The Dark (27 page)

What ho did that minx of a Fox Fish made of my bouquet? Chauncey wonders. He sent it to her at Barnum’s Hotel just after that sitting. Spent an age choosing the flowers and deciding on a message. Surely Leah gleaned that, although she must beware, he, the disguised sender, had the highest regard for her ingenuity, her beguiling person, her glints of passion—but then, Chauncey well knows that the passions of women can equal those of men, if only fired aright.

Chauncey hurls the ball down the polished alley. It thuds into the gutter. Nearby a three-piece ensemble starts up. The players are all coloured men: a fiddler, a banjo-player, a grey-bearded man with a tambourine. The grey-beard has a club foot, and his one shoe is engineered to conceal the deficiency. Chauncey watches him for a nonce.

“Their music sounds fair and the like,” Heman says. “Like good. Didn’t I always say you should pick up a banjo or a … trumpet.”

“What for, Hemano, to stuff in your fucko trap? Best keep it shut.”

Heman obliges and Chauncey considers again this “séance” he attended.
Séance
, that’s what Leah Fox Fish called it, as if the Frenchifying gave it credibility. Certainly there were vibrations, Chauncey allows. Certainly there were knocks that sounded as if on the ceiling and floor. And certainly there were thrilled expressions from those chosen from the crowd. All eyes were on these chosen as they shone in momentary fame. The spirits guessed at the past, gave solace, offered a smattering of advice. Inane, all of it. Not a word or idea a man could sink his teeth into. And how he wanted to sink his teeth into Leah Fox Fish. She was better rounded than when he had first beheld her at the Corinthian Hall. More imperious than ever. And her art was more refined. Indeed, the woman could write the damnedo manual. First: Put hand solicitously on client’s arm. Second: Gaze as if no one else exists. Third: Nod as if you have unbounded sympathy for their quotidian tragedies. Fourth: Speak in a low-toned trill. Last, and most importantly: Tell your clients only what they want to hear. Repeat with each client until your coffers are the envy of King Midas.

Chauncey asked not a single question. Said not a word. No easy task, but he prevailed. He forced his attention only on the sounds. Rat-a-tat. Thud. Not from the hands. No. The sisters were not snapping their fingers as he had supposed. How could they when they are forever gripping the sweaty palms of whoever was seated next to them? Chauncey dropped his pipe and then a key, a copper token, as if unable to contain his astonishment. A quick peering under the table. No clacking devices were in view. The sisters’ skirts swept to the ground, even when they were seated.

Chauncey comes out of his thoughts as the three-piece ensemble starts on an allegro tune. All three players tap their feet, although the tambourine player has only to shift his club foot a short space to give out a resonate thud.

At the sitting Chauncey had noticed the youngest sister, Katherina, as Leah Fox Fish called her, shake out her skirts, as young women so delightfully do when first donning long dresses. He had glimpsed her shoes: graceless, heavy shanked things, a tad overlarge.

The
toes
. Not the fingers. They’re snapping their damnedo toes!

Chauncey hurls the bowling ball. It glides alongside the gutter and knocks over near every pin. He raises his fists. “Eureka, eh, Hemano! So says Archimedes and so say I.”

“A
nd Chauncey was right?” I asked my patient, though I had guessed the answer.

“Oh, yes. Eureka,” she said, at which there came a loud tap-rap. It seemed to come from beneath the bed, the bedclothes even. She looked at the three linked windows of the garret, and I did also, and the raps sounded again, though now they seemed to emanate from there.

“A genial magic,” I said, and wondered how anyone could have thought it otherworldly, or anything more than the rattle-clack of one’s skeleton in a room. “However did you keep it up?”

“We didn’t ‘keep it up,’ ” she answered, all-tetchy. “The secret became its own creation. I’ve said that. Have I not? It took on its own life, as golems do, after the right incantations are said. Or that monster out of Mrs. Shelley’s novel, after the right amount of electricity was applied.”

I asked her then if it was not a dreary thing to be ever surrounded by ghosts, monsters, golems, call them ever what you will, if it did not give her pause? She did not answer exactly, but began to talk about the Greeleys’ house, or “Castle Doleful,” and what she came to understand while visiting there.

M
AGGIE PEERS OUT
the carriage window as they draw up to the Greeleys’ home on Turtle Bay. The house is not far outside of New York, but might as well be in the western regions of the country, Maggie thinks, what with the autumn-fired woods all about, the bay aglitter and empty of boats. The house is good-sized but plain in its lines and as sparsely ornamented as any factory or school.

“I’m real glad you can stay a while, Mag,” Katie whispers as Horace Greeley steps out of the carriage to hand them both down. “I don’t like fetching up spirits on my lonesome.”

“I know,” Maggie sighs. Leah has allowed her to accompany Katie to the Greeleys’ but she can only stay for two weeks. Then she must be back in Rochester to assist Leah at the sittings there.

“You’d think Leah doesn’t want us being alone together,” Katie said before they left. “As if we’ll think up our own plans or something.”

“That’s not the case,” Maggie replied, but thought, Of course, that’s it exactly.

“Miss Maggie? Miss Katie?” Horace peers into the carriage. “Come, please. Mary waits for us.” As she does, and on the veranda.

“About laggardly time you arrived” is what Mary Greeley says straight after the introductions. She wears a creased mourning fit-out of dullest bombast, and a nightcap though it is midday. Her skin is sallow, her hair tattered from overwashing, and her nose spidered with lines. Unhappiness wafts off her, along with the smells of camphor and lanolin. Maggie has met her sort aplenty by now. People who wear their misery like a badge, who make mourning a full-time occupation. Still, Maggie suspects this woman will take the biscuit.

“Is my Pickie here?” Mary cries. “Is he? Horace, you said these girls can talk to him. You said that.”

Horace gives a resigned shrug.

Maggie says, “He needs … needs time to feel at ease with us, ma’am. Spirits can’t be hurried so much.”

“Oh, that’s it, is it?” Mary’s eyes dart suspiciously over Maggie’s head, and then Katie’s, as if they are the forerunners of an ambush. She says, “Horace! Talk to the cook. She scalded the beans. I can’t abide scalded beans. You know I can’t.”

Horace nods and moves off gratefully.

“Come, don’t dilly-dally, you two,” Mary says. “I’ll show you Pickie’s favourite places. You need pay rapt attention.”

Maggie assures her they will.

Mary shows them the tree where Pickie loved to play smash-the-ants, the stair where he carved his name five times and which Mary cannot allow to be sanded over, not ever. Now she leads them through the wide hall. “And he dismantled this all on his own.” She points to a grandfather clock, plain as a pauper’s coffin, with a smashed casing and broken pendulum. “He was so curious. He could have been an engineer and made proper monuments. He wasn’t going to scribble for the rabble like his father does. I was going to send him to school. I was. Don’t let Horace tell you different. But I wanted to wait. Such influences at schools. Children of farmers and hack drivers and blacksmiths and, oh, other incorrigible sorts.”

“Blacksmiths?” Maggie says, thinking of her father at his forge. She smiles quick at Katie. “My, but their children are the most grievous incorrigibles.”

“Ghastly,” Katie agrees.

Mary shows them round every nook and cranny of her house. Pickie this. Pickie that. Mentions Ida, her toddling daughter, who is living with kin until she is a more manageable age. She halts up. “Will Ida outlive me? Can you know that? Her at least?”

Katie casts Maggie a nervous glance.

“We’re sorry,” Maggie says. “We don’t know anything about what’s to come. That’s for Gypsy sorts.”

Mary humphs, pushes open a door. “And this is Pickie’s bedroom.”

The bed is rumpled as if he had just risen. His few toys are still set on a shelf. His few clothes still hang on a peg-rail. Poor boy, Maggie thinks, and feels the dread tug of pity. Imagine being stuck here all day with this horrid woman, in this horrid house. For Pickie’s room, though plain, is the most adorned room in the Greeley house, has striped wallpaper, some soft white linens, a red rocking horse. Elsewhere the linens are a coarse brown, the furniture of plain workmanship. Maggie counts only three cushions, four simple pictures, a single braided rug. In all there is a sense of bankruptcy, as if everything lovely and unnecessary
for life has been sold. But the Greeleys aren’t bankrupt. They aren’t even poor. Horace makes buckets of money. Maggie is sure of it.

“We’re Grahamites,” Mary explains, as they sit down to black bread, raw vegetables and boiled, tepid water.

Maggie looks at her meal. You’re lunatics, she thinks.

“We met at Mr. Graham’s boarding house,” Horace explains. “Mary and I.” He tells how this Mr. Sylvester Graham sees health as a category of science. Vigorous exercise. No stimulants or alcohol. Plain food. No fripperies about the house to distract the mind.

“You’ll get accustomed to it,” Mary adds.

Maggie, sawing at her bread, doubts that very much.

Horace turns to Katie, “The academy we’ve selected for you is not far off and it is most reputable. You will learn the ladies’ arts—dancing, French, composition and so forth. You might become a writer like our dear Miss Fuller.”

Mary says, “And you’ll come back here right after school. No dilly-dallying or talking to the other girls. Pass the water, Horace.”

“We shall, of course, have to give you another name, Miss Katie. You’re too celebrated now. Have you thought of a name?”

“A different name. Like in a play?” Maggie puts in. She lifts a carrot. Is she to chomp on it like a horse might? She is already yearning for some blood pudding, tripe with ketchup, a glass of claret or champagne, or a toddy. Katie drinks her water, looking all-perplexed. She surely longs for a proper refreshment, too, Maggie knows. I mean, who ever drinks water?

“Yes, exactly, like a play, Miss Maggie,” Horace says patiently.

Katie frowns. “It just seems really devious, doesn’t it? I don’t know if I could carry it off. I’d have to pay attention all the time or something.”

“Oh, fush,” Mary said. “It wouldn’t do if everyone knew you were here. We’d be mobbed by unprogressives. Think of other people, not just yourself, girl.”

“All I ever do is think about other people,” Katie says with a sniffle. It has become her new refrain, Maggie realizes.

Horace puts his hand over Katie’s. “What of Sarah? That was our dear Margaret Fuller’s true, given name.” He looks at Maggie. “Margaret wouldn’t do, as that is your name.”

Maggie agrees it is.

Mary says, “That would suffice, I suppose. I do miss our Margaret, even if she was often so difficult and so masculine in her intellect. Well, you shall take her place, Katherine Fox.”

“Me?” Katie says.

“Katie?” Maggie says.

Horace puts down his fork. “No one can take the place of Margaret Fuller. No one. It is a tribute, merely. Does Sarah suit, then? Miss Katie?”

“I reckon so. I mean, yes,”

Why does Katie have to be someone else? Maggie wonders. And then straightaway regrets the thought. She’d heard how bereft Horace was after the death of this Margaret Fuller, heard how the ship ran aground in a storm, in view of American shores, in view of the salvagers who watched the ship list and crack. None helped. Miss Fuller, her dashing Italian husband, their babe. Gone. Gone. Gone. The papers were chock full with the woeful story. Maggie found it dreadfully romantic, and even more so when she read Miss Fuller and her “husband” had not been properly married. Indeed, Maggie thinks now, the tale is as romantic and tragic and drama-filled as any in a novel.

Of a sudden Mary fixes her lunatic eyes on her husband. “You’re slopping, Horace, you incorrigible slob. Is he here yet? Pickie? Pickie? … Horace, you said these girls talked to him. You promised so!” Mary holds her knife as if to plunge it into Horace’s heart.

Poor Horace, Maggie thinks, just as knocks patter along the table.

With one accord Horace and Mary drop their cutlery and cry out with joy.

In the days that follow Maggie and Katie bring forth Pickie again and again. He is not a difficult spirit to have about. His observations of the world beyond are uncomplicated, given his age of eight. His demands are all reasonable: some cider in the house, some cooked food, some rest for everyone.

Mary Greeley is insatiable, however. Pickie must be about every minute. Often Mary weeps and begs Pickie’s forgiveness for a whipping on this occasion or that. Pickie always gives it, because Pickie,
Maggie knows, only wants his crack-brained mother to leave him be. Once, when Pickie is reluctant to talk, Mary screams at Horace, “He won’t manifest because of you. You berated him when he came into your study. You told him to get out. As if your endless scribblings matter at all.”