Shadows in Summerland

  She told me the tale of her son’s sorry death. How he’d been under charge of a twenty-inch Smoothbore.

  This, according to a friend.

  Their last such charge had come at Sharpsburg. They’d been firing the cannon on top of a hill and in a sally it got loose, and Private Tuttle followed it to the edge of the grade and then went over with it. He’d gained some ground upon the thing when it picked up dead speed and came rushing down on him. He was a porridge after that—bones and blood and skin, all mixed.

  I began to grow faint, even there, in my chair. The room came in and out of true, the lamp on the table, the woman before it. She came uncoupled from her stamp, and she seemed to retreat down a tunnel of gaslight. A thousand grieving mothers there, two thousand sons and sons’ wives. Hers was the haggard face of war, of Lady Liberty herself, of a Longacre penny tramped down in red mud, erupting feathers from her head. And as I sat there, very still, willing the room and the face to stop shifting, I felt my faintness take its course not from somewhere outside me but in me, too deep.

  It was a sort of siphoning, a slow and heavy drawing off.

  And that’s when liquid, strange and warm, went coursing down my thighs, my calves. I thought, maybe, I’d spilled my tea or that the woman had spilled hers but realized there was no tea, that I hadn’t concocted my usual pot, and that the water came from me.

  I had voided my bladder, right there at that table, as sure as the Private had voided his life.

  I thought: it is a part of me but it is not a part at all.

  I tried not to look at the mess I had made—to maintain focus on her face. But she sensed my resistance. And perhaps she smelled something. I was violently embarrassed at the prospect and I blushed.

  “Now that’s all right, Miss Conant, Ma’am. How far are you along?” she said.

  “Only just,” I told her, stunned. “I am only just starting just now, Mrs. Tuttle.”

  “The first six fortnights are the worst. Take it from me, Ma’am, when I was with Beecham. But then, come week thirteen or so, it always gets a little better.”

  I think my eyes were very hard.

  She said: “I am sorry. You see, I just meant—it is, of course, a natural thing. You needn’t be ashamed, is all. One mother in Christ to another,” she said.

  Her eyes were half-lidded and kind in the dim.

  I gathered myself. “Mrs. Tuttle,” I said, “you’ve lost your son and that’s a shame—and then perhaps before his time, but you needn’t invent things on my account, Ma’am. A life cannot supplant a death. If you wish to do right by your Beecham,” I said, and the woman’s kind eyes clouded over with pain, “you must face up to certain facts. You will never hold Beecham, nor touch him, again. Nor hear his voice. Nor smell his scent. Can you concede to that?”

  She nodded. Though even I saw she would never concede.

  “Good,” I told her, better now, the urine dripping from my dress. “The test conditions are in place. And now,” I said, “we may begin.”

  Mumler Imprisoned

  October, 1861

  I sit here before you unjustly accused. I sit here at your mercy, reader.

  We three sit before you, a congress of rogues, and all our fates are intertwined.

  In the days leading up to our spurious trial, with summer skulking into fall, in different branches of the cross that made the Suffolk County Jail, Hannah, Guay and I sat waiting—mute, incoordinate, fearing the worst. Hannah was on the women’s wing while Guay and I slumped either side of the men’s, though the bumpkin and I might’ve been different sexes for all we were allowed to talk.

  Apart from my counsel, Mr. Townsend, who’d been appointed by the State, I suffered to receive no one and no one paid me mind by mail, though Boston’s papers proved adept at meditating on our straits. Every day without fail there’d be Hannah and me, and, boxed in a column adjacent the bumpkin, the scores and notations of Civil War dead beginning to play second horn to us rotting. The only ones of us still free were Bill Christian and Hannah’s mother.

  Yet I was a lever, while Bill was a cog. Bill Christian got frisked while I reigned in the Globe—but couldn’t they be cruel sometimes, calling me Mumbler, and Mummer, and Juggler, prodding at my tender name with keen, commercial impishness. And so while Bill of Beacon Hill of little moment walked the streets, it was I, Willy Mumler of Newspaper Row, photographer of ghastly marvels, who bent his head into a storm of rapists, pickpockets, cardsharps and abusers—in a ten by four space where the sunlight itself, shining raggedly into the arms of the cross, had not the slightest character, the slightest touch of heaven in it. There was always one man, all night long, who keened for just a sip of something and always another, when this man was done, who called to the guard in a seethe of invective. And forever the knocking of implements, scratching, the grunting of a hundred apes, those sad and headstrong bouts of sound that men fallen into the sere will enact.

  But I remained completely still.

  I wanted to conserve my strength. You see, I wished to feel prepared—stacked up to the task of defending myself—and short of running round my cell or doing smaller calisthenics, which every time I tried to do reduced me to a huffing mound, I determined to sit there, enormously silent, pondering my circumstances.

  Yet I did not consider long. Soon the trial was on, full swing.

  The state’s contention was preposterous. May it please the court, indeed.

  Elbridge T. Gerry, the State’s prosecutor, with whiskers as full as the Marshall was bald, promenaded back and forth with thespian flair before the court.

  “May it please the court,” said Gerry, “before stating my case in behalf of the people that we the Commonwealth commend the wide latitude that His Judgeship has shown to the hollow transgressions of William H. Mumler. Your mercy is not strained, My Lord. Nor ere was mercy ever so. But plummeteth down through the mists of its maker to soak into the ground below. And so it blesseth he that gives and he that takes in equal reach.”

  Gerry smiled to hear his words—The Merchant of Venice, I believe.

  He took a pass around the court. The eminence to which he spoke, a little pressed bug of a man with black hair, nodded his mandibles once and twitched sagely on top of his pulpit surmounting the court.

  “A most embroidered quote, My Lord, but also suited to the day. Not only in content, concerning Your Honour, but also in style of delivery, I think. For isn’t this Mumler an able embroiderer—and so his apprentices, here in our dock? Have they not taken common portraits—common as the Bard’s adage—and outfitted them in the cheap metaphysics that are the bugbear of our age? And have they not taken advantage . . .” he spouted.

  Sound and fury, on and on.

  They brought a so-called expert first: the old wizard himself, Bogardus.

  He was just as I’d pictured him, fatter perhaps, with a white mane of hair like a dowager’s blanket and a big bushy widower’s beard, just as white. It was as though his very life were locked in strife with fickle Fashion—as though it would’ve pained the man to dignify a court of law. And in this spirit he went on to hold forth on his breadth of knowing, specifically as to nine methods, in name, by which I might’ve forged my prints:

  One. By inserting a positive plate with a previous image in front of a clean one, so that when the latter came into the completion, the first plate’s residual image still showed.

  Two. By introducing for a quarter-of-a-minute a fleeting figure clothed in white (for instance, Mrs. Britten’s girl) who flees before the plate is done, deploying a shadowy visage behind her.

  Three. By the crafting and clever concealment of a microscopic image of the revenant sought in one of the camera’s four screw-holes, which is then magnified by a proximate lens and projected to proportion on the surface of the plate.

  Four. By concealing by way of the hand a spirit-haunted mica positive and in
serting this plate in the shield mid-exposure to achieve the “foggy dumplings” the spirits recalled . . .

  Yet to name only four is to name four too many. You heard what Gerry said of mercy.

  But on to Bogardus’ words about Child—a really, very damning bunch:

  “Is it true,” Gerry said, “that in this city here in the year of 1856 that Algernon Child was your life drawing student at the Boston Institute of Art?”

  “That is so,” said Bogardus.

  “Were the two of you close?”

  “As a student and teacher may be,” said Bogardus.

  “Forgive me,” said Gerry, “my ignorance, sir, but how close might that be? Please, teach us!”

  A breeze of laughter swept the court.

  “Affinity,” Bogardus said. “We have an affinity, each for the other. I felt—and still feel—great affection for him in spite of his unstudied technical hand.”

  “He was no good at drawing, then?”

  “Well he wasn’t quite average,” said Bogardus. “And yet he was dauntless. Ineptly inspired. His hunger to learn—it was that which endeared me.”

  “And continues today to endear you?” said Gerry. “I noticed you said, sir—and here see to record—that you felt and still feel great affection for Child. Which choice of words would then imply that he is still among the living?”

  “Oh, very much so!” said Bogardus, “the wretch. I saw him just the other day.”

  “Once again”—Gerry smiled—“might you be more specific?”

  “This Wednesday past,” Bogardus said. “He came to inquire on a technical matter. He was looking rather well in fact—weaning from the bottle likely—and yes, I remember distinctly,” he said, his finger raised before the court, “that he came to my rooms around five in the evening.”

  “Might you tell us then,” said Gerry, “the nature of the thing he asked?”

  “He wanted to know how to make spirit pictures.” A murmur stirred the gallery. “He wanted to know how this Mumler here did it.”

  “He could not figure it himself?”

  “As I said,” said Bogardus, “he is not hugely able. Hardly what you’d call a natural. Smart enough in other ways—intellectually smart, you might say—but not technically.”

  “Do you mean to imply, sir, that you were surprised that Child could not achieve such pictures?”

  “I was somewhat,” Bogardus said. “Most of the methods I named are deductible.”

  Then tardily, slowly, at blessed long last: “Defence objects,” said Counsellor Townsend. “My Lord, what bearing can this have on the fact of Mr. Child’s aliveness?”

  “Overruled, Mr. Townsend,” His Beetle-ship said. “Mr. Bogardus, continue right on.”

  “I thank you, Your Honour,” Bogardus said levelly. “By deductible, sir, I only meant that the process is no unattainable feat.”

  “And did you inform him of one of these methods?”

  “Why I did more than that,” he said. “I not only told him the methods, all nine—I stepped him through how they were done face to face.”

  “You effected all nine of the methods yourself?”

  “We only had time for some four,” said Bogardus. “The double exposure, the miniscule plate, the dumpling effect and the compromised nitrate. The lady in white, you’ll understand, required a bit more preparation. And anyway”—a brooding pause—“Child was disinclined to do it.”

  “The lady in white, did you say?” inquired Gerry. “The one that needs an actor for it?”

  “That is the one,” Bogardus said.

  “A bit more preparation, how?”

  “For one,” he said, “a willing body. Two bodies, ideally—a foil and a sitter. The sitter, well, to sit of course while the plate is exposed in the back of the box, the foil to interrupt the scene in such a way his form is captured.”

  “Captured ghostly,” Gerry said, at which Bogardus nodded once. “And why do you think Child himself wasn’t willing to be the actor in this case?”

  “I’d think that he was very tired.”

  The counsellor smiled. “Tired, sir. From what?”

  “From being Mr. Mumler’s ghost.”

  An excitable muttering burned through the courtroom. Townsend said, “Defence object—”

  “—you’re overruled,” Judge Dowling roared and continued to hunch further toward the proceedings.

  It was all, as I’d thought, a preposterous joke. Its logic tangled up in me, a strenuous and stiff unraveling, while the actual murder of Child, as we’d lived it, had been so sudden—been so simple!

  “From being Mr. Mumler’s ghost. That is what you said,” said Gerry. “By which you mean, I take it, sir, that Child and Mumler are in league. That Child is Mumler’s ghostly lady—or ghostly gentleman, let’s say—who in his wretched poverty, and in his lack of natural skill had been so reduced as to prostrate himself upon the needs of this man here?”

  “That is,” he said, “what I believe. The compositions show as much.”

  “The compositions of the prints?”

  Bogardus nodded. “See to them. Observe the way the figure stands. Unlike the other ghosts, so-called, in Mr. Mumler’s other prints, you’ll notice that Child’s attitude is contrived. He means, in his gory make-up, to be noticed. He means to unsettle while still being seen. Sir David Brewster’s Ghost,” he said. “Otherwise known as the lady in white. It has been a trick of our trade, Mr. Gerry, for as long as the camera has been there to make it.”

  “May it please the court to know that the Commonwealth’s witness attests to the following: Mr. Mumler did not manufacture Child’s presence. Mr. Mumler employed it, to conscious deception.”

  “As I said,” said Bogardus, “that is what I believe.”

  “And when he could no longer, sir—when Child had degraded himself good and well—then that is when he came to you to master Mr. Mumler’s trick?”

  “I suppose he had taken his fill,” said Bogardus, “of being Mr. Mumler’s boy. Sustenance is sustenance, but all of us must have our pride.”

  “Did he admit that this was so? That he had tired of Mumler’s yoke?”

  “Mr. Child did not need to admit it,” he said. “His disposition was transparent.”

  “Let the record reflect that the witness, Bogardus, believes the defendant to be in cahoots with Algernon Child, who is under discussion. But back to those devious methods of Mumler’s. Of those you and Child recreated together, which one of the four do you think came out best?”

  “The double exposure was bully,” he said. “I have it with me here, in fact.”

  “Exhibit the Second,” said Counsellor, striding toward Dowling, a picture in hand, whose contents—thank heavens!—I never made out, inferior as they most certainly were. “May it please the court to know that the picture which Mr. Bogardus has shown not only boasts plainly of Algernon Child, who Mr. Mumler claims is dead, but that the state’s witness produced it with ease by following one of the nine stated methods.”

  “Noted duly,” said the judge. “Am I to presume that the Commonwealth rests?”

  “Mr. Bogardus, one very last question—and here I’ll ask you not to laugh. Have you ever had cause to ascribe to yourself or been ascribed by anyone such abilities or influences as tether themselves to those of ghost-seers and mediums, sir?”

  “You mean, am I a Spiritualist?”

  “I mean do you possess abilities?”

  “Artistic abilities, certainly, sir. Would that I possessed those others. That way, I’d be able to say year to year what will show as the greatest advance in my field. As such I am always discoveries behind.”

  “Defence objects,” said Townsend, meekly. “Clearly, the witness is being facetious. And might I go further in saying, My Lord, that Spiritualism itself is not—”

  “—
sustained,” said Dowling, gloomily. “Counsellor should limit his questions to cameras. If Mr. Bogardus is not a believer, it can be no concern of ours.”

  “Of course, My Lord,” said Gerry, smiling.

  But the damage, of course, had already been done.

  Only later did Livermore—curse him and damn him!—enter the courtroom and climb toward the stand. He did it all with perfect poise, with his spine thrown back straight and his moustache aspirant. He seemed to be scanning the ground that he’d gained for trailing looks of admiration and I would be a liar, too, if I told you that mine was not.

  The effect of the words he pronounced on the stand I shall recount for you in full. And not to impress their veracity on you, but rather to show you how needling they were, how venomous in retrospect, and I kept having wavering thoughts of the banker before I had known what a blackguard he was—when he’d stood in my Otis Street rooms, sad and wealthy, searching my face with his striking green eyes.

  “Mr. Livermore, welcome,” said leading man Gerry.

  And Livermore took down the front of his jacket.

  Said Counsellor Gerry, “You knew the accused?”

  “I do,” said Livermore.

  “All three?”

  “I had entered into business with one of them.”

  “Which?”

  He pointed. “That man, sitting there.”

  “For the record,” said Gerry, “the witness means Mumler. William Mumler is the man with whom he entered into business. Mr. Livermore, tell me”—and Gerry walked wide, round the side of our table then back to his own—“for I have wondered why it was, your business being with this man, that you paid Mr. Mumler for services rendered then commended his name to the Boston police?”

  “Mumler has a way, let’s say, of having that effect on people.”

  “So that is why you gave him up? His methods seemed to you deceptive?”

  “Deceptive, absolutely,” said Livermore, frowning. “And sir, I am a Spiritualist!”

  “You of Webster’s Bank,” said Gerry, “believe in what this Mumler shows?”