Shadows in Summerland

  The eyes of Livermore were red and his ears were red too with the things they had heard. He sat before a shelf of books with the span of a ladder descending behind him. Just at the level of his head was a narrow shelfless portion of the wall with pictures on it. To these my eyes were slowly drawn.

  The top two rows were all Estelle, both during and after her brief luckless life—if lucklessness, reader, can be reckoned apart from the prosperous net worth of Livermore’s holdings.

  Estelle and her parents.

  Estelle at the beach.

  Estelle smiling out from a false bank of clouds.

  Estelle amidst her wedding veils, her face composed and somehow sad.

  Estelle and Charles on honeymoon.

  Estelle on a health cure in some scenic glade.

  Estelle holding her only daughter—Lucy Ellen was her name—the girl not more than two weeks old.

  Estelle looking piqued in a chair in the garden with Lucy Ellen, aged 7 or 8, at her side. Lucy Ellen seems happy and perfectly poised, ready and able to care for her mother.

  And many, many portraits more before we arrive at Estelle in her coffin: a glass-topped coffin ringed around with a party of mourners, all clutching their brows.

  Estelle rendered fair by the clever embalmer.

  Estelle’s gravesite in Forest Hills.

  Even more than the punishing need of the thing, I was staggered by its sheer manpower. How very many men had toiled over Estelle Livermore in her statehood.

  It was I who spoke first: “Did tonight satisfy?”

  “Exceedingly so,” he said and smiled, though not without a hint of gloom. “With Hannah on one side and Kate on the other, it seems that I can scarcely fail.”

  “And yet, sir, you have won,” I said. “Was that not the woman herself—your dead wife?”

  He paused for a moment, distracted by something. “Her, I reckon, yes,” he said. “It sounded like her anyway.”

  “Sounded?” I said.

  “When she spoke in my ear.”

  I waited for him to volunteer and when he didn’t, said: “You sensed her. Without even looking, you knew she was there.”

  “I admit . . .” he began, and sipped his drink. “I was somewhat afraid to look. What in the world could I possibly say when she was standing there at last?”

  “Hello?” I said.

  He hardened: “No. Estelle would scoff if I said that.”

  “I too,” I said, “have loved and lost. You’re not ready to see her yet. But a picture,” I said. “Well a picture is pleasant. A picture is a middle ground.”

  He looked at me fixedly, searching, then softened.

  “This war will be good to we young men at Webster’s, fledgling as it is,” he said. “And so, in our turn, we’ll be good to the war. A fifty-thousand greenback pledge to Boston’s blue boys gone to serve. Less than Suffolk house, of course, but equal to Hovey and Lowell, if I may.”

  “A pledge?” I said, confused at first.

  “A pledge not interest free, of course. A patriotic rate,” he said, “for the Minutemen of ’61. But we are not the only ones. The Hotel Vedome, the Boston Museum, the YMCA, Batchelder and Snyder, why even the crooked Credit House has offered up a share,” he said. “And can you guess what institutions finance such philanthropy?”

  “The banks?” I said.

  “Here, here.” He drank. “To appear to be civically minded,” he said, “you must give of yourself to the civic machine. Can you guess what will happen when they return home?”

  “The Union?” I said. “If indeed it should win.”

  “Oh, it will win,” said Livermore. “If I ever agreed with our man Mr. Sumner it is in his estimation of what the Rebels do not have. Commerce, railroads, schools, you know. Progress trumps regress, of course. And when we win, and win we shall, and Boston’s blue boys come back home, can you guess who will give them the money they need to purchase those homesteads in Dorchester, sir? Those homesteads vital and deserved under whose roofs they shall raise up their families?”

  “The banks?” said I.

  “Three cheers to that. Rah, rah,” he said and drank. “The banks.”

  He set his drink upon the desk. I could barely hear him do it for the feltness of his blotter.

  “Which is by way of telling you that money is no object, sir. For I should give it all,” he said, “to see her even one more time.”

  But I no longer looked at him.

  For there, behind him, in a picture, in a picture of him and Estelle at their wedding, was a much younger version of Algernon Child. He wore the same moustache, but fainter. His hands were laced upon his stomach. And at his neck a smart cravat that he wore with the evening to come in his eyes.

  Charles Livermore said, “I suppose you must wonder why it is that I gave you a fake name at first.”

  “I figured that you had your reasons.”

  “I may be honest now,” he said, “and say it was, really, I didn’t then trust you. And I haven’t been able to, well, until now.”

  I forced myself to look at him, to banish the picture from my eyes. I said to him, “Sir, I am glad that you do. That way we may trust each other.”

  And then we heard a creaking sound. The banker’s eyes were on the door.

  “Lucy Ellen,” said my host and got up partway from his chair. I saw the briefest swatch of something sucked into the house’s gloom. Livermore stood for a moment, considering. And then he slowly sat again.

  Hannah Mumler and the Dead

  June, 1861

  Afternoons among the graves. Katherine and I shared a few.

  Though often I came there a couple of hours early to walk among the morning dews.

  The greenness of it, weeping down. The shadows were empty. The hillsides unwandered. It was the only place I walked where dead ones did not walk there too.

  Mount Auburn was an antidote.

  I thought it would help her. My baby. To be.

  Not as my mother would have her, half-blind. The ken in her severed away at the root. But a Maier. My daughter. A seer of dead ones and trained in the art of the dead. Unashamed.

  For I would have her just for me. Not for my mother but me: a companion. Mount Auburn in stillness and sunlight. In peace. Would help my ragged womb take up. For though I walked there twice a week, my worries were as regular as Willy Mumler’s money.

  “Do you think we might trek today, Hannah,” said Kate. “There doesn’t seem a spot of rain.”

  I held to her. The promenade. She moved from my hand to my arm, at the elbow.

  “So tell me,” said Kate, “have you found your control?”

  “Found my what, Miss Kate?”

  “Your guide. Your docent through the great beyond. Every girl who’s in spirits should have one,” said she. “But you don’t need one, maybe, Hannah. Sleeping titan, aren’t you, dear?

  That little display during dinner,” said she. “And then in the séance—those muttering sounds. And Fanny Conant’s blowsy girl. It could not have been better brought off in the end had we three of us ventured upon it together. Willy, you and me: a team! For scarcely had I spelled out touch—”

  But I no longer wished to hear what she was saying.

  “My spirit guide is named Algie,” said I.

  Which was short, I now realized, for Algernon Child.

  “For a man, anyway, he is short,” began I. “He is short, with dark hair, and he wears a moustache. Something is wrong with the back of his head.”

  “Wrong with it?”

  Said I: “It bleeds.”

  She whispered: “Murder! Ghastly stuff. Yet it cannot be so!”

  “Why not?”

  “Because, my dear, I’ve seen him, too. Or anyway seen someone like him. My spirit control—my Rosa,” said she, “had his throa
t opened up in a hideous business.”

  Here had come a shift in her. Her old romantic self again. And the business of ice, and the girl, and pretending seemed to leave her all at once.

  “You have to admit it is uncanny strange. That both of us have murdered men. The man that I spoke of—my Rosa,” said she. “He was put in the grave for a large cash amount. About five hundred dollars, I think I recall. He explained it to Maggie my sister and I the first night that we ever saw him. He had worked as a tinker. A seller of something. Lightning rods, I think it was. I suppose that he knocked at the wrong man’s front door, years before my family came. He’d been dragged down the steps with his throat leaking blood and was buried ten feet in the cellar, like gold. What is the story of Algie?” said she.

  “Algie has no tale as yet.”

  She looked at me strangely at that. Then she smiled.

  “When Maggie and I would rap as girls, Mr. Rosa would rap, and the raps have kept coming. And so when I’m rapping with others—whoever—I’m always in some sense still rapping with him. Constancy is what one wants. From people, of course, but especially men.”

  Katherine Fox cried out: “Oh men! Terrible, wonderful. Caring and cruel.”

  I replied: “You mean?”

  “The banker. Charlie Livermore, of course!”

  Out of nowhere Katherine’s words. Terrible, wonderful. Caring and cruel. As though she had only just happened to say them. As though she’d been holding them close, in reserve, until she could no longer hold them.

  Said I: “Will you marry him?”

  “It is for him to ask, of course. He would need to be foolish indeed not to know. Which leads me to think he will ask me,” said she, “when he is sure that I’m for him. I find it attractive the way he bears up beneath storm after storm with that sad little girl.”

  Caught up to where she walked ahead and took her arm but she pulled loose. She veered off the path toward a thin stand of shrubs. A scummed-over lake lay beyond it in furrows. Presented me her dark, tense back, which flexed as she manoeuvred something.

  From even fifteen feet away I could make out the play of the sun in her hair.

  Approaching her she turned around. Wiping her mouth with a blue handkerchief. Came forward and took my hands. Each of mine in each of hers.

  “Which is why you must help me—oh Hannah, my friend!” She squeezed my hands.

  “But help you how?”

  “In order for Charlie to lay her to rest, he must have proof of her, you see. And I can only manifest her . . . just so many times in a barely lit room . . . before . . .” Her grip loosened. “. . . not long from today . . .”

  “Before he’ll want to see her fully.”

  “Why yes,” said she. “You understand.”

  “You wish us to make you a photograph of her.”

  “The very thing,” said Katherine Fox. “Men of arithmetic—Charlie,” said she. “They’re very keen on concrete proof.”

  The fierce sun continued to shine, off behind us. Framing her face in a terrible splendor. The single time before or since I hated what the graveyard gave.

  “Promise that you’ll help,” said she.

  “I promise I will try my best.”

  “Oh Hannah,” said she, and dropped my hands, and took my face in both of hers. “Sweet Hannah, I’m sorry”—she cradled my face—“but that just isn’t good enough.”

  Q

  Dead ones out in force today. I clawed my way among them, walking.

  Noticed that a single man amid the throng was on my tail.

  The man was dressed neat. Tailing me at a distance. Embarrassment of watching me. Coming fast for a time and then slowing, bizarrely. As though to imply he were seeing me home.

  When I’d climbed the front steps he gave pause, a block back.

  Before I had opened the door to the house he was there, below me, at the base of the steps.

  He greeted me as Willy’s father.

  Shocked. Not only by his clothes. His unassuming modesty. For I had seen him many times for all the times that he’d seen me. And always in those greys he wore, as though he had dawdled too close to a fire. Looking over Willy’s shoulder. Patrolling the shop with his hands held in fists.

  “And soh, you are Hannah, I tink,” said the man. He was slowly rotating his hat in his hands. “You will do me a favour, young lady?” I nodded. “Please tell him the next that time you see him,” said he. “His muder, Vilhelmina Marie, she is det.”

  Miss Conant in a Certain Way

  June, 1861

  First couple of months after leaving the Center, I took a room in Parker House.

  Of course, it was beyond my means, as Beacon Street was long with lanterns. It struck me as the kind of place that I would’ve been lucky to sleep in on tour but I angled to stay there as long as I could on what I had put by employed the Center. It was a clean, obeisant space. The sheets were always boiled and crisp. I made sure to sleep and to sleep in them often—to get the kind of sleep I needed. The coffee hour was always prompt with little sugared rounds of cake. The other guests were mostly travellers, to see the leaves turn or the liberty sites. And they passed me in families of four in the halls as a brand new attraction: the unattached woman.

  Observe, the fathers might’ve said, how high she needs to hold her head.

  And so it was here that the jeweller came calling, two days after planning the Banner together. His bulk was wholly clad in black. His auburn beard was trim and combed. He even appeared to have put off some weight. He happened to mention his mother had died, and that he would attend the funeral.

  But then he said the queerest thing.

  He asked me if I’d come along.

  The service was, in fact, that day. In a matter of hours, according to Mumler, and he had come by on the off-chance, he said, that I would be unoccupied.

  But I agreed to go with him. I think it was the human thing.

  I saw that my pity was far from ill-founded when he had the hack stop in advance of the park, from whose far edge we went on foot so as to garner less attention.

  “I admit that I don’t understand it,” said Mumler, “how people come here just to walk. The Common is perfectly good, after all, and then without the corpses in it.”

  “On days when there aren’t marching bands. Or regiments processing out.”

  “And yet The Common has no corpses. That is the signal distinction, to me.”

  We mounted toward a great stone tower. William Mumler took my arm.

  You see, he was in love with me. He was, at any rate, enchanted. His hands had touched me, sure enough. But I declined to feel their heat. And so, in this way, they were bunches of nerves that touched on other, separate bunches. The flesh would connect and the chemicals snap. But Mumler never knew the all.

  We crested the hill and began to curve downwards. The suddenness of it lurched my stomach. I had to stop there at the crest of the hill with my arms to my sides to resettle my balance. It was as though behind my ribs there bloomed a little patch of moss.

  At the base of the hill, in among the first graves, a small funeral party was gathered in prayer. Including the Reverend there were four: two older men and a middle-aged woman.

  The coffin hovered, sleek and square, above the long home dug out for it.

  “Come along this way,” said Mumler, steering us wide of the party of mourners.

  We crept along the many paths that made the outskirts of the park and in back of a series of big ornate graves in Roman and Egyptian style, we hovered arm to arm and watched as the prayer finished up and the coffin lurched downward.

  Even from here, I could hear the thing creaking. Mumler peeled away his gloves. He put his fingers to his lips and the flesh there turned white from the force of him, pressing.

  “You can’t hear what it sounds like here.
The sound of the dirt coming down on her coffin. My mother is in there,” he said. “Do you know what that feels like, Fanny?”

  I admitted to him I did not know, that I was sorry even so and that, if he wanted, we might venture closer so that he could bid her a proper farewell.

  He seemed to cogitate on this and then he said: “I don’t think so. I’m in no kind of mood to converse with my father. No thank you, anyway”—he nodded, as though he understood at last—“I’d so much rather stay right here. Standing here, next to you, I may speak or not speak.”

  Beyond the mourners and the grave another hill lead to another raised path and, walking along it, I saw Hannah Mumler. She spoke to herself with her hand on her stomach. I do not think she saw us there. He lips were working twistedly and she worried the front of her dress with one hand. Walking along the upper road with the coffin descending directly below her she struck me as a sort of spool that wound the coffin toward the earth.

  Mumler In A Correspondence

  July, 1861

  And here I had always been of the conviction that infamy is never bad. But ruin will call out to ruin and showmanship more of the same, and though I am loath to admit it outright, the bastard had inveigled me.

  Mr. Phineas Barnum, dedicated American, defrocked investor, cad and showman had written me letters and I’d written him in a mutual spirit of drapery hanging. Over the course of these letters he’d asked that I send him two of my best spirit pictures to place on display in his Barnum’s Museum in the full understanding, of course, that the pictures be viewed and reviewed with respect.

  Nobody has not gained a cent, Barnum wrote, in the underestimation of the audience he serves. And what is more, my dear flush friend, the highest aim of art is others.

  Yours In Humbug, he had signed.

  Which then, I did not think much of, for he was better known than I for the transparency of his artifice.

  So I did what he wanted, I sent him two pictures. Both were crowd-pleasers, displayed years before.

  One was just a gorgeous print of “Mutton Chops” Murray, the hair tonic man, Mrs. Murray or someone approximate to her standing off to his left with an armful of flowers. The other was a Senator who’d claimed to recognize his aide, beaten to death at a rally by teamsters. The Senator claimed he’d seen his friend in the face of a man who is clearly his senior, perhaps fifty-five when the aide had been thirty, and yet with resemblance enough to convince him that this had been the man he sought. The foregrounded look to the spirit itself is in large part what renders the picture unique, and the viewer can make out the weave of his tweeds, the cracks that line his aging hands, the charging shadow of his face as he moves through the room, past the sitter, away.