Shadows in Summerland

  “Gentleman, ladies, right this way. Positives and negatives, as best you can manage. Though we appear to have a surplus of the former on our hands,” said the man in a mask like a dog or a pig, standing at the centre of the diamond, directing. “No matter, no matter. As best you can manage. There’s a lady, there’s a gent. Two by two—not three!” he said, motioning to Susie, gold-mask, and myself. “Sir—King Midas—Croesus, yes, if you might sit between these ladies. These Circes in sackcloth—these bonny beekeepers—these monuments to tattered lace . . .”

  He continued to call out the guests one by one and one by one they hastened past, outrunning the spotlight to sit on a couch.

  To my right was the man in the black and gold mask and on his right sat Susie Cluer. On my left was the man in the mask of a lion, watching me with bright green eyes.

  The man was bigger than I’d thought. And he wasn’t well-muscled so much as just generous. His stockiness expressed itself in a slab of firm flesh, segmented by waistcoat.

  “I hear that you’re called Sleep,” he said. “I take it she’s your better half?”

  I nodded to him that this was so. I heard Susie laugh, pause to sip, laugh again.

  “Which makes you what?”

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “If she is half of sleep,” he said, “then I should wonder, what are you?”

  “Wakefulness, perhaps,” I said.

  His eyes had a warm squintiness through the holes.

  “I am called the Lion in the Meadow,” he said.

  I said, “Your mask is very black. A nighttime meadow, I suppose?”

  “Velvet,” he said.

  “May I touch it?”

  “Of course.”

  The Lion in the Meadow leaned a little closer toward me. I touched my fingers to his snout. He nuzzled his face against my fingers and they slid from the snout to the lips, down the chin. Going over the hole that allowed him to breathe, I felt him panting through the mask.

  “Let no man or woman speak false of the spirits,” said the man in the mask of a pig or a dog. “Let no man proclaim that they stalk the far shore, parched and lonely strangers to the wonder that is love. Nor let him proclaim to his bosom companion who walks beside him through the vale that the spirits, our guardians, command us these words: Go in want through this brief life. If he cannot speak true of them, then let him speak no more, I say. If he cannot speak true of them, then let him speak the truth of love. Yes, let him speak the truth of love, which does not expire with the husk of the body, no more than it expires or fades under the thralldom of marriage,” he said. “Or the scorn of ill health. Or the winter of age. Close your many eyes,” he said, “that you might come as one to see.”

  I myself did not so do. Other people might have though.

  This was once a library, I thought to myself as the man stepped aside. And then he extended his arm like a showman.

  A series of figures filed into the room.

  The lighting, as I said, was dim. So it was difficult initially to tell them for human. They might’ve been kangaroos or cats. They had that sleek, agile uprightness. They made a circuit of the room, skipping along the walls, hands clasped. Masks rotated after them or else they did not move an inch.

  “Continue to close your eyes, my friends. Feel the breeze these spirits make. Feel their ecstasy, their force. Sense them around you with all but your eyes.”

  The maybe ten figures passed once, then again. “Oh my,” said the people on couches and laughed. A garland of girls all wearing dark gauze—in nothing but dark gauze, I saw—circled the couches around and around, and started at last to use their fingers. They trailed them along the people’s shoulders. They ran them up and down their arms. They touched their ears, where earrings hung. They teased them up their trembling throats. They stood in back of people’s chairs, and the gauze that they wore had a luminous look.

  “See only the backs of your eyelids, my friends,” said the man in a mask of a pig or a dog.

  Susie Cluer would be smiling. Susie Cluer would be blushing. Susie Cluer would be trembling, her hand in the hand of the Japanese prince.

  One girl brushed a lady’s hair, working her fingers through the thickness and as the woman’s face tipped back she started to braid it, strand by strand. Now a lady bared her throat. Now a gentleman slumped forward. Now another laughed then groaned as a woman fell over him, kissing his mouth.

  The man in the black and gold mask turned to Susie but the mouth of her mask was too small for a kiss. He hiked it up and kissed her cruelly. While Susie kissed, ginger at first, a woman in gauze came around to the man and started to stroke his naked ears. The man in the leonine mask held my hand. And that’s when I saw that his body was wrenched toward one of the women in gauze just behind him. Sort of nibbling his jawline, she leaned in between us. The jaw was as brassy and proud as an axe.

  The maestro had partnered with one of the girls. They waltzed the diamond point to point. One woman rose from her place on the couch and danced all alone in their wake, her arms swaying. Her fingertips were pale and sharp. They seemed to rend the darkened air.

  And then I felt myself get up. The man in the leonine mask and myself were crossing the diamond en route to the door. Before us went Susie and Black and Gold Mask, their arms around each other’s shoulders. At first I thought that he was leading, and then I felt I wasn’t sure, and finally I had the thought that Susie was supporting him.

  An indistinct, persistent bell was singing just outside my ken.

  I thought at Susie: Turn around. Oh turn around, you foolish girl.

  “Miss Sleep,” said the man at my side, turning toward me. “I should say I’m new to this. I don’t often come to such functions, you see.”

  We passed through the doorway and into a hall. The way was long, the lighting sparse. Susie and Black and Gold Mask went before us, twenty paces by my guess.

  “What I mean,” said the Lion in the Meadow, voice muffled, “I am a gentleman, you see.” And then the bravado came back to his voice: “As much as Miss Sleep is a lady, I’m sure.”

  Susie turned around again. Susie, stumbling, called my name. And then her face appeared to plummet. It was as though she’d fallen through a gulf in the floor. She cried in delight. She was on the man’s shoulders. And he was running with her full tilt down the hall.

  “Farewell, Sister Sleep,” she cried.

  And that was the last time I saw Susie Cluer.

  Later when she made her plans; and later when I saw her on the night that she left; and yet later still when I saw her again, standing on the sidewalk looking up at the building before she picked her way downtown to meet the man that she called Jeffs, the man in the mask of the Japanese prince. Or maybe it was another man.

  None of them were her. Not Susie. Susie was that other girl. Susie was that wriggling thing, borne away on shoulders down a dimly lit hall.

  And so it was not Susie either, several years after that night, when a woman washed up on the shores of the Charles, tangled in among its trash.

  Hannah Sincerely

  A letter I received from Grace in care of Mrs. Eva Heinrich.

  Mrs. Prury’s School for Girls

  Camden, Maine

  April 16, 1859

  Dear Hannah,

  Here are as many words I know that get at the heart of this place I am held in.

  Dejected. Deleterious. Depressing. Despondent. Disagreeable. Dismal. Dratted. Dread.

  And those are just a couple of D’s, presented in good alphabetical order. Synonyms, I’ve lately learned from a lesson I left not two hours past. They are far too many classes here. Far too few of girls like you.

  I’ve thought of you often since leaving the Island and wonder where you’ve got off to. Most important, however, is that you are safe and in a place that suits you better.

 
; Here is something that I wrote that attempts to answer many questions. For one, Mr. Hardy. Is he still in the dark as to the widow’s whereabouts? Doesn’t he need her after all? Can we really believe that he’d give up so quickly?

  That lighthouse keeper, for another. Mightn’t he have grown a heart? And decided to buck Mrs. Reeves, his conspirator? For might Mrs. Reeves have exceeded her bounds and estranged in the process her most faithful friend, allying him with Mr. Hardy? Why, even scheming lighthouse keepers must possess a sort of heart.

  I think you will find the below satisfactory to the task of addressing some of these. And if you yourself feel inclined to contribute, I’ll insist that you do in the form of Act II.

  Hannah in Confidence

  October, 1859

  Breath. Appetite. Hours awake and asleep.

  What is a life to the person who lives it.

  Any less or more real whether shared or unshared. Released, at last, from lips that speak. Pumped out of the heart like heart’s blood or heart’s poison.

  Else before too long it were.

  The way he listened and absorbed. The way he made himself a vessel. Leaning back in his chair with his massive legs crossed, sighting me along his nose. And when I shifted under that. Feeling too much seen by him.

  William.

  Who said not a word of himself while the pictures were born in the small room adjoining.

  William.

  Who made sure I stayed in my seat when the dead came to visit me, blowing against me.

  William.

  To whom I had gladly returned since that first frightened evening, the front of me bloody.

  To make more pictures. Be with someone. Feel the feeling of control. We agreed it had something to do with my shadow. Reflecting the light of the dead on the lens.

  The cameo necklace now missing for days. William was making it lovely again. Told mother, however, that it had been stolen. A harbour rat had crept around and snatched it from its hanging nail and though I had chased him I hadn’t caught up. Going back through the maze of our heated pursuit I had gotten myself, I told mother, quite lost. And that is why I’d come back late. My chin bloody. My hair mussed up.

  By the third or fourth time that I left her to see him, I suspected she knew that a man was involved. Though never in the way she thought.

  A man who heard me when I spoke. A man who called me by my name.

  But never touched me. Not like that. Unless it was to set my shoulders. Brush my hair back. Gird my spine.

  Conclusion the first: I could realize the dead. See them and hear them and talk to them, yes, as I had always known I could. But also manifest them with my presence, with my being. Some process in me that agreed with the camera.

  Conclusion the second: unlike I’d supposed, the visitations weren’t all random

  Beloved enough by the dead one in question, it would gambol and romp through your life like a puppy. Reviled enough or else supposed of having done that dead one ill, it was likely to insult you in a key you couldn’t hear. Curse your name to total strangers.

  That second night. The jeweller’s rooms. The box and the screen. The developing drawers. The chemicals, secret and strange, in their phials.

  Said the jeweller: “I think we will get her again.”

  Said the jeweller: “Sweet Hannah. I’m glad that you’ve come.”

  First things first: a glass of something. Dark as honey that has dried. Yet not at all sweet to the tongue. Splutter-worthy. Opened up a space in me.

  It was the stuff that Mr. Fanshawe had been drinking, I remembered, when me and Grace had caught him dozing, sipped out of his half-filled glass.

  William drank a second glassful. Moving with energy over the boards. Sipping his liquor between little tasks such as moving the screen and adjusting the stool and making sure the plates were clean and seeing that the velvet cloth fluttered evenly over the top of the box. His beard would move ahead of him like a shadow-play Satan. The swell of his stomach. What furniture the room had held marshalled off to the edges before I’d arrived. The photographic implements carried into the now empty space to replace them.

  “What do you feel in this moment?” said he.

  “I feel a fullness—here,” said I and touched myself below my ribs.

  “And what about now, with the light on your face?”

  I told him: “It’s moving. It’s travelling up.”

  “Too warm?” said he.

  I shook my head.

  “The wooden stool agrees with you?”

  “It helps me lift my spine,” said I.

  “What spirit will you manifest?”

  “I cannot tell you that,” said I. “They come and go just as they please.”

  “That girl,” said he. “The other night. It would very much please me to see her again.”

  He finished off his drink. Watched me.

  “Are you going to begin taking pictures?” said I.

  He poured himself another drink. Exposed a series: one, two, three.

  The ken was moving in my throat. My mouth. My nose. My eyes. My brain. The room became a trembling place of light impending, breaking through. The skin backlit, the blood beneath. The blood beneath the waiting skin. So it was through the centre, the secret not-region between the membrane and the light, that the dead ones migrated. Distressed and confused. Held there a moment in darkness like amber.

  A man with a toothpick and wiry red hair whose stomach had turned on a bad piece of meat.

  A woman in a pretty dress who had taken a letter file, sliced up her arms.

  A boy of ten-and-seven years who’d been struck on Tremont by a runaway carriage.

  But never the girl from our first time together. William insisted that she was his cousin.

  Cora, he’d told me that first night, who drowned.

  Reminded me of someone else. Reminded me of someone loved.

  Her ball gown of a bathing dress. Her slightly sad and high-pitched laugh. The hair that kept her slightly damp. As though from a washing. As though from a fever.

  But it couldn’t be Grace because Grace wasn’t dead. Grace had been shipped to a girls’ school in Maine. To talk and eat with others girls. To sleep near girls who were not me.

  Eventually that second night, thin-witted from too many snifters of brandy, the jeweller announced that he needed to sit. Slept like my father, his head twisted back. His arms extended on the couch.

  And sitting there while Willy slept, I thought I heard the scrape of steps. Barefoot wispy quickened steps. Encompassing the little room.

  A swatch of something purple, maybe.

  It slipped from the darkness and then back again.

  The ache—with violence!—in my lungs. Powerfully, I coughed and sneezed.

  Stood up from the couch and called out: “Grace!”

  In spite of all, I called her name. And I had cried that name so loud that Willy Mumler, sleeping, stirred.

  But the girl had stopped circling. The shadows were silent. As suddenly silent as my soul.

  Some part of me had known, of course. Grace Fanshawe, my friend, was dead.

  Had always known. When we first met. Would die one day before her time. Too lovely at last to remain on this earth. Standing with her parents in the doorway of the church. Whirling away toward the sea, crying out.

  Meningitis it might be. Which ate through girls of Grace’s age. Which would travel too fast through the ranks of a school. Which clogged the ears and swelled the brain. And in its grip, at last, so died. That explained why, in the picture we’d made, she’d been feverish and soaking. So thin and so pale. Would Grace’s bunkmates, unafraid, have knelt with her and held her hands. Or would they have cowered away in the corner, afraid of catching what she had.

  Mumler Converted

  I have often heard it
said and I will say it now, myself, that Spiritualists are radicals. Spiritualists are vocal sorts. Spiritualists are manly women. Spiritualists are girlish men. Spiritualists are barn-burners of every conceivable checker and stripe. They are socialites and profiteers. Spiritualists are death-indentured, morbid to their turned-out toes. Spiritualists are woodland mystics, rolling bones in cavern floors, and Spiritualists are vaudevillians, Levites of the trap and the travelling show. Spiritualists are dress reformers. Spiritualists are foes of marriage. They are hypocrites but realists, too. Spiritualists are hopers, dreamers, immoderate cosmic philosophers all, and they are supernaturalists, depending on your view of things. Spiritualists are black occultists. Spiritualists are optimists. Spiritualists are soft inventors—they are lily-white shamans and unlettered doctors. Spiritualists are très naïve. Spiritualists are young and old. Spiritualists are, wholly, fools.

  Spiritualists are many things, but Spiritualists are rarely liars. They have no reason to be such—a fact that I could now speak to.

  Spiritualists are merely there. They gaze, and in that act, know all.

  Miss Conant in a Correspondence

  Centre for the Diffusion of Spiritual Knowledge

  Boston, Massachusetts

  November 6th, 1859

  Dear Reverend Davis,

  I hope this letter finds you blessed with family and vigour, the Great Spirit grant it. You probably do not know me though I know you through works and deeds. You are a credit to our faith, any Spiritualist here to Ohio will tell you. I have read and enjoyed your compendium works—Harmonial Philosophy—in especial your essay, “The Mission of Woman,” on which I have spoken a number of times.

  I am writing you now in regard to a man who’s been making an interesting stir in New England.

  William H. Mumler, the man this concerns, is a jeweller on Washington Street in this city. During the day he repairs emerald brooches and then in the evening he dabbles at pictures. These pictures, whose singular, Spiritual nature may well have reached your ears by now, I am scheduled to print in the Banner of Light, a publication you support. These pictures are remarkable; not only technically, however. In them, William Mumler claims to have captured the spirits of people long dead. More often than not they are dear to the sitters—that the sitters, with longing, have conjured them forth.