Shadows in Summerland

“Beg your pardon, Counsellor Gerry?”

  “She wishes us to counsel her?”

  “She is,” said I, “beyond all that.”

  “If so to what end does she speak?”

  “No other end,” said I, “but that. She wishes only to be heard.”

  Counsellor considered this. Cupping his chin in the palm of his hand.

  “I think I start to get your meaning. The dead are anything but shy. Yet still we remain in the dark, Mrs. Mumler, how was it you revealed these souls?”

  So I told him of the shadow, and the spitting on the glass, and the sometimes unintended sneeze, and the way I would grow very weak in the knees by the end of the long morning cycles of clients.

  “To realize the dead, let alone to translate them,” said Counsellor Gerry when I had concluded, “are talents that we have not seen to such an extent as your own, Mrs. Mumler. Spiritualism,” said the Counsellor, “whatever its basis in verified fact, has grown as widespread in our age as the despotic death that it seeks to combat. But spirit photography, really,” said Gerry and turned to face the jury box. “Gentlemen, ladies, the camera transcribes. It renders the truth of our world with dispassion, and yet without the fey intrusion native to an artist’s hand. Mrs. Mumler proclaims that her very own shadow reflects the light that makes the ghost but need I remind you that light, seeking light, does light of light beguile.”

  He laughed. Like a madman he laughed and continued to rave.

  And yet my attentions were being drawn from him. His voice growing thin and then leaking away.

  “Aren’t the backs of my hands just an unrivaled horror? Assure me my lips aren’t as ghastly?” said she. “Oh who will deign to kiss a girl with lips as ghastly blue as these?”

  Crouched there in her bathing costume just below the lofty stand. Pale and small-seeming. A supplicant swimmer.

  “Can’t you feel it pressing down? Won’t you help a girl to breathe? Would you be a dear,” said she, “and see my Godey’s book stays dry?”

  “Mrs. Mumler is not the only one,” Counsellor Gerry was saying “to tell us of ghosts. Not a one of the laudable women and men who have come here today in support of this Juggler can be blamed for the sorrow—the grave wishfulness—the hairline cracks in common sense—that have led them each one to surrender twelve dollars, sometimes on repeat occasions. Ben Jonson saw Catholics and Tartars and Turks in a horrible row about his chair. Byron saw phantoms, Cellini the Virgin. Goethe summoned ghostly flowers. Supernatural revelations? Derangement of the nervous system? Enlighten us, Mrs. Mumler,” said Counsellor Gerry, focusing again on me, “what symptoms, if any, most often attend these boisterous parlays with the dead?”

  He meant the way that I felt now. So I told him my symptoms and then said: “Fatigue. That is what I feel most often.”

  “And this painful congestion that leads to fatigue whenever the ghosts are nearby,” said the Counsellor, “have you always encountered it thus, Mrs. Mumler? Or are such sensations a recent occurrence?”

  “Always.” I nodded. “As my mother felt them. And her as her mother before her,” said I.

  Mother’s face amidst the court. Twenty years from today when it might show: one wrinkle. Stillness of her watching me. Pale and unanchored to form in the dim.

  “And her as her mother before her,” said Gerry. “You heard her speak those words yourself. Inherited powers, she calls them, this woman, encountered by way of the feminine gene. Yet it strikes me as no small coincidence, Ma’am—and may it please the court to hear—that what you maintain to be super-cognition is as easily traced to a sort of pathology.”

  “I don’t quite under—”

  “—sickness, Madam. An inherited ailment, progressive in nature, that more and more subtly fractures the mind.”

  “I cannot speak to that,” said I.

  “Nor ever can the mad,” said Gerry. And then he turned back to the courtroom at large. “And so rather than telling you time and again that Mrs. Mumler is insane I will presently seek to show the court and Mrs. Mumler in her turn how I believe she fits, as such, in William Mumler’s enterprise.”

  Whispers were mounting. The Counsellor’s boldness. He was polished again. He fairly gleamed. The dead were shooting up like reeds or crossing braced like darning needles, or making a pass of the court, spitting questions, until they passed from sight again, while Grace in her decrepitude was passing down the eastern wall. How she hummed to herself, absent-minded and sad. One side of her body pressed up to the oak.

  “Identify,” said Counsellor Gerry, “the photograph I’m holding here.”

  “If the Counsellor came just a bit closer,” said I.

  He strode toward the stand. With the picture held high. The first one we’d taken together. With Grace. Her palm held out. Her hair in rags. While I am tipping from the frame.

  “My first ever picture with Willy,” said I. “Taken two years ago now, Counsellor Gerry.”

  “And who are the persons,” said he, “it depicts?”

  “Her name,” said I. “Her name is . . .”

  “Yes?”

  But could I say it. Really: Grace. With Grace so near. So dead and sad. So little and wet with the mould on her cheeks.

  “Her name is Grace Fanshawe,” said I.

  “Really?” said Gerry. He stalled for a moment. As though I’d caught him quite off guard. Then, nodding his head, he returned to his bench, where he rifled a while among his papers. He made some selections. Approached me again. “That name is familiar to me, Mrs. Mumler, as it is familiar to you, I am sure. Would you like to know what we uncovered about it?”

  Vigorously, he consulted his notes.

  “Daughter of Lilla and Joseph Fanshawe. Born in Providence, June, 1841. Lived there for seventeen years with her parents a rung above the merchant class until, in 1858, they moved to Block Island where you, Ma’am, are from. There they planned to start an inn for travellers along the coast from what they had put by in previous ventures. Retire there, I reckon. An untroubled life, as all of us may hope to have, and that is when Grace met you there,” said the Counsellor. “The two of you became fast friends.

  “After you and your mother were run out of town for a murky, unspecified reason,” said Gerry, “Grace Fanshawe was shipped to a girl’s school, Mrs. Prury’s, to finish out her comprehensives. There she wrote letters—addressed to you, Ma’am. The majority of them I have with me here. Very few of these letters, however,” said he, “ever reached Mrs. Mumler or anyone like her. And yet you claim”—he turned to me—“that this is Grace Fanshawe, right here?”

  Brandished the picture and waved it above him.

  Meant to say, “Yes,” but the words slipped away.

  “See this letterhead,” said Gerry. Unfolding a sheet as he came toward the stand. “Tuesday November the 3rd 1860. Mrs. Mumler professes to manifest ghosts that speak their bloody woes aloud and yet it seems that Grace Fanshawe is a most literary phantasm indeed. For if Grace wrote these letters I hold in my hand then Grace Fanshawe is still alive!”

  “I never saw those letters there. The one was all I ever got. Why I even remember the date of it, Counsellor: April the 16th, 1859.”

  But Counsellor Gerry raised his hand. “It cannot matter now,” said he. “For the girl in the picture you took isn’t her.”

  Waves of whispers swept the court.

  “If it isn’t her then who is it?” said I.

  “Well who did Mumler say it was?”

  “His cousin,” said I. “Name of Cora Christine. Willy Mumler is honest but he is mistaken. I never had the heart, you see, to tell him that it wasn’t her.”

  “This person here?” said Counsellor Gerry, extracting a new photograph from his pocket. Held it up next to the first, side by side.

  A cameo portrait contained by a frame not unlike the one of my ageless grandmothe
r. But this was a girl, maybe ten or eleven. A family photo, her mother beside her, a Christmas scene behind them both. The mother’s colouring like Willy’s: auburn, soft and very fair. The girl’s hand pushes at the viewer. Not wearing a bathing costume but a dress. She is pushing her palm at the viewer while smirking. She is not yet a woman but hardly a girl.

  “Are you saying,” said I, “that the picture’s not real?”

  “Both pictures are real in a sense,” said the Counsellor. “The first one of you and the second of Cora. But graft them together as Mumler has done—as Barnum has done with a fish and a chimp!—and what you get is real as pinchbeck. Photographic sophistry. Like all of Mumler’s clientele, you saw what you wanted to see, Mrs. Mumler!

  “But true duplicity,” said Gerry, “is always more than just itself. It must have strategy to work. Which explains why this man needed someone—a woman—for women are best in this Spiritist business—to accomplish not only the external work of convincing his clients their portraits were real but also that other, insidious kind of being convinced of her powers herself! And being so convinced of them”—and here the Counsellor paused to mark me—“that she would be willing to testify to them even in a court of law. But she is not the villain here! For Mrs. Mumler never faked. This Mumler—this Juggler—this duke of deceit—and yet nothing more than a confidence artist—has basely, egregiously taken for ransom a woman unable to care for herself. And not only her but her suffering mother, both of them decent and both of them ill. Isn’t that right, Mrs. Mumler? So, say it.”

  “No,” I told him. “You are wrong.”

  “Why keep up this ruse any longer?” said Gerry. “My dear, you are in need of help. Let the next words you say in the lap of this court be the first in a series toward your liberation!”

  But only then. In Grace’s face. Here was a doubt like a vise, tightening on my throat.

  Guay Unmade and Made

  November, 1861

  The Positive Mind protect her soul she had not had an easy time and I began to see at last that I wasn’t as crucial as I had imagined. On the first Hand of Fate there was serving His Seership and then on the second to serve William Mumler and yet on the third serve the Marshall and Gerry in a way that embattled the first pair of hands.

  But these eight hands were preferable when in former times I had served just Diakka

  About my head the buffeting and always blackly of their wings.

  In these conditions I abided, thinking waiting in my cell. I’d told the lawmen on my faith that Mumler was the murderer and told them too in what queer place and how deep down Child’s corpse was laid. But my time on the stand could no more put off.

  When Counsellor Gerry questioned me it had been as he said a “formality only.”

  —Deception not that I had seen.

  —The Spirits were as real as any.

  —The man himself oh most integral kind and even brotherly.

  Piety was sacrifice and sometimes yes of lesser lives. The Mumlers were my sacrifice as Child had been one in his turn to the Mumlers.

  For everything was necessary. Everything was perfect too. The universe reflects I knew and in that reflection was all that it held.

  During that day’s adjournment they paid me a visit, setting stools before the bars. The Marshall had not been in court though here he turned up red and chafed as though he had been in a strenuous hurry. Gerry wore spectacles over his whiskers so bright I could not see his eyes.

  “He’s a fiendishly clever one, no?” says the Marshall. “More clever, surely, than he looks.”

  Says I: “Is there something wrong?”

  “Oh plenty!” says Tooker “And yet you seem to have no clue.”

  “Did you go where I told you?”

  “Indeed sir,” says he.

  “To the Negro churchyard at the base of the hill?”

  “It goes by some exacter name?”

  I could not see to answer that. I says to the Marshall: “Well what did you find there?”

  “A mute set there to guard the gates.”

  I swallowed stones I could not breath. “But what did you find in the grave, Marshall Tooker?”

  Marshall Tooker took the time to build and light a cigarette and when he had it smouldering he glanced at the Counsellor and says: “Not a thing.”

  “The plot was empty,” says the Counsellor tipping down his spectacles.

  “But that cannot be true,” says I. “I saw him buried there myself.”

  “You saw him buried,” says the Marshall. “Someone saw him out again.”

  “You have perjured yourself, Mr. Guay,” says the Counsellor.

  “For all I knew he was right there. For all I knew, my lords, believe me. If he were moved, I don’t—”

  “—please, sir. Preserve what honour you have left. Mr. Gerry and I have conversed,” says the Marshall, “and here is what we’ve come to think. You are a saboteur, of course—possessed of a certain rudimentary cunning that we were too proud to detect at first glance but now we have you in our sights we’ll not soon forget it, of that, I assure you. Which brings us to your strategy.”

  “Your aim in all of this,” says Gerry.

  “To destroy, on the one hand, the state’s case for murder by having the body removed from the plot, while planning, on the other hand, a straw indictment of your friend. You would see William Mumler fall, but you would play no part in it. You would let Hannah, mad, do that. As Hannah, mad, has surely done. You’ll notice Counsellor’s time with you was not exactly probing, was it? Nor were your answers quite up to the promise you made in exchange for immunity, sir.”

  “We might’ve delayed your testimony until after we’d dug up the plot,” says the Counsellor. “Yet alack and alas, we could no longer do. And so we have ourselves to blame.”

  “But you are far too clement, Counsellor. We are agents of the law. Mr. Guay of Poughkeepsie,” the Marshall begins in the voice of a stuttering ignoramus, “is all but the commonest c-c-criminal, Counsellor, lest we fail to recognize. Add to that: a common coward. But wouldn’t you guess it, Mr. Guay, we too have our insurance policies.”

  “Plenty of them, Mr. Guay.” And here the gaslight down the block twinned hell in Counsellor Gerry’s lenses.

  “See if this one fits,” says Tooker. “The trial will go on unabated. If murder cannot be the charge, let fraud and larceny stick deep.”

  “Let fear of us stick deep,” says Gerry.

  “But not of us alone,” says Tooker. “Let the fear of this Juggler stick deepest of all.”

  “Mumler?” says I.

  “Juggler, sir. For that is what this Mumler does. He has juggled alliances, enemies, all, in arcs too high and wide to gather and they have fallen round his feet in patterns most desperate indeed,” says the Marshall.

  “But I have not betrayed him, sirs!” says I to these men of the law rising up and Tooker and Gerry they backed from the bars as though they were afeared of me.

  And Marshall Tooker says to me: “Remember where it is you are.”

  “But I have not betrayed him, sirs!”

  And Tooker says: “Successfully. Which does not mean you haven’t tried. But how should Mr. Juggler know, attempting to stand beneath so many baubles?”

  “We will make sure he knows, is how. You can depend on that,” says Gerry.

  “Once a jeweller, always one.”

  “Once a killer,” says the Counsellor.

  “You can always depend on a jeweller,” says Tooker, “to make right his assets before closing shop.”

  Tooker stood there at the bars his baldness and his knuckles bright. His eyes were on me hard as slate his skull vibrating in its casement but then when he saw me. I mean really saw me: sprawling tearful on the floor his eyes lost their sheen for the wretchedness of me.

  And then he slowly
backed away.

  Q

  That night I did not sleep a murmur lying wide-eyed in my cell as the branching and winding of all I had heard brought me skinning my bones on the selfsame terrain.

  And yet after a certain point I did not think of anything but the small Quaker girl with the Light in her eyes who had brought me the bread when I came to Esopus. She had bounded right up to the place where I sat. She had not been afeared of me. She’d given me the cornbread hot in its straw-woven basket and under its cloth and she had raced away from me and waved to me along her way and I had ate it pinch by pinch while sprinkling the powder from one of my vials.

  I was not nor had been anything in my life. That little Quaker girl was all.

  When finally they came for me to bring me to the court of law my eyes were so starved of the morning’s last dark that they refused to open fully. But my vision cleared some at the door to the jail where there were figures standing, waiting.

  It was the Mumlers, flanked by guards.

  The figure of Mumler was bristly and big while the figure of Hannah was tattered and thin and pressing in around their bones a pulsing robe each one of Light. While out beyond the metal doors that led to the courtyard that led to the court there stretched a sort of Maw of Light that swallowed everything save them.

  Mumler’s figure nodded once. And then I could see him distinct at my side.

  “Good Morning, Mr. Guay,” says he. “A little sleepy are we, then?”

  He smiled and then he clapped my shoulder. “Today, perhaps, shall be our day.”

  I looked at him and looked at him for any trace of what he knew and when I saw that he did not I nodded at him lovingly. And then I tells him: “After you.” And William Mumler smiled again as if to say: I am obliged. As if to say all is forgiven good sir whatever it is that you think you have done for it could not be helped one bit. And Mumler and Hannah they both took a step and then the Maw of Light unhinged and just as my arm raised to block out the glare it took them ranks of guards and all.

  “You’re waiting on me to remind you how to? One foot goes in front of the next,” says the guard.