The Dark

by Claire Mulligan

“Do I look a nervous nelly, a worry wart?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Exactly. I could scarcely carry on my duty if I feared for my own self.” (I presume she meant did I trouble myself about germs, those invisible infectors so talked about these days.)

  “One day doctors will cure all manner of ailments and disease,” she pronounced. “It won’t be just luck and guesswork and that not-so-common sense that Leah put to use when playing nurse.”

  “What chalk and nonsense. If everyone should be cured, whatever would my purpose be?” I smiled then, at which she gave me a startled look, as if she did not recognize me.

  “I was making a little jest,” I added hastily. “Indeed, I’d rather be far less busy in my duties.”

  LEAH HUMS AS SHE TAKES UP her appointment ledger. Since she moved to this genteel New York 26th Street brownstone last summer she has been engrossed with building a roster of reputable clients. Now, in this early April of’53, her days are chock with sittings and consultations. Never has she been busier; never has she been happier. Burr’s ten thousand is going towards decorating and furnishings (as well as to some prudent investment) and soon the brownstone will be a haven of colour and tasteful comforts, even luxuries. Mother lives here also, as does Calvin, and faithful, useful Alfie. And Leah’s sisters, of course, though Katie has many private clients of her own and is often out at their homes, giving séances and conjuring up children, her speciality. And Maggie is often out with that Dr. Kane, with Mother or Elisha’s valet serving as chaperone. Lately, however, the doctor—being so occupied with organizing his Arctic expedition—has not been calling on Maggie as often as he was (to Leah’s relief), and because of this Maggie’s moods have been snapping back and forth like hung laundry in a gale, and she is often too much in a sulk to be of use at the sittings. Not that Leah needs either her or Katie as she once did. She can fetch up the spirits nicely on her own, though her spirits are mostly older sorts who cannot rap quickly, nor for a lengthy time. Trancing and automatic writing are what these spirits favour.

  She sweeps down the hall, list in hand, calling for Alfie.

  Stops short. Screams.

  Calvin. He crawls down the hall in a slick of blood. His fingers are webbed with mucus. “Which door? Which is it?” he gasps, as Leah sinks beside him. “I’m done for, though a doctor, a doctor might not be amiss.”

  The doctor proclaims he has never seen such a quantity of blood hemorrhaged.

  “My spirits, and yet we had no idea!” Leah exclaims.

  “The afflicted often conceal their illness,” the doctor says. He is a diminutive man, his reddish hair slick with macassar oil. “Though I can’t comprehend how you missed it. This, ma’am, is the most hopeless case of consumption I’ve ever seen. Nothing can be done.”

  “Poppycock. I shall care for him. We shall.”

  Her mother and sisters agree. They sob and wring their hands and look to her for guidance, as always.

  Calvin coughs up more blood. He is paper pale. His eyes bruised pits.

  Katie says, “You just have to stay with us, Cal, please. I’m so sorry the ghosts teased you so, back when you first came to help us. The carpet balls and that candlestick that made your lip bleed so. We’re sorry. Really. Truly.”

  “Kat’s right,” Maggie says. “We should never have let it go so far.”

  “Oh, he’s forgiven you girls,” Leah says. “Have you not forgiven them, Calvin? Just nod … Good. Now, Mother, you fetch the linens and poultices. And a bucket, yes, and I shall telegraph straightaway to Isaac for medicine and advice. We shall triumph as ever. Did I not save little Charlie from Death’s clutches? Did I not defeat our dread nemesis, that prattling poseur, that Chauncey Burr?”

  Her mother and her sisters agree again. Even look cheered. Calvin murmurs, “I should have duelled Burr. I would have if—”

  “Hush. Rest,” Leah orders. Thinks: Yes, it might have come to a duel if poor Calvin hasn’t been overtaken by a fit of coughing. God and the Spirits, how could I not have known that this one was in such peril?

  Leah recalls Burr striding into the Columbus courtroom. He was a head taller than any other man and he bit on an apple to show his contempt for the proceedings. As the case went on, Burr fixed on Leah as if they were alone in the room, as if no one else was of any import. And when the verdict came down against him? He actually laughed, and continued to do so even when the raps sounded loud in agreement.

  Leah looks down at the man in the bed. Ah, Calvin.

  The hours spin into days. The days grow warmer. Calvin coughs ever harder. Grows ever thinner. Leah learns resignation. She cannot always conquer Death it seems. She sings him Over the Hills and Far Away, his favourite song. The notes do not reveal their colours, not even faintly. An ominous sign.

  Calvin consoles her, consoles them all. He is determined to have a good death for their sakes. Has already selected a minister, a grave plot, has already proclaimed his sins, such as they are. Has composed his last words, made suggestions for a eulogy. He has left the music selections all to Leah.

  Bach? Mozart? Leah cannot decide. She is in the parlour sifting through her music books. Perhaps a gladsome song to prove that death is but a beginning. Or perhaps a military march. Poor Calvin. He has missed his chance at battle. There will be no more wars on American soil. “We may expect peace for a thousand years,” or so the spirit of General Washington assured at a recent sitting.

  Leah comes upon her father’s last missive. Here she had merely asked her father if he recalled the passenger pigeons lifting her up and he had gone on for pages about his own self. Her father had never been one to “paper the walls with his talk,” as the saying goes, yet his letters could paper a small parlour. She reads this particular letter twice through to the end. What I mean here, Leah-Lou, is that all your certainties can collapse swift as the walls of Jericho.

  Jericho? Did not its citizens deserve to be crushed by divine will or some such? And how is it, exactly, that her father became a knee-kneeling man of God? He has not yet said. It is as if he is too stubborn to do so.

  She folds his letter and tucks it in the lily box, but far beneath those other letters of commendation and gratitude, and just atop the clip-outs she has collected on Chauncey Burr. She does not collect them merely to relive her victory over the man, but as a reminder, yes, that she must be ever on her guard against … well, many things.

  A touch at Leah’s shoulder. Mother. “Leah, our Calvin has asked for you.”

  “My spirits, is it time already?”

  Mother dabs at her red-rimmed eyes. “I believe so, yes, but he wishes to ask something of you first, doesn’t he?”

  Leah finds Calvin propped up with feather bolsters. He has combed his hair and wrestled on a boiled shirt, a starched collar. Has coughed his lungs clean of blood and phlegm. He takes Leah’s hand on one side. Mother Margaret’s on the other. Maggie and Katie stand distraught at the foot of his bed.

  Leah does not give her answer for several days, and then she does. They marry on the 10th of September. Calvin says his vows while tucked in his deathbed. Leah says hers while arrayed in silver taffeta. Maggie and Katie weep into their champagne glasses. Mother Margaret throws rose petals on the couple as the minister intones the marriage rites. And then Alfie brings up the cake Leah has ordered from Weins and Rice, the best bakers in all of New York.

  Calvin gestures to Katie and Maggie, who are occupied in mixing rum flips. He whispers hoarsely to Leah, “I fear for them, my darling wife. They are of an age now. And this Dr. Kane. I must tell you, Leah, tell you that Kane’s intentions with Maggie are suspect. That his intentions may even be … dishonourable. God, I wish I could protect her! And Katie! Watch them closely, beloved.”

  Leah promises she will, as she has always done. Promises to keep a vigilant watch on Dr. Kane, as she has also been doing, by the by, since the cad entered the scene.

  “At least you will have the shield of my name now, dear heart. Now you will be a
proper widow and I may go to my grave knowing slander cannot assault you.”

  “You should not think of me at this hour, you should—”

  “You are all I’ve ever thought of, Leah. You and this family. You took me in and loved me when I lost my own family and—” He sobs.

  Leah pats his shoulder, slightly aghast. Need a deathbed scene be so overwrought with emotion?

  Calvin gathers himself. “Know that even once I am dead I will do my best to protect you and your name. Call upon me during the sittings. I will arrive without delay.”

  Leah’s sisters look over at this, perplexed.

  “Do compose yourself, Calvin,” Leah says. “For soon—”

  “Listen, Leah. My mortal remains mean nothing to me. I am yours in death as in life. If ever I am needed to—”

  “You need to rest, Calvin.”

  “Mrs. Brown. How I like the sound of that.” Calvin sits up and gauges the wedding cake on the sideboard. “They should have used gum paste for the scrollwork. But it looks passable. Do hand me a slice, my darling.”

  Leah does, and looks on with astonishment as he eats not only that slice, but three more.

  12th April, 1853

  Dearest Lizzie,

  I am charmed and delighted that you are to join Calvin and me in New York at last. Our brownstone is on the most reputable of streets and we have all the latest fixtures and keep the finest table possible and I do miss you. Your assistance is most strongly needed. And in answer to your question, yes, he has been asking for you, and in a manner most forceful.

  Now, Katherina is abiding with the Partridges for a time and Margaretta and Mother are in Philadelphia again at the behest of the thousands of believers there. Thus, it shall just be the two of us for a little while, and just as it ever was.

  Your Most loving Mother

  “And hardly any can claim these!” Leah tells Lizzie and twists a valve near the hallstand. A sconce hisses, then fires yellow. “You shall get accustomed to that gaseous odour, as we all have.”

  “One can get accustomed to anything, Mother,” Lizzie says, and unpins her fashionable little man-hat, then smoothes the jacket bodice of her three-piece fit-out, which is all of duff silk and is also mannish, also most fashionable. Though, God and the Spirits, Leah thinks, why would any woman want to emulate a man?

  “You do look wondrous fine, Elizabeth. I scarcely recognized you. You look so progressive.”

  “Why, thank you. And what a colourful dress you have today. Is that orange? What does one slaughter to get that shade? And the embellishments, so very many, one can scarcely fathom the amount of fabrication required.” Lizzie looks impatiently upwards as she says this.

  Apparently Lizzie left Bowman’s place in Illinois the moment she received Leah’s request. Leah is grateful, of course. Still, have all her former requests for Lizzie’s return not signified? Leah squashes this thought and does her best to impress her daughter. She shows her the ovoid mahogany table that seats up to twenty, the Belter suite of furnishing that is upholstered all in matching red brocade, the étagère, the whatnot cabinet, the piano. “Not a Chittering grand like the Littles had, sweeting. But a true piano! Just as we always wanted!”

  From outside the brownstone comes the rattle-clop of swank carriages. From inside comes a racket of birds. In the parlour three new cages hang by the window and house two budgerigars, two finches, a firebird, a thrush. Alone in his Ottoman temple, Vivace—Leah’s cherished Amazonian parrot—preens his green feathers and cackles as if crazed.

  “Chatting to dead folks pays very well, then?” Lizzie asks, looking arch.

  Leah swallows a sharp comment, a momentary fear. No, Lizzie would never slander them as damned Ruth Culver did. Ruth was a relation by marriage only. Lizzie is Leah’s only flesh and blood. Surely the girl would not have another outburst as she did at the sitting with Reverend Clarke those five years ago. In any case, Lizzie’s help at spirit sittings is not the help that Leah requires.

  Leah hastens them to the reading room. Shows Lizzie the stacks of spiritualist journals: Shekinah, The Spirit Messenger, The Banner of Light, The Spiritual Telegraph. “Our dear Horace was the first to use the terms Spiritualism and Spiritualist. He’s come round since all that silliness with Ruth and with our dread enemy, that bray-mouthed Burr. Anywise, I like the terms very well. Foxist or Foxism would have been absurd. I must admit that.”

  Lizzie agrees completely. She shows slightly more interest in Isaac’s book: Voices From the Spirit World; Being Communication From Many Spirits, by the Hand of Isaac Post, Medium. “Pity for Isaac. Was there not some criticism of this?”

  “Pity for Isaac? Why do you say that? Imagine having a book published with your very name on the cover.”

  “My imagination cannot stretch that far, Mother, as I’m sure you know. As for why I pity Isaac, well, because the critics weren’t terribly gracious, were they? Did they not say that the, hmm, famous dead, sounded all a piece? You know—Quakerish. And didn’t one reviewer remark it peculiar that Thomas Jefferson, that great speechifyer, would sound so wooden and so—what is the word?—trite?”

  “So, Elizabeth Fish, you have been attending the writings about your loving family.”

  “At times, Ma, at times.” Lizzy browses the shelves, exclaims in ill-concealed mockery: “Dear spirits, such authors! Let us see. Benjamin Franklin, Jefferson, Plato, Swedenborg, Andrew J. Davis. Have you read all these?”

  Leah sniffs. “I think it only respectful to have their writings. Many of these fellows communicate during our circles, or I should say séances.”

  Lizzie nearly drops Thomas Paine in surprise.

  Leah tries a beseeching smile. “The French does have a nice ring. And the fashionable people do like foreign things. I always say how it was you, my beloved daughter, who minted the term. Oh, Lizzie, I am so grateful you have returned home! It shall be as it was, I know it.” Leah reaches to embrace her daughter, but her arms fall awkwardly short, Lizzie having turned away at the sound of a bell.

  “Tell him I shall be up shortly,” Leah calls as Lizzie hurries off to see Calvin, who has miraculously transformed from a man stepping through death’s door to Leah’s invalid husband on the second floor.

  “I suppose he must be sleeping now,” Leah says when Lizzie finally rejoins her in the parlour. “I shall visit him later.”

  “He would like that,” Lizzie says flatly.

  The two women settle on opposing chairs. Between them a fire burns low in its marbled keep. The birds sleep in their covered cages. Alfie serves tea, then fades off to bed. Lizzie hums while she works on an embroidery round. Was she always a hummer? Leah wonders. Honestly, the girl cannot carry a tune in a basket.

  Leah says, “Our Katherina might be coming home sooner than expected from the Partridges’. The spirit of a yet another little boy keeps pushing on through, you see. Apparently he worked at the Partridge match factory when in the quick and now he is complaining incessantly about the conditions there.”

  “He would complain, wouldn’t he, if the conditions killed him.”

  Leah has to agree. Tries a new tack. “Tell me of Illinois, dear.”

  Lizzie speaks as if reading a list. “The weather is lovely in spring and summer. There are many wildflowers about the main house. Pa’s wife Charlotte does beautiful paintings of them. She taught me everything she knows about art. She can make anything look exactly real.”

  “Wife? Do you not mean housekeeper?”

  “They’re married,” Lizzie says firmly. “And Charlotte is very kind.”

  “Kind? You honestly think her kind?”

  “She is kind. Thinking has nothing to do with it.”

  “I suppose your father often spoke of me.”

  Lizzie bites off a thread. “I shouldn’t say often.”

  “I suppose he said that I was such a foolish young thing when we married, barely more than a child, and that I had not an iota of sense, nor an iota of my, my duties.”

&nb
sp; Lizzie humphs. “The only thing he ever said was that you terrified the living bejesus out of him.”

  Leah can think of no rejoinder, is, in fact, oddly flattered. She watches her daughter stitch-stitching away, calm as a cat with a milk bowl. And here she had been such a wriggly infant, peevish at the breast. And then as a toddling child always pasted to Leah’s skirt as if Leah might be blown away by wind and circumstance. Does she recall how Leah doted on her? How she scrimped for her French lessons? Allowed her to listen in on Leah’s music lessons?

  Like any modest woman, Leah has never mentioned the horrors of childbirth. Has certainly never mentioned to Lizzie that she came too soon, too quick. That Bowman ran for the midwife too late. Leah cut the cord herself with a fish-knife, then wrapped the squalling babe in a quilt. She had been told she would forget the pain of it all, the terror. What a load of poppycock that was. “No point in crying, my girl,” she said those years ago to baby Lizzie. “We’re alone and that is the way of it.”

  Leah hefts a poker and prods the fire. She is not one to be still as a houseplant. Sparks fly over the low grating and onto Lizzie’s embroidery round.

  “No! No! Mon Dieu! All that work!”

  “Oh, here,” Leah says, and dabs the round with her hands, but the damage is done. The embroidered scene is of a royal court at Versailles and the Queen, old and stout, looks only the more ridiculous now that her ear has been burned away. About her the courtiers and handmaidens look as mocking and resigned as courtiers the world over surely do, once the eyes of the monarch are askance.

  Leah thrusts the embroidery back at Lizzie. “At least you could always earn your keep with a needle, my dear, if you don’t marry.”

  Lizzie gathers her sewing basket and coldly says good-night. Leah longs to call her back. Why is it so easy to be gracious to clients and acquaintances, but to those she loves she is snappish, even unkind? Her father is to blame, Leah decides. He allowed her an impertinence that would have earned most children a proper whipping.

  Now Calvin, on the other hand, never gets in a huff. He understands Leah’s burden of caring for them all. And he is happy to see her any time at all.