Shadows in Summerland

  Bill’s mother accosted by slave-monger jackals and tossed into a grave indeed. For now, I slowly realized, I did not know a thing about him.

  The Sadness, profound and accumulate, took me.

  Bill’s mother and father appeared behind Bill. And yet they were not watching me.

  They were watching my wife and her mother, behind me, having followed at length from the courthouse to here. Hannah still sported the rank, off-white apron they’d given her to wear in jail and she stood there submissive, her hair in her face. Claudette and Bill exchanged a nod.

  “You need me to hail you a cab, Mist’ Mumler?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

  Bill stood for a moment then seemed to recede into memories fonder by far than the present. “You were me, Mist’ Mumler . . .” he started in saying. “Well, anyway. I think you’ll do.”

  Miss Conant Decided

  November, 1861

  She was, I’d heard, a youngish woman.

  A spirit medium, like me. She’d been unmarried all her life, not that she discouraged asking. She was pretty, they say, even beautiful, sometimes, when the lamps of the séance were burning quite right. Her showings were reputed to be “physical” in nature. Which meant that, according to hearsay, she showed as the strife of the spirits afflicted her flesh. She would, for instance, start to cough and a spirit miasma would slip from her mouth. Another time she’d offered up, in between pointer finger and thumb, shards of light.

  When one day she showed in a whole other way: a flexible mound at the centre of her. She manifested all the symptoms. Her stomach was ripe in the morning—most mornings. Her breasts were painful to the touch. She hadn’t yet been with a man to her knowledge, which was of course what they asked first and when they had reckoned with all that she told them she continued to service her roll call of clients. When finally her time arrived they took her to the birthing room and she gave vent to something not dead or alive: a slithering of ectoplasm. When she returned to her previous form, she claimed to have mothered the spirits themselves.

  She titled her ability what would come to be known as the New Motive Power.

  And so if someone saw me now as I carried myself to the city’s north side, this story—E.H.B. and myself had agreed—would be the story that I told.

  Perforant objects resulted in bleeding. Steam from a bucket would cook you inside. The pills that they gave you would tangle your guts when just as well you’d had the poke. The best you could do was curl up on a bed and, if you were lucky, decide not to die.

  The woman’s name was Mrs. Luft. She had a worthwhile reputation in such matters, as they went. Her name and her address—in Boston’s North End—were given to me by Miss Moss.

  Mrs. Luft worked as a seamstress by day.

  The North End was warrens, ill-favoured of lamplight. Chimney smoke boiled from the tops of gaunt houses, windows weak with bedtime prayer. A man-shape approached me, his silhouette awkward until I could peg him for missing an arm. While in among the crevices that marked the beginnings of new, twisted alleys, there were parchment-and-tin dioramas of saints.

  They glittered in darkness like broke-open ore.

  St. Stephen’s Church, with its new clock and cross, announced a final branching on the map I carried with me. I stopped there a moment. I knew not for what but that lamplight illumined the church’s pilasters. And in fact, as I stood there, some six trembling Catholics either mounted the steps or came out through the doors.

  My words, as I said them, were matter-of-fact. It was something, I think, about not dying yet. It was not a prayer but a conscious desire.

  Someone bucked out of the doors and came toward me, something hunched beneath his arm. I might’ve mistaken him, say, for a beggar—many in these varied parts—or an overgrown child with a long, jagged head, but I looked closer still.

  It was William Guay.

  He had a clutch of bags about him. He loomed and went loping away through the lamplight.

  The clock had yet to chime my time. I had gotten there early, of course, due to nerves.

  And wondering what spurred him on, especially now, with the favourable verdict, I tucked the map into my dress and rounded the corner some distance behind him.

  He kept straight for a time down the more major streets. He did not seem to know these regions. He had a natural furtiveness, as anxious and black as the rats underfoot.

  By and by, he reached the place. I bided down the block behind him. It was a typical block in that part of the city, dark and swaybacked in its paving. The place that he had come to was a boarding house or warehouse, its higher stories all alight. He hoisted the bags that he carried and knocked.

  A beat, and he was let inside.

  I abandoned my post at the corner and crept. A window showed along the side. I stood at the top of the long, deranged square that the lights from inside had arrayed on the sidewalk.

  The room was incredibly bright, too bright: it had the sick sheen of magnesium burning. Guay entered the room and went through it, back to me. He set his bags upon a table—a dining room table worn to shreds, as though they had salvaged it, brought it here, cleaned it. Behind the table, facing me, I saw the jeweller clad in sleeves. He looked at Guay—a vexed, red look—and commanded him something and Guay reeled away.

  Now I heard the clock at ten.

  The verdict had been innocent, which at first I determined had given me options, but here was I and there was he and I was not prepared for that. I had been on the verge all this time of returning, of turning around toward the CDSK but when I saw him there, enthroned:

  There was something about, well, the attitude of him. The way he looked upon the scene. It was a sort of blamelessness, the innocence that children have, but also a madness somewhere near the surface, as though he could not help himself.

  I rounded the edge of the light from the window.

  In the corner that now came to light was Claudette. She sat there intent on the dark of her lap; I had never felt right or secure in her presence. She had a sort of faceless force, a thing that moved ahead of her, so even when you saw her near she had always been there in some sense, next to you. Her hands, above a wide-lipped bowl, were spitting out a small, white rain. Her expression was trained on the floor of the room.

  Then, upon the nearest wall, a shadow flickered, rolled, was gone.

  I adjusted my vantage again.

  The clock ceased. This one, I said to myself, or the next one.

  And there in the wake of the shadow went Hannah. She hunched, her arms held straight along. Her hair swung and parted, and parted and swung before her lightly charging face. I remembered when I’d seen her in Mount Auburn cemetery, rubbing her stomach among the grey stones and she had seemed a sort of spool that wound the coffin toward the earth. Her footsteps were short but remarkably fast, as though she went at some instruction. She looked at nobody, not even her mother, on her way to the wall I was facing onto.

  Which wasn’t, quite, a wall at all; it was a sort of screen or curtain. And Hannah was testing her shadow upon it.

  Guay came into view again, conveying a big, rippling cloth, which he lowered.

  A cataract seemed to descend on the room, as though it were shrouded along with the camera. But it was only Hannah’s shadow, spreading like a pair of wings.

  And then I saw, as in a flash, that she had never lied at all.

  She had no reason to, not now. There was nobody watching her—no one but me and I did not care either way to verify the thing she was.

  But Hannah was herself enthroned. The wings of her shadow extended out from her and the dark majesty of the things she would see was already with her, already among us.

  Guay paid out the cloth, stepped back.

  No one sat before the screen. It was to be only a picture of absence, roosting under Hannah’s s
hade, but there were figures in it yet like fishermen in waist-high fog.

  And Hannah, as though hearing something—as though hearing me as I took in a breath—turned toward the window, emerging through hair, to show the street her sad contentment.

  I will do it. Go now.

  But I didn’t. I stood there.

  And finally my second came.

  Message Department

  What moves our tongues to speak your names, you mortals who tend on the ways of the spirits? Why do we cross over if not to abide and why cry out if not to mean? Why to watch over if not to protect and why to wake if not to love? And what makes you think you could even perceive us, you mortals, you darlings, who conjure us forth, when walking, say, amid a crowd you grasp an arm you recognize and you behold a stranger’s face, corrupt behind a wall of flies? But would it cheer you in your beds, in which you wake and wake with age, that every last spirit among us is reaching to make a mark upon your cheek, the imprint of a pressing palm that throbs with heat when we are near and keeps you for us, sad and bright, until the day you walk along? So what do we say to you? What do we say, you wilters and strivers, you cursers, becursed? Why must we bother to explain what you one day too soon will be?

  Mumler Ascending

  November, 1872

  With the Irish arriving in still greater seethes, and the swamps being stylishly choked with fresh gravel, and the Rail Splitter dreaming in mid-western loam, and the great war of Southern Aggression concluded for us regrettably too soon, and Spiritualism gone to ruin when Kate Fox admitted to juggling fruit and promptly drank herself to death—with all of this come down at last like a dynamited avalanche of unrefined granite, Hannah, her mother and I persevered, buying out rooms in the cheap of downtown, and there continued in our trade just a couple of blocks south of the place it began.

  Ours was a business arrangement, no more, in these rooms where we captured the soul’s transmigration and now reproduced at eight dollars a print—a reduced bill of sale but still true to our mission, may it succor the Spirit in these trying times.

  Hannah continued to give of her shadow, grown duller perhaps as the years scraped along but reflecting enough of the Summerland’s light to betoken a budding in long barren hearts. Yet the spirits themselves came more randomly now, more contorted and shambling, their faces averted. On more than a couple of occasions those days, hard up for a way to explain who appeared, I’d been driven again to the fraudulent tricks I’d had to adopt in my struggles with Child—double-exposing the strangers away, replacing them with someone loved. And while the murdered man himself no longer lurked inside my prints—a reversal on which I’ll elaborate later—it always gave me fleeting shame to have to fall back on such methods with others. This was never of course on behalf of the sitters, who had laid their breasts bare to my intrigues in coming, but rather on my own account, as though I had deceived myself.

  Hannah never knew the difference. Hannah did what Hannah did.

  But all the same, I bullied her.

  I could not seem to help it, reader!

  She was just so inviting of cruelty, finally, for all she barely slept and ate, her faculty weakened by punishing “spells” she endured in the room that lay under her mother’s. Sometimes I even told her this: she did not see the ghosts at all. It was only a fiction that I had enabled by way of the humours I poured on the glass. She would go very sheepish then, if only for a couple of hours. And I would have to build her up from the unhappy rubble to which I’d reduced her.

  Predictably, the house seemed small. But perhaps I am getting ahead of myself?

  It seems I’ve forgotten to mention the boy, though how could I forget him, reader. That boy and his feet even now at their scrambling’s, and skidding’s, and charging’s, and hammering’s down; and his baubles of soap on the stairs and his wailing’s all throughout the first two years until the child’s tantrums found focus at last in a general inanity and vehemence of temper, for he’d become that dreaded thing: a healthy boy of nine, cooped up.

  In March of 1862, the boy had been left in a dressmaker’s box at the door of the warehouse where we were then living. The dress-box itself, on that early spring night, had been padded inside with torn pillowcases and nary a note or Christian name to mark his being in this world. He was all but an infant, still choke-faced from birth, with hair that grew blonde for a time and then black.

  It had been Hannah and not me to insist, passively, that we take him inside.

  Surely I must owe her that or something else, reader, to placate her need, especially now that she no longer came like some countrified Lilith to sup of my essence.

  She had named the boy Heinrich, a squat, old-world name, and she loved him against her ruin. For hers was a terrible, soul-leaching love, as she practised in everything.

  And as he grew older, the boy felt it, too. Though mostly he was strange to me.

  That Guay had seen to end his life by drinking a glass of developing fluid—not long after which Child’s ghost disappeared—or that I’d seen Bill Christian once in the long line of mourners outside of South Church to lament, at a distance, the murder of Lincoln, made it all the more lonely for me in those days with the two generations of weird, resigned women and that child, their rambunctious familiar, for company. Fanny I’d not seen in years, since even before our acquittal for fraud. In her words she had been my own whore to be handled. She was also the most refined woman I’d known. The original stamp of the signpost endorsement that a decade ago I’d insisted she write, I kept folded up in a drawer in my closet—as yellowed to date as the picture of Cora. I would straighten it broadside and tamp down its corners and pore for a while on the shape of her words and sometimes even told myself that the ink had dried there but a few hours before.

  What was it about her?

  Austerity, maybe.

  I often missed her terribly.

  So you will forgive me for misrepresenting when I said that I persevered.

  I mostly had cause to bewail a spent life, as orphaned of friends as it was of good fortune. I allowed it to burn from the prominence of me, quickly turned to other things.

  Not least among them Madam Fisk’s, my cathedral of flesh at the top of Copp’s Hill.

  Brianna was no longer there. Brianna was no longer there, and yet there were traces of her everywhere—in the rooms that I heaved in, the water I laved. It wasn’t that I missed her, quite, but missed the thing she’d made in me and liked to go in search of it in the arms of the hags she had left me for congress. They were canny, used women, long stripped of their mystery, save what disease they might pass on. I combusted inside them with worrisome violence.

  Once I’d found myself unstirred.

  “It’s fine ain’t it, though,” said the woman beneath me.

  She had risen from bed and began to heat water.

  Q

  So it portended handsomely—returning at last to the lackluster present—when one fall evening, near to six, in the Year of Our Spirit 1872, that another sort of woman came to see me at the shop, her face obscured by widow’s weeds.

  It was well past the time that I entertained sitters, especially ones strange to me. Though still there was something about her, this widow, untold behind her blackened shroud. And I at last a gentleman.

  Accordingly, I asked her in.

  She was, I saw, a Lahngworthy, from the way that she bore herself, studied, polite—and yet with a sort of hard-bargained steadfastness; as though without purpose to power her forward she would probably slow with a moan, hunker down. She reminded me, reader, of red-letter days when I had been a personage of “eminence and licence,” and when it had always been women like this who came to sign their names and sit. Our recent clientele, you see, had been less and less choice by the signature, reader, the writers and statesmen in steady decline in favour of bondsmen, bricklayers, beer-brewers.

 
; I bade her sit and sign the book.

  She signed her name as Mrs. Lindall.

  I went to fetch Hannah who answered her door in a fierce flush of horseplay with Heinrich behind it, and as I briefed her on our guest I could hear him off thrashing his toys or some rot. She fussed for a while, making sure he was happy—god forbid she should leave him for only ten minutes!—before trailing me, tugging her skirts, to the parlour where we went about the science of arranging Mrs. Lindall at a coordinate of curtain that was favourable to Hannah.

  When everything was in its place I turned to the woman, who sat there still shrouded. I asked her might she move her veil.

  The woman told me only this: “When you are ready, then I shall remove it.”

  “But I am ready, Madam,” I told her. “Quite ready.”

  She stalled a beat, then pushed it from her.

  I am willing to admit at first that I didn’t fully understand the tentative solemnity with which she’d invested herself at this juncture. For this woman, de-weeded—this stubbed Mrs. Lindall—was nothing if not commonplace, with her mound of a figure, her veil-to-toe black.

  But that was when I recognized her.

  Monsieur D’Tocqueville, when he came to this country, chirping of democracy, would’ve praised us to the very stars had it not been for what he termed “the bootless chase” of heedless fortune. What he meant was our pursuance of elusive main chances, of the one combination that made it all work. Well, whatever the intention or inflection of that statesman, this woman was my own main chance, sitting there on her stool with her pushed-aside veil after so many years of deplorable sameness.

  She was Mary Todd Lincoln, last bloodkin of Abe. Exposing her, I might’ve trembled.

  And that’s when that sniveling nuisance in sockfeet came hoof-pounding into the room at that instant. He planted himself at its edge for a peek.

  Instantly, Hannah moved off to contain him.

  “Heinrich,” she scolded, too gently, I think. “Heinrich, my child, you are not to be down here.”