The Spirit Room (40 page)

She gestured toward the front windows open to the morning light. “The curtains?”

While he closed the three curtains, she took off her boots and stockings, short dress, trousers, and undergarments and draped them over the back of her rocking chair. There she was, naked in the parlor, first thing in the morning. She felt silly, giggling as she sat on the cold sheet.

“
Oh, it’s frigid. It’s dreadful. I want my nice warm clothes back.” She lay down on the wet sheet, her body tensing from head to toe against the chill.

Mac took the near side of the sheet and wrapped it over the top of her, then tucked it under her from ankle to shoulder.

“
That’s worse. It’s freezing.”

“
Be patient.” He crouched over, grabbed the far side of the sheet and drew it back over her, tucking it under her as well.

“
I can’t move. I feel like a cut of beef in butcher paper.”

Laughing, Mac bent over and kissed her lips. “You are my sweet little cut of beef.”

She did feel trapped, but somehow it was a delicious, absurd game that meant having Mac home in the morning.

“
When you commence your notes for your article about my cure, write down that it is horridly cold at first. Have you ever done this yourself?” Shivers ran along her spine as Mac draped the two blankets around her.

“
No, but be patient. It only takes a moment to warm up. Your body’s heat will warm the sheet.” He retrieved a notebook and pen and ink from his bookshelf, then placed them on the floor and sat on a footstool near her shoulders. “I’ll stay here this first time to make sure you are all right.”

He took the stopper from the inkbottle, dipped his pen, and opened the book. As he scratched away on the page, he said slowly, “The patient is chilled at first.”

She had the urge to smooth out his long and unruly eyebrows, but ensnared in the sheet, her hands were not free to reach for him. He continued to write without speaking.
Lawk-a-mercy
, he was right. The chill was indeed subsiding.

He looked up from his notebook. “Do you think the voices could be spirits, dead people? Isn’t that what your mother believed?”

Izzie sighed. “Ever since I can remember, she called the voices she heard spirit voices. Some of them even had names. The colonel. Great Uncle Lyle. There was one she called Sister. When I was a child I believed she could talk to spirits, that she was special. Once in a while someone would call her ‘witch’. I didn’t like that.” Izzie squirmed inside the sheet. “I knocked more than one young boy in the nose over that. I didn’t think there was a name for what Mamma could do or who she was. I never heard the word medium or Spiritualist until those Fox sisters came along. Papa would read about the Fox girls in the newspapers and tell us Mamma was like them and maybe one day she’d be famous too.”

“
Are you comfortable yet?”

“
Yes.”

Mac looked at the mantle clock and made a note.

“
Do you believe your mother was really some kind of medium?”

An itch prickled at the back of her neck. She tucked in her chin trying to scratch it against the wool blanket. “I did back then. But slowly, Mamma changed. She would be present with us in body, but not in mind. The children would play in a mean way sometimes, saying things to her when they were sure she couldn’t hear. I would usually stop them. I told them they had to be polite to Mamma all the time, no matter what state she was in. She was our Mamma.”

“
Warm enough?”

Izzie nodded while Mac scribbled out a note. “But, one day, I had been sitting at the spinning wheel. It was a hot summer evening and Mamma was in her rocker staring at the wall. She and I were the only ones inside. Everyone else was outside trying to stay cool. I was spinning and spinning. It seemed like hours and Mamma simply rocked and stared at the wall the entire time. My foot grew tired on the pedal so I knew it was a long spell to just stare, even for her. She got up and walked to the kitchen worktable without even a smidgen of expression on her face.

“
She didn’t seem hot either, whereas I was sticky and flushed. She picked up our biggest knife and looked it up and down. I called out to her, but she didn’t hear me. She touched the sharp edge of the knife with a finger. That made me nervous so I got up and walked over to her. ‘Mamma? Put the knife down,’ I told her. She laid her hand out flat on the table in front of her, spread her fingers open, and raised the knife up high like she was about to sling it down and chop hard. Like a meat cleaver. My heart stopped cold just as the knife started to come down. I lunged and grabbed her wrist with both my hands and steered the blade so it wedged into the table. It just missed her hand.”

Jaw quivering, Izzie felt a tear roll down her temple. She turned her head toward Mac and the sound of his pen rushing furiously across the page of his notebook. “Mamma blinked at me a few times and said, ‘When did you come home? Weren’t you at Julianna’s?’ I was scared. I screamed at her, demanding she tell me what she intended to do with the knife. I plucked it out of the wood. She said, ‘I ain’t doin’ nothing with the knife. I was getting myself a nice cool glass of water. Do you want one too?’ That’s when I decided she wasn’t right in her mind. She wasn’t a medium, a witch, a Spiritualist. She was insane.”

Mac slapped his notebook closed. “You never told me that story.”

“
I never told anyone, ever, in my whole life. I was afraid someone might put her in an asylum and take her away from us.”

Mac stroked her hair for a few moments, then began to unwrap the top blanket. “You must take the cool bath now.”

She wasn’t sure at all how any of this was going to rid her of her voices, but she was relieved to take Mac into her confidence. At least now she wasn’t alone.

Thirty

1860

THAT FRIDAY NIGHT AFTER WESTON LEFT CLARA at the Spirit Room, she was alone for a while. This was the part of Friday she liked. She liked how long it would be until the next Friday. She liked her gifts from Sam. This time two gold dollars. He’d said, “I didn’t have time this week to properly select a gift for you. Here is an extra dollar. This does not mean my affection for you has waned.” She liked the sound of the two coins clinking into her palm. On Friday evenings, she never hid her coins away in her bandbox after Weston left because she didn’t know when Papa would arrive from his taverns.

A month of Fridays had gone by and Papa had been silent on each walk home. This was the fifth Friday and Clara and Papa were setting off for their boardinghouse in the snow. Clara had been waiting for him to speak to her these past weeks, maybe even ask her forgiveness for making her do the other thing with Sam. Usually they were both a little drunk as they strolled in silence up snow-plowed Seneca Street, and this night was no different. She knew Papa was ashamed of her. Maybe that’s why he was stone silent. But, didn’t he have to be ashamed of himself, too? No father in the history of the world ever made his daughter do the things he was making her do. Would he ever apologize?

She loved Papa more than anyone in the family loved him. Sometimes she thought she even loved him more than Mamma did, but ever since he hit Billy so hard in the face, and then made her take Sam Weston as her paramour, she felt a hardness toward him growing inside her. It was like a brick wall being raised slowly by a mason, one brick, then another, then another. It wasn’t a wall yet, just a couple of rows. But if Papa didn’t change things soon, the wall would be finished. She would be finished.

The snow was falling hard, whipping cold and wet into her face and she was looking forward to her warm bed.

“
I’m prouder of you than you can know, Little Plum.” Papa said softly.

Clara had longed for this moment so badly, she was afraid to speak. They each walked seven more strides in dreadful quiet.

Hands plunged deep in his greatcoat pockets, eyes down, Papa’s footsteps crunched along the packed snow. “Some feller is goin’ ta be the luckiest man on this whole earth when he marries you. You had beauty all along. Now you know how to run a millinery business and you can sew nice, too. I ain’t never goin’ to forget this time and how hard you been workin’ for the family.”

He sounded tender the way he used to, years ago, when he would put Billy on one of his knees and her on the other and bounce them both up and down. He used to call her and Billy his deuces. He’d kiss them both on the head and tuck them into bed with Izzie and little Euphora.

“
Papa, I think Mrs. Beattie is suspicious of me and Sam. She was asking me a lot of questions at work this morning about whether I was alone with a man on Friday nights. She said she could hear a voice that wasn’t yours and that she couldn’t hear any others as she did when we had the spirit circles.”

“
It’s none of her business who she hears in there.”

“
She says it isn’t right for me to be alone with a grown man without your being there.”

“
I say what’s right for my family and my daughter, not some hat-maker.”

“
Papa, please can we stop Sam coming on Fridays? We can’t need the money so terribly much. Maybe I can get an afternoon job somewhere now that I have experience with Mrs. Beattie.”

He growled like he had a stomachache, but didn’t speak. Then he didn’t speak the rest of the way home. That was his answer for her. A stomachache growl. That’s all he had. One little bit of admiring, then a growl. That wasn’t enough to stop the brick masons.

They turned up the front path to the house. A light was burning in Mrs. Purcell’s bedchamber. Once inside, at the top of the stairs with Papa holding the small parlor lamp, Clara looked down the hall. Mrs. Purcell’s door was ajar. That was
tarnal
strange. It was near one o’clock in the morning. Then a sliver of Mrs. Purcell in her nightdress, her white hair down and flowing, appeared in the door crack, then she closed it quietly. Had she been waiting for them to come in?

Papa didn’t seem to notice or care. Inside the Blue Room, Papa wove his way over to the crate between her bed and Billy’s and lit their candle lantern.

“
I meant what I said about being proud.” Looking right at her, he pushed his spectacles up against the bridge of his nose with his thumb.

“
Please, Papa, stop him.”

Face hardening, he darted a glance over at Billy in his skinny bed, then looked back at her and whispered. “We need the money. Don’t ask again.” He turned away from her and went to his bedchamber.

Clara stripped down to her shimmy, blew out the candle, and got into bed. She stared at the long, tall window, faintly aglow from a snowy sky. She wasn’t sleepy. The house creaked and crackled. A pile of snow slid off the roof and softly thudded onto the ground outside. A while later, another pile slid down.

As the night wore on and the snow grew deeper, her heart grew sadder and sadder. Then after a long while, as dawn broke and the snow was still falling in the gray outside the window, her heart broke all the way and she began to cry quietly into her pillow. It was the first time ever that Papa had told her he was proud of her, that she was beautiful, that she would be some man’s treasure of a wife, and that it didn’t fill her up and make her smile inside, and make her want to take his hand and kiss his rough sideburn, make her want to run to a mirror and try to see the pretty girl that he saw. It was the first time she didn’t believe him.

In the morning, Clara was awakened when Euphora tore into the Blue Room yelling, “Papa hired a sleigh and horse. We’re going for a ride. Get dressed. Wake up.”

In cape and bonnet, Euphora stood next to the bed looking down at Clara. Euphora’s nose and chin were flushed pink from being out in the cold.

“
It’s two feet, maybe more. Fresh snow. Papa said everyone was doing so well lately, especially you, Clara, with your spirit circles, that we all had to celebrate. Come on, now, get up.” Euphora talked rapid-fire, her arms waving about.

It did sound like a good jingle, but Clara was tired from her night with Sam and the brandy, then not sleeping and unburying such a sad thing deep inside her heart. She sat up and looked at Billy’s empty bed.

“
What about Billy? Will he go with us?”

“
Can’t say. He’s downstairs. You slept through breakfast, you know. I’ll get you some corn muffins and a piece of bacon. You can eat it in the sleigh.” She swiveled and sped toward the door. “A winter picnic.”

“
What time is it? I’m supposed to be at Mrs. Beattie’s.”

“
Oh, no, all the shops are closed because of the snow.”

While Clara dressed, she heard a knock at the front door downstairs, then a woman’s voice in the foyer, then Mrs. Purcell responding. Clara couldn’t make out who it was. When she descended the stairs, ready with all her warmest petticoats under her woolen dress, she saw Mrs. Beattie near the front door. She was wearing a black wool bonnet with red roses and a long red cape, its hem caked with snow. She was always beautiful, but she looked especially radiant with her face all rosy.