

  Abby Blackwell, walking circles. Clutching at her broken neck. Not completely askew but not quite hinging right. As though she were looking, forever, askance. In half-mourning now for her husband and son, died March of 1823, yet still the wound of all she’d lost could in no way have stung her the fresher.

  Relations always sordid ones. Grace and I discussed them often.

  Would describe them to Grace who would file them away to be given a part in the drama.

  Mr. Isaac Hardy and the widow Abby Blackwell were childhood lovers prized adrift. But she was a widow on false information. Mr. Hardy was alive! Yet Abby’s mother, Mrs. Reeves, she disapproved of Hardy’s people and thus concealed the knowledge of his being alive in hopes that she would marry in a lateral direction. Thomas Unger, of course, with his Teuton last name, was Blackwell and Hardy’s unmentionable child. And unbeknownst to all the players was Mrs. Reeves’ massive fortune, promised to her daughter when she passed from the vale but in reality kept from Mr. Hardy, which Mrs. Reeves effected through a clause in her will that gave her daughter sole inheritance.

  The best rooms for bearing witness to a thrilling confrontation were 7, 13 and 21, in that order.

  Q

  Every day that the roadways were clear that December I travelled downhill to the New Shoreham Inn. Wrapped to the eyes in my double-thick woolens and over that an old serge cape. Too stiff with accumulate damp to ripple, it acted as a kind of sail, and frequently I found myself among the frozen rutted marshes at the edge of the road. Blowing in from the east, whole climates of sea-spray that slowly soaked my clothes and hair. Out west of the cliffs, Providence and places like it. Like leviathans scared to show their humps. Birds taking wing from their homes in the cliff-face and fanning out over the water due east.

  Towelled off my hair and my face with my scarf. Explaining to Grace when she asked, and she did, that the cart that I had ridden in to get there was uncovered.

  “Then you must arrange for a covered one, Hannah. Come thaw out your bones by our fire.”

  The Fanshawe’s was a peerless fire. Burning for hours in its hearth of cut stone. Carpet and curtains and dresser wallpaper. Tables here and there throughout, each of them topped with a white latticed cloth. On one of them, to make an ashtray, the varnished and hollowed-out hoof of a deer. Paintings of people so out of the common, so different from me and my life up at Clayhead, they might’ve been characters in a book whose ending I would never read.

  Grace’s father there sometimes, drinking brandy or tea by the fire in his housecoat. Cordial enough, though not warm in the slightest. The only thing warm in that room was the fire.

  “Grace,” he said. “Hannah.” His eyes dark and heavy. A Meerschaum smoking on his knee.

  Mrs. Fanshawe in and out, possessed by a sort of directionless energy. Their charwoman Willa was thorough enough that Grace’s mother never cleaned, but Mrs. Fanshawe seemed to clean, mainly rearranging things, until she retired to read one of her novels in a chair catty-corner to her husband’s by the fire. She’d acknowledged me once, on the first day she met me. Had yet to repeat the gesture since. But then she barely spoke to Grace, except to command her around the apartment:

  “Your overshoes, Grace, are in the hall. Wouldn’t you love to remove them for mother?

  “The crystal decanter. Pour mother a drink? And don’t come down the stairs so fast?”

  The few times I saw her familiar with Grace she acted at pains or by some imposition. Calling Grace over, embracing her fiercely. Then letting her free with a quick dry kiss.

  After a while, they stopped showing in church. Though Grace would come herself sometimes. The place where they’d sat in the pews was saved for them until it began to grow narrow. Then closed.

  Miss Conant

  Under Fire

  March, 1850

  “What is it that bolsters this Spiritualism?” Shadrach Barnes asked the committee of men. “It comes from out of the mouths of babes and those same babes contend it true.”

  He swept his arm past where I sat. I felt raw and alone so high up on my chair though I mightn’t have been there at all, in a way, for I sensed the proceedings might carry themselves from beginning to end far removed from my presence.

  “I am told that the wage of a Roundot mineworker is five dollars a day,” Barnes said. “Five dollars a day, less the cost of his tools, to brave the darkness and the depths.”

  Amos Edwards, front and centre, who co-owned the mine with his brother Elijah, shifted a little in his seat and slowly crossed his legs.

  “Fanny, behind me, garners double. Double and then some,” said Barnes. “Six sittings a day, one hour for a sitting, two dollars an hour—that’s a twelve-dollar take. Fanny, a girl of seventeen, making two times as much as the grown men of Roundot, and then in the comfort of her parlour, where the air is as crisp and as clear as a bell. As crisp and as clear as a bell,” he repeated, “unless you count the Spirits in it.”

  Laughter took the small committee, none so loud as Amos Edwards. Shadrach Barnes paced back and forth, careful not to turn around.

  “Roundot might’ve called many men to its aid. I, of course, am only one. And being that man which Roundot chose, to wit, a disciple of science and reason, I have studied long and hard for three days past inside this room to determine for all, to the best of my knowing, whether Fanny Conant can communicate with spirits. My inquiries have focused on the rap, by and large, the so-called grammar of the spirits. The inhuman sound that they use to express the sort of words I’m saying now. Yet far too human, I should say. As I have tried, gamely, to prove. And yet which due to some vile cunning, some legerdemain unknown to me, Fanny Conant has concealed and still conceals how it is made. But what can we really expect from a girl who claims to commune with the dead?” said Barnes. “It is a question I ask, gentlemen, not of you, but rather instead of Fanny Conant, who has only to look inside herself to see the evil of her ways.”

  “Here, here,” said Amos Edwards, rising slightly from his chair.

  “Tell us what evils afflict her, Professor.”

  “I myself have developed a number of theories on how Miss Conant works the trick. Medically speaking,” Barnes said and gave pause to finger the mandible prongs of his scope, “the rappings themselves may be ascribed to one of several dislocations. The ankles, the toes, the hips,
the fingers, and most favourable to this end, sirs, the knees. Why the knees? Since wide, the knees. The knees are the broadest and thus the most pliable, specifically the tibia and femur,” he said. “The former grates upon the latter when the muscles either side of the former are exerted, producing a percussive sound, and ample force to jar a table. Fanny Conant effects—or affects, I should say—a quite ingenious jamboree. Fanny is for the bandstand, sirs, to herald with flautists the coming of spring!”

  The laughter came bolder this time, more relaxed. The gentlemen were settling in. I felt my eyes begin to dart, searching out the room’s egresses.

  Where were my parents? They had profited from me. And then they too had been too scared. Their daughter, held below the town and brought every night to the church of the elders. Or maybe they waited, distraught but resigned, in front of the great double doors in the dark. If I were to stand on the tips of my toes to see through the window surmounting the lintel, might I have seen them on their toes attempting as hard as they could to be near me?

  Shadrach Barnes was down below. He was binding my feet with a sort of thick bandage. He did not speak as he did this, and I could see only the crown of his head. He wrapped and clipped and tied the bandage without ever once looking up at my face.

  “Of course, when they do it in China,” he said, “the women inflict it on themselves. The effect of the binding is purely cosmetic. They like to go on slender feet.”

  “Be sure she’s not too nimble, sir,” said the Minister Willets, his eyes resting on me. “She isn’t far from getting up and bolting through that door.”

  “She is just about right, I think,” said Barnes, and tightened the knot that he’d made in the bandage.

  There was a fiddling at the door, and then it burst open, admitting the nighttime.

  Someone laughed invisibly.

  An object trailing smoke rolled in.

  And as it rolled, the door slammed shut, and the room was suspended a moment in silence. One of the aldermen gathered himself and he walked down the aisle to survey what it was. His footsteps sounded very loud. The object was still trailing smoke when he reached it and then it exploded in his face. It was fondly what the boys would call a sparkling torpedo.