“No, it’s against the rules and I don’t want to get you in trouble.” Mira puts her arm around me and draws me to her, hugging me tightly. “I know how important it is for you to be here. This is your journey; I can’t take it for you.”
When she lets me go, she holds my gaze for a moment and then turns away. I’m surprised. I had thought she was going to try to get me to leave, warn me off Bosco, beg me to come home . . . but instead she’s already walking away toward the hedge that surrounds the giardino segreto. She turns at an opening in the hedge and raises an arm in farewell. I wave back, stifling an urge to call her back. When she disappears into the hedge, I have the uncomfortable feeling that the opening in the hedge has closed up behind her. I feel not so much that my mother has been swallowed up, as that I have been sealed in.
My mother’s visit was so brief that I begin, in the next few days, to wonder if it happened at all. The image of my mother standing at the bottom of the garden, white-robed and loose-haired, merges with half a dozen other images that haunt my dreams: various girls in flowing white drapery who wander the gardens of Bosco as if lost. The dreams always end the same way, with me following one of these figures through a grove of ilex so dense that all I can see of the fleeing girl are wisps of her white dress that catch on the branches and leave diaphanous shreds on the thorns. The thorns tear at my own skin, but I know that if I let the girl out of my sight, I’ll lose my way and be trapped in the thicket forever. I follow her down a path sloping toward the center of the maze, a green tunnel that grows darker and narrower until I realize that it’s not leading into the center of the maze, but into the center of the earth. I catch up with the girl just as she begins her descent into the underworld, and she turns, there on the brink between light and dark, her face pale and smooth and featureless as a river stone. Only it’s not time and water and wind that have wiped her face clean, but thorns that have flayed her flesh as she ran through the groves. The white-blazed trail I’ve been following is a trail of flesh.
Any doubt, though, that my mother’s visit was imaginary is put to rest when, after three nights of these dreams, Diana Tate calls me to her office in the gatehouse. I walk over after breakfast, clutching my thin cardigan across my chest in the cold wind, fearing the worst. The Board has realized they made a terrible mistake letting me in; my professors have retracted their recommendations; I’ve been unmasked as a fraud. The Tudor gatehouse, at the end of a long, winding path through tall pine trees, looms in their shadows like the witch’s house in “Hansel and Gretel.” I have to struggle against the wind to get the door open, and when I do the wind follows me in, stirring the pamphlets about Bosco on the shelves in the reception alcove. Each one is decorated with a drawing of a Greek goddess pouring an amphora into a spring beneath a pine tree, and each of these girls seems to look up at me as if challenging me to defend my right to stay here at Bosco. The only live girl in the alcove, Daria, is behind the reception desk, slumped in her chair with her eyes closed and legs sprawled on her desk, listening to a voice that drones from the speakerphone.
“And what I ask you is, if it wasn’t a real spaceship, then why did I begin to have dreams about Nefertiti afterwards . . . ? Do you want me to spell Nefertiti?”
“No,” Daria says, “I’ve got it.” She cracks open her eyes as I walk by and twirls her finger in a circle by her ear and mouths the word kooks.
I roll my eyes in agreement even though Mira once spent an entire summer channeling the fourteenth-century-BC Egyptian queen’s memoirs. I suddenly have the queasy feeling that the forces of New Age mysticism have followed me to Bosco—a feeling that’s confirmed when I enter Diana Tate’s elegantly appointed office and spy on the quartersawn oak surface of the director’s vintage Stickley writing desk one of Mira’s crystal necklaces coiled between the base of a Tiffany lamp and a white stone paperweight.
“Please have a seat, Ellis,” Diana says, gesturing toward a Morris chair in front of the desk.
The cracked leather upholstery lets out a sigh as I sink into it, as if the chair had absorbed every demeaning experience it had ever witnessed: every servant dismissed by the head housekeeper (whose office this was until the early twenties) and every secretary admonished for lateness, sloppiness, typographical errors, bad spelling, misfiling, and petty thievery by the administrative director.
As I sit back in the chair I remind myself that I’m a guest here, not an employee.
“Thank you for taking time out from quiet hours to see me,” Diana begins, touching a manicured hand to her pearls. She’s dressed in slacks, a silk pullover, and a pale green tweed jacket—casual office clothes that make me acutely aware of my jeans and moth-eaten cardigan and SUNY Binghamton T-shirt, but then, as Diana has just said, these are quiet hours, working hours. I’m not meant to be dressed for an interview.
“Not at all,” I murmur, trying to sound, if not offended, then at least slightly put out that my work’s been interrupted.
“I’ll get to the point because I know you’re anxious to get back to your book. How’s it going, by the way?”
“The book? Oh, very well, thank you . . . I mean it’s hard . . . trying to get the period details down and establish the characters, but it’s really beginning to flow . . .” I stop myself on the word flow, realizing that if I’m not careful, I’ll lapse into “Mira-talk.” It won’t be long until I’m blathering on about unblocking energy chakras.
“Good,” Diana says curtly. “I know the atmosphere at Bosco isn’t always salutary for first-timers. The freedom from work and family responsibilities can lead to an unhealthy lassitude instead of the flourishing of creativity that Aurora Latham envisioned for Bosco. And the presence of well-known novelists can be . . . distracting. Especially to impressionable young women such as yourself.”
Great. She’s heard I’ve been smoking pot with Nat and she thinks I’m sleeping with him. She thinks I’m an author groupie trading sexual favors for letters of reference and agents’ phone numbers . . . but then Diana leans forward in her chair and picks up the crystal beads and interrupts my paranoid fantasies. “We found this in the garden and footprints leading from the giardino segreto to the back gate, which has been chained closed for over a century. This was found on one of the gateposts”—Diana unfolds a piece of white cloth and hands it to me; the feel of the gauzy fabric instantly reminds me of my dream, the fabric turned to flesh—“and one of the guests saw you from her window talking to a woman dressed in white at the bottom of the garden,” Diana concludes, sitting back in her chair.
“Yes,” I admit, “it was my mother. She came because she was worried about me.”
“Had you given her any reason to be worried?” Diana asks, arranging her features into a look of concern. “In your letters, perhaps?”
As if I were a homesick camper writing hysterical letters home to Mommy.
“No, not at all. She had a bad dream.”
Diana lifts one eyebrow, but says nothing.
“My mother puts a lot of stock in her dreams,” I say. “She’s . . . well, she’s sort of a psychic.”
“Ah, so that explains your interest in Corinth Blackwell. I didn’t realize that your Blackwell novel was autobiographical.”
I’m not sure what to be more offended by: the idea that I’m using my mother as source material for the book or the accusation of autobiography. It had been, in Richard Scully’s classes, the fatal flaw in all juvenilia—the taint of the personal. It was understood that every writer must write a poorly disguised autobiographical bildungsroman, but that was the book meant to be discarded and moved past.
“I’d hardly call a novel about a nineteenth-century spiritualist autobiographical. And it’s not as if I believed in all that—”
“Well, of course not. If the Board had believed you were writing a supernatural thriller, you would never have been invited here. You’re not, are you? Writing a supernatural thriller?”
“No, of course not. I mean, there are scenes in which it
might look like supernatural occurrences are taking place, but they’re meant to be ambiguous—like in The Turn of the Screw.”
“Oh. Not my favorite Henry James. But how you’re handling your material is your own business. My concern is that the rules of Bosco, which were set in place to assure the optimum working conditions for all the guests, are respected. The guest who saw your mother in the garden was quite distracted. She said she thought she’d seen a ghost!”
Diana finishes with a dry little laugh. I know that the note of levity is supposed to signal that I’ll be forgiven if I apologize properly, but the description of my mother as a ghost brings to mind the image from my dreams of the white-dressed girl fleeing through the ilex grove and her stone-smooth face turning on the brink of the path’s descent into the underworld. Although the girl’s features have been washed clean as the paperweight on Diana Tate’s desk, I imagine there’s a faint smile and the shadow of a taunt in the girl’s eyes: Follow me, the look says. It’s the same look that I see in Diana Tate’s eyes right now, daring me to notice what she’s let slip. She said she thought she’d seen a ghost. The feminine pronoun repeated three times as if it were a charm. The only other female guest at Bosco is Bethesda Graham.
I deliver my little speech of apology. It’ll never happen again. I’ll make sure my mother understands. No, there’s no one else in my family likely to pay a surprise visit. It’s always been just me and my mother. And I’ll apologize to my fellow guest for scaring her.
Diana Tate looks satisfied—at the sparseness of my family unit and that I’ve caught on to the fact that it was Bethesda Graham who informed on me.
“It sounds like Bethesda’s jealous of you,” David tells me.
I’d been too upset after my interview with Diana Tate to go back to work. I couldn’t go to Nat to complain about Bethesda, of course, even if I weren’t still smarting from Diana’s comment about impressionable young women such as yourself. So I’d made my way up to the room I’ve come to think of as the animal den because of its carvings of bears and eagle. Sitting on the edge of David’s bed, I feel that I have indeed found my way to an animal’s lair, one padded and lined with blueprints and maps instead of fur and feathers. The clutter on the bed has grown to such thickness that I can’t imagine where David finds a place to sleep. Not that he looks as if he’s been getting much sleep. The healthy outdoors look he had when he came to Bosco has been replaced with pale skin and dark shadows under his eyes. His black hair hangs lankly over his forehead. He’s been skipping breakfast and dinner, so I haven’t seen him in several days.
“Why in the world would Bethesda Graham be jealous of me?” I ask.
David shrugs and looks away from me. “Maybe because you’ve been smoking pot in Nat Loomis’s room.”
Ah, I think, so that’s why he’s been avoiding me. “David,” I say, moving a few inches closer to him on the bed. “I was only hanging out with Nat because he seemed so lonely that day . . .”
“You don’t owe me an explanation,” he says, his voice cold.
“But, I do . . . I mean, I don’t want you to think there’s anything going on between me and Nat . . .” As I say the words, I realize how false they sound. Is there something going on between Nat and me? I wonder, remembering that ghostly kiss I’d felt in his room.
He looks up, his dark hair falling in front of his eyes, and moves toward me, the old mattress creaking under his weight and sinking into a trough that pulls me toward him, almost as if the bed itself were delivering me to him. But when his hand touches my face, I hear a sound like beating wings and I can’t help looking toward the headboard to see if the carved eagle has come to life as it does in my dreams. When he feels me tense, he shifts away from me and stands up.
“You should get back to work,” he says, his back to me, and then, as if regretting the preemptory dismissal: “Here, I found this in an old trunk up in the attic. I thought you might find it interesting.” David riffles through the stacks of paper on his desk and extracts a yellowed and dog-eared poster for the Lyceum Theater, Gloversville, New York, advertising the program for July 9, 1882. The headliner is a woman called Queen Eusapia, “The Clever Lady of Mystery.” Below Queen Eusapia, “Retained for one week longer owing to her enormous success,” is Corinth Blackwell, “The girl who talks to ghosts.”
“Wow, this is great,” I say, wincing at the false brightness in my voice. “I knew that Corinth appeared on the stage before she did private séances, but I never pictured her performing alongside juggling acts and burlesque dancers.”
“Look at the bottom of the bill,” David says, turning and sitting on the edge of his desk.
I look at David first, searching his face for a sign that he’s forgiven me for taking up with Nat, but it’s as if a film has settled over his eyes, as if a part of him isn’t really here. I look down at the poster and see the last act on the bill: The Great Quintini, Master of Disappearances.
Chapter Twelve
Tom watches Corinth enter the grotto with Milo Latham’s arm around her waist. He was a fool to think she’d leave with him now when she wouldn’t wait for him ten years ago. He moves back into the niche and sits on the bench by the small statue and rinses his hands in the water trickling from her upturned vase into the basin below. Violet had shown him the statue when they first arrived at Bosco and told him the story behind it. It was the kind of story she enjoyed: a nymph who’d been so grief-stricken by her husband’s death that she’d melted into water. Mrs. Ramsdale’s heroines were always wasting away, but in Tom’s experience women very rarely melted away from grief. Such transformations, he believed, were illusions, and illusions were something he knew about. They were all about misdirection, leading the audience’s attention away from the real trick, which, in a way, was the trick Corinth had practiced on him.
In those first few weeks with Corinth, all he saw was a girl who’d been badly hurt. It wasn’t just the rope burns on her wrists and ankles, although those were so bad that she was unable to stand or lift so much as a spoon to her mouth, or her cracked ribs, which had to be taped because that brute Oswald had pulled the ropes around her chest so tight. Something inside her had been squeezed out by those ropes, as if her spirit had been forced out of her body. She lay on the bed in the boardinghouse where he took her from the Lyceum, staring up at the ceiling, her eyes open but unseeing.
Corinth’s father came and looked at his daughter lying still on the bed and said, “This is what her mother was like before she died. It won’t be long.” And then he’d left. Tom found out later from the manager at the Lyceum that he’d collected Corinth’s wages and said he planned to try his luck out west.
The doctor came and examined Corinth. He said it was shock and would pass, but Mrs. McGreevey, who ran the boardinghouse, said she’d seen this happen before to Indians from the settlement up at Barktown who’d come to live in the town and lost their way. “Like a light gone out in them,” she said, not unkindly, but letting Tom know what he might be up against.
“Indians? But she’s not . . . ?”
For an answer Mrs. McGreevey had slipped her fingers under the neck of Corinth’s nightgown and pulled out a blue beaded leather pouch hanging from a leather thong around her neck. She drew out from the bag some dried green leaves and crumbled them between her fingers, releasing a sweet aroma.
“Sweetgrass,” Mrs. McGreevey told him. “I’ve seen the Indian medicine men burn it to bring back those lost souls.” She held a pinch of the dried grass under the girl’s nose and she stirred faintly. “Mind you, I wouldn’t like my neighbors to know that pagan ceremonies were going on up here,” she said, placing the leaves in Tom’s palm. “I’ve got my four girls to think about and their reputations. I’d smoke a pipe, if I were you, to cover the smell.”
And so for four days Tom had burned the sweetgrass in a copper saucer beside Corinth’s bed while he sat on the window ledge and puffed pipe smoke into Mrs. McGreevey’s backyard. The four McGreevey girls sat outside
in the shade of a white viburnum tree and sewed gloves. They did piecework for one of the local glove shops—nearly all the women in Gloversville did. “Respectable work,” Mrs. McGreevey said. “A man could do worse than marry a woman who can contribute to the family with such respectable work done in her own home.”
The leather pieces, already cut, were dropped off in the morning by one of the factory cutters, and the finished gloves were picked up by another man in the evening. The cutters all wore gleaming white long-sleeved shirts and ties and striped waistcoats. Watching them reminded Tom of his brief stint as a watchmaker’s apprentice. He’d been good with his hands, but he’d found the regular hours dull. Then he’d found other uses for his nimble fingers and gone on the stage. He’d been touring for seven years—since he was fourteen—and had thought it a decent life up until now.
On the fourth day he’d heard a rustle from the bed and saw that the girl had turned her head and was looking at him. When Mrs. McGreevey came up with the lunch tray, she helped him get her into a chair so she could look out the window “and get some air on that white face of hers.”
A few days later the girl spoke for the first time. “What are they making?” she asked Tom, tilting her chin toward the circle of girls under the viburnum.
“They’re sewing gloves,” he told her. “We’re in Gloversville. That’s what people do here.”
She’d looked down at her own bandaged hands, which lay like slaughtered doves in her lap, and smiled. “I like that. A town named for what people do in it.”
When the bandages came off, Tom asked one of the McGreevey girls (they were named Nora, Jane, Elizabeth, and Sue, but he could never quite tell them apart) for some of the leather and thread and asked if she would show Corinth how to sew gloves. “To help her get the use of her hands back,” he said.
She agreed and the next morning—it turned out to be Nora, the second-to-oldest sister—came upstairs with a packet of white kid leather and white thread. She drew a chair up close to Corinth’s and patiently showed her how to sew the delicate leather, their heads bending together—Corinth’s dark, red-flecked hair and Nora’s pale yellow curls—in the sunshine.