Mama taught me to lie.
Some would say that Mama went to jail in Carling, New York, because of lies, but we had other ideas.
We knew that the truth came in different varieties and that most people had a favorite. Same thing with untruth. Anyone could decide what to call a lie, so sometimes there’d be a misunderstanding.
Mama made claims to being clairvoyant: able to “see clearly” what was unseen by everyone else. She had what she called a sensitive way with the spirit world. I was her assistant. We offered services that only we could perform. Mama cultivated her talents to help people seeking solace, or relief from a predicament.
When a gentleman, for instance, misplaced a gold watch and offered a reward for its recovery, Mama’s psychic ability was almost certain to detect the missing object. Particularly when her beguiling smile and her nimble fingers had caused the misplacement to begin with, and I had selected the discovery site. When the gentleman reclaimed his property, we were handsomely paid, and everyone was content.
Until an incident of faulty timing led to a watch being observed in our possession.
That day in Carling, I was fifteen. I watched Mama being dragged away by the police with her stockings torn and her feet scrabbling to touch the ground. I saw her hat flung to the pavement, with the ostrich feather snapped under a boot. I wanted to howl and kick somebody. That sickening scene played over and over in front of my eyes, like at the moving pictures with the pianist gone home.
And while Mama languished for two days and nights in the stone cellar of that Carling police station behind a wall of iron mesh, I was confined to the sheriff’s home. The sheriff’s wife was a more formidable jailer than any of the young men with pistols who were watching over Mama.
“We’ve had villains in here before, Miss Annie Grey.” She jabbed her finger at me. “But never one so young, nor so unrepentant!”
Well, what was I supposed to be repenting for? We didn’t want the watch, we wanted the money for its recovery, and we never got that, so how could we repent?
“You sit right there and read aloud from the Good Book. Your mother has some nerve, with her claims to see into the future. No one but the good Lord can say what awaits us! I know what awaits you, young lady. You will read, without moving, from the moment you finish your breakfast until I put your supper on the table tonight.…”
At first I didn’t think it was much of a punishment. There are some great moments of drama in the Bible, storms and miracles, plenty of evil doings and heroic characters.
“ ‘And God divided the Light from Darkness!’ ” I thundered, waving my fist in the air, “ ‘and God called the light Day and He called the dark Night.…’ ”
But the sheriff’s wife didn’t want my interpretation. She wanted my piety and she wanted it plain.
“Don’t you get fanciful and don’t you rest.”
I had no wish to repeat that experience as long as I lived. I chose to have an epileptic seizure at the same moment that Mama agreed to marry her guard, and so between us we negotiated our freedom.
Luckily, Mama prided herself on always being prepared for trouble. Our savings were neatly arranged in the false bottom of our trunk and hadn’t been disturbed by the rude officers who had searched our belongings. We left town the very hour Mama was released, and we swore not to repeat our errors. Mama said soon we would have enough money to buy a home of our own. She said we could settle down, just as I’d been begging for, so long as I could remember.
We arrived in Hawley feeling breathless, as if we’d run all the way from Carling in our fine leather Hi-Cuts, instead of sitting in a first-class compartment with a Thermos of chamomile tea and a two-pound box of coconut macaroons. We stayed in Hawley just long enough to come up with a new twist to our old game.
“One of our strengths is your sweet and innocent face,” said Mama. “We’ll take it one step further and turn you into a dim-witted angel. You will be clucked over and then ignored by heartless women who think only of themselves. This will put you in an excellent position for eavesdropping.”
Mama was sharp; no mistake about that. She was a fake as far as hearing from the dead, or even seeing the outcome of a situation ahead of time, but she had a sensitive way about her, when required professionally. She was a master at drawing out secrets. With a little background information, she easily appeared to see straight into the hearts of forlorn and desperate seekers—usually women—who spent heaps of money to hear the advice of a stranger. And Mama was so pretty, people tended to trust her without thinking about it.
So, in Hawley, I sat for hours holding Mama’s mirror with the tortoiseshell handle. I perfected the ability to cross one eye while my mouth stayed open. I breathed out with a faint wheeze so that my lips dried up or even crusted. Once in a while I’d add a twitch.
If anyone had looked through the window, they would have heard Mama scolding me, “Get rid of that smart glint in your eyes. And let your lips gape!”
“It makes me thirsty, having my tongue lolling out.”
“Try honking through your nose when you laugh. That will give your mouth a rest.”
I experimented on the streets of Hawley. People would take a first look at me and shiver with disgust. They’d look again and think, Oh, the poor thing, thank the heavens she’s not mine. And then they’d ignore me, just as Mama had predicted, out of politeness, maybe, or embarrassment.
That was the moment I could go to work.
While in disguise I planned to gather gossip and bring it home to Mama. She would put it to use in little ways, giving it back to the very same people, only shaped differently and in exchange for money. Lots of money, over time.
We moved on to Peach Hill toward the end of summer, to start fresh. The days were still hot and I wished we could go closer to the shores of the Finger Lakes, but Mama said resort towns attracted more sophisticated people. We were better off in Nowhere, New York.
There was not a peach tree in sight. There was a hill, though, dotted with fancy houses that might have had peach trees before they had swimming pools and rose gardens. Below the hill, it was an ordinary town like all the others we’d ever stayed in; big enough for a train station, a church, and a cinema, but small enough to see most of it during an evening stroll. The edge of town wasn’t an edge so much as a fading away, with a few more tumbledown houses before the farms and fields began in earnest.
I felt shivers that first night, in spite of it being August. It was pretty here, and I wondered if this would be the place where our savings would add up high enough to find a nest. We’d abandoned most of our possessions in Carling, so we had only the trunk and a few bundles to carry from the taxicab into our new, furnished rooms at 62 Needle Street.
“Look there,” Mama whispered. “The curtain is quivering at number fifty-nine across the road.”
I slid my tongue out and let my eye droop.
“Put up the sign before you heat the kettle, Annie,” said Mama. “We’ll have customers by nightfall tomorrow.”
It never took long for word of our arrival to flutter around a town like a flock of birds. People might scorn us in public, but nearly everyone had a reason to seek us out on the quiet. Our rooms were on the ground floor, just off the main square, where people could find us easily. It wasn’t showy; we didn’t want anyone feeling nervous. But we gussied it up enough to suggest that our talents were worth the investment.
We took care setting up the front room, where Mama received company. We were lucky that the rooms provided a red cut-velvet armchair for the customer and a smaller, wooden one for Mama. We hired a polished table to place in between, one that could be enlarged, as needed, when we were hosting what Mama referred to as a calling. We could seat eight as the occasion demanded. By day, an ivory lace curtain dappled the light, almost like in a chapel. The sign in the window, lettered in gold script, announced MADAME CATERINA, SPIRITUAL ADVISOR.
Mama’s circulars claimed that we had Gypsy blood, but our tawny skin and black hair were really thanks to her grandmother, a Mexican maid in her grandfather’s house. Saying “Gypsy” meant more to the customers, that was all, making them think that wanderlust and fortune-telling came naturally.
Peach Hill was our eighth town, Mama’s and mine, if you didn’t calculate the hundreds of places we’d stayed three nights each while we worked with Lenny’s Famous Fun Fair. We joined Lenny when I was maybe four or five. When I was about nine, the United States joined the Great War and people had better things to do with their money than spend it on fun. Lenny closed up shop and we were forced to make our own fortune.
We moved a few times in the beginning, but for most of the war we lived in Deacon, where the factory made buttons for uniforms. That place was filled with sad, lonely wives, working on the assembly line and praying that their gleaming buttons would not be blown off the chests of distant husbands.
It was in Deacon where we first began to prosper. All those funerals were not just because of the war, but also because of the great influenza epidemic. There was likely not a family in town, or anywhere else, who did not release a soul or two through that deadly illness. But it was mainly the young men gone to be soldiers who brought us the clientele.
“I beg you! I beg you, on my knees!” a lady would say as soon as I opened the door. “Read my palm, look at the cards, pour out the tea leaves, whatever it takes, just tell me that my Davey (or my Joe, my Marco, my Terence) is still alive.…”
Not hearing from overseas for weeks or months could drive a woman crazy. Mama had to be careful about her wording on those occasions, wanting a return visit whatever the outcome.
“Ooh,” she’d murmur. “I’m seeing a place of great darkness and confusion. Your loved one needs you to be strong and patient.…”
When bad news came, it was no surprise that people hurried back to our parlor. The war had a positive outcome for Mama and me, aside from stomping out the wicked tyrants overseas who threatened peace and liberty. It left thousands of mothers and sweethearts and wives aching to connect with their lost boys now dwelling on the Other Side.
Mama plied her trade, and we learned an important lesson: Heartbreak is very good for business.