5
1880
The weather turned suddenly sharp as the trees around campus faded from brilliant red and orange to a wan straw color. The young men’s voices grew loud with talk of upcoming revelries as their secret fraternities geared up for Hallowe’en, a night of drunken rituals that were never talked about in front of the young ladies. But it was widely known that the women of Cornell would do best to stay indoors and learn of the men’s exploits only through the dormitory windows.
For their part, the girls could not help but think about magic prognostications—apple peelings, egg yolks, and lighted candles held in front of mirrors—for All Hallows’ Eve was the night on which, according to common superstition, their future husbands’ names might be revealed.
Now that the girls were settled into their routines and felt fully comfortable around one another, they had begun to go about Sage in loose tea gowns, without their corsets. The same girls who maintained a strict air of composure while conducting their scholarly life on campus could be lively and gay inside the confines of the henhouse.
The day before Hallowe’en, several girls gathered in Maud and Josie’s room, and the talk soon turned to boys. Everyone, of course, was talking about their future husbands, but no one wanted to be the first to suggest that they try any of the rituals for themselves.
“I think I would simply faint if I looked into a mirror with a candle and saw an image appear over my shoulder. I would collapse so quickly from fright that I wouldn’t ever be sensible enough to know what I saw.” This from Josie Baum. Everyone knew she was sweet on her beau, Charlie Thorp.
“It would be dreadfully wicked to do such a thing,” Jessie Mary said. She was a strict Presbyterian.
“I can promise you,” Maud said, “that if I looked in the mirror, I know exactly what I would see.”
“Oh, Maud, do tell!” Her friends leaned in with interest. Up until now, Maud had never breathed a word about having a beau. Josie thought that Maud had seemed interested in Teddy Swain before their disastrous encounter in the botany class, and Maud had never mentioned anyone in particular since.
“I would light a candle and look in the mirror, and over my shoulder”—Maud spread her hands wide, lowered her voice, and widened her eyes—“an image would appear…”
“Tell! Tell!” Josie said. “Who would appear in the mirror?”
“And there over my shoulder,” Maud continued, “I would see a ghostly image, first faint, then bolder, and then, finally, crystal clear.” She paused for effect, holding her two friends spellbound.
“Tell us!” Josie cried.
“Over my shoulder would appear—MY MOTHER!” Maud cried. “Saying, ‘Maud Gage, I did not send you to get a degree in holy matrimony. I sent you to study for a diploma. You will most certainly not be married by Hallowe’en next. Now, get back to your studies!’ ”
With that, the girls collapsed in laughter.
Maud flipped over onto her stomach and stared at everyone.
“I have an idea,” Maud said. “We should form our own secret society—females only.” From the corner next to her wardrobe, she grabbed a broom, brandishing it high above her head. “In hoc signo vinces!” Maud cried. “In this sign, we conquer, and in this room, we all have a vote! Who votes that we revive the all-secret, all-female Cornell Women’s Society of the Broom?”
Maud kept the broom held aloft as she looked around the room, meeting the eye of each of her friends. All of them knew the story of the super-secret all-female society. It had long been rumored that in 1872, when the first sixteen women enrolled at Cornell, the men had refused to enter into any social intercourse with these new coeds, shunning them in classes, ignoring them as they walked across campus, and banning them from ever entering in the all-male fraternities that controlled the campus’s social life. To fight back against this slight, this intrepid group of young women had formed their own clandestine organization—naming it the Society of the Broom and taking as their motto In hoc signo vinces: “In this sign, we conquer.” Of course, the men did not fail to notice the symbolism behind their choice—the broom, witches, the dark arts of women. No one discussed it publicly, but in private, the campus was scandalized that the women were being so radical.
If the group had indeed once existed, as rumored, it had long since been disbanded, but the legend of the Broom Society continued.
The relations between the sexes, while not exactly warm, had since thawed enough that the rumored society was no longer necessary, and the girls had become more interested in joining one of the nascent sorority organizations that were already being founded in other universities, particularly in the West. But the significance of their predecessors’ secret society was lost upon none of them.
“Let’s reconvene the Society of the Broom,” Maud said. “We can hold a séance.”
“Oh, Maud!” Jessie Mary breathed. “Are you a medium?”
“Of course not,” Maud said. “But tomorrow is Hallowe’en, so why not try it?”
“I don’t think it’s a good idea,” Josie said.
“It won’t be a real séance,” Maud insisted. “We’re just doing it as a lark. The boys have all kinds of fun in their secret fraternities—this will be our secret ritual. We won’t breathe a word about it.”
“Sorcery…” Jessie Mary murmured, as if bewitched by the mere sound of the word.
“We all know that witchcraft and sorcery are nothing more than superstition,” Maud said decisively, lowering the broom. “But I say we have a right to a little bit of fun while the boys are outside making mischief.”
THE NEXT NIGHT, a few minutes before midnight, nine intrepid girls were crowded into Maud and Josie’s room. Maud had placed a small table in the center of the room, and she told the girls, who were pressed shoulder to shoulder, to each place both hands on the table.
“I will act as the medium,” she announced. “Because I’m not afraid of the supernatural, and I don’t believe in it, so if anything happens, we’ll know that it’s true.”
The girls all nodded their assent. No one but Maud would be bold enough to try to act as a medium.
The night of Hallowe’en was frigid and still. Sharp pinpoints of starlight shone through the window. The gas lamps were extinguished, and the girls’ faces were shadowed, but their white dressing gowns glowed in the dark.
“Silence,” Maud said in a firm voice. “No laughing, no giggling, no talking. We must all be perfectly still.” Maud struck a match and lit a wax candle, placing it in the center of the table. The girls stared solemnly at the flame.
Matilda had always maintained an interest in the occult and spiritualist practices. But Maud herself knew little about any of it except what she had picked up from her mother. She thought this was all just playacting, though she knew from the attitude of the other girls that many of them were inclined to believe.
“On this All Hallows’ Eve,” Maud intoned. Josie giggled. Maud nudged her under the table. “We summon the spirits….If you hear us, please give us a sign.”
The room was quiet, but filled with the muffled sounds of young bodies trying to stay still: the shuffling of feet, cleared throats, loud breathing. The silence went on and on until Maud sensed that their concentration was just about to break.
Without giving any outward sign, she pushed up on the table, very slightly, until the side she was holding levitated just above the ground.
The change in the room was electric. The table seemed to move even higher now, as if several of the girls were buoying it into the air. Their faces were shadowed, so she couldn’t read their expressions, but she decided to continue to play along.
“We have received a sign!” Maud said in her most dramatic voice, channeling Susan B. Anthony as she whipped up a lyceum crowd.
Maud heard Jessie Mary’s audible gasp and felt her startle beside her, which only made the table shake more.
“Can you answer some of our questions?” Maud asked, in the same portentous tones.
This time, Jessie Mary didn’t move, so Maud surreptitiously rocked the table herself.
The girls sat perfectly motionless, their attention rapt. Maud was enjoying herself. “Who has a question for the spirits?” she intoned, her voice grand.
The air of expectancy in the room was palpable.
Josie coughed, and a half-strangled word died on her lips.
“Josie? Do you have a question? Be bold! Speak up!”
“Well…I…”
“Spirits, Miss Josie Baum would like to ask a question. Do you agree to accept her question?”
Maud waited to see what would happen, but nothing did.
“Give us a sign.” Again, silence. Maud slowly raised her knee and bumped the underside of the table, taking care not to jostle the candle too much.
The startled cries around the table satisfied Maud. It pleased her to know that the girls could get up to their own mischief without having to carouse outside like the boys.
“Miss Josephine Baum, please state your question.”
“What is the name of the man I will marry?” The girls all giggled, the table jostled, and the candlelight flickered around the room.
Now Maud had to improvise. She had a strange feeling deep in the pit of her stomach: Did all the girls know she was just fooling? Or had she swept them up into something without really thinking about the consequences?
She looked around at the faces of the gathered girls, wondering what should happen next, but soon her sense of fun overtook her. With her index finger, she began a series of knocks under the table. She tapped three times, then stopped.
“Why, I believe that the spirits are spelling,” Jessie Mary cried out.
“One-two-three. It must be C!” one of the other girls said in a hushed voice.
Counting on her fingers, Josie exclaimed, “It’s C!”
“Charlie Thorp!” the girls cried in unison. Of course everyone knew that he was Josie’s beau.
“Ask him when we will marry!” Josie said excitedly.
Maud quickly did the math in her head, figuring out when Charlie would graduate before tapping the numbers 1-8-8-3.
Soon the room was filling with questions, and Maud stopped worrying so much about whether it was obvious that she was answering everything herself.
IT WAS PAST ONE in the morning, and the girls were finally starting to tire. The candle was burning down to a stub, and the air of heady excitement was tapering down to yawns and fatigue. Maud herself was worn out. As the night had gone on, the girls had heard more shouting and revelry as packs of drunken boys had carried on below their windows. At one point they even heard the windows rattling—as if someone had thrown up pebbles—but when they looked below, they saw nothing and heard only the sounds of distant laughter. Maud was glad that the boys had seen the lights flickering and known that the girls also had secret cabals of which the men could have no part. At the same time, she wished desperately that she were outside, in the cold night and wide-open air, instead of trapped inside this stuffy room where all of the girls seemed to have anointed her as the purveyor of vital information about their future lives.
“We thank you, kind spirits, for revealing the secrets of the other world,” Maud said, hoping to wrap it up for the night.
“But, Maud!” Josie cried. “We haven’t asked a question for you!”
Maud had been hoping that this omission would pass unnoticed. She dreaded the indignity of asking her question only to have the question remain unanswered, because she couldn’t answer it. She did not know whom she would marry.
“Yes, Maud! We must ask for Maud,” cried a chorus of voices.
“No,” Maud said. “I don’t want to know. I don’t want to ask the spirits about myself.”
“Well, then I’ll ask,” said Josie. “Oh, spirit, please tell us the name of the man that Miss Maud Gage will marry.”
Now Maud was biting her tongue. She wanted more than anything to put a halt to all this and confess that the only spirit in this room tonight had been her own—the one that no one ever tired of telling her was far too lively. The silence had grown so long that Maud thought she would die of embarrassment when into the silence a muffled rapping sound started at the window: 1…2…3…4…5, then a lengthy silence, then one more: 6.
Maud leapt up from her seat at the table so quick that she almost knocked over the candle.
“The wind is blowing,” she said. “It’s just a pine bough batting up against the window.” She pushed open the heavy sash and frigid air rushed inside, making her shiver violently. Outside the window, she could make out the outlines of a pine tree, which was now utterly still.
“Close the window, Maud, we’re all freezing in here!” Jessie Mary said.
The girls had all lost interest and were overtaken by yawning, and the stub of their candle finally sputtered out, leaving them in darkness. Tired but full of new gossip and speculation, everyone except Josie and Maud departed for their own rooms.
The two girls settled under their covers, but Maud lay awake in her bed, thinking about her own deception. She was in so deep that she couldn’t possibly confess. And what of the six taps of the pine bough upon the window when the air was still outside? A sudden gust of wind, she told herself, had moved the branch—that was all. She tossed about until her bedclothes were rumpled.
At last she could keep quiet no longer. “Do you believe in spirits?” she whispered, thinking that if Josie had already fallen asleep, her friend would not hear.
But Josie was also wide-awake. “I do, I do, of course I do,” Josie replied. “You heard the sounds as well as I did.”
“Perhaps…” Maud thought again of confessing her role as a “medium,” only she didn’t quite dare. “Perhaps one of the girls was knocking the table?”
“But why would anyone want to do that?” Josie sounded mystified. “What good would it do to make up stories when we want real answers?”
The question hung in the air between them. Maud wasn’t sure what to say. From where she sat, people often preferred made-up stories to real answers. Hadn’t she spent her whole life around her mother’s suffragist friends, women who always had their eyes set one hundred years in the future, imagining the welfare of their daughters’ daughters’ daughters while they sometimes seemed too busy to pay attention to the flesh-and-blood girls who stood before them? Was imagining that you could see the future really any different from knocking on tables in the middle of the night?
Maud lay in silence for a while, thinking about the six faint scratches against the window. A, B, C, D, E, F—according to superstition, she should be marrying a person named F. Only what if it wasn’t F for someone’s name but, rather, a big fat F for failure?
“Guess what?” Josie was still awake. “I suddenly realized that I know exactly who would be perfect for you. You want me to tell you?”
Maud rolled over and propped her chin up on her hand, peering at her roommate’s silhouette in the other bed.
“Not at all. It doesn’t interest me in the least.”
“Oh come on, sure you do.” Josie yawned and rustled in her bed. “What girl doesn’t want to know the name of the man she’ll be married to by next year?”
“Well, you can tell it’s all nonsense just from that,” Maud said. “One year from now, I’ll be right here where I am now, studying at Sage College.”
“Oh, I can’t resist telling you. I can’t believe I didn’t think of it right away. I know someone who is just as peculiar as you!”
“Oh, ‘peculiar’! That is some compliment!” Maud said. “You’ve been on the lookout for a boy who is just as peculiar and odd and strange as Maud Gage?”
“No,” Josie said. “That’s not how I mean it. This is someone quite wonderful—he’s handsome and kind, and he’s funny, and ever so interesting.”
“Funny and kind,” Maud said. “Now, that is peculiar!”
“But there is something about him that’s—oh, you’ll just have to meet him. Come for a visit at Christmastime and I’ll see that he comes to call. He’s my cousin. His name is Frank. Frank Baum.”
Frank. Maud could almost hear the faint scratching of the tree branch, although now all was silent. A, B, C, D, E, then F.