Shadows in Summerland

  So I squinted my eyes and I followed them forth until the brilliance claimed me too.

  Miss Conant in Talks

  November, 1861

  Dimmer, darker, by the key, the gates of Suffolk fell away. Pawing hand by matron’s hand, my belongings were rifled through, charged and accounted. Mainly, I carried the creature inside me which I hadn’t done much to conceal by design. That and a galley of the Banner, which I held folded in my hand.

  They patted my ankles for chisels and pins. They ruffled the place where my thighs met my groin. They left the comb that held my hair; it was whalebone and bright, a luck-charm from Miss Moss.

  I liked the way it hugged my scalp and made my shoulders prone to lift.

  Inescapably, one of them stopped at my stomach. “Oh,” she said lightly. Her key ring went swinging. She started again beneath my arms then gave her inspection a cursory finish.

  “Couldn’t keep them legs closed, could she? Slattern walking!” called a voice.

  Then: “Miss! Oh, Miss! A handsome comb! A lady needs a patron, Miss!”

  My wooden heels went marching off. The deeper darkness smelled of piss. A lantern of misery swayed in dim arcs across the slick, ill-sequenced stone.

  Hannah Mumler’s prison cell was the very last one in the block, on the left.

  She sat there with her knees drawn up, her pallet pushed against the wall. Her pale arms encircled her knees for protection, the right hand encircling the wrist of the left. Her hair was curtains fallen to; it revealed just the tip of her straight, skinny nose. Were it not for the faintest gestation of breath along the ridgeline of her shoulders, she might’ve been a carven woman—pale like paraffin or soap.

  I’d long since glimpsed the morning’s headline: Perfect Battery Imperfect.

  A chair knocked behind me, as though out of nowhere. I sat in it, lifting and smoothing my skirts. Some stealth juggernaut of a matron had brought it. I watched her backside roll away.

  “Miss Conant?” she said.

  She’d been looking right at me.

  “I was sorry. . .” I swallowed my words, ill at ease. “I was sorry to hear of your troubles,” I told her. “Yesterday can’t have been easy for you.”

  She paused before speaking. “Some say I deserved it.”

  “Did William Mumler say that, then?”

  “Willy would never say that,” she told me. “Willy puts great trust in me.”

  “And you in him?”

  Her posture loosened. “Willy dotes on me,” she said. “I believe he would be here right now if he could be. But the gentleman’s wing, it is so far away. I am here alone, Miss Conant.”

  “Not all alone?” I said.

  “Yes, Ma’am.”

  “There are no spirits here with you?”

  “I’d rather not to speak of that.”

  “Would rather not or cannot, Hannah?”

  “Would rather not,” she said, “Miss Conant. I shouldn’t talk of spirits, now.”

  “Why not?” I said.

  “They said I shouldn’t.”

  “The spirits said?”

  “The Counsellors, Ma’am. The Counsellors have said I am past them, such things. They say that I have dreamed them up.”

  “But you did not do that, did you? The spirits exist, don’t they, Hannah?” I said.

  She looked at me a touch too long. Her eyes were dim sparks in the cave of her hair. But a glimmer had showed in them—was them, a moment, when I had told her I believed.

  “You’d pretend to be somebody else for their sake?”

  “Not for them,” said the girl. And her head tilted up, and her hair fell away to the side of her face, and the look there beneath it was calm, beatific. It was, I thought, a look of faith. “It’s for him,” she continued. “For Willy’s sake, Ma’am. They say that I will ruin him.”

  “And what of you?” I said too loud and Hannah went flinching back into the shadows. “One should always be careful to speak for one’s self,” I said to Hannah Mumler, softer. “Otherwise one might end up with a far different life than one ever imagined.”

  “Why have you come here to see me, Miss Conant?”

  “I have come here to give a proposal,” I said. “But first I feel it best to say . . . Which pertains after all to the reason I’ve come . . . I feel it best to tell you, now, that I come bearing William’s child.”

  So there I had said it and now it was said.

  And I thought: it is something that is—in this world.

  She studied me slowly, serenely. Those eyes.

  “Oh,” she said. “I didn’t know.”

  I watched her watching me: “Well, then.”

  “I tried,” she said, “but we could not.”

  She spoke those words without a hitch—there could be nothing strange about them—and I thought to myself: Am I still human, then? When a person turns into a monster, what happens?

  Yet I said: “I am sorry to hear that, of course. And furthermore, Hannah, I will understand if you hate me and wish me . . .” I quavered my voice. “. . . if you hate me and wish me to go, right away. For William Mumler is your husband. That is cause enough,” I said.

  She didn’t nod or shake her head. “Does Willy know?” said Hannah Mumler.

  “Locked up in here these many weeks I don’t believe he could,” I said. “But of course if you wish me to tell him, I will. . . .”

  A burden seemed to weigh on her. “Right now,” she said, “it seems unfair. I think we’d better not to tell him. He’s had trouble enough simply clearing his name.”

  “He isn’t a bad man is he, Hannah?” The girl shook her face—a convulsion of hair. “He is merely a man in bad circumstance.”

  “They have trapped him,” she said. “They have made him to kneel.”

  “And you are caught between them, aren’t you? You are in a quandary. You.”

  “They’re keen to correct me for helping him, Ma’am. They’re keen,” she said, “to teach us both.”

  “You want to be helpful?” I said.

  “Yes, Miss Conant.”

  “Then what if I told you there must be a choice.”

  “Between Willy and me?”

  “Between him and this child.”

  “Your and Willy’s child.”

  “This child.”

  “I’m not sure that I understand.”

  I took a breath of competence which seemed to garner her attention I said: “His chances are not strong. Neither of yours are—together. One needn’t look farther than headlines to see it: the Commonwealth will bury you. Most certainly William Mumler, they say. And Guay will be collateral. It’s you alone who stands a chance. You alone alone,” I said.

  Huddled there, she squirmed a bit. “You really think I have a chance?”

  “Right now is your chance if you have one,” I said. “They think you are insane, don’t they? They think you’ve made the spirits up? But you are not insane. You’re not. Those barristers have skewed your mind. They mean to make you doubt yourself. So simply let them think you are. Play into their hands,” I said. “And win your freedom just that way.”

  “But why would I do that?” she said, as if it were the strangest thing.

  “So you can tell this child,” I said, “that baseness is not in its blood.”

  At once, Hannah let go her legs and stood up. She made a circuit of her cell. She absently, forcefully rubbed at her stomach. She seemed to say a couple of things to parties whom I could not see while tracking matter with her eyes that seemed to move from place to place.

  “But first we must make sure,” I said.

  “Make sure?” she said and paced again.

  “Make sure that William and not you is martyred by the Commonwealth.”

  I felt the monster in me stir, the woma
n part of me was gone and I thought to myself: it is no more than this. It is no more than what I will presently say.

  I looked directly in her eyes. I told the medium my plan.

  Miss Moss would be the centrepiece. Had Hannah ever seen her hair, how fine and dark it hung from her? And then I folded out the galley, the first one that Mumler had taken of Cora. Did Cora not bear a strong resemblance to dark-haired, pale-skinned, lean Miss Moss?

  It would transpire like this, I said.

  We’d coach Miss Moss to be that girl (the “cousin” that Mumler was sure he had captured): David Brewster’s Ghost revealed. We’d place her on the witness stand, and see him put away for fraud. Meanwhile Hannah would persist in playing the crazed innocent from Rhode Island by professing to have not the slightest idea that Mumler augmented her gifts on the side.

  She must stand by these gifts, of course. For were they not her granted gifts?

  And so in the course of the scheme I proposed she would never, herself, be compelled into lying.

  It was risky, I told her, but more so contentment—riskier to just sit here. And as she kept pacing she seemed to go firmer—seriouser, anyway. She had even stopped rubbing her stomach. She stood there.

  “If I may speak immodestly . . .” said Hannah Mumler, eyeing me. “What are your plans, Ma’am, to do with the child?”

  I thought to lie to her again as I’d been doing this whole time, but then I said: “I cannot think that I would be much of a mother at all.”

  “Will I play a role in its life?” she asked plainly.

  The monster in me said: “Of course.”

  “Thank you! Oh thank you, Miss Conant!” she cried. “Oh praise the spirits, oh! Praise God.”

  Q

  Yet the plan we’d agreed on was never to be when the case was thrown out at defence’s first witness. Despite his seeming prejudice, Judge Dowling was the one who’d done it. Counsellor Gerry’s case for fraud was nothing if not well-constructed, but it fell in the path of the ultimate fact that Child was nowhere to be found. It was the case’s fatal flaw and one that Judge Dowling had long overlooked. Now, he announced, he must tighten his belt.

  And then he went about the task of acquitting the lot of them, one by one.

  Mumler on the Promenade

  How joyous is the promenade, in every nation on this earth, a venue for strolling and taking the air whose plenitude all men do breathe. The Brit and the Dutchman, the Norse and the Frenchman, the Guinea-Coaster and the Swede goes each at his appointed hour along bright esplanades that give way to the sea, across moors in the mist and on greenways through parks. The American gentleman is no different. He too treads with vigour the promenade’s windings with colleagues and relatives, lovers and friends and he goes with his hat on, his cane striking earth, his footsteps as evenly paced as a waltz. He meets the stares that rub him raw. He greets the rumours said about him, sober, with an even mouth. He skirts the wallow of despair. And in many a mind he walks taller, this man, American in every sense.

  Mumler at Large

  November, 1861

  That His Beetleship’s gavel drove thundering spikes through Gerry’s sour nut of a brain, I am certain. Some among the court dropped eyes or stood up halfway in their seats. Others of them raised their arms and whispered to the person near them. And all at once my chains were dropped like the chains of the slaves being freed round the country, and as my shattered coffles rang upon the marble floors of justice, I went on toward the busy street—Suffolk Street, as was the case—while Hannah and Claudette regrouped and Guay perused the crowd for no one.

  I burst through a column of newspapermen, my arms like axe heads at my sides, and I made for the regions beyond the grand steps, determined to savour my triumph in private.

  As for the men who had sought to destroy me by confidence schemes of their own, what about them? They were slaves to the dollar, bloodhounds for the dream, whereas I was no less than an artist who earned! It had been a heady thing to watch them drubbed in open court.

  I should’ve felt happy or merely at ease and yet I was conscious of something not there.

  Hacks were still moving outside in the street, and people passing by with purpose, and superintendents of the law were conveying now here and now there with their charges, and a horse, yoked to cartloads of what I assumed were beams for a construction project, beshitting the pavement with prodigious ardour, letting off a little steam.

  At the discharge and crumbling apart of that shit, my heart surrendered altitude and the fact that the world hadn’t changed in my absence felt more deflating by the instant. And as I stepped over the shit, headed home, past faces that fleetingly recognized mine and faces to whom I was no one, I started to view the ordeal of my trial and my public besmirching with sharp irritation. It was, for a moment, the one thing I felt. And this irritated me, too.

  I grew tetchy. The day was starting to go cold.

  I did not slow my pace for Hannah. Hannah Mumler would catch up. She shadowed the progress I made even now with her mother-retainer, her hair in her face.

  I hurried on toward Otis Street for where else, reader, would I be?

  I was in the main anxious to recommence business. The box had been too long without me. And imagine the backlog of long-standing orders that had gathered these last couple of months in my absence; I almost expected, I freely admit, to be met with a wild, distraught queue of petitioners—a funeral train’s worth of calcified souls that I would endure with a wave of my hand.

  But what I saw instead was Bill. He stood in the studio’s window a moment, his face like the face of some Guinea-Coast-God.

  A regular butler in teakwood was Bill. He must be on a homecoming! He had swept the crawlspaces, and batted the curtains, and refilled the oil-lamps, and scoured out the sinks, and plumped the couch cushions, and waxed down the mantle, and polished the windows to better the light in these vacated rooms where I’d taken my pictures. And where I would take pictures still.

  He said at the door: “Mist’ Mumler, you’re back.”

  I thought: here is a different Bill than the one I’d entrusted to safeguard my office and, different chiefly, because of the fact that Bill and I now shared a history between us. We had both of us been bound by chains and both of us in good faith freed. It made us equals, at the last.

  It made us, truly, timely, friends.

  “I am returned,” I said to Bill. “And in no little part thanks to you, I should say.”

  I reached out for Bill Christian’s hand, but Bill shook his head—without malice or spite.

  “There you stand sure enough, Mist’ Mumler,” he said. “But you no longer welcome here.”

  “Not welcome,” I said on the verge of a laugh.

  But what I saw beyond the door behind Bill Christian stayed my tongue.

  The scuffed velvet couch, and the old easy chair, and the whitewood dinner table with the ring of rattan seats that had formerly been in Bill’s rooms, now in mine. All of this and plenty more formed a sort of blockade before all that I owned, each piece leaning into or bracing the next. The grandfather clock given me by LaRoy to honour our third fruitful sitting together now leaned in a corner wedged in by a table. Resting in the crevice that the edge of it made with the hip of the grandfather clock, shades from lamps—dunce-cap of them teetering above the whole confused morass.

  “Not welcome. So I see,” I said. “Well aren’t you going to tell me why?”

  “Nothing personal now, Mist’ Mumler,” said Bill. “It’s just that these rooms here are mine and not yours. They’re paid in full, a week today.”

  “You cannot own this house,” I said, “for I have never sold it, Bill.”

  “You never owned it, Mist’ Mumler. It gone into ’rears the first month you in jail.”

  “In arrears, you mean, Bill?”

  “If it please you,” sa
id Bill.

  “You paid for the house with what money?!” I said.

  “You ain’t the only man,” said Bill, “can turn a nickel in its traces.”

  “You did it with pictures,” I said. I was laughing. But Bill’s features were deathly still. “With ghost pictures! You thieving wretch. You stubborn, black son of the devil’s own nig—”

  “—all right,” said Bill Christian. “Okay, Mist’ Mumler.”

  “You stole my life.”

  “I had my eye. Claudette has helped me some, of course. You needn’t to take it that hard, Mist Willy.”

  And here he was—old Bill, my Bill! But then in a flash he was gone.

  “Damn you, Bill.”

  A shape drifted into the door behind Bill: the ancient undertaker father. He was a feeb in loose tan slacks with an overgrown iceberg of black and grey hair, and he dithered obscurely just right of his son, peering at me from the shade of his hair.

  But I would not barge in past the man. No, I would not provoke a scene!

  I was a gentleman, and white, and one to wit of some repute, and I would not be taken in by any substandard—and then I pushed past him.

  He did not really block my way.

  Maybe only to take back a few of my things—say, a couple of lampshades, the scuffed logbook stand. It was all of it mine, after all, was it not? From the stains on the flock, to the cobwebs in corners, to that old Negro woman right there in that chair whom I hadn’t been able to see from the door and who tilted her face up at me as I passed with a mild-mannered look of inquiry. Then smiled.

  She tented the book she was reading to mark me.

  We remained there observing each other a while, like acquaintances summoning probable names. “Why, you must be the photographer man. I heard a goodly bit on you. You the luckiest man that I reckon’s alive, the mess you got out of today,” said the woman.

  She was, of course, Bill Christian’s mother.

  But that was all I heard her say. For Bill had sauntered up behind and quietly restrained my arms. I let myself be led back out.

  It had all of it, terrible, happened so fast!