Shadows in Summerland

  “You are no killer, Mr. Guay,” says the Marshall once more while the Counsellor kept writing. “You do not have the sand for that. He is the murderer—Mumler!” says Tooker.

  I screwed my face in panic ways and the Marshall broke down into hard haughty laughter and when he could draw breaths again he fixed me with a sober stare.

  “I never in all my life,” said Tooker, “have witnessed a man with so sporting a chance so eager to condemn himself. No, no,” says he. “We don’t want you. Solely, your cooperation. Either furnish us with evidence of Mr. Child’s murder, which we know Mumler had a part in, or testify he is a fraud in the trust of the good Commonwealth that sustains you.”

  “Immunity,” says Gerry softly putting down his busy pen.

  The light surprise of hearing him had caused my head-shaking to cease.

  “That’s full immunity,” says he and crossed his tailored legs again and though the Marshall looked on sour did not deny the Counsellor’s words. “Tomorrow under oath,” says he, “or right here in this room, right now, your words may effect a reversal of fate, so choose them carefully, my friend. All that is left to determine”—he smiled—“is whose fate it shall be and how. And so I ask you, Mr. Guay, of what stuff are your interests made?”

  Message Department

  Hannah, traveller, floating haze, who sits confined by walls of stone, what beckons you up from your corner of dark? What bears you aloft over where Mumler dreams behind dark sails of falling hair, the tips of which tickle, just so, Mumler’s mouth as he mutters in somnolent, flippant despair? And when you orbit William Guay, lying as stiff as a dressmaker’s doll, will you shadow him, Hannah, and dry his wet cheeks? And leaving the cell-block, the jailhouse entire, while to cycle the slumbering earth at your ease and to see Fanny Conant in rooms not her own under mandate that no woman born can appease, until you detach from the ledge of her toes and into the evening beyond where she sleeps, like a shorn figurehead sailing over the earth, the wreck of your ecstasies lost to the deeps? See the governess, loping and blue in the face, and the man in the church with the kelp in his hair, and the grande dame ensconced in her yellowing gown, bent composing a letter that no one will read, and the bludgeoned photographer, pressed under glass, and the drowned girl, the darling, unseeming, at sea? Oh how fair is this wasteland that keeps us no more? Oh how boundless this charnel house, choked with our hopes? Until Hannah’s eyes in their fortitude close, and the clouds part before her, and downward she soars?

  Miss Conant in Transition

  November, 1861

  I could go nowhere else but there. So there must be the place I went.

  To afford the hotel, I was down to one meal. My prospects, as such, were uncomfortably barren.

  People, I think, had been staring at me as I trudged down the street with my passel of bags. Several had offered to help and I’d thanked them. Concerned, they’d watched me walk away.

  E.H.B. was kind but short. “You’ve come to fetch your curtains, Fanny?”

  I stood before her in the door of the CDSK, breathing hard from my travels. “I need somewhere to be,” I said. “I hope that you will get my meaning. I know that it’s not strictly that kind of house but I hope all the same that . . .”

  I couldn’t out with it.

  She looked at me from toe to crown. A strut gave out behind her eyes.

  “People talk,” she’d said. “I listen. But I didn’t believe it was true until now.”

  “I will not make excuses for the state of me,” I said.

  “We harbour our sisters when they are in need.”

  “Thank you for sparing me begging,” I said.

  I put down my bags and extended my hand.

  She left the hand hanging and drew me against her, lightly and for fairly long. At the edge of my vision, nose pressed in her hair, I saw that her horse-teeth, too large for her mouth, were creasing the flesh of her lip into sections.

  “Oh, Fanny,” she said. Then repeated: “Oh, Fanny. How singular you are to me.”

  Q

  Miss Moss, without asking, donated her room. I reinstated my possessions—shoes and dresses, lamp, toilette. This room before mine and Miss Moss’ had been someone’s.

  Then I remembered: Lucie Beebe’s.

  The pale little snot, I had stolen her scissors in what now seemed another life. I’d snuck them from her sewing basket so that Susie and I could construct our sheet-masks and these we had worn, then, to Jefferson’s party, out upon that gorgeous lawn, and I had cause to wonder now if I had ever put them back.

  The money I’d been putting by from Bill Christian’s visits and Parker House clients, I hid beneath the faulty plank that the spirits emerged from in roundtable sessions.

  Miss Moss waited on me those first couple of days. She’d grown up lovely, dark and tall. She lit my candles, slopped my pans, brought my meals and poured my milks. She stood, demure, before my door. She even called me Madam Conant. I let it go a day or two.

  When at last on a morning she came to my room with one of her pitying pitchers of milk, I sat up as spry as I could in my bed and I held my palm outward to hold her at bay. She did a little startled jump. The milk in the pitcher went sloshing about.

  “I’ve been meaning to ask you what’s happened to Constance.”

  “She is no longer on at the Center, Miss Conant.”

  “You are, it seems, the leading girl.”

  But then I saw I had been cruel.

  “You prefer her to me. I’m aware of that, Ma’am. You find me—have found me—ambitious, perhaps. Constance has gone to New York, Ma’am, to live. With a man, it is rumoured, and there to tell fortunes.”

  “Oh,” I told Miss Moss. “I see.”

  Something, an image, began to eat at me. I tried to resist it—to keep with Miss Moss.

  “It needn’t be me,” she was saying, “at all. I will find someone else if it pleases you, Ma’am, and you may even keep my room. I will not be a strain on you in the fragile estate that confines you—”

  “—Miss Moss. I am not sick unto my death. The thing I am is mine to bear.” Her pretty face dropped further then. “Just the same, I should mention: you’ve been very decent.”

  She crossed the room and poured me milk.

  I said to her: “How cold it is.”

  But all I could think of was Susie, nineteen, dragged paraffin-pale from the sludge of the Charles.

  From that day on, we mostly talked while I slowly rotated around the apartment. Her family were farm people out in Ohio. Her brother had gone to suit up with the Union. Since the wholesale bloodletting at Sharpsburg, she claimed, they had not read a word from him, but no one had come by or mailed them a notice to tell them he was dead for sure.

  I told her her family must be very proud.

  I told her I was from New York.

  What I didn’t tell her was about my own father, a miner whose eyes were as dark and as deep as the mountainous caves that he blasted and scoured. Nor either my mother, a mother by trade. Nor the crisscrossing chutes of the mountains of Roundot.

  The Center, I said, had been my home—the place where I had cut my teeth. The Center had been everything until at some point it was only four walls.

  Yet scarcely had I told her this, the merest of disclosures, really, than I would trammel up with dread to think on why Miss Moss was there. She hadn’t just happened to start waiting on me—to give up her rooms and to start bringing milk. The answer must be E.H.B., who had wanted a tutor for her leading girl. She was nurturing me, culturing me. She lay in wait for me. She was trying to ensnare me in a pretty woman’s life.

  But then Miss Moss would do something to make my turn of mind reverse and I would feel monstrous all over again for letting the filth of my life overtake me. She would look out the window in sly concentration, fixed on the flowers that waved from the trelli
s. She would ask me a question, consider my answer, study me long, and then look at her hands.

  We mostly walked around the block but always while the air was fine.

  And when one day I threatened to burst from my skin with no more than strolling and sleeping and eating, I went to call on E.H.B. in her royal apartments on top of the house.

  I call them this because they were: spaciously made, with good carpets and rafters. A tapestry of Joan of Arc in ecstasy arrayed the hearth and yet for years without a thought to the wood-smoke’s effect on the weave of the image. Joan, impassioned, seemed to smoke.

  E.H.B. watched me approach in the light from the glowing bay windows behind her. Stacked to the height of her chest on the blotter was a rampart of books; she was all head and neck.

  “You’ve been well taken care of,” she said, “by Miss Moss?”

  “You’ve made impressive work of her.”

  “But haven’t I, Fanny,” she said. “As with you.”

  “If I am to stay here, I’d like to contribute.”

  E.H.B. smiled at me quietly; shifted.

  “Our purpose—our mission—unchartered, I know, but no less noble for that fact—has been the formation of women from girls according to the principles of spiritual benevolence. And not just any kind of woman”—E.H.B. held up her hand—“but one who will speak—who will earn for herself. One who will lift up her sex.”

  By God, if she wanted a thing, let her say it. Her circling of topics worked in me like lye. Perhaps it was the redcoat in her, careful not to charge too fast.

  “If I am to stay here rent-free in her room, languishing about.” I paused. “I may be slower than I was but that does not exclude me working. There is washing, and sewing, arithmetic, surely—”

  “—we will not have you scrubbing, dear.”

  At some point she had risen up and returned with a chair, which she set before hers. “My dear, please take a seat,” she said.

  As I did, I examined the table between us.

  The stacks of text were newspapers, the top two bearing Mumler’s face. The headlines shrieked his name, his crimes, his narrowing chance of acquittal, his process.

  Juggler’s Accomplice in Humbug Speaks Out! Photographer Debunked! Soft Spirits!

  “I’m sure that you’re aware,” she said when I declined to speak at first, “that avenues exist, Miss Conant.”

  “Avenues?” I goaded her. I wanted to hear her pronounce it aloud.

  “Alternatives,” said E.H.B. “For women of your—latitude. Though I think you will find it is handsomely worth it to visit someone with a name on his shingle.”

  “And do you think that I would not? Penholders, wire, Pennyroyal, all that?”

  “It is merely advice,” said E.H.B. “You may take or discard it—whichever you like. But hear these words,” she said to me and positioned her hands on the papers before her. “If you’re to take such avenues and to take them in the fashion that a woman ought take them, then you will not be needing this.” She peeled away the two top layers: William Mumler’s face stared back. “Nor this. Nor this.” And peeled still more, a succession of William’s and Hannah’s and Guay’s and Livermore’s and all the lawyers. “Nor this. Nor this. Nor any, dear. You wish to contribute?” she said. “This is that. Sacrifice is contribution. For sometimes in order to better ourselves we must cut off the thing that enables us most.”

  I stared at her. She stared at me. And I felt, as we faced off, a welcome exhaustion.

  “My feet!” I blurted out at her.

  She let go the papers, as if she’d been slapped.

  “Your feet?” she said.

  “They ache,” I said. “They’ve been terribly swollen and achy of late.”

  “Ah,” she said, brows raised. “Of course.”

  With her shoulders set toward me, she lowered her head and pushed her chair across the floor. And when she raised her head again and lifted my feet in her lap to massage them, I watched her face soften in peaceful contentment beneath the face of Joan of Arc.

  Q

  At the end of my walk with Miss Moss the next day, I took my leave of her and wandered. I came by and by to the steps of the court where the circus of shame had been carrying on. I didn’t go in but sat down on a bench that faced the Suffolk Courthouse doors and I waited on the exit of the session with intensity.

  Finally, at three, it came.

  The prisoners left not last but first: Mumler, Guay, then Hannah, trailing. Mumler came on with absurd gravity, as though he were the wounded plaintiff. The man looked prouder even now than he’d looked that first day on his way through my parlour. His beard was in the lead of him, He wore his jailhouse wool like tails. And I tried to imagine a birthing room somewhere—in Mumler’s darkroom or in Lucie Beebe’s parlour—where I would emit something foul and headstrong the colour of the jeweller’s beard. It would march from my womb as he marched from the courtroom. It wouldn’t know how it was cursed. Yet before I could really conceive of this fully, the unthinkable-ness yet the imminence of it, I had turned my attentions from Mumler to Hannah. And keeping well beneath the shade I studied her with newfound eyes—how she stumbled among the ranks of men with all her dark and eerie hair.

  Hannah on the Stand

  November, 1861

  In court there was a circus of them. Standing at the exits, milling. Arising absurdly behind banks of seats or picking their ways past the feet in the aisles.

  “How am I to feed my girls without that swamp soprano’s rent? With me laid up in bed like this, how’s they going to live?” said one.

  “Where is my Joe? Did he sleep at my bedside? Am I to suppose that the bleeding has ceased? Am I to suppose that my sweet little bud is slumbering in God’s green earth?”

  “Can a lady be true to herself?” said another. “Can she ever really be? And if I am true to myself,” it continued, “will he consent to be my friend?”

  “Mrs. Mumler, in essence, enlighten the court on how you show these ghosts, exactly? Mrs. Mumler?” asked a voice. “Mrs. Mumler, are you there?”

  I gathered a breath. “Thank you, sir. I am fine.”

  “And so I will ask you again,” said the Counsellor, “by what method you show these ghosts.”

  “The dead ones, you mean. They have always been with me. Ever since I was a girl.”

  “Of what stuff were the spirits made?”

  “Why I should think of flesh,” said I.

  “Should think?” said Gerry.

  “Rightly, sir.”

  “So you are saying, Mrs. Mumler, that after a lifetime of watching these ghosts you never once bothered to touch one?” said he. “I frankly find that hard to swallow.”

  “You may not be able to see them,” said I, “but they are very real to me.”

  “I don’t doubt that at all,” said Gerry, a bit of wryness at his lips.

  “Defence objects,” said Counsellor Townsend. “Counsellor Gerry is coercing.”

  “Overruled, resoundingly. Mrs. Mumler will answer the question,” said Dowling.

  Grace or not-Grace. Going here and now there. Could not seem to stay in one place past a minute. Galleried court and the counsellor’s bench. Counsellor’s bench and the stand where I sat. Stand where I sat and Judge Dowling, beside me, she crouched like a gargoyle, her eyes slanted down. Pushed her palm along her face to rub away the mouldy sheen and a coarse spray of droplets released from the skin. They peppered, though no one there felt them, the court.

  “I’ve never touched one—no,” said I. “They do not take so well to touch.”

  “It angers them?” said Counsellor Gerry.

  “It is far less a matter of them than of me.”

  “The ghosts discourage it, somehow?”

  “A flame,” said I. “A burning match. You can hold one for only so long in your
hand. Can suffer the heat for so long before—pain. That is what it’s like,” said I, “to try to touch dead ones directly.”

  “Pardon my ignorance, Ma’am,” said the Counsellor. “I am novice in these matters. If roundly they discourage touch, then how else might they manifest?”

  “I see them,” said I.

  “Just as you see me now?”

  “As you have a flurry of grey in your hair.”

  “Age with stealing steps, Madam, hath clawed me in his clutch, it’s true.” And here the Counsellor gentled back the wings of greyness at his ears. “Not so yourself, I see,” said he. “Your vision is minutely keen. Which makes me wonder, after all, if you see spirits here—right now?”

  Did not answer right away. The question seemed a sort of trap.

  “There are a few,” said I.

  “How many?”

  “Their number fluctuates,” said I.

  “They come and go and go and come with atmospheres that ward off touch, but how are we the Commonwealth to know when they are in our midst? For instance, Madam, might we hear them? What do they sound like, these woebegone dead?”

  “They sound like you sound now,” said I. “They cannot speak unless they question.”

  “Ha,” said Gerry. Stopping. Smiling. “Ha,” said he and raised a hand. “Appropriate,” continued Gerry, “that their grammar is one of disguise and evasion. May it please the tone-deaf court I should like you to tell us what they’re saying now.”

  “Which one?” said I.

  “Whichever best. One that we might understand.”

  “One of them that’s here,” said I, “seeks news about her husband Joe.”

  “This Joe has passed on from the fold?” said the Counsellor.

  “She has had a business done. A most unpleasant, hidden business. But she never lived to the end of the thing and now she wonders how it was. She wonders at her husband Joe. She wishes to tell him she named the boy Eustace.”

  “She wishes us to help her, then?”