Mansions Of The Dead (18 page)

Her coat was easy to find and she was slipping it on when she heard Jack’s voice out in the hallway.

“Cammie, stop it, just stop it.”

In the mirrors on the opposite wall, she could see them, Jack and Camille and Drew, standing together in the hallway. She stepped back, pressing herself against the opposite wall until she could no longer see herself in the mirrors.

There was a short silence and then Sweeney heard Camille’s voice.

“But it’s dishonest. I’m running for office, for Christ’s sake.”

“Cammie, he’s right. It’s simple. Just leave it the way we discussed.” Drew’s voice was hoarse and definite.

“I don’t know. Is it worse if it comes out now or if it comes out later?” Camille’s words ended in a gasp. “Oh God! Why is it coming down to this? I’ve worked so hard.”

“You have. And that’s why we have to do it like this. Okay?” Drew’s voice was older-brother-sure.

“Fine with me,” Jack said.

Camille didn’t say anything. In the mirror, Sweeney watched Drew put an arm around her and whisper something in her ear. The three of them walked out of the hallway and Sweeney counted to fifty before she slipped out of the coatroom and out the front door.

On her way home, Sweeney got Indian takeout and stopped at the video store. It was so cold and damp and she was so drained from the weekend that all she wanted to do was curl up on the couch with
North by Northwest
and feed herself soupy, spicy, comforting food.

But when she got home, she paced restlessly around the apartment and finally went to get the notes she’d taken about the Putnam family plot.

The problem was Edmund’s missing mother. Without her stone, it was impossible to put together a family tree. Sweeney brought her laptop into the living room and signed on while she dumped her chicken korma onto a plate and dipped the nan bread into the sauce. Then she went to one of her favorite genealogy Web sites and started looking for Putnams.

There were a lot of references to the Putnams of Boston and it didn’t take long to put together a rudimentary family tree.

Edmund, she saw from the family tree, was the son of Charles and Belinda Cogswell Putnam. Charles Putnam had died in April 1863, eight months before his son was born. Belinda, who had been born in 1840, had lived to the ripe old age of eighty-five. But she had lost her
son in 1888, when he was only twenty-four, newly married and with a son of his own. That was Joshua Putnam, Brad’s great-grandfather.

The mourning jewelry, Sweeney realized with a sense of satisfaction, could have belonged to Belinda Putnam. Assuming it was all part of the same collection, the first brooch probably commemorated the death of one of her parents, or perhaps a sibling. The hairwork necklace and locket must have been made when Charles died, the dark hair—almost exactly the color of Brad’s and Jack’s—from Charles’s head. And the second brooch must have been made when Edmund died.

Belinda Putnam. It was an evocative name. Sweeney had a sudden image of a Victorian lady in dark mourning dress, her hair piled high on her head, the mourning brooch pinned to her bosom.

While she ate, she read over the notes she’d made in the cemetery. Some of the stones had included months and years, and some had just listed the years of the person’s life. Sweeney had always disapproved of the incomplete ones. It was partly her role as historian and it was partly that she always felt as though it mattered whether someone had died in January or October. Surely they ought to get credit for those last few months. She started comparing her notes with the dates on the family tree to make sure that the genealogy site had gotten them right.

The phone rang. “Hey,” Toby said. In the background she could hear music and people talking.

“Are you on your cell phone?”

“Yeah. Lily and I are at that bar on Mass. Ave. that you hate.”

“Lily and I?”

“Mmmmm.” He sounded embarrassed.

“So, I take it that my presence wasn’t missed last night?”

“I’ll tell you later,” he said quietly. “Anyway, I just wanted to make sure you were okay. You took off so quickly.”

“I know. I’m sorry about that. I’m fine, although I went to Brad’s memorial service today. It was kind of awful. But I got Indian and Hitchcock.”

“Ah. Better than Vicodan. So you’re okay? Where did you stay last night?”

She hesitated. “At Anna’s.”

“Really? That’s great. Was it good to see her?”

“I don’t know. I guess. Anyway, Cary and Eva Marie are waiting, so I’ll let you go.”

“But you’re okay?”

“Yeah. Have fun.”

After she hung up, she stood up and went over to the window. The apartment felt cold and empty and she put on another sweater before getting out her sketches of the mourning jewelry and comparing them with the dates in her notebook that she’d copied down the last time she’d gone to Mount Auburn.

But something was bothering her. She wasn’t sure what it was until she got out her notes on the mourning jewelry. The date of birth given for Edmund Putnam on his gravestone was December 4, 1863. But the brooch listed it as March 4, 1864—three months later.

It must have bothered Brad too, she realized now, because surely it was why he had gone to see John Philips at the Blue Carbuncle and asked him if the jewelry had been changed or tampered with.

But she supposed that there were all kinds of discrepancies when it came to one-hundred-year-old lives. There were lots of possibilities. The jeweler who had inscribed the back of the brooch may have read Edmund’s birth date incorrectly. She served up the rest of the korma and put
North by Northwest
on the VCR.

By the time Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint were tumbling around in their train compartment, she was fast asleep on the couch.

BECCA AND JAYBEE WERE
back in class the next day.

Sweeney had wondered whether they would come. But when she walked into the seminar room, there they were in their regular places, Becca looking miraculously well rested and happy and Jaybee his usual, charming self. He grinned at her and then went back to a conversation with Rajiv.

“Hi, everyone,” she said. “How are we all doing?”

They seemed more relaxed today than they had last week. This was better, this felt more like before. Jennifer, dressed today in a pair of flowing silk pants and a pale blue embroidered sweater that had probably cost as much as Sweeney’s monthly rent, had done them all the favor of sitting in Brad’s regular chair, so that they wouldn’t have to stare at it.

Sweeney dropped the slide carousel into the machine and shrugged out of her raincoat. She waited until she had their attention and then started, “So I think we were saying during our last class that mourning jewelry was somewhat popular in the new American nation prior to the Civil War, but that we see a real surge in popularity after 1861. Let’s talk a little bit about that. What are the two events that we see in 1861? Do you remember from your reading?”

“The start of the Civil War and, in England, the death of Queen Victoria’s mother and then of Albert, the prince consort,” Rajiv said.

“Good. Remember that the time before the start of the Civil War had been one of relative peace and prosperity. The horrible deaths that attended that war—remember everything you know about battle-field medicine in those days, the amputations without benefit of anesthesia, the infections that would get started in wounds and move slowly up the body, remember the letters home that those soldiers wrote—America had to figure out a way of dealing with death, a way of dealing with numerous deaths and the sense that those deaths might not end anytime soon.

“At almost that exact moment,” Sweeney went on, “England, which had always dictated the fashion to her former colonies, experienced the two deaths to which Raj referred.

“After her mother’s death, Queen Victoria suffered greatly and went into a deep mourning which was only made worse when her beloved Albert died of typhoid on December 14, 1861.

“She responded to the death by doing everything she could to memorialize him, in short, not to move on from it, but to remain in a state of perpetual mourning. She built an elaborate sarcophagus for his body, with a marble effigy on top that she could visit. She surrounded herself with pictures and busts of him, and her dress reflected this state of mourning.

“Albert’s room was kept exactly as he had left it and the queen forced all of her courtiers and family to remain in strict mourning for three years. In sympathy with the queen, her subjects took to wearing jet and other mourning objects.

“In America, the new fashion for mourning dress and jewelry coincided with the sudden need for a publicly acceptable way of handling the raw emotions that these years of death brought on.

“Just as England had joined this cult of mourning, so did America. Hair-work jewelry became an important part of the mourning ritual. Before someone left for war, he would leave behind a lock of hair that
could be a remembrance and—if the soldier died—a piece of mourning jewelry.”

She turned the lights down and showed them thirty slides of typical Civil War—era jewelry.

“Now I want to show you some portraits of women from the 1860s and 1870s wearing mourning jewelry.” She clicked ahead to a photo of a proper-looking matron wearing a high-necked dress and a mourning brooch.

They talked about mourning jewelry for a while longer and then Sweeney showed them a slide picturing the participants in an 1872 séance.

“In addition to finding ways of coping with grief over the death of a loved one, the Victorians also fell prey to a new brand of hucksterism. Spiritualists claimed to be able to contact the dearly departed so that they could communicate with their loved ones.

“There are well-known stories of spiritualists being locked in cabinets during séances to prevent them from interfering with the so-called visitation. But they had elaborate ways of getting around this and often the ghostly figure who appeared in the spiritualist’s drawing room was nothing more than the spiritualist herself in disguise.

“But spiritualists were increasing in popularity. Those who could afford it went to séances where they were told they could speak with the dearly departed. Of course the spiritualists charged exorbitant fees, but perhaps worse was the emotional price they exacted from their victims.”

She was getting ready to move to the next slide when Ashley said, “How do you know that it wasn’t real? Who are you to say there’s no such thing as spirits?”

Sweeney looked sharply at her. “Come on, Ashley,” she said. “From an academic perspective this stuff is really interesting. But it’s very well documented that these so-called mediums were scam artists and that the spiritualists used a series of highly sophisticated instruments to achieve their effect. They preyed on the grieving.”

“But how do you
know
? How do you
know
that people who have
died don’t come back to visit us? How do you
know
that people who are murdered don’t come back to tell on their killers?”

Sweeney didn’t know what to say. She looked around at the rest of the class, but they just looked uncomfortable, staring nervously down at the table. Before she could think of anything, Ashley went on.

“People think they know,” she said angrily. “But they don’t. They don’t know anything. There’s a whole world out there that we don’t know anything about. Anyone could come back, anyone could try to contact us, even . . . ”

But Jennifer cut her off. “Calm down, Ashley, she’s not attacking you personally. She’s just saying that this is how we have to study this.”

“But, what about—”

Now it was Raj who cut her off with a warning, “Ashley . . . ”

There was a tense moment of silence, and then Ashley, surprisingly, sat back in her chair and let it go.

“Anyway,” Sweeney went on, a little tentatively, “what people were seeking when they went to spiritualists wasn’t so much the actual contact with the departed as the comfort of knowing that the contact was possible. People sought to relieve guilt, to resolve unresolved emotions. The spiritualists became an important part of the American response to widespread death. Mourning jewelry—whether it was hair-work jewelry or a mourning scene—became the outward manifestation of these responses. The jewelry was as much about societal roles as it was about emotional response to death. Any questions?”

Usually, the class spent the last half hour or so of their time discussing Sweeney’s lecture, but today they didn’t have a lot to say, so Sweeney let them go early.

And as she walked back to her office, she wondered about Belinda Putnam and what her mourning jewelry had meant to her.