Shadows in Summerland

  “Of course you do,” I said. “I too. And now we know. The both of us.”

  Hannah Mumler Loud and Clear

  February, 1861

  Katherine Fox engaged in Boston. Sent her girl around to call.

  Sweet Auburn at noon. Cambridge-side of the river. Handsome city of the dead.

  Katherine Fox was waiting, unescorted, at the gates. Strollers in the park already. Umbrellas open, should it rain, were passing down the narrow lanes.

  We passed the chapel at the gate and wandered down along a road. Avenues had names like Ash and Buttercup and Saffron. Stones in clusters, grouped by clan. Some of them modest, weathered, grey. Others ugly with proclaiming. Stone angels in tears. Gentlemen flying whiskers. Tombs in the Egyptian style. A lot of the graves were streaked with salt. Wore mantles of snowfall on top of their headstones.

  She had a daybook and a pencil. Writing down some names she saw.

  Romulus Gwyn, Born in 1840, Died in 1859.

  Cornelia McDonald, Born in 1834, Died in 1857.

  Talked about her sister, Maggie. Lamenting a suitor three years in his grave. Adventurer into the Arctic, said Kate. All he brought back was a case of consumption.

  For him to die took two years. Six months in Havana, attempting recovery. The man had sent Maggie avowals of marriage, but he had never made it back.

  From New Orleans to Philadelphia, Maggie’s suitor’s mourning train. Ever since she had taken to drinking all day. As people were wont in the place they were from. But this drinking, said Kate, was new. This drinking, said Kate Fox, was strange.

  “It’s as if, when she does it, she’s breathing,” said she. “And the rest of the time she just goes around, stifled. I’ve talked to him beyond the veil. I’ve asked him things regarding her. But Maggie, she is unconsoled. She is, by all accounts, too tired. The medium’s life is a perilous one in matters of love and affection, of course.”

  “Were they married before he died?”

  “Alas.” Katherine sadly shook her head. “Oh Hannah, it’s awful, it’s awful, I know, I mightn’t even say the words, but what if he meant to appease her, you know? To cast her finally from his life? And never planned to marry her upon his return from—where was it?”

  “Havana.”

  She looked abashed: “You listen well. You might attempt to sit for circles. For that is all it is, you know. Listening to dreadful things.”

  And then a rain began to fall. Huge and cold and quick, from nowhere.

  We ran along Laburnum Path, which coiled down a hill between close-growing bushes. Soon it let us out again at a level much lower than most of the graves. And here a sort of matted lawn, on the outskirts of which sat a few mausoleums. One of them open, its door clanging wide.

  HITCHCOCK chiselled in the stone above the dripping archway there.

  We huddled in behind the bars. Rain exploded on the grass. Nowhere to sit but a brief bit of ledge that lined the walls that housed the crypt.

  “Would you like me to teach you?” said she.

  “Teach me what?”

  “How to sit for someone sad.”

  Had picked the conversation up as if we had never been caught in the rain

  “First I will do you,” said she. “Furnish me with someone dear.”

  Did not tell her Grace’s name. Grace’s name would be my secret.

  And so I told her of my father. His Sunday Gin. His loose tobacco. Cresting the waves with the seabirds perched on him.

  Kate Fox nodded as I spoke. And yet when it became her turn, she did not really seem to see him. See him as he’d been to me. She spoke of him in general terms. Like any father, anywhere. “Ain’t you missed me, girl,” said he, but in Katherine’s voice as she channelled his words. “But ever was I home again upon the wide and rolling sea.”

  At some point the rain had stopped falling outside. Kate had been speaking for minutes, for hours.

  “Now,” said she. “Why don’t you try. And let us pick someone that matters. My sister Maggie’s beau. Do him. Where is he,” said she, “right now?”

  I combed the small space for a dead one to speak of. Any dead one would have done. A clerk. A red-faced drummer boy. A ruined Narragansett belle.

  But none of them were here. Not now. Only Kate’s imploring face .

  I had not seen a single dead one past the cemetery gates.

  “Is everything all right?” said Kate. “I haven’t upset you, have I, Hannah? Sometimes what comes through . . .” She searched. “Why it can prove too true, you know.”

  “Really, I am fine,” said I. “But I am afraid that I can’t see a thing.”

  Q

  Not seeing did not last for long. Katherine saw me back downtown.

  Along the path that lined the Charles and in the crowded trolley car. Here and there among the throng that pushed in two opposing streams. But always turned the wrong way round. North when they should’ve gone south. Or vice versa.

  Dead ones daft and pale and trackless. Asking me questions I couldn’t ignore.

  A portly charwoman in only a nightgown. A soot-covered man in a billed cap of tweed. A beautiful boy—the Dauphin of the Hub—wearing just one of his patten-heeled shoes, his blond curls oddly matted down as if he had slept on them wrong in the night.

  Had wanted to tell her: Here they are!

  Had wanted her to take my arm when I saw the young man in the queue at the druggist’s. Young man standing, out of place, in a cavalry jacket of dirty blue wool. Turning toward us. Face in profile. Eyes and cheekbones, nose and lips.

  The other half was sheered away.

  Brightness of bone under wet bands of muscle. Fringe of flesh around the hole. I saw them flex, the chords, the strings, as if he had tightened the jaw when he saw us.

  But Katherine Fox had seen him not. She had grown cloistered. Deferential. Allowed the things I could not say with little hmm’s or little smiles. The new white snow beneath our feet running grey and putrescent with rivers of rain.

  Q

  Mother in our room as always. Waiting for me at the foot of her bed.

  She sat like a man, with her knees pointed out. Her spine girder-straight with her hands on her thighs. Even underneath her dress you saw how poised she was. How strong. Pale winter light from room’s single window starkly describing the bones in her face.

  “I never had more faith in God than when you were inside me, Hannah. I prayed to God. To Christ, his son. Once in a while, even prayed to the saints. You see, I knew if they were real that they would do all that they could to protect you. And that is why I prayed,” said she. “I knew that I couldn’t protect you myself.”

  “I was born in the summer,” said I.

  “In July.”

  “It was so hot my eyes were fogged.”

  “Your barely blinking eyes,” said mother. “You were turned the wrong way, shoulders up, in the womb.”

  “But then you breathed for me,” said I. “In my mouth.”

  I knew the story, how it went. Next she’d say: We breathed as one.

  “The real trouble only came later,” said mother. “I saw you in your crib one day. You were standing or trying to stand when I saw you. You clutched at the bars of your crib and leaned out. And I thought: Oh, the little dear. I will come to the crib. I will help her to stand. You were not reaching out to me. And I wanted to tell them: Leave her be! But then I saw your face,” said she. And she turned full upon me. Her eyes wide with fear. “I saw you did not need my help. No more than you needed my help to keep breathing.”

  “You wish that I were not like you. You think that what I am is wrong.”

  “I wish that you were different, Hannah.”

  “Different than I am?” said I.

  “What you are . . .” Voice dropped. “My child. I’d hoped I was the last, you see. I’
d hoped that it would end with you. But it comes in the milk, don’t you see? Is the milk. In the blood that we bleed, in the urine we pass, in the sneezes we make, in our spit—it is there. But this Mumler,” said she. “He is vain and impatient. He does not even trust his friends. And yet there is something unyielding in him. Even something overpowering. One has cause to wonder, child, about the seed of such a man.”

  “You wish me to bear him a child,” said I.

  But mother did not answer me.

  “I was sixty years old on the day you were born. Before even your father I’d married a man. We bore no child,” said she. “He died. Year after they broke her”—she fingered her locket—“I married your father, and then you were born. My mother— Elsa was her name—she married three men in her lifetime alone. The Maier blood is strong,” said she—a prayer-song, I felt, that my mother kept singing. “We have always, of course, needed men at our sides.”

  “You are seventy-five, mother?”

  “Seventy-six.”

  “And grandmother, how old was she?”

  “One-hundred-and-thirty-years old when she died. Three husbands—three. Outlived them all. And she would’ve had more had they not broken her. Burned her,” said mother, “because she could see.”

  “Do Maiers never die?” said I.

  “Not from growing old,” said she.

  My mother’s changeless, handsome face. Like a statue that guarded some old Roman shrine.

  “You want me to have Mumler’s child not out of love, but advantage,” said I.

  “You married him out of advantage,” said she.

  “I married him because you said.”

  “Better on the whole,” said she, “than to spend a lifetime pining after that girl.”

  “You are terribly, terribly cruel to say that.”

  Not wanting her to see me cry, I started to go from the room in a hurry.

  “My dear sweet daughter, understand,” I heard her say, “it’s who we are.”

  Miss Conant at her Furthest Tether

  April, 1861

  At the Rochester Convention for the Vested Rights of Woman, I did not rap three times for yes. And in front of the Womanist’s League in Montrose I introduced Constance and brought her on stage to assist in my talk on “the medical folly.” And at the Modern Times Experiment in Brentwood, Long Island, I let myself get cold enough I was able to beg off the trance altogether, this being due to the wind off the Sound, battering into my rostrum.

  When toward the middle of the crowd, I saw him standing: Shadrach Barnes.

  His hair and his beard had broad patches of white. His face was fuller, hung with jowls.

  I only realized then, I think, how much like Mumler he appeared.

  The people milled impatiently. They wanted me to channel someone.

  Barnes looked at me from the thick of the crowd with a cautious yet not at all frightened expression. Somebody yelled to do Luther C. Ladd, the first man shot down in the War of the States; I scanned the crowd to find the voice. When I turned my eyes back to the place I’d seen Barnes, I expected his face to be magically gone, but he was moving down the row, excusing himself through the cluster of bodies.

  When I arrived back at the Center again, I wasted no time in beginning to pack.

  These last couple of years I had not amassed much. Old galleys of editions of The Banner of Light; ladies’ shoes with lead-worked soles; cans of phosphorescent paint; a small lamp with a crimson shade; bloomers from department stores that I had been given to wear on promotion.

  Did I sit on my bed and know where I was going?

  I might’ve gone to Mumler’s rooms, not to stay in the long term but, merely, regroup. We could meet in the cellar or down in the shop or one time, even, in the foyer. We had done this less carefully, probably, than ought. In short—and it was often short—any place in the house where “the battery” wasn’t. But I could not go to him now. For as soon as I went there and told him my story, then he would know why I had come.

  So it was in the act of preparing for somewhere that E.H.B. happened to stop by my rooms. She glanced at me and then my things, arrayed upon the coverlet. I followed the path of my guardian’s eyes and saw a stage-set, nearly struck.

  “Many clients this morning?” she said.

  “Very few. And what about you, Mrs. Britten?” I said.

  She smiled and took a shaky breath. “I can scarcely remember a time in my life when so many souls wanted saving at once.”

  “On account of the war, I suppose,” I said weakly.

  But then for a moment she seemed to forget that there had been a war at all. “I wonder Fanny dear,” she said, “if you have heard the story of my spiritual unfoldment?”

  When I nodded at her I had heard many times, she started talking anyway.

  “I was under the development of Miss Ada Foy, my one-time tutor at the keys. Piano all the rage those days—” And then I thought, she has digressed and she will say, But anyway. “—but anyway, the time had come for us to go our separate ways. I now had clients of my own and the lecturing circuit was just starting up. Have I ever told you of the first one I gave? You can scarcely imagine how nervous I was. Nervous, and yet I spoke fluently, Fanny. A wonder that I spoke at all.”

  “You were saying,” I caught her, “about your unfoldment?”

  “After that, Ada Foy and myself parted ways. She remained in her rooms in Canal Street, took sitters, while I embarked on lectures and campaigning like you. Can you guess what she told me the day that I left?”

  I smoothed down the hem of a dress in my valise. I started to recite the words: “Forget the dead, Emma, remember the living. The dead will drag you down, down, down. The dead are the dead while the living are—”

  “—here. Yes, the living are here,” said E.H.B. “You and I and everyone, that walks and breathes, that grieves and loves. You always listened closely, Fanny. You always had the keenest ears.”

  “I cannot stay. Not now,” I said.

  “I am the only one who knows. You do know that, don’t you?” she said. “I suppose that is why you have come to resent me.”

  I thought of the light on the rail platform swaying—hiding her, showing her, over and over. She was a woman who had saved me from a schoolhouse full of monsters. That is all she was to me. And that was all she’d ever be. And yet I discovered: I didn’t resent her. For that would mean that she had won. That would mean when I left here, en route to where I could not say, that my spite and resentment would weigh down upon me until I had to throw them off. And then, in spite of spite itself, I would start once again to feel gratitude toward her.

  I did my best to look unmoved. “I’ve decided I do not resent you,” I said.

  But when she smiled to hear those words I did resent her, terribly.

  “Oh how I shall miss you,” she said, coming forward, folding her arms around my neck.

  Guay in Despair

  May, 1861

  His Seership once explained to me that men’s impulses good and ill have all of them their complement in the World of the Spirits that borders our world.

  And so for every saintly man is a Spirit that cradles that man in its favour. Just so for every wicked one is One that holds him to his ill.

  Affinities these ties are named. The wicked ones are called Diakka.

  Like angels but with blackened wings, they seemed to flock around my head. They liked to have a lark on me. At night I heard them clambering upon the roof of my hotel, dragging their pale bodies over the slate and scraping the tips of their wings in the gutters.

  Mumler was no more at Newspaper Row. Now he was in other rooms just three streets south on Otis Street and these were larger, Mumler said, so as to hold his clientele.

  A week passed then of William Guay in search of chairs and rugs and drapes.

 
The first day we opened for business at large everyone you’d think was there. Hannah’s mother in her room—and Hannah in a pretty dress—and Mumler in a costly suit provisioned on His Seership’s dime—and then of course there was Bill Christian, lurking, coming in and out.

  The day’s first sitter came at ten. He knocked his all there was no bell. I drew the door—says to him, “Welcome. Come upstairs and sit,” says I.

  But then he looked at me cock-eyed for I’d forgot there were no stairs.

  When Hannah asked him for his name he said that it was Mr. Hinkley. And then he went on to explain that he did not desire a sitting. Rather it was for his master. This man he declined to name.

  Mr. Hinkley bowed to us and then he let me see him out.

  No sooner had I shut the door than there was knocking there again and I went down the hall to retrieve Mr. Hinkley. Not only was the knock not him but this new man was tall, well-built, and stood with folded slim white hands. He wore a sweep of waxed moustaches—fussy suit—and bowler hat. The first thing he did upon coming inside was to write down his name in the studio’s logbook.

  “Mr. Five Hundred?” Mumler says. He checked the shop’s logbook again.

  “I am the gentleman spoke of,” says he. He had a mellow high-ish voice. He was almost a pretty man. His staring eyes were very green and damp as though he had been weeping.

  “And what do you do here in Athens,” says Mumler, “if we are not to know your name?”

  “You came recommended by Katherine Fox on account of your medium, sir, standing there. She has told me that Hannah, if that is her name, would provide me with the evidence I needed for conviction.”

  “Conviction in regard to what?”

  “I hear that your Hannah is gifted,” says he. “By some accounts too gifted, yes? While you, sir, were explained to me as a prodigy of science and an artist to bargain. More than belief, that is why I have come. To see a splendid process happen.”

  The way he had said the word happen was strange. It almost seemed to make him giddy.