Shadows in Summerland

by Adrian Van Young

  “Only from holding in giggles,” Nash says.

  “I think that you have blockage here. A burning blockage,” says His Seership.

  “A licking burning,” counters Nash. .

  “By that, I assume you mean flames?” says His Seership, continuing on past the waist to the thighs. “The fluid flows,” His Seership says. “The fluid circulates, you see. The fluid that was in your chest may now have travelled to your legs. Just as your sense—your inner man—may wander the spheres under right test conditions and you, sir, may remain behind, lying right here on your back.”

  “I’m sorry, doc, my inner what?”

  “Your inner man,” His Seership says. “Your self which is a pilgrim, sir. Hither and thither he goes within reason about the land which lies beyond until one day he gets reborn and starts to wander at his will. On that fair day—”

  “—reborn?” says Nash. “Unless his soul is spoken for.”

  “Spirits are not spoken for. Spirits, Mr. Nash, are smoke.”

  “Exile, flames and smoke,” says Nash. “I’m starting to see the pattern here.”

  “I wonder, Mr. Nash,” says he, “if you have come down from Mayville, after all.”

  The wire was out before I saw it, the tautened extent of it there in the hands, reaching out for His Seership to trap him and seize him. I bolted forward into them and knocked His Seership to the floor. The assassin buck-wheeled off the bench and crouched down but soon enough we had him pinned. He struggled underneath our weight the garrotte flailing in his hand.

  “He waxeth strong in His right hand! He waxeth very strong indeed!”

  He kept on yelling this then: “Fool! You have defiled your one true home!”

  “You didn’t think that through too well,” says one of His Seership’s interns. “Did you?”

  “I am in your gratitude,” His Seership tells me wide-eyed—shaking. “In spite of all that I may say I’m not ready to die—not yet.” He watched Mr. Nash in his spitting and thrashing and suddenly seemed to become philosophical. “You really must admit,” says he, “there is so little time to do.”

  Mumler on Marriage

  That marriage is a sacred pact among men of all races and creeds is determined. The Anglicans would have it thus and who are American men to say different, unless, in the way of American men, they differ in most everything. For, lo, the American gentleman knows that marriage is a wondrous thing. It is a long and unbecoming cultivation of hardship, and hopes for the future, and faith in each other, and thus can scarcely be confined to what most men would have it be. American husbands apportion to marriage no more than the office itself will return. They are unbounded, in this sense and better fit to stay the course.

  Hannah Betrothed

  November, 1860

  “Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here in the sight of God and in the face of this company to join together this Man and this Woman in holy Matrimony—an honourable estate, instituted of God in the time of man’s innocence, signifying unto us the mystical union that is betwixt Christ and his Church . . .”

  Spoke the Reverend before us. Between us. In robes.

  Behind us: mother, Negro Bill.

  So here is my witness, thought I, the whoremonger. On this day of all days that I am to be wed.

  “. . . and therefore is not by any to be entered into unadvisedly or lightly; but reverently, discreetly, advisedly, soberly, and in the fear of God. Into this holy estate these two persons present come now to be joined . . .”

  But there were others in the room. In the giantess shadows my mother and I cast down in the nave of the Neponset Church.

  Now sitting upright in the pews. Or leaning on them, loiter-like. Or lying on them facing up as though they were counting the beams in the ceiling. Wandering down and across the slim aisles to always just miss crossing paths with each other. And when they did cross paths, just brushing. Heatless and purposeless. Coat-sleeves and bustles.

  “. . . if any man can show just cause, why they may not lawfully be joined together, let him now speak, or else for ever hold his peace . . .”

  Dead ones did. They said their part. Had been saying their part all throughout the proceedings. Their pointless, unanswered, ongoing laments. All the worse for the fact that they targeted nothing. Declared nothing more than the fact of themselves. How death, at last, could be no mystery. Death was just our waking lives. Death was a stranger, senile and aggrieved, babbling in an empty room.

  “—hold my peace, much longer now, when her highness, Madame Antoinette, is so late? Am I to, as they say, eat cake? Or am I to eat what the froggy bitch sells me?”

  “—Won’t someone tell the hulking fool that I will not be turned away? That Poughkeepsie attack-dog or no, I’ll persist—that I will find him out at last!—that I will stand here, in the dark, as deep as I am in my cups until—”

  “—woe? Such a pure weight of woe upon me and my cunt? And when I have gone to the chemist’s to tell him, has he not been a righteous judge?”

  “. . . Wilt thou love her, comfort her honour and keep her in sickness and in health; and, forsaking all others, keep thee only unto her, so long as ye both shall live? Wilt thou obey him, and serve him—love, honour, and keep him in sickness and in health—and, forsaking all others, keep thee only unto him, so long as you both shall live?”

  “I will,” said I.

  Or did I say.

  But I had said it. Loud and clear.

  “Who giveth this woman,” said Reverend Not-Hascall, “to be betrothed unto this man?”

  My mother, departing the side of Bill Christian. And she gave me her arm. And I felt that it knew me. Partake of this arm, which has trafficked in wonders. And when she had stood there a moment, unsmiling, her hand gave a squeeze and withdrew back to Bill.

  Not-Hascall’s hand upon my hand. While Willy’s hand contained the rings. Bought on the cheap yesterday and left out without the time to box them up.

  “With this ring, I wed thee,” Not-Hascall continued, “and with all worldly goods endow. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.”

  And Willy was tasked with repeating his words. The rings were upon us. The rings were our rings. And the Reverend Not-Hascall continued to mutter the familiar, dark prayer of the One and True Lord:

  “Our Father who art in heaven, Hallowed be thy Name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done—”

  First time ever Willy Mumler kissed me, light, upon my lips.

  Not-Hascall shut his book of prayer: “And so I say to you—Amen.”

  Message Department

  You fraudulent and forked of tongue, you coveters of fabled ends, what God if any bides in us? What solace is our ill to bear? What second life begins in us, we livers never and again? We tortured dreams and shadow-shapes that mortals yearn to stand too near to demonstrate they walk and breathe, to shore themselves against the end, to show Creation, We were here! in opposite to all of them? What makes you think us innocent when we were never so in life, as though death were a remedy for mortal sin, for mortal strife? And whether it be larceny or cruel manoeuvres of the heart or faithlessness or robbery or murder done in money’s name, where do they go, these blackened acts, if not with us into the grave, there to perfume the coffin air and gird our pillows as we dream, perhaps of fortunes otherwise than those to which we dead are chained? And yet you set out just the same, though after what we wonder still? What makes you stake your undead souls on what you are foredoomed to lose?

  Mumler in Love

  July, 1849

  Believe me, reader, when I say, though it may seem to you unkind, the day I lost my cousin Cora is one of the fondest that I can remember.

  My father and my mother and my mother’s brother Asa, and his daughter, my cousin, little Cora Christine, were camped along Nantasket Beach for the handsomer part of a long J
uly day. Dinghies sawed atop the swells. Egrets and gulls skimmed for food in the shallows.

  None so favoured as we five, arrayed beneath our little rampart of umbrellas, the elder ones tippled with afternoon sherry while Cora and I, at ten and twelve, roamed the bights and cliffs and grottos.

  The Spirit keep my mother in her weakness: she drank laudanum. There were a couple of drops uncoiling at the bottom of her glass. But so do we all have our weaknesses. Yes? And so must we indulge them.

  Earlier, in a grotto, beneath a fringe of wet moss, Cora had taken down her costume. I noted that Nature had not found the place between her skinny legs. She posed a moment, unashamed, then she lowered her chest and her groin to the earth, and pressed them there, into the sand, with her eyes resting on me incuriously. When she rose moments later caked in grey from the sand her boldness was imprinted there.

  I stared at the ghost of the shape that she’d made and when it subsided again turned away.

  Now she looked over, beneath her umbrella. Her costume was purple and flounced at the knees. She dropped her Godey’s Lady’s Book and her hair whipped away from her mouth in the breeze.

  “Willy, come on,” she cried. “To sea!”

  She raced down the beach, veering into the surf.

  I gained some beach on running Cora, my belly shaking out before me, and cut her off on a pass coming in from the shore. Together we stumbled out to sea, our arms around each other’s shoulders, kicking the waves as we went.

  When our feet no longer touched the bottom, we clung to each other, both paddling in place.

  “You’re crowding me, Willy,” she said.

  “I—oh . . .”

  “And stop that poking thing you’re doing.”

  “May I kiss you?” I said.

  “To be sure, you may not.”

  “Under what conditions may I kiss you?” I said.

  “Conditions,” she said to herself, amused. “I will have to think on some.”

  She launched from my arms, a victorious fish, and rafted away on her back.

  “I will swim to . . . there,” she said. “And when I come back, you’ll have your kiss.”

  “I will swim with you.”

  “You will not.”

  “I won’t?” I said.

  She looked at me.

  “From here to there is far,” I said.

  This as she began to swim.

  Long-legged for all that she was slight, my cousin began to kick and pull, a motion that took her ever further from where I watched her in the calm. How fast she seemed to swim away and yet through the warp of remembrance how slowly, her head, neck and shoulders, all working together, rising, then falling, then failing to rise.

  Inconceivable? Yes.

  Impossible? No.

  In the space of that last breath she took, she was gone.

  “Cora,” I cried. And cried. And cried. Not tears, but her name, said again and again. “Mother,” I begged of the shore. “Mother, quick!” And paddled about to face the beach.

  But mother had been there all along. Mother, vague-eyed, had seen all.

  Miss Conant at a Distance

  January, 1861

  With one of the signs crumpled up in my hands, I did not knock upon the door.

  I went, with controlled violence, up the stairs. The Negro was waiting up top, just like always.

  “Miss Conant,” he said. “Mist’ Mumler with clients. Why don’t you come inside and wait.”

  “Detain me then,” I told Bill Christian, who took a step back and gazed after me, grinning.

  I went at a clip through the sitting room door. Mumler’s back was turned to me; he was bent at his tripod as ever, inspecting.

  “Mist’ Mumler, I tried, but she wouldn’t let up, and I told her—”

  “—now, Bill, it is perfectly fine. I’m sure that she has got her reasons. Would you like to sit down and wait for me—”

  “—in here. I would like to wait for you in here,” I told Mumler, indicating the very same room he was in.

  His sitter, a flushed, older man on a stool, looked unnerved in my presence and then irritated.

  “As you were, Mr. Baker,” said Mumler. “Just so.”

  When the sitting was over, they confabulated, the man making grumblings directed at me, but by and by he took the stairs, projecting irate looks behind him. The Negro seemed to know at last that Mumler and I were to be left alone and, hooding his eyes with uncertainty at us, he too left the room to go wait in the stairs.

  The room’s atmosphere calibrated to hold us, volatile and unconstrained.

  Mumler sat on the couch with outrageous bravado, an aura of lewd and majestic dominion, exhaling roughly through his nose, his bicep cast over the arm.

  Let him play Henry. Just let him, I thought.

  “Won’t you take a seat?” he said.

  I showed hesitation, the ladylike type. Then I went to the couch and I hovered above it; and I hovered, my bustle sublime in the air, before sitting down on the opposite end. As I arranged my skirts around me, I very lightly touched my throat.

  “Where is Hannah?” I asked him.

  “Out shopping with mother.”

  “I’d thought she was your battery.”

  “She is,” he said. He grinned. “She is. Though I don’t often need her past two or three shots. And besides,” Mumler said with an air of sad wisdom, “it is unrealistic to always have ghosts. Three with ghosts and three without—now those are what I call good odds.”

  I considered his face and then looked to his hands. Today, again, he wore the gloves.

  “Congratulations are in order?”

  “This thing here,” he said. “Of course.” And he wiggled a copper or brass wedding ring.

  It was sad tragedy for a jeweller to suffer. It was as though the wedding ring were merely an object to anchor the glove.

  “Before,” I said, “when I came here, irritated with you for promoting your prints, which cost the Banner revenue, not to mention reflected disorderly on us— well I daresay that here, today, you have sullied my trust for the very last time.”

  Astoundingly, he looked confused—as though in his mildness I really had struck him. And then it seemed to come to him. “The sign postings,” he said. “Of course.”

  “The sign postings, yes, Mr. Mumler, I’ve seen them. Do you think I am stupid?” I said.

  “Not at all.”

  “Do you think then I didn’t know what you were up to? Having me endorse you, sir?”

  For a moment the jeweller looked poised to cry “Outrage.” Then the impulse left his face. “If you knew I would beggar your interests,” he said, “then why did you agree to write?”

  “I fear I thought the best of you. I fear I believed in our little alliance.”

  “Yet clearly you didn’t,” said Mumler, amused, “if you are as wise as you claim, Madam Speaker.”

  “You are staring at me, Mr. Mumler,” I said. “What is it that you think you see?”

  “A woman to be reckoned with,” he said to me softly, absurdly.

  I scoffed. “And you have reckoned—is that it?”

  “I’ve reckoned,” he said, sitting back, “but ungamely. How would you have me put it right?”

  “Describe me better than you have.”

  “I see a coquette with a head on her shoulders who wishes to say how this shop’s to be run.”

  “That is better,” I said. “That is plausible, even.” I touched the buttons on my dress. “Though I am sure that you see more.”

  He paused for a moment and watched me, gone grinning. He pointed a finger at length, which he dropped. I looked around the studio to see was anyone still there.

  I did not care a stitch for Hannah, Hannah’s mother, Negro Bill. So I worked at the first of my bl
ocky cloth buttons, not breaking for even a moment his stare as I needed the air rushing in, rushing over, rushing into my neck from cool channels above. I stuck out my knees so they met with his knees and when he tried to move, I held him. It was an alignment of knees, and it pleased me, and I thought to myself, It is something unspeakable, and I rapped on his thigh, very sharp, with two fingers, my middle and my index, braced.

  “Tonight we will have something straight that you would do better to never forget.”

  And with those words I took the sign and mashed it, crumpling, in his face. I paid it with a crackling noise across his hot, accepting face and felt his features coming up beneath the rover of my hand.

  I felt him through feeling his warmth and his breathing. I felt him though he was not there.

  He made, then, to kiss me. I pushed him away. He flopped, awkwardly, on his end of the couch. And there, tumbled over, his hair in his face, not knowing at all what to do with his hands, I think I may have liked him best. I loomed in above him—unswerving, totemic.

  “Eyes right here,” I said to him and did away another button. And when he moved again toward me, thinking at last I had given him licence, I shook my head at him. He lowered his hands.

  “You may extract yourself,” I said.

  “And I will watch your breast, so doing.”

  “You will do no such thing,” I said. “Your eyes may rest upon my neck.”

  He did not go about it quickly but lissomely, rather, as if I weren’t watching. I could not hear the sounds he made for the deafening sound of my blood in my ears. We sat there in silence but for his exertions, upwards of a couple of minutes.