June, 1861
First couple of months after leaving the Center, I took a room in Parker House.
Of course, it was beyond my means, as Beacon Street was long with lanterns. It struck me as the kind of place that I would’ve been lucky to sleep in on tour but I angled to stay there as long as I could on what I had put by employed the Center. It was a clean, obeisant space. The sheets were always boiled and crisp. I made sure to sleep and to sleep in them often—to get the kind of sleep I needed. The coffee hour was always prompt with little sugared rounds of cake. The other guests were mostly travellers, to see the leaves turn or the liberty sites. And they passed me in families of four in the halls as a brand new attraction: the unattached woman.
Observe, the fathers might’ve said, how high she needs to hold her head.
And so it was here that the jeweller came calling, two days after planning the Banner together. His bulk was wholly clad in black. His auburn beard was trim and combed. He even appeared to have put off some weight. He happened to mention his mother had died, and that he would attend the funeral.
But then he said the queerest thing.
He asked me if I’d come along.
The service was, in fact, that day. In a matter of hours, according to Mumler, and he had come by on the off-chance, he said, that I would be unoccupied.
But I agreed to go with him. I think it was the human thing.
I saw that my pity was far from ill-founded when he had the hack stop in advance of the park, from whose far edge we went on foot so as to garner less attention.
“I admit that I don’t understand it,” said Mumler, “how people come here just to walk. The Common is perfectly good, after all, and then without the corpses in it.”
“On days when there aren’t marching bands. Or regiments processing out.”
“And yet The Common has no corpses. That is the signal distinction, to me.”
We mounted toward a great stone tower. William Mumler took my arm.
You see, he was in love with me. He was, at any rate, enchanted. His hands had touched me, sure enough. But I declined to feel their heat. And so, in this way, they were bunches of nerves that touched on other, separate bunches. The flesh would connect and the chemicals snap. But Mumler never knew the all.
We crested the hill and began to curve downwards. The suddenness of it lurched my stomach. I had to stop there at the crest of the hill with my arms to my sides to resettle my balance. It was as though behind my ribs there bloomed a little patch of moss.
At the base of the hill, in among the first graves, a small funeral party was gathered in prayer. Including the Reverend there were four: two older men and a middle-aged woman.
The coffin hovered, sleek and square, above the long home dug out for it.
“Come along this way,” said Mumler, steering us wide of the party of mourners.
We crept along the many paths that made the outskirts of the park and in back of a series of big ornate graves in Roman and Egyptian style, we hovered arm to arm and watched as the prayer finished up and the coffin lurched downward.
Even from here, I could hear the thing creaking. Mumler peeled away his gloves. He put his fingers to his lips and the flesh there turned white from the force of him, pressing.
“You can’t hear what it sounds like here. The sound of the dirt coming down on her coffin. My mother is in there,” he said. “Do you know what that feels like, Fanny?”
I admitted to him I did not know, that I was sorry even so and that, if he wanted, we might venture closer so that he could bid her a proper farewell.
He seemed to cogitate on this and then he said: “I don’t think so. I’m in no kind of mood to converse with my father. No thank you, anyway”—he nodded, as though he understood at last—“I’d so much rather stay right here. Standing here, next to you, I may speak or not speak.”
Beyond the mourners and the grave another hill lead to another raised path and, walking along it, I saw Hannah Mumler. She spoke to herself with her hand on her stomach. I do not think she saw us there. He lips were working twistedly and she worried the front of her dress with one hand. Walking along the upper road with the coffin descending directly below her she struck me as a sort of spool that wound the coffin toward the earth.