We Hear the Dead (20 page)

“It is not unreasonable that you should ask,” Kate said, again and again.

“What kind of woman asks a man for a proposal?” I would reply. “He will think me shameless and grasping!”

“If he is your sincere lover, he will understand,” she soothed me. “After all these months, is he your suitor or your brother?”

Restless and miserable, I scarcely listened to her. I could take no faith in the reassurances of a fifteen-year-old girl who laughed at potential suitors behind their backs. I realized that I had been goaded into unwise action by Leah, who wanted the affair ended by my doing or his, and I cursed myself for rising to her bait.

The reply to my demand was two interminable weeks in coming, and when it arrived, it appeared on my bed in the middle of the day with no warning. It was already opened. Leah had read it and left it for me. I understood at once that she did not want me to witness her reaction, and I knew instinctively that I would find the contents very good or very bad indeed.

Tears were pricking at my eyes before I even had it unfolded.

Maggie,

I confess that your letter comes as a shock to me, and yet I chastise myself for having been so childishly credulous in all these months of sharing my thoughts and dreams with you. In all your former correspondence, which I have reread at length, you write to me entirely as to a friend—kind, noncommittal letters. All the warmth and affection seem to be on my side. And now I see that you have viewed me all this time as nothing but a gentleman hypocrite, never really sincere and amusing himself with a pretty face. I suppose the sort of company you keep has conditioned you to a low expectation.

I imagine that you care for me but not enough. Perhaps it is not in your nature to feel that deeply. Rather sternly you chastise me for not putting my intentions forward. All the more fool I was, for thinking they were self-evident.

I am a man of facts and purpose. I will leave after me a name and a success. But with all this I am a weak man that I should be caught in the midst of my grave purposes by the gilded dust of a butterfly's wing. My intentions? My intention is to sail to the Arctic and from there proceed to the discovery of Sir Franklin's fate and the polar sea. No true gentleman would promise anything to a lady under those circumstances; no true lady would require it.

Just as you have your wearisome round of daily moneymaking, I have my own sad vanities to pursue. I am as devoted to my calling as you, poor child, are to yours.

Remember, then, as a sort of dream, that Dr. Kane of the Arctic Seas once loved Maggie Fox of the Spirit Rappings.

E. K. K.

Maggie

As tempting as it was to blame Leah, I knew the fault was my own. No hand had guided mine when I wrote my ill-conceived demands to him. Truthfully, I was the one who most desired evidence of his commitment. I had challenged his devotion and, by doing so, proved that I was simply beneath his station, as my sister had warned me and as his letter confirmed.

“He was a puffed-up, pompous little man,” Leah was quick to say. “He blamed you for his own shortcomings. He was nothing but heartache for you, Maggie. You are better off without him.”

I did not answer her, believing that in her bitterness she was speaking of her own lost love more than mine. Leah's true love had rejected her twenty years earlier, and she had married a second time only out of friendship and pity. There was no doubt that for Calvin it was a love match, but Leah was already irrevocably damaged by the man who first abandoned her. And it occurred to me that this dubious honor went not to Bowman Fish at all, but to our own father. Therefore, I let her caustic comments fall into a well of silence, where they lay moldering in their own animosity until even Leah felt embarrassment.

Perhaps my family expected me to take to my bed in hysteria, as I had done after my fright in Troy. Instead I continued to uphold my duties in the spirit circles and in the correspondence Leah had entrusted to me. I had written in my letter to Dr. Kane that I would never turn my back on my family, and I was determined that the last sentence I ever wrote to him would at least not be a lie.

It was true also that I wrapped a shroud of tragedy about myself and let it shield me from the view of others. Perhaps I read too many novels and viewed myself as heroine of my own tale, a sad combination of star-crossed lover and jilted bride. Whatever the source, my tragic demeanor kept the young men who still attended our spirit circles from intruding upon my grief. Their plentiful presence remained, each one eager to detect any sign of encouragement, and in the meantime they were happy to ply their charms on Kate, who toyed with them lazily. For my part, I viewed them all with distaste. Not one of them could hold a candle to Dr. Kane. In fact, being among them was rather like the plunge into darkness I experienced when Cora Scott's electric lamp was extinguished, a sense of being blinded by the memory of brilliance, with faint spots of afterglow still dazzling my eyes.

Spring faded away, and in the early part of summer we received a regretful letter from the Caprons regarding the Scotts, who had been unmasked nearly in the manner Leah had foreseen. Their electric device had failed in midhaunting, and during the resulting confusion of darkness, the apparition had stumbled bodily into one of the guests, thus proving her own corporeality. The tremor of this disaster was felt among the growing community of spiritualists, followed by a tighter binding together of the faithful. We erected a wall of common sense against the resulting wave of doubt. One cutpurse did not make a crowd of thieves, we argued; one falsehood did not make all neighbors liars.

Of an even more personal and intimate discomfort to me was the arrival of August, when Dr. Kane's lecture circuit returned him to New York City. Every day proved a torture. I felt his presence in the city, and even though I expected no contact from him, I found myself uncontrollably holding my breath every time we opened our doors for a public sitting. Newspapers in the household mysteriously became scarce, but I had long since memorized his itinerary and knew precisely where he was lecturing and to whom. My family's sensitivity was well placed, however, for if any gossip sheet had observed “an unnamed beauty” in his company, I would scarcely have survived it.

In the third week of this torment, we admitted to one of our public sittings a man who introduced himself as Cornelius Grinnell. His name was met with a collective silence and subsequent coolness from my family members. The man cast an appraising glance in my direction before deferentially retreating to the background of the party. Leah herded him to a seat as far from me as she could manage without actually shooing him out of the room. This man, Cornelius Grinnell, was the son of Henry Grinnell, who had financed Dr. Kane's first Arctic expedition and who had pledged a ship for the second.

I found myself scarcely able to breathe and totally unable to participate in my established roles. Kate took over for me deftly, and Leah laid a protective hand over mine while I kept my eyes modestly down and tried to maintain a dignified composure.

A well-dressed man in his thirties, with a square jaw framed by fashionable muttonchops, Mr. Grinnell made no overtures toward me and, after that first frank perusal, kept his attention strictly on the rappings and the spirit writing performed by Kate. My family knew that he must be an acquaintance of Dr. Kane, but I knew from my conversations with Elisha that this man was in fact a close friend and confidant of the doctor. His purpose in visiting us, I could not fathom.

Had he come to spy upon me and report to Elisha? Or had he come for the sake of his own curiosity? In my torturous musings, I imagined that my former suitor sent him in humorous self-reproach, saying, “By all means go and see her for yourself so that you can judge what a fool I was!” At last the interminable spirit session came to a close, and after a halfhearted attempt to mingle with the other attendees, Mr. Grinnell bowed his head in a somewhat apologetic manner and departed. I promptly fled the room in the other direction, dissolving into tears.

Later, I agonized over his unexplained presence to Kate. “Perhaps his visit is unrelated in any way to Dr. Kane,” she soothed, “an unpleasant coincidence.”

“Did he seem interested in the spirits to you?” I challenged.

“No,” she replied, “he did not seem overly taken with the experience. I doubt we shall see him again.”

Here Kate's prophetic powers failed her, for the very next day Mr. Cornelius Grinnell presented himself again at our public sitting. It was less of a shock the second time, but still an aching pain of renewed grief for me. How many days was I to be thus tormented? Mr. Grinnell seemed almost cheerful this time but studiously avoided my eyes and willingly kept himself distant. Leah frowned at him imperiously, and even Mother drew herself up indignantly, as though his presence was an affront to her poor, discarded daughter.

That night, as I prepared for bed, I despaired at the thought of seeing him a third time. I would not attend tomorrow's sitting, I decided, rubbing my brow to relieve the headache brought on by my pent-up tears. Kate approached my bed, throwing out her arms with an exaggerated yawn and casting down onto my blankets a small bundle of paper. I stared uncomprehendingly at the packet, then turned to look at my sister, who grinned mischievously.

“I dared not give them to you earlier,” she said, “lest Leah suspect. But Mr. Grinnell passed them to me in the doorway as he came in today. He said he would have delivered them to you yesterday, but Leah kept too sharp an eye on him.”

The letters had been tied so tightly, to make a tiny package, that they sprang apart with some force when I cut the string. With trembling hands I unfolded them one by one, tears blinding me at the sight of Elisha's handwriting.

They were apologies. Abject, heartfelt, self-abasing apologies. He begged me to forgive him for the letter that had torn out my heart. He blamed the demands of his work, the pressure of his family, and finally, in an eerie echo of Leah's words, his “inflated sense of self-importance.” One letter had been written from a sickbed in a Washington hotel and begged me most piteously to come to his side. This note, like all the others, was unfinished and trailed off in the middle of a rambling sentence. None of the letters had ever been made ready for the post.

What battles of willfulness and pride must have taken place on the field of his heart! And after months of warfare, what measure of humility must have risen victorious in order for him to bundle all these pitiful notes together and surrender them for my appraisal! In that moment, I could not have loved him more.

A final note, dated yesterday morning, read:

If you can find it in your heart to forgive me, beloved Maggie, please do me the honor of meeting me at the Tea Room of the New York Hotel, Waverly and Broadway, this coming Friday at noon.

“Will you do it?” Kate asked, curled up beside me on the bed. “You should do it! I will make up some excuse for you.”

“No,” I murmured, realizing in that moment that I could not.

“What? Do you not forgive him?”

“We must begin as we mean to go on,” I explained. “I cannot meet him in this manner. If I did, it would be an appalling act of impropriety, and how would it look in his eyes?”

“It was his idea!” She seemed astonished that I did not run out immediately and lay down against the hotel doors to wait for Friday. My impetuous Kate would have done so in an instant.

“If he ever once sees me as less than a lady, then I will never regain that status. No woman of Philadelphia society would accept this invitation.” Climbing out of the bed, I searched for paper and a pen among the various items in our shared chiffonier and then scrambled back onto the bed with a book for a writing surface.

My dearest Elisha,

How desperately I long to see you! There is no need to speak of forgiveness between two people who are matched so well in mind and soul. I cannot make an imprudent promise to meet you without the consent or approval of my family, but I humbly and meekly request that you call upon me at my sister's house. I know you will understand how much this means to me.

Lovingly,

Maggie

Kate's violet eyes showed both her admiration and her approval. “I will deliver it to him,” she volunteered.

***

On Friday morning, Kate went out for a walk. As soon as she was out of the sight of the house, she hired a carriage to the New York Hotel, where she handed a doorman my note addressed for Dr. Kane. With the message delivered, I sat down to bite at my fingernails and await his response.

The first indication came when I heard Leah's voice raised in indignation while Mother dithered with her in excited agitation. Quickly, I gathered my skirts and scrambled down the stairs in a most unfeminine manner. Leah rounded on me as I entered the parlor. My prompt arrival without benefit of a summons gave me away. “You knew about this!” she exclaimed. “You were expecting it! Have you been in secret correspondence with him? It was that Grinnell man, wasn't it? And here I was, feeling sorry for you!”

She was waving the paper in her hand so vigorously that it took me a second to catch it and pull it from her grasp. It was a note from the doctor, expressing his intention to call upon the house that afternoon. I let out my breath with relief and collapsed onto the settee, pressing the paper against my pounding heart.

“I don't want that wretched dandy in my house!” Leah growled.

I looked up at her. “You must receive him for my sake.”

“We discussed at length why he is not an appropriate suitor for you!”

“We also discussed,” I answered her evenly, “how matters of the heart cannot be resolved with good advice. Please, Leah, I ask this of you. Otherwise, I will write to him and say that Mother and I will meet him somewhere else.”

Thus was Leah outmaneuvered, for she was not about to be left uninformed and dependent on our mother for intelligence. The meeting between Elisha and me would be held under her watchful eye.

***

No girl ever dressed more carefully. I chose a gown that was neither the most expensive nor the most elaborate in my possession, but the one I deemed most striking in its elegant simplicity. Kate helped me arrange my hair in the newest, most fashionable style of the city, a complicated twist at the back of my neck that needed nearly four hands to assemble.

In the end, however, I might as well have dressed in sackcloth and left my hair in rag curls. Once our eyes met, for the first time in nearly a year, nothing else in the room mattered. It was only later that I registered his shorter hair, no longer curling on his collar, and his smartly cut new suit. At first sight, I was only aware of his eyes, which held mine with a magnetism and intensity that I had almost forgotten, and his smile, which rose spontaneously upon his face as he realized, in the same moment as I, that our attraction remained unbroken.

Mother actually took his arm to prevent him stumbling over a footstool, for he had turned to look at me as soon as he entered the parlor. I remained seated in a corner of the room, blinking back tears and smiling foolishly at him. With a visible start, Elisha recovered his composure and wiped his own grin from his face. He turned to look briefly at Calvin, seated in his favorite chair with a shawl draped over his shoulders even in the heat of August. But after only a glance in his direction, Elisha directed his bow at Leah, evidently knowing full well who was the true head of this household.

“Thank you for receiving me on such short notice, Mrs. Brown,” he began. “I know I have been long absent and silent, and I hope that I have not presumed upon our acquaintance too much.”

Leah nodded but kept her lips primly sealed, for which I was grateful. Elisha realized that he could not expect any more greeting than that and, clearing his throat, prepared to continue. Belatedly, my mother tried to offer him a seat with her usual ineffectiveness. “No, thank you, Mrs. Fox, I shall stand for the time being. Some months ago, I was asked a question—a very reasonable question—about my intentions for Miss Margaretta, with whom I had been bold enough to forge an acquaintance and with whom I continued to correspond. After a rather lengthy and undue delay, I would like to respond that my desire is—and has been, almost since the day I met her—to make her my wife. However, her tender age and my rather unorthodox career led me to believe that it was best to keep those wishes to myself, and thus allow her the opportunity to find a match more to her benefit, if she was so inclined. In fact, I was prepared to end my friendship with her, in the best interests of all concerned—” my sister began to nod her head vigorously “—but I find myself utterly unable to withdraw my suit without making a plea to her in my favor.”