Shadows in Summerland

by Adrian Van Young

  “Don’t be frightened, Hannah, dear. These shrunk ladies are my friends. Isn’t that right, little ladies? You, lovelies.”

  “Kate,” said I. “You’re still in bed.”

  “Well I had meant to go abroad but here I am all dressed for work. And here you are! You’re always here. You love me, don’t you, Hannah Mumler?”

  Inconceivably hot in that room. Windows closed. Some rug at the centre, gone pale at the edges, where light from the garden broke over the boards.

  Fanning her arms and her legs in the covers. Knocking a few staring dolls to the floor.

  “Maggie and Kate, at ten and eight . . .” she started sing-songing while trying to rise.

  Wavering, lay back again

  “As soon as I wake in the morning,” said she, “I don’t remember for a moment. These last several mornings . . .” Katherine looked at the ceiling. “The thing is, I’m happy. And don’t quite believe. But then, you see, I know again. I know it like my very blood.”

  “Kate,” said I. “What is it, Kate?”

  “You should know it relates to your Willy, uniquely. Charlie has—how shall I say it?—entrapped him. Caught him in his wealthy web. Oh Hannah,” said she. “It is perfectly awful! What at all am I to do?”

  Broke down crying. On her back. Her wrists held stiffly near her face.

  “One moment I’m sure that he wants me,” said she. “The next moment there’s just this—cruelty! And now I know. I really know.” She grew violently sober while sniffling her nose. “I suppose, in the end, it is all for the better. Well maybe not for you, poor dear. This way, I may . . . move along. This way, twenty years from now, I won’t wake up one day and find . . . And find . . .” Her voice grew thin with tears. “. . . the man has used me as a pawn!”

  And here she did break down in wild, ruined laughter.

  “Maggie and Kate, at ten and eight, in country darkness lay afraid and so to prove that they were brave, dropped first one apple then its mate.”

  She paused and leaned down. Groping under the bed. Brought up the last of a bottle of sherry. Gnashed out the cork with her teeth and drank deeply. A little spilling down her chin.

  “I have done this, Kate,” said I. “I have driven him from you.”

  “You have driven him from me? Would that that were all,” said she. “He was never headed toward me. I was simply—a bridge! A bridge that he must go across.”

  Lay on her back. Lightly humming, conducting. The canopy burring along with her arms

  “Tied with pretty little strings. We bounced them up and down. Rap, rap. And she and I, at ten and eight, controlled our terrors just that way.”

  “You and Maggie sang that song.”

  “Always,” said Kate Fox, “as girls. And now you know: I am a fraud. A ridiculous shicker-head rummy, that’s all, who loves a man she cannot have.”

  “The raps,” said I.

  “We made with fruit. Fruit we tied to strings and dropped! But that was all so long ago. Yes, we have graduated, since.”

  “You must lie back and sleep,” said I.

  “But we don’t make the rapping with fruit anymore. And we don’t make it with our toes. We make it with our knees. The fools! Oh the fools!” cried Kate Fox before turning to stone. Then a grim revelation took over her face. “Oh the beautiful, elegant fool!” she lamented. “He’s abandoned me here to my doom—an old maid!”

  And fell asleep just as she was. Fully clothed and sweet with sherry. Slept with her head on my breast, where I’d moved—to the head of the bed, I mean, to hold her—and how could it matter if Katherine was cruel, did Grace not own my heart already—and Katherine’s face purred air. Leaked water. Her hair bent in masses of black on my breast.

  And that’s when the dead girl unmoored from the wall and walked toward me across the room. The bright hem of her bathing costume rolled between her bony knees.

  “Has it occurred to him,” said she, “that I am having trouble breathing? A game is always well and good, but hasn’t this one run its course?”

  “Grace,” said I.

  The dead girl laughed. A full and larking laugh, cut short.

  “. . . crossed paths with my pop?” she was asking me now. “How is my pop for jowls these days?”

  My mother’s words: Go home to God. You are long overdue at his side, darling child. And the governess, mumbling, had wandered away. And this had been a sort of lesson.

  For if you loved them well enough. Or if their madness pricked your heart. Then you might keep them in their grief, if only for a little while.

  And so I told her: “Fine. He’s fine. Your father is fine—can you doubt it?” said I. “Why just the other day, in fact, I saw buying fresh-cut flowers.”

  Deeper inside of my shadow, she came. The whey of what had been her face. “Flowers for an entrance hall? Or are they meant for someone’s grave?” Continued the dead girl: “Might I bring him flowers and hold them above him to bless him, my pop? Might I show him some fair way that I am still his only girl?”

  I frowned at her. And shut my eyes. And counted to ten in the dark of myself.

  Looked up, and she was Grace again.

  Said I: “Just any way you please.”

  Guay in Questioning

  September, 1861

  Things I told to Marshall Tooker:

  First things first the Marshall asks: “When was it that you first met Mumler?”

  “A year and a half come this August,” says I.

  Says he: “And that was here—in Boston?”

  Says I: “I had come from Fredonia then.”

  “Expressly to meet Mr. Mumler?” says he.

  “That’s right,” answers I. “For to witness his marvels. On my and His Seership’s behalf,” answers I.

  “By his Seership you mean, Reverend Davis, your ward?”

  “Andrew Jackson Davis, yes.”

  “And what then was your diagnosis?”

  “When I first saw his photographs I thought that they were very proper. He has the talent that they say.”

  “But it isn’t him with the talent, now is it?”

  “Isn’t it?” says I to him.

  “She is the one who produces the trick.”

  “Hannah makes the trappings, yes, but Mumler always takes the picture.”

  In silence the Marshall considered these facts and then at length he says: “Indeed. Though I can’t but imagine it isn’t distracting to have a woman in your shot? Distracting enough to draw the eyes of a good many curious onlookers, surely.”

  “I don’t see what you mean,” says I.

  “I think you see quite well,” says he. “I think your eyes are sharp as diamonds. Tell me, Willy, if I may, by what process these ghosts appear?”

  “I told you already,” says I. “Hannah’s trappings. Willy fits the slide and then . . .”

  “Fits the slide?” says Marshall Tooker.

  “Puts the plate in back,” says I.

  “And always with the selfsame hand? Always wearing gloves?” says Tooker.

  I was not sure what he was on.

  “Mr. Mumler’s reported to have certain habits. All within your outfit do. You, sir, have your holiness. And Mumler has his holy hand.”

  “Her shadow reflects the light,” says I.

  “The light of the spirits.”

  “So others have said.”

  “And that’s how the camera is able to catch them?”

  “That I have seen it done,” says I.

  “And what about this man,” says he, “who so many people proclaim to be living?”

  “There is no man I know of, sir.”

  He showed me the picture of him I had done for—the one that was taken amid Hannah’s sneezes.

  “Why that man . . .” I says foundering. “T
hat man . . .”

  “Is named Algernon Child,” says the copper. “He lives here in Boston—the South End, in fact. Most every person that I’ve asked attests that he is still alive. And yet here he is in a ghost photograph amid a rather bustling crowd.”

  “And you have seen him round yourself?”

  “I have,” says the Marshall. “Conversed with him, even.”

  “And you are sure that it was he?”

  The Marshall was stiff as though swallowing something and then he looked down at his lap.

  “But here’s a question for you, Willy: what makes you so certain that you can trust Mumler?”

  “He hadn’t cause to lie,” says I.

  “Why I should say he’d ample cause. And now you are complicit, sir. He has lied himself into a corner, I’ll say, and he is crowding out your space. Isn’t it true that you finance his ventures?”

  “Not out of my pockets directly,” says I.

  “Through Mr. Davis, then?” says he.

  “Entrusted by way of his faith in me, sir.”

  “And so I ask of you again: it that not cause enough to lie?”

  “I do not think he would,” says I. “Besides that, sir, he is my friend.”

  Explosively the Marshall laughed and the chair that he sat in appeared to lurch toward me. “Frauds do not have friends,” says he. “Frauds do not need friends whatever.”

  “If he is not my friend,” says I, “then tell me what he wants with me.”

  “That, I have already told you,” says he. “He wants your money, Mr. Guay. He wants the stamp of Jackson Davis. And while he is at it, I shouldn’t much doubt, he wants a pup that he may fetch with. I daresay, sir, that you are that. Maw full of money and useful connections. And here you are in perfect faith, ecstatic to suffer the sins of your master.”

  “And Livermore?”

  “And Livermore! Why, Livermore was just the bait. We’ve been watching your, sir, for some months at this point. I am happy to say you did not disappoint us.”

  Mumler by Misinformation

  September, 1861

  “When was it, exactly, you met Mr. Child?”

  “Two years and two months to the day,” I told Tooker.

  “You seem to know it very well.”

  “I thought I heard you say: exactly.”

  “And where was it you knew him first?”

  “I met him at a séance in a house in the Back Bay. He was the photographer there and we talked. After that for a while we were friends,” I confessed, “as I’m sure Algernon will attest. If you have him.”

  But Tooker did not hear this last or if he did he gave no sign. “Friends for a while, sir, how long do you mean?”

  “The next year and a half I would say, give or take.”

  “I say that’s considerably more than a while.”

  “It was a while to me,” I said.

  “And all of a sudden you no longer were?”

  “Fairly suddenly,” I said. “We ended on bad terms, in fact. Algernon Child was convinced”—I clasped hands—“that I was in some way suppressing his talent.”

  “A case of envy, plain and simple.”

  “A case of misconception, sir. For ours was a friendship of mutual honour. But Algernon could not see that.”

  “The pictures we have of him,” Tooker went on, “all show him rather worse for wear. In fact, he looks a downright mess. In other people’s pictures, too. And when they came forward suppose what they claimed?”

  “If it please you, no,” I said.

  The Marshall laughed. “The fools said this: that man is not the man you say. That man is my brother, my nephew, my friend for Mr. Mumler told me so. While others said: that man there, Marshall. That man there is still alive.”

  “If that is true,” said I, “produce him.”

  “Are you implying,” said the Marshall, “that for some reason, sir, he cannot be produced?”

  “Nothing of the kind,” I said. “I myself haven’t seen him since we parted ways. And since I have nothing to fear,” I pressed on, “when it comes to my work being proven a fraud I wonder have you entertained the thought that Algernon is . . .”

  “Dead.” He looked at me wryly and long, his brow twitching. “How very clever of you, sir.”

  “But that is purely speculation.”

  “We cannot produce him,” he said. “He is missing. Missing,” His Baldness repeated. “Unless . . . But let us circle back to that. You’re aware that Child went to the college of art? The man was there three years, we’re told. Hazard a guess as to whom he befriended?”

  “Why don’t you tell me,” I said.

  “A man named Charlie Livermore. A recent patron of yours, no? Livermore and Algernon, the two of them were friends,” he said. “Like you, they had a falling out. All of this started two years after college. Livermore had quit at art. Embraced the banking life full-time. More gainful pursuit than photography, surely. And yet he wished, I do suppose, to keep his finger on the pulse. And so he did what artists do when they resort to making money. He became a board member, if not an aspirant, of the Massachusetts Chapter of the PSAI.”

  “He denied Algernon’s application,” I said. “I’d heard as much from Child. But why?”

  “In part, I’ve come to understand, for his entanglement with you.”

  “I’m not sure that I understand.”

  “Before he applied to the PSAI, Child had asked Livermore for a loan,” said the Marshall. “He wanted to finance some process experiments. He wanted to see how you did what you do. But Livermore denied him that. Spirit pictures, it seems, were implausible to him, believer in spirits though he was. And then when Child dropped off the map at the height of his suspect involvement with you, Livermore, feeling guilty, concerned for his friend, looked into the matter of looking at you. He came to us with his results, and we proposed our little sting. Mr. Livermore,” he said, “was suggestible far in decline of his friend. Care to dwell, Mr. Mumler, on some of his theories?”

  He did not give me time to answer.

  For by then he’d commenced in a sonorous voice, by way of what the banker told him, to enumerate for me the various ways that I was thought to work the trick. When he was done I smiled at him and eased back snugly in my chair.

  “. . . Livermore was full of theories. Here’s another one for you: Algernon happened on methods,” he said. “And that is when you murdered him.”

  “Why this must be some grotesque joke.”

  “We know that Algernon is missing. Along with the fact that when he disappeared, he was firmly in the business of investigating you. Such relative contingencies may not be overlooked,” he said.

  “And yet your logic has a flaw so far as those prints of him go, Mr. Tooker. For if I am a fraud,” I said, “I cannot be a murderer. And if I a murderer, then I can no more be a fraud.”

  “And so you admit to the first one,” he said. “Murder’s not your cup of tea?”

  “I freely admit to none of them.”

  “And that is why, sir, we’ve accused you of both. For if we can’t have you on murder,” he said, “then we will have you on the rest.”

  “That will never wash,” I said. “As you say yourself, Algernon has gone missing. I should think that you might have a difficult time convincing a jury my pictures are hoaxes when you cannot produce the man whose very existence is your only proof!”

  “Legally speaking, Mr. Mumler, we won’t have to produce him, when we’re done with you. Our experts and lawmen and rival photographers, not to speak of the people whom you have defrauded, are more than ample cavalry to drag you screaming through the mud.”

  “And if the charge of fraud should fall,” I asked Marshall Tooker, “you’ll settle for murder?”

  “Murder we are working on.”

  �
�Working on,” I said, “indeed. Which is to say you have no case.”

  “In point of fact until just now. It’s your accomplice, Mr. Guay. He has just now confessed everything, Mr. Mumler.”

  Miss Conant in Confidence

  October, 1861

  I kept to my room at the Parker Hotel, to no little degree with the jeweller’s assistance.

  His and Guay and Hannah’s trial for manifesting ghosts at cost was a little bit less than a full month away. The three of them were held at Charles Street, Hannah in the women’s wing. So Mumler had put it to Bill—Mumler’s man—to see that I was kept in rent. Their coffers were not overflowing. Things were looking ugly for them. But come Friday the Negro, too. He came between clients, the parcel in hand. First he’d close my fingers on it, and then he’d instruct me: “Take care now, Miss Conant.”

  And yet I wished that he had stared. Untowardness would have been a comfort. It would’ve made me wonder less on what the folded bills were for.

  The jeweller occurred to my mind only sometimes. Most of all I thought of Hannah. I pictured her sleepless and mild during meals. I wondered what dark things were loose in her hair. I tried to envision the face of her jailer—dark serge dress and belt of keys. I remembered the kindness I’d seen in her eyes and wondered was it still alive. And I wondered at kindness—the thing in itself. How it could be killed down in someone.

  When it wasn’t Bill, or a porter or maid for whom I never had a tip, the women came to sit and weep. And not from the cellar, as one time they had, but in from the heat with their parasols lowered. They were wretched and bitter from nursing their sadness. Oftentimes their mouths smelled stale. It was never a daughter but always some son whose name they came to say, red-eyed.

  One woman came in search of this: Private Beecham Tuttle of the 2nd Massachusetts.

  She was a lumpen, dark-haired woman. And she had the look, too, of a God-given mother; that was all she’d ever done. She’d been born in some hamlet somewhere in New England, the daughter of some woman like her, and when she’d emerged in a cabin’s rank steam she’d known her function even then.