Shadows in Summerland

by Adrian Van Young

  Thinking them impregnable, I shipped off P.T. Barnum these.

  But I had not thought wisely, probably.

  This narrow outlook on my part might well have been due to my skill as a hoaxer—great, in that I was no hoax!—for there’d always been something of common illusion about my correspondent’s work: his woolly horses, Feejee mermaids, giantess ladies and overdressed dwarves. And he seemed, in the manner of most bloviators that seek primacy in their part of the pool, to be more than aware of his many shortcomings, how degraded his craft was compared to my own. While I might’ve been the inferior showman, showmanship was not my game.

  The man attacked me in the press.

  He singled out my work uniquely.

  Some correspondents will ask me, he wrote, if I believe that all pretensions to intercourse with spirits are impositions. And I tell those men that if people declare that they can privately communicate with invisible spirits, I cannot prove that they are deceived or that they are attempting to deceive me. Indeed if these men and women can cause invisible agencies to perform in open daylight all of the things they pretend to accomplish by spirits in the dark, I will promptly pay five hundred dollars for the sight of it. In the meantime, I think I can reasonably account for and explain all pretended spiritual gymnastic performances—throwing of hair-brushes—dancing pianos—spirit rapping—table tipping—playing of musical instruments—and flying through the air in the dark and a thousand other wonderful manifestations to be as flat and cold as dishwater. Spirit photography, he concluded, is false if not more so than these.

  I’ll say it caught me quite off-guard. We were both of us caught off-guard, I think. Put a clever old goat in a room with his junior and you must let them kick it out.

  But I declined to stoop to that. I answered him quietly, privately, briefly. I told him he might keep the pictures, hoping they would entertain.

  On the night of the day that they published his screed, a brick came through our northside window.

  Slipper-shod, I searched the scene for a note maybe tied to the back of the brick, some sinister promise or defaming, but all that there was, was the hurled thing itself. The incident had roused the women who both ventured down from their garret of night where they stood in the doorway with unblinking eyes.

  I drafted a scorching succession of letters, oppressively rhetorical, clad in the facts. Yet I didn’t postmark them. I shelved them and waited—ideally, for some hot addendum from Barnum, and when it was clear none was coming, still more.

  There was a small drop-off in business. Or maybe not so small, at that. Though I was sure that, given time, this deficit would self-correct.

  Yet here was Barnum—spitting, reddened.

  I had been the better man.

  And yet you will be wondering why Barnum goaded me at all? There’d been that piddling drop-off, yes, in the sitters who came to inquire at my door—fifteen sitters in a week where prior to that there had been nearly thirty. Yet even so the year before had been nothing if not a spectacular year and I had plenty cash already biding in my parlour’s chests.

  The crux of it was only this: the man had dealt blows to my good reputation.

  And that is how it came about that Charles Livermore became all the more crucial.

  The man had been in omnipresence all about my rented rooms. He sat there in his tailor-mades, making the modest wallpaper look shabby, or worse would stroll along the walls looking at my spirit pictures and wondering with fierce impatience when his and Estelle’s would appear there among them.

  The picture of Baker and Child’s bloodied corpse I’d immolated weeks ago, though that didn’t answer the question one bit of who Child had been to the banker in life. For Child with his head battered in reappeared in several—many—of my prints. He crouched and stood and loomed and lurked and sulked and paced and lounged and peered. It was the highest designation of the fellow’s afterlife, I’m greatly saddened to report, to recur in my prints looking not quite his best.

  It was a proper haunting, reader!

  And so I would double-expose him away, replace him with another ghost and deliver this forgery, priced as before, down into the sad, amazed hands of its owner.

  A slippery incline?

  Of course it was, reader.

  I was well, well aware of the risks that I took.

  The banker came two times a week. But today, oh today, it might always be different.

  Today he came at ten past eight, and as I led him to his stool once Guay had taken off his coat, he stared at my wife at the edge of the room in the process of warming herself for the sitting. My wife was mustering her shade as a fisherman musters the width of his nets, picking out the kinks and folds so as to throw them best and farthest. Her eyes were fluttering a bit, her gullet working rapidly. It looked as if her cranium were on its way to giving birth.

  Katherine Fox was due, and late.

  “Mr. Mumler, I wonder,” spoke up Livermore, “how Matthew Brady’s portraits strike you? Powerful stuff, I am told. And quite gruesome. He means to make us own our war.”

  I thought of what I knew of Brady: ruined boys and bloody dirt.

  “You are all about Boston these days, aren’t you, sir?”

  Observing me, he sat and smoked. “I’m not withholding confidence that you will manifest Estelle. She shall be your Confederate sharpshooter, eh? And all of Boston will rejoice.”

  When at that moment, happily, Katherine Fox came up the stairs.

  For a moment she wavered upon the top step, as though in amazement how she had arrived there. Livermore stood when she entered the room.

  “Charlie, I’ve come,” she said. “Hello! Hello to all of you!” She waved. “Say, Charlie: I think we will get her today. I feel she is within our reach.”

  If Kate Fox was not dead with drink then I was not in need of one. Her feet sounded extremely loud across that many-peopled space.

  “You’re welcome to take up position,” I said, “as soon as you’re inclined, my friend.”

  Livermore sat down in front of the curtain and started to cinch up his tragic cravat.

  I asked Livermore, “What is Miss Fox’s role?”

  “The spirit of my wife,” he said, “is on good terms with Kate’s control.”

  I remembered the girl from the Spiritualist Center not unbecoming in her robes while Livermore screwed shut his eyes, unwilling or able to see who she wasn’t.

  “Of course.” I smiled at Livermore. “The plates are ready, Mr. Guay?”

  Guay poked his head from the closet. “Yes, sir.”

  “Then I shall calculate the light.”

  Bill Christian appeared in our midst with the drop cloth and paid it out over the top of the camera.

  “Mr. Livermore, you’re comfortable?”

  And Hannah took that as her signal, rising abruptly from her stool and dragging it right of the shot, just outside it. At this remove she sat again and Livermore responded, “Quite.”

  And so with the hand that had helped Mother sleep, and the hand that had cramped under scourge of Papa, and the hand that had fashioned my girl-wife her ring, and the hand that had fingered the picture of Cora in the dark of my closet so many nights past, I fitted the plate in the back of the box.

  I ducked my head below the shroud.

  Beneath the gloom-permitting cloth, I followed the light as it tracked in the fabric and listened to the murmurings of Livermore obtaining poise.

  Katherine tittered drunkenly: “Elegance embodied, Charlie.”

  And then I sensed Hannah was no longer moving, that she had perfected the path of the shot and that she was waiting, her back to the curtain, to see the camera through its work. But not only was Hannah not turned from the curtain but facing its tableau head-on and, to make matters worse, she was violently sneezing, burst upon burst upon burst, toward the shot. The
motes she blasted from her nose were scrambling up and through the light, and the sneezes came on her with steady control, like shot before a rifle column.

  It was all I could do to wait out the exposure, counting off the thirty seconds, while Katherine said: “God bless you, Hannah. Bless you—bless you—bless you—bless—”

  “Mr. Mumler,” said the banker. “Haven’t you waited a moment too long?”

  I realized, sadly, that I had.

  “A grip of sneezes!” said Kate Fox. “But Charlie, we must try again. If you have it in you to keep looking dapper, I’m sure that my Rosa can see to return. Is that not so, my friend?” she said to the still parlour air at the right of her head. And waiting a beat she pronounced: “He agrees.”

  Mumler Confirmed

  August, 1861

  Reader, I ask of you, what is a month? What is a month in the shadow of ruin? A biddy of a moth, no more, chafing her stick-arms and whirring her wings above the fluid grain of time—so tentative of touching down, of being snagged and snatched away.

  So I had bought myself a month. And yet I did not feel I owned it.

  In his infinite cruelty and infinite patience, Livermore had sold it to me, not that a month wasn’t standard, all told, for producing the six or so prints that I owed. But how unfair it seemed—to me! For I think I began to conceive of the prints that I had made for Livermore as a grouping of cursed and impossible objects whose conjuring I’d had no part in—that had simply appeared there, maleficent, foreign, stern against their cardboard backing, determined to fester my life with unluck.

  But allow me to describe them, reader, clad with dread inside their drawers:

  More than one ghost would’ve been bad enough. In Livermore’s pictures there are five. They crowded around him on his stool.

  Some of them I recognized but most of them, of course, I didn’t. You could only see Child on account of the fact that his ghost was, as usual, fixed on the viewer. Around him are shoulders and profiles and hairlines and people’s necks above their collars. Why Hannah had ruined the picture with sneezing I could not at that moment say, yet still I must square with a critical fact: the land of the dead was not mine to set foot in. I might schedule the sittings, and work the machine, and jaw pleasantly through the Lahngworthy dinners, but Hannah and her instrument had always had the upper hand.

  And so I attempted to muster control; I fumbled about in my arsenal, reader.

  Delaying the order, destroying the prints and falling on the banker’s mercy, doctoring the prints myself with an image purloined from Charles Livermore’s study.

  Such were my options. I studied them well. I could not simply give them to him. And still there was the threat of Child—him noticing Child, which he would in short order.

  The shades had amassed and the fees had been paid.

  At the end of that week, I resolved to do nothing.

  Imagine, then, my panic, reader, when I arrived home on the Friday that followed to find Mr. Hinkley, in livery, waiting, upon the topmost of my steps. Hannah was out on parade with Kate Fox again while Claudette, I could only assume, lurked inside—not that she ever went anywhere, reader. It was just Guay and I who came up the front steps.

  We were hobbled with bundles and bags from the chemist’s. Physically and then besides, the meeting was an awkward one. The footman did not offer aid, just watched Guay and I fight to balance our things.

  “To collect Mr. Livermore’s pictures,” said Hinkley. “He thought they might be done by now. May I help you with those bags while we travel inside to collect them?” he asked.

  I conferred on his person my three biggest parcels and everyone processed inside.

  Into our receiving rooms, I put down my parcels and spoke to the footman. “Feel free to remain, Mr. Hinkley,” I said. “I will go and fetch the prints.”

  “I’m sorry, sir. I can’t do that. Mr. Livermore was very clear that I vouchsafe his pictures’ freshness.”

  “You wish to come into the closet with me?”

  “I wish to merely stand outside it.”

  There was no more sidestepping what now must be done. So I walked to the door in the shadow of Hinkley, and Hinkley himself in the shadow of Guay.

  In the end, I went in and came out of the closet.

  Everyone was still alive.

  He checked the pictures, looked at me, said: “Fifty dollars, is it not?”

  “And what do you think of our services rendered?”

  But he declined to answer that. When he had counted out the bills he pressed them, springing, in my palm.

  “As you can see, she isn’t there. For that”—I drew nearer the footman—“I’m sorry. But I think you will find, on a closer inspection—” Yet the footman had moved to the window, surveying, as though I hadn’t spoken to him. “If you, sir, are dissatisfied on Livermore’s behalf,” I said, “then I trust you will out with the source of your grievance before it commences to harden and set?”

  Mr. Hinkley continued to stare out the window. And then his eyes grew possum wide. The front door of Otis Street hammered and shook. All of us recoiled at once.

  I said: “There’s no need, I am coming, do not—”

  But whoever was doing the ramming kept on.

  The door-jamb retched splinters, the knob jarred the floor, the door itself came quickly after. A column of coppers stood there in the door with a battering ram as the spine of the column. They passed it back, and spread inside, and a bald man in plainclothes came in on their tail.

  The man was squat and carven-shouldered. On his head a bowler hat.

  “Mr. Mumler, I take it?” he said, very brusquely. “Mr. William H. Mumler of 4 Otis Street?”

  “That is the place where you’re standing, good man, in case you weren’t aware,” I said.

  “And that is the name of the hand that I’m shaking?”

  “But you have yet to take it, sir.” I took his hand and said: “Let me.”

  “But you must wonder who I am. Inspector Marshall Henry Tooker. And I’m come here to tell you,” he said not to me, but rather to the group at large and dropped my hand to walk the room, his bowler swinging from his side, “as chief emissary to his honourable mayorship beneath the directive of Article 7 of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, that you are accused of larceny and fraud against the common man.”

  “On what grounds are we charged?” I said.

  “Your actions, sir, have been confirmed.” He gestured at Hinkley, gone stiff in his corner.

  “On what grounds are we charged?!” I pressed.

  “You’re eager for me to pronounce them?” he said.

  He seemed almost disinterested. He peered amidst the couch’s weave; he ducked into the murky closet; he hunted along the wainscoting as if it supported some structural secret; he cycled by the entry-table, picking up a single card, and skimmed it backward toward its brethren. Then he went by William Guay.

  “You are the assistant, I’m told?” And Guay nodded. “Now what can we say is the plural for William?” Trying to think of the right word to call us, his eyes remained fixed on the bumpkin and me. “A skein of geese. A pride of lions. A murder of crows,” the Marshall said. “A confidence, perhaps. Ah, there. A confidence,” he crooned, “of Williams. And where is the black one?”

  “He’s elsewhere,” I said.

  “And where is the woman? This Hannah—your wife.” To this last I did not respond. “I wonder, Mr. Mumler, sir, if they would do the same for you?”

  And then he softened: “Come,” he said, “You are under arrest. Had I got round to that?”

  I was a little disappointed when he said that, I admit.

  And then we were filing in awkwardness dayward, through the door and down the steps.

  I turned to see the shop again and in the window Hannah’s mother. She had parted the curtain
on the street to show the world her ageless face. I almost had to turn away, so bright with darkness was that look, the way her sighted, sightless eyes peered on toward a future that couldn’t mean good, and everything—everything—all seemed to char, like a beautiful painting set fire from behind—like the roses in the picture of the girl in her coffin or the blood slipping wildly from Algernon’s collar. The ageless face hovered—evoking, accusing. And then the curtain wiped it clean.

  Hannah Reminded

  August, 1861

  Willy dour these summer months. Sitters coming at a drip.

  So it was fitting Kate should call. That Kate should be the place I went.

  To the Sunderlands’ house. Where she stayed when in Athens. Not so elegant now at the height of the summer. Cornice-clipped and mouldy-looking. Received at the door by the Sunderlands’ girl, whose hair was damp with indoor sweat.

  Into the foyer and past the front parlour, we stopped before the grand staircase.

  “Ma’am,” said the maid in a fixed tone of voice. “She’s in Sarah’s old room. Up the stairs, down the hall.”

  Rising through the costly air. Everything smelling of wood and glass polish. Room the maid had named, I knocked.

  “Is that Hannah?” came a voice. “If that is Hannah, do come in.”

  Beyond the creak lay Katherine Fox. Ensconced in the lacework of Sarah’s old bed. A flowered, frosted pink-white bed. Prettified as glassed-in cake.

  Shoes and city dress and all, she lay amid a pile of dolls. Porcelain and cloth. Apple-cheeked. Crowded close. Sun pouring in through the back of the canopy.