THERE WAS NOTHING new about the spirit photographs—they had been circulating since the end of the war—but the recent acceleration of publicity around them had won Edward Moody widespread attention. Elizabeth Garrett had paid her first visit to him after reading of a woman whose lost child had appeared standing beside her in a photograph. The article was one of hundreds of pieces that the Spiritualists had been publicizing in their papers.
Dovehouse, of course, dismissed the Spiritualists as swindlers and imposters, and since her husband held Dovehouse’s opinions in such high regard, Elizabeth knew that she would need to tread carefully. In her fashionable Boston circles, there were the women who believed and those who didn’t, and while the Spiritualists had managed to penetrate into every rank of society, it was still a delicate matter as far as the electorate was concerned. Elizabeth had successfully avoided ever declaring precisely where she stood. An inquiry about a portrait need signify nothing more than curiosity.
Mr. Moody worked in the central part of Boston, in the building where Elizabeth had once gone to have an addition to her bridal silver engraved. She was initially surprised by the photographer’s appearance. Attractive—even handsome—but terribly unkempt.
“Mrs. Garrett,” he said, “I trust you have come because you are a believer in spiritual communion?”
His voice lacked energy. That too came as a surprise.
“Mr. Moody, I—”
She paused, wondering if the famous “Moody” was the same dishevelled man who sat before her.
“Worry not, Mrs. Garrett,” he said. “These wonderful concepts are often difficult to grasp at first. In your letter you mentioned your son—”
“Yes, William Jeffrey.”
“How long?”
“Eighteen years. He was three. It was eighteen years ago now.”
“Yes—I believe he contracted it when we were in Washington. I have found it very difficult to return there ever since.”
“Unfortunate.”
“Yes.”
His eyes were profound—beautiful and lonely. The eyes of a man who was heartbroken.
“And the senator?” Moody said. “He will be sitting for the portrait as well?”
“I have not yet told my husband of this design,” Elizabeth replied.
“Mr. Colfax was here, as you probably know.”
“Yes, I am acquainted with the vice president’s portrait. The Harper’s article has excited great interest in it, and I know that it has become much talked about in Washington.”
“A vast majority of the community, having fought the cause for abolition, are sympathetic to much of the good senator’s beliefs. If there is any hesitancy on your part due to the senator’s unique position, dare I suggest that a photograph might even work to his benefit?”
Elizabeth perceived his meaning.
“Mr. Moody,” she said, “I can assure you that is not the intention of this investigation. My husband’s reputation is not something he would ever surrender to the charms of spiritual fanatics and—artists.”
Her emphasis on that last word produced its intended effect. Moody failed to respond, and she observed his hands moving uncomfortably in his lap.
“Mr. Moody,” she said, “I don’t mean to be unkind, but you can understand my concern. Many have expressed their doubts.”
Moody’s face became rigid, and his eyes fixed on hers.
“Your son is everywhere around you,” he said. “And soon, Mrs. Garrett, you will not doubt that!”
He was so emphatic—it was almost like an attack—and her momentary confidence was gone.
“The photographs—” he continued, softening, “They give us an opportunity to go back. They reunite us with those we’ve lost. We call spirits forth from their beautiful kingdoms, beckoning them to return to this hard and earthly world. We cannot determine how long they will linger … we can only hope for some gratification. There is such sweetness in it, when it does come.”
She was silent, and now her hands betrayed her nervousness.
“Isn’t that what you desire, Mrs. Garrett—more than anything?”
She stared at him.
“The gratification of seeing William Jeffrey again?” he pressed. “Reunion, in this life—and the next?”
A sharp pain gnawed inside her. She knew that it could never be the same as it once was, and yet—
“Yes, Mr. Moody,” she replied. “That is what I desire.”
WILLIAM GARRETT’S DEATH some eighteen years before that first encounter had marked the beginning of Elizabeth Garrett’s struggle with her own beliefs. The day William’s silver rattle appeared on the entry hall table, for instance, a full two years after the child’s passing, had initially convinced Elizabeth of nothing more than Jenny’s mischievousness. Jenny had been against purging the house of William’s playthings; she warned that doing so would only result in angering the boy’s spirit. “You know how Master William loved that rattle,” Jenny had said, “and you know that he’s going to miss it.” Outraged, Elizabeth had only grown more determined, and tossed the rattle into a wooden box designated for one of the West End orphanages.
But when the rattle appeared—worse yet, when it appeared on what would have been William’s fifth birthday—Jenny was nowhere to be found. The day before, she had gone to see her sister who worked in Cambridge, and did not plan on returning until later that evening. Elizabeth had passed by the entry hall at least twenty times since Jenny’s departure. She had seen nothing unusual, and no one else was in the house. Yet on that morning, when she passed the front door, there was William’s toy.
Elizabeth immediately jumped to conclusions—Jenny had always found subtle ways of retaliating. Elizabeth knew that when she had commanded Jenny to get rid of the rattle, Jenny had not liked it, and would remember. The negroes had their own ways of thinking about these things, and even Elizabeth had come to appreciate that. But she was the mistress of her house, and no matter how much equality her husband liked to preach, she was not going to comply with taking instructions from her own housemaid.
And so the rattle was there, two years after she was sure that she had ordered Jenny to send it away in the wooden box. But was she sure? She looked at it—its dull glow growing in the morning light. And as she moved toward it, hesitating with each step, the unevenness of the glow seemed to make the rattle pulse.
He had been holding the rattle when she lost him.
“It will be gone soon,” he had said.
“What will be gone, my little darling?”
But the child never answered. The child never spoke again.
As successful as Elizabeth was at forgetting things, that was one moment she never forgot. Then she remembered—the rattle had not gone off to the orphanage with William’s other things. She had plucked it from the box at the last minute. There was a part of her that realized that Jenny was right, that the rattle should have remained in the house; but there was also that part of her—the unyielding part—that never could have surrendered to Jenny. And so once the box was full, and Jenny was out of the room, Elizabeth had quickly seized the rattle and hidden it where even Jenny would be unlikely to find it.
The rattle. She had taken it! And she had found it in her pocket one day, too, long before that day when the rattle appeared on the entry hall table. The child had been dead for only a few months, and Garrett had been gone, in Washington. She had just wanted to hold the rattle for a little while, to have her moment alone with it, which was something that she had taken to doing in those months following William’s death. This impulse signified what Elizabeth thought of as a weakness, but she had succumbed to it, until she heard Jenny’s footsteps in the hallway. She had quickly shoved the rattle into her pocket—yes, she remembered now—she had shoved it into her pocket, wrapped tightly in her handkerchief so as to muffle the rattle’s sound. Even so, when Jenny entered the room Elizabeth sensed that she suspected something. Jenny was never very careful about suppressing her suspicions.
There was some house matter or other to deal with, Jenny had said—what it was Elizabeth could not quite remember—but hours went by before Elizabeth reached into her pocket again, only to discover the rattle. It had been a narrow escape. Jenny had not found her out. Elizabeth would need to keep the rattle hidden—forever.
But on William’s fifth birthday, when the rattle appeared in the entry hall, Elizabeth was forced to remember that narrow escape. She remembered the sense of panic that had overcome her on that day, when she had plunged her hand into her dress pocket to find William’s rattle wrapped within her handkerchief.
It started there—with the rattle on the entry hall table, two years after William had gone. It was the first event that she could not explain. Others followed, of a less physical nature, most of them involving sounds, and at times William’s voice. She was always alone when it happened, and extremely thankful for that, for the notion of Senator Garrett’s wife having “Spiritualist tendencies” was not something she could have accepted in those days. After all, public outcry had forced John Edmonds to resign. The papers had excoriated him, claiming that his championing of the Spiritualists had rendered his intellect “unreliable.” It was not, the papers said, “befitting of a state Supreme Court justice to be seen gadding about with people who believed in ghosts.”
By the time the war came though, the influence of the Spiritualists was reaching far beyond that set, and Elizabeth was becoming more convinced that William had not entirely “moved on.” When Constance Merriwhether, the wife of Garrett’s former law partner, invited the Garretts to a séance at their home, Elizabeth admitted her desire to attend. Constance’s brother had fallen at Gettysburg, and Constance was one of thousands who was desperate to reconnect with someone who had never returned. “I need to know that he died a good death,” she told Elizabeth. “I need to hear that his death was honourable.”
When Elizabeth told Garrett that the Merriwhethers were hosting a séance, his reaction was quick and predictable: “Elizabeth, can you imagine a bunch of lawyers sitting around a table with their wives, waiting for some rap-tap-tapping or the meowing of a cat? Ridiculous. Merriwhether has gone out of his mind.”
But she knew that even he experienced his own doubts. When the death tolls reached him by messenger, one night in September after Antietam, he had retreated to the drawing room and asked to be alone. After three hours had passed and he had still not emerged, Elizabeth interrupted him. He was sitting before the fireplace, staring at it, motionless, and she guessed that he had been in that position for several hours. Drawing closer, she immediately noticed his expression—the emptiness, the utter despair of all hopes lost. She recognized that look as one she had never wanted to see again. William had been dead for ten years at that point.
She placed her hand on his shoulder, and still Garrett did not move.
“McClellan has lost over twelve thousand of our men,” he said. “The dead will never forgive me.”
It was then that she truly understood that her husband also feared his own secrets—not simply the practical kinds, the kinds that could ruin families and careers—but the deeper, intangible, recalcitrant secrets that could destroy the foundations of everything one believed in.