The Dark (73 page)

“D
ANDY-FINE,”
Maggie says after listening to Katie’s cajolery for a good hour. “I’ll come, but I’m only attending to make certain it really is Her Fatness in that coffin. And to make certain she’s buried a good six feet down. I suppose a stake through the heart is too much to ask.”

“It is,” Katie says, and sniffles.

“You can’t be crying. Oh, the good grief, Kat, you do recall she sent you to prison. The Tombs? I surely do. It’s like I was locked up with you. And she did try to steal your children.”

Katie wipes her eyes. “You make her sound so awful and mean. Like some troll or that witch with the candy house.”

“Her? No, she got stuffed into an oven. That wasn’t Leah’s fate, was it?”

Katie reminds Maggie of the grand times the three of them had once. How she and Maggie delighted in Leah’s flattery of their skills. How Leah was loyal in her way. And how, really, their lives had been extraordinary because of her.

“Well, yes.”

Maggie and Katie arrive dressed in white, like all the other “celebrants.”
Life is but a transition! Happy are the dead!
They are both heavily veiled so as not to be recognized, there being a good few celebrants who consider them traitors to Spiritualism. To Leah. Not to mention to all the living, and all the dead.

They sit at a pew in the back. No other members of the family are in attendance. David wrote that they would hold their own service in Arcadia. Amy, family by association, died a year ago. And Lizzie? Lizzie is in Paris with her husband. Who knows if she even received the telegram announcing Leah’s death?

Maggie peers through her veil. The other celebrants become white-shifting forms, their talk disembodied. They have become, indeed, the same old whom-evers.

“Our poor Leah,” a scratch-voiced woman says. “I heard that she was terribly afflicted with melancholy this last year. And she constantly imagined hands against her. That insistence of hers that the Hydesville cellar be dug up again, I—”

“Oh, Leah roared and railed at me about that too,” interrupts a woman with a singsong voice.

“Was it the peddler again?” asks a woman in a superior tone. “He is giving Lazarus a run for his money.”

“Mr. Hyde wasn’t having it. He’s had ruckus and riot aplenty with that house,” puts in Singsong.

“Besides, that cellar has already been dug to China, my dears,” says Superior-Tone. “All that will turn up now are relics of Noah’s flood.”

As which there is chuckling—yes, chuckling at a funeral.

Maggie whispers to Katie, “Leah wanted the cellar dug up again. Why-ever?”

Katie shifts, nearly slides off the pew. “I dunno. She kept saying may-hap they missed something, those years ago. She said they didn’t dig up all of the cellar or check, say, the walls. Fuss-it, did you bring a flask?”

“No, we can last, Kat. You had enough brandied coffee this morning.”

Scratch-Voice says, “Our Leah was so dreadfully lonely. Daniel was so often away on business or in England for his health.”

“Who the devil goes to England for their health?” asks a man, his voice overloud.

“Hush, he’s in the front pew, there. He may hear you,” warns Singsong.

“He did defend her against her Judas sisters, my dears,” says Superior-Tone.

“Indeed, yes, at first,” says Scratch-Voice. “But then our Daniel became very quiet.”

“But we will surely hear a message from our Leah’s spirit soon, I hope.” This from a nervous-voiced woman. “Do you think her sisters might … ah, no, I suppose not.”

“Appalling and atrocious that her sisters haven’t come,” puts in Singsong.

“Dreadful creatures, indeed, yes,” Scratch-Voice says. “And gone to seed. Entirely.”

“Did you expect her dashed sisters to come today, ladies?” Overloud Man asks. “After what they did? Their baseless accusations. The deuced musical hall travesty?”

“Leah became such a recluse, didn’t she?” Nervous-Voice asks. “Is it true she never received callers? But it’s not as if she was being snubbed. I myself was often rather too busy—”

“As was I!” Singsong cries. “I had my own family affairs and business, you see, and—”

“That terrible housekeeper of hers,” says Scratch-Voice. “She was the only one our Leah could find who would stay. Apparently her horrid sisters’ scandalous accusations are known by the even servant classes.”

“Servants are privy to more mysteries than even the finest of mediums, my dears,” offers Superior-Tone.

More chuckling.

“Indeed, yes,” Scratch-Voice continues. “But it was that horrible housekeeper who broke our Leah’s French toile vase and then had the audacity to declare it a fake anywise. Well, you know how Leah was about her things. It put her into such a dreadful rage that she fell instantly to the carpet and—”

“I heard there was no lingering,” Nervous-Voice says.

“No. Not a minute, my dears, all reports agree,” Superior-Tone says.

“Such a shame and pity,” Singsong agrees

“Indeed, yes, a terrible shame,” puts in Scratch-Voice. “No beloved family crowding round to hear her last words or watch her last breath escape. Just that terrible housekeeper. How dreadfully terrible to die so unawares.”

“Mr. Underhill was there.”

“I heard the contrary. That he was out, as always.”

“At least our Leah is in joyous Spirit Land now,” Scratch-Voice says. “Indeed, I have no doubt whatsoever that our Leah will be extremely joyful now that she is a spirit herself.”

“Yes, my dears, and with, you know, all those other spirits for company.”

But will those other spirits be joyful and at peace in
her
company? Maggie wonders, and nearly smiles.

After the reverend speaks about Leah’s selfless life, her dedication to her husband and family, the injustices heaped upon her, after a long variety of Leah’s favourite music is played and sung, the celebrants are left to mill before the funeral procession. Maggie and Katie help themselves to the punch, discreetly lifting their veils.

The cortège draws perplexed onlookers the entire way to the cemetery. But then, what sort of funeral attendees are white-dressed and sing joyful hymns and toss flower petals, as if at a wedding or a May festival? By the time the cortège reaches Brooklyn’s Greenwood Cemetery on this cold November day of 1890, Katie is so tired and overcome that she collapses on the broad ivory and cream painted coffin just before it is lowered into the grave. The celebrants murmur in outrage. Who is this disrespectful woman? And who is her companion?

“Forget all them,” Maggie whispers to Katie, and gently pulls her off the coffin. “Shush,” she adds, because Katie is weeping loudly behind her veil. An odd, hupping sound that could be mistaken for laughter.

I
arrived early on this day. It seemed best I come before my desire for drink overwhelmed my sense of duty. The sun patterned the ceiling, making near-pretty the mottlings there. August’s birthday was on the morrow and I had not yet completed the coverall.

“Alvah, I’ve had the same dream again. Of the same cemetery.” My patient tried to sit up, anxious for the telling of it.

“The cemetery where you planted Leah?” I asked, and brought out the medicine and some blancmange. I had little hope she would eat, however; she had scarcely eaten the last week.

“No, no, put that away. Listen, before it vanishes. I am in a war cemetery, not just any, but a military asylum one, the Washington one.”

She told her dream in fits and starts while I knitted fast as I could:

She is awander among those endless rows, looking in vain at those identical knee-high lozenges of white marble. But for what?
Unknown. Unknown
. All are a blank. A cipher. And these headstones, they are undulating in their regiment order, and then not undulating, but wading through the grave dirt and over groomed lawns, down declivities, around stands of trees, as if living things intent on some destination. My patient is not troubled by this, nor by the certainty that she is lost. Then in the distance she sees the high, iron gates. That is where I must go, she thinks, and she runs and runs with her skirts held high, and she feels very young, as young as that day with her sister Katie, in the orchard, before they met the peddler. Then,
just before the iron gates, she stumbles and falls prone atop a grave. It had been moving like the others, as if to catch up with her. Now everything stops. The sky is the boy-blue of her Elisha’s eyes and it is as unreachable, but the grass is soft, the ground surprisingly warm. She lies there, catching her breath. The headstone is blank as all the rest.
Unknown. Unknown
.

“It is the third in from the gate, in the tenth row of that sector. I have had this same dream three times, and each time, Alvah, it is the same headstone.”

I set down my knitting and drank a nip, then spooned up some blancmange. “You must eat.”

By way of answer she asked for the lily box. I gave it to her. She didn’t open it. “Do not forget that this box, and all within, is yours to keep when I pass.”

“Eat, you must,” I repeated.

“You know that is not practical, Alvah,” she said, and with a ghost of her former smile. “You must know that I am done with all that.”

O
N AN AFTERNOON
nearly two years after Leah’s funeral, Maggie and Katie walk down 45th Street. Katie’s thin shoes are covered with mud and straw. She has lost her coat somewhere. And her hat. She leans heavily on Maggie. They were being stared at. Not that they gave a damn fig. They’ve been stared at nearly all their lives.

“Come and live with me,” Maggie says. “You and the boys.”

“Ah, no, Mag. You’ve reformed. Rah and fiddle-dee-dah!”

This is true. Maggie doesn’t go on sprees any longer. Doesn’t touch brandy or gin or wine. Instead she drinks her poppy tea and with careful rationing. Keeps her head and thus her few clients, the ones who have low expectations. Because she has returned to rapping, there really being no other way for her to feed herself. They come to her at her apartment, one client at a time. She cannot charge much, granted, not after her labelling her own profession a fraud, but she earns enough money to keep herself from the streets. She always hands the clients her card first.

The Spiritualist Society, of course, shuns and derides Maggie. They call her a liar for her confessions. An addled sot because of her drinking. They proclaim her words cannot be trusted, not one syllable. Maggie doesn’t care. She would no more knock on the door of the Spiritualist Society than on the Gates of Hell.

“You must, Kat. We can be together. We should be together. And I’m not so reformed. I still, well, I don’t so much indulge in brandy and such, but I’ve a lovely tea you must try. Dr. Wadsworth in England gave me the recipe. I do miss the man. But people come and go, excepting me and thee.” She smiles. “Do come to my apartment and try it. The tea makes the days pass in coloured dreamy whorl.”

Katie halts. Takes both of Maggie’s hands. Sways as if wanting a childish game of ring-around-the-rosie. “No, no, no. I’ll only drag you into the down and down. You’ll take on my habits, and not my nun-like habits, hah! You’ll haunt my taverns. Haunts. Hah! As if I’m one of our ghosts. Perhaps I am. Now, don’t be a worry-all. You’ll always find me, Mag. And I you. Really.”

When the knock on Maggie’s apartment door comes a day later, she opens it expecting Katie. Her relief and joy are short-lived, however. It is not Katie. It is Daniel Underhill. His kindly eyes are hooded and weary. His cravat badly tied. Pleasantries over, he informs her that Leah’s will has finally been sorted.

“She had many assets in her name. And, well, there was complicated accounting in returning those assets to my holdings. But I suppose that you, and Katie, yes, you two, of all people, would know of complicated wills and bequeathments.”

“Alas and such, we know very well.”

Daniel tries for a smile, but manages something more like a
grimace. “Leah stipulated that you be given this. Discover what you will.” He hands her Leah’s bible box. “I number myself among the fortunate,” he adds enigmatically as he lets himself out.

Maggie places the bible box on the table. Runs her hands over the lilies of the field, the wasp nestled there.

She opens it to find, as she expected, a wealth of letters. From Katie. From her own self. From her mother. From Calvin. From this society and that. From Leah. There are also newspaper clippings galore telling of the Fox sisters’ triumphs and tribulations through the years. And a great many reporting on the doings of Chauncey Burr.

“Chauncey, old Chauncey,” she murmurs, and takes up the pages that look torn from a journal. A note is pinned to these pages that reads:
You’re asking for my damnedo thoughts? Mrs. Foxy Fish Underthehill? Here they are torn out and just for you. A last warning: Don’t waste your beloved time on this earth, Leah, I thought that when we met that last time. We are dust-motes in the eye of oblivion
.