May, 1861
Alone at night. The studio. Alert in a darkness the texture of waiting. Arms parallel to my legs. Hands on knees. The back, the structure, very straight. Peering in an anguished way to see something there in the dim. To hear something.
Some nights he would be out till three. And nights I waited, limbs outflung. Listening for drunken steps.
Meanwhile, the giggling. The bright swatch of purple. Trailing a brightness I saw in the dark. Hid in not-shadow, the loveliness of her. Scampering around my bed.
Grace would help me raise it, surely. Grace would cool its little heels. It would smile with its gums while Grace flitted around it and then, when she got in too close, it would sneeze.
And so I waited. Would it hurt—yes the man was my husband my husband my husband—my face averted when he came. My body splayed and darkly open. Watching the window, its limning, its sounds. The rapping, diminishing ones of the traps, and the drunken, diminishing ones of the revelers, and the screams of the horses under winch, and the snuffles and snorts of the ones in the stables. I watched the sounds—how could it be unless Kate Fox could see them too—and I watched them along with his footsteps approaching—how could it be how could it be—and I watched them and tried to connect them—to Grace—until he was there at the side of the bed.
A creak of unbuckling. A sloughing of pants.
A wavering of gritted teeth.
He moved in me and then we lay. But we did not lie there alone.
There was: the policeman. The blue chambermaid. The pair of sailor-suited twins. The man with a collar of blood on his shirt.
“Won’t you light a bloody lamp? I daresay, sir, you’re used to gloom?”
“Seen a queer sort?” said the copper. “Swarthy and big-boned, his arm in a sling?”
“Where is Clem?” The fair-haired twin. “My one and only brother lost?”
“See here, Hannah,” said someone, adjusting what seemed to me very real weight.
Willy, my husband, was speaking to me. Looking at me sideways, mildly.
I lay apart from him, curled up, as I’d been instructed to do by my mother.
“Are you happy here, Hannah?” said Willy again. Had asked me this upwards of several times now, I could hear in the high-ish end note of his voice.
“Happy, oh yes. Very grateful,” said I.
“But how can you be happy, really?”
“We’re safer here,” said I. “There’s that. And we have our own rooms. And there is steady money in it. And you, sir, are the most—”
“—not that. That is not what I am asking.”
Picked up a cheroot from next to the bed. His broad, whiskered face in the flare of the match.
“Did it make you happy—the thing that we did?”
“I hadn’t yet done it before, Mr. Mumler.”
“You needn’t call me that, you know. You’re Mrs. Mumler now,” he said. “You expect me to give you a child, I suppose?”
“I would like it,” said I, “but I do not expect it.”
“To expect without fear is to truly be happy. I’ll do my best to grant you that.”
“It’s kind of you,” said I. I smiled. “I want to be that, in the way that you say.”
I rose from the bed altogether and pale and went to stand before the glass. So rarely, if ever, in only my skin. Even by myself at night. This heightening along my flesh. The dwindle of this man in me. I knew his name but who was he.
The jeweller’s cheroot jewelled and dimmed, reflected in the pane of glass.
“I am always most happy,” said he as he yawned, “when I am looking at the sea. My parents would take me when I was a boy. The North Shore, Hannah. We might go. Yes, we might bring your mother there. And then when I say I am happy,” said he, “you both will know the thing I mean. In the summer it turns to the colour of sea-glass. But the glass, it melts inward, absorbing your foot. You see, it seems solid, but then you approach it and find that it couldn’t be softer, more warm. And that is why it makes me glad. To know it can be both, at once.”
“Can’t you feel it pressing down? Won’t you help a girl to breathe? Would you be a dear,” said Grace somewhere in the shadows behind Willy Mumler, “and see my Godey’s book stays dry?”
“You are fine over there at that window,” said he. “But soon you must return to me.”
And saw below, on Otis Street, an undead legion on the march. Their progress slow, their heads downcast. As if they walked under incredible burdens. Their matted-down and broken pates passing under the window like strange, trackless worlds. And yet for all that they were young. And yet for all that they were boys. All of them clad in the stripe of some army. Some imminent force that had yet to lock step. Thirty, fifty, hundreds of them. Sun-bleached blues and tatty greys. All a-clatter about them, their muskets and cups, their shot-pouches and soldier’s packs. The tassel and the tinsel of them swishing under all the rest. Gouge-headed and missing limbs. Malarial and thin. Scoop-eyed. Grinning though they did not smile. Wordless, tragic. Trudging on.