“You do realize that poor Gertrude is utterly despondent, don’t you? Or is it simply that you can’t be bothered to help? She hardly gets out of bed these days. Mind, I know as well as anyone that she’s not a pleasant woman, but even I can’t help but pity her. And you, who think you’re so exalted that the very clouds bow down to you, you can’t spare a few hours to lift her suffering? Really, Catherine. How much revenge do you need over one impulsive slap?”
It was October or November of 1854; the intervening months had passed in a whirl of excitement over my new studies. I no longer cared when I caught Darius or Dr. Lewis staring at me. I tolerated Gus’s excitable displays of his new magic in a spirit of slightly condescending indulgence. What did I care if he could make a blue heron shine like mercury when I could examine the structure of that same heron’s feathers? His passion struck me as fundamentally superficial, all spangle and illusion, where I was delving into the deeper realities.
So when Margo ambushed me on my walk home from the Reverend’s house, I was nearly able to shrug off her accusations, as well.
“Reverend Skelley told me she’s doing poorly. I’m very sorry to hear it. Of course I would help her if I could do so in good conscience.” My prim tone betrayed that I hadn’t entirely forgiven Margo for her deceit. Our shadows spindled out in the late afternoon light, warped by the uneven road.
“What abject nonsense, my dear. You were there. You heard Viviana speak as plain as day through your own lips. And if you deny our little lost darling the chance to speak to her grieving mother again, well, I can only assume you do it out of spite. I thought better of you.”
I remember the cresting gold of the autumn elms, the sharp effervescent smell of fermenting apples. My own feelings resembled the scent: an intoxicating tang just on the edge of rot.
“As you say, that voice spoke through my lips. I could feel—I could taste—that it wasn’t who it claimed to be. You accuse me of seeking revenge on Mrs. Farrow. Well, if I were, I would do exactly what she asks, and make that voice say anything that suited me!”
I realized at once that I had said too much. Margo’s face went hard with consideration.
“How?” She paused. “It didn’t sound like you in the slightest, not even if you tried to disguise your own voice. And Viviana died when you were all of ten months old, you couldn’t possibly remember how she sounded!”
We were on treacherous ground. I could not mention magic without betraying Gus.
“I don’t know quite how it was done,” I said, carefully truthful. “But I believe Mrs. Hobson was telling me, in a veiled way, that I could learn the trick of it.”
Margo bristled. “Mrs. Hobson is a lady of the greatest integrity. Congressmen attest to her character, for heaven’s sake. She was generous beyond words in offering to guide you, and I still can’t understand how you could find the impudence to refuse her.”
I had thought that Margo was my friend, after her fashion. To discover her true valuation of me salted through each disdainful turn of phrase—it had its effect. Shame and fury heated my face. But I had absorbed Reverend Skelley’s Spiritualist values, if not his actual beliefs, and here those values came to my defense.
“I can’t allow another person to dispose of my conscience merely because of who her friends are,” I said. I admit my tone was haughty in the extreme; it was the only way I could control the tumult of my feelings. A dust devil spun around me, and the elm leaves streaked by like bands of gold.
Margo let out an exasperated huff and caught my face between her hands. “Catherine, my dear, don’t be so bull-headed! Gertrude has her pride, too, you know. It cost me a great deal of trouble to persuade her—”
Why did I find this speech so provoking? I jerked away.
“To do what?” I snapped. “To try a second time to use me as your marionette?”
“Gertrude would pay you very well, of course,” Margo soothed—which infuriated me even more. “And Mrs. Hobson still takes an interest in you, her letters have been explicit on that point. But I can’t help you if you won’t meet us halfway. Come tonight, please. For my sake and Gus’s, if you can’t do it for Gertrude’s.”
Her words reminded me vividly of the séance, and the repellent impression I’d had that night of a silent conspiracy licking and probing at me. And what did she mean by bringing Gus into it, when she knew he didn’t believe in spiritual communication any more than I did?
“Tell Mrs. Farrow that I hope she finds peace,” I said. “I’m sorry she can’t find it through me.”
We stared at each other: the sort of mutual regard that sets the air ringing with its percussion.
“She won’t appeal to your better nature again, Catherine,” Margo said at last, in grave tones. “I’ve tried all I can. I’d do anything for Angus, and that means I have to do my best for you as well. The two of you are unquestionably spiritual affinities, though in practice all it means is that you’re equally insufferable.”
If I had possessed a clearer understanding of the doctrine of spiritual affinities, I might have focused on that last assertion rather than on the warning that weighed down her voice.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Think it over,” Margo rejoined, and turned on her heels. She wore the same silvery dress as she had at the séance, its color dissonant against the golden streams of sunlight. “Come tonight at eight. It will be the best thing for everyone, I promise you.”
As she walked off I felt a cold clenching in my stomach. Suppose I went, and paid back Gertrude Farrow’s contempt with my own falsity, and then strolled away laughing with a fistful of her money? I was nearly sure I could conjure that voice again; that the lurking, fidgeting pressure just above my spinal cord would be all too delighted to play tricks if I let it. It reared up now as if excited by the prospect, hot and waggling in my brain’s abyss.
If I did not like to admit it, still I knew what that presence was. I imagine the sensation of it was similar to what Mrs. Hobson termed her guide, in her ignorance of her power’s real nature.
In truth, I’d felt it ever since my confrontation with Darius in the field, and I wonder now if that was his real purpose in frightening me: to make me release a force I would have corked up otherwise. Once I learned to recognize the feeling of it, it never went away. I could not stop dabbing at that little magical protrusion, worrying it, as if it were a loose tooth.
But if I allowed the Farrow ladies to pressure me into acting against my own judgment this time, there would be no end to it. And then if I played the medium, Thomas and the Reverend would know that I did so insincerely. The more I argued against his rather ethereal beliefs, the prouder the Reverend grew of me, the brighter and warmer were his smiles. I couldn’t bear to disappoint him.
I let the evening sidle by, focusing as hard as I could on my mundane tasks. When eight came and went and I was still at home, I felt nearly limp with relief—just as if I had fought off an overbearing influence, a nudging in each current of the air, that meant to herd me where I did not want to go. By the next morning I felt obscurely proud of myself, sure that I had won some unseen victory.
I felt that way, that is, until I returned home from the Skelleys’ house two days later, and found Gertrude Farrow and my father standing by the bed I shared with Anna. I didn’t understand what Gus’s mother was doing there until I caught a flash of burgundy leather in her hand, the spark of gilt on a spine. My Wordsworth.
A dozen more volumes were spread across the mattress. The room was dim, and blue shadows blotted her face until it looked like a footprint pressed in the snowy mounds of her pale hair. Her eyes stared with a hectic glimmer and her mouth was pursed into an expression of desperate vindication.
“Don’t tell me to ask Gus!” she said, or nearly shrieked, with no preamble whatsoever. I had the impression that she’d been waiting some time; that suspense had pressurized her voice until it whistled out of her like steam. “As if I didn’t know he’d lie for you! As if we all didn’t know! If you seduced him into stealing from us, destroyed his morals, that’s even worse than if you stole the books with your own hands! Oh, of course I’d suspected, of course I had. But when you have only one surviving child, how can you harden yourself to correct him? Even as you watch him drawn into—turpitude, disobedience—”
The two Mrs. Farrows believed passionately enough in those aspects of Spiritualism they found congenial, but its great message of radical human equality had apparently bypassed their understanding. If Gus had defied his parents in slipping me that contraband knowledge, had he not followed something in himself better than their unfeeling dictates?
“Catherine?” my father said, barely above a whisper.
“Gus gave them to me,” I said, as levelly as I could. “I believed they were his to give.”
This was not, of course, entirely true. But it was enough to elicit a sorrowful nod from my father.
“You hid them under your mattress, though. If you weren’t ashamed, you wouldn’t have concealed them.” He turned to his employer. “My girl knows she’s done wrong. What will satisfy you, Mrs. Farrow?”
She looked at me, plainly evaluating how best to wound.
“Well, of course she must never speak to Gus again. I can’t allow her to be the ruin of my only son.”
My knees wavered, and I opened my mouth to protest, but my father’s look quelled me. Defiance now would surely cost him his job, cost my siblings their bread. Haven’t you done enough? his gaze said. Control yourself before you wreck us all.
“But that’s hardly enough to make her answer for her theft,” Mrs. Farrow pursued. The last word was loaded with such venom that it was clear she was alluding not to a stack of books, but to a voice, bright with childish innocence; to Gus’s disaffection; to a lifetime of loss that she now chose to blame on me. At that moment I hated her too much for pity, but it was a near thing. “You’ve allowed her to get above her place, and look what’s happened. If this goes on she’ll end up as a streetwalker.”
A tongue of power flicked at the base of my brain. Why, I could exact punishment of my own. I imagined Viviana’s voice denouncing Gertrude Farrow in vicious terms, even blaming her mother for her death—
“You must put a stop to her presumption, Jacob. No more of her arrogance, her unfeminine grasping. Greek, for heaven’s sake!”
Until the mention of Greek, I had not understood where her malice was tending. Now I did and my mouth went round with horror. Oh, I could make her pay, even drive her to suicide if I wished. The flickering presence jumped and fumes seemed to unwind, to blur my thoughts, until I hardly heard my father.
“Mrs. Farrow’s right, I’m sure, Catherine. I’ll write Reverend Skelley, tell him you can’t come anymore.”
If I crushed this hateful woman, shattered what remained of her heart, how could I ever look Reverend Skelley in the face again? How could I embrace Anna, comb the tangles from her leaf-strewn hair? With a shock I understood: if I gave way to my rage, if I let magic take me over, I would lose my hold on that sweet ordinariness that wasn’t ordinary at all—lose my last defense against an alien becoming, a transformation I rejected with every throb of my blood.
I’d lose everything that stood between me and Old Darius.
Revenance
—Anura
I met a ghost in black and white,
Spilled milk, spilled ink, a burning page
Where all her excess truth bled out
And doused the living thought within
In veiling dark, in canceling din.
I met a ghost who spoke in sound:
A blurt, a blast, a pulsing rage,
Its syllables all overrun,
As if in her no speech remained
But ruptured heart and spreading stain.
Where death abandons time, we drift
Far from the crush of rolling days
And unpursued, our steps forget
The racing surge, the urging strain
Until our hopes abandon change.
But death is here; it brushes past
On streets so foreign to its ways.
It wears the faces of the lost,
And though we never risk a glance
We feel their pressing revenance.
I met a ghost; she slipped her thought
Like thieving fingers into mine.
But what she left and what she took
Have turned impossibly the same
Till silence rumbles with her name.
I met a ghost. I did not guess
How dream would not abandon time,
How time could not forsake regret.
Your word transfused, your stolen chance
In me preserve their revenance.