Shadows in Summerland

  The alderman yelled and shot upright. He clutched his eyes and limped away. A couple of local Roundot boys separated from the darkness beyond the open door.

  They carried torpedoes of all shapes and sizes, ones to lob and ones to hold, and they lit them at once, as in some ceremony, and came on holding flames like monks.

  The women, who’d been standing in the back of the room, who I’d hardly been aware were there, cried and came forward, a tide of them, running, to tamp the things before they went. The mine-owner, Edwards, looked shrewdly content. He leaned and whispered something in the county judge’s ear.

  Shadrach Barnes stood patiently, his hand upon his chin.

  The pack of torpedoes went up, a sortie. The women, too late, fled clutching their bonnets. The room was filled with brilliant shapes and oppressively violent cracks and bangs. I stared for a moment, unable to move. And then I remembered my feet, lashed together.

  Sweat was spreading through my clothes and trickling down my bandaged legs.

  Shadrach Barnes was still, like me. He was standing at the head of the long line of tables and watching the proceedings down the middle of the aisle. He stood with his arms crossed, his necktie bunched up, strange, wild lights playing over his face.

  “Now wasn’t that a proper shock?” said one of the wives, who had mounted the table and was holding protectively onto my arm. “I trust you’re holding up all right through all of these hooligan antics, Miss Conant.”

  Please don’t make me go downstairs, I tried to convey with my eyes, without speaking, but the woman would not look at me, as if she’d been instructed.

  I tried to pull my right arm free, but the woman who held it was uniquely strong so I hauled myself off of my chair into space, not caring what happened, just wanting my freedom, and I went swinging out in a sort of drunk circle anchored by the strong one’s arm. A second woman joined the first upon the stage and wrenched me back, assisted by a stouter third. I kicked with my legs but they targeted no one, just lifted me slightly off the ground.

  “This isn’t right,” I think I yelled. My voice was unthinkably loud in the silence. “This isn’t right. This isn’t right.”

  “Do not be alarmed,” said Shadrach Barnes. “Miss Conant is afflicted with the bilious derangement. It is yet another symptom of the mediomania that compels her to sit there and lie to our faces. Spiritualism, womanism, bloomerism, abolition—all variants of the selfsame affliction. And now, gentlemen, they have driven her mad.”

  Everyone nodded thoughtfully as I was dragged across the room.

  “Go easy now, miss,” said one of the women. “You’ll only make it harder on yourself if you fight.”

  “Motion to reconvene,” said Barnes, “when I have dredged this mystery further. Thanks to you boys for the most rousing show. And to the rest of you, goodnight.”

  Mumler at Home

  August, 1859

  In the nineteen years that I’d lived there and even now I do no longer, I am incapable of entering the Charles River house where my parents have lived for three decades without holding my breath for as long as I can, my knuckles jammed into my nostrils.

  It is not any smell in particular, reader, that drives me to blunt my olfactory organ, as you will doubtless be expecting based on other tales you’ve read—tales of little innocents imprisoned in some manor where they are subject to the tortures of a cruel, demented aunt and who only need smell the linseed oil that auntie used to dry her letters to send them headlong into fugues of remembrance from which they can never completely return.

  No—since you ask, I am not one of those.

  It is nothing so disturbing or evocative as that which makes me plug my nostrils up. Though I have often wished it were given the doldrums of my boyhood where a breath of the gruesome or macabre would have been better than nothing at all.

  Which is what my parents’ house smelled like, not to say it had no smell; it was rather a medley, all woven together, so no smell rose above the rest.

  First would come that of my father’s meerschaum, a resinous and bitter reek that was strongest in the parlour and the bedroom where he slept. Next came my mother, a sour-sweet putrescence like some garden fruit in suspended decay, a polite simile for the gin and then laudanum which she had been using to temper her pain since the “pond incident,” several years ago now. And weaving in among these notes, if the rare parlour casement was open that day, was the smell of the river gone brackish in summer or faintly metallic in the cold, along with the wind-carried smell of the hospital: orchids, ammonia, alcohol, death. And then the dust, dust everywhere, little bits of us Mumler’s flaking off day by day, collecting on the ceilings and the stones in the walls like an extension of our claim on that place, of our unhappiness.

  I would venture to say, if it isn’t forgone, that this is the place where The Sadness was born.

  On the day that I speak of, these smells became one, in the same hanging cloud, when I entered the house. My father wouldn’t be at home, I knew from his twelve-hour days at the shop, which would give me some much-needed time with my mother whom I hadn’t called on in a number of weeks. Her murky bedroom was upstairs, separated from my father’s by a span of dark hallway. Thusly had they always slept. Or ever since the fateful night that they battered their bodies together, made me. And it seemed darker now midday than Boston proper was at night, the churchlike panes above the stairs veiled with blood-red floor-length curtains, giving the hallway a battlefield haze—an artificial, gory twilight.

  My mother’s door was locked of course, so like a good boy Willy knocked.

  She opened the door in her robe de chambre, a yellow affair in dire need of a wash, and the woman inside it hollow-eyed, with a malarial air of intensity.

  “Oh, Willy. Entre, entre,” she said, running a corpse-maiden’s hand through my hair. “I was just—reading, thinking, breathing. How many breaths, dear, we must take in a day.”

  “Are you feeling all right today, mother? Not worse?”

  “Not worse and not better. Not well, anyway. My arm, you see. It comes and goes.”

  “Of course,” I said. “It must be awful.”

  In the winter of 1855, my mother slipped and broke her arm on an icy embankment beside Walden Pond. I was eighteen years old and I saw the whole thing. It shook me a little, I’m happy to say. A host of bystanders, including myself, were gathered around her when daddy returned with three cones of chestnuts side-stacked in his arms. (Mother’s chestnuts went to me, which made the evening seem worthwhile.) I knelt beside her in the snow and clung to her hand through the height of her pain. She lay abed the next few weeks in a fog of good-natured self-pity, slept mostly.

  “I’ve been to the chemist’s,” I said.

  “Have you really?”

  “You knew I’d have been to the chemist’s.” I smiled.

  “I rather thought you had,” she said, backing away to sit down on the bed. “But then again, Willy, it could be you hadn’t. It could be you hadn’t and nothing in hand and I’d have been forced to abide in your company.”

  “Well today I can offer you both,” I said, beginning to reach inside my pocket but mother got up jerkily and stumbled across the carpet toward me.

  “Have you slimmed a bit, Willy, since last time I saw you?”

  She pressed my arm back to my side, where it hung.

  “A mother knows, Willy. A mother takes note. Your clothes seem to hang on your frame, well, more smartly.”

  I drew the vial out of my coat and approached her, the cork-end extended.

  “Perhaps I’ve not been sleeping much. I’m on a new hobby of late,” I informed her. “Now can’t you kindly take this please—”

  But mother proceeded to race to the curtain where she stood with her hand trembling on the chord.

  “Here’s the problem, dear. You drift. Your mind is defective somehow,
I suppose. So many talents, so little commitment. What would your father have to say?”

  “What wouldn’t he say?” I answered dully.

  “He’d say, wake up!” she shrieked at me, drew the bedroom curtain wide and cackled as light deluged the room. “He’d say, wake up, and look around. Your life’s estate lies here—before you.”

  She seemed barely able to withstand the sun, so fiercely did it flood at first and stood in a sort of perpetual wince, half wilting away from and half leaning into the smoulder of hot July light from the street.

  I tossed the vial up, let it turn in the air and land with the lightest of smacks in my palm. But before I could do this again she ran toward me and sheltered the vial in the cave of her hand.

  “I accept!” said my mother. “I will keep it safe, Willy. On reserve for the really bad days, don’t you know.”

  “But not before you’ve tallied up.”

  “No, never before that,” she said. “Though I seem to need all in my arsenal lately to make good work of just one column. But enough about me and my weaknesses, Willy. Methinks that you pity your mummy too much! Where are the ladies—the beautiful ladies—who are destined to steal your regard clean away?”

  “They are here and there,” I said. “But you, mother, are everywhere.”

  “Oh Willy. Don’t sport. I am just in one spot. I have been in one spot—right here—for some months.”

  And then suddenly she grew silent, my mother, as though she had remembered something and her boudoir glaze of resignation seemed to leave her all at once. It was replaced by something strange and yet something I felt I knew, a sort of half-remembered fear whose ghost flitted across her eyes like a swimmer in moonlight traversing a pond but not without ripples disturbing the dark, fanning to the farther shores.

  “Poor courageous, kindly thing.” I took up her arm and made with her to bed. “Let us get you snug and sound and if the pain is in you dosed. And then—”

  “—hands off. Hands off, I said!” She wrenched from my grasp with fear plain in her eyes. “I can put myself to bed! Well can I withstand such pains! If I need you to help me with either,” she cried, “by God I will tell you myself, horrid boy.”

  Then she went limp. Mother swooned and I caught her. I caught her and brought her, a-mumble, to bed. En route, I felt her untrimmed nails scratching along the inside of my forearm. I drew back the covers, and tucked her beneath them, and levered her head to support it with pillows. And when her eyes began to flutter, I poured from her pitcher of cloudy night-water and sweetened the murk with four droplets of laudanum.

  This cupful I poured in the purse of her lip then titled her head back until it went down.

  With mother asleep or nearly so, I tried to tidy up the room. First I pulled the curtains closed to spare her eyes that wicked light. Next I collected the old drinking glasses, took them downstairs to the kitchen and slopped them. Last I amassed all the blood-besmirched tissues and gave them to the wastebasket then returned to the bed, where I re-ensconced mother, smoothing down the counterpane and brushing back her sticky hair.

  And yet it was strange I felt nothing at all apart from the urge to keep on, to keep moving. I’d attended, delivered, assured and made good. I must get on to other things.

  And that is what sets me apart, I suppose, makes me the kind of man I am.

  Hannah Not a Moment Ago

  February, 1859

  Grace and I along the cliffs while mother watched us from the porch.

  Usual talk along usual lines: the bachelor. The widow. The orphan. The will. The evil hag athwart them all.

  But none of them were in that place. The freezing, arid land unrolled.

  Yet I pretended they were there to fill my ears with Grace’s laughter.

  “She comes for you tonight,” cried Grace. “With her imbecile’s sleeves and a face like Ophelia.”

  “Fibber, she does not,” cried I.

  She was running ahead of me, calling behind her. “Seek out Mr. Hardy then!”

  “Seek who?”

  “Seek Mr. Hardy. So he may protect you.”

  I caught up to Grace and ran in very near. So near, in fact, our elbows touched. Peeling away while she laughed and cried out: “Beware the black spinster, Lutheria Reeves.”

  Later, ran to rags, we stood. The both of us screening our eyes, looking inland.

  “Do you think she can see us?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “She seems to see more than most people, your mother.”

  Knowing this true, I resolved to say nothing.

  “How lovely that must be,” said Grace.

  “That my mother is able to see us?”

  “No,” answered Grace. “To be seen. To be noticed. I sometimes fear my mother can’t.”

  “And yet they love you, Grace,” said I. “Even I can see that much.”

  “Your parents?” said Grace, breaking into a smile.

  “It was your parents I meant,” I said.

  “We don’t choose them, you know. Our parents. And yet they appear, for all that, to choose us.”

  “I have chosen you,” said I. And when Grace didn’t answer: “Just as you’ve chosen me.”

  A queer sort of smile on her face when I said that. A mirthless exposure of teeth.

  “Then I shall take you at your word. Take you and not let you go. Not ever.”

  And she ran toward the ocean, displaying her arms, whirling around at the edge, circling back.

  Q

  From the edge of our porch here were Grace and my father. Cresting the rise that wound down into town. Hunkered figures stamped in tandem. Father sawed the reins and cursed. What, I imagined, would they say to each other, hollering over the wind off the mountain.

  Walking backward through the door, the threshold creaked beneath my foot.

  “Hannah, come in here a moment,” said mother.

  I paused at the edge of the room, looking down.

  On a bench turned away from the table she sat. The bucket wedged between her calves. Flurries of soap from the figure she carved unwinding slowly down the air.

  “You sapped yourself but good today.”

  “And Grace?” said I.

  “A peach,” said she. “But Hannah, I wonder.” Blew soap from her hands. “Do you think she can see them the same as you do?”

  “She sees.” Arms crossed. “Grace sees.”

  “Grace sees because Grace is your friend,” said my mother.

  “But it’s only a game. A stupid story. I’ll tell it to you, if you like.”

  “It is no game. So hold your tongue. Come sit over here as I asked you to, child.”

  I did as she said. On a chair next to her. She continued to shape out the figure unyielding. “Now what is it, Hannah, that you and Grace see?”

  “Wonderful people,” said I.

  “What kind?”

  “Sad people, mostly. And some mad. Others of them do not speak.”

  “I trust you remember the girl,” said my mother. “The one that we saw long ago, you and I.”

  “Out there?” said I. Motioning to the window, beyond which stretched the ocean dunes.

  “That poor child had lost her way.”

  “She died,” said I.

  “She had,” said mother. “Died—and yet you saw her, child.”

  “Why is it only us that see?”

  “If I knew that.” Stopped carving. Hard and pale and very still. “It’s the ken that decides, I expect,” she continued. “Picks us each and every one. Touches us, child. Right here. On the eyes. And ever after that, we see.”

  “And the others,” said I, “who do not speak. The ones who watch, are they dead too?”

  “Mostly dead,” said she. “God keep them.”

  “Like Lazarus, then?
”

  “Like that.”

  “Mostly dead?”

  She paused. “Yes, child.”

  “So, part alive?”

  Knife angled down. Hands in her lap as she thought what to tell me. “When Lazarus was taken ill and all were sure that he would die. Not dead, mind you, but very ill. With Martha and Mary watching over. Jesus”—she dusted off her work—“bearing down hard on the city of Bethany. Tell me, child: what was he then?”

  “Before Jesus touched him?”

  She nodded.

  “I can’t . . .”

  “You can. Think, child.”

  “Alive and dead?”

  “He was neither.” She smiled. “He was nothing at all. And yet he looked like me or you. This is one of those,” said she.

  Brushing the last of the soap-dust away. Revealing a man in a hat and galoshes. A man whom I instantly knew.

  It was Pieter.

  “You saw him, child. The same as I. And yet we know: he walks and breathes. Pieter,” said she, “will be your first. Pieter is for you to keep.”

  She handed me Pieter, still grainy with shavings. And this a highly detailed likeness. Right down to the kelp woven into his hair, the vertical jag of his nose and his lips scrolling from beneath his hat. The crown of that hat a bit rumpled in dampness. The face itself puzzled, a little bit sad.

  “Is Pieter sick?” I asked. “Like Lazarus?”

  Turning the figure about in my hands.

  “He may be sick. Or injured.”

  “Or very, very old,” said I.

  “Yes, that too,” said she. Down-looking. Shaking the soap from out her skirts. “Or Pieter may be well. Quite healthy. Until one day not too far off . . .”

  “Pieter will be dead,” said I. “Dead but alive, like poor, poor Thomas.”

  “Perhaps undead describes it better. That is what Pieter is now. Undead.”

  “But what if I keep him safe and dry?”

  “It won’t do him a bit of good. This doll which is yours, which you hold in your hands, is only for you to remember him by.”