“Harriet?” Mrs. Putnam was asking. “Harriet or Wellington Hayes? Are you there, my dears?”
Lizzie supposed Dr. Ellinwood had spent the afternoon cadging information about the Hayes family from the unsuspecting Putnams. The idea annoyed her. She dropped Mrs. Mullin’s hand, deliberately breaking the magnetic chain, but Mrs. Mullin’s sharp fingers closed over hers like a cat’s paw on a bird’s wing.
“We have your Lizzie here,” said Mrs. Mullin. Her words resounded loudly in the absolute darkness. “Harriet?”
“Lizzie?” A tiny, sleepy, faraway voice came from behind. “Is it Lizzie?”
“Speak up, dear.” Mrs. Mullin squeezed Lizzie’s hand. “Your mother is asking for you.”
“Yes, Mother,” said Lizzie. Mrs. Mullin’s nails dug into her skin. “I’m sitting right here.”
“Oh, Lizzie. Your father says to tell you we miss you. And our darling Edward. He loves you very much.”
“I love you, too.”
“We’re all watching over you now!”
Lizzie had never doubted it. “Thank you, Mother.” She thought to provide a distraction. “Mrs. Mullin is here.”
“But Lizzie, you have us so anxious.”
“And the Putnams. Your dear, dear friends.”
“Why do you put us through this worry? You were always so dependable. What’s come over you?” The voice was beginning to sound like her mother’s, after all. It had her mother’s disappointed, unsurprised tone. It came closer, spoke in her ear. Lizzie thought she could have touched it, if Mrs. Mullin and Miss Rolphe weren’t holding her hands so resolutely. Everything Miss Rolphe did was resolutely done. There was no reason for Lizzie to find this irritating. Miss Rolphe was a thoroughly admirable young woman.
Lizzie’s corset was cutting off her air. Mrs. Mullin’s grip was cutting off her circulation. Lizzie’s fingertips began to throb. “Mother, I’m the treasurer for a charitable home. I’m quite good at it. I have sixty-two wards at present.” The wind whined outside. Something scraped against the window.
“You’re our only living child. We should be at peace. You never used to behave this way.”
“What way? What have I done?” This was rash, and Lizzie immediately wished she could retract it. She was letting the mere semblance of her mother get to her, and in front of everyone, too. But even as she told herself to calm down, she felt her agitation growing.
“Stay away from Mammy Pleasant.”
Lizzie shook abruptly free of Myrtle. “Don’t tell me what to do, Mother!” she said. Her voice was loud and angry and unlike her voice.
Never before had she spoken that way to her mother in public. There was a stunned pause and then a shaft of light, as if someone had opened the door into the corridor. A gust hit the window like an explosion. The glass of the cabinet shivered and cracked into a spider web of fissures. Through the glass, a multitude of green hands and staring faces could be seen. They seemed to slide through the cracks, evaporating immediately, flattened and bleached, into the material world.
FIVE
It took an entire glass of sour wine to calm Lizzie down. Everyone was looking at her, and she hated this above all things. Her corset was sawing her in half. She had the ghosts of ghosts burning in orange afterimages under her eyelids, which could easily bring on a headache, and she would blame Dr. Ellinwood if she got one, for all the good that would do.
Dr. Ellinwood hovered, rubbing his wrists where the bonds had been, to emphasize their tightness. “Obviously I unleashed something I couldn’t control,” he told the group. “I blame myself. Calling the dead is not a party game.” He apologized to them all, just as if he hadn’t orchestrated the entire catastrophe.
Which, of course, he had. From the other side of the wine, Lizzie could see that her mother had not come back, certainly not. Was Lizzie the only one who’d read that Margaret Fox, the most famous of the American table-rappers, had admitted to fraud? Lizzie didn’t know how Dr. Ellinwood performed his illusions, but that was no reason to credit them. Surely the dead led lives of more dignity than this feeble, grasping, greenish manifesting.
Mrs. Mullin raised her voice. “Dr. Ellinwood? Do you think the dead can still tell lies?”
“They can indeed,” he assured her. “But they have no reason to.” Which was, Lizzie thought, practically an admission of guilt.
She herself regretted nothing. She wished only that she’d been louder and ruder. In the category of small mercies, at least there’d been no ectoplasm.
Half an hour later Lizzie was safely back in the carriage and clattering out of the Palace courtyard. The rain was falling harder and colder. The streetlamps shone in the damp, soft and rainbowed like bubbles. On Mrs. Putnam’s instructions, the driver was urging the horses to hurry—at Roscoe’s age! with the road so wet!—and Lizzie couldn’t help feeling guilty about this. Roscoe himself could scarcely believe it. He would take a quick pace or two, then slow until whipped, then take another quick pace, then slow again. His obstinacy was affecting the other horse. The carriage rocked like a train, bumped like a boat.
Rain was too ordinary in San Francisco to spoil a Saturday night. The streets were brightly lit. Sheltered under canopies and alcoves, bands played bravely along their route—ecstatic polkas and somber Salvation Army hymns. The carriage passed phrenologists and shooting galleries and the Snake Drugstore, with rattlers coiled in its windows. Revolutionaries shouted from the steps of jewelry stores, salesmen offered the afflicted the revivifying powers of aconite, tiger fat, and belts stuffed with cayenne pepper. The nymphes du pavé beckoned from beneath umbrellas, their smiles wet, scarlet, and practiced.
Mrs. Putnam was not speaking to her. Lizzie was clearly meant to feel guilty about this as well, but the impact was lessened by Mr. Putnam’s need to fill any silence with labored gallantries. He was a naturally garrulous man; now he also appeared to be drunk. Mr. Putnam noted that Mrs. Mullin’s shawl was as good as Italian, that Lizzie’s color was attractively up. He observed his own good fortune in being the only man among three such elegant ladies. He informed them that the king of Hawaii, Kalakaua, was staying at the Palace. The livery boy had said so when he brought the carriage around. “They say he is very ill.” Mr. Putnam’s voice was serious and subdued. “Might die.” Rain plonked on the fabric roof of the carriage, slid down the glass windows.
“Surely not,” Lizzie answered politely, although how did she know? She imagined the stretched green dead people dispersing throughout the Palace, inhaled out of one room and exhaled into another through the pneumatic tubes. She couldn’t imagine this would improve the king’s chances.
“Death comes to king and commoner alike,” Mr. Putnam intoned. He shook his head sadly.
And what if it didn’t? People always said things like that as if it were such a shame, but how much more of a shame would it be if death were selective? A brougham crossed them on the left. The driver sat, hunched in a thick wool coat, rain dripping from the brim of his hat onto his hands. A gray horse shook rainwater from its mane. The brougham’s windows were draped, but twitched briefly as they passed. Lizzie had a quick glimpse of a woman’s eyes in a veiled face.
“In Hawaii, they admire a dark skin,” Mrs. Mullin said. “They see it as a mark of royal blood. The king is very dark.”
“In Hawaii they admire a stout figure,” Mr. Putnam said. “Not merely stout. Actually fat.” Mr. Putnam was himself a remarkably thin man.
“I just this moment remembered.” Mrs. Mullin was seated next to Lizzie, opposite Mrs. Putnam. She leaned forward as the carriage wheel hit a hole, and the broody, headless wings on her hat jumped in an unpleasant parody of flight. “You were there at the ball the night Mammy Pleasant turned colored.”
Mrs. Putnam nodded once, a sharp, brief nod. Her face was turned away toward the street. The hair around her ears bobbed gently; the feather in her hat shook. In fact, she was atremble from head to toe. It was the carriage making her so. That, and the angry stiffness of her
spine, a forced rigidity adding much to her bouncing.
The real cause, of course, was Lizzie’s insulting behavior. Mrs. Putnam believed that mothers and the dead should be treated with the utmost deference. Rudeness to one’s mother when she was also dead was beyond the beyond.
“Oh, yes,” said Mr. Putnam. “Yes, indeed. Everyone was there. Mr. Ralston. Senator Sharon. Mr. Bell. Of course, they were young men, they were no one important yet. They were just like us. And all of them lining up to dance with her. She was a looker. No one called her Mammy that night.”
“And her not nearly as young as everyone thought, neither,” Mrs. Mullin noted.
Mrs. Putnam directed herself strictly to Mrs. Mullin; Lizzie was still only getting the profile. “And out of the blue, she just says it. I’m a colored woman, she says. I thought it was a joke, when I first heard about it. More and more people from the South were arriving then, with the war coming, so she must have known she’d be exposed. People from the South, they know what to look for.”
“Once you were told, it was obvious,” said Mr. Putnam. “She was dark. We all knew she was Spanish or something. But Ralston, Sharon, Bell, and her, they were great friends even after. They all got rich together.”
“Nothing more needs be said on the subject.” Mrs. Putnam shook her head, then continued. “There were so few respectable women in the city back then. No one maintaining standards. Vigilantes and hoodlums roaming the streets, vying with each other to see who could make the most misery for the most people. But those days are past and in the past may stay.”
Roscoe had settled back into his usual pace with his usual roll. The ride had smoothed accordingly. The sounds of the rain on the fabric roof, of hooves and wheels on pavement, the warmth of the Putnams’ lap robes, the smell of perfume and horsehair, and the wine she had taken medicinally combined to make Lizzie sleepy. She closed her eyes and let the conversation float over her. She’d heard about rough San Francisco all her life; she even remembered a bit of it. This and the sleepiness made her feel young as a girl.
“And then there was that business with Mrs. Bell,” said Mrs. Putnam. Lizzie opened her eyes. “People have all but forgot about that. He’s living on Bush Street, like a bachelor. She’s over on Sutter with two of his children and calling herself Mrs. Percy. One minute the papers say they’re married, the next, not. She vanishes for months, and Mrs. Pleasant hires the Pinks to track her down. And then Mrs. Pleasant up and invites everyone to a wedding party as if all is right as rain. With Thomas Bell still denying he’s a married man.”
“Were you invited to that as well?” asked Mrs. Mullin.
“I wouldn’t have gone,” said Mrs. Putnam, and no doubt she wouldn’t have, though this clearly meant no.
The carriage swung slightly, following the curve of Mission Street. They were leaving the lamps of the downtown, heading into darkness. Lizzie covered a yawn with her hand. “What happened to the Palace’s Negro waiters?” she asked.
“Fired,” Mrs. Mullin told her. “Just this week. One of them was caught filching food from the kitchen, so Morgan fired the lot of them. You see how old and toothless Mrs. Pleasant has become since the Sharon business. No one would have dared do that to the colored when she was younger. She’s always been a great one for the courts.”
“Oh, Lizzie.” Mrs. Putnam turned and seized Lizzie’s hands, shaking her fully awake. Her face shone in the carriage, dim and yellowed by the black hat and deeply creased, pocked as the moon. She was a decade younger than Mrs. Pleasant, but she looked a decade older. “I have nothing against the hardworking colored. You know I believe in judging people by their hearts. But you don’t know how treacherous she can be. Will you promise me not to see her? For your dear, dear mother’s sake?”
When Lizzie was fifty instead of forty, she would still be a child to the Putnams. She didn’t mind; it was one of the things she loved about them. Nobody else could make her feel young now that she so definitely wasn’t.
One afternoon when Lizzie was twelve, and Erma seven, they’d begged to eat their supper on the Putnams’ back lawn. They were playing castaways, they were playing Robinson Crusoe—Lizzie’s idea, of course; this was a book she’d been allowed to read early, all except for the chapter with the pirates. “You’ll break a dish,” Mrs. Putnam protested, and they promised to be ever so careful.
“We’ll make maps,” Lizzie said, getting overexcited as usual, and then, racing into the house for pencils, she stepped on the pink rosebuds of her dirty plate, heard it crack, and ran home without another word to anyone, before Erma even knew. An hour or so later, Mrs. Putnam appeared in her room. “I hope the day never comes when I care more for a dish than for a little girl,” Mrs. Putnam said. She didn’t even tell Lizzie’s mother. How could Lizzie ever bear to refuse her anything?
She opened her mouth to accede. In that moment she saw, through her left eye, the tiny disturbance in the air, the silver flash that presaged a headache. The emerald wings on Mrs. Mullin’s hat hung like a hawk. There was a gummy silence within the carriage; without it, the mounting drumbeat of rain and hooves. She closed her mouth in a panic. Her vision improved immediately.
“Do you know what voodoo is?” Mrs. Mullin swayed in the carriage and her voice became a whisper. “What it really is? Black arts aimed at the destruction of the white race.”
“You don’t believe in magic, do you, Mrs. Mullin? Hocus-pocus? Habeas corpus?” Mr. Putnam shifted in his seat so as to engage Lizzie’s eyes, involve her in the joke.
“I believe in malice. As if you or I or poor, fanciful, inconsequential little Lizzie could ever do Mammy Pleasant a speck of harm.”
Lizzie’s eyesight had normalized, but her breathing had not. Her voice was oddly tilted. “She came to the Brown Ark on business,” she told Mrs. Putnam. “I don’t expect her back, but I can’t promise not to see her on business. I have to do whatever’s best for the children.” She touched her hands together to reassure herself that they were both warm. She pressed her fingers to her forehead.
“Her business is just what I want you kept out of,” Mrs. Putnam said.
Lizzie lowered her hands and saw Mrs. Mullin patting Mrs. Putnam’s knee. “Lizzie’s not her usual type,” Mrs. Mullin said. Mrs. Pleasant’s usual type was a fragile beauty like Mrs. Bell.
“Lizzie is being very obstinate,” Mrs. Putnam complained.
“Lizzie looks very handsome this evening,” Mr. Putnam observed without looking at her. “I have spent the evening with three very handsome ladies.”
“Are you getting one of your headaches, dear?” Mrs. Putnam asked.
“No,” Lizzie said cautiously. It appeared not. She began to feel the charged, sweet heat of relief rising inside her.
“She was the most wonderful cook,” Mr. Putnam said. All three women turned to look at him. He raised his hands in protest. “I was never at her table, myself. But everyone says. Cajun crab cakes and candied figs. Wine jellies. Caraway cheese. Dishes from the South.”
And then Roscoe stopped, because Lizzie was home. She looked through the rain to her dark, cold house. A woman who had just released a quantity of dead people, including her own angry mother, into the city should probably not sleep alone. E.D.E.N. Southworth’s The Hidden Hand lay on her bedstead, a popular, feverish book, and she was just up to the chapter where robbers hid themselves under little Capitola’s bed.
Mr. Putnam prepared to help her down. Outside the carriage she heard Roscoe shake himself. She did the mental equivalent. Nonsense, she told herself firmly.
There was no room under her bed for a pack of robbers.
The green people were a fraud and an illusion.
And anyway, her mother’s spirit, if it was loose at all, was at the Palace Hotel and surely happy. The Palace would be her mother’s idea of heaven, especially if there was also a king dying there.
ONE
Whatever complaints Lizzie may have had concerning her mother were slight compared with Teresa Bell’s comp
laints regarding hers. Teresa Bell was obsessed. She referred to her mother often in conversation and, late in her life, wrote two similar accounts of their relationship. One of these she sent to the physician who attended her in her final years. The other formed the heart of her Last Will and Testament. Teresa Bell died in 1923.
Her maternal grandfather was one Colonel Nathaniel Tibbals. Colonel Tibbals distinguished himself during the Revolutionary War and was given, for his services, a parcel of land in Auburn, New York. He married Sarah Lydia Ward, one of a family of celebrated Kentucky beauties, and together they raised four healthy children.
The youngest was the youngest by far, and her father, rather an elderly man by the time she was born, doted most upon her. She had her own harp, her own pony, and she knew her own mind. Her name was Elmina Caroline, and her father would hear nothing against her. He died when she was only eleven.
Some years later Elmina married Wessel Harris. She brought six hundred acres of farmland to the marriage, as well as her own considerable beauty; he thought himself the luckiest man in the world. He kissed his bride and commenced his living happily ever after.
But in the next years he faced the inexplicable loss of his first two children. Both of them boys, they were full-weight, pink-cheeked, active babies. Labor and births unremarkable. Yet neither lived to see four months. When a third child was born, a pretty girl who favored her mother, with eyes like cornflowers and hair like cornsilk, Elmina refused even to hold her. Before the child was three months old, her father came home to find her stripped to the skin and set outside on a windowsill, sobbing her heart out in the soaking rain.
Wessel wrapped the baby warmly in an old, soft undershirt, tucked her inside his coat, and walked off in the storm. Five miles away lived the family of a bricklayer named John Clingan. The Clingans had recently lost their middle daughter, Matilda. Wessel Harris gave his baby to the Clingan family, and she remained with them for many years.