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CHAPTER 1
Mumler in the Dock
October, 1861
I sit here before you unjustly accused. I sit here at your mercy, reader.
We three sit before you, a congress of rogues, and all our fates are intertwined.
There is I, William Mumler, the spirit photographer. There is Hannah, my wife, who can reckon the dead. There is William Guay, our Poughkeepsian friend, who has up to this juncture protected our interests. And these are just the tattered souls who sit here left and right of me in the Year of Our Spirit 1861, bearing credible witness, in Suffolk Court's dock.
Publically we are accused of fraud and larceny most foul.
Privately we are accused of a murder that cannot be publically proven on account of the fact that the man it concerns cannot be verified as dead.
Put forward uniquely, such charges might crush us. Taken together, they cancel each other.
For now we sit here in our cells — mute, incoordinate, fearing the worst. The jail is a piece of well-meant legislature, the new human way to prohibit and punish — four long wings of Quincy granite branching from an octagon with enormous arched windows admitting Charles Street where people, in their freedom, go. Not so William Mumler, confined behind bars, impotent and indisposed, his head inclined into a storm of rapists, pickpockets, cardsharps and abusers in a ten by four space where the sunlight itself, shining raggedly into the arms of the cross, has not the slightest character, the slightest touch of heaven in it. While forever the knocking of implements, scratching, the grunting of a hundred apes, those sad and headstrong bouts of sound that men fallen into the sere will enact.
And though I am not one of them, I am neither, however, completely not guilty.
But I didn't bamboozle American mourners, and I didn't murder the man that they say.
It is these crimes and these alone for which I am brought here to answer today.
CHAPTER 2
Message Department
What moves our tongues to speak your names, you mortals who tend on the ways of the spirits? Why do we shiver if not to feel cold and why lament if not bereaved? Why do we wander if not to discover and why watch over if not to guard? And would you believe us, you passers among us who cannot hear our ceaseless pleas, that we shiver and sadden and wander and watch because we cannot help but do? And would it pain you in your beds, in which you sleep to wake again, that all of these and more but stir the same collective nerve of us, a network of spirits, each bound to the next — each spirit a story, each story an absence, each absence a loss in the world, a bleak room, a beggar's shack we pace amidst? So what do we say to you? What do we say, you mortals, you breathers, you feelers, you babes? What do we say to all of you to whom at last the answer matters?
Hannah at Clayhead
August, 1845
Born half-dead, so I've been told. Not a single tearless cry. Pulled me out backwards, strangling on my mother. Then lifted me into the light for a breath.
Took one in. So here I am.
Ghastly and purple: some flower in ruin. Or a big withered beet. Or a corpse flower: yes. Passed down to my mother who held me aloft to the various shades in the room.
Little girls forget, see nothing. This was not the case with me. For here is my mother, a young woman then. Middle of her dress undone. One of her breasts spilling out of the gap to let down milk between my lips. Resting over her sternum, a cameo portrait that held a face not unlike hers. In careful inks. With charcoal depth. The Maier flute below the nose. The hard flattened cheekbones. The widely spaced eyes.
And here is my father in pouting grey clothes. Muttering a benediction. Petting me along my sides. Always reeking of fish, not enough, far too many. The inherited curse of grey fish, caught in nets, resting pickled and smoked on others' tables.
There was tribulation living in his lungs, even then. Starting, already, to tatter him.
Nights the ocean smote our island. Hurtling against the rocks. Our house stood at Clayhead, a perilous clime. Where before your every step, above the mottle of the rock-beds, you could fairly hear the snapping of your bones as you fell. The year after I came, a lighthouse went up. So many salmoners lost to the waves. Unluckier families than me and my own accepting cold bratwurst and strudel.
* * *
Saw others, too. Not the salmoners. Others. Earlier, even, than anyone guessed.
They made a very queer parade through those first couple of years of my life in the vale.
Stupid and stubborn. Confused in their movement. Lummox shadows trundling by. Asked me of things about which I knew nothing. Never seemed to look at me for long, or directly. Stood in dark rooms, turned into the corner. Distractedly perched on the edge of the bed. Walked up to doors where they paused for a moment, unsure of the thing that they sought. Turned around.
But I was not the only one. Mother saw them, too.
Claudette.
Gaunt as a birch. Undappled grey eyes. Tight about the thin, chapped mouth. High-collared dresses all the colours of a rainstorm. Hair long and dark as a river at night. Corded wood the same as father. Levered our trap from the deep April ruts. Hoisted great cauldrons of stew from the fire without a bit of broth the lesser. They said when Claudette pushed me out, she lowered her legs, very still, from the stirrups and rested her feet on the floor. When she sat on a chair in her kitchen dominion and carved her figures out of soap, I felt that nothing could displace the bucket wedged between her knees. These figures she kept in a drawer in her bedroom. Latch was always snug in place. Yet still I sensed the dolls sometimes. Seeing my way through her room with their eye-nubs.
Nights my mother sang to me. A song without rhythm. Yet music it was. Said that it came from the Bible, my mother. Her Bible and hers alone.
"Your hair is like a flock of goats, moving down the slopes of Gilead. Your teeth are like a flock of ewes and every one bears each its twin."
Tapping with her fingers on the surface of my teeth, she would kiss my forehead and would let her lips linger. Would kiss me and brush back the goats in my hair. Spilling them, scrabbling, down onto my shoulders. While just outside the ocean waves dashed and murmured on the rocks. Light from the lighthouse, magnesium, molten, cutting back and forth above us. Flickering into the room's darkest corners. Darting again out to sea.
* * *
Who came first.
The governess. Out wandering among the dunes.
Me there with my mother, the two of us watching, as the girl in the Grecian-bend bustle came on. My mother stood facing away from the sea. A tepid winter sun behind her. Yet the light was enough to determine her shadow, which stretched, twice her height, inland from the cliff. The figure approached us not head-on, but rather instead from an easterly tack. Coming up over the waist-high dunes between Clayhead and the ocean. Hair half piled upon her head, half straggling about her shoulders. Nostrils raw. Skin pale to translucence. Bright, blue veins reaching under her scalp. But as she approached, drawing closer and closer, I found I could only see her less. Perspective of her shifting clockwise unless I stood completely still.
Mother was without this problem. She followed the girl steadily with her eyes. And pivoted where she stood, my mother, to match the figure's every motion. Matched them, and ticked like a sundial behind them, as though to keep the figure within range.
"Where are my children? Lavinia? Miss Pearl?" said the girl into her cold, cupped hands.
"And where is my stick for biting on?
"Where is the Doctor and where are his salts?
"Why am I dizzy so close to the sea when precisely sea-air was prescribed me?"
And my mother replied, "Go home to God. You are long overdue at His side, darling girl."
"Is that where they have gone — to God?"
"So will we all one day," said mother.
A pause from the her. A thoughtful pause. A human pause, it seemed, at first, and I remember thinking: I can really know them, can't I? Know them like my flesh and blood.
"Did falling sickness land me here?"
"Like as not, it was," said mother.
"Then where's my stick for biting, miss? Don't you know I'll be needing it soon?" said the girl.
Standing there pinching the tulle of her dress. Waiting for the fit to come. And then when it didn't she muttered away. And that was the last time I saw her.
Mother knelt down, drew a sharp arm around me. "You're looking at them wrong," said she.
I was then four. Said I, "How's that?"
"You're trying to trick yourself into seeing them."
"They squirm a lot."
"It's these that squirm." Mother pointed at her eyes. "Let them do the work they'll do. Learn to trust in what you've got."
"What's that?" said I.
"The ken."
"The ken?"
"The ken," said my mother, but said nothing more.
CHAPTER 3
Mumler on Dress
To the true gentleman, it should go without saying that his physical appearance is an index of his character. His mode of dress concurrent with the rigour of his hygiene and the neatness of his grooming are pre-eminently vital. The American gentleman is no different, and so is honour-bound to be that which his country boasts of him. Sober, strong, self-governing, with nary a hint of anything that beggars immodest regard from his fellows: the foppish or brigandly wearing of jewellery, the compassing of one's top-hat with bands of sealskin, silk or satin, the adoption of a formal coat that finds the wearer out-of-season, and so the wrongs accumulate until the scoundrel is consumed. But in the American gentleman, lo, such conflagration need not rage. This prodigy of taste and tact should refrain from not only arraying his wealth if he is blessed enough to have it but moreover still from discussing its prospects or making it known in any way. In mind as in make as in manner, this man, and never the tierce, in him, shall cleave. He should be neat in the extreme — his moustache trimmed, his frock-coat smart — inviting no further impression whatever than that, precisely, which he is: a gentleman about his business, a gentleman to be admired.
Mumler on the Up and Up
July, 1859
In the summer of 1859 with all of life's prospects assembled before me, I was sent to deliver a cameo necklace to the Sunderlands of Exeter Street in Back Bay.
The necklace was silver and dripping with cameos after the Egyptian fashion, with forget-me-nots cut into the mounting and four amethysts ranged around.
In the jewellery shop where I worked with my father off Newspaper Row in the heart of downtown, I had a name for all of them who came peacocking through the door. I would whisper it, seethingly, under my breath no sooner had the door swung closed — a door that bore upon its glass the words Mumler & Sons, my unthinkable future — coming and going, and going and coming, I would utter my withering secret aloud: "Lahngworthies, Lahngworthies, every last one." I would murder the A as they did on Cape Cod, these Spiritists and womanists and anti-Sabba-whatsit-nists, Boston Brahmins each and all, these people who bought jewellery to gussy up their worthless lives. They wrought nothing, did nothing, squandered the triumph of having more than most — than me. They were contemptible in that.
And yet I kept an open mind.
I, William Jr., was the shop's chief engraver, not because of my father but rather my hands, quick and exacting for all they were stubby, sweeter than a barren maid to the baubles and chains that came under their care. When I came down the stairs from the modest apartment that my father allowed me above the workshop, the other craftsmen on the floor would turn their eyes in shame from me.
Such was my estate on that red-letter day in June of 1859 as I walked down the Green in between the house-fronts past the old and tyrannical names of the street-signs.
Moving west there was Berkeley, Clarendon, Dartmouth, until Exeter came like the edge of a cliff; I stood, nervous despite myself, in front of a puddingstone sliver of house that matched the address on the ticket.
I checked on the state of the cargo I carried and went up to knock on the door.
A servant girl answered, took my name and led me to sit in the carpeted foyer on a couch with a hideous pattern of tulips directly across from a grandfather clock. Though I was early at the house by no more than a couple of minutes, still I must wait for those scrupulous hands to light on the hour I was set to arrive. Beyond a sort of canted screen between the parlour and the foyer I saw a figure in rotation, Mrs. Lucretia or her lady, preparing the room for my coming.
I got my calling cards in order.
Mrs. Sunderland seemed to emerge from the screen like some sort of fairy the way I perceived it, though really she slipped through the sliver of space between the screen's edge and the parlour's doorway, tailored to her size exactly. She took my card, glanced at it, scanned me lengthwise and to my surprise took my hand in her own. My hand had been swollen with heat from my pocket, yet there in the cave of her palms it contracted.
She was little and lithe in the way she was made, her hair curly as barrel liquorice. She had a pretty, cramped face just showing its lines.
She glided off beyond the screen and once I had followed her, wrenching the thing to fit my magnanimous bulk past its edge, she motioned I sit on a second low couch within her lace-curtained and cool inner sanctum. My hostess sat across from me in a brocaded wingback that bore her aloft a couple of feet above the floor. I found I was squinting because of the sun which her lady had let through the drapes as I waited, slanting over the top of her mistress's chair and shining down into my eyes.
Set between our sets of legs was a table with coffee and small pastries on it.
"Let's have it then, Mr. Mumler," she said.
I took out the necklace and showed it to her in a fan on the flats of my hands.
"Would you?" she said as she rose and then I. She inclined her head foreword. "Obligingly, sir."
Careful to maintain a suitable distance, I fastened the chain below her hair. She shook back her hair and began to process before a gleaming Cheval mirror.
"I take it you are pleased?"
"Oh, quite. And tonight I shall give it a coming-out party."
"Special occasion?"
"A speaker," she said. "Miss Fanny A. Conant. She's on at the Banner of Light. Do you know her?"
"A Spiritist," I said.
"A Spirit-ual-ist," my host corrected. "She is to speak and hold a sitting." Finished inspecting herself at the mirror, she sat once again in her chair. "Are you familiar with our movement?"
"As much as I've read in the papers," I said.
Sitting again, I crossed my legs and tented my fingers upon my left knee. My hostess's eyes flickered over me briefly.
"Oh we are frightfully disorganized," the lady said quickly. "We are buffeted by skeptics almost constantly, you know. And yet we are always accepting of strays."
"I am not wed to any faith. You see, I cannot be a stray."
"We Spiritualists," she said, "are more. Though I grant you that faith might have somethingto do with it. Are you learned, for example, on the question of woman?"
"I am learned on the answer of woman," I said.
"Really, Mr. Mumler. What a wicked thing to say. You're in the habit of saying such things, I imagine? And yet anyway," she gave pause, "you're not boring. Maybe a little passé, but not that."
"I've liked our talk myself," I said. "So much, in fact, I would like to discount you. Half-price let us say for the necklace, Lucretia?"
Her nostrils flared a little then. She did not answer for a moment.
"Oh you may call me that," she said. "You may call me Missus L. But the size of your offer, you see — it's indecent."
"You are busy enough as it is," I pressed on, "what with all your women and their questions, Mrs. Sunderland. I won't be the cause of your falling behind all on account of some ornament."
"We've been privileged enough to afford it," she said with a curious ruffle of her dress.
This fanning of her feathers done, she smiled and moved onto the edge of her chair. And I detected in that movement an apologetic tremor or anyway one of explanation — I could not help myself, you see — as though she were now more embarrassed for me than she'd been for herself just a moment ago when I had implied that she'd needed my help.
But why, you will ask, did I wish to discount her when I was not my father and my father was not me — when I gave not a fig for Lahngworthies like Lucretia, with their frivolous neckwear and parlour revivals?
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Shadows in Summerland"
by .
Copyright © 2016 Adrian Van Young.
Excerpted by permission of ChiZine Publications.
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