The House of Velvet and Glass (10 page)

Everyone said Mrs. Widener had never fully recovered from losing her husband and son. The Widener men put her and her maid into a lifeboat, after an interminable wait, Sibyl read in the papers, and then stepped back onto the deck of the doomed ship, knowing they had no hope of rescue. Sibyl doubted that she would ever have such courage. What if Lan and Harley had been on shipboard, too; might her mother and sister have been put safely into a lifeboat then? Some men survived. Perhaps they all would’ve come back to Boston together, on a chartered rail car, giving interviews in all the papers about the horrors of their ordeal, full of the righteous indignation born of safety and security.

What were Helen and Eulah doing, when they first saw that the water was coming? When did they know that the water was for them? For a moment Sibyl’s eyes closed, her ears echoing with imaginary screams, frigid water swirling around her mother’s and sister’s feet. But Sibyl shoved the thought away.

What better way to mourn a bibliophile than through the building of a new library, she reflected, steering her mind to safer waters. Though she supposed that certain future generations of Harvard’s men would find reason enough, during exams, to curse the Widener name. Perhaps once the building was open, everyone would stop gossiping about how quickly Mrs. Widener had remarried. Perhaps, but Sibyl wasn’t optimistic.

Helen had been so excited to learn the Wideners were on board that she immediately cabled to share the news. It was, in fact, the last word Sibyl had from her mother.

While she was alive, that is.

SET TO DINE WIDENERS THIS EVE NOT CAPTS TABLE BUT WILL HAVE TO DO STOP EULAH BRIGHTEST BUD YOUNGER SET STOP TAKE CARE PAPA TAKES MEDICINE LOVE MOTHER

Helen never could keep herself under the limit.

Sibyl turned away from the new library and hurried across the Yard, following a half-known path to the Department of Social Ethics, hurrying to make her appointment with a man she hadn’t seen since before he chose another woman for his wife.

On the second-floor landing of the Social Ethics building as she climbed the stairs, a sudden pain in Sibyl’s stomach stopped her. A black fog crept into the corners of her vision. She leaned on the banister, taking long breaths. Her father was right—she hadn’t eaten enough at breakfast. In truth, she’d had only some sweetened coffee and a few bites of Betty’s oatmeal.

Perhaps less than a few bites.

She breathed, feeling the compression of her corset around her rib cage and belly. It would pass in a minute. It always did.

Before long the fog began to dissipate, and the pain receded, replaced by the familiar sensation of perfect emptiness. Of control. She could face him now. Sibyl exhaled in perverse triumph.

Benton’s office was at the end of a dark hallway, the door propped open. Voices traveled down the hall, and she glimpsed a suited figure leaning in the doorway of Ben’s office, shoulders moving in lively discussion.

“Oh, you can’t be serious!” She heard Ben’s voice, friendly, but challenging.

The man in his office laughed. Sibyl, curious, crept closer to listen.

“I’ll tell you the problem, Benton,” said the man. “Hobbyists and charlatans. I read in the
Globe
about a chiseler who was holding séances for impressionable women. Seducing them, and then taking their money. Article said when he was arrested, his pockets were filled with love letters, blank prescriptions, and clairvoyant calling cards. True Spiritualist inquiry should happen in an academic context for just that reason. Don’t we owe it to science to have an open mind?”

Sibyl swallowed, excited by their vigorous intellectual discourse, but also intimidated. All the women of her acquaintance couched their opinions in such polite language that it could be difficult to know the depth of their convictions. Eulah had been different, of course. She would say anything to anyone. But Eulah had been beautiful enough that she could afford to be shocking.

“Whoop, you’ve got a visitor.” The man had spotted her, and beckoned her over with an easy gesture. She started, a blush creeping over her cheeks.

“It’s a waste of time and energy,” Benton’s voice countered from inside the office. “I’m much more concerned with the practicalities of a life well lived, in the here and now.”

While Benton spoke the man in the door smiled at Sibyl. She edged nearer, reminding herself that she had been invited. The man, younger than she first guessed from the way he was talking, rolled to the side out of the door to make room for her, smiling behind a pair of gold spectacles. His hair was parted in the middle, worn in thin shellacked waves close to his skull, and his suit was of a weathered tweed.

“Practicalities, Professor Derby,” the man rejoined, indicating her.

Sibyl stepped into the doorway and found a room barely larger than her closet, stuffed to the gills with papers, a desk, a chair, books, a filthy brass ashtray, and a few trinkets scattered across the upper bookshelves. One window was wedged open with a telephone book, letting in the wet afternoon fog. A desk lamp cast the office in a greenish tint. Behind the desk, leaning back in a swivel chair with his muscular arms folded, leaned Benton Derby, associate professor of psychology. When he spotted her, he got quickly to his feet, scattering a few papers to the floor in his haste. He blushed and bent to retrieve them, cursing under his breath.

Benton would be about thirty-five now, perhaps a little less. Older, at any rate, than the fellow in the doorway, who was around Sibyl’s age. Ben still had the build of a man who’d wrestled at school: overmuscled for his suit, which bunched in places, sewed by a tailor accustomed to slight society men. His hair had gone carbon gray in the past three years. The graying hair on a young frame gave Benton a funny air of exoticism, and it was cut short, a sign of an impatient man who doesn’t wish to waste time on his appearance. Benton had round wire-rimmed glasses pushed up the bridge of his nose, making his steel eyes seem smaller than she remembered. Sibyl wondered if he truly needed the spectacles, or if he were trying to seem professorial. Of course, all those years of study were bound to ruin one’s eyes. That was one reason Helen had been dead set against Sibyl going to college.

Sibyl smiled, waiting to be introduced.

“Here, let’s ask her,” Benton said, waving a hand in her direction, as though she had been present for the entire duration of their argument. “A neutral party.”

Sibyl was taken aback by Benton’s informality until she saw that he was shuffling the papers in his hands with more vigor than was called for. His eyes settled on her, lit up, and darted to the bookshelf. It occurred to her that Benton might have been nervous about seeing her again, too.

“Ask me about what?” Sibyl said.

“You’ll have to forgive him.” The man leaning in the doorway smiled, extending a hand. “It’s a truism about psychologists that they should all probably be put away. I’m Professor Edwin Friend.”

She accepted his hand, laughing. Benton pretended to glower. “And it’s a truism about philosophers,” he said, “that they don’t make a lick of sense when they talk. Professor Friend, meet Miss Sibyl Allston. Go ahead. Ask her.”

“I’d hate to bore Miss Allston before you get the chance to do it yourself,” Friend said, smiling.

Benton wrinkled his nose at the other professor and tossed the papers onto his desk.

“The question,” Professor Friend said, folding his arms, “concerns the American Society for Psychical Research. Dissension in the ranks. One faction thinks we should concentrate on psychic phenomena, like telepathy and precognition. It’s possible that the human mind has qualities that aren’t fully understood, which could be explained within the laws of physics.”

Sibyl nodded, aware as she did so that Benton was staring at her. Her eyes flickered off of Friend’s face and caught Benton’s gaze, which darted back to his desk surface. He cleared this throat.

“The alternative view,” Professor Friend continued, “wants to emphasize Spiritualist phenomena. Communicating with the dead, ectoplasm, spirit writing, and so on. Which is a kind of human potential, but of a very different sort. So which direction can most reveal something meaningful, something
true
, about human existence? Expanded talents in this world, or transcendence with the next?”

Sibyl smiled, intrigued. “My goodness. What weighty concerns you professors have on a spring afternoon.”

“See, Edwin?” Benton exclaimed. “Miss Allston’s far too practical a woman to be concerned with nonsense. I can’t imagine what
your
excuse is.”

“On the contrary,” Sibyl said, giving Benton a long look. “I have a rather strong opinion on this matter.”

“There,” Professor Friend said, talking over Benton’s incredulous “You do?”

Benton collapsed into the chair behind his desk and made a show of sinking his head in his hands. Sibyl laughed. “Now, Professor Derby, you have no idea what mischief we practical ladies get up to away from prying eyes. I think you’d be surprised.” She turned to Professor Friend. “Of course I would never presume to comment on what’s worthy of scientific inquiry. But as it happens, I have, myself, witnessed some remarkable events.”

Benton suppressed a gasp as Professor Friend’s ears perked up. “Have you, then?” he said. “Of which type, may I ask?”

Sibyl had never discussed her involvement with Mrs. Dee. Mrs. Dee insisted on discretion, and revealing her activities to two members of the Harvard faculty would hardly qualify.

“Of . . .” She hesitated.

Professor Friend leaned forward. Benton rested his chin on his fist, watching her with apparent amusement.

“Of the . . . spirit type. As a matter of fact.” She could obfuscate who was involved. And she found herself wanting to impress them. Helen had warned Sibyl that men didn’t appreciate women who were too smart, but she had always found herself wanting to seem serious for Benton.

“Is that so?” Professor Friend said, keen with interest. “Can you tell me any details?”

“I’m afraid that I’m required to keep most of it in strictest confidence,” Sibyl said, enjoying the suggestion that she might have secret knowledge that this eminent scholar could not fathom. “But suffice it to say that, for my own part . . . Well, we experienced some loss. In our family. Within the past few years.”

He nodded in sympathy, accepting her euphemisms, encouraging her to continue. “There’s a regular meeting, not far from my home. Of people who’ve suffered the same loss.”

Benton may have mouthed the word
Titanic
to Professor Friend, but Sibyl only caught his mouth moving out of the corner of her eye, and so she couldn’t be sure. She shot a lowered eyebrow in his direction, but he affected not to see it.

“How extraordinary,” Professor Friend said, bringing a finger to his chin. “And you have, yourself, seen . . . ?”

Sibyl smiled a private smile. “It would be breaking a confidence to say in any great detail. But I must assure you . . .” She paused, creating the impression that more should be read into her words than was being made explicit. “I’m of the opinion that communication with spirits is not only possible, but offers real comfort to those of us left behind.”

“Fascinating, Miss Allston,” the philosopher said, scratching under his chin and gazing up at the ceiling in thought. “Thank you. A vote, then, in favor of researching life after death. Most intriguing.”

He thrust his hands into his pockets, rocked on his heels, and then shook off his ruminations and grinned at Sibyl and Benton.

“Well!” Professor Friend said. “You have matters of grave import to discuss, no doubt. I should let you get to it. You’re at Radcliffe then, Miss Allston? You must drop by one of my lectures sometime. You’d be quite interested by phenomenology, I think.”

“Oh!” Sibyl exclaimed, laughing. “Oh, no, no. I’m not a student.”

“Ah, no?” Professor Friend said, raising his eyebrows. He lingered, perhaps waiting for one of them to explain why, if she were not a student, Sibyl might be visiting Benton in his office hours. When no explanation was forthcoming, he remarked, “I see. Well! Onward and upward,” rapped on the doorjamb in a genial farewell, and ambled away.

Benton’s eyes tracked the other professor’s movements. He lifted a hand in a polite wave and listened for the footfalls as they receded down the hallway. When their sound finally disappeared, he burst. “Can you
believe
that?”

“Believe what?” Sibyl asked, perplexed.

“We finished our doctorates at about the same time, you know. A prodigy. One of the finest minds I’ve ever seen, and now he fritters his time away on nonsense. Do we look at telepathy, or do we commune with the dead instead? For Pete’s sake. What about real life? Does he know how many children scrounge in the Boston city dump for food and ice and fuel every day? It’s in the hundreds. What do they care about mental telepathy? What good will table-turning with their dead grandfathers do them? Ed’s a fine man, but he wants to spend his time on this hocus-pocus. What good’s the soul, without knowing the mind?”

Benton’s cheeks were flushed, and his breath came quickly with the force of his assertions. Sibyl stared at him, taken aback. Then he seemed to recover himself, wiping a hand over his face before he pushed back from the desk and rose to his feet.

“Listen to me,” he said, shaking his head with a laugh. “Ranting like a madman. Let’s blame the undergraduates, shall we? Hello, Miss Allston. It’s such a pleasure to see you again.” He paused, his unsettling gray eyes taking in Sibyl’s face. She smiled out of the side of her mouth.

She drew her glove off, one finger at a time, and offered him her hand. He pressed it between his. His grip was warm, familiar. Her hand tingled at the contact, and she returned it quickly to her lap.

“Benton, really,” she protested. “Haven’t we known each other long enough?”

“Sibyl, then,” he said, pleased. He gestured to the disorderly pile of student papers that he had rescued from the floor. “You should see what some of them think will pass for a term paper. Even gentlemen must know how to put words together, I tell them,” he remarked as he took his seat again.