THE ENNUI OF THE PSYCHIC

On my last day at Lake Pleasant, having largely completed my researches into the ways and means of the Spiritualists, I found myself with the opportunity to while away an hour or two before dinner in reading an issue of the British magazine Cornhill . This was a welcome distraction. The weather was stormy, which quite literally dampened the spirits of the Spiritualists, who believe the dead dislike bad weather and seldom materialize when it is raining. It never rains in Summerland where they abide, though miraculously the air is fragrant with flowers.

I was alone in the reading room. When I heard someone come in at the door, I knew by the stealth of her step that it was Violet. She took a childish pleasure in all manner of pranks and had nearly sent Mr. Babin backward down the stairs the evening before by jumping out from the linen closet in the hall as he came up to escort us to dinner. I pretended I didn’t hear her as she crept up behind my chair and stood silently looking down at me. “I know you’re there,” I said. She made no reply, but leaned forward, scrutinizing the paragraph under the title. “That isn’t correct,” she said. “It was 1872. And the ship wasn’t in tow. They sailed her to Gibraltar.”

I looked up, holding the journal open with my palm. “Have you read this account?”

“No,” she replied. “The name is wrong too. It wasn’t the Marie Celeste . It was the Mary Celeste .”

“You seem to know a great deal about it,” I observed.

She straightened, but she kept her eyes fixed gloomily on the offending text. “I knew the family,” she replied.

Then she crossed the room and she threw herself down on a settee near the bookcase, taking up one magazine after another, and paging through them distractedly until I had finished reading the article, which I found preposterous, though suspenseful and engaging. Before I could say a word, she snatched up the journal and disappeared to her room.

I took out my notebook and ensconced myself at the writing desk, elaborating my notes on Lake Pleasant. The gallery of the hotel was so wide that tables could be set up without fear of damp, and these were soon filled with whist players, chatting and drinking tea. Snippets of their conversations wove their way into my observations. “Hattie has derived great benefit from Dr. Skilling’s magnetic treatment. She says she hasn’t felt so invigorated in years.” “Mr. Leary’s corn is obviously the best, but the price!” “Mr. Whitaker’s son Harvey has come through again. Such a loving boy.” At length I capped my pen, closed my book, and went up to my room. Inside I found a folded sheet of paper wedged against the carpet. Writ large with more than necessary pressure on the page were three words: COME TO ME .

I crossed the hall and tapped on Violet’s door. “Come in,” she called out. She was collapsed upon the chaise, one hand over her eyes, the other brushing the floor where her shoes were lined up neatly next to the splayed copy of the Cornhill . As I took the chair opposite, she lifted her hand and scowled at me. “Who is this person?” she inquired. “This Dr. Jephson. Have you ever heard of him?”

“He says he’s from Boston,” I observed.

“It’s an outrage,” she said. “Poor Arthur. I’m sure he’s seen it already.”

“Who is Arthur?”

She pulled herself up, dropping her feet to the carpet, poking the journal with her toes. “I thought you journalists had standards. This account is replete with factual errors.”

“I don’t think Dr. Jephson is, strictly speaking, a journalist.”

“Well, he’s a doctor. Surely doctors have standards. Surely they’re not allowed to broadcast bald‑faced lies in print.”

“I had the sense that the account was actually intended to be read as a fictional piece.”

“That’s not what it says,” she snapped. “It says …” She picked up the volume and turned its pages impatiently. “ ‘J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement.’ It doesn’t say story. It doesn’t say anything about it being fictional.”

“I think that may be the point.”

“The point of what!”

“Well, the author isn’t Jephson, but someone pretending to be Jephson. It’s not an entirely new thing. But the Cornhill doesn’t print the names of its contributors, so there’s no way of knowing.”

“But they know, don’t they? The people who published it must know if it’s meant to be a story or a true account. And they know people will read this – whatever it is – and think it’s true and that the ship actually went to Africa and this lunatic passenger – there were no passengers, by the way – killed everybody on the ship one by one, and that the crew was made up of Negroes, when they were only four Germans …” Here she threw the Cornhill at the breakfast table. “It’s just lies,” she concluded. “How is it possible, after all this time?”

“Who is Arthur?” I asked again.

She stood up and began pacing about the room, stopping when she reached an obstacle and turning back again. “He’s Sarah’s orphaned son,” she said. “He must be, let me think, he’s nineteen now. And Benjamin’s mother, Mother Briggs, she’s still alive, poor woman, though everyone she loved is dead. I’m sure she’s read this travesty.”

“Who is Sarah?” I persisted.

“Sarah Briggs,” she said, exasperated at my slowness. “Mrs. Benjamin Briggs. The captain’s wife. She was on the Mary Celeste and so was their daughter, Sophia Matilda; she was just two years old.”

“Jephson says the captain’s name was Tibbs.”

“He didn’t even get that right. Are there laws?” she exclaimed, stopping before me with her hands spread wide at her sides. “Can this Jephson person be sued? Or the Cornhill ? Can the Cornhill be sued?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “Not if the author changed the names.”

Tears filled her eyes and she balled up her hands into fists, which made her look like the child she must have been not so very long ago. She stalked back to the chaise, sat down upon it. Resting her elbows on her knees, her chin in her hands, she muttered at the floor. “It just brings that whole awful time back,” she said miserably.

“Were you close to the family?” I asked.

A few tears, funneled by her hands, slipped down alongside her nose. “Sarah was my best friend in this world,” she said. Then, sniffing, she sat up straight, wiping her tears away with the backs of her hands. “I shall speak to Mr. Babin,” she said. “He will give me the benefit of his legal counsel.”

* * *

I was less interested in the legal recourse recommended by Mr. Babin than in Violet’s strong reaction to Dr. Jephson’s account, or story, or whatever it was, and whoever Dr. Jephson was. Her exclamation that Sarah Briggs had been her friend was the closest thing to a past she had owned to. I had been under the impression that her home was in upstate New York, but it was unlikely that a seafaring family would live that far inland. So, I concluded, Violet was from the East Coast, possibly Boston. I’d noted that she read the Boston papers assiduously.

Though all manner of spirits were welcome in Lake Pleasant, the alcoholic variety was forbidden. As the evenings wore on, it was clear that some of the band members and the wild young men who had a clubhouse and dressed up as Indians, terrifying old ladies who thought they were native spirits returning from the dead to scalp them, were clearly under the influence of something stronger than the ubiquitous lemonade. Jeremiah Babin, being a man of sophistication and culture, had provided himself with a bottle of excellent port, which he offered to share with us as a digestive aid after our dinner at the Lakeside Café. No sooner had we taken our seats in Violet’s sitting room and he had poured out three glasses of the ruby potion than she brought the issue of the Cornhill to his attention, expressing her conviction that the lead article constituted an actionable offense. “It’s full of errors and lies,” she avowed. “He doesn’t even get the captain’s name right.”

Jeremiah, recognizing at once the ship’s name, recalled what he knew of its melancholy fate. “At first they thought it was pirates. Is that right?” he asked. “But then, it was the crew. A mutiny? Was that it?”

Violet sipped her port, giving him a steady look that betrayed no feelings in the matter. “It was not a mutiny,” she said calmly. “That has been ascertained. But this account says that it was.”

Jeremiah nodded. “Yes, well. I would have to look into it. But I can tell you that if the names are changed, there’s probably nothing to be done about it, by way of legal action I mean.”

Violet turned upon me an inclusive smile. “Is there another kind of action?” she asked.

Jeremiah, seeing my puzzled expression, said, “She’s thinking of investigative journalism.”

“He has read my mind,” Violet said.

I considered the matter. “It might be difficult to interest the public in the factual basis of a story that appears in a literary journal, especially as it concerns an incident that happened so long ago.”

“You call it an incident,” Violet said glumly, reaching for her glass.

“Whatever it was,” Jeremiah said, rising from his chair. “It was a famous story at the time, and evidently this fellow is using it to put himself forward. I’ll leave you ladies to discuss your scheme of retribution. I have an early appointment with Dr. Plunkett. His magnetic treatment has cured my bad knee. I wonder if I can persuade him to set up in Philadelphia.”

When we had said our good nights to Violet’s benefactor, she and I sat for a few moments in silence.

I had enjoyed our dinner on the lakeshore. It was a mild, clear evening, the paper lanterns glowed charmingly, the food, though plain, was good, and the conversation wide‑ranging and thought‑provoking. Jeremiah Babin was a quirky gentleman, full of enthusiasms, an opera lover, a reader of contemporary poetry, well‑traveled and informed about world affairs. There was no talk of spirits or second sight, though the ghost of Sir Walter Scott might have enjoyed the enthusiasm we three discovered we shared for his romances. Jeremiah was a great fan of Robert Louis Stevenson and spoke so highly of his Kidnapped , which I confessed I had not read, that I vowed to take it up at the next opportunity. Violet and I encouraged him to give Mrs. Gaskell his attention.

The meal ended on a lively note as a sudden breeze whipped in off the lake and set the lamps flickering. Our fellow diners smiled and laughed to one another, saying the spirits were off to bed, and so should we be. Violet had not mentioned her pique about the fallacious article and I assumed she’d forgotten it, but now I understood that she had been waiting to bring it up in a more private setting. Jeremiah’s dismissal irked her; I could feel that as we sat there without speaking, sipping the wine he had considerately left for us. This suited me, as it was my intention to draw her out on the subject, which so conveniently opened a door upon her past. I took up the journal, which Jeremiah hadn’t bothered to examine. “Are you still in touch with the Briggs family?” I asked.

She gave me a mildly startled look, a clear signal to me that her guard was down. “Not at all,” she said. “There’s not much left of them.”

“Were they numerous?”

“They were,” she replied. “Mother Briggs had six children. They all died at sea except for James, who had the good sense to go into business. And two of her grandchildren died as well. Well, one died, Maria’s boy, Natie, and then Sophy, Sarah’s little girl. She was on the Mary Celeste .”

“And Mother Briggs was Sarah’s mother?”

“Her mother‑in‑law. Also her aunt. Sarah and Benjamin were first cousins.”

“How devastating for her, to lose so many children.”

Violet looked away toward the open balcony, where two night birds were twittering in an overhanging branch of a pine. “Oh,” she said, watching their fluttering movements indifferently. “She had the comfort of her religion.”

“She was a pious woman?”

Violet smiled to herself, lifting her glass to her lips, taking, I noted, a healthy swallow. Then she turned to me with an eagerness I recognized – she had decided to reveal something she ordinarily would not. She’d regret it later, I thought. Perhaps we both knew that.

“People said that family was cursed,” she confided. “Mother Briggs’s husband, Captain Nathan, was an amusing old fellow, something of the town crank. He was killed by a lightning bolt that struck him in the hall of his own house.”

“Good heavens,” I said. “Was this before Benjamin and Sarah died?”

“Disappeared,” she corrected. “It was a couple of years earlier. Sarah’s father, Leander, the Reverend Leander Cobb”–she pronounced the title Reverend with mock solemnity–“he died scarcely two months before Sarah sailed on the Mary Celeste .”

“So he never knew.”

She frowned. “I was …” The pause was slight, occasioned, I suspected, by some subtle alteration of the actual sequence of events. “I visited Mother Briggs just after the first telegram came. I wanted to send Sarah a letter and I went to ask her for the proper address. She was calm as a clam. She told me the ship had been found derelict, so there was no point in sending a letter. Then James came in with Arthur, Sarah’s son. He was a grim little boy, nervous and timid, and of course, they’d told him nothing. James believed, we all did, that another ship might have picked up the crew and we’d hear from them as soon as they got to a port.”

She glanced up at me to see how I was responding to her story. Wanting to give the thin edge of agitation in her voice room to expand, I said nothing.

“It was so dreadful,” she continued. “Benjamin’s brother Oliver – he was a charming man, full of gaiety – he had sailed from New York a week later than Benjamin and Sarah. They all had plans to meet in Messina. Oliver had even told his mother what songs he planned to sing at their reunion – she told me that later. He had a fine voice. He and Sarah loved to sing together. What we didn’t know then, when they got that first telegram …” Again she paused, this time to raise her glass for another bracing draft of wine. “What we didn’t know was that Oliver’s ship – it was the Julia A. Hallock –went down in a storm in the Bay of Biscay. He and the first mate clung to some pieces of the deckhouse for four days before Oliver gave up and let go. The mate was rescued not two hours later.” Tears gathered in her eyes and she extracted a handkerchief from her sleeve.

When a heartfelt account moves the teller to tears, the natural response of anyone with ordinary human feeling is to offer kind words of sympathy and consolation, but my profession precludes such natural expressions, and the sight of tears tends to stir in me nothing so much as a sense of predatory anticipation. I watched Violet without comment. She dried her tears, sniffed mightily, coughed. Her eyes fell upon the journal, which was resting on my lap. “How could that person, that Dr. Jephson, how could he make such a mockery of other people’s suffering? People he didn’t even know.”

“Did the Briggs family live in New York?” I asked.

She gave me a look of consternation. She was having a difficult time getting anyone to share her outrage at the scurrilous Dr. Jephson. “They lived in Massachusetts. Why would you think they lived in New York?”

“I thought you grew up in New York. I seem to remember reading that. Upstate somewhere. Isn’t that correct?”

“Gloversville,” she said, too quickly. “We lived there until I was twelve. Then we moved to Marion.”

“I see,” I said. “And that’s where you met Sarah Briggs.”

“We went to the Academy together.”

“Do you still have relatives there?”

Her eyes narrowed slightly and she lifted her chin, contemplating me for a moment before speaking. “I have an aunt,” she said. “But she disapproves of me, so we’re not in contact.”

“She lives in Marion?”

“I don’t know where she lives now,” she replied. “Nor do I care.”

I smiled, thinking of my mother’s sister Claire, who had refused to help us when we were destitute because mother had married, in her view, beneath her.

“Have I said something funny?” Violet asked, looking pouty.

“I have such an aunt,” I said.

A snort of glee escaped her. “Do you?” she said. I nodded wisely. “Bad luck to them both.” She was now relaxed and warmed to me. We were two of a kind – orphans with heartless relations. I wondered if she had any money of her own.

“May I ask you a personal question?” I said.

“I think I know what it is,” she replied.

“What do you think it is?”

“You want to know if I have an income.”

It surprised me that she should have guessed my thought. “Yes,” I said. “I understand you don’t charge for the services you render, so I wondered …”

“I have a little money from my grandmother,” she replied. “Not enough to live on. But I can’t charge for what you call my services because if I did the people who really matter wouldn’t seek me out. They would assume I was a fraud, that I was in it for the money.”

“I notice at these séances advertised here, the psychics all charge admission.”

“Exactly. Twenty‑five cents. How many of those would one have to do to make up the price of a pair of shoes?”

“Yes. I had that same thought.”

“Those people are hobbyists, and many of them are just ludicrous, obvious frauds. They make disembodied hands appear, or instruments play themselves. It’s entertainment.”

“I see,” I said. And I did, though I didn’t understand why people found being roundly duped an activity worth paying even twenty‑five cents to enjoy.

Violet cast me a look tinged with desperation. “Oh, I wish I could be like you and earn my living by my pen!” she exclaimed.

“I fear you’d find it dull and tiring.”

“You’re out in the world, editors send you off to find out things and write up what you find, doors open to you, people respect you. No one patronizes you. Jeremiah said he thought you a brave sort of person. Level‑headed and sound.”

“Did he?”

“Yes. He admires you.” She plucked at her skirt peevishly. “You may be sure no one ever thinks of me as level‑headed.”

“Do you want to be level‑headed?”

She raised her eyebrows as if the question bore consideration, then sighed, dropping back in her chair. “They tire of me,” she said. “At first it’s very exciting and I’m in a trance half the time, keeping them in touch with their loved ones. But after a while …” She raised her hand to her hair, patting a straying curl back into place absentmindedly. “Often the gentlemen develop little crushes on me. At the Bakersmiths’ it was the son. You should see some of the letters I’ve received! Then the wives begin to think of how much good I could do for their friends, a soiree is arranged, and I know I’m about to pack my bags.”

“They pass you on.”

“Exactly,” she said.

“How long have you been living like this?”

She sent me the frank look of appeal I’d seen that first evening, when she bent over to pick up her napkin. “Ten long years,” she said.

“Good heavens.”

“I’m just a pet. I’m the in‑house clairvoyant.” She chuckled sourly. “Sometimes I play the tyrant, just to keep from dying of boredom.”

I pictured Violet in a tyrannical mood, doubtless a fearsome sight.

“What do you do?”

“Oh, I make them wait, or I get headaches and have my meals in bed. I actually do suffer from blinding headaches, so no acting is required. Sometimes I flirt with the husbands until they get so carried away they fear I’ll tell their wives. But I never do. I used to hope one of them might marry me, but now I know, if there’s one thing they dread, it’s scandal. And marrying a psychic would be a scandal, especially if a divorce was involved.”

“Tell me about the trances,” I asked. “Can you make them happen?”

“Oh, why is everyone so interested in that? Is that what you want to write about?”

“Not necessarily. I’m just interested,” I said. “Like everyone.”

“I have no memory of anything that happens in a trance,” she said firmly.

“Yes, Jeremiah told me that. It must be like hypnotism.”

“I don’t know about hypnotism. At first it happened when I was alone, working on my poetry. There would be this lapse of time and when I came back, I’d written several pages I had no memory of writing. And they were messages, but not to me.”

“You write poetry?”

This question pleased her. “I do. I always have. I have notebooks full of it. Would you like to see some? I never show them to anyone because I’m afraid they may be very bad.”

“Why would you show them to me?”

“That’s a good question,” she said, leaning over her knees to make some adjustment to her skirt. “Perhaps I won’t.”

I ignored this display of coquettishness, though I could see how well it might work on an interested gentleman. “Do you still receive messages while writing?”

She sat up straight, folded her hands in her lap, and presented me with the prim expression of an innocent bystander who has just been sworn in to the witness box. “Not much. It’s easier to just repeat what I’m hearing. Evidently the spirits prefer to use me in that way.”

Everything about this last statement irritated me. “Do they?” I said. “I wonder why.”

“That’s not something I could know.”

“It’s so convenient, that part, where you don’t remember what you’ve said.”

She frowned. “I don’t get to choose whether or not to hear what I hear and see what I see. Do you?”

“No. But I wonder, why you … I mean, why did these spirits choose you and not someone else?”

“I suppose because I’m open to them.”

“Could you close yourself to them? Could you make them go away?”

“You’re making fun of me.”

“No, I’m serious.”

“You don’t believe a word I say.”

“Let’s just say I believe you’re being used, but not by spirits.”

She was silent. Her gaze was so free of resentment that I was intrigued to hear her next words. “You think I make it all up, just to please people who will help me.”

I nodded.

“Do you imagine that possibility has never occurred to me?” she said.

“Has it?”

Abruptly she stood up and took a few steps toward the balcony, leaving me with a view of her profile. She took a deep breath, then another, evidently in the grip of a strong emotion. Her long, slender hands clenched into fists at her sides. More tears, I thought, more earnest protestations.

So I was surprised when she turned to me with dry eyes and an expression of powerful resolution. “I want to stop,” she said. “I want another life. Will you help me?”

* * *

I didn’t tell Violet I was unwilling to help her, but I did point out the unlikelihood that I could. My employment, which she persisted in envying, was a hand‑to‑mouth affair, and as she had no commercial skills beyond the one that currently provided a comfortable, albeit restricted, existence, there was no definite track that I could set her upon. She had the childish notion that if only her efforts were brought to the attention of the public, she would make her way as a poet. I recommended a course in typing, as it was a skill always in demand. When I asked if she had told Jeremiah Babin, who was in the most likely position to assist her and appeared to have a keen interest in her welfare, of her ambition to find gainful employment, she laughed. “No,” she said. “And don’t you tell him. He would not be pleased to hear it.”

Our conversation, as I recall it, was amiable, but I could see that she was disappointed, that she had imagined I would be her deliverer. By morning, when she woke with a headache from the port, she would be ashamed of her declaration at the window and resentful of my part in the dissolution of her fantasies.

When we said good night, I promised to consider her situation and perhaps recommend a course, beyond typing – which clearly had no appeal to her whatsoever – that she might take toward self‑sufficiency. As I crossed the hall and let myself in at the door of my room, I reflected that my own situation, which sometimes struck me as arduous, lonely, dull, and pointless, was actually far preferable to the lot of the various citizens whose doings I was, as Violet put it, “on assignment” to investigate. All that day my article about the Spiritualists had been taking shape in my mind, and I had that pleasant, ticklish sensation of mental busyness, as well as a burgeoning confidence that must result, very soon – I could feel it – in my taking up my pen and my notebook and setting out on the journey into print. In my room I paused, admiring the moonlight, like spilled milk, on the desk. The apple I kept at the ready for midnight munching floated in a dark blue pool of its own shadow. I crossed to the balcony and stepped out into the still, warm, pine‑scented evening.

The Spiritualists believe their spirit friends are fond of flowers. Summerland, their dwelling on the other side, is a garden that needs no tending, and they fill their airy rooms with all manner of blooms. As wildflowers are abundant in the woods and fields bordering Lake Pleasant, the guests are in the habit of gathering bouquets and setting them out in vases, pitchers, baskets, or even buckets, at odd places around the camp.

These portable arrangements were constantly falling over, or they were picked up, refreshed, rearranged, and moved about by passing campers; it was a harmless, charming game they played, one of their more sympathetic practices. I noticed that a new collection of colorful pitchers had magically converged at the end of the bench just across from my balcony. If only they would confine themselves to flowers, I thought. In a dreamy state of mind I turned back to my bedroom, pondering the bizarre revelation that Violet Petra imagined herself a poet.

I drew the curtain, leaving the door ajar to have the benefit of fresh air. My toilette was a simple washup at the basin, a few strokes of the hairbrush, and a quick change into my dowdy cotton gown. As I slipped beneath the stiff, starched sheets, I imagined Violet, just across the hall. Her gown was doubtless embroidered satin with lace insets across the bodice. She had expensive tastes and habits. At dinner she had pointed out that what I took to be amethysts sparkling on the broad bust of a psychic competitor were in fact “cheap garnets.” She was right to be worried about her future, as she couldn’t afford to live in the style required by the company she kept. For the time being the Babins provided her with a clothing allowance. “Even with that,” she had confided, “I have to have my shoes resoled.”

In this manner, puzzling over the question of what would become of the fascinating, though often aggravating, object of my investigations, I drifted into sleep.

I awoke in the oppressive and humid darkness of a deep wood on a cloudy moonless night. For a few moments I lay still, my eyelids heavy from sleep, listening to a repetitive clicking that had summoned me back to consciousness. At length I determined it was coming from the wardrobe. What was it? I also became aware of a hushed whisper, like leaves rustling in a mini‑whirlwind, such as one observes of an autumn day. It was the pages of my notebook, I speculated, being riffled by a breeze.

When I turned my face toward this sound, a current of air brushed lightly across my cheek, like warm caressing fingers, tentative and tender, grazing my brow, lifting a strand of hair loose at my temple. Why was my room so dark? The curtain at the door was a summery voile, and the moon, though not full, had shone brightly when I stood on the balcony, but now my eyes couldn’t penetrate what felt more and more like a swirling current of blackness. It was as if I were in a whirlpool.

I sat up in the bed, pushing my pillow to one side. The clicking sound must be the wardrobe door, which, unlatched, was knocking again and again against the frame. The whispering intensified and had an impatience about it that made me think of old women defaming some young beauty in a church – I don’t know why this image came to me, but it did. A storm had whipped up, I concluded, and I must feel my way to the open balcony door and close it tightly. I swung my legs over the side, stood up, one hand resting on the bedpost, and waited for my eyes to adjust to the dark. My movement animated the quarreling currents of air and a kind of pandemonium broke loose in my room. The wardrobe door slammed hard, the hinges complaining at the force. The cyclonic air ripped the curtain, which I could dimly make out fluttering grayly before the door, free of its rod, and sent it rushing toward me, as if to wrap me in its embrace. I heard small objects – my cologne, my hairbrush, my fountain pen, my ink bottle – scattering in all directions from the dresser and the desk.

I took a step, confident that I would reach the door, which I could dimly see, and close this maelstrom out. Another step. Abruptly something cold and hard struck me on the forehead, as if it had been thrown with pent‑up malice by an assailant with excellent aim. I staggered and sat down on the floor. My notebook hurled itself from the desk and slapped me cruelly on the collarbone. I touched my forehead, which felt sore from the vengeful missile. Determinedly I crawled toward the door while a fresh gust lifted the pitcher from the washstand and smashed it against the floor. One of my shoes flew up and slapped me on the hip. I pushed on.

When at last – though it was not half a minute – I was near the door and could grasp the handle, I found to my astonishment that it was closed. At the moment when my fingers pushed against the panel, determining that the door was tightly seated in its frame, the fury in my room entirely ceased.

I was so confused that I sat there, my back against the glass panes, staring into the darkness. What world was I in? The room began to lighten, and I made out the apple resting against the leg of the dresser. Of course, I thought. The apple was the missile that had struck my forehead. Carefully I got to my feet and returned to the bed, my mental state still much confounded. As the dawn light gradually flushed up the walls, I sat on the edge of the mattress and surveyed the wreckage of my room. The curtain lay in a twisted skein near the door; my meager possessions were scattered across the floor. It looked as if some barroom brawler with a raging toothache had taken the place apart.

But he was gone now; the room was quiet and still, the air cool, charged as it is often after a storm. But what puzzled me was that there was no sound of wind or rain outside. The branches of the pine trees shading the balcony were unmoving, not even their needles trembled, as they did in the faintest breeze. I crossed to the door and stepped out onto the balcony.

It was a soft, fragrant summer morning of infinite sweetness, and the only sound was the soft cooing of a dove, and distantly the sharp rap of a woodpecker investigating a tree trunk. I stepped out to the rail. Surely the ground would be strewn with fresh needles and the flimsy vases toppled, the flowers strewn across the path. I looked down at the bench.

And there they were, undisturbed, four clay pitchers top‑heavy with wildflowers, cheerfully greeting the day, announcing to passersby that the spirits of the dead were welcome in this place, that they might come and stay and do just as they pleased.

How was it possible?

* * *

All I wanted was to quit my room. I dressed quickly, stepped into the hall, locking the door behind me, and walked purposefully away from the hotel. I wanted to walk to Philadelphia and never see Lake Pleasant again, but I was soon standing on the shore, looking out at the still, calm surface of the eponymous body of water. The chortling ripples playing in the grasses near the edge mocked me. A ghostly mist lay across the water and in the hollows of the forest beyond. It was early; the waitresses were just setting up in the tent and only myself and an aged crone who sat muttering on a bench under a tree were about. To recover my composure, I decided to walk along the path to the highlands.

The natural world is rife with anomalies, but I believed everything in it could be explained by a thorough understanding of its properties and laws. Water, for example, which seeks the lowest ground, could be forced to run uphill, as it did in the aqueducts the Romans designed to refresh their citizens’ thirst from sources far away. Fire, with its ravenous appetite for fuel, could be cajoled into accepting a steady diet of candlewick or cotton strips soaked in kerosene. Wind, well, one couldn’t say wind was actually harnessed, though sailors liked to think so, and they had made such a study of its various temperaments that they contrived to use it to accomplish a marvelous feat; by adjusting sheets of canvas, they could move large ships across entire oceans. Wind in my view was the most capricious element, but there was one thing it couldn’t do and that was whip up a tempest in a closed box. Therefore, it was clear that the wind had entered my room from the outside. The door had been open and slammed shut just as I reached it. As for the vases of flowers, they might have been protected by the bench and the low shrubbery near the path.

So I reconciled myself to a practical view, and exercised by my climb, I arrived at Gussie’s Tea Room in a rational state of mind. As I drew closer, to my surprise, the screen door flew open and Jeremiah Babin barged out, walking briskly toward me, his head lowered and giving off an air of agitation, which struck me as odd because his nature, as I had observed it, was expansive, sociable, and not prone to vexation. When he glanced up to see who stood in his path, he appeared at first startled and then annoyed. “Good morning,” I said. “You’re up early.”

He stopped, scowling at me so intently that I took a step back. “I’ve been up since dawn,” he said coldly.

I felt nothing but relief at this news. “Was it the storm?” I asked. “It got me up too, but not before it wrecked my room.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “I’ve been up since dawn attending on our dear Miss Petra, who is in quite a state, thanks to you.”

“Now it’s I who am mystified,” I said. “She wasn’t the least excited last night.”

“Really?” he said, meaning he didn’t believe me. “She says you accused her of being a fraud, and she says you tried to get her to admit it, and she’s sure you have every intention of writing horrible lies about her in your newspaper and she’s back there”–he flung out his arm in the direction of the hotel–“packing madly because she wants to leave at once, though she has an important sitting this afternoon with Mrs. Grover Greenwich who has come all the way from Ohio on purpose to see her.”

“But that’s not true,” I protested. “I said nothing of the kind.”

“Well, you must have said something, Miss Grant. And I think it very small of you, as we’ve been nothing but welcoming and generous and willing to answer all your nosy questions since you came among us.”

My conscience stung me, but not because of my conversation with Violet. It was because I had allowed Jeremiah to pay for my dinner the night before. I shouldn’t have, and he knew it as well as I did. “I’m very sorry to hear that something I said upset Violet,” I said. “But I assure you, I made no accusations or any kind, nor do I intend to write anything critical of her.”

“What did you say?”

“I hardly said anything at all. I just asked what you call ‘nosy’ questions. Perhaps she regrets her answers, but not because I suggested she should.”

This appeal tempered his anger, but he was still uncharacteristically sullen. “I shouldn’t have left her alone with you,” he said. “Now I don’t know who to believe.”

We had been walking in a leisurely way as we talked and had arrived at a bench set in the shade of three birch trees that hovered over it, as if to eavesdrop on any conversation that might take place in their domain. “Let’s stop here,” Jeremiah suggested, and I agreed. When we were seated, he repeated his dilemma. “I don’t know who to believe.”

“What motive could I have for dissembling?” I asked.

He considered this question, and its corollary – what motive might Violet have for not telling the truth – and for several moments neither of us spoke. I was thinking over anything I might have said to Violet that would make her desperate. “I hope you won’t be offended,” I said, to break the silence. “But I think it isn’t a good idea to give her wine.”

His heavy brows drew together and he cocked his head to have a closer look at me, as if I were a cat who had unexpectedly offered advice. “That’s what Virginia says,” he admitted. “But Violet says it helps her sleep. She can be very insistent.”

“I believe that,” I said.

“That wine helps her sleep?” he asked.

“That she has trouble sleeping.”

He studied me with unnecessary intensity. “And why do you think that is? Why can’t Violet sleep?”

“Because,” I said measuredly, “Violet is a deeply unhappy woman.”

“Is she?” The thought appeared entirely novel to him. “But why should she be?”

I shrugged. How could he not know? was what I thought.

“Insomnia is a common female complaint, isn’t it? Many women suffer from it; men seldom do. Virginia takes a sedative most nights. She can’t do without it. Women have very complex nervous systems. They are too highly strung.”

“I’ve heard that view expressed by medical men,” I agreed.

“Yes,” he said. “It’s widely understood.” He stroked his hair back from his temple, as if to assist his brain in its pursuit of the solution to a puzzle. “Do you have difficulty sleeping?”

“Not as a rule,” I replied. The sleepless night I’d just passed nagged at me, and I realized it had left me shaken and dispirited.

“But you’re an unusual woman. I’ve observed that. I don’t think many women could live by their wits as you do. I certainly don’t think Violet could, nor should she. Her gift is too important; it must be protected.”

“You think she’s too sensitive to take care of herself.”

“I know she is.”

“Perhaps that’s what makes her unhappy.”

“Why should it?” he said sharply. “People come from miles around to consult her. She’s welcomed everywhere she goes. She’s had a great success.” He shook his head in profound perplexity.

Violet, I thought, had spent the morning “playing the tyrant” with her protector, and she had managed to vex and even to frighten him. My sympathies were not unengaged by his dilemma; he was an intelligent, open‑minded, amiable, unimaginative man who wanted life to go smoothly and pleasantly. But where Violet was concerned, he was paddling about in a pond that was deeper and darker than he could possibly know. To such a man, Violet Petra must be well nigh unfathomable. Nothing in his nature could account for what was in hers. Now he regarded me with pleading eyes, eager for some useful feminine clarification, blissfully unaware that the obstinacy of his befuddlement had begun to wear on my patience. “No,” he concluded, “I can’t believe she’s unhappy. She has a fascinating life.”

I recalled Violet’s weary reply the night before–Ten long years .

“Is it such a life as you would want for your own daughter?” I asked my insistent companion.

The slow intake of breath, the drawing away that followed this question, didn’t surprise me. I lowered my eyes, waiting for his momentary confusion to be replaced by resentment or hostility. A gnat had struck at him, after all. But Jeremiah had better defenses in his arsenal. After a proper, nearly ceremonial silence, he said softly, without agitation, “I see.”

I met his eyes, which buried me in an avalanche of contempt. “I see,” he said again, calm and distant. All his courtesy and interest and earnest entreaty of my opinion had evaporated like the mist the sun had burned away while we had been talking.

“What is it that you see?” I asked, deflecting his iciness with a chill of my own.

He smiled joylessly. “What you do,” he said. “And why I found Violet hysterical this morning.”

Abrupt reversals in the terms of a professional relationship are not uncommon in my experience. A previously willing party to an investigation decides all at once to become an obstacle. My questions have touched some nerve, my intentions, which – I really think because of my sex – are presupposed to be honorable, are revealed to be ignoble. The story I’m after is not the one my subject wishes to be told. I may well take the liberty of printing “horrid lies.” I made no reply, as I had nothing to say, and I expected Jeremiah to fire some dismissive parting shot and walk away, but he sat there glowering at me in what could best be described as a huff.

Our fellow campers began to appear, sauntering in small groups toward the lake or up the path to the waterfall, eager to take in the delights of the new day. Two pretty children in white dresses and light summer shoes skipped on the path, their straight black hair cut in identical bobs, their heads inclined together, deep in conversation. They didn’t notice us as they passed, but I watched Jeremiah notice them, and some sliver of sympathy awakened in me – he must think of his own lost darlings whenever he saw living children, children who would grow up, children who would have more to say than “we are happy here.” His eyes rested upon them as they passed, but his expression didn’t soften.

A young man stepped out of the teahouse and, seeing the girls, called out to them. “It’s Mr. Talbot,” one gasped to the other, and they took off at a run to greet him. Mr. Talbot was the proprietor of the spirit photography shop; I’d seen samples of his work in the window. One sat for him and the resulting photograph invariably included a misty spirit hovering over the chair, or funneling in from the ceiling like a cloudburst. If these innocent girls had a dollar to spend between them, they might pass a titillating half an hour inside the tent, while Mr. Talbot, a handsome young impostor who always wore a boater hat and a floppy black tie, posed them and teased them and swore he could see the veiled face of a spirit rising up behind them, but they must not turn to look or the picture would be spoiled. I watched the girls, holding hands and laughing at some witticism from the droll photographer. An old couple, the man thin, the woman portly, appeared at the edge of the forest path, their eyes strangely glittering in the morning light.

A powerful sensation of revulsion rose up in me. Who were these bizarre, complacent people, these obstinate monomaniacs fixated on the patently absurd? Amid all this natural beauty, what most enlivened them was their conviction that death was not momentous, that life, as they put it, was continuous. The spirits they peddled had no mystery; they were ghosts stripped of their otherness. In their cosmography, the dead were just like us and they were everywhere, waiting to give us yet more unsolicited advice. That and the news that they were happy being dead, that life as they now lived it was better than it had been when they walked the green earth disporting themselves in flesh and blood.

The tumultuous events of the night, the condition of my hotel room, my anxiety to get away from it, the rush to the lake, the beauty and serenity of the scene, the timely intrusion of Jeremiah Babin with his provocative innocence and his sham interest, it all struck me as of a vicious piece, but a piece of what I couldn’t tell.

Jeremiah, emanating superiority and indifference, leaned forward beside me and dangled his hands between his knees. Did he really believe it? I wondered. Did this powerful, wealthy, educated man believe in the continuity of life? Or was he more interested in the continuity of his own comfort?

As if he felt my question, he turned to me. “I’d like to assure Violet that you won’t write anything against her,” he said.

“You may assure her,” I said. “I will tell you that when I met her, it was my intention to expose her as a fraud. And she may well be, for all I know. But I find I haven’t the heart to do her any harm. My article won’t mention her name.”

He was faintly disappointed, but I could see that his wish to return Violet to a state he thought of as normal was gratified by the idea that I would cause no further disturbance to her sensitive nervous apparatus. He stood up and looked down at me. “I’ll carry your message, Miss Grant,” he said. “And I trust you’ll make no further attempt to contact her.”

This amused me. “I never attempted to contact her to begin with,” I said. “She summoned me.”

“Did she?” he said, though of course he knew this, had been in on it. “Well, I don’t think she will again. Good day to you.”

“And to you, sir,” I said. Without looking back, he strode briskly down the path to the hotel. I watched his strong back, his well‑coiffed hair, until he turned off at the lake and left my line of sight. I sat for a few moments more, mulling over my best course. At length I stood up and made my way down to the Lakeside Café, where the waitresses were serving coffee. I decided to drink a cup to brace myself for the tiresome business of putting my room back together and packing up my belongings.

An hour later, as I checked out, I asked the ever‑cheerful desk clerk if he had been disturbed by a sudden storm in the night, which, I regretted, had resulted in my water pitcher being now in three pieces inside the basin. “No,” he said. “I sleep like the dead.” He winked at his own cleverness. “But things do go bump in the night here, don’t you know,” he continued. “We call them polterguests. There won’t be no charge for the pitcher.” I thanked him, paid my bill, and set out along the wooden walkway, past the dance pavilion and down the steps to the station platform. A soft breeze rustled in the white pines, a woodpecker was up and drilling, and I could hear the band running through scales in preparation for their morning parade. I plopped down on the platform bench, grateful to spend my last fifteen minutes at Lake Pleasant communing with nothing more spiritual than my valise. I made out the train, like a drop of ink spreading on a page, far down the track.

I had been waiting for perhaps ten minutes when I glanced up the hill and noticed a woman walking swiftly on the path from the hotel. As she reached the board walkway, she paused, bent over her ankles, and unbuckled her shoes. Then she sprinted, her skirt billowing, her dark hair loosening from the pins that restrained it, her stockinged feet flying across the wooden planks. At the stair landing she paused, gazing in the direction of the oncoming train, then at me, before she came pattering down the steps to join me on the platform. It was Violet, of course, flushed, wide‑eyed, laughing at her own impetuosity. I stood up as she rushed to me, holding out her hands. “I couldn’t let you leave without saying good‑bye,” she said, her breath coming in gasps. She took my hand in her own, shaking it gently as if we were just meeting. “Jeremiah said he told you I was angry at you, which is just ridiculous, I hope you know. I was angry at him!”

“I’m glad to hear it,” I said, and I meant it. “But–”

“I couldn’t sleep after you left,” she continued. “I just paced the room until I couldn’t stand it anymore and I knocked on Jeremiah’s door and made him get up and listen to me. I tried to tell him how excited I was, and how I wanted to change everything, but he is so dense. I got frustrated and wound up in tears.”

The approaching train wailed as if in sympathy to her plight. Violet raised her voice over the racket. “But I was never angry at you. I had to tell you that.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” I said again. “But I fear you’ve torn your stockings.”

She raised one foot and we both laughed at the shredded silk. “I haven’t run in years,” she said. “Why do we never run?”

Now the engine was grinding and huffing and the brakes squealed as it lumbered to the platform. I picked up my valise and turned toward it. As I did, Violet caught my hand to stop me, and I turned to her. She released me at once, drawing back as if abashed by her own impulsiveness. “You have completely shaken me up, Phoebe Grant,” she said.

“I didn’t mean to,” I replied. The two carriages glided in before us; there was a wheeze and a cloud of white steam rose from below. The attendant yanked the heavy door open from inside. “Good luck to you,” I said, handing in my valise and following it.

When I looked back, Violet was smiling. “And to you,” she said. She had gripped her skirt in one hand, pulling it up and back so that the hem was lifted above her ankles. Another belch of steam issued from the train, washing over her torn stockings, her lifted skirt, up to the hand clutching the cloth at her hip. It alarmed me; I felt she was being swallowed up, and though I was perfectly aware that this was not the case, I had a strong premonition of something dark, something like doom gathering around this small, pert, eager woman who had made a most unladylike spectacle of herself in her anxiety to bid me farewell.

“Don’t forget me,” she called out, as the door slid shut and the train, with another wail of the whistle and screech of metal against metal, pulled away from Lake Pleasant.

Date: 2015-02-16; view: 657