July, 1859
In the summer of 1859 with all of life’s prospects assembled before me, I was sent to deliver a cameo necklace to the Sunderlands of Exeter Street in Back Bay.
The necklace was silver and dripping with cameos after the Egyptian fashion, with forget-me-nots cut into the mounting and four amethysts ranged around.
In the jewellery shop where I worked with my father off Newspaper Row in the heart of downtown, I had a name for all of them who came peacocking through the door. I would whisper it, seethingly, under my breath no sooner had the door swung closed—a door that bore upon its glass the words Mumler & Sons, my unthinkable future—coming and going, and going and coming, I would utter my withering secret aloud: “Lahngworthies, Lahngworthies, every last one.” I would murder the A as they did on Cape Cod, these Spiritists and womanists and anti-Sabba-whatsit-nists, Boston Brahmins each and all, these people who bought jewellery to gussy up their worthless lives. They wrought nothing, did nothing, squandered the triumph of having more than most—than me. They were contemptible in that.
And yet I kept an open mind.
I, William Jr., was the shop’s chief engraver, not because of my father but rather my hands, quick and exacting for all they were stubby, sweeter than a barren maid to the baubles and chains that came under their care. When I came down the stairs from the modest apartment that my father allowed me above the workshop, the other craftsmen on the floor would turn their eyes in shame from me.
Such was my estate on that red-letter day in June of 1859 as I walked down the Green in between the house-fronts past the old and tyrannical names of the street-signs.
Moving west there was Berkeley, Clarendon, Dartmouth, until Exeter came like the edge of a cliff; I stood, nervous despite myself, in front of a puddingstone sliver of house that matched the address on the ticket.
I checked on the state of the cargo I carried and went up to knock on the door.
A servant girl answered, took my name and led me to sit in the carpeted foyer on a couch with a hideous pattern of tulips directly across from a grandfather clock. Though I was early at the house by no more than a couple of minutes, still I must wait for those scrupulous hands to light on the hour I was set to arrive. Beyond a sort of canted screen between the parlour and the foyer I saw a figure in rotation, Mrs. Lucretia or her lady, preparing the room for my coming.
I got my calling cards in order.
Mrs. Sunderland seemed to emerge from the screen like some sort of fairy the way I perceived it, though really she slipped through the sliver of space between the screen’s edge and the parlour’s doorway, tailored to her size exactly. She took my card, glanced at it, scanned me lengthwise and to my surprise took my hand in her own. My hand had been swollen with heat from my pocket, yet there in the cave of her palms it contracted.
She was little and lithe in the way she was made, her hair curly as barrel liquorice. She had a pretty, cramped face just showing its lines.
She glided off beyond the screen and once I had followed her, wrenching the thing to fit my magnanimous bulk past its edge, she motioned I sit on a second low couch within her lace-curtained and cool inner sanctum. My hostess sat across from me in a brocaded wingback that bore her aloft a couple of feet above the floor. I found I was squinting because of the sun which her lady had let through the drapes as I waited, slanting over the top of her mistress’s chair and shining down into my eyes.
Set between our sets of legs was a table with coffee and small pastries on it.
“Let’s have it then, Mr. Mumler,” she said.
I took out the necklace and showed it to her in a fan on the flats of my hands.
“Would you?” she said as she rose and then I. She inclined her head foreword. “Obligingly, sir.”
Careful to maintain a suitable distance, I fastened the chain below her hair. She shook back her hair and began to process before a gleaming Cheval mirror.
“I take it you are pleased?”
“Oh, quite. And tonight I shall give it a coming-out party.”
“Special occasion?”
“A speaker,” she said. “Miss Fanny A. Conant. She’s on at the Banner of Light. Do you know her?”
“A Spiritist,” I said.
“A Spirit-ual-ist,” my host corrected. “She is to speak and hold a sitting.” Finished inspecting herself at the mirror, she sat once again in her chair. “Are you familiar with our movement?”
“As much as I’ve read in the papers,” I said.
Sitting again, I crossed my legs and tented my fingers upon my left knee. My hostess’s eyes flickered over me briefly.
“Oh we are frightfully disorganized,” the lady said quickly. “We are buffeted by skeptics almost constantly, you know. And yet we are always accepting of strays.”
“I am not wed to any faith. You see, I cannot be a stray.”
“We Spiritualists,” she said, “are more. Though I grant you that faith might have something to do with it. Are you learned, for example, on the question of woman?”
“I am learned on the answer of woman,” I said.
“Really, Mr. Mumler. What a wicked thing to say. You’re in the habit of saying such things, I imagine? And yet anyway,” she gave pause, “you’re not boring. Maybe a little passé, but not that.”
“I’ve liked our talk myself,” I said. “So much, in fact, I would like to discount you. Half-price let us say for the necklace, Lucretia?”
Her nostrils flared a little then. She did not answer for a moment.
“Oh you may call me that,” she said. “You may call me Missus L. But the size of your offer, you see—it’s indecent.”
“You are busy enough as it is,” I pressed on, “what with all your women and their questions, Mrs. Sunderland. I won’t be the cause of your falling behind all on account of some ornament.”
“We’ve been privileged enough to afford it,” she said with a curious ruffle of her dress.
This fanning of her feathers done, she smiled and moved onto the edge of her chair. And I detected in that movement an apologetic tremor or anyway one of explanation—I could not help myself, you see—as though she were now more embarrassed for me than she’d been for herself just a moment ago when I had implied that she’d needed my help.
But why, you will ask, did I wish to discount her when I was not my father and my father was not me—when I gave not a fig for Lahngworthies like Lucretia, with their frivolous neckwear and parlour revivals?
Here is the reason: I wished to deceive her.
I wished to infiltrate her graces under the pretence that I stood in worship of her. I wanted to smirk at the plush of her world, to see its frailty from inside. And I wanted, I think, to avail myself of her, to channel her relations and resources and connections towards higher, purer aims than hers.
Decisively, I raised my hand and I blocked out the sun slanting into my eyes. I said to her: “Madam, I see.”
Leaning closer toward me still, she spoke in that same vital fog of apology: “But surely there’s—oh, let me see . . .” She counted on her well-kept fingers. “Yes, surely an eleventh place can be made in our circle for one such as you. Unless you are elsewise committed?” she said.
“When you call it a sitting,” I said, leaning forward, “is it not a séance you mean, Mrs. Sunderland? Complete with planchette, levitating violins, chilly hands upon one’s shoulder?”
“The way you say it, Mr. Mumler, I should think you had decided we were charlatans already. There must exist in all of us a modicum of childlike wonder.”
“I would very much like to feel that. I will come.”
I lightly, gamely, slapped my thigh. Then appeared to go gloomy; I did a faint laugh.
“Mr. Mumler, what is it?”
I held out a moment, looking away from her briefly, then back. “Seeing I will be your guest, the price does not agree with me. Nor would it agree with my father,” I said. “Bless him that he made me, Ma’am, but my father has never been partial to bargains.”
“I can see that you will not relent,” said my hostess. “And a most welcome tyranny, dear Mr. Mumler. Half of half, all right?” She smiled. “I would gladly meet you at a quarter.”
“Do you stand firm in that?” I said.
Mrs. Sunderland frowned. “Why as firm as you stand. As you’ve stood, Mr. Mumler, against every reversal.”
Q
Which is why later on, in the hours before supper, under the guise of receiving a shipment of various gemstones arriving at Lowell, I dropped in at Fisk’s at the top of Copp’s Hill, thinking it would relax me some.
Fisk’s was—no polite way to say it—a brothel.
Last house on the right on Snowhill Street and just round the way from Copp’s Hill Cemetery, Fisk’s had been my hideaway from the day-in-day-out-ness of Mumler & Sons. There was brandy and laudanum and beer and sweet wine. Cigar smoke and opium smoke muddled oddly. There were soft, low-backed couches on which to extend while Women of Erin and Women of Ham and Celestial Women made love in your ear. I loved the ease of it. I loved its transaction.
I came there often twice a week.
Sometimes I would even pass up on the girls—Madam Fisk didn’t mind if you kept buying brandies—and sit in the shadows alone, watching others, a light tipple in me, at ease in my skin.
I would sample diversely when I had the urge (yellow Fang and black Bertha and olive Aida) though I mostly returned to the red-curtained room of a fair, Irish girl named Brianna O’Brennan.
Her name in Gaelic meant “Sad Hills.” She had told me this one night in what was verily an outpouring.
I would think of her hunched at the foot of the bed, her hair too short to hide her nipples, opening and closing her legs on her soreness, as if to hide the thing we’d done.
But she was not the only one who felt the darkened edge of something—just the faintest pollutant of sadness or shame in the wake of our nighttime and noontime encounters.
Let us call it, then, The Sadness, sharp in me from time to time.
I felt it then, and feel it now, and shall feel it, I am wholly sure, till I die. In the bedrooms of Fisk’s it would moulder in me as soon as I had spent myself, giving rise to gloomy thoughts that begged the point of all this searching. Not for something high-minded but pleasure itself, which seemed to me flagrant, deceitful, outrageous.
But then I would remind myself that Brianna O’Brennan was only a whore.
Which brings us back to Madam Fisk’s on the day I delivered Lucretia her necklace, aware that in only a couple of hours I would find myself deep in the enemy’s camp. I needed Brianna. I needed release. I needed somebody to pour me a drink. And with this in mind I arrived at the brothel, unfrequented in these working hours and never on afternoons past by me, so that the house Negro, a man named Bill Christian, launched from the wall he’d been leaning on smoking, thinking perhaps that I might be The Law.
“Mist’ Mumler,” he said. “Come by early today.”
“Pressing business, Bill,” I said.
“Brianna just now waking up.”
“A loyal gent at arms, is Bill.”
Bill assessed me carefully, looking to see was I drunk or unhinged. He was charged to size up every one of Fisk’s clients, whether or not they were his friends and I knew that he wasn’t above the heave-ho, if situations came to that.
Once in a gin-fog I’d seen him do violence to the face of man who’d refused to pay Madam. Bill had been smashing his face on the brick. First his nose, cocked to the side. Then his lips, rent down the middle. Then his nose stove in entire, a syphilitic pit of blood.
He was also a gorgeous male specimen, Bill—the handsomest Negro in all of the Hub. The bones and sinews of his face were overlaid with darkest satin and his plum-coloured lips were in perfect proportion. He smiled at the women and smiled at the men and he smiled at nobody at all on the street. It was Bill Christian’s armour—a pre-emptive smile, not just for white people but everyone breathing. Reaching me his flask of gin, he showed it to me now.
I drank.
“Here’s to life with both eyes open.”
“One closed and one open,” I said as I swallowed, “to throw the bastards off their guard.”
Bill opened the door and revealed me the staircase that led to the parlour crisscrossed with low couches. Standing there against the light, Bill looked like the sculpture by Charles Cordier of the Moor in the turban and Renaissance beads, and for a brief moment I felt overjoyed to be welcomed by him in this halcyon place—some sultan’s dominion, all columns and incense, giggling ladies of the veil, the prince who took a little gin and called me warmly by my name.
Off of the receiving parlour, Fisk’s became a long red hall. The place had used to have a wall that split up the floor into separate apartments but the wall had been felled and replaced with a hall that ran between the eight-some rooms. When you walked down the hallway, as I now was walking, passing by the curtained rooms, there was a sort of temple hush, a feeling of going past saints in their niches.
When I came to Brianna’s room, I saw that she was not alone. A man with skin as white as hers was mounted stride her, bombarding her groin. He had a wide constellation of moles on his back and his head was as dark as a Kilkenny mare’s. They were having their way in pantomime—plunging limbs and soundless cries. Behind her lover’s lunging shoulder Brianna’s pale face would rise up now and then, the lips retracted slightly on the dark filmy teeth and the sharp chin appearing to quiver with pleasure. Yet I detected something different in the splay of her legs, in the way that her face, every time it emerged, was fixed on a point resolutely before it, which I took to be her lover’s eyes. And oh it was a stolen sight, such that I couldn’t look away.
I fumbled myself and I clung to the curtain.
We all of us happily shuddered together, becurtained Willy Mumler and the beast with two backs.