“Inventions? Discoveries? Well, what about Bell’s telephone? It’s trustier than any old medium. And what of that special paper, nice and soft, and only for the wiping of one’s ass. And tabulators, and zipper-thingos. Now a lady can undress herself, snap-quick.” I hefted my tumbler of gin. She hefted hers of laudanum.
I added. “And let’s not forget the damned Gatling guns and howitzers. Such swell new inventions.” I picked up my gin bottle from the nightstand and in doing so knocked over her pot of handcream, the one I had brought for her a time back: Mrs. Howe’s Neroli and Rose Miracle Hand Cream. Miracle? Now there was a thrown-about word. Anywise, she had yet to use the cream by what I could tell. I set it back on the night table.
“What were we chatting about then, Maggie, dear?”
“Inventions unbounded.”
LEAH’S NEW-HIRED MAID, Susie, fastens Leah’s underpetticoat, then fastens six more petticoats atop that. Leah still prefers petticoats to give her skirts volume. She will never take-up these new-fangled crinolines of whale-bone and metal. What reputable woman would have her legs dangling inside a hooped-out skirt like the tongue of a bell?
Susie sets one of Leah’s séance gowns on a dress pole, then climbs the stepladder. Leah holds her arms up stiff and straight. These séance gowns are of shadow-grey, ash-grey, cloud-grey—all the better to fade into dim-lit rooms. And though drab, these dresses are beautifully tailored, the pockets invisible, the hems of perfect length.
She surveys herself in a looking glass, or a “mirror” as they are called now; it is a costly one, with no warping or mist. “Susie, dear, would you say I appear younger than forty-three years?”
“Oh, yes, ma’am, years younger.”
Leah sighs. Sometimes it seems a curse that she can always spot a lie.
She dismisses Susie and opens her supply chest and takes out her jar of lard, her special-made gloves. Now why did Alfie have to up and die? She never had to worry about dealing with her supplies before. Leah was the one who found Alfie in the outside privy, his trousers around his ankles—a most unfortunate discovery that. A watercloset had been installed inside the brownstone, but Alfie considered voiding inside a house unwholesome. He was slumped in the privy all through Sunday, his day off, and most of Monday; it was only then anyone noticed his absence.
Now Leah must do everything her own self. She must even deal with that sin-ugly Mr. Pettifew on her own. Generally Pettifew supplies her by post, but at times she cannot avoid patronizing his shop, which has moved several times, growing larger and more difficult to find on each occasion.
She reaches deeper in the supply chest and eases out the stoppered canister of phosphorous, her hands all larded and gloved—she does not wish to glow green like those “phossies” who make make matches for a living. And what had Alfie said about phosphorous igniting? She should have written it down. And, honestly, why had she agreed to go out for this sitting? The spirits are always more co-operative in her own home. Ah, but George Willets and his wife are of this circle and Leah is still grateful to him for standing fast with her against the rioters at Corinthian Hall those ten years ago. And this circle pays very well, and Leah, like everyone, always has need of money.
A few hours later, and Mrs. Simeon, the hostess for this evening’s sitting, is introducing Leah to Mr. Daniel Underhill, a thickset man with a quantity of light brown hair, a quantity of good teeth and a stick pin of diamonds and gold.
“He is the president of the New York Fire Insurance Company, Leah, the city’s largest, and he has long followed your career. It seems his sister is also a medium and can speak in tongues. And his mother can move tables merely by placing her hands upon them. Which must be so useful when rearranging the furniture.”
Mrs. Simeon moves off. Daniel says, “I must apologize. I am mortified beyond calculation.”
Leah smiles bravely, says in her trilling low-toned voice, “I hope the sitters do not expect great manifestations this night. The spirits so often refuse to co-operate for the disrespecting. Worse, they often get up to mischief.” She presses a hand to her chest. “A moment … There.”
Daniel offers Leah his arm. “I am your servant, Mrs. Brown. Indeed, I count myself among your greatest admirers.”
“My thanks, Mr. Underhill. No doubt the spirits will favour a gentleman such as yourself.” And so they proceed to the parlour, where the servants are already turning down the lamp wheels.
“WHATEVER ARE YOU DRINKING?” my patient asked.
“Absinthe, Maggie-duckling. I was once a faithful adherent to the green hour, which was five at any respectable tavern. How I loved pouring over the sugar-laden spoon. Ah, but little rituals do give credibility and justification, as you should know from your séances. Well, the green hour is gone now. Gone out of fashion, like bonnets. Like the good death. Like la-la, the rest.”
“Absinthe makes the heart grow fonder.”
“Hah! But of someone else. That’s the last part of the poem—oh, everyone forgets the last parts, and damn it …” The bottle nearly slipped from my grasp. “No escaping me!”
To explain: the blue devils were swarming (Blue devils; how we love to colour our fears) and I had ever found that absinthe was a river they could not cross. Yet now they were crossing, and in miserable little boats.
“Nope, no escaping me at all,” I repeated once the absinthe was safe again in my hands.
“I am quite aware of that,” Mrs. Kane said, then asked if I could give her the hand cream. I did so, the neroli and rose scent wafting out as I unscrewed the lid.
“PUT THAT DOWN, it’s toile porcelain, a bona fide French one,” John tells Leah.
They are in the Greeleys’ parlour and Leah has snatched up the vase as if to smash it, her expression one of rage and woe, the selfsame expression she wore as a girl whenever a grand scheme went awry. The expression, John allows, is less charming now.
“Bona fide?” She glances sharp at him, as if he had just spoken Greek and not plain Latin.
“I bought one alike it for the Arcadia house. It’s naught but a melted lump now, ’course.”
Leah thunks the vase down. “I had a bad sense. A terrible sense. I should have heeded it. Ever since God and the spirits took Alfie I have known that a mischievous spirit would one day throw approbation upon me.” She speaks as softly as she is able, which is not soft at all.
The Simeons’ parlour was too crowded, she explains, the people jostling and talking and making jest, and so the spirits rapped that the party must split in two, that Leah should take a group of the most sensible and best-prepared into an adjoining bathroom. “The spirit lights had just appeared when my hands began to burn. Honestly, I have never felt such pain, Father. Just look.” She holds out her red and blistered palms. “I nearly fainted.”
“Did you now … and then what?”
“I plunged my hands under a faucet of water and—”
“Inside a house?”
“Yes, inside a house. They have such things in the city. They have all sorts of marvels here. My spirits, you are worse than Alfie … Anywise, the water was not enough to quell the terrible pain, and so I rushed outside to the garden and plunged my hands into the dirt. And what came out? Tendrils of smoke and luminous spirit glows. None had ever seen the like.”
“Spirit glows, was it.”
“Yes, did I not just say so? It was Mr. Underhill who helped me to my feet, gallant man. But the next day Mrs. Simeon declared she had found granules of phosphorous in the dirt, just where I had plunged my hands, the lying old buffle-head.”
“Hmm, and what do you reckon happened?”
“I cannot say for certain excepting … excepting that it is well known that the human brain is a reservoir of phosphorous. Likely the spirits draw it out in some complex manner.”
“Out of the brain? Why, that’s mortal interesting.”
“Yes, the brain. Do not look at me so. I have had suspicious looks aplenty since this misunderstanding. Oh, indeed. And lett
ers. From the Willets. From the Posts even. They are all asking me to explain what happened. They do not suggest … oh, but they do. They are. One scarcely needs a magnification glass to read between the lines. But I cannot explain what happened. It is beyond my ken. Only Mr. Underhill has been steadfast beside me. But then we Spiritualists are being assailed on all sides these days. We are like those poor early Christians. If there were lions in America our enemies would feed us to them, and just because of some dashed frauds. What of it? Of course some would hold false séances for monetary gain, the greedy pigs. And there’s some would use gadgetry. Oh, and then the Blue Book, such a fantasy, as if there were a regular underground correspondence among mediums, as if we lived in some secret, contrary world.”
John chuckles.
“This is amusing?”
“You’ve been feeding yourself this cant year after year and now you’re swallowing it whole, Leah-Lou. Now you’re choking on it.” He does not say this as an accusation. Who is he to accuse? For after years of prayer he now believes wholeheartedly in God the Father, and God the Son, and in the Holy Spirit infusing all things. Believes in salvation and the resurrection and in winged angels. And in the Devil, surely.
“Will you speak plain, Father? No, no, do not bother.” She rubs her forearms, mutters, “My Good Lord and all that, you sound just like damned Chauncey.”
“What’s that?”
“Nothing. No one. No one of importance. Now attend me, please. I am speaking about my reputation, about the dolts-heads who are challenging it. How could they doubt me?”
“God sees inside our hearts. Our heads too. Even the ones stuffed with phosphorous. Reputation is a thing of the world and the flesh. It won’t be a help to you in Paradise. It don’t matter what other people think of you is what I’m saying,” John finishes, exasperated, for Leah is looking at him as if he were explaining algebra.
“Poppycock, you’re a man. You don’t require reputation as we women do. Reputation is what I survived on when you left me to fend for myself for ten long years.”
This again. “It were just … I couldn’t find you, that’s all.”
“Hah! You knew perfectly well that I was living in Rochester. I saw you that day when I was incommoded with child and that Bowman Fish was hauling me along.”
“Confound you, girl. You got eyes in back of your head? And he weren’t hauling you, if I recall. It were the other way, and—”
“And you didn’t come and speak to me. That is what matters. You cringed back into the shadows. Oh, I am sorry for my … suggestion that time in Arcadia. I would never hurt your reputation with accusations, false or not. It was only so you would not harm mine. Just imagine if your reputation were endangered. You would feel as I do, as if you could stab yourself through the heart.”
John looks at her fondly. Thinks how she would be the last person to stab herself through the heart, even if she could find it.
Tears runnel Leah’s cheeks. “It may not be figured like some, but I do have a heart, Papa. I do!”
John starts. He hadn’t spoken aloud. He is sure of it.
Leah continues, “I just … I cannot help who I am. I wish I could. I wish I were someone else entirely at times.”
“So you say and say again. But you, my girl, become someone else ‘entirely’ each time you take on a dead person’s voice with your so-called trancing and channelling.”
“Need you be so dramatic, Father?” she asks, cool of a sudden.
“Ecclesiastes says, Let thy words be few and—”
“I know how it goes.”
“Then say why you’re here, Leah.” He smiles grimly. “Your words, they’ve been few enough to me since I arrived in New York. Now you’re telling me all this about phosphorous and doubters. Why?”
Leah paces, this way then that. “Do you recall that little box you made for your playing cards? You showed it to me when I was a girl. There was a secret place within it and inside that was the King and Queen, and the Jester, of course. Ah, but you made such ingenious things once.”
“That I did. I made a whole ingenious house for you women. Noah never laboured harder at his ark. Lot of mortal good it did me.”
“It is just … just that I need an ingenious thing—a box, an ingenious box, to prove my innocence. I need your help, Papa.”
She kneels at his feet. Takes his roughened hands in her burned and blistered ones. She winces. At the pain? he wonders. Or the humiliation? What does it matter? His Leah needs him. Perhaps the house he laboured over all those years was not the safe haven he had imagined. Perhaps the haven was himself, all along.
He considers, then says, “You still got the bible box I made you?”
“The lily box? Why, yes. My spirits, I surely do.”
CHAPTER 34.
“Here, Alvah, attend.”
My patient lifted the lid of the bible box. It was a very thick lid, I noticed then. She ran her little fingers along the lilies on the topside and pressured it just so. Just then a little hatch slid open on the underside.
“Oh, how clever, clever.” I drank a nip of gin, and she drank a nip of laudanum.
“What is the hour?” she asked. “Is it night?”
I looked at my bracelet watch. It was a delicate gold creation that another patient, a French lady, had bequeathed to me. It had stopped at 2 p.m.—the time I usually arrived at the garret—and I told Maggie Kane this fact.
“But is it night? Day? I cannot tell the difference any longer.”
“That’s a common thing. It’s the body preparing for Eternity. Night and day are indistinguishable there, from what I’ve heard.”
“Ah, like the Arctic.”
“I don’t see how.”
“Noonday and midnight are alike, and except a vague glimmer on the sky we have nothing to tell us that this Arctic world has a sun … That’s from Elisha’s book and—”
“No need to show off your memory, duck.”
“Dandy-fine, then … Perhaps you should wind it, your watch.”
“I can’t. The bit is too small—or my hands too large.”
“Here, let me have a try,” she said.
I shrugged and handed her the watch. Her little hands trembled faintly but were still deft enough to wind the stem. Afterwards my watch smelled of the neroli and rose oil hand cream I had brought her and I was pleased, to be frank, as one is when a gift is at last being used.
DANIEL NUDGES ASIDE the silk rose at Leah’s ear, whispers moistly, “How is your tally of joy, my dovey?”
“Do not trouble your mind, Mr. Underhill. I am gifted with joy. I simply overfloweth with it,” Leah says, and looks over the crowded parlour of the Greeleys’ town-home. The scene is boding well: the Willets are not casting suspicious eyes her way. Amy and Isaac Post are not casting disapproving eyes at the lavish food, the masses of flowers, the oceans of punch, perhaps because a number of Daniel’s family are fellow Hicksite Quakers, and with their own mountains of good causes. The Greeleys—who have come from their Turtle Bay home with daughter Ida and baby Gabriella—are not bickering for once. Certainly Leah’s mother and father are as congenial together as Leah has ever seen. Lately they have taken to holding hands, of all things, and at this instance her father is helping her mother arrange the punch glasses, as if he were a servant, or a wife himself. As for Maggie and Katie, they seem to be attending out of affection, not just duty. Are perhaps even sober. Indeed, the years might be wound back on the Fox family and their intimates, so convivial, co-operative and optimistic is the scene. The only thing missing is her daughter, Lizzie, but she is now Mrs. George Blauvet and is abroad at the moment, though exactly where “abroad” Lizzie has neglected to tell her.
Daniel now whispers to Leah’s cheek, “Are they all here and accounted for, our guests?”
“Yes, the guests are all here, all the invited ones.”
“Are there other varieties?” He is not being sarcastic. She has yet to see that in him. Thus she does not enlighten him
that, of course, there are always uninvited guests. People who take umbrage at their exclusion. People like Mr. Pettifew, whose note she tore up as soon as she read it: And I heard it will be an affair of small grandeur. I admit I thought an invitation would not be unwarranted as we have been acquainted these many year and our Fates are knit up.
Such a distressing little man, Leah thinks, what with his distinct ugliness, that twist to his back so that he must look up, up at one with a pained expression, as if he prefers the dirt at his boots. And what is that blather: Fates knit up? Is her fate knit up with her butcher’s? Her dressmaker’s?
Amy Post passes Leah’s view. Even for a joyous wedding Amy wears her usual austere garb. Wears, too, her usual look of restrained concern, which, at the moment, is be directed at Maggie. Understandable given Maggie’s fixed smile, her gaunt frame, her intent eyes, which are darker than before, as if the pupils, like ink blots, have stained the irises. And whatever does Amy make of Maggie’s dress of light-sucking black bombast? Of her fingers twisting round her crucifix like blind worms? Leah, for one, still cannot believe that Maggie converted to Catholicism and all because of Elisha-the-dead. The baptism was officiated by that Father Quinn. Katie was the only member of their family who attended.
And where is Katherina? Leah wonders. She spies her out easily as Katie’s gown is a startling aniline yellow. Leah approves—and highly—of these new aniline dyes: mauvine, magenta, fuchine, methyl violet. These inverted colours are much alike the colours that music once revealed to her, and does no longer. Perhaps the anilines are in compensation. Perhaps the brighter and brighter man-made lights are as well. Certainly gas lights are nothing remarkable now inside city houses, and the night streets are so lit that the stars and moon are no longer required as guidance. As for rushies and candles? They and their meek light will soon be found only in the countryside, which is where the dark belongs.
“… but I do believe in justice and truth and all that, really,” Katie says to Amy, her voice twanging loud, as it still unfortunately does when she is rattled.
The Dark Page 43
