The Dark (26 page)

Men. That Man. Leah’s hands ache for the keys, as they do when she is troubled. She goes over and sits at the suite’s fine parlour organ. The brass wall lamps are still aburn and give off that sweet and tenuous odour of spermaceti oil. She touches the foot bellows, then a chord. Sings the most popular song on Broadway these days,
The Rochester Knockings at Barnum’s Hotel
.

The girls call out, “Not again!”

A knock at the door; they fall quiet.

Alfie answers the knock, doorman being one of his many tasks these days. The door opens on George Willets, gusting with excitement, his ginger hair dark with perspiration. He heaves a bulging carry-all onto the centre table.

Mother takes his arm. “George, we were getting worried. Weren’t we? You’ve been gone all the day.” She and the girls crowd around him, cooing with excitement. Leah slips the cover over the organ keys. Alfie retreats to his ledgers.

“Now did you ever think? Did you?” Mother cries as she pulls a handkerchief from the carry-all. The handkerchief is bannered with the words:
The Strange Rochester Knockings
and is imaged with the dead pushing open doors to the living world, the living beckoning them on.

Leah saunters over. Picks out an earthen mug. On it a ghost hovers over a table of sitters who stare, not at the ghost, but at a girl with dark braids. She is saucer-eyed, woefully thin. Katie peers at it also. Giggles. “You reckon that’s me, Leah? I look ghastly! I look fit for a coffin myself.”

Mother says, over and over, “Did you ever think? Did you ever imagine?” She pulls out one souvenir after another. The pie plate makes Leah laugh outright. The plate is engraved so that each slice of a pie will reveal more of the story. In this slice a man is dying, now he is coffined, now buried, now he rises as a ghost alongside the Fox sisters three while his wife gapes in either joy or vexation at his return; it is difficult to tell, the engravings being so crude.

Calvin sets the mug and pie plate and handkerchief aside the souvenirs already on the sideboard: a plaque, a pin cushion, and Leah’s favourite—a small book that when flipped through shows the events at Hydesville as if the figures are moving inside the covers: first a shadowed figure slashes the peddler’s throat with a butcher’s knife, next this same shadowed figure buries him in the cellar floor, now the little Fox girls are hearing the peddler’s tap-tapping on a gloomy night. The book is a small marvel. Static pictures made animate. Yet, realizes Leah, Maggie and Katie looked at it but once, then proclaimed it cheap dross.

These souvenirs will be added to the gifts for their kin back in Arcadia. These gifts include: a gold-embossed bible for their father,
a French linen apron for Maria, embroidered red suspenders for David and a filigreed apple-press for his wife, Beth. For Lizzie in distant Illinois Leah has personally bought a sketching folio; in a recent letter Lizzie revealed she has taken to sketching and that her subjects, as she stressed, are rendered exactly as they appear.

“George?” Leah calls. “Tell me you purchased a shawl for Ruth?”

In answer George hangs a paisley shawl round his head, to general merriment. Even Alfie, helping himself to the punch, gives his lipless smile.

“But it’s so costly? Isn’t it?” Mother asks.

“Consider it a consolation gift,” Leah says. “You know how it irks Ruth that she has no talent for mediumship, the green-eyed sourpuss.”

“That’s because she gives even dead people the willies,” Maggie says. She is hunting through the newspapers. “Now, wherever did I put it … Ah, here it is. Here! The poem. Not precisely Byronish, but …”

Katie reads over Maggie’s shoulder. Chimes into the recitation:

Maggie and Katie curtsy at Leah.

“I think it pitch-perfect. It rhymes very nicely,” Leah says, and watches Alfie place the takings into a padlocked box. She reflects on
how Horace Greeley was dismayed at the price she charges, how he advised her to charge five dollars a head to keep the rabble away. But Leah insisted that a dollar a head was sufficient. The spirits commanded the price, she told him. She would trust in them and trust in Providence, though privately she reasoned that in New York a dollar was spent with a shrug. But five? People would expect the saints themselves for that.

Alfie pockets the padlock key, then trudges back to his desk. Even without seeing the ledger Leah knows the final tally of the takings on this day, August 28th, 1850: ninety-eight clients at a dollar per head. Ten private clients at fifteen dollars a head. Total: two-hundred and forty-eight dollars. An astounding sum that will be just as astoundingly spent on dresses and fripperies, on outings, on the hotel. Her young sisters, in particular, spend money like regular heiresses. Margaretta cannot get enough of the Bowery theatres. Katherina of embroidered anything. And everyone must have their share: Alfie and Calvin, and young George Willets when he is about, and her mother (though, granted, her needs are few). And some money must be sent to David for the support of their father, who is still hammering on his house in Arcadia and who does not know, of course, that the money is from Leah. Thus, the busy schedule: sittings for thirty people, sometimes more, are held at 10 a.m., 5 p.m., and 8 p.m. The private sittings happen between those times and late in the evenings. It astonishes Leah how they can all stay upright, laughing and talking into the advanced hours. Calvin, in fact, is laughing so hard at the moment at some witticism of Maggie’s that he doubles over with a spluttery cough and needs to wipe his lips on a souvenir handkerchief.

Leah says, “Horace has asked again that we visit with him, and soon. He has a particular fondness for Katherine.” She puts her hand on Katie’s arm. “He has asked you to stay for the autumn and has even offered to pay for your education. And so you must do your best by him and Mary, my dear. They have five or six dead babes—I forget—but their boy Pickie is the one they would most like to contact, he being the only one old enough to chat, I presume.”

“Wouldn’t he want to talk to Miss Fuller too?” Maggie asks, her face scrunched in worry. “She’d be grievous hard for Kat to raise. I mean, that lady knew things … about everything.”

“I know things!”

“Girls!” Leah calls to head off the bickering. “No spirit can be raised who does not wish to be, not even from Neptune’s depths, where that poor Miss Fuller now resides. Margaretta you know this. Now, Katherina, what do you say to abiding with the Greeleys?”

“Can Mag come?”

“For a time, yes, until you are at ease there.”

“Why is it always me, me and me again?” Katie grumbles.

“Because you’re the best, aren’t you, lamb?” Mother says.

“Indeed,” Leah agrees. “And Horace is a man of great influence and power. He believes in us, and is not blinded by snobbery like some other editors. He is on our side. We must do what we can to keep him there. Think of others, for once, Katherina.”

“All I ever do is think of others,” Katie sighs.

“Pish, Leah,” Maggie says. “You only like him because he said that you were a lady of twenty-five.”

“An easy enough mistake,” Calvin says. Leah smiles in agreement. She feels a tug on her sleeve, looks down. A boy porter has slipped into their suite. He holds a bouquet near the size of himself. “From an admirer, Mrs. Fish,” he says gravely.

Leah frowns and studies the bouquet. The daffodils and bellflowers signify regard, yes, but the thorn-apple blossom? That signifies disguise. The begonia, beware. The clematis both artifice and ingenuity. Thus it is a puzzling, contradictory message. But clearly some kind of warning. Even a threat. Leah snaps off the begonia and drops it in the wastebasket. Then gathers herself. “My heavenly word, that porter was so charming in his little uniform. Calvin, did you tip him well?”

Calvin claims he did.

“Honestly, there are so many funny children in this city,” Leah continues. “The bootblacks with their cigars, oh, they look so comic. And that parade of orphans we saw. All so neat and clean and wistful. I do so love children because—”

“They’re so obedient,” Calvin interrupts, looking proud to know her mind.

“No, no, it is because—”

“They’re so … callow, that’s the word,” Maggie puts in, with that sly smile of hers.

“No, it is because—”

“Ah, because they’re innocents who so need our patience and protection, don’t they?” This from Mother, and in all seriousness.

“I know,” Katie says. “It’s because they’re so dainty and sweet that folks just want to eat them up.” She frowns, adds, “Poor things, I’d hate to be eaten.”

“Allow me to finish,” Leah says in her strongest, attend-me voice. She has decided to enjoy this teasing exchange; it does take her mind from the threats around every corner, from That Man, who no doubt sent Those Flowers. She says loudly, “I love children because they are small.”

“Small?” Katie echoes, and grins and makes an inch-size with her fingers.

“Not that small, my lamb, small like General Tom Thumb. How I should love to steal him from his cruel taskmaster, that Phineas T. Bunkum. Just pop him in my carpet bag. And off!”

Laughter and giggles. And something else. A sandy rattle. Leah turns around. “What is it, Alfie? Are the books not squaring?”

“They’re good. Tallied and squared, yes. I thought … I’m retiring, is all.”

“Good night, then,” Leah says, puzzled. It is almost as if he wished to join them. “Alfie!” she calls.

He turns. “Yes?”

“Are you going straight off?”

“No, no. I can stay up a time and—”

“How grand. Then do double-check the takings-box, there’s a dear.”

“S
O THAT IS THE TRICK OF IT
. I am amazed!” I exclaimed.

“The trick of what? What do you mean?”

“The kinetoscope. The moving daguerreotype? You pay a nickel, and there you are, peering into a box, the past illumined and all amove. Now don’t look a puzzle-wit. You mentioned the souvenir
book. Flip it and the pictures become animate. It is the selfsame trick as the kinetoscope, that is all.”

“Not magic?” my patient asked, wide-eyed, mimicking an innocent.

“Oh, you are a one. No, not magic. As well you know.”

“But still astounding. Still intriguing.”

“Yes, very,” I agreed.

My patient tapped her fingers together for a nonce, then mused, “That makes me wonder: Did Chauncey disbelieve in magic? Or did he merely think it a paltry second cousin to human ingenuity? If so, then is that why he so wanted to find us out—to uncover and comprehend our ingenuity? Our downfall would result, but perhaps he didn’t see that as the worst thing that could happen to us, and perhaps he was right.”

“I don’t know about all that, duck,” I said, and gathered out my knitting (she seemed all-set to talk). “But I suppose I will.”

C
HAUNCEY RAISES HIS FISTS
as the bowling pins topple with an almighty clatter. Five pins. Eight. The pin-boy rushes to set them up. Chauncey takes up another ball, big as a cannon ball, white as a skull. Behind him is a phalanx of gilded mirrors, above are chandeliers the size of sea-skiffs, and all about are brass cuspidors that rattle away as men spit tobacco and try to best one another with turns of wit, tales of valour, boasts of seduction. The sound of this talk is as restful to Chauncey’s mind as seaside waves. Unlike the sound of Heman’s voice.

“I dunno, Chaunce. Like I said. I dunno and I’m not convinced besides. Why not restart the mesmeric shows? Got folks laughing. I heard them. Give up on those women, they’re getting us nowhere. And we’re broke besides.”

“Bloodyo laughed, did they!” Chauncey declares, and studies the bowling ball in his hand. Heman backs up. Chauncey, however, is not considering bashing in his brother’s scarce brains. He is considering the “spirit” sitting he attended at Barnum’s Hotel several weeks past. He went incognito, as a labouring-sailor sort. None
recognized him, although Leah Fox Fish slid him suspicious glances, spying out a doubter, no doubt.