Shadows in Summerland

by Adrian Van Young

  “I believe in the foundations of it—that’s so. In Swedenborg. In Jackson Davis. In the midair contortions of Sir Henry Gordon.”

  At this there were a couple of laughs.

  “But I only believe in those things I can see. That is a compact I made with myself upon entering into this Spiritualism. Only stay, I told myself, if you have seen the proof yourself. I must admit, I have,” he said. “I have seen many wondrous things. Though it takes more than something just simply existing for me to admit it is widely conceivable.”

  “And how to demonstrate that difference—between what happens and what is.”

  This last was addressed half to Charles Livermore, and half to the bustling courtroom at large.

  “The life of the mind is perception,” said Gerry. “The basis of your compact, sir! What is this unique, rarified characteristic you did not see in Mumler’s work?”

  “Mr. Mumler had his habits. He did things while he took your picture. One of them was this,” he said, and drew a camera on the air. “He always slid the plate, just so, by way of his left hand enclosed in a glove.”

  “Is that all?” said the counsellor.

  “No, sir. There’s his closet. Never let a soul inside.”

  “And this,” said Gerry, “I presume, is where he perfected the pictures he sold you?”

  “I could not tell you at my word for I have never been inside.”

  “That cannot be all,” said Gerry. “That will not be enough to damn him. What more besides convinced you, sir, that Mr. Mumler was a fraud?”

  “There was also the length of the sessions.”

  “How long?”

  “Never less than one full hour.”

  “Long enough, would you say, to take how many prints?”

  “A goodly many, I should think. He would seem to be trying on different exposures like suits of stolen clothes,” he said. “And not only that, but the frequency of them.”

  “The frequency?” said Counselor Gerry.

  “He would have me return every week,” said the banker, “to make sure that he got it right.”

  “Got what right? Elaborate.”

  “A spirit picture of my wife.”

  “Your wife . . .” Gerry glanced at his notes “. . . named Estelle, who died of consumption. Our sympathies, sir.”

  “She was,” said Charlie Livermore, with a grief-stricken flash of those forest green eyes, “a young woman of thirty-five. Lucy Ellen, our daughter, is not here today—fortunate for her, no doubt.”

  “And why is that?” said Counsellor Gerry.

  “She would be in contempt of court.”

  “I beg your pardon, sir,” said Gerry.

  “She would never be able to countenance him, who has prospered so well from her dead mother’s name.”

  And here he stabbed his chin at me—his sculpted, resilient, strong-principled chin, and all the courtroom gave a groan: three-quarters bereavement, one-quarter disgust.

  “And he never did get her, did he?” said the Counsellor.

  “Never quite,” the banker said. “Though told me he was drawing closer. And that, of course, would draw me back.”

  “In the hope that one day he would get her?” said Gerry.

  He paused. “I had no other choice.”

  “A steep premium of a prospect, I’d think, to endure on the hope of one day seeing someone.”

  “I see that only now,” he said. “I am ashamed to say it, sir.”

  Those emeralds, faintly damp, turned up. Were there tears in a vial that he squirted into them?

  I had to turn my eyes away while Gerry processed down the court. He muttered to himself en route. And then he said, “One. The consistency, sir, with which he used his leftmost hand. Two. The distrust that to all but himself he practised in his secret closet. Three. The extended lengths of time that saw him standing at the box. Four. The repeated appointments, at cost, that he all but insisted you make to his rooms. Why Mr. Livermore,” he said, with incredulous glory in his voice, “this might point to signs of suspicion, I grant you, but could it be the sordid truth?”

  “On that,” said the banker, “I’ve no reservation.”

  And here the degenerate thespian smiled. “Thank you, Mr. Livermore. Now let us speak of Mr. Child . . .”

  And so the unhallowed proceedings continued—scurrilous lie after scurrilous lie.

  They pissed their blame upon my grave. I hadn’t a thing to my name. I had time.

  The Sadness blew hot and unclean through my sails.

  When Townsend rose, a well-fed man with sprawling, ineffable under-eye bruises, I retained little hope of his tactics reversing the process that Gerry had preached into being. He untucked his glasses from over his ears and polished them at too great length.

  He started: “Mr. Livermore, you are a Spiritualist, correct?”

  “If you mean am I still one since last I confirmed it, I will venture to say that I am,” said the banker.

  When the laughter that followed had died on the air, the Counsellor continued: “You might’ve fooled me.”

  “And why is that?” said Livermore, behind a haughty half-formed smile.

  “Because of what you’ve suffered, sir, at the hands of this man here before you,” he said. “Taking you up to the hub of your trust. And yet it appears that you have little trouble renewing the bonds of your faith in this court.”

  “The Commonwealth objects,” said Gerry. “Objects resplendently, Your Honour. What bearing the witness’ faith can exert on the blamelessness of the accused is beyond me.”

  “Sustained,” said Dowling. “Please rephrase.”

  “Your Honour, if I may,” said Townsend, and started to polish his glasses again. “All that I mean corroborate, sir, is that through all of this you remain a disciple. Even when, notwithstanding the court’s knowledge of it, this is far from the first time you have been deceived.”

  “You must be more specific, Counsellor.”

  “I will be, sir,” and Townsend smiled, good-naturedly, his glasses polished. “Is the name R.S. Lillie familiar to you?”

  “R.S., Counsellor?”

  “Rachel Southey?”

  “I seem to . . . yes . . . recall,” he said, “some person or other who went by that name.”

  “I take it you are being wry. Could you forget her, really, sir?”

  Livermore’s eyes went concertedly level. “Miss Lillie was a medium whom a number of years in the past I employed.”

  “About how many years?”

  “Some four or five.”

  “Just after your wife—God protect her—had died?”

  “I was in need of consolation.”

  “Doubtless, sir, you were,” said Townsend. “Nor ever would I question that. But this Miss Lillie, sir, was different. Why was that, Mr. Livermore?”

  “She had been surveying my daughter and me. She collected a file of misfortune on us. And then,” said the banker, unthinking, provoked, with the lather of something consuming upon him, “she extorted, why, hundreds of dollars from us on the basis that she could see into our hearts.”

  “But she could not see in,” said Townsend, “is what you are implying, sir.”

  “No more than I can see,” he said, “the object of what you are getting at, Counsellor.”

  “Indeed,” said Judge Dowling. “Be forthcoming, Counsellor.”

  “She could not see in,” said Townsend, “and yet you are a Spiritualist. You had been extorted, in other words, sir, by the order to which you now pledge your allegiance. If Our Lord Jesus Christ when he entered the temple had overturned half of the money he saw and pocketed what still remained, might all his disciples have followed him out with the same resolution of purpose, I wonder?”

  “I reckon that they might, at that. It was not saf
e for them to stay.”

  “A clever, considered rejoinder,” said Townsend. “For you are clever aren’t you, sir? Too clever, at that, to be taken in twice by so venal a species of liar as Mumler. The witness has a prejudice,” Townsend announced to the courtroom at large, “to put it very mildly, sirs. A prejudice, on second glance, that has all the marks of entrapment,” he said.

  “Objection!” said Gerry.

  “Sustained,” said Judge Dowling. “I’ll remind Counsellor Townsend the witness himself has never one moment been under suspicion.”

  “True enough,” said Counsellor Townsend. “Allow me to rephrase.” He paused. “That unfortunate business you suffered with Lillie—how did it impress you, sir?”

  “Impress?”

  “How did it make you feel?”

  “As any man might in the wake of such evil. Violated, sir, profoundly.”

  “And angry?”

  “Well naturally, sir,” said the banker.

  “In extremis,” said Townsend, “and in the long term?”

  “No longer,” said Charles Livermore, “than was needed. That woman, that Lillie, off-white as she was”—and here a breeze of laughter blew—“did not deserve the energy that it would’ve cost me to show her contempt. She was a fraud. A parasite. A creature well beneath regard,”—and here the breeze of laughter died as the banker began to show red in the face—“and she no more deserved my impassioned disdain than the right to recite my late wife’s blessed name.”

  “And yet,” said Counsellor Townsend, mild, “you do seem very angry now.”

  “The memory of it rankles me.”

  “And all of us on your behalf. It is an unfortunate narrative, sir. Though I dare say had suchlike befallen my life—and I am glad it hasn’t, sir!— I should not only like to attend where it stings, but rectify it, tit for tat.”

  “I’ve imagined it hundreds of times,” said the banker.

  “Why stop with Lillie?” said the Counselor. “Why not against all Spiritualists who have preyed shamelessly on the stricken and weak?”

  “You’re asking am I a crusader?” he said.

  “A crusader,” said Townsend, “seems generous, sir.”

  “Then what am I?” said Livermore.

  “I think you are an inside man who courts an agenda of widespread entrapment. I think you are a shattered man who nurses—”

  “I object!” said Gerry. “Counsellor Townsend is badgering, honour!”

  “Sustained,” said Dowling less severely, as though he were rotating something in mind. The banker was a little whey-faced—not so pretty now, was he?

  “I’m curious, Counsellor,” said the Judge when by and large the hubbub ceased, “of what might be the benefit behind such—as you have explained it—entrapment?”

  “Mr. Livermore,” said Townsend, affixing the banker again in his sights, “explain to us in layman’s terms the concept of Roxbury Unity Lenders.”

  The banker went more curdled still. “It is . . .”

  “Your concept, is it not?”

  “My concept, yes,” said Livermore. “A sort of, well—a public trust.”

  “Publically advertised?”

  “Publically owned.”

  “Privately advertised, then.”

  “Within reason.”

  “And what would you say,” Townsend said, “is its function?”

  “To furnish Boston’s citizens with a future they might not begin to afford.”

  “Begin to afford?”

  “An ungraspable future.”

  “These are not layman’s terms,” said Townsend.

  “An ungraspable future, at last, that can be. I sell mortgages, sir—I will sell them—to soldiers when they arrive home from the war,” said the banker.

  “Beneath the auspices of Webster’s?” said Townsend.

  “You might say a sideline of Webster’s,” he said.

  “And so being a sideline and selling, well, something apart from the notion of mortgages, surely, how is it you finance your venture?” said Townsend. “This Roxbury Unity Lenders of yours?”

  “I offer up securities.”

  “You have others buy in, do you mean?”

  “That is right.”

  “So that Private Jack Johnson, let’s say,” said the Counsellor, “who purchases a home in Quincy, obtains said home by leave of you and how many other shareholding investors?”

  “Only technically, really, by leave of myself, but if you wish to quibble . . .”

  “No. I am less interested in how many than whom.”

  “I could never reveal—”

  “Oh you needn’t,” said Townsend. “For I have got their names right here. Or anyway some telling ones.”

  Gerry rose spitting, “Objection, Your Honour!”

  “Of course you object, Counsellor Gerry,” said Townsend. “For your name is among the lot.”

  A deafening hubbub went up in the court, and Dowling brought his gavel down, and as he whacked it—once, twice, thrice—he said: “You may proceed, I’m sure!”

  “I thank Your Honour for his grace.” Townsend took down his glasses, wiped at them, replaced them. “I said that I had Gerry’s name on this list of investors I hold in my hand. Though that is not quite true, I fear. For the name I have here is not Gerry but Griswold—Cornelius Griswold, to be quite specific—who turn and turn about, I’ve learned, is none other than Gerry’s own brother-in-law. Which development might be coincidence, purely, were it not for a bevy of others just like it. Can you guess what they are, Mr. Livermore, sir?”

  “I’d rather you delight me, Counsellor.”

  “Ferdinand Tallmadge, the cousin-by-marriage of one Marshall Tooker who brought in this case. Benjamin Seybert, the nephew,” he said, “of one of your witnesses, Asahel Baker. Samuel Browning, the god-son, I think, of no one less than P.T. Barnum, who if I’m not mistaken has been instrumental in bringing this poor man before you to heel. And would you like me to go on?”

  “I’ve suffered enough of your humbug,” he said.

  “It appears that His Judgeship alone,” said the Counsellor, “is missing some relative’s name from this list. The reason? By proxy and secret design, with nothing forthcoming to link them by name, these men have straw-purchased a paying interest in a confidence scheme of titanic proportions. Participate in Mumler’s downfall, profit from a civil war!”

  Said Livermore, “Don’t be absurd, man—”

  “Objection—”

  “Order! Order! Order! Ord—”

  I volunteered nothing, smiled slightly, perhaps.

  When I rose from my bench for the day to be coffled and led through the court to my cell in the jail, I got a glimpse of all the faces milling back beyond the rail. A gallery of rogues, all right—a frieze of faces I had known yet that I seemed to know no longer. Mr. Wilson the tailor, the actor J. Jefferson, Mr. Isaac Babbit of Babbit’s Brand Metals, “Mutton Chops” Murray, Reverend Spear, LaRoy and Lucretia Sunderland.

  At first I felt only a sort of exposure, rawness to the weather of them, but as I watched them watching me, the milling, rapt ranks of my quote-on-quote victims, I started to feel something else, something finer, the manifest pull of their sundry attentions, and I couldn’t help it, dear reader, I beamed.

  And I thought to myself: They have come here for me!

  They have come here, my patrons, to judge for themselves.

  Guay in Deliberations

  October, 1861

  The night before I took the stand received me peaceful in my cell.

  Then Gerry and the Marshall came. I sat very straight at the end of my cot now allowing my eyes over one then the next one. Counsellor Gerry crossed his legs. He took out paper to record.

  Bald head flashing says the Marshall: “Comfortable in court
today?”

  “As prisoners may find theirselves.”

  “Comfortable in here?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Comfortable then all around, relatively?”

  I did not feel that I need speak and so I only nodded shortly.

  And besides I had already eaten the meat—and the fruit—and the nuts—and the beer they had sent me—and lain on the pillow of goose-down my head in the stale winding down of the windowless day.

  “Any word from your man, Mr. Mumler?” says Tooker.

  “A couple of whispers,” says I, “in the court.”

  “And he hasn’t attempted to see you inside? Conveyed you messages, perhaps?”

  I thought upon the one he’d written: Do not believe the Marshall’s lies.

  Says I: “I have not spoke to him since him and I first met yourself.

  “So long as you are sure of that. And ready to testify to it, I trust, when morning finds you on the stand?”

  “I shall,” says I. And then I paused. “Where,” says I, “is Mr. Townsend?”

  “You still haven’t answered my question,” says Tooker. “When you come to the courtroom tomorrow,” says he, “on what charge of the State’s will you hazard to speak?”

  “To that which has been laid on me.”

  “That charge alone?” says Marshall Tooker.

  “Unless there is another one.”

  “Murder, maybe?” says the Marshall. “Murder dealt and murder done.”

  Abide in the Light of the Positive Mind. Do not believe the Marshall’s lies but here I sat in darkness yet and Marshall Tooker spoke the truth. I made to speak but could not do as courses of doomed icy water ran through me and I says in my terror: “The blow—”

  “—yes, the blow?” And Gerry raised his brows at me.

  In the face of privation, His Seership had told me, and in the face of mortal terror. The man’s name had been Algernon and I had stove his head clean in. Diakka brought him back betimes to visit me inside my cell, their black wings revealing his mouldy white skin as they birthed his cadaver back into the world.

  “I’ll not confess I think,” says I and Counsellor Gerry says: “That’s fitting. It isn’t your crime to confess, after all. We know it was Mumler who killed Mr. Child.”