Shadows in Summerland

  “Then you carve them,” said I, “so you will not forget them?”

  “I carve them because they are real. Real to me. And I would be foolish indeed to dismiss it.” She looked at me a moment, searching. “I spared you as long as I possibly could.”

  Q

  Father went out on the water that March and came home every night for supper. In need of a drink or sometimes four after hours upon hours on the newly warm ocean. Casting the fishnets and hand-over-handing and bailing them landward and casting again. And then they would rest at the end of the day while spilling the guts of those fish on the rocks. Father’s hook so slathered up that even wiped clean, left to dry overnight, it stunk the whole front of the house to high heaven.

  Nights I heard my parents seething. Louder sometimes than the wind. Until, in the small hours of the night, their anger turned into exhaustion and sadness.

  “Promise you won’t go,” said mother. “Promise you won’t get on that boat.”

  “Know how daft that sounds, Claudette? Sometimes—I swear—I might be living with a madwoman.”

  Left my bed and crossed the house. Came to stand before their door. Something, however, had warned me off knocking. Knocking or turning the knob. I could not.

  “Your hair is like a flock goats, moving down the slopes of Gilead. Your teeth are like a flock of ewes and every one bears each its twin. Your lips are like a crimson thread. Your lips are lovely,” said my father. “Your cheeks are like the halves of a pomegranate, darling, behind the fresh drew of your veil. “

  Strangers on the road to Shoreham. Lurking in its muddy streets. Furtive, silent, grizzled men half-shrouded in dirty mist. Watched the road like highwaymen who lacked the impetus to rob. Wandering between the buildings. Standing at the mouths of alleys. Perched on a hitch-post in front of the bait house. Wet hair obscuring embarrassed, pale faces. The same four or five, I became fairly certain. It was something I read in their posture, their height.

  Inklings of the shadow-Pieter—the one who didn’t fish with father.

  The curve of his hat-brim, the jag of his face, the seaweed twining in his hair.

  They were not like the spinster Lutheria Reeves, and they were not like Mr. Hardy.

  They were not like the widow Blackwell, untying her noose from the beams.

  Q

  Holding her high-collared dress at the neck in nesting rings of pearl and jet, two locks of hair— one blonde and one brown—crossed under glass like a family crest.

  Grace right beside me. Her eyes wide as mine.

  “Is she positively radiant this morning?” said she. “She must be now she’s heard the news.”

  “The news?”

  “That Mr. Hardy lives!”

  “Radiant,” said I. “But sad.”

  “Probably, she can’t believe it.”

  “She’s waited so long for this moment,” I said.

  “She daren’t believe it, of course,” Grace added.

  The widow stood and looped the noose. “Tell me, girl: will it be quick? How long till I am with my boys?”

  Farther I went into room 22. Up ahead, like ink, my shadow. Approaching the chair that the widow stood on, which shook a bit beneath her weight.

  “Is Mr. Hardly there as well?”

  “Presently he comes,” said I.

  “Who comes?” said our lady of silk and grey rope, the course of the noose through her hands never ceasing. “Bowen? John? Is that who comes? But oh why now, my cherished boys? Why now, as I stand on this chair unafraid, prepared at last to come to you?”

  Remembering my mother’s words: Hannah, I carve them because they are real. And I would be foolish indeed to dismiss it. And angry at her suddenly for presuming to tell me what was real. For keeping it from me, this blessing or curse, until she could no longer.

  I would know the widow Blackwell for myself, then.

  I would touch her.

  I would touch, let’s say, her brooch.

  Began to move toward where she stood.

  “When they meet at the heart of the room, they shall kiss. Kiss—and with such passion, Hannah!” This as Grace turned from the widow to face me. Catching my shoulders, her face very close.

  And before I was conscious of having desired it, so pure and so simple a thing, we were kissing. No more than a second. The briefest of pressures. Grace’s lips and mine, conjoined. A humid smell like baking bread or wine or brandied raisins.

  Bliss.

  And a closeness I sought to increase, bit by bit. Until her body gave a hitch.

  Grace pulled away from my lips and stepped back with something dangling from her chin.

  And here came the itch, rising up from my lungs. The tide of pain not far behind. And looking up I realized that I had been foolish to gainsay my mother for three feet away, standing full in my shadow, was the widow Abby Blackwell looking me in the face. Her head bent at angles it mightn’t have bent at. The bruise on her neck a deep purple up close. Tiny globes of nervous sweat were standing out across her brow.

  I veered toward the window away from my friend. Who was wiping her chin. Looking at me in horror. The stuff I’d sneezed or spit on her in a sort of sticky web between her fingers.

  Here was the cold dingy street of New Shoreham. But in that room the sun was bright. So bright it meant to break my eyes. So bright that Abby Blackwell, now reflected in the casement, was blurred about her darkened edges. And Grace behind her, coming toward me, somehow not squinting at all in the glare.

  Mumler and Child

  August, 1859

  Child and I met on a blustery night in the Atwood and Bacon Oyster House.

  I sat at the bar with a brandy and water—it was my second of the hour—and was blessed with a view of Child struggling inside in his soaking greatcoat with his hair in his face, one hand wrenching at his collar, the other one absently holding the door so wind and rain came swirling in and a pinched deputation of waiters rushed up to make the bumbler more at home. He noticed me, sat on the neighbouring stool. Lightning raked across the sky and imprinted on the surface of the sidewalk-facing windows. In the stutter that came before the thunder, through curtains on curtains of slant-falling rain, a couple strolling arm in arm disentangled themselves to dash for cover. Child, who was sponging his face with a napkin, followed my gaze to the couple and smiled.

  “Enjoying the scenery, are we, Willy—safe and tight and dry?” he said.

  “But wouldn’t it make a splendid picture. Lovers flee the angry gods.”

  Child scoffed at this. “Man and woman in a storm. What have the gods and their anger to do with it?”

  “Why that was poetry,” I said. “And poetry must mark its passage. The artist—the true one—must never depict except for what he feels or sees.”

  Child said, “Baudelaire, if I’m not mistaken. Let nature speak for itself—there’s another.”

  “Who said that?”

  “I did,” said Child. “And every picture-maker from Bogardus to Daguerre.”

  “Bogardus—your teacher?”

  “The same,” answered Child. He flagged down the barkeep: “What he’s drinking, please.”

  “Let nature speak for itself,” I continued. “Doesn’t that strike you a tad over-literal?”

  “Certainly,” said Child. “Why not?” He cut a playful eye at me. “I should say you’ve used that book, so eager to out with opinions and theories.”

  “Here and there. About,” I said.

  “About, mostly, I’d say,” said Child.

  “All of that aside,” I said, “why shouldn’t the artist inflect on his art? Infuse it with his unique essence? Why shouldn’t he devote himself to being an artist above everything? To making a living, yes, there’s that, but also enriching that living with something—some part of himself that he cannot divorce or distance
from the thing he sees.”

  “A story for you about tetchy old Abe.”

  “The darksome man revealed,” I said.

  “Hardly a warlock, if that’s what you mean. And hardly cloaks himself in shadow. In fact he is the opposite: a straightforward man of essentials. Of facts. When Abe began to tutor me, initially, at least—”

  “Tutor you in what?” I said. “I’d thought he insisted you go it alone.”

  “That was photography, strictly,” said Child. “Before that he served as my life-drawing teacher at the College of Art right here in Boston. The camera was for him back then a sort of photogenic pencil. He practised in secret, a dubious hobby. I don’t think anybody knew. So it was necromancy of a sort, I suppose. Though it was hyper-scientific, hyper-real, hyper-rare.”

  “And when did he usher you into the circle—reveal to you his eldritch dabblings?”

  “He didn’t reveal them at first,” said Child. “Bogardus had us sketching snowflakes.”

  “From life?” I said.

  “See, that was it. It wasn’t really life at all. We were meant to imagine—approximate—snowflakes according to what he called our fancy. And the outcome was always imperfect, all wrong. Like pie-shaped parlour lace, our flakes.”

  “And yours?”

  “Mine were best in the class,” Child said. “And yet still lacking by his standards. But then one night in late December he pulled me aside after class had let out and he led me out into a terrible storm. Flakes were falling all around. Real and symmetrical ones—perfect flakes. Perfect and yet we had sketched them all wrong. Have you ever seen snowfall up close?”

  “On my nose.”

  “I mean, beneath a microscope.”

  I think I almost laughed at him, but then I saw he spoke in earnest.

  “It looks like something wrought in iron. Or else the finest fine-spun glass. Indestructible-seeming and yet so frail . . .” He returned to himself with a sip of his brandy. “At any rate he had me sit. On a commonplace bench on The Common itself. It was one of those evenings—hellaciously cold. We were the only souls abroad. Abe held out one black-gloved hand, contrived to settle there: one flake. And he told me to draw. And he sounded, well—angry. And so I drew, slowly at first, until that lovely flake was gone. It had melted on the leather, you see—disappeared. So Abe caught another and told me: Draw faster. And I tried—oh, I tried!—but I couldn’t, you see, for this new flake had melted too. I’d no more been able to capture its essence than Abe had the poor thing itself, in his palm. It was,” his voice hoarsened, “a glorious mystery.”

  “But photography solved all that?”

  He nodded. “To his and my thinking it changed more than art—more than made science of art or vice-versa. It had changed the very terms of existence, we were certain. Changed even—dare we think it—death. Lovers flee the angry gods. . . .” He said it with a hint of mocking.

  I felt my mouth projecting down. “Yes,” I said. “What of them, sir?”

  “The poetry, Willy, is in the process. The process is inside the camera. The camera is the best rebuke to all our man-dreamt foolishness. It captures the mystery without all the meddling!—our human need for explanation. For that is what poetry is, in effect: a futile explanation of what cannot be explained.”

  This time I caught the barkeep’s eye.

  Our oysters had arrived or were arriving at the table in a foul and sloshing sea of brine and as Child fished for one, then another, to drink them, I quietly ordered not two but three brandies, planning to fob off the extra on Child when the order was brought and could not be recalled.

  “Photography doesn’t need poets,” said Child. “All that it properly needs are photographers.”

  Poor Willy Mumler, a man of few friends. I’m guessing why may be divined.

  I have long been a lone timber wolf, you might say, howling my contentment at the moon’s yellow vagueness. Scrappier, scurvier wolves come abreast, sniffing my backside, the pads of my claws and I have a mind to draw blood and regroup unless the courtship can be made on my terms.

  But I didn’t strike out against Algernon Child. I sat and listened to his nonsense. I sat and listened to this man rail against the elations that I had conceived.

  If only I’d heeded the lupine in me then all that came after might have been avoided.

  Miss Conant Cast in Lead

  March, 1850

  My first couple of hours in the basement that night I lay on my back with my eyes on the ceiling. The room was intensely dark and airless. I could not see my lifted hand.

  I woke, suddenly, to a key in a lock. Someone came on in the light of the hall. He cut a bedraggled shadow in the door, like a man weighted down by the heft of his life. His hair and the long pointy beard that he wore rendered blonde in the light and the room went to blackness.

  Then I heard him in the darkness, edging his way toward the bed.

  I tried to back up but he came on too fast. And yet he didn’t use his hands. He used just himself, his own bulk, to tip toward me, and he buried his head in my breast like a cat.

  I accepted the weight and we lay, like stacked wood. He curled a leg up and then over my hip, his face still nuzzling in my breast. He didn’t kiss or bite, just pressed and possibly smelled me, his nose in the fabric.

  I saw him through feeling his warmth and his weight.

  I saw him though he was not there.

  I felt the rise and fall of him, the vast proportions of his chest. I wanted to stop him, to thrust him away and tried to for a time, I think, my arms reaching out for some fixed point of purchase.

  “You lovely child,” he said to me. “You lovely, lovely child.”

  He moaned.

  “Tell me I am small,” he whispered. “Tell me I am barely there.”

  I cradled his face and I peered at it closely.

  His eyes were shut tight, like a child in night terror. I ran my fingers over them: the eyeballs lightly spasming, the lashes heavy on the cheek. I touched his nose, his mouth, his beard and all the while he lay so still. His eyes began to open slowly. He seemed to want to see me there.

  But then, before his iris showed, I had lowered his head to my breast.

  Q

  The inquiry continued for another two weeks. This was what they told me after. But a week, I found out, is no longer a week when the days no longer feed each other.

  That was all it was: existence.

  I heard the feet of youngsters, skidding, the marching of the teachers as they gathered them to hand. Sometimes a squeal or a bark of commandment sifted through the boards like dust. Some of the boys, I could only assume, were the very same ones who had lobbed the torpedoes.

  One of the teachers from the school would bring me what remained of suppers. She was a fat and buxom woman who put me in mind of a South Indies icon, gliding along despite her girth, then crossing her arms to watch me eat.

  When the sounds of the schoolhouse went silent above me, the wives of the men of the spirit committee would come to clean my face and hair.

  “My dear,” said Shadrach Barnes one night. “Today you must give up the trick.”

  But he spoke without heat. And his words, they lacked purpose. He only seemed to say them as a matter of course. So Amos Edwards stepped in then to take up Shadrach Barnes’ slackness. He walked along the table with a queer erratic violence as if his movements were not his.

  “To me,” he said, “the greatest mystery is what Fanny Conant is trying to prove. The girl speaks in sophistries, riddles, evasions. Sometimes she declines to speak! Yet what she wants is clear enough. There is precious little mystery in Miss Conant’s motivations.” And the coal-baron turned to address me directly, facing away from the men of the crowd. “Frederick Conant works my mine. Frederick Conant is your father. And Frederick has come into more than a penny since when you fir
st beheld these spirits.”

  Roughly his fingers encircled my ankle and dragged it, wriggling, from the stage. I nearly lost my balance then, tottering upon the chair.

  Barnes came on a couple of steps.

  Edwards presented my foot to the crowd, jerking me down bit by bit from the stage.

  “This cheap, vile enchantress,” he said. “This soubrette—”

  “—I say, sir,” said Shadrach Barnes.

  “You say what?” said Edwards, spinning. All of the archness was gone from his face. “You say a great deal, Doctor Barnes, but what of it. What has any of it come to while we sit here like fools!”

  “You are tired,” said Barnes. “I understand. We are all of us equally tired, Mr. Edwards. And yet we are all of us men, after all. Gentlemen, once upon a time.”

  Amos Edwards cleared his throat. “Of course,” he said and stepped away.

  Q

  Shadrach took me down that night but did not stay to lie beside me. He seemed at once protective of me and terribly worried what others might think.

  And then I awoke to a scratch at the lock. Soon he’d be crossing the room to sit down. And yet he seemed timid or possibly drunk—his key, I mean, the way it scratched. They had gotten him drunk. They had put notions in him. Find where she sleeps and defile her, they had told him.

  The person who entered was not him.

  This person was thinner, and shorter, and balder. He moved jerkily, as if he were nervous, as if he were conscious of me through the dark.

  “Say your name,” I told the shape.

  I heard it catch a breath, then nothing.

  It turned sideways and closed the door. There was something familiar in its profile. I braced myself against the bed, curling my hands into claws.

  That was when Amos Edwards’ face loomed like an unhealthy moon from the dark. His hair stood in wings along his head. His teeth were yellow, strong and clenched. He was breathing roughly from his nose, with pauses in between the breaths. Before he even reached the bed I smelled the liquor in his pores.