Shadows in Summerland

  But he stayed in the doorway, confused, maybe daft. Hannah took a few steps closer.

  I said: “Our little foundling, Henrich.”

  Mrs. Lincoln fixed me with a muted distaste—what in the world had I said to offend her? She turned to Hannah, then the boy, and then she said: “Your son, I take it?”

  Hannah Mumler told her: “Yes.”

  “I am partial to children. All kinds,” said the widow—the widow of Lincoln, need I be reminded!—who sat here now before my screen in a weathered pursuit of this Spiritualism beyond even what promised to be its disgrace. Katherine and Maggie, just eight months ago, in mutual decline toward drink, had admitted that when they heard rapping as girls it was only the dropping of fruit tied to strings.

  Granted, so to speak—ah, reader, I love a presidential pun!—I’d heard that Mary Lincoln was a Spiritualist herself, that she had sat for mediums and put on séances while still in the White House, though her coming here now, in so desperate an age, impressed me as not a jot less than fantastic. For an instant I feared I’d embrace her right there.

  Her husk, which had buried her husband and son all in the space of a few thieving years.

  But I didn’t embrace her. I said: “Heinrich, come.”

  The diminutive wretch looked afraid for a moment as he so often did with me. He approached Mrs. Lincoln a-twitch and a-twitter, his hands unappealingly rumpling his pockets.

  “Have you come down to watch us then?” said Mrs. Lincoln, smiling warmly. Simple Heinrich did not speak but continued to lurk there like some sort of changeling. “Well, have you?” she pressed him.

  “Yes, Ma’am,” the boy answered.

  “How silly you must think us, dear.”

  He said: “I like the pictures, Ma’am. I like how they look when they’re fresh from the bath!”

  And cramping with shyness, he heeled from the room.

  “Isn’t he a cherry, Miss,” the woman pronounced, with a flattish inflection.

  Hannah thanked her, muttering. She nodded and then turned to stone for the picture. Mrs. Lincoln paid her monies, complimented our tact and then hurried away.

  But not before writing, in next to her name, a day that would suit her to come for her prints and, making note of it too well, I shut the book on hours well spent.

  I subjected Mary’s sitting to the firstlings of development and having done so went to bed.

  Q

  But I didn’t sleep long before I was awoken.

  Something rankled on the air. I sat up in bed in an unnatural sweat. The room, I slowly found, was baking, and I tried through my grog to align the strange smell with the reason I should be so hot. My curtains, which faced on the north side of Milk Street—velvety, black ones that meted the sun—were alive top and bottom and down through the centre with a queer agitation of ambient light. I thought that it looked like a portrait of hell—a negative of hell, perhaps. As I walked from my bed to the street-facing window, wiping that freak of night-sweat from my brow, I heard the sounds of hell unreckoned, a popping and grating and crashing. Then screams.

  I parted the curtain to look on what bedlam.

  The building next to mine was burning. It had recently trafficked some manner of textile and now as I watched it be eaten by flames in the foreground of other such buildings, half eaten, I fancied I could hear the sound of the bed-sheets or rugs or whatever inside it flaring and whooshing and crinkling to crisps.

  Was the whole blessed city on fire?

  So it was.

  Crazed, I wrenched the curtains closed. I even cried out—an absurd, sincere cry: “Why has no one come to warn me?!” And then as though without a thought—with less than a thought, the abeyance of thinking!—I raced in my bed-shirt downstairs to the street. And when I arrived there amid the melee, my bed-shirt clinging to my bulk while the shop next to mine, now a banquet for flames, began to nibble at our mansards, I was startled at last at my own cowardice.

  I had never paused once to alert the two women.

  I’ll admit that for more selfish reasons than right ones, I did not wish them both to die—though if I had my druthers, reader, I would’ve elected Claudette for that outcome. And yet I discovered that I’d been unable to think of anyone but me. I had woken, felt heat, sniffed at smoke, reckoned danger, transported myself at a clip from its clutches. I had not even brought the prints that I had made of Mrs. Lincoln and though I thought to rush back in and cradle them, sweating, away from the flames, I could not will myself to do it.

  A black-winged inertia held me to the spot. Yet still I felt resilient, reader; many times in my life, even, favoured by chance.

  A notion perhaps superseding belief as flames began to take the shop but one I was willing to—must!—believe in as I commenced to walk away. And so did the H.M.S. Mumler set sail for what new shores I cannot say, only that when I got there—yes, missing the prints and without the weird women required to make more—there always would be Mrs. Lincoln’s, Hannah Mumler’s, hopes to hope.

  I ran down Milk Street bound for Summer with the logic that I would be safer near water—the sort of idiotic thing that occurs to one, reader, in such situations. But I found as I ran that the fire was well-fed by mansard rooftops cheek by jowl, not to mention the porous beige bulk of old granite, which now, all around me, began to combust in a walled-kingdom wreckage of battlements breached, huge hunks of it cracking and taking to air to crater the ash-sifted street with its ruin. The cauldron shapes of firefight troupes were grinding up and down the main, doing their best to spout impotent ropes across the spreading of the flames. The firemen shoved, and punched, and swore as to which troupe among them would herald a savior while the horses attached to their engines stood still. They were baleful and black and they bowed their rank heads, as if at my prospects of getting away; and that was when the ghost of something—something large, grotesque and bubbling—rose out of an alleyway off to my left in a great gathering of opaque, gaseous matter and when it reached the highest point, the size of a book-spine between the two rooftops, concussed in a torrent of gas set aflame, coating the frail world below with hot rubble.

  A goodly portion found me out, pinging off rooftops and walls, breaking windows, but always, always, missing me, and I fled ever farther, the whole world aflame, like a sinister throat that was coughing me out.

  And then the bedlam seemed to stop.

  The horses perked their scabby heads. The firefighters no longer fought. All were looking at the sky.

  And William Mumler, too, looked up to see what drew the others so and saw far out beyond the roofs, unfurling each a tail of flame, a burning migration of geese toward the ocean. Any second, they’d crash down. Their wings would dip in singed surrender. And their feathers would flee from them, blackly, in torment, as they went into mostly dead spirals and sunk.

  When I lowered my eyes to the street once again, the scene around me had resumed. The inferno was popping, the water was lashing, the people were running, the children were crying, the horses were snorting, the firemen were brawling, and yet I could not feel a thing.

  It was as though an atmosphere impassable to earthly force had gathered around me the place where I stood.

  And suddenly I realized I’d no idea where I was.

  Not only geographically in terms of where I had come from, but also the street that I stood in, the city; I might’ve been in any one.

  So I ran to the end of the street I was on to commit to my memory the name on the sign with the logic that if I forgot it again then I might remember it, sooner than later. But there was no sign there at all, just a shattered gas-lamp at the top of a pole that was bowed at the middle and faintly on fire, and turning I ran down the street whence I’d come, or had it been another street, and kept on running through the dark where the fire showed in grotesque displays on the brick.

  At the end of that street, I
turned left and then right; then right again, then left once more, at every branching looking up to see if I could read the sign. But most of the time there was no sign or the words were so worn I could not make them out. Or maybe there had been a sign but no sooner seen than forgotten again, as though my mind could not retain the letters as they were arranged.

  “Can somebody tell me the name of this street?” I shouted at some passersby. “Is there one cursed street in this Sodom,” I said, “that wears a sign upon its post? How is a gentleman meant to discern the place he is headed, one block to the next?”

  But the people I’d shouted at didn’t respond. They did not even turn around.

  When turn and turn about I came to a street in the darkness that, somehow, I knew. I am not sure why I felt this. And yet I had the certainty that I had been there once before and when I had, a few years past or maybe only fifteen minutes, that all the jewels of happiness had lain assembled in my palm.

  Where was I? I wondered. What had I been doing?

  And then I remembered: a city on fire.

  Three people emerged from a two-story house across the street from where I stood. They were fleeing the drawn-out and deadly collapse of the structure entire as its upper floors caught—two adults, I could see, with a boy in between them. The boy was coughing violently, that quick, raw cough small children make. The adults were both women: one older, one younger. The older one was in the lead. And while her eyes were vague and strange, her jaw was set ahead of her—not to such a degree as to make her forbidding, but only concerned for her grandson and daughter, intent on conveying them out of harm’s reach to somewhere better, somewhere safe.

  At first they were familiar but then I thought I was not sure. There was something about them, the way they appeared, familiar yet also indelibly strange, as though I had known them in some other life.

  They seemed a loving family, yet suddenly I felt ashamed. Not only because I was filthy with ash or in a state of half-undress but rather that I could not say the way that I appeared at all. I was utterly, darkly unknown to myself, a mirror at a canted angle. And I couldn’t be sure from one beat to the next either what I would say or attempt in their presence. It was almost as though I were propped in a coffin, the sort in which killers are propped for displaying behind the glass of druggist’s shops, and though I lay there dead to all I could hear every word, I could track every movement. The beautiful family had but to go by me, to tilt their eyes toward where I leaned and they would see my helplessness, my fallen and decaying face.

  I wanted to ask them: “What street are we on?

  I wanted to ask them: “Have we met before?”

  I wanted to ask them: “Assuming we have, did I cradle your hands to my mouth for a kiss? “

  But I said none of this. It was too, too absurd. Embarrassed, I found out the shadows again. They stood a moment, conferencing, and then with the boy in between them they vanished.

  “Where am I, exactly?” I said. “In what city?”

  And when nobody answered: “To whom am I speaking?”

  The answer is speaking to you, faithful reader.

  I have now and forever been speaking to you.

  Hannah Mumler True and False

  November, 1872

  Willy kept out late tonight.

  Had taken one brandy too many, perhaps. As he was given to most nights. Gone to sleep at the tavern, one time in the street. But we could see to warn ourselves.

  The heat and the smoke and the warping of wood and the shouts of the injured and dead were enough. I stood at the door to the room that we shared, Heinrich on the bed behind me.

  “Stay. You stay right here,” said I.

  “I don’t want you to go,” said he.

  “It’s all right. It’s all right. You must sit and be brave. Bravery smothers the fire—did you know? I will be back in . . .” I smiled to myself. “. . . in how many blinks of an eye, do you think?”

  “In thirty blinks?”

  “In twenty-five.”

  “I will start them now,” said he.

  I paused when I had reached the door. “I do not know what I should do were I to come back here and find you not blinking. I do not know what I should do. Do you hear what I’m telling you, Heinrich?”

  “Yes, Mommy.”

  Closed the door and tested it, and climbed the attic staircase slowly. Here the smoke from the fire of the building next door fingered out from the walls like a dangerous scent.

  The door to mother’s room was hot. Had to bunch my skirts to turn it.

  Already awake at the end of her bed. Sitting with her back to me. Dress the colour of ash that fell down past the windows. Bearing witness to the world, her dolls beside her on the floor. Lining the bucket in which they’d been made in a tilted and gathering spiral of figures, wrapped each one in dunish crepe. There were these and a few random dresses. Her knives. My mother, my maker, was already packed.

  Helped her to go down the stairs to the landing, pushed the bedroom door inward. “Come, Heinrich. We’re going.”

  “I waited!” said he.

  “A whole thirty blink’s worth?”

  “I counted to forty.”

  Said I: “Needn’t worry. Grandmother is with us.”

  When he looked at my mother his eyes were black pools.

  Came down the staircase with Heinrich between us. The side of our building already on fire.

  “Are we going to die now?” said he, looking back. His frightened, disbelieving face.

  “One foot and then the next,” said I.

  “Are we, Mommy?”

  Smiled. “No, dear.”

  “All right.” He gripped my hand. “All right.”

  Finally we reached the bottom where Willy’s rooms were, the developing closet. Here I determined to usher them out. But then at the very last second I stopped.

  Cut my eyes toward Willy’s door. A jittery glow in the crack of the frame.

  I tipped the door wide with my foot and edged in. The bed was completely on fire. And the curtains. They withered like bacon and dropped to the floor where they made other fires that began to grow taller. I strode through the flames to the door of the darkroom, and when I had reached it I gathered my skirts and pushed the door, unlocked, from me.

  The negative had been completed. On the counter it sat, freshly dried from the bath.

  The woman occupies the foreground. Her hands clasped before her, her mouth a grim line. While Willy, my husband, is standing behind her. Willy, who’d taken the picture himself but also there inside the shot. Already concealed and revealed by my shadow. His body cocked slightly. His head gazing up. The expression that colours his wide, fleshy face no more than one of vague surprise. As though he is seeing, perhaps, a rare bird arranging itself on the window outside.

  The negative I wrapped in cloth and holding it to me I rushed from the closet.

  Q

  The chaos was general. Boston in ruins.

  A spout of flame and blasted stone from the upper west side of the block. People crumpling. Crumpled horses crumpling too, beneath the soaring sheet of flame. And Heinrich, beside me, cough-squinting, dry-sobbing while trying to hide in the folds of my skirts.

  Mother, calm, surveyed it all. “We should make for the water,” said she, facing forward.

  “There may be fire there too,” said I.

  “No matter,” said mother. “At least there’ll be water. And there is nothing for us here.”

  “Mommy,” said Heinrich. “Burning birds!”

  He was tugging my skirts. He was pointing. Exclaiming. My mother beginning down Summer Street now. The path that she carved through the wreckage a good one. The ashed lakes of water, congealing to mud. And sometimes, too, the charred, dark forms. Their faces burned away wholesale or turned to ground from deadly falls.

>   “There!” said Heinrich. “Watch it, there!”

  The water arcing overhead. He bounded ahead of me. Laughing, unthinking. I wanted him to laugh, of course.

  But all I could think was: this step or the next one. This fire, which is the whole wide world.

  As we went, the fire dimmed down. The muscle of it mostly north. Chalk it up to puddingstone, which did not burn like granite burned.

  A little girl stood at the edge of a lawn. Refugee among the many. Looking up at her house, which had been mostly spared. All except the upper floors, which were singed at the edges from skirmish inside them and a window that bristled with torn wood and glass where someone or something had gone pitching out.

  Below it a white shape. Onlookers around it.

  A person draped under a sheet stained with blood.

  The girl on the lawn in a terrible state. Her face was smeared with dirty tears. And her hair was soaked dark from the engines’ exertions. The name of her mother, who lay in the grass, she partly screamed and partly sobbed.

  Above the body on the lawn stood a man in a vest greened with age. Golden fob. The singed stateliness of his house all above him. A couple of neighbours stood by in concern.

  I saw my mother mark the man. The girl upon the sodden lawn.

  And then moving forward, head turning away. Still bent on existing, on being somewhere, for as long as the grail of her blood would allow her.

  “Why is she crying?” said Heinrich.

  “Who, dear?”

  “That little girl.” He pointed. “There.”

  “That little girl”—I studied her—“has lost somebody that she loves.”

  “Can I go to her, Mommy?”

  “No, Heinrich. Not now.”

  “But Mommy she needs me. I can’t—I can’t leave her.” My mother paused at Heinrich’s words. “Can I go to her, grandmother, please?” said the boy.

  I started to scold him for asking her, too.

  Mother showed me her palm. Not a threatening motion. Yet one that impressed me as purposeful, solemn, as though here in the burning and burned Boston street, she would finally do it. Be family to him.