IN THE MONTHS SINCE HIS ARRIVAL, HE HAD REFUSED to enter the darkened parlor. Now he sat at the table, waiting.
“What’s wrong?” She removed her bonnet and pulled back the curtain. A damp breeze blew through the open window.
“I want to talk to your mother,” he said.
“It isn’t so easy, Father.”
“You do it for strangers. Surely you can do it for your own father. Have you ever even spoken to your mother?”
Her forehead burned. She called for Olga to bring something cool to drink, but the woman did not answer. Now that Madge was gone, the house carried the silence of abandonment.
“I would think that if you really have this ability, as you say you do, you would speak with your mother’s spirit, not sell yourself like some strumpet on the street.”
“Strumpet?”
“Tell me about this Heil. He is corrupting you, is he not?”
She sat in the other chair.
“Are you some kind of witch?”
“Good heavens.”
“Did you call me to Chicago to assist you in a fraud?”
“Call you to Chicago? I—”
“Don’t you realize this city is crime-ridden?” he interrupted. “I’ve been reading the papers here since I arrived. I’m afraid for your safety.”
Sadie had heard that women who sold their bodies to paying men were called “war widows” whether they had actually been widowed or not. The moniker disturbed her.
“Are you beyond salvation?”
“I just want you to accept me.” Her voice diminished, and she could feel herself growing younger. Soon, she would be a child again, a baby, retreating into that space before words. Difficult to argue with the dutiful, difficult to argue with the child that went along uncomplainingly. All she had to do was renounce the spirit, marry, return to York. All would be forgiven, and life would be as it was before.
“Are you a mesmerist as well? Will you change me with your touch? I hardly need help, you know. I’m perfectly balanced.”
She wanted to explain the loneliness, how the gifts alienated her. She had brought Madge home because anyone who would stick a hand in fire for money had to be a believer. Now she had even lost her. Sadie was torn: he was her family, but she needed to escape him.
“Your mother would turn in her grave.”
“My mother nursed a young woman back to health and gave her own in return. That was a sign of her character.”
“She provided hope and rest, not lies.”
“I, too, provide hope.” She thought of Michael, the spilled tea. She had not wanted him to reject her proposal, not yet. So she’d put him off. And now she feared she had lost him, too. Everything was wrong. Nothing added up any longer. Perhaps James did corrupt her. She had visited Michael’s home and asked him to marry her. What kind of woman did that?
“Tell me about this Heil.”
“He was a soldier.”
“An officer?”
“No.”
“A wife? Children?”
“No.”
“Carry on.” He waved a hand, turning his body to the side, one foot beneath the table, the other pointed in the direction of the doorway. She found herself unconsciously mimicking his position.
Her father was so single-minded that she wondered if, for him, fatherhood was just another book to bind and shelve. She wanted to reclaim what he’d taken from her, but here he was again: directing, ordering. Olga had not answered, so Sadie drew the curtain herself. Even with her back turned, she felt the hardness of her father’s eye resting upon her like judgment. She sat opposite him, placed both palms on the table. He looked down, as if he half-expected the table to rise into the air. She closed her eyes, ready to be done with it. She was tired of this spirit. Warmth seeped through the crown of her head. Come on, James. Hurry. After a few minutes, she was certain her mother would come.
The spirit’s voice began as if in the middle of a thought.
The trains arrived, running with the blood of the dying and wounded. They lay like dolls, their mouths frozen open, necks twisted. Many would not have been recognized by their own mothers. They were young and old, but they were mostly young. They were married and unmarried. Fathers, brothers, nephews, cousins, uncles. They cried like children, begged for God’s mercy. And while I nursed them, I became as they—a soul holding on to the hope that my sacrifice had meant something.
There comes a time when we must rise up and meet our humanity, when our personal beliefs no longer matter and the instinct of self-preservation must disappear. At these moments, every narrow debate becomes irrelevant. The moment is bigger than us. There is a higher truth, you see. That’s why I went to that hospital. There was no thinking, no decision making involved. It was the right thing to do. Northerners or Southerners, Unionists or Rebels, I would have gone. But it is still a painful kind of heartbreak to realize that your arms are not long enough to wrap around the entire earth. How small we all are. How insignificant, my dear Andrew.
The voice drifted off. Sadie, who had been motionless, stirred. She opened her eyes and sat quietly. This time, James had not served as conduit. It had been direct contact with her mother’s spirit. She was certain of it. She could even smell her mother’s natural body scent, as if the woman had just worn her dress. Could she access all of the spirits without him? What did this mean?
“So this is what you do for people,” he said, taking what seemed to be his first breath in minutes. “You take their money and consort with this spirit, give people a gospel of false prophecy. They march in here like ants, sit at this table under the image of your good husband while you defile his name and home. Your mother was a holy woman, and when you were born we gave you the name of your grandmother, an honor to see you through life. I came here to break bread under God’s roof; instead, I find you consorting with demons.”
He spoke so low, so quickly, that even if someone had been standing in the hall listening, they would only have heard the sound of s’s slipping through his teeth.
“It was her. It was actually her, not the spirit. I—”
“You shame me. You dishonor your mother.”
Sadie sweated beneath her dress. Her mouth moistened. They both stood, but she stepped back from the table.
“This is not,” he said, “what your mother would have wanted.”
Seldom was she given an opportunity to witness what people did with their belief once they left her house. Powerful enough to heal or destroy, the séance claimed a part of a person, and she had learned that sometimes ignorance was a safer space. Now the veil between her new life and old one had been irrevocably lifted. And Sadie could see by the look on her father’s face that he believed. Entirely.
“She went to that hospital so she could be of use. I, too, am trying to be useful.”
“How dare you compare yourself to her. She was a woman.”
His eyes were black orbs, and nothing, not the flicker of candle, not the sparkle of her necklace, not even his rage reflected in them.
“You have to understand.”
He thrust a gnarled hand out. “This spirit induces you to do his work. But what comes of speaking to the dead except more grief?”
He turned, his words clipping the air in front of him. She pursued him out of the parlor into the front hall. He threw his coat over his shoulders, took up his cane, and flung open the door. He turned, standing in the frame. Behind him, the fog obscured everything, hung over the street like smoke.
“But I am trying to tell you something. It wasn’t him this time. Please come back inside.”
“We were good Presbyterians. Good people. We did not follow the faithful into church as often as we should have, but you were taught. You were taught, Sadie.”
It had rained earlier and everything was damp and slick. She could barely see five feet ahead. A pedestrian emerged behind him, ghostlike, and disappeared again, leaving behind the echo of his boots striking the cobbled walk.
“You are one of the good widows, Sadie,” he said. “You are one of the faithful—Naomi, Ruth, Abigail. Not Jezebel or Tamar.”
Wet strings licked his forehead. When he spoke he tipped his head back, aiming his mouth at her. She could see the peel of lip skin, the crooked tie.
“When Naomi lost her husband, she left Moab, returned to Bethlehem. The land of her people,” he said.
He was drawing her out, the way he had done when she was young. “Yes, that’s right,” Sadie replied, remembering the story. “She went back to Bethlehem to start a new life, but—”
“She did not dishonor the memory of her husband.”
“I have very few memories of Samuel, Father, and you have fewer.”
“Abigail protected her husband, Nabal, by going to David and counseling restraint.”
“Abigail?” she said. “Her father married her to Nabal because he was wealthy, but Nabal turned out to be a mean and cruel man.”
“Samuel was no Nabal.”
“How would you know?” she said. “How would you know anything? You barely knew the man.”
He turned, threw his hands up. She thought he threw them up in frustration but suddenly realized he was falling, slipping, his arms beating the air like wings. A shoe scraped the ground. His cane sailed. She moved toward him, saw his eyes widen as he flew into the bank of fog. She heard a crack, and she rushed down the steps, kneeling beside him.
“Help me! Please, someone!”
She screamed until she heard someone approach—a man’s voice urgently calling out to her.