Shadows in Summerland

by Adrian Van Young

But Bill was intent on the now-exposed slide, which I drew from the back of the box and submerged. His soft dark eyes worked tirelessly, tracking the plate as it moved through the air.

  “A good long soak is all,” I said. “And Bill will emerge, if the mixture is proper.”

  “How much do you charge for them cards de visit?”

  “So Bill is keener than he seems.”

  “I live in the city of Boston, don’t I?”

  “It’s cartes de visite,” I inflected with relish. “And I have not devised a sum. How much would you charge,” I asked Bill, “were you me?”

  He considered the prospect. “Fifteen for a dozen.”

  “A little steep for novice work.”

  “Speak for yourself, Mist’ Mumler,” said Bill. “I may be a Negro, but novice I ain’t.”

  We had carried out maybe a dozen exposures before the sun hovered in force over Athens. Between us the process felt glad and ecstatic, like brothers at play in a father’s wardrobe, inciting each other: just one more silk necktie, just one more wool greatcoat before he comes in.

  After the final exposure we sat in the midst of my new photographic equipment and shared what was left of a bottle of bourbon I kept on reserve for occasions like these. We sat for what seemed like a very long time, drinking eighty-five-proof with the sun on our cheeks, not really even getting drunk so much as just feeling the bite of the liquor, our shirtsleeves bundled up, eyes raw.

  As though taking its cue from the shift in the light, The Sadness expanded, enormous in me.

  “Have you ever lost someone you loved?” I asked Bill.

  “Name for me a man who hasn’t.”

  “But I am asking you,” I said, with a bit of a barb to my voice. “You, Bill. My cousin Cora died. Quite young. And I could’ve saved her but then, well, I didn’t and I suppose I sometimes feel . . .”

  “As if you had done it yourself,” said Bill Christian.

  “Indeed.” I glanced at him. “Sometimes.”

  “How was it she died, Mist’ Mumler?” he said.

  “She drowned, Bill,” I told him. “In that very ocean.” I nodded at the east window. “I was twelve and she was ten. Holiday in Nantasket. Our parents were drunk. We were swimming, my cousin and I and—she vanished. We never even found her bones.”

  Bill had been watching the light cultivate, moving quietly, mutably over the boards and he looked at me now from the sides of his eyes.

  “My mama,” he said. “Coming here, from down South.”

  “You lost her at what age?”

  “Can’t say.”

  “Can’t say how old—”

  “No, sir,” said Bill. “I’m twenty-eight or nine, I reckon. But then I can’t say that she’s dead, well, at all.” And here he appeared to grow wordlessly angry; he dazzled the world with his smile, sipped his bourbon. “You asked me had I lost someone and I just told you that,” he said.

  “Care to tell me how?” I said.

  “We were near to Ohio, it come down upon us. The men we had with us was certified scoundrels. White men, river men. Ferrymen, they were called. But mostly just jackals, dyed white in their fur. Like as not they’d sell us back the very place we’d run off from or cut down the lot of us, triple their shares. Toss our bodies in Old Muddy. And camping out there on some sandbar some night between Kentucky and Ohio, mama set her mind on something. But when she waked up, shaking daddy and me, holding the key to our chains in her hand . . . And it was like she knew,” said Bill. “But wouldn’t—dursn’t—pass the cup.” Bill Christian winced and licked his lips. “We were already fighting upriver without her.”

  So Bill and I were not so different—fugitives of former lives. The sun drew focus on the pane and the dew burned away, irretrievably lost.

  The best picture I took that day has Bill with his hat pointed up in his lap, his torso tending slightly left, the smile he has brandished to fend off the world just beginning to show at the sides of his mouth; an unassuming, lovely smile. The other ten pictures were botches, I fear—or anyway not up to snuff. I disposed of them quickly, with flinching remonstrance, in the dimly lit alley that bordered the shop.

  Mr. Thumb is on the scene in most of these aborted prints, seeming to glare at Bill out of the shadows.

  In one, he hovers at Bill’s shoulder. While in yet another he lurks at Bill’s feet. While another one still has him waiting off-stage for rehearsal to end and the show to begin, furtive in his shroud of night-fog, studying my every move.

  Message Department

  What of these companions she keeps, our familiar, amid the dim of wintry rooms? We speak of the widow and so of her sons, the lighthouse keeper in his cap, the eel-stung surveyor marooned under bedclothes, the lady at her long dispatch, and so we ask these broken ones how they can suffer to be seen when they especially and alone can never know the mortal cost? And ask again, we shambling dead, we pious and we unconsoled, if Hannah of unending eyes can see the precipice she toes? Or Fanny Conant in her cell prevailed upon by men to speak, can you bleak mortals comprehend the heresy of Fanny’s creed that fond and long departed love might raise its bones and thenceforth be? While in among the darksome dens that heal the wanting souls of men, what strange affection all the same this Mumler courts in wanton girls who have no name or provenance beyond their office of an hour? In hunger sharp and fancy dull where goes he, now, upon his way? Up the hill and down again, past plots where paupers fall to dust, what sweet removal from this world does Mumler in motion, in furious motion, in ruthless and furious motion pursue?

  Hannah at the Wharf-Side

  September, 1859

  Boston from the start was this: a fleetness of shades without object or aim. So many I could scarcely count. For every being made of flesh, a double of shadow beside or behind him.

  We had been there, my mother and I, for five months.

  We lived on the wharf among fish and more fish. How the first place we saw on the boat coming in was also where we made our home. We had set up a stall, which was profitless, really.

  It sold not fish by statuettes.

  Drifts of soap behind our stall. Making squeaky our floors. In our shoes and our hair. Trails of it sliding from our skirts and leading the way to our door, in the evening.

  Shaped like children, family pets. Like heads of state. Like former lovers.

  Also, that first month ashore, a fine remembrance of my father. Standing spraddle-legged in boots. Fishhook hanging from his hand. By a narrowing thread from the top of his shoulder, the net of spring salmon that he’d never caught. His salt-stung eyes. His puckered face, a barge for albatross and gulls. Father shrinking in the rain, where mother had placed him, his visage. To melt.

  Suds of him bubbling into the gutter.

  With the weather still warm we extended the tenting. Slept on palettes in the back.

  But poverty is seldom slow. It tends to happen just like that. Such was the case with my mother and I. With winter coming on, we starved.

  Old potatoes. Blackened bread. Rusty well water perfumed with an onion.

  Mother hardly seemed to mind. It was more than just pride. In my mother, a relish. A life of privation a life to be lived.

  Could barely get out of my nightgown those days for fear of looking at my ribs.

  Mother’s cameo necklace occurred to me often. Sole precious thing not of soap that we owned. Its mould of jet. Its silver backing. Its long romantic, linking chain.

  Mother only took it off for fear of tarnish when she bathed. Her single monthly luxury, in a tub loaned to her by the fruit-seller’s son. The water she’d heat with the driftwood she found along the harbour’s filthy beach, some of it so sodden through she must burn other wood to dry wood to be burned. And then she would sit in her loan of a washtub, washcloth draped upon her eyes.

  The necklace was the only thing.
<
br />   I could filch it. Or filch it and hide it for later. Could claim it was stolen. Could tell her: a shame. Exchange it for money and money for food. Not sustenance but human food.

  For we were humans after all. Not Maiers. Not bitches of Satan. But women.

  At the end of the month, as she soaked in her bath, I stalked the necklace like a cat. It hung on a nail just in back of the tub.

  With her long ropy arms hanging over the lip, my mother shifted, sighed, subsided.

  Last time I had disobeyed her, Grace had flinched from my embrace. Grace had flinched, and I had swooned, the Widow Blackwell in my face, and everything from that point on was a long falling out of the life I once knew, and I would be foolish, colossally foolish, to slip that necklace off its nail.

  Q

  Had never once strayed from the wharf-side, our home. Had heard tell of Boston, but never once seen it. But now I was in it, I could not ignore it. Rousting me from every side.

  Yes, had heard tell of Boston when we lived at Clayhead. Mostly from menfolk, who’d gone there with fish. How two men in Boston had twelve years been neighbours—waked and slept and ate twelve years—while only in the thirteenth year had come to discover, in fact, they were brothers. Beaten by the city into numbness of each other.

  Now I saw how this could be.

  Granite, puddingstone, and brick. Awnings striped and checked and solid. Ragged, evil-looking churches. Hotels as high as the heavens were low. Mansard friezes so lifelike they squirmed with change as you approached. And vendors, vendors everywhere. Of leather, tobacco, candy, nuts, men’s top hats and women’s scarves. Rows and bins of children’s toys, as finely wrought in wood and paint as the figures that we carved in soap.

  The cameo necklace surprisingly heavy, tolling down between my breasts.

  Bostonian at twelve o’clock. Boy a couple years my junior. Trousers and shirtsleeves, a charcoal grey vest. Face gaunted and red with cold.

  Foot traffic broke and flowed around us.

  “Has missus got the time?” said he.

  “I haven’t got a watch,” said I.

  “I beg your pardon.” Second stranger. Halting then veering around me, lips clenched.

  “How can you tell by the moon, then?” said he. “Isn’t there some way to tell by the moon?”

  “I’m sorry, but I must keep walking,” I said and whirled around to take my leave, and heard back behind me the questioning voice: “What’s the deviled problem, then? Aren’t I fit to know the time?”

  Turned to watch the dead boy fade behind a veil of jostling bodies.

  I stopped at the corner of Washington Street. Admiring the cuts, very clean, of the buildings. How bright and regular the lamps. When suddenly something, a clanging chimera with coal-smoke boiling from its base came tolling its onslaught in high, hollow rings, bristling with people that clung to its flanks or dangled from its rearward parts. Could not move from off the curb. People queuing up behind me. One block up the creature stopped, rejected about a dozen captives and when they had safely alighted moved on.

  The ring of the thing in diminishing pitch.

  A foreign pressure on my elbow. “Miss,” said a man’s voice, “I say, are you well?”

  Harvest blond and fair-complexioned. Hatted, coated, gloved and caned. Handsome, I guess you would call him—yes, that. Near all of his person inclining toward mine.

  “Are you ill?” the man said. “May I help you along?”

  “Be at peace,” I told the man. Like my mother might say. “You are missed at God’s side.”

  “I say, are you looking for something? Some business?”

  “I’m sorry,” said I. “But I . . .”

  “Thought what?”

  A beat in which we watched each other.

  “I’m looking for,” I searched, “a jeweller’s.”

  “Washington Street is the ticket,” said he. He took my arm and started walking. “Not too far and not too close. Though I should say, your arm in mine and on such a fine night, in its infancy yet . . .”

  “We must hurry,” said I.

  “To the jeweller’s?” said he. “They’re open late all down this street.”

  “But I must get back to my mother,” said I. “She’s very old and very weak.”

  “An angel of mercy, are you, then? And what must be your sainted name? Which leads me to ask, now I think of it, miss—”

  “—but really, sir, we must push on—”

  “—Saint Cordelia, perhaps? Or Constance, yes? You strike me, somehow, as some manner of C. Up ahead is a place that I know,” said the man. “Many say they do good work. Grant me your hand for a kiss if you’re going.”

  “I couldn’t,” said I.

  And broke into a run. The young man grabbed my elbow hard.

  He whispered at me: “Slattern bitch.” And then with a last violent squeeze let me go.

  Running along the storefronts. Tripping. My chin scraping against the road. Rising again with a faint beard of blood. Faceplate of the locket cracked. A trickle of blood from the scrape on my chin getting smeared by the chain there, a greasy red fan.

  I broke my eyes against the gloom. Squinting while running to make out the storefronts.

  Mumler and Sons, I read, in script. Wasn’t that a German name. The printed pane began to shake as someone descended the stairs to receive me.

  Did not bear much speculation, the big bearded man who came down to the door. Remains of something formal on: rolled shirtsleeves, a loose cravat, a vest of dusty, greenish-black. Wiping his hands with a towel in the foyer. Thick, dark eyebrows slightly arched.

  “You’re open,” said I.

  “No, miss. We are closed.”

  “I was told you were open.”

  “You were misinformed, sadly.”

  “Still you answered. There you are.”

  I was shocked at the sound of my own indignation.

  “Which surprises you, does it?” said he, on a smirk. “As if I could ignore such ringing. The devil’s own summons you gave me, I’m sure, and yet there is some doubt I’d come?”

  Why would this shrewd fat man not help me. How could he be so cold, so cruel. The night’s events, like staggered waves suspended at their crests from breaking. Fright after fright after fright. And I wept. So rarely if ever. Surprising myself. Tears streaming cold off the end of my chin.

  Mumler and Hannah

  September, 1859

  The girl was weeping, frightened, bleeding.

  It was rather an overreaction, I thought, to hearing that the shop was closed. And yet you never knew how close some ladies wore their jewellery—most of the time for the sake of a flirt, while for others it was their ward and ensign. Yet she wasn’t unlovely, I’ll give her that much, and I was not a man of stone.

  I beckoned her up and then over the threshold.

  Not a little irritated was I still in any case, having closed the shop early to tinker at pictures and was midway through soaking, at that precise moment, the fourth in a series of six of Bill Christian. I had her sit upon the couch where mournfully she scrubbed her hands.

  “Custom or repair?” I said.

  “Neither, sir,” the girl said. “I have come with a sale. A cameo necklace of silver and jet. It’s faceplate is broken, but that’s only glass. I am sure you can fix it,” she said, “and resell?”

  “If it’s an assessment you’re asking,” I said, “I might prevail to grant you that. But a resale, I’m sorry, is out of the question. We’re strictly custom and repair.”

  “Won’t you kindly look?” she said. “If you won’t look, you’ll never know.”

  She fumbled the necklace, her eyes still on mine. She was capable of anything, it seemed, in that moment. I should probably get her a cloth for her chin; her décolletage sported a bright swatch of blood. When
she’d taken the necklace from off of her neck she waited a moment then held it up, swaying.

  Its faceplate was shattered indeed, rim to rim, and the glass cleared away save a rind at the edges. The portrait, set in jet, was sound, as well the portrait’s silver backing.

  “You’d do better to have it repaired then resold. Here, I’ll say twenty-and-five at the margin. Yes, twenty-and-five would do it nicely.”

  “And not repaired,” the pale girl said. “What would it fetch me not repaired?”

  “Exceedingly lucky you’d be to see ten. Bit of fingersmith’s chattel. Of course I know of other shops that move such items in and out. In the North End, for instance, or else down the wharves, the northern slopes of Beacon Hill . . .”

  “And in order for you to accept it?” she said.

  “But we are not a pawnshop, Miss.”

  “Is that your assessment?”

  “I’ve not made it yet.”

  “And will you make it now?” she said.

  With her long fish’s mouth and her widely spaced eyes, she wasn’t quite pretty—no, not in the least. But fascinating, nonetheless; innocent and alien and terribly desperate.

  “I’d require half an hour of your time,” I said then.

  She coloured deeply, looked away.

  “Oh, it’s nothing like that, not at all,” I assured her. “A touch outré, if you must know, seeing it’s on business grounds but really very innocent, I think, in the scheme, a personal hobby of mine . . .” I trailed off. “In the night, when it suits me, you see, I take pictures.”

  “And you’re asking to take one of me in exchange?”

  “You read me like a hand of Tarot.”

  “Why, I’m not sure . . .” She touched her hair. A wisp of it loosened and shaded her brow.

  “So long as I’m breaking house rules,” I announced, “the least you might say is the name I’m to call you?”

  And looking up she barked it out, as though she’d been holding it in her whole life.

  Q

  In the first in the series she sits there alone, looking off to the side, studying her surroundings. Her gaze is not at staring height but dithering along the floor—a gaze that finally finds my shoe, tapping the time that will mark the exposure.