The Spirit Room Read online

  “I’m not sure exactly what she did. She’d drift away from us and then tell us she’d been speaking to her spirits. I never understood it exactly.” Hoping the conversation would turn elsewhere, Izzie took a sip of warm tea.

  Mrs. Fielding set her cup down, then rose and approached Izzie.

  “What do you think she saw or heard?” Her voice was gentle.

  To tell these strangers what she truly thought about her mother, that she was somewhat touched, perhaps even loony, would be disloyal. Izzie wanted to yell at Mrs. Fielding and Anna, “The rotten voices killed my mother!” But instead she looked down from their gaze and waited. The fire crackled, spitting sparks at the screen. Clara and the others kept their attention on her. Izzie could feel them waiting for her answer. No, it would be better not to talk about Mamma outside the family, even to these two.

  Izzie stood, suddenly overwhelmed by the urge to leave. “Perhaps we can talk about Mamma later.”

  “Of course, dear. I apologize. I know you are mourning.” Mrs. Fielding patted her shoulder. “Let’s have the ginger cake, Anna.” Mrs. Fielding beckoned to Anna with a wave of one hand and, with the other, pressed down once again on Izzie’s shoulder, more gently this time. Izzie gave in, sinking back into the chair.

  “Perhaps we should go now,” Izzie said, wanting to flick Mrs. Fielding’s hand away.

  “Clara, would you like to continue with the lessons?” Mrs. Fielding asked.

  Having just taken a large bite of ginger cake, Clara chewed for a long moment, then looked up toward the glass chandelier over the table and then gulped down her cake. She glanced over at Izzie and squinted again. That squint was a bad sign. Clara was afraid of something and wanting something at the same time. Clara looked at Mrs. Fielding.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Oh, rubbish and rot. Clara wanted the lessons, ghosts and all. Well, that was going to make getting out of Papa’s scheme a lot harder.

  “And why is that, dear?”

  Clara fidgeted in her seat. “I want to learn something new.” She grasped the edge of the tablecloth and began to twist it. “And I want to help our father. He needs us.”

  Papa’s girl again. Clara needed some talking to. Papa had run away from them. He had deserted his family. Why wasn’t she angry at him for that?

  “That’s very noble dear, but this is special work, sacred work. I’m sure you and Isabelle can find other ways to help the family.”

  “There’s something else,” Clara said. “I think Izzie is like you and Anna.”

  Mrs. Fielding, blue eyes sparkling, examined Izzie.

  “Papa got you thinking that way. It isn’t so.” Izzie shoved her teacup and cake plate away. “It’s ridiculous.”

  “Izzie says things sometimes that no one else knows. When someone knocks on the door at our rooms, she always guesses who it is.”

  “That’s nothing, Clara. I just know how people knock. Mrs. Purcell knocks three times firmly. Miss Mary Carter and Miss Jane Carter both knock very lightly but Mary keeps going and Jane is short with it.”

  “Girls, I can return your father’s money to him or we can continue and see if your transcendent powers develop. It may very well turn out that neither of you have a gift. If we go on, I expect your utmost dedication and concentration on the exercises.”

  Egging them on with nods and smiles, Anna rose and stood by her fancy tea tray. These women certainly knew something extraordinary. Whether it was about religion or theater or death or artful deception, it wasn’t entirely clear. Izzie clenched her hands together in her lap. If they got their money back, Papa could return it to whomever he borrowed it from and there would be less chance of trouble later. If they went on with the lessons, she and Clara would be mediums, either true ones or charlatans, as soon as Papa set them up.

  Mrs. Fielding stroked Izzie’s hair lightly.

  “Isabelle, I think this is up to you.”

  Suddenly Anna was making a terrible ruckus, her shoulders gyrating, her arms flailing about. Eyes closed and neck craned back, Anna lifted her face toward the ceiling. At first her breathing was belabored, then she yipped piercingly like a wolf cub.

  “She’s in a trance,” Mrs. Fielding whispered as she extracted one of Clara’s hands from its grip on the tablecloth and held it, then she reached down for Izzie’s hands and tried to unclench them, but Izzie refused. “I think she is going to speak for her spirit now. Don’t be afraid. He’s a kind gentleman.”

  Anna opened her mouth and a low, scratchy voice poured forth. “Clara, Izzie, your mother wants to speak to you.”

  Izzie’s heart cramped. She glanced over at Clara who was sitting rigid with thunderstruck eyes. This was certainly an inventive way to get them to take the lessons, but it was cruel.

  “She says your life will not be complete until you embrace Spiritualism, Isabelle.” Anna’s voice was sweet and soft again. “She didn’t know how to use her gift. You will. You will learn.” She hesitated a moment. “You will understand. Listen to these women. Learn from them.”

  Feeling a cold draft at the back of her neck, Izzie turned to see if a window was open, but it wasn’t. Mamma’s spirit. Ridiculous. Did they think she was a half-wit? If she could show Clara this was a silly act, maybe Clara would see how foolish, how disrespectful, this all was. It wasn’t right to portray Mamma as present in some way. Mamma was lost to them forever. Lost. This is what mediums did—dangle the hope of eternal life at people who were deep in pain. An imaginary, delicious meal set before the hungry. It was plain cruel.

  “Mrs. Fielding, may I ask Anna, or her spirit, a question to prove that my mother is really there?” Izzie asked.

  “This kind of proof does not always work as one desires, Isabelle. You shouldn’t be disappointed if you don’t receive the message you are seeking. It can take many attempts before the proof, as you say, is satisfactory.”

  “I’d like to try.”

  “All right.” Mrs. Fielding looked at Anna who still had her eyes closed and head tilted up. “She can hear you.”

  Izzie had to ask something that only Mamma could know. The white horse. That hot summer night back in Homer when Clara was little. Clara refused to use the chamber pot in the house and insisted that Izzie escort her to the privy in the backyard. It was a starry night with a crescent moon and just enough light to see by. When they were nearly to the privy, they heard strange, hollow breathing and snorting. Alarmed, they grabbed each other and squealed. Not twenty feet from them, a white horse, luminous and eerie, pounded frantically out of the bushes. It reared up, then darted off, its hooves thundering as it sped around the side of their little house. After it left, it took Izzie until dawn to calm Clara down.

  “Mamma, can you hear me?”

  “Clearly, like a bird in the early evening, Isabelle.”

  “Do you remember that night when Clara was only three and I took her to the privy? There was an animal out there and we scared it just as much as it scared us. Can you tell me what it was so that I’ll know this is really you, Mamma?”

  Placing her hands over her chest, Anna stilled. There was no way Anna could answer this question, absolutely none.

  “You mean that old white horse that broke loose?”

  Every hair root on Izzie’s scalp prickled. The back of her hands tingled. Leaning back in her chair, she noticed that Clara’s precious brown eyes were petrified and she was sitting up so tall it seemed she was going to levitate.

  The mean monster horsey was all she talked about for weeks and weeks after that night.

  Anna patted her chest lightly. “I love you both. Do not worry about me. I am not in pain. It’s beautiful here in Summerland.”

  Izzie was dumbfounded. This wasn’t possible. They couldn’t know about the white horse. Could they?

  Clara, whose eyes were now more fearful than surprised, looked up at Mrs. Fielding, who was standing between them and smiling brilliantly.

  “Do you see Mamma, Mrs. Fielding? What’s Summerland
?” Clara asked.

  “Shhh. Wait.” Mrs. Fielding lifted a finger to her lips.

  Anna stepped away from the table, then began to pace back and forth. Suddenly she froze and looked straight at Izzie.

  “There are many who want to talk to you.”

  The prickling sensation on Izzie’s scalp shot down her spine. “Who are they?”

  “I’m not sure. There’s a large group all asking to be heard. It’s confusing me.” She stood motionless and appeared to be listening to something.

  “Whoever they are, I don’t want to talk to them,” Izzie said.

  “Wait,” Mrs. Fielding said.

  Anna was breathing steadily and looking off at some point high on the wall. Several moments passed. Izzie was concentrating so hard on Anna, standing there in her green plaid bloomers, with her perfect olive skin and radiant black hair, that she began breathing in rhythm with Anna.

  Finally, Anna closed her eyes, then blinked a few times.

  “I’m sorry. I had to stop. It was too baffling, too many voices at once. That happens sometimes.”

  “I don’t want to speak with them,” Izzie said.

  “Why not?” Mrs. Fielding asked.

  “Because that’s what my mother did, talk to people who weren’t there.” Izzie’s face burned and tears started to stream down. “Sometimes my mother stayed in that world with her spirits for long periods of time. This last time she didn’t come back to us.” She took a moment to compose herself and wiped her eyes with her dress sleeve. “I won’t be like that.”

  Izzie knew she had to leave. It was dangerous here. She shoved her chair back and rose.

  “Come on, Clara. Leave with me.” Izzie glanced from Anna to Mrs. Fielding who both looked concerned.

  “Are you sure, Izzie? What if Mamma wants to say more to us?”

  “Mamma is dead. She’s gone.”

  Clara stood, picked up Mamma’s black cape from the back of her chair, walked to Izzie, and took her hand. Then Izzie turned quickly and, pulling Clara along, started down the hallway for the front door.

  “Wait, please, Isabelle. Anna gave you a very special message. Please, don’t run away,” Mrs. Fielding said.

  Halfway to the door, Izzie stopped and whirled to face Mrs. Fielding who was again calling for her to wait. Anna, watching them, remained behind in the parlor. Clara’s hand trembled in Izzie’s grasp as they waited for Mrs. Fielding to get closer. Mrs. Fielding held out a thick book toward her. Without thinking, Izzie dropped Clara’s hand and accepted it.

  “Isabelle, one great lesson I have learned is that life is never what you expect it to be.”

  Mrs. Fielding’s blue eyes narrowed as she spoke. She tapped the brown cloth cover of the book. “Your father says you love books. This one is our sacred scripture. Read as much as you can tonight and tell me your thoughts tomorrow.”

  The Principles of Nature, Her Divine Revelations, and a Voice to Mankind. Izzie pushed the volume back toward Mrs. Fielding, but Mrs. Fielding raised an outward palm and shook her head.

  “No, please, just read some of it and return it to me at your next lesson. If you choose not to take the lessons, we will return all of your father’s money.”

  Izzie was torn. She did want to know more about how Anna spoke of the white horse, but she was afraid. The weight of the book and the texture of its embossed gold title tugged at her. She had never refused a book and she knew the book itself couldn’t hurt her.

  With the big bright windows behind her, Anna’s face was just visible, but Izzie sensed the now familiar encouraging smile. The glass chandelier sparkled above Anna’s head as she waved calmly at them. Clara returned the wave.

  “Tomorrow then,” Izzie said to Mrs. Fielding. Tucking the book under one arm and taking her sister’s shaky hand again, she led Clara to the front of the house and then out into the snowy evening.

  Two

  LATER THAT NIGHT, after they had met with the mediums, Clara perspired by the fire as she sat sewing at one end of the long pine table in the Blue Room. While she worked the needle, she was missing Mamma and trying not to cry. At the other end of the table, near the foolish, giant fire her brother Billy had stirred up, Papa and Billy were playing checkers. Izzie was downstairs in Mrs. Purcell’s library reading the big fat Spiritualism book that Mrs. Fielding had given her. Her younger sister, Euphora, was playing alone with her wooden horses on the girls’ bed. Everyone had been settled like this for hours, no one saying much of anything. Clara’s heart sank every time she looked over at Mamma’s empty rocker.

  The Blue Room upstairs in Mrs. Purcell’s boardinghouse, with its sky-colored walls, was both their family parlor and bedchamber for Clara and her brother and sisters. They had a long table with six ladder-back chairs by the fireplace in the middle of the room and two beds with cotton mattresses—a skinny one for Billy and a broad one for the three girls. They also had Mamma’s rocking chair, which no one wanted to sit in now, brought with them from Ohio.

  One Blue Room door led out to the top of the stairs and another led directly to Papa and Mamma’s bedchamber, now just Papa’s room since Mamma died. Tonight the Blue Room was full of a broken-heart heaviness, hot and stuffy because of Billy’s mutton-head fire, but there was no place else Clara wanted to be. She wished Izzie was here too, but Izzie was always downstairs reading. Since they got to Geneva and Izzie and Mamma found Papa passed out in the rat-hole hotel down near the train station, Izzie didn’t like being around Papa much. She said she was never going to forgive him for his running off on them. And since Mamma died, it was worse. She hardly spoke to him at all or even stayed in the same room with him.

  Billy jiggled his knee while he waited for Papa to make a move. “I heard John Brown went down to Missouri and stole eleven slaves right out from their masters’ plantations and took them a thousand miles to freedom,” Billy said.

  “That Brown’s goin’ to get himself shot,” Papa said, keeping his eyes on the board.

  Clara pulled the glass candle lantern closer to the shirt she had taken from the pile of seamstress work Mamma had left unfinished. Fifty shirts. Fifty collars to finish. One hundred cuffs to sew to one hundred sleeves. One hundred sleeves to sew to one hundred shoulders. Only eleven shirts, eleven collars and twenty-two cuffs done. Until Billy got his first pay at the tree nursery in a few weeks, this pile of shirts was the only earnings anyone in the family had. Clara studied her loose and uneven stitching on the cuff. “Inferior,” she could hear the tailor saying. Should she tear it out and start over? No, they needed the money now. If she were lucky, he wouldn’t notice.

  Billy jumped up for the ninth time and added a log to the fire. The fire was already burning so furiously it looked as if the flames might lick their way up onto the walls and catch the whole tarnal house on fire. Every time he made a move on the checkerboard, he popped up and stoked again.

  “That makes thirteen logs, Clara,” he said.

  “Twelve.”

  “No, thirteen.”

  She ignored her twin and went back to her sewing. He might be right. He might have used thirteen logs. She might have missed one. Using that much wood, he was surely borrowing trouble with Mrs. Purcell. She pulled the thread through the sleeve cuff and felt tears try to push out from inside her eyes. When she and Billy were four years old, her brother had taught her to count everything in the world. Now neither of them could stop.

  “Billy, are you trying to cook us like pigs on a spit?” Euphora, red-faced and weary looking, clutched her two painted wooden horses. She hadn’t picked up those little blue and yellow horses since they arrived in Geneva. She was too old for them now.

  Billy sneered at her. “Go back to your toys.”

  Once Billy settled down and fixed himself on the checkerboard again, Clara dropped her mending on the chair, wandered to the window, and opened it. The cold air soothed her. She breathed in the smell of new snow. Euphora left the bed and came and leaned against her side.

  “Did you
and Izzie really talk to Mamma with the mediums?” Euphora asked.

  “We did.”

  “You did not. It was some kind of trick,” Billy said from across the room.

  She put her arm around Euphora’s shoulders. Even though Euphora was eleven, two years younger, she was lanky and nearly as tall as her. By next summer, Euphora’d shoot past her like a stalk of corn at the end of August.

  Clara looked up at the white stars in the black sky and thought of Mamma somewhere out there and then thought of how few people were at her burial. If they had been back in Homer, half the town would have come to Mamma’s burial, but since they had only been in Geneva a short time, there were only seven besides their family: Mrs. Purcell, who knew Mamma when she was young, the two spinster sisters, who were the only other boarders, the man Mamma did the seamstress work for, and Papa’s friends, Mr. Weston, Mr. Payne, and Mr. Washburn, and not even Mr. Washburn’s wife. It was a puny service and the reverend’s high voice reading scriptures had given Clara a headache and it wasn’t like any headache she’d ever had before. It hurt in her head but also made her peaky in the stomach.