“Speeeeeeeeak,” groaned another, different voice, something like Mrs. Dee’s, but gravelly and deep, as though the medium’s body had been transformed into something larger. The sound was placeless, seeming to come from overhead.
“Well,” the woman began, choking back sobs. “I . . . I wanted you to know that . . . that I’ve missed you terribly.” She waited, choosing her next words. The room hung in silence, waiting.
“And Josiah—you’d be so proud of him! His schoolwork goes well. He’s growing up to be such a healthy, strapping boy. So helpful to me, and to his sisters. He excels at his lessons, and . . .” The woman paused, as though suddenly aware that a roomful of strangers was listening in on her conference with her departed husband. She swallowed audibly.
“And at chess, just like you wanted. But I make sure he doesn’t while away too much time at it. It’s not good for boys to be kept too much indoors, you know.” This last comment seemed designed more for the eavesdroppers around the table than for the visiting spirit.
“Goooooooood,” groaned the mysterious voice, and the listeners all sighed, moved by this benediction from beyond.
“But, John . . . ,” the woman broke in, aware that her alloted time was drawing to an end. “I . . . I must . . .” She gasped, sniffling back her tears, and then pausing to collect herself. She drew a deep breath, and continued. “There’s something very important that I must ask you.”
Sibyl noticed a thrum of interest travel among the seekers at the table. A secret, about to be revealed. She was glad that Mrs. Dee was so adamant about anonymity.
“Asssssssskkk,” the disembodied voice groaned, and the assembly held its breath in anticipation.
“Well, since you’ve been lost to us, we’ve had some . . . ” She paused, her voice strangled with shame. “Difficulty,” she finished.
Sibyl’s heart contracted. Most of the passengers who drowned with the ocean liner had been men, of course, as they insisted that women and children be the first into the lifeboats. It was even said that the orchestra had played hymns as the ship deck tilted, to give courage to the men remaining. Boston learned of their self-sacrifice with pride, and pointed to it as a sign of the innate manliness and worth of the sons that it had lost. Less often spoken of was the effect on families left behind, so many of whom now lacked the person most able to provide income and support. For some, poverty stalked on the heels of emotional devastation.
“You needn’t worry, John. We can manage. And Carlton has been particularly keen on looking after us. He stepped in right away to ensure that no debts went unpaid, never bothering me with any of it. He’s so like you, you know, and I was grateful to have his help, that I could concentrate on the children. Josiah took it so hard, you see, and I was terribly afraid it might turn into some sort of nervous condition. And in all that time, Carlton made himself indispensable, and I came to rely on him. I don’t know why I never noticed before, but he’s grown rather devoted to me, you see. And the children are quite taken with him.” Her words tumbled out, one over the other, as if their speed would squash any objection.
“Not that anyone could ever replace you in our hearts,” she hastened to add. “Only we’ve got to think of the future, all of us. And Carlton is really nothing like the brother you knew. If you could only see him with Josiah, I know you’d understand. . . .” The woman’s voice trailed off, uncertain, wavering.
A pause lingered over the table, as if the disembodied voice were considering what it had heard. At length it sighed.
“I . . . sssssseeeeeeeee.”
“Oh!” the woman gasped, with palpable relief. “Oh, my darling, thank you! I knew you’d never object, if you only could see.” She dissolved into weeping, and Sibyl heard the sound of a nose being blown, delicately, into a handkerchief.
“Thank you,” the anonymous woman murmured through her tears. And then, more quietly, “Thank you.”
One of the hands holding Sibyl’s squeezed, as though moved by the family scene playing out before them. Sibyl hesitated, then squeezed back.
“And now,” intoned Mrs. Dee, her voice transformed back into its recognizable, if ethereal, self. “I sense the presence changing. Who is there? Who can it be? We must all concentrate very keenly. Everyone, keep your eyes closed. Hold the image of your lost loved one in your mind.”
Sibyl did so, allowing her mind to soften. The sniffles of the woman who would marry her husband’s brother faded, and she felt herself floating, comfortable and serene, aware only of Mrs. Dee’s voice. She redoubled her efforts, painting in details of Helen’s and Eulah’s faces. She thought of them, in the days before leaving for the tour. The laughter and preparations. Her own envy. Sibyl scowled. It was her duty to remember them.
“The presence is making himself felt to me,” Mrs. Dee murmured. “But he asks that all eyes stay closed. He is shy. Spirit, we will honor your request. We only yearn to help you reach us. No matter what happens, we pledge to honor you!”
A low rumbling filled the room, indistinct. Sibyl’s heartbeat quickened.
“What are you trying to say to us, spirit?” Mrs. Dee asked. “Are you sad? Could you be angry?”
Sibyl gasped and straightened in her seat. She thought the table had shifted under her hands.
“O spirit!” Mrs. Dee said, her voice rising. “We feel your anger! Your life was over too soon! We hear your anguish!”
Sibyl’s heart thudded in her chest, astonished, her mouth falling open, and she fought to keep her eyes sealed shut. For the table was pressing against the backs of her hands. A sudden lurch, and without warning one side of the table lifted itself, then fell back to the floor with a thunk. Sibyl cried out, and gasps echoed around the room. Now the other side of the table rose, carrying the séance-holders’ hands with it, then threw itself back to the floor. First one side, then the other, until the table was rocking back and forth with gusto, as though on board a ship tossed at sea. The table shook into a crescendo of fury, the clutched hands of the supplicants hopping and slapping against its surface. Then, abruptly, it stopped.
Sibyl felt her palms grown clammy with sweat. Around the table, small sighs could be heard as held breath was let go. The hands gripping Sibyl’s loosened. For a moment, silence reigned.
“We may never know whose anger we have just seen,” said Mrs. Dee, her voice steady and reassuring. “For he has gone without a further word. But we can rest assured that merely in allowing him to share his distress with us, we’ve brought comfort to a suffering soul.”
Murmurs of satisfaction encircled the table, and Sibyl shivered with the exquisite pleasure that comes from confronting fear. The table-tipping was the most substantial manifestation she had witnessed in all her years attending Mrs. Dee’s gatherings. She wondered whose spirit had visited them. But it was a man. It couldn’t have been Helen. Or Eulah. They would never have been so angry. In public, anyway.
“We have such time and energy gathered here, that I feel one more spirit yearning to commune with us. Everyone, please turn your gaze to the center of the table.”
Sibyl obeyed, excited, zeroing her gaze on the blackness before her. The harder her eyes focused, the deeper the darkness grew. The hands clutching hers on the tabletop tightened their grip, and she felt one of her knuckles shift under the pressure.
After a time, the quality of the darkness seemed to change. She frowned. She thought she could see the faintest gathering of light, coalescing in the space just above the table. The light wasn’t strong enough to reach the faces of the supplicants, but it was there. After a time the faint light began to resolve into an indistinct shape.
Everyone around the table was seeing it, too, Sibyl could tell, because she could hear the others breathing. She swallowed, trying to identify the shape. Could it be a face?
Once, years ago, Helen had returned home from one of Mrs. Dee’s evenings breathless with wonder, exclaiming that they’d witnessed a full-form manifestation right there in the living room, of a tiny girl, s
wathed in sheets, who hovered just out of reach, and vanished. Her father scoffed from behind his newspaper, but Sibyl, a girl of seventeen at the time, first turning her mind to questions of death, was moved by the account. And Eulah! Eulah, a little girl herself then, demanded Helen tell them about the tiny girl again and again. How tall was she? Were the sheets very dirty? Did they blow in an invisible wind? Imagine—a full-figure visitation from the beyond, seen with her mother’s very own eyes! Sibyl’s breathing tightened, her eyes hunting forward in the dark.
With wonder Sibyl perceived that it was a woman’s hand. Fully formed, hovering, attached to nothing. A gasp of awe emanated from the group around the table as the ghostly white hand hung before them, illuminated by an eerie internal light. Her heart leaped with hope, faint and dizzying.
“A spirit, reaching out to us for comfort!” Mrs. Dee cried. “We welcome you, O visitor from realms untold!”
Murmurs of assent joined the welcome, and Sibyl looked upon the manifestation with begging eyes. Could it be? She wasn’t sure. The hand, she felt she must know it, it had held her as a baby, had cradled her face as a child. How could she be any sort of daughter and not know her mother’s hand?
“O spirit, how we yearn to grasp your hand! But we know if we break our circle, you should vanish! How your nearness tortures us!” Mrs. Dee carried on. “For whom have you come? How can we reach you?”
The white hand brushed its fingers against an unseen surface, waving, as though over undulating water. The supplicants gasped, each conjuring his own private horror of being submerged in icy water. Slowly the hand folded itself into a pointing finger, which then rotated in space, aiming at each individual around the table in turn.
Try as she might, Sibyl couldn’t tell if the hand belonged to Helen. Too old for Eulah, whose fingers were delicate and tapered, cared for with files and ointments. The hand turned as though on a rotating plate or gramophone, lingering for a moment on each member of the group before moving on. But it must be Helen. Helen had been a Spiritualist since Sibyl’s girlhood. Helen, of all people, would pilot herself through the mists and ectoplasms of the beyond to return here, to Mrs. Dee’s drawing room, where she herself had passed so many evenings communing with the spirit world. Helen must know that Sibyl would look for her at Mrs. Dee’s. What a vast space the beyond must be, for Helen to take so long getting back. Sibyl ached for her mother to see all that Sibyl had had to do since she left, craved for her mother to soothe her. Sibyl’s solitude bore down on her like a weight that she could never set down. The hand must be Helen’s. It must.
The hand continued its slow rotation. From man to woman. From woman to woman. From woman to man. At last, it came to rest.
It was pointing straight at Sibyl.
Her heart plummeted down through her chest, and she choked, her nose and cheeks flushing with tears. The hands holding hers on the tabletop tightened, rooting her to her seat as her body was overcome with trembling. The hovering hand pointed, motionless.
It was her. At last. Sibyl’s mouth opened, closed, opened again as she struggled to choose the right words among everything that she wished she could say, knowing that she had only a few moments before her chance would be snatched away.
Helpless before her awe and relief, she cried out the only word that she could sift from the jumble in her heart and mind: “Mama!”
At that moment, the room plunged into blackness. Sibyl blinked, and the hand was gone. A babble of voices rose around the table. Then the buzzing rose to shouts, and Sibyl screamed. She jumped up from her seat, shaking and sobbing, rubbing her hands vigorously on the material of her dress, trying to bring feeling back to them, to reassure herself that she was safe, appalled at her own horror and fear.
For the table had flooded with ice cold water.
Chapter Two
Alighting from the taxicab in the alley behind Beacon Street, Sibyl paused to face the river, flexing her toes inside her tight buttoned boots. Her feet ached, and she wished she could walk without shoes, as she used to.
As a girl, before the Charles River was dammed to make the basin, she used to tie up her dresses around her knees to hunt for eels in the tidal mudflats behind their home. One afternoon she’d collected three glistening fat ones and brought her prize to the kitchen door full of triumph. Barefoot, mud-caked, braids askew, with a basket full of river-rank eels, Sibyl ran smack into the appalled form of her mother, was pronounced “a sight,” and banished to the tub, her basket confiscated.
“Don’t bother with the hot water, if you like the river so much!” her mother’s admonishment followed her up the back stairs. Young ladies did not hunt for eels, she was reminded as the mud was scrubbed off her neck, leaving it reddened and raw. But later that night, her father confided that he saw her catch them out the window, and those were some fine eels indeed.
Sibyl sighed as the sun sank deeper in the sky, and then she turned to the waiting kitchen door.
“So you’re back, then,” barked a voice with a subtle burr as Sibyl closed the door, her eyes adjusting to the gloom of the rear hall. “Wipe your feet, or you’ll track in the wet.”
The white hallway paint was stained with yellowish dinge, layers of smoke from coal fires, tobacco, and leaking fireplaces, and though the gas fixtures were all lit at dusk, the walls absorbed the light rather than reflecting it. Sibyl shrugged off her overcoat and handed it to the dour matron who awaited it, mustering her best impression of a lady arriving at a house she commanded. Her performance fooled neither of them.
Clara Doherty, the housekeeper, was unchanging, a solid person in an old-fashioned peaked linen cap and long black dress. She might have been Sibyl’s age, had not the Allston family employed her since Sibyl was a child. Mrs. Doherty lingered on the periphery of family photographs for over two decades, holding a baby, or standing in the background of a holiday dinner, and through it all, as the people around her grew and changed, she stayed, arms straight at her sides, face unmoved. She was Irish, but she didn’t look it, or at least that’s what was always said of her. Her eyes were small, blue, and hard, her cheeks sunken. She wore her dark hair in a coil at the base of her neck, and though it must have been long enough to loop into place, Sibyl had trouble picturing what Clara Doherty might look like with her hair undone.
Sibyl had a fantasy of what warm and friendly Irish maids might be like, drawn from novels and the households of her girlhood friends. They were called “Peg” or “Mary,” and they dispensed cakes and merriment in equal measure. They loved saints and little children, and they had amusing folk sayings that scarcely made sense. Sibyl sometimes yearned for one of these imaginary Irish maids. She cast a wary eye at Mrs. Doherty as she handed over her hat. The woman accepted it with a sniff of motherly disapproval, dusting it off with a few thumps of her hand.
“Left your messages in the parlor,” Mrs. Doherty said. “Belgian relief committee, and it’s your turn to host the sewing circle, Mrs. Drew says. Do you want her to arrange for the flowers, et cetera, and she’s very keen that you call her back.”
Sibyl’s shoulders sagged. Of course Mrs. Drew wanted to arrange the flowers. She wanted to arrange everything. And why couldn’t she host the meeting herself ? Sibyl wondered, as was her habit when confronted with Mrs. Drew and the sewing circle.
“Thank you,” Sibyl said. The housekeeper shot her a reproving look that Sibyl was given to understand meant that other ladies of her standing usually employed a girl to see after the social schedule, rather than distracting the housekeeper with message-taking all day. It was an old argument. Sibyl knew that one day she would lose.
“Mister Allston is at home, I take it?” Sibyl asked, attempting to sound authoritative.
“So he is,” the housekeeper said over her shoulder. There was a pause, of instructions needing to be given. “You’ll be wanting to see young Mister Allston first, I wager.”
“I beg your pardon?” Sibyl said.
“Young Mister Allston’s t’home, these
two hours ago.”
“Harlan? He’s home?” Sibyl glanced upward, as if the layers of wood and plaster separating her from her brother could melt into transparency and demonstrate the truth of this unexpected piece of news. Her mouth twisted in a nervous twinge. “But what can have happened? He’s not due ’til June.”
Mrs. Doherty’s face was impassive. She stood before Sibyl, holding the coat and hat over her arm. Behind her eyes flickered a measure of sympathy, held at a far remove.
“Not to worry. We’ve got the sheets well changed. But the girl’s been wanting to know what time she’s to have supper for ’em.” Mrs. Doherty always referred to the cook as “the girl,” for reasons Sibyl never could fathom.
“It’s not the sheets that have me concerned,” Sibyl said without thinking. She was always saying more than she should. The housekeeper was silent, and in her silence was agreement. Sibyl watched, but the woman’s narrow face gave away nothing—no illuminating details that might shed light on her brother’s appearance at their door, unannounced, untelephoned, uninvited, in the middle of the week.
“You’ll be stopping by the kitchen, then,” Mrs. Doherty said, in the neutral tone that was simultaneously an observation and a suggestion. Sibyl noted the comment, reassuming the surface of a woman unfazed.
“I’m sure Betty has it all well in hand,” she said with a determined step down the hallway, as if to suggest that she had known all along that Harlan was coming home, had planned for it, had taken it up with the kitchen staff, and that if she had neglected to inform the housekeeping staff, it was her privilege as lady of the house.
“Yes, ma’am.” The chill comment followed behind her in the darkness. Mrs. Doherty knew better.
Sibyl hurried to the kitchen, choosing the most easily solved of her fresh problems. She pushed open a heavy door and met the delicious aroma of roasting chicken. Through the savory haze of kitchen air, cloudy with flour and aglow from the gas fixture over the work table, Sibyl observed Betty Gallagher, striped cotton back turned, castigating one of the occasional girls as she crimped the edges of a soggy-looking pie.