In the Shadow of Blackbirds

by Cat Winters

  “No. You didn’t say a word about that in your letters. Holy smoke!” I burst out laughing. “Dainty Aunt Eva is building battleships.”

  “Don’t laugh—it’s good work. Clears your mind of troubles. The men all left for the war, so they rounded up us women to take over.” She hoisted my iron-bottomed trunk with such ease that there must have been some mighty biceps inside those bony arms of hers. “I hope you’re feeling fit enough to walk to my house. I’m avoiding the germy air on public transportation.”

  “Don’t you breathe germy factory air?”

  “I mainly work outside. Now come along. Pick up your other bag so we can leave this place and get home.”

  I grabbed my black bag of treasures. “I like your hair.”

  She growled through her gauze. “Don’t mention the hair. I cut it short only because the other girls said it’s easier for working. I haven’t had a single man give me a second glance since I chopped it off.” She walked ahead of me, lugging my trunk with her new brute strength.

  I didn’t have the heart to tell her the lack of male attention probably had more to do with her greasy boots and sweat stink than the short hair. I plodded after her in my own boots, knowing we made quite a pair—two young women, only ten years apart in age, whose femininity had become yet another casualty of war.

  Hardly a soul lingered on the streets outside the station now that the recruits were gone, just a gray-haired man in a pinstripe suit shoving his luggage into the enclosed passenger section of a black taxi. The driver smoked a cigarette through a hole poked in his gauze mask, and wafts of the smoke intermingled with the sea salt and cannery odors in the breeze. Overhead, the spotless sky beamed in an innocent baby blue.

  Aunt Eva led me northward. “They’ve closed down the city to try to keep the flu from spreading. They quarantined the soldiers sooner than the rest of us, but now it’s the churches, theaters, moving-picture houses, bathhouses, and dance halls—all closed.”

  “Schools?” I asked with hope in my heart.

  “Closed.”

  My shoulders fell. “Dad told me the flu wouldn’t be as bad in San Diego because of the warmer weather. That’s one of the reasons he wanted me here if anything happened to him.”

  “It’s become catastrophic down here, too, I’m afraid. I’m sorry.” She glanced my way. “I suppose it’ll be boring for you, but it’s better than being dead. Make sure you wear your mask at all times. They’re strict here about keeping them on.”

  “I wonder if surgical gauze is really doing anything besides making us look like monsters from another planet. My science teacher, Mr. Wright, wore a mask, and he’s just as dead as the people who didn’t.”

  She didn’t respond, so I trudged beside her with the words about my dead teacher echoing in my brain. Our boots marched in unison. We traded the trunk and the doctor’s bag every two corners and broke the silence of the streets by huffing from the strain of my belongings. My nose and chin sweated beneath my mask. It was entirely too hot for October.

  A few blocks north, we turned right on Beech Street. A horse clip-clopped behind us, and I smelled something so rotten I gagged.

  “Don’t look, Mary Shelley.” Aunt Eva pulled a handkerchief out of a trouser pocket and pressed it over her mask. “Keep your eyes to the ground.”

  But, of course, Aunt Eva’s words made me want to look at whatever horror she was trying to conceal. I peeked over my shoulder and saw a horse-drawn cart driven by a gaunt dark-skinned man who stared at the road with empty eyes. His sun-bleached wagon rattled closer, and in the back of the cart lay a pile of bodies covered in sheets. Five pairs of feet—a deep purplish black—dangled over the edge.

  “I said don’t look!” Aunt Eva thrust her handkerchief my way. “Breathe into this.”

  Instead, I pulled down my mask, bent over the gutter, and threw up the small snack I had eaten on the train.

  Aunt Eva dropped the trunk. “Put your mask back on—quick.”

  “I need fresh air.”

  “There is no fresh air with this flu. Put your mask on now.”

  I yanked the gauze back over my nose and inhaled my own hot, sour breath.

  We were quieter after the cart rolled by. We still switched turns carrying my trunk once my nausea passed, but our labored panting softened out of respect for the dead. In the distance, another ambulance shrieked.

  Crepes in black, gray, and white marked flu fatalities on several front doors, just the way they did back home: a black piece of fabric for an adult, gray for an elderly person, and white for a child. The Brandywine twins down the street from my house in Portland had died three months shy of their eighteenth birthday, so their mother—unsure whether to call her girls children or grown-ups—had braided black and white crepes together. As we turned left and entered Aunt Eva’s block of modest-sized clapboard homes, I worried about whether my aunt would one day need to hang a piece of cloth representing me on her front door. My stomach got queasy again.

  “Somehow, we’ve managed to avoid the flu on this block.” Aunt Eva navigated my trunk along her cement front path. “I don’t know how, but I hope to God we stay immune.”

  She led me up the porch steps of her two-story Victorian, an oversized doll’s house with scalloped yellow siding and wooden fixtures shaped like lace doilies above our heads. A tan card in the front window declared the household MEMBERS OF THE UNITED STATES FOOD ADMINISTRATION and included the organization’s official insignia—a red, white, and blue shield surrounded by heads of wheat. The pledge card ensured Aunt Eva would forgo meat, wheat, and sugar on the days the government requested, to save food for our soldiers and the starving in Europe. It also proved to her neighbors she wasn’t a spy, a traitor, or a dangerous immigrant and should be left well enough alone.

  I wondered what my life would have been like if my father had just gone along with Americanisms like that blasted pledge card and let the war progress around us.

  Aunt Eva unlocked her door and led me inside the narrow front hall, which, once I tugged my mask down to my throat, smelled as pungent with onions as the train. A Swiss cuckoo clock announced the four o’clock hour from somewhere in the depths of her kitchen, in the back.

  From around the corner, a childish voice murmured, “Who’s there?”

  Startled, I dropped my bag. “Who said that?”

  “That’s just Oberon.” Aunt Eva plunked my suitcase onto the hall’s scuffed floorboards. “He’s a rescued yellow-billed magpie that belongs to my neighbor, a bachelor veterinarian off at the war. I’m taking care of the bird while he’s gone.”

  I stepped inside her lavender living room, to the left, and encountered a beautiful black-and-white bird with tapered tail feathers twice as long as his body. He stood on a perch in a tall domed cage.

  The bird lowered his dark head and studied me through the bronze wires. “Who’s there?”

  I smiled. “I’m Mary Shelley—your adopted cousin, I suppose. What else can you say?”

  “He says his name and Hello, and he likes to whistle and squeak,” Aunt Eva answered as she removed her work coat. “You can get to know him better later, but right now you should take your bath. Use water as hot as you can stand, so we can boil the germs off you. And wash your mask while you’re at it.”

  “All right. He’s a gorgeous bird. I love those white patches on his wings and belly.” I went back out to the hall, picked up my trunk and black doctor’s bag, and was just about to head upstairs when I caught sight of my own face staring at me from a pale purple wall across the living room.

  The image was a photograph of me, taken in Stephen’s older brother Julius’s Spiritualism studio during my April visit to San Diego. I lowered my luggage back to the ground and crossed the room for a closer look.

  “Mary Shelley?” asked my aunt from behind me.

  My blue irises—almost hauntingly absent in the black-and-white photograph—stared back at me in a defiant gaze. I had been so skeptical about genuine spirits showing
up in the developed photo and had done my best to look marvelously stubborn. A pair of silver-painted aviatrix goggles hung around my neck, even though Julius and Aunt Eva had wanted them off me, and I wore a breezy white blouse with a collar that dipped into a V.

  Julius’s words from the moment before he captured the image crept into my ears: Stay still. Smile. And summon the dead.

  Beside me in the developed photograph knelt a hulking, transparent figure draped in a pale cloak that concealed every inch of its head and body. The creature clung to my chair and leaned its forehead against the armrest, as if it were either in immense pain or bowing to me in worship.

  “What do you think of your photograph?” The floorboards behind me creaked from Aunt Eva’s work boots. “We told you something amazing would emerge if you posed for him.”

  A shiver snaked down my spine. Instead of responding, I read the text below the photograph aloud: “‘Miss Mary Shelley Black and an admiring spirit. Beauty resides within the sacred studio of Mr. Julius Embers, Spiritualist Photographer.’” I spun around to face my aunt. “Julius used me as an advertisement?”

  “That advertisement has led a great deal of grieving individuals to solace in his studio. You look absolutely beautiful in that photograph. Look at the way he almost captured the chestnut hue of your hair.”

  “Who cares how I look? I’m sitting next to a fake spirit! That’s probably a transposed image of Julius covered in a white sheet.”

  “That’s not a fake, Mary Shelley. Julius thinks your visitor may be proof that you possess clairvoyance. I told him you always seem to be channeling your mother’s scientific spirit.”

  “Channeling her spirit?” I said with a snort. “Are you out of your head? My mother’s love of science is probably in my blood, just like she gave me blue eyes and the shape of her mouth. Sir Francis Galton wrote papers on that very subject.”

  She heaved a sigh. “Did Sir Francis Gallon—”

  “Galton.”

  “Whatever his name is, did he write about sixteen-year-old girls—sixteen-year-old girls!—who invent improved versions of doorbells for their science fair projects?”

  “He wrote about intelligence being inherited, and that’s probably what happened with me. Why can’t a girl be smart without it being explained away as a rare supernatural phenomenon?”

  “I’m not saying you can’t be smart. In fact, a scientific mind like yours should want to explore the communication between spirits and mortals. It’s no different than the mystery behind telephone wires and electrical currents.”

  I turned back to the photograph and scrutinized the “ghost” through narrowed eyes.

  Aunt Eva crept closer. “Julius Embers is a good man. He specializes in the spirits of fallen soldiers now. See?” She pointed to a neighboring picture frame that held an article from the San Diego Evening Tribune.

  The article, dated September 22, included three photographs of dark-clothed people, probably parents and wives, behind whom posed transparent young men in U.S. Army uniforms. Ghostly hands rested on the peoples’ shoulders. The supposed spirit faces disappeared into blurry mists.

  “Do you still visit Julius?” I asked.

  “I didn’t at first.” A chill iced her voice. “I was too humiliated after what happened between you and Stephen that day.”

  I flinched.

  “But then Wilfred died,” she continued before I could say a word. “Julius’s photography helped me with my grief.” She nodded toward a small photograph of herself and a hazy man with a slim build, who could have been my uncle if you looked at the image cross-eyed. “I felt guilty for not loving Wilfred enough when he suffered so deeply from his illness.” She straightened the photograph with her thumb. “But Julius and his mother always welcomed me into their home with warm smiles. He’s photographed Wilfred and me a few times now.”

  “For a large fee, of course,” I muttered.

  “Stop criticizing Julius. Here—look closely at the last paragraph in this Tribune article.” She tapped the glass framing the story with a fingernail caked in shipyard grime. “There’s a local photography expert, a man named Aloysius Darning, who exposes fake Spiritualist photographers across the country. He sent two men to jail up in Los Angeles, but he can’t find a single trace of fraud in Julius’s work. He attends my church, when it’s not shut down for the quarantine, and I’ve heard him discuss Julius’s spirits.”

  I leaned toward the article and silently read the line about the fraud catcher:

  Mr. Aloysius P. Darning, renowned for his ability to catch crooks in the act of falsifying spirit images, still cannot find one shred of proof that Mr. Embers is a fraud—much to Mr. Darning’s chagrin.

  “It’s still impossible to believe.” I shook my head. “Stephen told me this is all the work of a drug addict and a cheat.”

  “Julius isn’t an addict.”

  “Stephen mentioned opium.”

  “Maybe Stephen was the one who was lying. Did you ever think of that?” She plopped onto her sofa’s flowery cushions and untied her boots, which unleashed the foul odor of her feet. “Stephen was always jealous of his brother’s success.”

  My stomach lurched. “What do you mean was?”

  “I mean … Stephen’s battalion headed to France over the summer.”

  “I know. We still write to each other.”

  Her face blanched. “Oh, Mary Shelley.” She uncrossed her legs. “You shouldn’t be in contact with him. Does your father know?”

  “He’s seen me receive Stephen’s letters.”

  “No,” she said, “does he know what happened between the two of you when you were last down here?”

  “He doesn’t know the made-up version you heard from Julius.”

  “Why would Julius lie about what he saw?”

  “I told you back in April, he and Stephen were having a fight.”

  She pulled off her right boot without looking me in the eye.

  I sank into the rocking chair across from her. “What has Julius said about Stephen’s whereabouts? Has their mother received any letters?”

  “Only one since Stephen arrived overseas.”

  “When was that?”

  “June or July, I think.”

  “My last letter from him was dated June twenty-ninth, right after he made it to France. Then he stopped writing.” I clutched my stomach. “Why hasn’t he written anyone since then? Does his family think he’s all right?”

  She yanked off her other boot with a grunt. “As far as I know.”

  “Why hasn’t his brother gone to war?”

  “The draft board turned Julius down. He suffers from flat feet.”

  “Oh, poor Julius.” I rolled my eyes. “I’m sure he’s suffering deeply because of those feet.”

  “I was sincerely hoping you would have calmed down about Julius Embers during these past six months. He invited you over for another free photograph tomorrow. And he has something for you from Stephen.”

  “The package?”

  “You know about it?”

  “Stephen kept saying he asked his mother to send me a parcel right before he left, but it never arrived. Why didn’t she ever mail it?”

  Aunt Eva avoided my question by rubbing the sole of her foot. I could see a gaping hole in her black stocking. Oberon let out an angry squawk, no doubt to break the tension gripping the room.

  “Why didn’t she mail it, Aunt Eva?”

  My aunt’s face flushed pink. “Mrs. Embers probably felt the relationship wouldn’t be good for either of you. You were both too young and too unmarried for that sort of intimacy, Mary Shelley. You should have never gone into that room alone with Stephen.”

  “We didn’t—”

  “It took me two months before I could show my face to the family, and it’s only because Mrs. Embers reached out to me after she read Wilfred’s obituary.”

  I shot out of the rocking chair with the intention of grabbing my belongings and escaping upstairs.

 
; “Mary Shelley—”

  “My dad never even let me near Stephen’s brother when I was growing up.” I picked up my bags. “But you act like Julius is a saint. He told a terrible tale about his brother and me, but you worship him.”

  “Stop. Please stop.” She kept on massaging her smelly old foot. “I know you’re upset about Stephen and your father, and I know I’m only ten years older than you—”

  “I just want you to understand that what happened that day was a thousand times more innocent than what Julius told you. Will you please start believing your own flesh and blood instead of this friend who’s striking it rich off war deaths?”

  She lowered her head.

  “Please, Aunt Eva.”

  “Julius has been so good to me,” she said. “You don’t understand how hard it is to be alone when the world’s unraveling around you.”

  “Yes, I do. I understand completely.”

  She met my eyes, and her expression softened. She dropped her foot and exhaled a sigh that told me she was dead tired of everything, including our conversation.

  I took a calming breath. “Despite this problem with Julius, I am extremely grateful you and I can be together right now. And I appreciate you letting me live here without once mentioning the danger Dad has posed to the family members still up in Oregon.”

  She jutted her chin into the air with typical Aunt Eva pride. “Thank you. I’ve been worried about my brothers ever since we saw those people beat on that German man during your last trip. A Swiss German surname like Boschert doesn’t sit well with some people these days.”

  “I know. The inability to see the truth about a person is a terrible thing.”

  She returned to fussing over her foot, choosing to ignore the fact that I was still talking about Julius. “Go change out of those clothes, Mary Shelley,” she said without any fight left in her, which made me feel guilty. “I’ll start running your bathwater. Look on the bedside table while you’re up there. I’ve left you something that belonged to Wilfred.”

  “Thank you.” I cleared my throat. “I’ll go look for it.” I climbed the stairs with my traveling trunk thumping against the wood.