Shadows in Summerland

by Adrian Van Young

  Miss Conant and Mumler

  February, 1860

  So I would go to him this time. It was I who requested the meeting.

  I went.

  The time was mid-evening. The man looked exhausted. I sensed I was first in a long string of clients. Photographers must eat of course. But only when the jewellers earn.

  He was sitting there waiting for me at his desk. Rather, more of a workbench repurposed as one. Even in his own rooms and so late in the evening—it was well after eight, when he said he’d be free—his coat was buttoned all the way, his hands encased by white silk gloves.

  A moment passed before I saw her, the pale girl standing near the door.

  When I’d entered the room she had been there behind me, her hair hanging slightly in front of her face. For all of a moment it made me uneasy, but soon the feeling went from me.

  She had this sweetness to her eyes—grey mixed in with bits of green.

  “You’re here with some concern?” he said. “Your telegram sounded concerned, so I ask.”

  “And how may writing, lacking speech, impress you as concerned?” I said.

  “Its terseness, I reckon,” said Mumler and shrugged. “Should like to have a word with you.”

  “To be perfectly honest.” I harboured a breath. “I am irritated with you, Mister Mumler.”

  I saw recognition, then nothingness, vast. He fingered the blotter. He wanted a drink.

  “For handing out the pictures in Melodeon,” he said. “I’m truly sad about all that.”

  “I have come here to hear that you’re sorry. . . .” I said.

  “And now that I have said I am?”

  “Have you?” said I. “Have you said that?”

  The jeweller smiled at me and shrugged.

  “Rather than hearing you beg for forgiveness,” I said to the jeweller, still standing above him, “I would like to propose an alliance between us.”

  “What kind?” he said.

  “Say, a business alliance.”

  “Is that not one we have already?”

  “Something official,” I said. “On the books. Something that, weekly, we both might commit to. A column,” I told him, “a blending of talents. I grow tired of speaking through spirits,” I said.

  “And yet,” Mumler countered, “that is your profession.”

  “I am a womanist,” I said. “The spirits, all that, are a means to an end. I have positions that want grounding. Dress reform, marriage, the feting of woman. The freeing of woman,” I said, “by my hand.”

  He considered a moment. He did not deny it—deny that it needed to happen, I mean. He said: “Spirit pictures are only of spirits. They meddle not in woman’s plight.”

  “They are evidential,” I said. “And that matters. Images affect, you see. People, for better or worse, Mr. Mumler, aspire to recognize the real.”

  “And so I print pictures,” he said, “of the dead.”

  “You take the pictures, I print them,” I said, “in the Banner of Light, publication of mention. You and she take the pictures,” I nodded to Hannah,” and I pair them with a message to the sitter from beyond. Yet along with the fluff that they normally say—dear one, take heed, etcetera—I outline the aims of progressive religion, which Spiritualism is, at root. I will call it: the Message Department,” I said.

  “You will outfit the spirits with captions?” he said.

  “They will be transcriptions—direct ones—from death on what the living might accomplish.”

  He appraised me a moment in calculant silence. “Hannah,” he said. “What do you make of this?”

  I found myself surprised he’d asked her.

  “I think that, well, Willy, it’s fine. It sounds fine.”

  “A contract, then. To make it binding,” said William Mumler, his gaze fixing me.

  I said: “I have made one in printing your pictures.” But Henry by Holbein would not be backed down. So I said: “Very well.”

  “Here’s a pen for you. Wield it.” He slid one, with paper, toward me. Then sat back. “Transcribe what follows, then,” he said.

  “I do attest . . .” he started in and I began to write apace, “. . . that the manifestations of William H. Mumler, photographic portraitist of eminence and licence . . .” The bottom of his voice dropped out, obtaining new texture, new depths of announcement: “. . . are as faithful and artful—please underline that.”

  I scribbled headlong in pursuit of his words

  “. . . are as faithful and artful toward Beauty and Truth as any life-drawing or atlas put forth on behalf . . .”

  “You will have to slow down.”

  And he stopped. I arrived at the end of the phrase and looked up.

  “. . . put forth on behalf of the earth’s living record.”

  “Signed,” he said.

  “My name?”

  “Indeed. Signed,” he said, “In Spirit Bonds . . . Fanny A. Conant . . . Trance-Speaker. The date.”

  The minute I finished he reached for the paper and mostly ripped it from my hands. He did it with such strength and speed that the pen trailed away from the line I was writing. He took up the paper and shook it to dry it. He observed its completion. He set it before him.

  Hannah was looking up, semi-surprised, from the tattered storm-cloud of her hair.

  The jeweller rose out of his chair and came around to draw my own. As I stood and the chair scudded back on the boards I felt his eyes below my waist.

  I thought, It is a part of me.

  I turned around, and there he was.

  Before the door he took my hands and held them for a moment, waiting. And then when the gesture was going too long, he treasured them up to his lips and he kissed one. I was not at all sure why I let him do this. He held my right and writing hand between his rabbit paws of gloves and he seemed to want to trap it or to understand it fully the way he held it to his lips.

  But then the jeweller parted his. My index finger slipped inside. My instinct was to draw it out, but something slowed my doing so and I felt him applying the minutest pressure as my finger emerged from his mouth at the knuckle. Hannah was standing there, watching us gently, as the rows of his teeth grazed the length of my bone.

  Mumler in His Castle

  May, 1860

  All through May of 1860, with the heat in a bell-shape enclosing the city, so many people came and went from my Washington studios through the night that I might have been running the most brazen flophouse Athens had to offer up.

  After closing was the time, when I’d go upstairs and attend to my pictures. And so my passion had its patrons—scores upon scores of the lately bereaved.

  Mr. Jonathan Ewell of the Wells Fargo Bank seeking news of his sister, burned down by consumption. Mr. A. Baker, the suave Saratogan, whose son had been killed by a mishandled gun. Mrs. Isaac Babbit of Babbit’s Brand Metals in search of her husband, gone patchy with tumours, never mind that the man who appeared in the picture possessed a virile head of hair.

  Some of them bore the grim wages of death—of their drownings and shootings and wastings away—while others still appeared intact with no more than sadness to mark them as other. All of them wrenched from the frame of the shot like vampires before the sun, their hands held up before their faces, clawing against the bright fog of magnesium. They looked embarrassed, pious, awkward—too tired, at last, to not be seen.

  Did Ewell see his sister? Mr. Baker, his son? Mrs. Babbitt, Mister?

  Well.

  Absolutely yet not necessarily, reader. They saw the thing they wished to see. For there were people in the frame, just not the ones their loved ones said and the mind—oh the mind—will do desperate things to insure that it sees what it wants to, believe me.

  Cue the girl who carved soap statues. She would stand at an angle—the angle, in fact�
��to the client sitting on his stool so that her shadow in its falling subtly grazed the path of light. She darkened the path of the shot; she controlled it. It was her shot, all said and done. And sometimes before I inserted the plate she would spit on the front of the glass, just a dribble, and I would pay the spit about until it was absorbed. Always she did this in dark and in secret, in the closet where I kept the plates, the bright thin line depending down to pool upon the good French glass. She did it with her back to me, her shoulders hunched up and her head slightly down. The spit, she said, was to insure that “the dead ones,” as she called them, showed up in the prints. When I had asked her why these “dead ones” were never the ones that the sitters desired, she had seemed at a loss to explain the conundrum.

  “The dead ones,” she told me—her word for the figures, but never spirits, never ghosts— “the dead ones go where they will go.”

  Her behaviours in the studio were eerie and intense precisely because of their lonely covertness and due to this fact, I had come to believe, as close to authentic as ever existed. When the sitters arrived, she’d grow furtive and bloodless and then as the visit drew on quite abstracted, hearkening to sights or sounds that no one there save her perceived.

  But maybe I’m getting ahead of myself.

  Had I mentioned that she and her mother moved in not less than a month from the show at Melodeon? Well there you have it.

  We were three—Maiers and Mumlers, all under one roof.

  A number of causes preceded this change, some of them spoken and some of them not. First came the demands of our mutual business. The spirits in no way appeared without Hannah and everywhere that Hannah went her mother went also.

  But the second and unspoken reason was this: Claudette wanted Hannah, one year short of twenty, to clarify the nature of our murky attachment and what better way to shed light on the thing than by trapping us all in the same house together.

  Halcyon days, were they not, eager reader? You do not need to answer that.

  But life is not all lust and glory. People will get in the way.

  One person I’m sure I have already mentioned—the proselytizer, William Guay. He came to me pimply, mean-tongued and abashed from the liminal reaches of New York. He claimed he had come on behalf of our Pope, Andrew Jackson Davis, the Seer of Poughkeepsie, who’d heard about my photographs. When I asked how, Guay told me letters—sent to the Reverend by Spiritualist patrons.

  Bad enough he shared my name. That was the first of our misfortunes. He stood there gangly in the door, as if I should be glad to see him.

  He seemed to have no concept of the thing I was about. Photographs were magic to him. He asked the name of every item, then pursed his lips to record it to memory. His face was long, and very thin, a brittle and immobile disk. His every move about my rooms seemed practiced and a little strange, and I couldn’t decide in the end, was he daft, or did he just pretend to be?

  He had also just given me five hundred dollars, courtesy of Jackson Davis.

  I told him he might shadow me for a week and I booked him a shit rooming house in the town.

  Hannah and Kate

  July, 1860

  Second time I saw Kate Fox was at a night of entertainments in the Sunderlands’ parlour.

  “Our hosts are LaRoy and Lucretia,” said Willy as we approached the lofty house.

  “The woman with the curls?” said I.

  “The woman,” said he, “who is missing her mother. But yes, the woman with the curls.”

  “I seem to remember them, Willy,” said I.

  At the door to the house: “Mrs. Sunderland, Ma’am. You honour us greatly,” said I, “as your guests.”

  “You’re welcome, I’m sure,” said the girl in the foyer. A private and embarrassed smile.

  The jeweller whispered in my ear: “That isn’t Mrs. Sunderland.”

  “I’m ridiculous, Willy,” said I. “Will she tell?”

  “They don’t pay her to gossip, Hannah.”

  First thing I saw in the Sunderland’s parlour: the fresh snowy face and the bell-shape of hair. Grouped about her, people. Milling. Glasses of wine and champagne in their hands. The woman’s name was Katherine Fox. I’d seen her stand upon a stage. She’d spoken words, as best I knew. Though I could not recall their theme.

  The party guests stared at me. Called me by Mumler.

  The room was outfitted for some kind of viewing. A screen or a bed-sheet draped over the window before a couple of rows of chairs. We sat in the left bank of chairs, toward the back.

  I watched Kate Fox sit down in front. While Fanny Conant sat behind us.

  When I turned to see Fanny arranging herself, she was staring at me in a high trance of ease.

  Willy with a glass of sherry. “This will make work of your nerves. Now drink up.”

  A man whom I had yet to meet yet whom I remembered was some sort of actor. Seated in coattails just right of the stage. Cleared his actor’s throat to speak: “Since we’ve yet to lay hands on Mr. Muybridge’ s Zoopraxiscope we must make do for now with the old-fashioned kind. Gentlemen, ladies. Most honoured of guests. We project for you now Le Fantasmagorie.”

  “Look right at the wall,” said the spirit photographer. “Otherwise, you’re bound to miss them.”

  “Courageous assembled, I give to you now: the Bloody Nun of Saint-Germain.”

  Something flickered on the wall. A sort of flaming leaf, I thought. Still more of these shapes came to flicker in turn. Until without warning one swerved into focus. The blades of it melted away and it lengthened. Became a head atop two shoulders. Stringy hair about the face. Or was it blood. The Bloody Nun. She groped and yearned for us in terror.

  No sooner than she was replaced.

  “The Ghost of Banquo and Macbeth.”

  A man at a table. Got up like a knight. Shielding his face from some spectre above him.

  A muffled ting. The jeweller’s finger. Knocking the rim of my glass that I drink.

  We sat through: The Nightmare. The Death of Lord Lyttleton. Medusa Beheaded. The Rape of Leda by the Swan.

  Willy went to get more wine. And that was when there came a shift. The air around me shifted, say. In Willy’s place was Katherine Fox.

  The smell of her a piney smell. The smell of Clayhead’s pines in May. The folds of our skirts feeding over our thighs where they mingled like skins in the gap there between us.

  “Do you find them unsettling—these pictures?” said she.

  “Only strange,” I said to her, “that people laugh to see them shown.”

  “I find them unsettling. Must they be so bloody? Spiritualism, so it seems, must always have a lot of blood.” She paused a beat, then gave a sigh. “Mediumship—what a circus,” she said.

  Shockingly quickly she drank down her sherry. Her fine white throat, in blue lapels, went swallowing after the last of the liquor.

  “You are just starting out. Have you clients?” said she.

  “Fairly many clients, Ma’am.”

  “Clients come and go,” said she. “Since the spirits first rapped in my ears as a girl we Fox sisters have been booked solid.”

  “Rapped,” said I. “I’ve heard it, Ma’am. The rap,” said I, “what does it mean?”

  “Do they not rap for you?” said Kate.

  “They—well . . .” I blushed. “They might rap yet.”

  “They always like to give a rap. Rapping is their grammar, dear. Go ahead and ask Miss Conant. She is a most dexterous rapper, I’m certain.”

  “The dead ones, they—I mean, the spirits. Mostly they just come,” said I.

  “They come to us in different ways. So who’s to say what form they take.”

  The Destruction of Pompeii. Osiris Enthroned. The Witch of Endor in her Cave.

  Guay in Ecstasy

  October, 1860


  Man is the sum of the natural world. The Six Great Principles show this. They are Wisdom—Utility—Justice—Power—Beauty—Aspiration—Harmony, in that order. Harmony being the last and the highest for it is closest to the wishes of the Positive Mind.

  Or Divine Architect. Or Great Spirit. Or God.

  For William Mumler was His agent. Listen please while I explain.

  Take a camera say and point it. Point it at a tree why not—and tell that tree to keep still please—and make what is called, and what is, an exposure. Now do as William Mumler does. Take the plate. Wash it. Pour the so-called preparation. And when you’re done: observe.

  That tree.

  It is all of it there in its fullest expression. No more and no less than the Positive Mind had in mind for that tree when He made it exist is missing from the picture you have taken of the tree.

  To see it there exults your heart.

  I wrote to His Seership to tell Him as much and His Seership writes back: Stay as long as you need.

  Packages arrived for me in three days’ time at my shabby hotel.

  There are two kinds of prophets at large in this world, I thought as I crouched at the base of the stairs and watched the little darkened square that showed the front of Mumler’s rooms. The first kind of prophet holds forth in the day and humbles a crowd with the marvels he’s seen, yet who can say that this man’s words are not the raptures of the crowd. The second kind he has no crowd—he has no mount—and speaks at night—and then speaks only to himself in a room as dark as William Mumler’s. No one can say they were prophets, these men, for no one has been there to witness their marvels. Isn’t this a tragedy and yet a triumph even so.

  Maybe if I stayed right here in my little hideout at the base of the stairs. Maybe if I stayed right here in my base Mental State en route to the next then I could say in years to come that I had been the first to see.

  Mumler In Straits