December, 1859
Oh what a sensation it made down below from where we were sitting, high up in the shadows. Like a single, twitching organism, the Lahngworthies looked at them close, hissed about them and dutifully passed them down the rows, thinking, perhaps, it was some sort of ploy until they turned the photographs and saw my stamp upon the back. Below the stamp was printed this: “Endorsed by the Society of Spiritual Development. Fanny A. Conant, Trance-Speaker, March 5th.”
Which is why, this time around the clock, I listened intently to Fanny’s address, not that it was difficult to grant that lady your attentions. But it seemed vital for me to absorb what she said—to be able to quote her verbatim if called for—if I wished to know her as wholeheartedly as she’d determined to know me. For it was she who’d called me here to be vetted by those at the top of her movement: the homely redcoat whom they called E.H.B. and the financier Mr. Day, among others.
The address began with her standing there still and gently lit upon the stage. The footlamps had dimmed to a dark pumpkin shade.
“Someone name the theme,” she said.
A multitude of hands went up.
“What does it mean?” said the girl from the wharves.
“Electing the topic she’ll speak on, my dear. Have you one of your own to suggest?” I said.
But my idle flirtation was lost on the girl who pursed her long mouth and turned back to the stage.
Some of the men there began to call out. They were pitching their voices, their hands at their mouths. .
“Harper’s Ferry!” cried a voice. “Harper’s Ferry! Harper’s Ferry! Free John Brown and string up Lee.”
But Fanny Conant did not blink. The shouted words seemed foreign to her. And I followed her gaze to a chair just below me, a chair that held a person in it, discernible from where I sat as all but a headful of shining brown hair.
The woman stood. I recognized her. She was one of that cohort who lived at the Center where I had gone to badger Fanny—a Fanny-in-training, or so it appeared. The woman was a single plank in the soaring and fraudulent edifice of them, though religion, I realized, could start with one act; the voice of one person pitched up from a crowd.
“Dress reform,” the woman said, as if she had lived and might die by those words.
Fanny hesitated for a moment in responding.
The woman repeated, “Dress reform. What do you say to that, Miss Conant?”
“Take a stand on slavery first!”
Fanny shaded her eyes with her hands, peered before her. The voice had seemed to galvanize her. Blinking her eyes while attempting to see through the haze of cigar smoke that coated the seats, Fanny advanced to the lip of the stage.
“Take a stand on slavery, sir? That will not be hard,” she said. “We women are slaves to the dresses we wear. There’s your slavery, stamped and paid for! They bind the flesh—they bind the self. They blind us, good sir, to the fact we are bound.”
And with that she was off on a dashing tirade. She spoke of the criminal imp of high fashion. And she spoke of the bodice tight with lace. And she spoke of the hot and early grave that a widow’s mourning costume perpetrated on the body. And she spoke of Florence Fashionhunter. And she spoke of the drama “The Fatal Cosmetic.” And she spoke of the prison of powders and pleats that marked the century before.
I realized amusedly she had not for one moment gone into the trance.
Sitting to either side of me, the girl and her mother were listening intently. They looked petrified in their big velvet seats, as if she were forcing them back with her words.
On stage a long and awkward bell was ringing Fanny Conant down and the trance-speaker, meanwhile, was talking so fast that I halfway expected my face to catch fire.
Katherine Fox replaced Miss Conant.
The legend of her went like this:
Katherine Fox of Rochester, Spiritualism’s own midwife, who, with her sister Maggie Fox in the small, shingled house where they lived in New York had claimed as girls to hear a sound they ascribed to the soul of an unhappy ghost—a peddler who’d been murdered there in the red basement mud of the Fox sisters’ house. The sound had been a rapping one; a forceful drumming on the boards. The men in the family had dug and dug down. The remains of a person—somebody—was found.
When Kate Fox took the stage that night, she channelled the spirit of Zachary Taylor, tactical scourge of Monterey and the twelfth president of the nation. She twitched and rolled her eyes about, like a somnambule, underneath their pale lids.
“Old Rough and Ready entreats you,” said Fox. “Take all of ye heart in these trying, dark times.”
I thought to myself: What a mortification, this long and untenanted life of the soul.
Q
The evening having run its course, we waited for the hall to clear: Hannah, her mother, Bill Christian, and I. We waited not quite in the wings—that would prove too fitting, reader!—but rather in back of the orchestra rear, huddled in the shadows there. For we should keep something of mystery about us, not to speak of modesty, if we were going to measure up to what we had proven in prints to be true. And if we should happen to miss crossing paths with the Spiritualists on the way to the doors, then that would be an awful shame, and one I’d explain in a letter to Fanny the first chance I got in the next several days.
But entrances are always simple; exits are the thing to watch.
Our main complication was Algernon Child, who moved from some hidden dimension stage left. He rebounded from me, saying, “Willy!” too gladly.
We shared an overlong handshake, Child’s free hand gripping my elbow, while Hannah stood some distance back, confused and dismayed at the little man’s ardour.
The last time I’d see him, for oysters and drinks, I’d felt for him only a muted distaste with a thimble of grudging affection mixed in it. But now that I was in the place where I was on the way to the person that I was becoming, the distaste had settled into a repulsion. And attendant upon it, the instinct to flee. But the small man prevented this only too well, kneading my shoulder with vulgar goodwill. I felt, through the arm of my coat and my shirt, the coarseness of his strangler’s hands.
“Too, too long, my friend!” he said. “Was Fanny Conant not magnetic?”
“This is Hannah,” I said.
And he grappled her hand. “The apple of your camera’s eye! As shiny, fresh and sweet as any. Willy is such—well you know, Hannah. So many fair birds never flocked round a steeple—”
“—Mr. Child,” I cut in, “shall we go for a drink?”
“The five of us then,” exclaimed Algernon Child. “I should love to parlay with your cohorts in art.”
“Why not just us,” I said to Child. “Hannah and her mother are exhausted, I should think. Bill,” I shifted my focus to him, “now can’t you see them back downtown?”
Bill leaned on the wall with his legs crossed before him, brandishing that flinty smile.
“Yessuh, Massa William,” said Bill, smiling broader.
“Now, Bill.”
“Bill show dem girls right home.”
“We should really be going.” I captured Child’s arm. “As you can see, the show is done.”
Bill’s backhanded minstrelsy, that was one thing; Child in the same room with Hannah, another. Suffice to say, it made me nervous, two worlds intersecting beyond my control, not to mention the fact that I felt, well, possessive of Hannah and her special talent.
“Ladies,” said Bill, in a sardonic drawl. “Your equipage ready whenever y’all needs it.”
“What Bill here means of course,” I said, “is do you even need to ask.”
Q
A hackney ride later, arrived in Child’s room, I noticed three things right away. First was that some of the photographs there hung just askew upon their mounts. Second was that below these few a half-drunk brandy bottle stood. And third was that one of the slant-hanging photos—the one of the men wearing waxy moustaches and lighting each the other’s pipes—had been stove at the centre and left to lean there, a labyrinth of spidered glass.
Which meant that Child was plenty drunk. Drunk and, what’s more, he had meant to conceal it and had done this by way of a Browser breath-mint or a good scouring out of the tonsils.
“Congratulations are in order. Shall I pour us that drink?”
“I should like that. Yes,” I said.
“Everyone’s abuzz, you know.” Decanting the bottle, he slopped out two fingers. “You weren’t in the crowd when the show had let out so you wouldn’t know what a racket you’d made. You’ll have a customer or twenty in the morning, I expect.”
He reached the brandy glass my way. “You thimble-rigging imp!” he said, pointing a finger at me, laughing. “That waif of a girl. Bit of double exposure. Foggy nether regions for effect. Very clever.”
“Well I have you to thank,” I said.
“Don’t be ridiculous, Willy,” he said. “I was only, well, musing ironically, eh?”
“Is everything all right?” I said, trying my best to solicit catharsis.
“All right?” he said and paced. “All right.” He walked along the bank of pictures. “Little upset hereabouts.” He passed a hand over the wall’s disarray. “Had I mentioned I’m a false? Had I mentioned I’m base? Had I mentioned . . .” he half said, half choked, “I’m a liar?”
“A liar,” I said. “In what respect?”
He lifted the smashed picture frame from the wall and set it on the sideboard near the bottle of brandy. Sipping his drink, he hunched over the table and started to pick out the loose shards of glass. He held a large, serrated bit between his thumb and index finger, and turned it in the light, inspecting.
“I wouldn’t expect you to,” he said. “To understand my lie, I mean.”
He drained his glass and poured again. He must be at loose ends the way he was drinking. He fitted the picture-frame’s shard into place. I was suddenly feeling more generous toward him.
“The truth,” he said and turned toward me. “I never was a member of the PSAI.”
“Not a member?” I said.
“Though I told you I was. Granted at the time,” he said, “my work was up for nomination.”
“And now?” I said.
“Declined,” he said. “Abraham Bogardus is a principled man. If he granted me entry on grounds of affection, what should people come to think? I don’t resent you either, Willy. You do know that, don’t you?” he said.
“Of course, Algernon. Naturally, as you say.”
“Even with Washington Wilson’s book I was over a year learning how to take pictures. You took half of one, if that. It’s a marvellous portrait. A wet-plate Fuseli. Tad dishonest”—his eyes grew intense—“but still brilliant.”
I did not like where he was going. My sympathy turned to a wary embarrassment—more on his behalf than mine.
“When did you hear the news?” I said. “About them declining your pictures, I mean.”
He winced at this, as if I’d struck him. And seemed to retreat within himself. Calmly, he lowered his hands to the table and let them rest a while, palms down. And then, just as calmly, he turned up one hand and swept the picture from the top. It hit the floor sideways and skidded across all the way to the wall where it slammed and deflected, sending up a spray of glass that seemed to emit from the wainscoting.
“Tonight,” he said. “I heard tonight.”
I observed him a moment. He appeared to feel better.
“I am sorry to hear that, Algernon.”
And he wordlessly nodded, his face to the side.
Q
When I left his apartment, due north for my own, I’ll say I was in better spirits—though you must think me monstrous, reader, for taking such pleasure in Algernon’s pain. I was conscious, of course, I should not be this way—that my dislike of him should’ve fallen from me right along with the pride that had drawn my contempt.
But I wasn’t that person. I was rather this other. I could not be another way.
So it was when I turned onto Washington Street and saw a man-shape skulking there, I thought it must be Algernon who had outpaced me here to engage me in strife. But as I drew closer, I saw it was not on account of a number of mustering tells: the height was all wrong, it was taller, the figure, and skinner even than Algernon was, and the figure was dressed rather shabbily, too, a brace of banged-up bags about him—a gasping ruin of a hat, like some creature struck dead in the road by a carriage, was being pulled taut at the brim by two hands which I saw in the gaslight were covered with scabs.
“Mister Mumler?” he said in a strange, clotted drawl, as though too many bones were at work in his mouth. “Mister Mumler of Washington Street, the photographer?”
“I am known for my work in the jewel trade,” I said, “But yes, since you ask”—and I blushed—“I am he.”
He doffed his hat and grinned, the man, and held it by its brim again.
“Are you taking sittings tonight?” said the man.
“It’s really rather late for that.”
“Tomorrow?” he asked me.
“Who wishes to know?”
“I will come back then,” he said.
“How can you be sure I will be there?” I said.
“Tomorrow will be very good.”
He screwed the hat upon his head and nodded at me sharply once, and arraying his parcels of luggage about him like enormous, dark acorns on some tree of night, he loped in his gentle abjection away. And so he moved out far beyond me, this man, in the very same moment he entered my life.