The Stenographer’s Story, contd.

She sweeps down the hall, her heavy skirts chivvying dust bunnies along, and light from the shuttered windows stripes her for an instant and then again and then again. Lorgnette chafes her stiffened bodice. At her waist, in a silk reticule, bulky shapes: ear trumpet, tongue depressor, speculum. In her hands a gleaming ferule. Her mouth is stretched around a wire mold. They say she wets her lips with printer’s ink at bedtime and wears this armature all night. After rubbing it with erasers inside and out she winds a cloth around the whole contraption: It becomes a snout. But today it is not wrapped, and saliva flows down her chin, wetting her neat linen bib. I note this, as I note everything that may be useful to me.

The Headmistress began to warm up at five for the morning calisthenics, to “open the hatches,” as she said, employing every tool in her kit: the camphor-and-menthol atomizers, the gnathodynamometers, the cotton pads, the rubber bulbs, the steel-and-porcelain ratchet gag. When, barely buttoned into their uniforms and blued with a dash of ice water from the basin, the students heard round a corner the rap of her heel or saw the trembling shadow of her snout, they would flee down the corridors or lower themselves into chests and come out much later in a fountain of moths and with faces like moths, all eyes.

All day, the Headmistress came and went, her route decided “more by rhetoric,” she explained, “than by expediency,” through that puzzle box of classrooms, dormitories, living rooms and dying rooms: rapping down haunted galleries, past laboratories filled with models and machines, and oubliettes filled with wrongdoers, through gymnasia where children flung themselves over and over through their own mouths and out again; rustling through the curtained laying-in room where those expecting mouth objects lay in the half-dark, staring at pictures of holes and of darkness, their lips thickly smeared with goose fat, attended by smaller children who massaged their throats through the swaddling. She would pass down a row of the youngest students arranged by size and bend an ear to each mouth in turn. With cotton soaked in morphine she would soothe strained tonsils; she’d offer ink-and-ipecac purges and poultices of paper pulp and cantharides, and to complainers, the advice, “Pretend you aren’t here.” Shushing chatterers, bating breaths, tying gags with a reef knot (never a granny), distributing baffles and tightening muzzles, inspecting creels and wind socks, and tuning high voices with a firm hand on the windpipe and a whiff of smelling salts, she reigned: schoolmarm and monarch, high priestess and inquisitor in one.

Bullish, rumpled, Mother Other would stump along behind in her leaden shoes, harrying the children into place, slapping a pointer into the hand of the unvoice teacher, setting up without question or comprehension the masks, the bellows, the paper cones. She’d appear suddenly in the dictation room with a wobbling armful of paper balloons; she’d ball up newspapers to fill an artificial lung or pop a tongue depressor into a passing mouth. Meanwhile Whit and McDougal padded to and fro, palpating creels with white-gloved hands and removing any mouth objects found within, wrapping them in diapers to wick away saliva and protect them for what remained of their journey, and flitting away with them cradled reverently in their arms. Somehow they always seemed to know when one was due, as if like spiders thrilling to the vibrations in their web they had some special sensitivity to the fabric of the Veil. Often they managed to be there to help deliver it, coaxing the mouth a fraction further open and hooking the item out with a crooked finger. Sometimes one of the students, confused, fought them.

“You can’t take it! It’s mine!” Victoria scuttles away, huddled protectively over the creel, which swings wildly. “G-get back! G-g-g-get offa me!” Runs, knocking over a chair, another chair. Disappears down the hall.

By evening, “Wh-wh-why say anything”—on the phonograph, Edison—“if it’s not the dernier cri?” the Headmistress would croak, in crepe and whalebone on a horsehair divan, surrounded by ear trumpets, taxidermy, and memorial hair art. “What good is it to be Headmistress of the Sybil Joines Vocational School for Ghost Speakers and Hearing-Mouth Children, if I can’t be more famous than the F-F-Fox sisters and better-looking than Cora Hatch?” She took a sip from the “brain,” that curiously shaped decanter that Mother Other, to provide ease from the friction of leadership and the traffic of ghosts, kept filled with Stickney and Poor’s Paregoric, “1 8/10 grains Opium to each fluid ounce,” and fingered her earlobes, then with calipers measured her mouth and again launched into “My w-word, wh-wh-why,” etc.

When visitors came, the Headmistress would arrange demonstrations, lavishing particular attention on wealthy relatives who might be persuaded to pony up for a scholarship or a sports field. She required Mr. Lenore, our drama teacher, to rehearse “impromptu” séances to a script, observing, without a blush, that it was a mistake to think that merely because the medium was a fraud, the dead were not really present. Cheating was underrated: “It may be precisely when we counterfeit that we ring true.” Along a course minutely planned to give the impression of spontaneity, she led visitors at a stroll, pumping them for information all the while. A discreet aside to any student would send a runner ahead in the itinerary with amendments to the plan: This visitor hopes to hear from a maiden aunt, preferably through the mouth of a well-brought-up young lady; this other from a tot, carried off by scarlet fever; while this one would like to see a boy student, blindfolded, mouth stretched around an ivory wind tunnel, his tongue forced down with a stirrup, his cheeks held apart from his teeth by two flanges locking in place, while his instructor strokes his distended throat with a peacock feather.

O’Donnell was a favorite among the boys, with his erect stance, his white teeth, his blond hair, artfully tousled (by Mr. Mallow under the instructions of Mr. Lenore) before the arrival of his audience. Smithson was first among the girls for her curls and the pearly nails on her little pink fingers, and Dixon next for her glossy dark skin and the theatricality with which she drew herself upright, raised her chin, jerked, and shook out a booming masculine voice. I, less picturesque, was never chosen.

Some visitors, flushed, speaking a little too loudly, would request a private tête-à-tête with one or another of these prodigies, would confess the desire to test the fabric of the Veil, to let the winds of the afterlife cool their hot cheeks, to watch a mouth object delivered, perhaps, into their own eager hands, or even assisted a little with a judicious finger. To these requests the Headmistress or her delegates would smoothly reply, “R-r-regrettably it is not p-possible; the children require the supervision of an expert at every stage, there is always a r-risk of the accidental summoning of a hostile rev-rev-revenant, the school has tried many times to take out a policy against wraith-related m-m-m-mutilations or deaths, but insurers have not been cooperative . . . Are you feeling all right?”