The Clairvoyants(7)
I wandered over toward the window and looked out at the tree-shaded street. I pressed my lips to the glass and closed my eyes.
My mother’s plan had been to stay the night in a motel nearby, but she checked her watch and I knew she wanted nothing more than to leave me entirely and be on her way.
“This hasn’t taken nearly as long as I thought,” she said. She hefted her leather bag onto her shoulder and crossed her arms, resolute.
“What about our tour of the campus?” I said, hating myself for sounding so desperate.
She pursed her lips. “Do I need to do that with you?”
I followed her down the stairs to the porch, and then out to the street. A breeze picked up, moving the elm’s heavy branches. A dog barked nearby, and I feared the scratch of its nails on the pavement, the jangle of its tags coming closer.
“Are you sure you should go?” I said. “It looks like it might storm.”
And then in the flickering elm shade a woman appeared, as if produced from its shadows. She stood to the right of my mother’s car in a coat far too heavy for the summer day—an eggplant-colored down coat, woolen gloves, a pretty cloche hat. Her dark hair held the semblance of the curls from her poster, but ice matted them together. Her fingernails were bitten to the quick, and she played with her necklace—an amethyst pendant, the kind of necklace I’d seen in my mother’s Spiegel catalog as a child. The missing Mary Rae. I felt a jolt of excitement—I almost called out to my mother, who had already climbed into the car, “She’s here! I’ve found her!”
But one look from the woman stopped me from saying anything. Any hopefulness I’d entertained about a new start dimmed. Her round eyes were blue, thickly lashed, and they stayed on me, beseeching.
“Now, Martha, I want you to be happy,” my mother called out the car window. The Cadillac idled by the curb. She’d put on her large-framed sunglasses. Her lipstick was cracked, and her face lined under its makeup, and one day I would be older, as she was, and, like her, have no idea how vulnerable it made me seem. “I am! I am happy!” I said. The heat of the car’s exhaust and of the sun on the hood were stultifying, and I leaned in and kissed her dry cheek, which smelled amazingly the same as when she would enter my room in the dark and bend down to kiss first me good night, and then Del, and say she was sorry for telling us she wished we’d never been born. We felt chastened when she did this—as if we’d forced her to make the declaration. And hadn’t we, with our squabbles, our messes, the work that tending us required?
Under the covers I’d have on a floral, flannel nightgown with a lace ruffle on the bodice that scratched and sleeves that were too short. Del, in the twin bed beside mine, wore a matching nightgown. In winter, the heating registers clanked, snow piled up on the roof, and we were children.
“I think I can easily make it back by nightfall,” my mother said, sounding like a character in a fairy tale. She rummaged in her purse and made a sound of surprise. “Oh,” she said. “I almost forgot.” She handed me what looked like a cosmetic case—tan leather with brass trim.
“It’s a travel alarm clock,” she said, brightly. “Your grandmother gave it to me years ago. I thought you could use it.”
She gave me a smile, and her eyes brimmed with what Del and I always called happy sad. I didn’t beg her to stay. I knew it was no use. Beyond the car, Mary Rae seemed rooted in the shade of the elm. My mother’s car pulled away, and I felt entirely forsaken.
4
Up in my apartment, the porcelain taps to the bathroom sink and to the shower were cracked, and a small sign posted above the bathroom sink informed me, in what I assumed was Geoff’s careful printing, that the pipes would make a loud noise when I turned on the shower, but that I should keep turning the taps and the noise would stop. At the spot where the water dripped from the faucet into the tub, there was a dark stain. Combined with the groaning pipes, the tub seemed the scene of a gruesome crime. I would get used to it soon enough, I supposed.
The couch bed and the table and chairs were delivered by two tired-looking men with packs of cigarettes sticking out of their shirt pockets. Despite my attempt to make friendly conversation, they said very little, as if they’d been warned by some superior not to talk to customers. Still, they left a lingering odor of sweat in my room. I unfolded the sheets and put them on the thin mattress. Out the window, the sight of Mary Rae in her heavy coat, the ice in her hair that refused to melt, surprised me. This was unusual—the dead never remained once I left their presence. A breeze slashed at the elm, thunder rumbled in the distance, and I smelled ozone. I went out with my camera and took Mary Rae’s photograph.
I’d never told even Del what I saw. At one point, after I stopped believing the writings of “A Student,” I stumbled onto Occult Phenomena in the Light of Theology, by Abbot Alois Weisinger—a theologian who claimed that in Paradise Adam and Eve possessed powers that were afterward lost to them, though some of these powers might have remained, weakened, latent in the gene pool, waiting to be revived. In the Spiritualists by the Sea camp, the mediums gave card readings, group readings in which attendees held hands and a medium summoned a personal spirit guide who might have a message for someone in the audience; I read about the Victorian spiritualist heyday that prompted the proliferation of these mediums. And I read about the popularity of spirit photographs in those days—Mrs. French of Boston, with Spirit Son, 1868, and Moses A. Dow, Editor of Waverly Magazine, with the Spirit of Mabel Warren, 1871—silly images taken by charlatans and tricksters—and this added to my unease about my own photography.