The Dark (43 page)

“And hardly any can claim
these
!” Leah tells Lizzie and twists a valve near the hallstand. A sconce hisses, then fires yellow. “You shall get accustomed to that gaseous odour, as we all have.”

“One can get accustomed to anything, Mother,” Lizzie says, and unpins her fashionable little man-hat, then smoothes the jacket bodice of her three-piece fit-out, which is all of duff silk and is also mannish, also most fashionable. Though, God and the Spirits, Leah thinks, why would any woman want to emulate a man?

“You do look wondrous fine, Elizabeth. I scarcely recognized you. You look so progressive.”

“Why, thank you. And what a colourful dress
you
have today. Is that orange? What does one slaughter to get that shade? And the embellishments, so very many, one can scarcely fathom the amount of fabrication required.” Lizzie looks impatiently upwards as she says this.

Apparently Lizzie left Bowman’s place in Illinois the moment she received Leah’s request. Leah is grateful, of course. Still, have all her former requests for Lizzie’s return not signified? Leah squashes this thought and does her best to impress her daughter. She shows her the ovoid mahogany table that seats up to twenty, the Belter suite of
furnishing that is upholstered all in matching red brocade, the étagère, the whatnot cabinet, the piano. “Not a Chittering grand like the Littles had, sweeting. But a true piano! Just as we always wanted!”

From outside the brownstone comes the rattle-clop of swank carriages. From inside comes a racket of birds. In the parlour three new cages hang by the window and house two budgerigars, two finches, a firebird, a thrush. Alone in his Ottoman temple, Vivace—Leah’s cherished Amazonian parrot—preens his green feathers and cackles as if crazed.

“Chatting to dead folks pays very well, then?” Lizzie asks, looking arch.

Leah swallows a sharp comment, a momentary fear. No, Lizzie would never slander them as damned Ruth Culver did. Ruth was a relation by marriage only. Lizzie is Leah’s only flesh and blood. Surely the girl would not have another outburst as she did at the sitting with Reverend Clarke those five years ago. In any case, Lizzie’s help at spirit sittings is not the help that Leah requires.

Leah hastens them to the reading room. Shows Lizzie the stacks of spiritualist journals:
Shekinah, The Spirit Messenger, The Banner of Light, The Spiritual Telegraph
. “Our dear Horace was the first to use the terms
Spiritualism
and
Spiritualist
. He’s come round since all that silliness with Ruth and with our dread enemy, that bray-mouthed Burr. Anywise, I like the terms very well. Foxist or Foxism would have been absurd. I must admit that.”

Lizzie agrees completely. She shows slightly more interest in Isaac’s book:
Voices From the Spirit World; Being Communication From Many Spirits
, by the Hand of Isaac Post, Medium. “Pity for Isaac. Was there not some criticism of this?”

“
Pity
for Isaac? Why do you say that? Imagine having a book published with your very name on the cover.”

“My imagination cannot stretch that far, Mother, as I’m sure you know. As for why I pity Isaac, well, because the critics weren’t terribly gracious, were they? Did they not say that the, hmm, famous dead, sounded all a piece? You know—Quakerish. And didn’t one reviewer remark it peculiar that Thomas Jefferson, that great speechifyer, would sound so wooden and so—what is the word?—
trite
?”

“So, Elizabeth Fish, you
have
been attending the writings about your loving family.”

“At times, Ma, at times.” Lizzy browses the shelves, exclaims in ill-concealed mockery: “Dear spirits, such authors! Let us see. Benjamin Franklin, Jefferson, Plato, Swedenborg, Andrew J. Davis. Have you read
all
these?”

Leah sniffs. “I think it only respectful to have their writings. Many of these fellows communicate during our circles, or I should say séances.”

Lizzie nearly drops Thomas Paine in surprise.

Leah tries a beseeching smile. “The French does have a nice ring. And the fashionable people do like foreign things. I always say how it was you, my beloved daughter, who minted the term. Oh, Lizzie, I am so grateful you have returned home! It shall be as it was, I know it.” Leah reaches to embrace her daughter, but her arms fall awkwardly short, Lizzie having turned away at the sound of a bell.

“Tell him I shall be up shortly,” Leah calls as Lizzie hurries off to see Calvin, who has miraculously transformed from a man stepping through death’s door to Leah’s invalid husband on the second floor.

“I suppose he must be sleeping now,” Leah says when Lizzie finally rejoins her in the parlour. “I shall visit him later.”

“He would like that,” Lizzie says flatly.

The two women settle on opposing chairs. Between them a fire burns low in its marbled keep. The birds sleep in their covered cages. Alfie serves tea, then fades off to bed. Lizzie hums while she works on an embroidery round. Was she always a hummer? Leah wonders. Honestly, the girl cannot carry a tune in a basket.

Leah says, “Our Katherina might be coming home sooner than expected from the Partridges’. The spirit of a yet another little boy keeps pushing on through, you see. Apparently he worked at the Partridge match factory when in the quick and now he is complaining incessantly about the conditions there.”

“He would complain, wouldn’t he, if the conditions killed him.”

Leah has to agree. Tries a new tack. “Tell me of Illinois, dear.”

Lizzie speaks as if reading a list. “The weather is lovely in spring and summer. There are many wildflowers about the main house. Pa’s
wife Charlotte does beautiful paintings of them. She taught me everything she knows about art. She can make anything look exactly real.”

“Wife? Do you not mean housekeeper?”

“They’re married,” Lizzie says firmly. “And Charlotte is very kind.”

“Kind? You honestly think her kind?”

“She
is
kind. Thinking has nothing to do with it.”

“I suppose your father often spoke of me.”

Lizzie bites off a thread. “I shouldn’t say often.”

“I suppose he said that I was such a foolish young thing when we married, barely more than a child, and that I had not an iota of sense, nor an iota of my, my duties.”

Lizzie humphs. “The only thing he ever said was that you terrified the living bejesus out of him.”

Leah can think of no rejoinder, is, in fact, oddly flattered. She watches her daughter stitch-stitching away, calm as a cat with a milk bowl. And here she had been such a wriggly infant, peevish at the breast. And then as a toddling child always pasted to Leah’s skirt as if Leah might be blown away by wind and circumstance. Does she recall how Leah doted on her? How she scrimped for her French lessons? Allowed her to listen in on Leah’s music lessons?

Like any modest woman, Leah has never mentioned the horrors of childbirth. Has certainly never mentioned to Lizzie that she came too soon, too quick. That Bowman ran for the midwife too late. Leah cut the cord herself with a fish-knife, then wrapped the squalling babe in a quilt. She had been told she would forget the pain of it all, the terror. What a load of poppycock that was. “No point in crying, my girl,” she said those years ago to baby Lizzie. “We’re alone and that is the way of it.”

Leah hefts a poker and prods the fire. She is not one to be still as a houseplant. Sparks fly over the low grating and onto Lizzie’s embroidery round.

“No! No!
Mon Dieu
! All that work!”

“Oh, here,” Leah says, and dabs the round with her hands, but the damage is done. The embroidered scene is of a royal court at Versailles and the Queen, old and stout, looks only the more ridiculous now that her ear has been burned away. About her the courtiers
and handmaidens look as mocking and resigned as courtiers the world over surely do, once the eyes of the monarch are askance.

Leah thrusts the embroidery back at Lizzie. “At least you could always earn your keep with a needle, my dear, if you don’t marry.”

Lizzie gathers her sewing basket and coldly says good-night. Leah longs to call her back. Why is it so easy to be gracious to clients and acquaintances, but to those she loves she is snappish, even unkind? Her father is to blame, Leah decides. He allowed her an impertinence that would have earned most children a proper whipping.

Now Calvin, on the other hand, never gets in a huff. He understands Leah’s burden of caring for them all. And he is happy to see her any time at all.

Calvin’s room is lit only by a banked fire. A greyness stirs near the window. It is man-sized but not a man: a form in slow flux. Leah starts back and stumbles on the rug. Whispers, “Calvin?”

No reply. Only creaking. Only a susurration that is not a human breathing, not a fire dying.

She is about to rush for Alfie, when the movement takes on sense: the velveteen drapery. It billows in front of the window, which is open, a young physician having advised that Calvin breathe outside air. Ridiculous advice in New York, but Calvin agreed it worth the try.

Leah hurries to close the sash. Calvin jolts awake. He is propped up so that his lungs can drain. The bucket on the floor shows little blood. His breathing is less hoarse than usual.

“Mrs. Brown!”

“Yes, I am arrived. I am here, Calvin.”

“Ah, you must be so pleased to see our Lizzie again. I’ve missed her these years. But you, you I miss every moment you are gone.”

“And I miss you.” She
has
missed him, the helpful young man ever at her side. She turns up the gas valve, brightening the room, then busies herself with the plumping of pillows, the emptying of the ashcan. The young physician also prescribed medicinal cigars and Calvin smokes three daily. It makes more work for Leah, but she does not complain.

She drops in a wing chair and lets escape a small sob.

“Why the tears, my heart?”

“I have not, not appreciated you. Nor Lizzie. I am a wretch of a mother. A terrible wife.”

Calvin chuckles. “And what sort of a husband am I, then, who is bedridden and needs such cosseting … but look!” He throws back the bedclothes.

“Calvin!”

“Leah. We’re married. It’s not improper.” He swings his thin legs onto the floor. Walks five steps to the window. Five steps back. “This is the second time today I’ve walked so. I am regrouping. My strength is returning. Those cigars are working like the a magic charm.”

“But this cannot do. Come back to bed. Here. Allow me …” She reaches out and Calvin pulls her into his arms. She cries his name. He cries out hers in answer, then attempts to kiss her, and on the lips.

She pushes him away to arm’s length. “Calvin! You are too weak for such, such things and it would drain you further. And … I thought, surmised, that this marriage was only to protect me, my name, that is.”

“Leah, you know I adore you!”

Leah becomes all briskness. Takes his thin hand and leads him back to bed, ignoring his spleeny looks. All this effort has cost him and he hacks blood into the bucket. She pats his back and bids him good-night and turns down the gas lights.

“One kiss?” he beseeches, fingers to his lips. “Only one, honour bright.”

“You need think of your recovery. Only that.”

He coughs into a handkerchief. “Bully, then, it’s not like it would kill you.”

Leah treads wearily down the hall. If Calvin recovers he will certainly force his husbandly rights. She thinks of Bowman Fish and his coffin-lid weight. She kept Bowman at bay for some time before he became forceful, though he was always contrite and sorrowing in the aftermath.

In her private room she undresses layer by layer until she is down to her chemise and pantalettes. She cannot abide being fully naked and barely tolerates her weekly bath. She recalls the Corinthian
Hall investigations when she and Maggie were stripped and stood before strangers. She hid her terror and humiliation then for Maggie’s sake alone.

She burrows under the quilts and wonders how other women endure sexual congress. Perhaps they become blasé and study the ceiling rose. Oh, she has heard there is some comfort, even pleasure, in such physical closeness. But there is precious little comfort in dying in childbirth, or in putting child after child in the grave. She must remind Maggie and Katie of this. Lizzie as well.

I will make a far better widow than a wife, she thinks before sleep takes her.

“W
here have you been?” my patient asked this day. She had just stirred awake.

“Where? Why, right here, duck, I’ve been here forever. You were elsewhere, mind, dreaming on about some other place.”

“I don’t dream.”

“Don’t dream? That’s chalk and nonsense. Everyone dreams. And you were tossing about like a skiff at sea, duck, and amutter besides. If that is not evidence of dreaming, my name isn’t Alvah June Mellon.”

“Fine to that, but I only see fragments. My dreams don’t unfold like a story, not even a muddled one. They’re alike fragments, or a tableau, though they
do
move a jot … thus perhaps more alike a cosmorama, a fancy one that shifts when you view it through a keyhole.”

“I’ve never been one for entertainments nor—”

“And dreams don’t mean anything. Interpreting them is alike pulling hankies from the air, like an illusionist does.” She plucked at her bed jacket, her little hands looking very pale against the fabric’s deep bishop’s blue. “I muttered? About what?”

I smoothed out my cover-all. I was pleased with its design of stars and rays. “You muttered about Elisha. And thus you may as well tell me more about him, and this grand romance you shared.”