Ghosts I Have Been

by Richard Peck

  13

  ONCE YOU ARE FAMOUS, your fate falls into other hands. This I learned shortly after the busiest hours of my life up to that point. I refer to the afternoon when I broke up Professor Regis’s criminal seance and rounded off the evening by sinking on the Titanic.

  Miss Spaulding was out of school for two days, victim of the first sick headache of her life, so we were all crowded in with Miss Winkler’s seventh-grade bunch.

  Lowell Seaforth seemed to go underground, as writers will when they have a lot of raw material to get down on paper. His first effort was to publish in the Pantagraph the news of how I broke up the seance. This filled four columns under a headline reading:

  SUPRIOUS SPIRITUALIST ROUTED BY LOCAL LASS

  It ended with an all-points bulletin inquiring into the whereabouts of a wayward girl, only known name being Sybil. Miss Winkler dealt with this article in Current Events but did not call on me.

  I’d thought Miss Dabney would be very interested in me leaving my body to experience the Titanic sinking. It touched on two topics popular with her: the unearthly and the English. I paid her a call the first chance I got, when the salt water from the Atlantic Ocean was still damp in my hair. But she could scarcely attend me; she was entirely too excited by the busting up of the fake seance and so pleased to have her papa’s watch back that she’d fixed it to a ribbon depending from her bosom.

  She was still draped in the black mantilla from the seance, and crowed considerably at the role she’d played herself. Pouring out cocoa from her Rockingham pot, she urged corn muffins on me. I suspected they were from Minerva’s unseen hands and passed them up, having had enough spectral doings for one day. Miss Dabney also warned me about going out in winter weather so soon after a shampoo, so I gave up trying to tell her anything.

  On the third day after the event, we were back under Miss Spaulding’s jurisdiction. Each time she looked my way, she seemed ready to break down and bawl, but this was only a combination of nasty shock and deep confusion. After all, I’d flown in the face of science, which is her creed. She was soon to suffer more irritation.

  Shortly after morning recess, which Letty Shambaugh and her club spent by plotting against me, the door banged open and a disorderly gang of men marched on Miss Spaulding.

  “Here now!” she cried, but found herself outnumbered.

  Several wore the checkered vests and high-polished yellowish shoes that marked them as St. Louis men. Two carried cameras, and some apprentice types lugged in tripods. They were all newspapermen and insistent.

  As any interruption to education is always welcome, everybody in the class, particularly Les Dawson and Alexander, milled around. Miss Spaulding was backed up to the blackboard by several reporters, demanding to have me pointed out. One brandished a St. Louis newspaper with a headline that screamed:

  HUMBLE SMALLTOWN GIRL CONDEMNED IN TRANCE TO RELIVE DREADFUL RECKONING OF CRUEL SEA WICKED HOAX OR PSYCHIC BREAKTHROUGH?

  Lowell Seaforth had released my tale of Death at Sea to all the St. Louis papers, a move sure to advance his career. He entered our classroom on the heels of the out-of-towners. Under his arm was the fatal blanket, folded and dry. “Mr. Seaforth!” wailed Miss Spaulding. “Are you the author of this outrage?”

  He made a small bow, and there was calculation in his eyes. “Oh dear,” Miss Spaulding whimpered, “do not let them set up those cameras. This is a place of learning.” She grasped a blackboard pointer to her chest and took on the posture of a trapped rat.

  “My dear Miss Spaulding,” Seaforth said, “there is much for children to learn about the workings of a free press in a free country. These journalists have made a long trip for a look at Blossom. I’ve set down the . . . facts of her case in black and white. But what you and I have witnessed as unassailable truth, these . . . gentlemen are inclined to regard as . . . human interest, at best, or a childish prank.”

  “Who could blame them?” Miss Spaulding murmured.

  “And so the burden rests with you and me, Miss Spaulding. We know our evidence will vindicate Blossom. But I am only an untried small-town reporter. Your word as an educational leader is the only thing that will save Blossom from being thrown to the wolves, as it were. In the interest of truth, you will surely not let that happen.”

  I sat with folded hands at my desk. Miss Spaulding darted me a hooded glance. It was plain that she was considering throwing me to the wolves in the interest of peace and quiet.

  “We don’t have a prayer of explaining Blossom’s powers to these hardbitten skeptics,” Seaforth continued smoothly. “But to borrow a phrase from yourself, she deserves her day in court. They will want to take photos of Blossom and the blanket. And they’ll just naturally want her teacher in the picture.”

  “I?” asked Miss Spaulding faintly.

  “It is only right,” said Seaforth.

  “Will the Bluff City Pantagraph run pictures too?”

  “It is only a matter of time,” Seaforth replied. Miss Spaulding’s hand crept up to arrange her back hair.

  She and I were shortly posed before her desk, holding the blanket between us to display the legend: ROYAL MAIL STEAMSHIP TITANIC. The air was yellow with flash powder as the cameras shot away at us from every angle. I was not so blinded that I missed seeing Letty at the back of the room, working her hands in hopeless rage. The rest of the Busy Fingers gaped at me. I could have taken over the entire club at that moment and run it to my own satisfaction. But new worlds were opening up to me. This is often the way with life.

  Directly after the picture-taking, Miss Spaulding rounded on the reporters. She’d sized them up, as I had. They tended to snicker and poke each other with elbows. Some looked capable of spitting tobacco juice on the floor. And their language was not good.

  She dropped her end of the blanket and expanded. “And now, gentlemen,” she announced, “I will remind you that this is a public-school classroom, not a Roman orgy. You will find yourselves seats at any available student desk. Be seated at once. It is a teacher who presides in a classroom, as any of you who may have gone to school will know.”

  Several of the reporters looked like they’d been slapped. We all watched ten or twelve grown men trying to fit themselves behind the desks.

  Miss Spaulding took up her blackboard pointer. “You have broken into a busy school day to track down a story you have already judged as a laugh and a lie. But I wonder,” she mused, fingering the pointer tip, “if you have contemplated the amount of research this story entails. You have come to point the finger of scorn at fantasy. I wonder how you will handle hard facts.” There was grumbling from the invaders, quickly stilled by a flash from the pince-nez glasses.

  Miss Spaulding held up a corner of Julian’s blanket. “You see a blanket emblazoned with the Titanic name. Is this well-made throw from a prominent English mill a fake? Surely a young girl in Bluff City did not weave it on a home loom to perpetrate a fraud. I trust you mean to contact a responsible official of the White Star Line to verify this piece of hard evidence.”

  There were furtive looks among the St. Louis men, who’d not considered doing any such thing. Even Seaforth swallowed hard, though he was in the clear.

  “We move on to other matters,” Miss Spaulding said. “During Blossom’s . . . experience . . . she called out the names of passengers on the Titanic’s sad maiden voyage: the Poindexter party. I wonder how many of you have checked this name against a passenger list of the ship. Such a list is a matter of public record.”

  There were several hung heads among the St. Louis crowd. “No, I thought not,” she said. “Blossom, stand up and stand tall!”

  I leapt from my seat, forgetting all about my stake in this matter. I was not wearing my Select Dry Goods outfit, so was in my natural state.

  “Gaze again, gentlemen of the press, upon the young girl who has piqued your idle curiosity. Is this a child who has moved sufficiently in the elevated society of England to describe its manners and its members? Supernatural force
s alone would have placed her in such circles.

  “Is this a child who contrived to drench herself in salt water in the presence of her teacher to pass herself off as a shipwreck victim far out to sea?”

  “Blossom’s never been anywhere in her life!” Letty piped up, and all the Busy Fingers agreed.

  “Letty, see me after school!” Miss Spaulding barked.

  “Gentlemen,” she concluded, “you are dismissed. You have a good deal of homework to do. Doubtless a story beyond your capacities can be adequately dealt with by such as the Chicago Tribune and the Milwaukee Journal.

  Horror was written across the faces of the St. Louis men at the mention of these superior newspapers. They struggled from their desks and filed out. “Do not replace your hats until you have left the building!” was Miss Spaulding’s parting shot.

  The class burst into applause in admiration, but she walloped the desk with her pointer and canceled recess.

  The next day Lowell Seaforth broke the story in the Pantagraph. He had a picture off one of the photographers that showed me and Miss Spaulding and the blanket. The article took up most of page one, under a headline reading:

  LOCAL EDUCATOR ROUTS ST. LOUIS PRESS CORPS OVER THE SUPERNATURAL STORY OF THE CENTURY

  My mama saw the picture, and so I had to read the whole story out to her. Then she whupped the tar out of me for giving away a story I could just as well have charged money for. But there was a gleam in her eye, and I knew she saw future possibilities. She was not the only one.

  14

  BY THE EARLY SPRING of 1914 a person would not have recognized Bluff City. The Cornhusker Hotel was raising a four-story wing to lodge the visitors come to spot ghosts, expose the whole business, have religious experiences, inquire into relatives lost at sea in various ships, have warts cured, locate missing house pets, get their palms read by Mama, and take pictures of me at recess.

  Anybody wishing a full account of all this activity will have to thumb through back issues of the Pantagraph.

  I’d passed the winter granting interviews, only telling the unvarnished truth. The truth is too much for some people and too little for others. But they all fazed me very little. The world is hungry for novelty.

  At first I took care to dress in my best. But I soon learned that the tackier I looked, the better they liked me. Miss Spaulding brought these interviews to a halt. She claimed they were cutting into my education. She also said if ever I felt a fit of the Second Sight coming on during a school day, I was to get out of her sight and her classroom.

  One of our winter visitors was an official from the White Star steamship line, come all the way from Southampton, England, to verify the blanket. He pronounced it authentic and then tried to make off with it. But it was impounded by the Bluff City Chamber of Commerce. They hung it in the window of their office on the Square behind a picture of me, blown up to life size. It was blurry but a fair likeness. Beneath, a notice in ornamental print said:

  BLOSSOM CULP—PINT-SIZE PROPHETESS

  HER SPIRIT IS KNOWN TO ROAM

  BUT SHE CALLS BLUFF CITY HOME

  The Select Dry Goods Company sold authentic copies of Julian’s blanket, handwoven, in a full selection from crib size to double-bed. And there was a new sign down at the depot to greet newcomers.

  WELCOME TO BLUFF CITY

  1100 MILES FROM THE ATLANTIC OCEAN

  BUT THE LAST SPOT THE TITANIC WAS SIGHTED

  Schoolchildren contributed pennies for a combined monument and souvenir stand to be raised to Julian Poindexter in the Greenwood Cemetery. The paved road to Pittsfield was renamed the Titanic Turnpike. And the football team over at the high school called themselves The Invincible Icebergs. A local poet, name of Manfred Eams Davenport, wrote a poem honoring me which he recited with gestures in church halls. It went like this:

  Down, down into the ice-strewn sea

  Great Titan plunged with boilers burst,

  With all its wealth and majesty,

  A vessel vaunted and then curs’t;

  And few to mark its watery grave

  Except a bit of floating flotsam,

  And many passed beneath the wave,

  But not, thank God, our wondrous Blossom.

  Miss Spaulding read it in class, without gestures, and pronounced it “sickening.”

  Certain citizens, unhappy at the turn Bluff City was taking, wrote to the Pantagraph suggesting I be put in a foster home out of town or a reform school until my majority. While these soreheads were far outweighed by others cashing in on the town’s new progress, I inclined to caution and determined to lay low until much of this blew over.

  My fame was not merely local. A firm out in Fort Lee, New Jersey, was making a moving-picture show of my experience, though they were taking liberties with the facts. I was to be spectral, but adult, and Julian was to be revised as a grownup too. The pair of us were to be lovers defying time, but we were to die at the end of the picture, locked in embrace on a facsimile of the ship. The well-known actress playing me was to be Miss Dorothy Gish. A tribe of Arizona Indians was said to be raising a totem pole in my likeness somewhere on the outskirts of Tucson.

  I was offered a free trip to a girls’ college called Radcliffe, in Massachusetts state, where a professor was writing a book on me. I already knew there were colleges for girls who could not get their educations on their own, but there’s a difference between studying and being studied. I turned the offer down, though that professor is writing the book anyhow, probably from newspaper clippings.

  Every newspaper in the United States seemed to discover the names of the Poindexters on the Titanic’s passenger list. Lady Beatrix was reported saved and brought to safety on the steamship Carpathia. Julian and his paw were pronounced lost at sea. I dreamt several nights of Sir Clifford dropping from deck to water. He fell past Julian’s porthole in a large feathered hat and lady’s flapping cloak. But I had no actual vision of this spectacle.

  In fact, all the notoriety seemed to run my Second Sight completely off. Despite repeated urgings and a cash offer from the Louisville Courier-Journal, I was indifferent to more dabbling in other worlds. Who knew but what I might have to live through any number of disasters, past and future. History is jammed with them.

  Besides, there was a missing part to my Titanic journey. The beautiful woman of high degree who’d committed a sin and a crime against her own kid was Lady Beatrix, much as Mama had read in my tea leaves. But it looked to me like Lady Beatrix, wherever she was, got off scot-free. I half thought I’d see Julian again as before, out by the trolley tracks, dying again. I’d been able to do little on his behalf, and he was a determined little critter, even in death.

  All this I mentioned to Alexander Armsworth, who I was on speaking terms with again. He’d taken to walking me home from school. And there were two or three of his sex he’d beaten up for the privilege.

  The shortcut home is through the Armsworth property, as I’ve pointed out before. One day Alexander strolled me right past the bay window of his family’s mansion. When I wondered aloud what his mama would think of him keeping company with me, he said I seemed to be okay in her books. This was progress indeed.

  Mrs. Armsworth’s a woman very hungry for a notable place in society, which money alone has never given her. I guess my fame raised me a notch in her opinion. Besides, it was due to my experience that her son-in-law, Seaforth, was promoted to Night Editor of the Pantagraph, with offers from other papers too. A woman of finer fiber would have me up to the house for a visit is what I thought. But in this life you take what people are willing to give. No more. No less.

  Alexander always walked me right to my door before we parted. There were generally several strangers hanging around outside, often wanting me to bless small medals and suchlike. Alexander grew expert at waving them away. Even the streetcar made a brief stop opposite our porch to point out this landmark.

  It was worth a look. Our tumbledown shack had undergone an awesome change. With money in her
mattress and credit at the bank, my mama had the place rebuilt, and was showing a profit inside.

  A thatched roof covered the old tin one. The siding, once featuring flattened-out oil drums, was now covered in shingles strangely like gingerbread cookies. The porch, which had often fallen down in the past, was now held up by pillars painted to represent candy canes. And the sheet-metal flue was newly encased in a tall chimney of pink brick oozing mortar, set at the angle of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. The whole place was worked over to recall Hansel and Gretel. Though my taste was still largely unformed, I knew this was bad.

  A sign outside shaped like a descending ocean liner announced Mama as a “Seeress” and “Spiritualist Advisor, Cash in Advance.” She was working three shifts a day and charging whatever she felt like. She insisted on being addressed as Madame Culp, even by me.

  That one particular day, me and Alexander lingered on the front path, newly paved in colorful stones. A gang of gardeners from an expensive nursery had plowed the yard, which was once swept dirt. They were putting in a flower bed shaped like a White Star Line life preserver. The round border was going to be white tulips, and the name TITANIC was being spelled out in blue crocuses. That day they’d got as far as TIT.

  Our front door, freshly painted with Dutch hex signs, was ajar. The sweeping skirts of someone I took to be a client of Mama’s had just passed inside. I figured this was another sucker about to be relieved of a dollar or so on the strength of my reputation.

  Mama was still at the door. Even Alexander lingered for a look at her. She wore a new long purple gown of washable velveteen embroidered in cloth-of-gold stars and crescent moons. Her black hair coursed down the shoulders of this shroud, but was held flat on top by a metal tiara set with glass stones. Circles of rouge flanked her nose. The only feature recalling Mama’s earlier self was her collapsed cheeks. Even with income, she had not bought dentures. Though her speech remained muffled, I was just as glad, for she would surely have taken on the look of a grinning skull, though she never grins.