September, 1859
“Shall I describe him once again?”
“Oh yes,” the woman said. “Describe him.”
Her eyes were bright above her scars, one down and one across her cheek. They’d been given to her by her brute of a husband over the course of too many years married. All day I would watch as her kind came and went on the narrow, dark stairway below the street level. Once in a while one of them, such as her, would knock for me and take a sitting.
I closed my eyes and laid my hands palms up, wrists down on the cherry wood table.
“He stands about five-five,” I said.
The woman grinned and shut her eyes. “A beanpole of a boy,” she said.
“So skinny,” I said, “he appears almost taller.”
Breathing in, she gave a nod.
“The spirit continues to grow, to develop, when all the flesh has sloughed away.”
“Lordy, how I doted on him.”
“He died before his time,” I said.
“So very long before,” she said.
“He died by the hand of his father,” I said.
“His father—my husband, whose name was Orestes. What sphere is he in now?” she said.
“He dwells between spheres two and three. He is dressed in pure wisdom, that sphere’s final medium.” My foot started its rightward creep. “Fertile plateaus. And Elysian gardens. Groves flooded with light . . .”—still creeping—“. . . where every single branch and leaf unfurls its own transcendent song.”
My toe found out the weighted chord that worked the window’s shade if pulled.
A jerk of my ankle toward me: there. A beam of light cut through the dark.
“Continue to rest your eyes,” I said.
“Would it blind me,” she asked me, “to look on my Tommy? Oh how I want to be with him!” she said.
“Continue to rest your eyes, please, miss.”
Holding the drawing chord in place I produced with my left foot a series of raps.
“The affirmative sequence,” I said. And she gasped. “He wishes, I think, to tell you something.”
I pitched my head about, eyes closed.
“. . . wants nothing so much as to see you,” I said. “. . . it is the despair in your voice, Tommy says . . . mother, he says, pretty please, don’t be sad . . . I am already two times the man you imagine . . . here in the Summerland . . .”
“Yes?” said the woman.
“. . . among its gardens, streams and groves . . .”
“Pretty, pretty please,” she said. “Always so polite, my boy.”
“. . . there is no sadness here,” I said. “. . . only the light of the Univercoelum . . . it burns away being . . . knowing, too . . . until all there is . . .”
“Is, Tommy?”
“. . . is grace.”
“Oh, happy, happy day,” she said. “Oh Tommy, my love, my darling boy.”
Ever so slightly, I opened my eyes and saw that the woman was weeping with violence.
“Are Tommy’s wounds healed? All his bruises and cuts? There were so many bruises and cuts when he died. Orestes stepped away . . .” she said. “He was standing over something in the corner and he . . . Oh . . .”
I toed at the chord with my foot till it tautened. The window shade started to scroll down again.
“The doorway is closing,” I said. “Tommy fades. Tommy says, Mother, I must hurry home.”
“Make it stay open,” she said, “yet a while. You can keep it open, can’t you?”
“Tommy has no proper say in the matter of when he comes and goes. Tommy is a wisp of cloud upon the firmament of—”
“—no please don’t,” the woman cried. “Please don’t let my Tommy go.”
“Tommy is no more,” I said. “Tommy is gone. There remains only Vashti. And yet Vashti is going too. Going back to her elders as Tommy before her. Denizens of the upper spheres—beings of utter, unbearable purity . . .”
She was whispering, “Damn you. Goddaaaamn you to hell. Goddaaaaaamn you to hell, Orestes Quint.”
I dropped my head, opened my eyes. I waited for her to return to herself.
Before the working day was out, hearsay of our meeting would carry downstairs. And the women beneath would come like rats to raven at their futures past.
Through a part in her hair, she looked up at me, squinting.
“I hate for you to see me this way.”
“Really,” I said, “you must think nothing of it.”
Sitting up straighter, she said, “Shouldn’t I?”
I was thinking what to say to her. I laid a dry hand upon hers, which was damp. So here were moments, brief and few, where tenderness became a scepter.
That’s when Constance gave a knock.
“A Mr. Mumler here to see you.”
“I’ll be off,” said the woman with scars and got up.
The jeweller was here, I now remembered. We’d met at some Sunderland function or other. I arched my neck and smoothed my skirts and bade that Constance let him in.
Walking across the wooden floor, the jeweller seemed to fill the room, not just on account of his size but his presence, which was—how to describe it?
Well.
His tread was light for one so large. He wore his beard full; it looked healthy and growing. A writing-slate-sized dossier flapped and waved against his thigh. He carried his head very high in the air and yet without a hint of malice; it was rather as though he were combing the ceiling for something amusing he never quite found.
Passing the woman with the scars, the jeweller lightly doffed his hat, muttered something gentlemanly and fixed her with one of the most curious smiles that I have seen in quite some time. He smiled at her mildly, politely at first, until he met her in the door and the mildness turned into a boyish disorder that drew his lips clear up the sides of his face.
He irritated me of course, but then he also made me laugh.
He was Henry VIII in the portrait by Holbein, come to visit Anne Boleyn.
“Charmed, Miss Conant. Charmed as ever. Do you recall the night we met? You were an hour or so answering the question of woman and then we all spoke to a dead girl together.”
“I seem to have some recollection,” I said, “of unbelievers in our midst.”
“The sole fact you retained?” he said.
The jeweller sat across from me in a chair that was likely still warm from the woman. He balanced the leather dossier upon his solid hocks of thighs.
“Throughout the history of your movement, how many spirits have been seen?”
“I’m not sure what you mean,” I said. “Seen is a dubious term, after all. People have sensed and felt and heard, which amounts all in all to perceiving, I think—”
“—but seen?”
“Yes seen. What of it, sir? Seen with the eyes? Or the ears, sir, the heart.”
“You Spiritists equivocate.”
“We Spiritualists have liberal leanings.”
“And liberal definitions, too.”
“I suppose you have come here today with some purpose?”
“Vital one indeed,” he said. “Though perhaps you had better just see for yourself.”
He rafted the dossier over the table, and watched until I had it open.
There were numerous photographs under the leather. As I looked at the man in the first, which was Mumler, bent over the woman half hidden by hair, I felt I was looking at something uncouth or something pornographic even.
That was when I saw the girl.
She stood, in her bathing costume, in the background. In her bathing costume, mind you, in a jeweller’s workroom and holding up beside her face one still and outward facing palm. A trope, I had learned, in the Eastern religions which told the viewer: Do not fear.
The man could not have looked more earnest. He was jiggling his legs with nervousness or with excitement.
“Am I meant to attest to your skill as a humbug?”
“If you wish,” said the jeweller. “If a humbug I am.”
“If Barnum, sir, may graft a fin to match the rear parts of a chimp then what is to keep you from causing a girl to resemble a manifested spirit?”
“So you grant she resembles a spirit,” he said.
“Resembles one but that is all.”
“She drowned when she was ten,” he said. “That girl that you see in the print, who’s my cousin.”
“You took it yourself, I’m assuming?” I said.
“Took it,” he said. “Exposed and developed.”
There was something of doubt in his voice. “And?” I said.
“Took it and yet, I did not make it.”
“I wasn’t aware of a difference,” I said.
“The woman I am hunched around. That is the woman who made it,” he said.
I watched his finger going down to tap, at two, upon her figure.
“You want me to endorse it then?”
“I want you to more than endorse it,” he said. “I want you to print it in your paper. I want you to print it for all of the Hub and I want you to label it first of its kind.”
“And what makes you think I would ever do that?”
The jeweller appraised me. “That look on your face.”
“The look on my face when I look at the picture?”
“Not that,” said the jeweller. “When you look at me.”