Shadows in Summerland

by Adrian Van Young

  Q

  In the next she seems to know her purpose and she stares comfortably at the camera, mouth set. She is either oblivious to the fact that the device on four legs is engraving her image or knows its usage all too well and could not be less curious of it. I’m looking down through the top of the box and seeing her there at the end of it, watching. My foot has stopped tapping. There is only we two. I find that I am hard as ruby.

  Q

  In exposure the third she is still looking forward yet now to the left and slightly up, which gives her eyes the strange effect of appearing rolled-white like the eyes of a horse. Her shadow on the white backdrop could not be rendered more distinctly. I am standing by the tripod, dutifully changing the slide, looking at her, though if you were to trace her gaze it would fall wide of where I stand. At this point I’d said to her, “Hannah, where are you? Miss Hannah, Miss Hannah. Come back to yourself.”

  Q

  The final picture in this series has me standing over her, holding her up. When the plate was exposed she’d begun to tip forward and I’d quitted my place to be sure that she didn’t. The camera, which could not be stopped, had etched this tableau anyway, awkward and tender in all the wrong balance, a botched composition were it not for the girl. The girl who stands there just behind us, quizzical of eye and mouth, her tiny hand held up palm out and roughly at a level with her glossy, dark head; it could be a gesture of greeting or warning. The wrinkles on her palm are pruned. She wears a bathing costume, too, that clings to her as though still damp and her head, which I described as glossy, appears so because of her shining, wet hair. Her face is intensely yet guardedly pale—the shaded pale of human bone or a white wedding dress in the lee of a coffin. Her expression, however, is hard to pin down. She seems confused, to say the least. She seems, like the waif who prefigured her coming, to dwell half here, half somewhere else.

  Yet one thing I am sure of, reader. I, who hunch before the lens. I, who curl my bulk round Hannah. I, who appear to be shielding her, reader, from what she sees, from what she shows me.

  I, William Mumler, do testify now as certain as I walk and breathe that the figure in the photo is my dead cousin Cora on the day that she drowned, near a decade before.

  Miss Conant in Residence

  September, 1859

  “Shall I describe him once again?”

  “Oh yes,” the woman said. “Describe him.”

  Her eyes were bright above her scars, one down and one across her cheek. They’d been given to her by her brute of a husband over the course of too many years married. All day I would watch as her kind came and went on the narrow, dark stairway below the street level. Once in a while one of them, such as her, would knock for me and take a sitting.

  I closed my eyes and laid my hands palms up, wrists down on the cherry wood table.

  “He stands about five-five,” I said.

  The woman grinned and shut her eyes. “A beanpole of a boy,” she said.

  “So skinny,” I said, “he appears almost taller.”

  Breathing in, she gave a nod.

  “The spirit continues to grow, to develop, when all the flesh has sloughed away.”

  “Lordy, how I doted on him.”

  “He died before his time,” I said.

  “So very long before,” she said.

  “He died by the hand of his father,” I said.

  “His father—my husband, whose name was Orestes. What sphere is he in now?” she said.

  “He dwells between spheres two and three. He is dressed in pure wisdom, that sphere’s final medium.” My foot started its rightward creep. “Fertile plateaus. And Elysian gardens. Groves flooded with light . . .”—still creeping—“. . . where every single branch and leaf unfurls its own transcendent song.”

  My toe found out the weighted chord that worked the window’s shade if pulled.

  A jerk of my ankle toward me: there. A beam of light cut through the dark.

  “Continue to rest your eyes,” I said.

  “Would it blind me,” she asked me, “to look on my Tommy? Oh how I want to be with him!” she said.

  “Continue to rest your eyes, please, miss.”

  Holding the drawing chord in place I produced with my left foot a series of raps.

  “The affirmative sequence,” I said. And she gasped. “He wishes, I think, to tell you something.”

  I pitched my head about, eyes closed.

  “. . . wants nothing so much as to see you,” I said. “. . . it is the despair in your voice, Tommy says . . . mother, he says, pretty please, don’t be sad . . . I am already two times the man you imagine . . . here in the Summerland . . .”

  “Yes?” said the woman.

  “. . . among its gardens, streams and groves . . .”

  “Pretty, pretty please,” she said. “Always so polite, my boy.”

  “. . . there is no sadness here,” I said. “. . . only the light of the Univercoelum . . . it burns away being . . . knowing, too . . . until all there is . . .”

  “Is, Tommy?”

  “. . . is grace.”

  “Oh, happy, happy day,” she said. “Oh Tommy, my love, my darling boy.”

  Ever so slightly, I opened my eyes and saw that the woman was weeping with violence.

  “Are Tommy’s wounds healed? All his bruises and cuts? There were so many bruises and cuts when he died. Orestes stepped away . . .” she said. “He was standing over something in the corner and he . . . Oh . . .”

  I toed at the chord with my foot till it tautened. The window shade started to scroll down again.

  “The doorway is closing,” I said. “Tommy fades. Tommy says, Mother, I must hurry home.”

  “Make it stay open,” she said, “yet a while. You can keep it open, can’t you?”

  “Tommy has no proper say in the matter of when he comes and goes. Tommy is a wisp of cloud upon the firmament of—”

  “—no please don’t,” the woman cried. “Please don’t let my Tommy go.”

  “Tommy is no more,” I said. “Tommy is gone. There remains only Vashti. And yet Vashti is going too. Going back to her elders as Tommy before her. Denizens of the upper spheres—beings of utter, unbearable purity . . .”

  She was whispering, “Damn you. Goddaaaamn you to hell. Goddaaaaaamn you to hell, Orestes Quint.”

  I dropped my head, opened my eyes. I waited for her to return to herself.

  Before the working day was out, hearsay of our meeting would carry downstairs. And the women beneath would come like rats to raven at their futures past.

  Through a part in her hair, she looked up at me, squinting.

  “I hate for you to see me this way.”

  “Really,” I said, “you must think nothing of it.”

  Sitting up straighter, she said, “Shouldn’t I?”

  I was thinking what to say to her. I laid a dry hand upon hers, which was damp. So here were moments, brief and few, where tenderness became a scepter.

  That’s when Constance gave a knock.

  “A Mr. Mumler here to see you.”

  “I’ll be off,” said the woman with scars and got up.

  The jeweller was here, I now remembered. We’d met at some Sunderland function or other. I arched my neck and smoothed my skirts and bade that Constance let him in.

  Walking across the wooden floor, the jeweller seemed to fill the room, not just on account of his size but his presence, which was—how to describe it?

  Well.

  His tread was light for one so large. He wore his beard full; it looked healthy and growing. A writing-slate-sized dossier flapped and waved against his thigh. He carried his head very high in the air and yet without a hint of malice; it was rather as though he were combing the ceiling for something amusing he never quite found.

  Passing the woman with th
e scars, the jeweller lightly doffed his hat, muttered something gentlemanly and fixed her with one of the most curious smiles that I have seen in quite some time. He smiled at her mildly, politely at first, until he met her in the door and the mildness turned into a boyish disorder that drew his lips clear up the sides of his face.

  He irritated me of course, but then he also made me laugh.

  He was Henry VIII in the portrait by Holbein, come to visit Anne Boleyn.

  “Charmed, Miss Conant. Charmed as ever. Do you recall the night we met? You were an hour or so answering the question of woman and then we all spoke to a dead girl together.”

  “I seem to have some recollection,” I said, “of unbelievers in our midst.”

  “The sole fact you retained?” he said.

  The jeweller sat across from me in a chair that was likely still warm from the woman. He balanced the leather dossier upon his solid hocks of thighs.

  “Throughout the history of your movement, how many spirits have been seen?”

  “I’m not sure what you mean,” I said. “Seen is a dubious term, after all. People have sensed and felt and heard, which amounts all in all to perceiving, I think—”

  “—but seen?”

  “Yes seen. What of it, sir? Seen with the eyes? Or the ears, sir, the heart.”

  “You Spiritists equivocate.”

  “We Spiritualists have liberal leanings.”

  “And liberal definitions, too.”

  “I suppose you have come here today with some purpose?”

  “Vital one indeed,” he said. “Though perhaps you had better just see for yourself.”

  He rafted the dossier over the table, and watched until I had it open.

  There were numerous photographs under the leather. As I looked at the man in the first, which was Mumler, bent over the woman half hidden by hair, I felt I was looking at something uncouth or something pornographic even.

  That was when I saw the girl.

  She stood, in her bathing costume, in the background. In her bathing costume, mind you, in a jeweller’s workroom and holding up beside her face one still and outward facing palm. A trope, I had learned, in the Eastern religions which told the viewer: Do not fear.

  The man could not have looked more earnest. He was jiggling his legs with nervousness or with excitement.

  “Am I meant to attest to your skill as a humbug?”

  “If you wish,” said the jeweller. “If a humbug I am.”

  “If Barnum, sir, may graft a fin to match the rear parts of a chimp then what is to keep you from causing a girl to resemble a manifested spirit?”

  “So you grant she resembles a spirit,” he said.

  “Resembles one but that is all.”

  “She drowned when she was ten,” he said. “That girl that you see in the print, who’s my cousin.”

  “You took it yourself, I’m assuming?” I said.

  “Took it,” he said. “Exposed and developed.”

  There was something of doubt in his voice. “And?” I said.

  “Took it and yet, I did not make it.”

  “I wasn’t aware of a difference,” I said.

  “The woman I am hunched around. That is the woman who made it,” he said.

  I watched his finger going down to tap, at two, upon her figure.

  “You want me to endorse it then?”

  “I want you to more than endorse it,” he said. “I want you to print it in your paper. I want you to print it for all of the Hub and I want you to label it first of its kind.”

  “And what makes you think I would ever do that?”

  The jeweller appraised me. “That look on your face.”

  “The look on my face when I look at the picture?”

  “Not that,” said the jeweller. “When you look at me.”

  Message Department

  What future is enshrined in us, you base pretenders to our pain? What makes you mortals put us on that we the worn might live again? You schemers and you squanderers, you walkers in the garb of flesh, how can you love us, we the dead to whom you speak in darkened rooms, when profits warm your outstretched hands the more with every cold untruth, compelling you to whisper now and evermore to those that grieve? You speak by the right hand but act from the left, then cry false feeling down the wind, yet who among you, kin to none, will say in truth the lies of men? So see you, then, the mockery that is this life’s immortal truth? You Fanny Conants, William Mumlers, peddlers of the spirit all, who flout the very love you seek, so seek we all in mortal clothes, with leaden shoes and glowing paints and counterpane tableaus of doom and harps and horns and weeping strings and chiffoniers with players stocked and braided hair and shattered glass and phantoms lurking in a box? And yet we spirits ask you now, you innocents of boundless dark, resounding with such grim echoes as only spirits, grimmer, mark, how little matters if at all the good or else the ill of men when all go to their slim reward, their puppetry, their endless ends and none the wiser to regard, across the void, where they began? And so why speak we dead at all? Why squander this, our eloquence? What smoulders in us, we the snuffed, that we should beggar heartlessness when hearts in us by darkness kept as well beat once if ever beat, that slow and falter, gloam and swoon, until they cease and cease and cease?

  Miss Conant in Development

  May, 1856

  Rap once for no, three times for yes, and five if you wish the alphabet. If the session is successful, thank the spirits for their kindness; if it is unsuccessful, curse the lot of them for tricksters. Make your feet and knees your friends and be sure they are always warm, for feet and knees too cold and cramped will never work a proper rap. Always maintain perfect posture. Never concede to be shut in a cabinet. Be wary of writers and college professors. Do not speak outside the trance. Wear a dress that shows your neck but wear a skirt that hides your feet. Watch the face but not the eyes. Invest in harps and horns and strings. Do not be afraid to put a little sap in it. Often pray and always sing. Repeat words and phrases. Say: Harmony, Beauty, Comfort for the Ills of Life. Condition your palms not to sweat. Exude grace. Never take more than a glass of red wine.

  Q

  Miss Cluer and I sat across from each other. E.H.B. sat in the middle, observing. Even at so young an age—both of us were just sixteen—E.H.B. would call us Miss. This was no different for small girls of ten.

  “Miss Cluer, you have lost your daughter. Your daughter was five when she died. It was measles. Miss Cluer has sought you out, Miss Conant. She’s heard that you can see beyond. Your signal job,” said E.H.B., “is making that beyond seem closer. Make it local, in a word. Make beyond a place, Miss Conant, that she can go to in her heart and yet make it one, if you possibly can, that she will require you to show her around. Comfort and confidence first, dear girls, but loyalty second, third and fourth. Loyalty is the sweet, soft milk that draws them here like hungry cats.”

  E.H.B. held up one hand, the other inching up to join it.

  “Comfort and confidence first,” we recited. “Loyalty second, third and fourth.”

  “Such a lovely harmony!” E.H.B. clapped her hands and we smiled at her weakly. “Miss Conant,” she said, “engage Miss Cluer. What are you going to ask her first?”

  “Who were you hoping to speak to tonight?”

  “Who were you hoping to contact, Miss Conant. If mediumship is to be a profession we must use professional words, mustn’t we?”

  “Who were you hoping to contact, Miss Cluer?”

  “Splendid, Miss Conant! Miss Cluer, your answer?”

  Susie Cluer was a strange one. She was a tall and awkward girl who did not understand her body; her posture in the séance room was, for our teacher, an ongoing nightmare. It was also her habit to mumble her lines which is why, in our sessions, I was often the leader.

  “You tell me,” said Sus
ie Cluer.

  “Please enunciate, Miss Cluer. Who were you hoping to contact tonight?”

  “Whoever you think best,” said Susie. “I sit here at your expertise.”

  “Miss Cluer, you’ve listened! Now you go, Miss Conant.”

  “I am sensing a presence. It knows you, Miss Cluer.”

  “Less purposeful, Miss Conant, please. Are you not in the grip of a mesmeric trance?”

  “I am . . . sensing . . . a presence. It . . . knows you, Miss Cluer.”

  Susie peeked out from beneath her lank bangs. “What kind of a presence?” she said, more assured.

  “A female presence,” I responded, but already our teacher was clucking her tongue.

  “Let Miss Cluer guess, Miss Conant. Tell her: a presence longed for and beloved.”

  “A presence longed for and beloved,” I amended.

  “Is the spirit male?” said Susie.

  I rapped once with my toes, in the negative sequence.

  “Is it female, then?” said Susie.

  “Quicker, girls!” said E.H.B.

  I rapped my toes three times for yes.

  “Is the spirit old?”

  (One rap.)

  “Is the spirit young?”

  (Now three.)

  E.H.B. held up her palm. “If my memory serves, me Miss Conant,” she said, “you’re ambidextrous in your talents. In that case don’t be shy about it. Your clients shall want variation.”

  I rolled my eyes about the room, rendered passive by the trance.

  “Excellent!” said E.H.B. “Let her heartbeat race a bit. And now begin to feed her, slowly.”

  I rapped twice with my toes and three times with my knees for a total of five at which E.H.B. beamed. “The alphabet is motioned for. So spell for us your name,” I said. “Oh bountiful, womanly rose of the Summerland, gladden our hearts with your name,” I cried out.

  “Now you are laying it on a bit thick. But markedly improved, Miss Conant. Miss Cluer, what shall be her name?”