The Dark (58 page)

“Don’t claim to know, Beth,” he says at last, “but I’m guessing the Good Lord has his reasons. I’m gonna pray now. We all should.”

T
he walk-up was hard going this day, and I so stopped on the tenth-floor landing to catch my breath. I steadied myself against the wall, felt the cracks, the peeling plaster, the grave-damp of poverty. The tenement reeked, as always, of sewage pipes, onions, cabbages, piss. I heard a child crying, a dog yapping, and a muted argument cycling through accusations of betrayal and want.

I sat down on the step and set the gin bottle aside me. It was near empty.

To explain: I had not uttered my son’s name—August—for many years. And uttering it—that is, reading the same name aloud from Kane’s book, well, it had brought him back utterly.

“We’re on the side of justice,” was what my August said before he left to join the Union Army. By that time my August owned eighteen years. He was strung-tall and rackety-limbed and homely in parts (I admit) and he blinked too often, as if in constant aghastment at the cruelties in the world. Still, he had an arresting grace.

I had a hundred discouragements to him joining. They made no difference. He was stone-wall stubborn, as the truly good often are. I refused him my blessing. I was that mad. I just watched, arms akimbo, as the green horizon folded him up. When I came to my senses and ran after him he was gone, gone, gone.

Mr. Mellon rolled his mean, piggy eyes. “Ah, let the weepy fool go save them darkies,” he said. He would have said more but
something in my glance stopped him, murder to be frank.

I waited and waited for a letter to tell me where he was. And one arrived, yes, but that Mr. Mellon kept it from me until it was too late. When I found the letter I was so enraged I thwacked Mr. Mellon with a hot pan (I was cooking eel stifle at the time). He dropped and did not move, not even when I shook him. I left that very hour for Bull Run. No sign of Mr. Mellon dead or alive when I returned to the cottage some weeks later, nor have I seen him since.

The letter Mr. Mellon hid from me, out of jealousy and spite, is tucked into a side pocket of my satchel. I keep it with me always, like a talisman. And like any talisman I hold it often, though I surely know it off of heart.

“Gather yourself, Alvah June. Look presentable. Look brisk,” I said, and stood and then huffed up the last storeys.

My patient began her narrative straightaway upon my entering, as if I had not even left.

M
AGGIE LATCHES THE DOOR
softly behind her. When the Greeleys lived here the room had been the nursery for their five (or was it six?) dead babes. It has been shut up for years. No one enters anymore except Maggie. Not even the maid, a sturdy Nantucket girl. She wouldn’t, even if Maggie allowed it.

“That thing in there!” this maid exclaims. Excessive, is the general opinion; shudders and perplexity, the general reaction. A closet shrine to the dead is one thing; a whole room quite another. Leah would nag constantly about this, which is another reason Maggie has chosen not to stay at her sister’s brownstone. Leah has no sympathy for Maggie’s determined grieving, unlike their father, who has been nothing
but
helpful since he moved here to the Greeleys’ town-home. No one could fault his attention to the gas lights and candle-trimming; and when Thomas Kane came to bribe Maggie out of Elisha’s love letters, and with a puny insult of a sum, what did Maggie’s father do? He shoved Thomas out the door as if Thomas were a petty bill collector, a sight that almost made Maggie laugh again.

Maggie shuts the black bombast drapes against a slip of light. She has sold the more frivolous of her jewellry to buy not only these drapes, but also the black candelabra that sits on the black-draped table. Displayed on this table are Elisha’s “white gifts”—the lace handkerchiefs, the Honiton-lace undersleeves, the fox stole, the silk cape, and the white diamond bracelet from Tiffany’s coiled there in a velvet-lined box. Also displayed are newspaper clippings detailing his exploits, maps of his journeys, copies of elegies, and two black-framed daguerreotypes of Elisha-when-alive. One shows him in his explorer’s furs, rifle in hand; another as a beardless man of twenty. But, alas and such, no daguerreotype of the Elisha-when-dead, not one of him in his coffin nor propped in an armchair. Maggie does not even have a death mask of her beloved. No
memento mori
at all. But at least Father Quinn, her confessor, has helped her to purchase something close.

She strikes a lucifer and lights the candles. Blinks to stop the flames from dancing so oddly. She drank perhaps more of good Dr. Bayard’s laudanum medicine than she should have. She often does.

I will cease it all soon, she vows, and kneels on her black stool, her widow’s weeds stiff and heavy in the spring warmth. She feels alike a black bauble suspended on a heavy chain, unable to swing this way or that. Is she a true widow or not? She and Elisha had indeed vowed themselves to each other. But no minister blessed their marriage ceremony. No papers recorded it. And what to make of their peculiar, bloodless consummation? For love to be consummated there had to be blood. Didn’t there? Consummated? Or is the word “consumed”? She conjures Elisha. He stands over her, his torso candle pale, his trousers buttoned fast. He presses her hands there. From behind Elisha, the peddler leers. He is as ugly as Elisha is handsome. He shows his member. He curses her again: “You’ll die alone and ranting for your lies, you hoyden bitch.”

Maggie presses her fists to her forehead. The image thankfully recedes.

Does Elisha wander Purgatory? she wonders now. That grey place between Heaven’s light and Perdition’s dark? Such is the place for questioning souls. And if Elisha should attain Heaven, will he be
happy there? He joked he wouldn’t be. All that stasis, all that dull perfection. He said he would prefer that his soul seep into her skin.

Maggie wills her breath quiet. Elisha will speak to her if she is quiet. Patient. Still. He will send her a message from the beyond or wherever, and in one of his clever little codes. She must simply attend. And then he will utter her name. Then he will make a clear declaration to his family, the world. Come soon, she thinks, else I’ll vanish inside these weeds, leave only a black puddle of crepe and tears for the maid to scrub off the damned floor.

Maggie looks to the side wall, up and up, the dreadful image there giving her comfort and a sense of substance, as always. Now she rearranges the objects on the table, polishes a frame with her sleeve, polishes harder and harder in her frustration. She has again been denied a way out, again her inentions have been thwarted and denied. She was set to leave behind the spirit sittings, the ghost talkings. Become a wife and mother. She would have been happy with an honest life. Katie would have come to live with her and Elisha, would have found a husband and another life as well.

She approaches the far wall. The tortured Christ looks down at her from his cross. The rendering is macabre even by papist standards. Blood sheets his face and body; thick nails split his palms and feet; heavy thorns gouge his head and brow. And such an expression on his gaunt handsome face: of agony and resignation. The wood carving is twice the height of Elisha, but the resemblance, well, it is undeniable.

“Do forgive me,” she pleads. “I will find a way to make it all right. I promise.”

“W
as it not terribly remarkable, Alvah? That we invented this religion, if you could call it that, and in such an accidental fashion withal. The séances, the spirit boards, the spirit writing and spirit cabinets, the hundreds of Spiritualist Societies, the uncounted mediums and charlatans, the endless hope and yearning, and all invented out of that little lonesome house after a long dull winter, and by children, playing as they oughtn’t, the hobgoblins.”

“Inventions? Discoveries? Well, what about Bell’s telephone? It’s trustier than any old medium. And what of that special paper, nice and soft, and only for the wiping of one’s ass. And tabulators, and zipper-thingos. Now a lady can undress herself, snap-quick.” I hefted my tumbler of gin. She hefted hers of laudanum.

I added. “And let’s not forget the damned Gatling guns and howitzers. Such swell new inventions.” I picked up my gin bottle from the nightstand and in doing so knocked over her pot of handcream, the one I had brought for her a time back:
Mrs. Howe’s Neroli and Rose Miracle Hand Cream
. Miracle? Now there was a thrown-about word. Anywise, she had yet to use the cream by what I could tell. I set it back on the night table.

“What were we chatting about then, Maggie, dear?”

“Inventions unbounded.”

L
EAH’S NEW-HIRED MAID
, Susie, fastens Leah’s underpetticoat, then fastens six more petticoats atop that. Leah still prefers petticoats to give her skirts volume. She will never take-up these new-fangled crinolines of whale-bone and metal. What reputable woman would have her legs dangling inside a hooped-out skirt like the tongue of a bell?

Susie sets one of Leah’s séance gowns on a dress pole, then climbs the stepladder. Leah holds her arms up stiff and straight. These séance gowns are of shadow-grey, ash-grey, cloud-grey—all the better to fade into dim-lit rooms. And though drab, these dresses are beautifully tailored, the pockets invisible, the hems of perfect length.

She surveys herself in a looking glass, or a “mirror” as they are called now; it is a costly one, with no warping or mist. “Susie, dear, would you say I appear younger than forty-three years?”

“Oh, yes, ma’am, years younger.”

Leah sighs. Sometimes it seems a curse that she can always spot a lie.

She dismisses Susie and opens her supply chest and takes out her jar of lard, her special-made gloves. Now why did Alfie have to up and die? She never had to worry about dealing with her supplies before. Leah was the one who found Alfie in the outside privy, his trousers around his ankles—a most unfortunate discovery that. A watercloset had been installed inside the brownstone, but Alfie considered voiding inside a house unwholesome. He was slumped in the privy all through Sunday, his day off, and most of Monday; it was only then anyone noticed his absence.

Now Leah must do everything her own self. She must even deal with that sin-ugly Mr. Pettifew on her own. Generally Pettifew supplies her by post, but at times she cannot avoid patronizing his shop, which has moved several times, growing larger and more difficult to find on each occasion.

She reaches deeper in the supply chest and eases out the stoppered canister of phosphorous, her hands all larded and gloved—she does not wish to glow green like those “phossies” who make make matches for a living. And what had Alfie said about phosphorous igniting? She should have written it down. And, honestly, why had she agreed to go out for this sitting? The spirits are always more co-operative in her own home. Ah, but George Willets and his wife
are of this circle and Leah is still grateful to him for standing fast with her against the rioters at Corinthian Hall those ten years ago. And this circle pays very well, and Leah, like everyone, always has need of money.