The philosophy professor let out a hearty laugh and said, “I do believe Houdini has debunked more. Strange work, that a stage magician would align himself with academic science. But you must admit, Benton, that people’s very willingness to believe in her speaks to the profound, nearly universal desire to commune with the spirit realm. Isn’t that desire itself evidence that the spirit realm exists? The idea of the soul is an abiding belief, across cultures, across history. The callousness of a few manipulative people can’t make the entire enterprise unworthy of study.”
Sibyl let out an audible sigh, without meaning to, and both men paused, noticing. Benton let his hand drift to her knee and leaned his mouth close to her ear.
“There now,” he said. “There’s nothing to worry about.”
“Why?” she said, voice fragile and small.
“Why what?” he murmured.
Observing their confidential discussion, Professor Friend pretended to be absorbed in the staid house fronts of Beacon Street passing outside as the taxicab rolled its stately progress down the hill and into the Back Bay.
Sibyl swiveled her eyes to Benton’s face, dark and pleading. “Why would you want to do that, Benton? I feel so—”
The lines around his eyes contracted with concern. “Me? But, I just—” he started, then stopped. He took a breath, and then tried again.
“Because. I thought— You’re so very—” he started, then stopped again. Still she gazed at him, searching his pale gray eyes for comprehension of why he would want to pull away this bit of solace. He squirmed, dropping his eyes to his lap, threading the fingers of his hand together with hers.
“I want so badly for you to be happy,” he confessed, having some difficulty assembling the words. “Truly happy, I mean. I couldn’t stand the thought that some charlatan would—”
She waited, wondering what he was going to say next. She let her thumb explore, almost by accident, the skin of his knuckle, with its few tiny dark hairs. Something about those few dark hairs compelled Sibyl, though she was at a loss to explain what that might be.
Finally, he spoke again. “I thought this interest of yours might be standing in the way, that’s all.” He cleared his throat, forcing himself to say what he was thinking. “Of your moving on. It’s natural to mourn their loss. Of course it is. But you’re still alive, Sibyl. There’s so much of life waiting for you.” He brought his eyes up to her face again, and she felt his stare enter into her.
“But, Ben,” she whispered, dreading what she was about to say, or rather, dreading that the accepting look on his face would fall away when she said it.
“What is it?” he asked, tightening his grip.
“I . . .” she began, then paused, biting her lip. “I wish I could explain. But you must know. I did see something in the glass. In fact, each time I try it, I see more.”
He frowned, worried. “The power of suggestion is very strong, Sibyl. You mustn’t feel strange about that. Anyone would have thought they saw things, who had sufficient desire to do so.”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “You don’t understand. What I saw—”
“What was it?” he asked, his tone unexpectedly gentle, willing to listen.
“I saw the night sky over the Atlantic, and I saw the prow of the boat, which I’ve been seeing for a few weeks now. But this time, it was different. This time, I was finally able to see people.”
“People? What people?” he asked.
“They were all in a very fine dining room, the first-class dining room, and there was dancing. And then all at once everything shook, and everyone started to panic. There was running every which way, and then the boat started to list. Oh, Ben.” Her voice caught, horrified by the memory. “It was horrible.” She brought her hands to her face with a shudder.
Benton spoke slowly, drawing his words out. “Did you see them?”
Sibyl swayed with the motion of the taxicab, her face buried in her hands. Professor Friend cleared his throat, possibly to remind them that he was still within hearing distance. Sibyl dropped her hands halfway, peeking at Benton from above her fingertips.
“Not them,” she whispered, eyes reddening.
“Who?” he whispered. “Who did you see?”
Sibyl swallowed, then dropped her voice until it was little more than an exhaled breath.
“Him,” she whispered, pointing at Professor Friend as he gazed, lost in his own thoughts, out the taxicab window.
Interlude
Shanghai
Old City
June 8, 1868
Once, the summer before he shipped out on the Morpheo, at an afternoon musicale at the home of Eunice Proctor, two blocks down Chestnut Street from the Allston home in Salem, Lannie encountered a zoetrope.
“How’s it work?” he inquired of his young hostess. Of Eunice Proctor that particular afternoon all Lannie could remember were two dainty cross-stitched bloomer cuffs extending below a full plaid taffeta skirt, as his gaze hadn’t so far been able to stray farther north than the giant bow at her waist. He spent most of the musicale addressing himself to her shoes.
“It’s simple,” she said. “You take a strip of this paper, here.” She held out a long coil printed with successive images of a horse in midrun, each silhouette depicting the horse’s legs in a slightly different position. “And then you put it in the barrel, here.”
She leaned forward, adjusting the mechanism with purpose. It was in that moment that Lannie had made it as far as the bow.
“And then you look through the slats,” she urged. He leaned forward, bringing his nose near to the barrel. Out of the corner of his eye he grew aware that Eunice was also leaning forward. He might have just spotted a glossy corkscrew of hair, tantalizing in its nearness, but he daren’t look.
“And then you spin it!” she said. The barrel burst into motion, and Lannie caught his breath. Flashing through the barrel slats, the horse broke into a run before his eyes.
“Why, look at that! It’s moving!”
The girl tittered, enjoying showing off her sophisticated parlor entertainments. It spun and spun, the horse galloping in a circle to nowhere, gradually slowing along with the dwindling rotation of the barrel, devolving into flat flickers which, finally, resolved to stillness.
“Want to see another one?” she asked.
“You bet I do!”
Scene after scene was fitted into the barrel, and in each instance the illusion took Lannie’s breath away. A lion, leaping over a ball. An elephant walking with an acrobat on its back. A long-tailed blue parrot bursting into flight. He quickly forgot Eunice Proctor’s bloomer cuffs in his astonishment at discovering movement in images that had, moments before, been devoid of life.
This long ago afternoon, in a Salem parlor half a world away, lurked now in the back of Lannie’s mind as he lay in the Shanghai house of smoke and flowers.
Just as he had stared through the slats of the zoetrope, now his full attention focused on the strange scenes forming within the light on the motes of tea at the bottom of his cup. He stared, entranced, pulled in by the illusion.
“Like a zoetrope in my hand,” he whispered.
He saw water, mostly. At first. Not water in the teacup, not tea, but water—the ocean. Whitecaps, ripples, and swells. As though he were there in person, staring at the surface of the sea while riding to shore on the cutter. He had never, outside Eunice Proctor’s well-appointed drawing room, experienced a moving image reproduced, and he couldn’t tear his eyes away. The perspective within the teacup changed, as though he were skimming along the water like a seagull, and he came upon a clipper, the Morpheo, he thought, slicing its way through a canal.
“The ship,” Lannie whispered.
The image shimmered and transformed into another ship, similar to Morpheo but larger. A steam-sail hybrid, and his perspective zoomed over the deck until it hovered by a man of about thirty bent over a navigation table. With a chilled gasp Lannie saw that this man was himself, with long
muttonchop whiskers, and that he was giving instructions to a younger man standing next to him.
“Steam?” he whispered. He knew of steamships, but had yet to work one. He spoke the word aloud, and the scene melted apart, unveiling a ship that boggled Lannie’s mind. Impossibly large, massive, more like a European hotel laid on its side than any oceangoing vessel. The behemoth had no sails, pushing itself forward through a starlit night, muscling aside the ocean as it went, with four striped smokestacks belching coal smoke. A craggy shape floated in the distance.
“But, what? How does it—?” Lannie sputtered. Was it another command? When he was even older? Was it all just a phantasm of his twisted imagination?
“You’re muttering,” the young man overhead commented. Lannie didn’t hear him.
Inside the tea glass, the sea boiled away to reveal a college campus in the full flush of autumn. Blurred faces passed by, young men his age, none of them familiar. And then he saw himself.
His cheeks were fuller, tanned still, his hair less moppish, and his mustache had finally come in. This grown Lannie was not doing anything in particular, just striding along past Massachusetts Hall, shuffling his feet through chestnut leaves, hands in his pockets, lost in his thoughts.
Lannie imagined he could hear bonging, the university clock tower perhaps, and then the college campus dissolved, its buildings melting like spun sugar in boiling water. Out of the swirling tea fragments resolved the form of a fine house, rising from an empty riverside vacant lot within scaffolding, brick by brick, in a time-lapse succession.
“My!” he exclaimed.
As he watched, a man, himself he guessed, only older, in a dark waistcoat, his whiskers touched with dignified gray, ushered a very young, very beautiful woman on his arm up the stairs.
“Having pipe dreams, are you? They can be awfully nice, sometimes.” The scholar’s voice wedged itself into his ear. Lannie pushed it away.
He wanted more. He wanted to see inside the house. He watched himself fumbling with keys at the front door, the beautiful woman tossing her head back and laughing, waving her hands with excitement while she explained something. His older self smiled and nodded, but there was something behind the smile that looked a little sad.
“I don’t see what you want a clock for, anyway.” The voice intruded again.
What was he wanting to talk so much for? Lannie wished he could be left alone with his teacup. He was entranced. Pipe dreams, maybe, but everything he saw fit the plan he had hatched, with his father’s guidance, in the months leading up to the ship’s departure for the Far East. He’d finish out his time on Morpheo, make some money. He would arrive home older, wiser. Then he’d be ready for college down in Cambridge. After Harvard he’d get his own merchant command. With this new command he’d make his fortune. He’d make his name.
And someday, he’d meet that exquisite girl. Who was that girl?
Absorbed in his plans, Lannie grumbled an incoherent nonresponse to Johnny. He wanted to see more. He wanted to see all that the sea would make of his life.
“A clock can’t actually tell you anything about time,” the scholar mused, oblivious.
“Huh?” Lannie said, irritated. The image in the teacup grew difficult to discern. He needed to concentrate, or it didn’t work. Whatever “it” was. He wished the young man would stop distracting him.
“It’s useless to know what time it is now,” Johnny insisted. His bowl’s worth of opium must have worn off, making him chattier. “Knowledge of the past makes a man wise. Knowledge of the future, well”—he laughed—“that could make a man rich. But neither will make him happy.”
“You don’t think being wise and rich is the same as being happy?” Lannie asked, still with one eye in his teacup. Johnny wasn’t making any sense.
“Yankee with the fake Chinese name,” the scholar said, peering over the edge of the bunk and looking into Lannie’s face. “Only by being present can you be happy. Too much attention to the past and the future takes the now away. And once it’s gone, you never get it back.”
Lannie laughed, shaking his head. “You’re crazy, you know that?” he suggested.
The scholar’s face withdrew back to the top bunk. “Maybe,” he muttered. “Maybe not.”
Lannie pulled his chronometer from its hiding place and gazed on it, as if consulting the timepiece would prove his acquaintance wrong. But something was off. He screwed his eyes tighter. Lannie had trouble telling what time the chronometer read. God knew what poisons were in his blood, souring his humors and fogging his brain. Try as he might, he couldn’t derive any sense from the chronometer face. With a sigh of irritation he secreted the instrument back in the safety of his armpit. If he nodded off he had no wish to be relieved of it before he even had the chance to use it at sea.
He ruminated, swirling the liquid in his cup, watching the patterns shift with the motion of the tea. “Johnny?” Lannie said without tearing his eyes away.
“Mmmmmm?”
As he’d said his companion’s name, the scene in the leaves shifted, focusing. He saw Johnny, in the same clothes that he was wearing now, in the thin light of early dawn. An argument. A crowd had gathered. Someone stepped forward and shoved him in the chest. The group cheered, like the braying audience at a bare-knuckle boxing match. Johnny shoved back, and the crowd clustered nearer, egging them on.
Then the other man had his hands around Johnny’s throat. The hands tightened, and Johnny’s face started to turn cherry red. His fingers clawed at the other man’s hands, and his feet beat against the ground.
“Oh, my God!” Lannie exclaimed.
“You shouldn’t swear, Yankee,” Johnny muttered from the bunk overhead. “Unchristian barbarian.”
“Oh, stop it!” he cried, forgetting himself, speaking to the figures that he saw in the glass.
At the moment that the words escaped his mouth, the scene shifted. Someone broke through the crowd around the two men, who were locked together, grappling, each man pushing the other’s face away with a clutching hand, teeth bared in animal strain.
Johnny’s tongue protruded in a grotesque perversion of a mask from Greek tragedy, his limbs slackening. Then the third figure was upon them, there was a flash of something bright and a splash of red, a spreading blotch on the larger man’s shirt, and the hands around Johnny’s neck loosened. Freed, Johnny doubled over, collapsing on the ground, coughing and clawing for air.
Through the zoetrope of Lannie’s teacup, the larger figure fell to his knees, his hands wrapped around his middle, surprised. With each slosh of the teacup the man’s face changed, as though viewed through a prism. The third man stood over him, and Lannie could see that the third man was breathing heavily, his head down, his hands at his sides. Both of the third man’s hands were stained red, and at his side, held loose, was a short knife dripping blood.
“Johnny,” Lannie started to say, baffled. The scene was like a version of what had happened in the whorehouse, but the time was clearly different, and the outcome was as well. He didn’t understand. Was he just now feeling the fear from the earlier fight, when Tom had beaten a tooth out of his jaw?
“Don’t spend too long in the pipe dream,” the scholar admonished. “You might never make it back.”
But Lannie didn’t say anything. Deep within the shifting forms of tea, in the strange dreamworld the drug had woven in his mind’s eye, the third man, the one holding the dripping knife at his side, had lifted his other arm to wipe the sweat from his forehead, and turned at a different angle, so that Lannie could clearly see his face.
“Oh, my God,” Lannie whispered. “It’s me.”
Chapter Twenty
The Back Bay
Boston, Massachusetts
April 30, 1915
“Shhh! She’ll be back anytime,” Dovie whispered, disentangling herself from Harlan’s grasp and rolling out of his reach. Harlan grinned, making a show of grasping at the air where she had lately been.
“No, she won’t,
” he insisted. “Come on. Just another minute.”
“She will,” Dovie said, with a lowered eyebrow at him. She turned her back and faced his highboy mirror, bunching her fingers in her hair to fluff it back into place. “I expected her an hour ago. It’s a wonder she hasn’t gotten home already.”
Harlan propped himself on an elbow and looked at Dovie, enjoying the quick movements of her slim arms as she rubbed a fingertip over her lips to redden them. The rumples in the shell-colored slip hanging from her shoulders accented the shape of her body, with its slim boylike hips and narrow shoulders. She looked like a fledgling with her hair mussed like that, all baby feathers and bony legs. A delicious, almost painful twinge of affection caught his breath up short, and he smiled at her, eyes soft. She glanced up into the highboy mirror reflection, meeting his eyes. And returned the smile.
“Oh, who cares what she thinks, anyway,” Harlan said. His hand stretched forward and caught the hem of her slip.
“I care,” Dovie said, turning to face him. The slip hem twisted around her legs, tying itself like a bow. He tugged on it, enjoying watching the silk move over her skin. “She’s been real nice to me, you know.”
“Well, sure she has,” Harlan said, still with an easy grin on his face. “You’re wonderful.”
“I mean it,” Dovie said as he drew her slowly to him with the slip in his hands. Her shins met the edge of his rope bed, and she climbed on, standing on her knees with her hands angled down along her flanks. “I know they all think it was my fault.”
“What, this?” Harlan brushed his free hand over the bandage on his ribs. “Oh, they don’t know.”
“They do,” she countered, looking down at him with what he knew was her real serious face, and not her simulated one. “They think I’m some whore you tried to rescue, and my procurer beat you. They do!” she argued over his beginning protest. “Or else they think you got jumped by gangsters, which I probably introduced you to, since I’m so unrespectable.”