The Clairvoyants by Karen Brown
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My gratitude begins with my family—storytellers all, who contributed to the mythic landscape of my childhood, a place from which I’ve drawn my own stories. I am indebted to my late uncle, Christopher Nicholas Brown, for poems that shaped my writing life, especially the elegies for my grandfather, the lightning rod man: “… sharp eyes of Lyme fishermen and North Bloomfield growers knew the talk of his toned nonsense that electricity was life that after rain the grass was so green blistering because of static in the air.” I owe inspiration, friendship, and thanks to Valerie Wilson, who first told me about Pine Grove Spiritualist Camp, and Susan Wolf Johnson, who graciously read this book’s convoluted first draft and offered encouragement. Thank you to everyone at Henry Holt, especially Barbara Jones, gifted editor, who inspires me to be a better writer, line by line. To Samantha Shea, I owe my deepest gratitude. Her patience, direction, and tireless reading of this book’s many versions gave me a reason to keep writing it.
And he will find them divisible into two great classes—those whom we call the living, and those others, most of them infinitely more alive, whom we so foolishly misname the dead.
—C. W. Leadbeater, Clairvoyance, 1899
She is young—dark hair, blue eyes, lashes long and dark, spangled with frost. Her skin the only brightness in the small, dim space. She lies on a narrow bed. Above it are shelves of aluminum pots and pans—their finish worn away from years of use. Dollar Store pots. The kind we played with in the sandbox at the awful nursery school when we were small. Some of them dented. Alongside those, a box of matches, and a lantern smelling of kerosene, a tin of deviled ham, a rusted can of green beans, a moth-eaten bag of clothespins. Amber-colored light seeps through a curtained window into a galley-like space—a small counter, a stove, a tiny booth like a restaurant, and a rod hung across one end that holds tattered clothing slipping from metal hangers. Beyond the curtains, a snow-covered vista, the sun very low behind shaggy pines. Ferns of ice etch the inside of the window. The girl must be very cold without any clothes. Her limbs lie fixed—one arm across her breasts, the other thrown out like an actress about to take a bow. Somewhere, girls her age awaken in giddy expectation of Valentine’s Day roses and heart pendants and dinners out with their boyfriends at places with white tablecloths. She stares at a point beyond the ceiling. Come here, she says.
1
I was named after my great-aunt, a nun I first saw in my grandfather’s barn on my seventh birthday. The barn was in Connecticut, where I’d grown up, and Auntie Sister sat in her black habit on a bale of hay in a shaft of sunlight. Pieces of her dark hair snuck out of her wimple. I knew her from the photograph my grandmother kept in her living room—Sister’s pretty face framed by her coif, her head tilted to one side, her eyes laughing. My grandmother had two older sisters, Martha Mary, destined for the convent, and Rose, who would languish in the old Fairfield State Hospital in Newtown.
For my birthday, I’d spent the night with my grandparents, their house placed at the edge of my grandfather’s thirty acres—land bordered by the Mile Creek Club golf course, Long Island Sound, and the woods where the Spiritualists by the Sea had their camp—a handful of seasonal cottages and a temple. That evening, as I sat with my grandparents on the back terrace, my grandfather had cocked his head at the drifting notes of their organ.
“That’s the sound you hear on the astral plane,” he’d said.
The smoke from my grandfather’s cigarette rose over the privet hedges and swirled off toward the water. “I hear it,” I’d said, though the sound had faded. My grandmother pushed back her chair, the metal feet scraping against the slate. She took me by the hand and told me it was time for bed.
My overnight visit was a rare treat away from my three sisters. I didn’t know why I’d been singled out this way—none of my sisters ever were. Unaccustomed to the quiet—the absence of arguing, of Leanne’s music, and of Sarah banging through drawers, slamming her closet doors, complaining about not having anything to wear—I’d spent a fitful night on the high guest bed, which had a horse-hair mattress, an acorn bedpost, a history of bodies stretched out in sleep, or sex, or death. And in the morning I awoke before my grandparents. The house was cold, and the light at the bedroom window was like rose-tinged water. I did what I often did at home when I awoke before anyone else—I crept into rooms in the house and rummaged through drawers and cabinets—and I discovered in the bottom drawer of my grandmother’s breakfront a child’s white, leather-covered missal. It had gilt-edged pages, a silk ribbon bookmark, and colored illustrations—Jesus in all of them, a golden half-moon floating over his head. On the flyleaf Sister had penciled our name in cursive. I’d slipped the missal into my little overnight suitcase. I didn’t think to ask my grandmother if I could have it. Once I’d asked for a ruby brooch I’d found in her jewelry box, and she’d told me no.
I’d never gone into the barn by myself before, but that morning my grandparents sent me off to play and, not used to playing alone, I had wandered along the pebbled drive, missing my little sister, Del. We were only a year apart and did everything together. Del was my mother’s favorite—blond and pretty—and perceptive enough to try to include me when she saw she was getting more attention. If my mother noted how many flowers Del had picked, Del would pipe up: “But Martha chose the prettier ones!” Sometimes I was grateful for her allegiance; other times I resented it and found her disingenuous. Still, my mother thought Del was smarter, and it served me to let her think it.