If You Are There

by Susan Sherman

  “Oh, mon Dieu,” the woman breathed. “That is Daphne. That is her voice.”

  “You have to tell her to stop.”

  “Bien sûr, ma chérie. Lotte will not play with it.” Then to her husband: “I told your sister to keep that child away.”

  “You are too excited, Josette. Look at you. You are trembling all over.” His hands were shaking so badly that it was difficult for him to take hers.

  The conversation went on like that for several minutes. There was some talk about a cat and a favorite doll named Claude. The child said she was happy, that Tante Odette was with her as well as Grandmère and that everything was beautiful. Soon after that the medium’s voice began to trail off; her words grew faint and then finally stopped.

  The grieving mother waited, her hand clutching her husband’s. “Daphne?”

  Her husband began to talk to her quietly, urgently, pleading with her to calm down. “She will come again, Josette. You will see. She’s not lost to us.”

  “Daphne,” she cried. “Do you hear me?”

  Noémi began to speak to the woman in her own voice. “She is gone now. She can’t hear you,” she said firmly but with compassion. “But you cannot think that this is the end. It is not over. It will never be over. She will come again and you will speak with her. For now there are others here who wish to speak. It is their turn.”

  “Yes, we understand,” the husband said, rising. “My wife is very tired. I must get her home.” He slipped his hand under his wife’s arm and helped her up. She leaned into him, sobbing quietly. Without another word he guided her to the door. Gabriel followed their progress: the wife clinging to her husband, his whispered reassurances. They moved as one tragic creature.

  For a moment nobody moved. The woman with the jewelry sat with her palm cupped over her mouth. The girl from the university held back tears. Her companion whispered in her ear.

  Noémi began to chant again, the same tune, the same strange words. “I have a message for Simone Maslin,” she said, in a diaphanous voice. The girl from the university looked up, eyes wide.

  Noémi’s advice for Gabriel came from his brother Victor. “Don’t worry about Papa,” Victor said through the medium. “He will come around. You are different from them. He will accept it.”

  Gabriel’s eyes fixed on the table, a knot of irritation growing in his stomach. The others waited for him to either confirm or deny what had just been said, but he would not give the medium the satisfaction.

  “You’re too sensitive, Gabriel,” Noémi complained, after the others had left. “Look at you with your sour face.”

  “How would you like it if I dropped little tidbits about your life, eh? Pigalle perhaps? The photographs? Sessions?”

  “Oh, Gabriel, do not be angry. I didn’t mean anything by it. And besides, I cannot control what the spirits say.”

  “Stop it now, Noémi. It’s just the two of us here.”

  “Stop what?” she said with an innocent smile.

  He gave her a withering look. “I’m here to learn the tricks.”

  “What tricks?” She held up her hand against his, palm to palm, as if to measure the difference in size. His dwarfed hers.

  He thought about arguing with her. Instead he felt the heat of his palm against hers. He knew Noémi. He knew she wanted to be wooed and won, so after that he decided to use a different tack. He closed his hand over hers and brought it up to his lips. They rested for a while, side by side at the table, amid the sober detritus of the séance: the flickering candles, dried flowers, and bells, talking about the past, about her growing practice, and her plans for the future.

  Noémi had nothing in common with the schoolgirl she pretended to be. Once they were alone the real Noémi made an appearance, the girl Gabriel remembered from the cafés in Pigalle—the little grisette, who could stay up until dawn and then go off to a twelve-hour shift on the laundry boats. Noémi was the smartest of her lot, an opportunist who always said she would make her own luck. They continued teasing one another until they finished all the wine. Then she invited him up to her room. At first he was reluctant to go, until she assured him that she no longer charged for it. After that he was happy to follow, knowing later, when she was satisfied, she would give him what he came for.

  Rue de Poupées, the Street of Dolls, was a narrow lane lined with two doll factories and little else. Even though it wasn’t far off the boulevard de Strasbourg, the street was dark and eerily silent. It lay in a kind of trough and so it made its own loathsome weather. Smoke from the kiln stacks mixed with the heavy winter mist to create a noxious pallor that hung low over the street. It was nearly always night in rue de poupées. There were shadows upon shadows, dark and even darker, that seemed to lurch from corner to corner. Depending on which way the wind was blowing, these toxic phantoms swirled and merged, formed and faded in a dance of industrial waste.

  Gabriel found that the man he had come to see lived in a flat over one of the factories. To get to it he had to walk through the showroom of the Bébés Gesland, a manufacturer specializing in baby and fashion dolls. These dolls stared at him from every corner of the room, from the top shelves, from the glass cases, and from shelves behind the counter. They were dressed in silks, satin, and velvets, plumed hats, and tiny dancing shoes; their glassy eyes stared out at him with bland complacency. He made a point of not looking at them as he hurried through to the workshop housed on the factory floor. It was childish, he knew, but he never seemed to shake the feeling that there was something beneath the clay and glass, something unnatural behind the fixed smiles, the tiny white teeth, and the painted rosy cheeks.

  The factory was not a big concern. It employed only nine workers, all of whom were engaged in different facets of doll making. In a corner a boy stirred a vat of slip, liquid clay, with a long wooden spatula. Two men stood over a long slotted trough pouring the slip into the molds secured with thick bands of rubber. On the other side, men perched on stools at a long table and cleaned the heads, arms, and legs that had been recently released from the molds. They used delicate dental tools and squinted at their fine work in the meager light of the warehouse. Across the room stood the kilns tended by another boy, who kept feeding wood into their fireboxes. Two men were loading the last kiln with green ware. One of them looked over at Gabriel and nudged the other.

  “I’m looking for a Monsieur Baye,” Gabriel said, after the man approached him with an inquiring look.

  “He is up there.” He indicated a second story.

  “He lives up there?”

  “He is a relation of Monsieur Gesland’s. If you want to know where he lives, you can go up there and ask him.”

  It turned out that Monsieur Baye did not like visitors. When Gabriel knocked on the door and explained that Noémi had sent him, he told him to go away. When Gabriel mentioned he wanted to become a medium and that he was willing to pay for the lessons, there was no answer from the other side.

  He waited and knocked again. This time Monsieur Baye asked if he was a believer.

  “No, not at all.”

  “Then why do you want to learn?”

  “I’m a journalist, monsieur. I’m doing a story.” This wasn’t entirely true, as he was still waiting for word from his editor.

  “You want to expose the mediums?”

  “I only want to tell the truth.”

  “And you always know what that is, do you? You know it when you see it?”

  “Not always.”

  Again silence. Gabriel waited for a few moments and then knocked again.

  The bolt slid free and the door swung open. An old man stood in the threshold. “A truthseeker, eh?” He stepped aside to let Gabriel pass. The man’s right arm hung limp by his side, his right hip sagged, his gait stiff and crablike as he heaved himself back to the table and collapsed into a chair with welcomed relief. He motioned to the chair opposite.

  Gabriel settled himself in and glanced around the room. It was small but neat. A bunch of tulips
stood in a jar on the table, a fresh coverlet lay on the bed, and curtains hung over the one window that looked out from the back of the factory across a wintery field. Someone had made an effort to make the room comfortable. A hot stove made the room almost unbearable. Even so Gabriel left his coat and scarf on.

  “My daughter likes flowers,” Baye said, when he noticed Gabriel looking around. “She wants me to live with them, but I am not that far gone. Not yet anyway. So you want to become a medium?”

  “I want to learn how so I can write about it.”

  Baye regarded Gabriel with a thoughtful smile and said: “What if I told you that there are no tricks? That what you see is real. That the spirits speak through these people because they have a gift.”

  Gabriel paused for a moment deciding what to do. Then he rose: “I think I have the wrong place.”

  Baye burst out laughing. “No, sit. I will teach you what you want to know. Believe me there is no love lost between me and my former colleagues. I don’t care what happens to them. Nevertheless, I don’t want to see Noémi get hurt. You must promise that your article will make no mention of her.”

  “Of course.”

  “Good. Then I hope you have money because it will cost you.”

  On Thursday Gabriel returned with money, a hemp rope, and a bottle of good brandy. The money came from his editor, but the liquor he had to pay for himself.

  Monsieur Baye sat at the little table sipping the brandy and massaging his bad leg while he talked about his career, how he was once a sought-after manifesting medium, how the scientists had come to study him, and how a stroke had ended it all.

  It had been only a few days since Gabriel was at the flat, but in that time he saw a great change in the old man. His hair was whiter now, and he moved with greater difficulty. He face looked older too, but that may have been a trick of the light.

  “On the other hand Noémi is a test medium,” Baye was saying, pouring himself another glass. “She gives names and dates and details about the sitters that she couldn’t possibly know, and in this way they learn to trust her.”

  “How does she do it?”

  “You don’t believe the spirits tell her?” He gave Gabriel a short laugh and pointed to a book on the shelf. “Here, hand me that.”

  Gabriel got up and handed it over. “This is the blue book,” Baye said, opening it to a random page. “It contains information gathered by mediums as they travel around the country.”

  Gabriel thumbed through it and found that the book consisted entirely of names organized by city. Under each name were listed family members living and dead, family tragedies, business setbacks, observations of all kinds. Under Paris he found Comtois, Alain and Josette. Daughter Daphne died January 1902, whooping cough. Dollhouse, red coat, daisies on the collar, doll named Claude. Tante Odette died 1893.

  Baye sipped his brandy with pleasure and refilled Gabriel’s glass. “Test mediums can be interesting, but what I am going to teach you is something different, something rare and precious. I am going to make you a member of the royalty, the rarified few. You, my friend, will learn the secrets of the materializing medium. You will know how to bring spirits into the circles. They will talk and sing and fly about. If you choose to give a sitting, it will be one they will talk about for a long time to come. Are you ready?”

  Gabriel nodded.

  “Hand me the rope.”

  Over the next few minutes Monsieur Baye labored to tie Gabriel to his chair. He secured Gabriel’s arms, tying his feet together and then running the rope up to his chest and around the back of the chair several times. He finished off the job with a special knot, one that would have taken any man with two free hands a number of minutes to untie. Gabriel was surprised that he made such short work of it. Monsieur Baye didn’t look as if he had the strength. He was thin and insubstantial, almost like an apparition himself.

  Once he finished, Baye stood back and admired his handiwork. “Yes, that ought to do it. Now, free your right hand,” he said, holding up a pocket watch. “You have one minute.”

  Gabriel tried to lift his right hand, but it was securely fastened to the arm of the chair. “And exactly how am I supposed to do that?”

  Baye gave him a look of mock surprise. “It shouldn’t be difficult. Go ahead, try. Even I could do it.”

  Gabriel strained against the rope, but his arm wouldn’t budge. He tried wiggling free, twisting and turning his wrist, all to no good. Monsieur Baye watched him grow frustrated and even a little panicked, grinning at him the whole time, clearly enjoying himself. Gabriel did not share in his fun. “Yes, you made your point. Now get me out of this.”

  While Monsieur Baye untied the ropes he explained that the success of the entire séance rested on one thing—securing enough slack to be able to free yourself once the time was right. “You will be in the cabinet, and the drapes will be closed. No one will be watching, and that is the time you’ll need slack.”

  This time Baye instructed Gabriel to sit up straight while he tied his hands to his knees. This meant that Baye was forced to tie the rope around the thick part of Gabriel’s thighs. When he finished he told Gabriel to lean forward. This caused the rope to slide from his upper thighs to his knees—where the legs were much thinner—giving Gabriel enough slack to free his right hand.

  Next he told Gabriel to twist his wrists so the thumbs were up as he tied his hands behind his back. When he was done he told Gabriel to twist his wrists back again, giving him the slack he needed to free himself. While Baye wrapped the rope around Gabriel’s chest and around the back of his chair, he told Gabriel to sit forward slightly. Then once he was done, he told Gabriel to sit back. Gabriel was surprised by how much slack he had to work with.

  “It’s astonishing what you can do with your mouth and teeth and elbow,” Baye said as he tied Gabriel up in several ways and in each case had a technique for stealing slack. “But everything starts with slack. Once you have that, you can free a hand. Then anything is possible.”

  Gabriel came for his second lesson on Monday and found Baye just finishing up his supper. A girl, perhaps his daughter, was cleaning up and waiting to take the tray away. Once she had gone Baye brought over a jar from the counter and set it on the table. It contained the heads of more than a hundred kitchen matches that he had been soaking in water for several days. He poured off the water and added a little linseed oil. Then he told Gabriel to turn the gas down and close the curtains. Once the room was dark he held up the jar so Gabriel could see that it glowed like a blue orb. When Baye attached it to a flexible rod and bounced it around the room, its radiance shone like a distant star trapped in a jar.

  “All you need now to make a glowing apparition is a gauze mask with a face painted on it and a handkerchief.” He had both. He painted the handkerchief with the phosphorescent solution and then holding the handkerchief behind the mask made the face appear as if it were glowing in the dark.

  Over the next few weeks Baye showed Gabriel how to make a spirit gown out of a few meters of tulle, how to hide it along with the mask and other props in a guitar built with a hidden compartment. He showed Gabriel how to make a horn play on its own by using a music box hidden inside. How to make a glowing orb dance around the room on a reaching rod, a telescoping device a little over a meter long, that looked like a fountain pen when not extended and could be carried into the sitting in the medium’s pocket.

  Proudly he displayed his shoe, which had been constructed with a button on the inside of the heel. With a slight movement of his foot he was able to press the button and release the back, which sprang open on a hinge. He explained that while his control kept a shoe on his boot thinking that his foot was inside, in actuality, his leg and foot were free to perform all manner of “miracles.”

  During one lesson Baye covered a student’s slate in white chalk. Then he took a photograph from a newspaper, licked it all over, and set it down on the chalk. He used a rounded pencil to draw over the lines in the photograph, and becau
se the paper was wet, it picked up the chalk wherever the pencil was applied, leaving a black line in its wake. Once the image was transferred to the slate, Baye lifted up the photograph and showed Gabriel the portrait underneath, black lines on a white chalky background.

  “Now, it’s only a question of substitution,” he said, holding the slate under the table. “When the lights are low you substitute the blank slate for the one containing the portrait that you’ve been hiding all along.” Here Baye got up with some difficulty and showed Gabriel the underside of his chair which had been outfitted with brackets that allowed a slate to effortlessly slide in and out.

  Baye suggested that Gabriel conduct a séance at Noémi’s to see if he could put it all into practice. He lent him a wind-up music box, slates, chalk, all the other props needed for a proper materializing séance. He cautioned Gabriel to practice every day, until he felt comfortable with the equipment, and to remember to steal slack.

  On the last night, the lesson ran late, so Gabriel had to see himself out. He had been shown where the keys were hidden in the showroom for just this eventuality and had no trouble finding them even in the dark. He had to sort through them using the small wedge of light that stole in through the transom. He tried to keep his eyes on the locks and his attention on the keys, but he kept thinking about the dolls on the shelves all around him. From the corner of his eye he kept seeing movement, a hand, an arm. Here and there a doll’s glassy eye glimmered in the light and it seemed to him, although he knew it was ridiculous, that one or two had turned to face him. It was a childish fancy left over from a story Étienne had told him when he was little. He reminded himself that he was grown up now and it was foolish to be fearful of a hunk of clay and glass. Then he heard—or thought he heard—a childish giggle.

  He struggled with the keys, trying one, then another. His fingers were trembling, becoming more desperate with each try. Finally, he found the one that fit, turned the locks, and shoved the door open. Once outside he realized that he had been holding his breath and took in a gulp of the noxious air.