The Ghost of the Mary Celeste (15 page)

The next day the
Cornhill
joined the July through December issues on the shelf in the drawing room. Months passed. Spring came, brutal and tender by turns. The walls of snow that lined every human passageway turned to slush, the tips of the tree branches swelled, the sap rose in their trunks, and every maple in town sprouted a spigot and a bucket.

At last it was full summer and the preparatory bustle of the annual migration to Lake Pleasant enlivened the atmosphere at the house of Pink. Twelve volumes each of the
Cornhill
,
Blackwood’s
, and
Longman’s
were packed into boxes and carried away in a cart, along with three trunks of clothing, a selection of pots and pans carefully chosen by the cook, four carpets of various sizes, another trunk of linens, a medicine cabinet, a box of expensive British tea, a full tea service, a china and flatware service for six packed in a specially designed crate, and a hamper of smoked meats and hard cheese.

In the opinion of Mrs. Pink, it was a pity and a disgrace that so many of her fellow Spiritualists, who kept up well enough with
politics and were acquainted with the reputations, if not the actual persons, of the most excellent mediums from Chicago to the Russian court, could not tell you the name of a single contemporary British poet or novelist. On her arrival at her simple cottage on the lakeshore, carefully timed so that the maid and the cook should have a full day to arrange everything to their mistress’s taste, Mrs. Pink sent to the hotel for a boy with a handcart to collect the boxes of British journals. On the next day she supervised the placement of the year’s editions in the glass-fronted bookcase she had herself purchased expressly to provide guests who might seek to entertain themselves in the lounge with matter of more substance than
Godey’s
or the
Woman’s Home Companion
might provide.

And so it was that on a rainy July morning in 1884, Phoebe Grant, a journalist employed by the
Philadelphia Sun
, having settled herself in an armchair in the lounge of the Lake Pleasant Hotel, opened a copy of
Cornhill
magazine and began reading an article with the ungainly title “J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement.” Unbeknownst to her, another lady entered at the door and with elaborate stealth came up behind her chair. At first, this lady contemplated the shoulders and bowed head of the absorbed reader with an amused expression, as if she intended to play some girlish prank. But after a moment her eyes drifted to the page held aloft before her and a frown of interest lightly pursed her lips.

“I know you’re there,” said the journalist calmly.

But her friend made no reply, continuing her silent inspection of the opening lines of the article. After a moment, in a tone suggesting righteous offense, she observed, “That isn’t correct. It was 1872. And the ship wasn’t in tow. They sailed her to Gibraltar.”

In October 1888, on assignment for the
Philadelphia Sun
, I was in the audience when Margaret Fox, the founding mother of the Spiritualist movement, stood before a packed hall at the Academy of Music in New York and confessed that she had been “instrumental in perpetrating the fraud of Spiritualism upon a too-confiding public.” A year later she recanted that recantation, bringing the whole filthy business full circle. One had the sense that it could never have been otherwise, that by discrediting herself as a reliable witness to her own actions, Margaret had achieved what had always been her objective. All she would own to was her invincible capriciousness. The press called her confession “the Death Blow to Spiritualism.” But the Spiritualists ignored Margaret’s call to disarm, and ultimately the founder was abandoned by the religion she created.

Violet Petra never publicly admitted to fraud. There are those who still believe she was the genuine article—a clairvoyant of extraordinary powers. However, near the end, there was a confession of sorts, wrung from her in a paroxysm of sobbing before a
solitary auditor in the lounge of a shabby Philadelphia hotel, on a chilly afternoon in November 1894.

I was that auditor.

Fraud has long been one of my interests. Doubtless it began in childhood when, like most children, I experimented with pushing the casual fib to the outright lie. I said I’d drunk my milk when I’d actually poured it down the drain; I pretended to be ill when I was perfectly well; I blamed a little friend for breaking a toy I’d broken myself. I remember these three episodes because my falsity was quickly detected and the consequences were harsh. The devil, my mother adjured me, is a successful liar and his reward is a permanent residence in hell.

In my childish imagination this made perfect sense. For the duration of my effort to carry off the thing-not-true, I had felt I was living in a furnace. I gave up lying and became, in fact and in practice, a seeker after truth, such as I find it. And when I do find it, it is my business to record it for the public benefit. I am that risible hobgoblin of the contemporary male novelist’s imagination: the female journalist.

In the course of my investigations, I’ve closely observed some talented and professional frauds—they abound in our times as in all others—and have even been caught up in the havoc they inevitably wreak upon those weak-minded enough to trust them. Truly accomplished frauds are rare, but there exists a superfluity of ordinary and presumably intelligent people who are eager to court and to credit them.

The perversity of the liar is that he does not, as I did, dread the thought of being caught in the lie. In fact, the likelihood of exposure is for him no more bothersome than a buzzing insect, and his triumph is most complete when the contempt he has always on reserve for those who catch him out can be fully brought to bear.

A constant alternation between contempt and belligerence is essential to the
amour-propre
of the confirmed liar. He may be said to be driven from the pillar of one to the post of the other, a hectic gauntlet that constitutes for him a simulacrum of identity. As
wind fills a sail, the flagrant dispersal of that which he knows to be false inflates his sense of self. His need for an audience is great, for a podium even greater, and it matters not if his auditors be only his family taken hostage at the dining table or a mob of strangers gathered on a street corner; his lies must be broadcast on the first available soil, they must be watered and cultivated and encouraged to bloom into misshapen flowers—not of evil—but of banality and inutility.

I first saw Violet Petra in 1874 at a private gathering in the home of her patron, a banker named Jacob Wilbur, at his well-appointed town house near Washington Square in New York. She was very young, scarcely more than a girl, and her performance, while affecting, only hinted at what was to come. There was a rage for female trance speaking at that time and men of substance were combing the provinces for attractive young women to grace their parlors with prodigies of clairvoyance. Often these sessions began with a display of the speaker’s better than average knowledge of a subject; say, astronomy or Roman history, chosen at random by the assembled guests. It was understood that the speaker’s eloquence was attributable to the intercession of “spirit guides,” deceased know-alls who spoke through her, without her will or even her consciousness. Some of these were historical figures—Ben Franklin was a popular resource, which struck me as appropriate, given his reputation for meddling in the affairs of others and his preference for the company of pretty women. Once the fad for guides got under way, American Indians were much in evidence, presumably chosen for their spiritual purity. These guides served as conduits to the immense, sunny, happy land where the spirits of the dead wandered aimlessly waiting for a summons from the loved ones they had left behind.

Violet Petra didn’t have a spirit guide at that first gathering in New York. She spoke for fifteen minutes on the subject of magnetic attraction and took a few questions written on scraps of paper and tossed into a hat. I remember one, an inquiry about the health of the questioner’s relative who had recently decamped for California. This traveler, described only as “my niece,” had insisted on making the trip to join her husband, though she knew herself to be in a delicate condition. Violet read out the question to the group in her soft, clear voice, keeping her gaze upon the paper. Her eyes closed, her lips parted, and she dropped her chin upon her breastbone, which caused her dark, waving hair to fall forward, curtaining her features. A long moment passed, long enough for the gentleman next to me to finger his pocket watch and the air to grow thick with anticipation. Then she lifted her face, brushing her hair back with one hand, and I saw the trademark oddity of her left eye, which bulged in its socket, the iris wandering off to one side.

This peculiarity of Violet Petra’s eye was to become part of her myth. According to the brief autobiographical account sometimes appended to her speaking programs, it was the result of her first contact with the spirit world, which occurred when she was nine years old in a meadow near her bucolic childhood home in upstate New York. It was a warm summer’s day, and she was busily gathering clover to weave into a crown. Her older sister, propped against a maple tree with her writing desk in her lap, was composing a letter. Little Violet could hear the
crop-crop
of her pony grazing near the fence of his pasture. The sun brushed the world with a liquid light outlining each flower in gold, or so it seemed to her. She felt a kiss of cool air against her cheek, once, twice. Startled, she brought her hand to touch the spot. A voice close to her ear whispered her name, a voice she recognized as belonging to her grandmother, which was odd, as she knew her grandmother was far away, at her home in Philadelphia. But here she was, gently summoning her granddaughter by her pet name, which was Viva. The delighted child raised her eyes and for a moment looked into her beloved granny’s sweetly
smiling face. In the next moment, with the speed and
thwack
of an arrow striking a target, a bolt of light sliced into her left eyeball. She was knocked backward by the blow, and sprawled unconscious upon the clover with her bouquet still clutched in her hand.

Some hours later she woke up in her own bed. Her mother rose from her chair nearby, laying her knitting on the side table as, with tremulous lips and moistened eye, she approached her daughter. “Where’s Granny?” lisped the winsome child. “I know she’s here. She called me.”

Late that night a telegram arrived from Philadelphia with the woeful news that Violet’s grandmother, a sprightly widow of independent means and spirit who until that day enjoyed excellent health, had collapsed on the sidewalk outside her town house. Before a doctor could be summoned to her aid, she passed from this life, expiring, speechless, in the arms of a stranger.

I’ve never been able to determine whether this story had some basis in the original trauma that resulted in the peculiarity of Violet’s eye, or was entirely fabricated to take advantage of a condition predating her first experience of spirit communication. Apart from the autobiographical sketch and another carefully documented article that has to do with her accurate prediction of a shipwreck during the war, Violet Petra’s history is a carefully guarded secret. She appeared in Boston, like Venus, full blown from some westerly town she refuses to name. She was, she claims, eighteen at that time, but she may have been younger. Like many of her coreligionists, she has a thorough knowledge of the Bible, which book she holds in contempt. She has a strong background and a keen interest in geology, suggesting to me that Petra is not her real name.

I knew nothing about her that evening in Mr. Wilbur’s lavishly furnished drawing room. When she raised her face to her attentive audience, the alteration in her features—for it wasn’t just the eye; her complexion was deathly pale and her lips dark and tumid—was so striking that I joined in the general intake of breath. She coughed, bringing two fingers to her sternum, as if opening a path
from her heart to her throat. When she spoke her voice was deeper than her ordinary speaking voice. It wasn’t an entirely different voice; it wasn’t, as is sometimes the case with female mediums, a masculine voice, but it had a sonorous, humorless gravity, an irresistible authority that held her listeners in her sway.

“Bridget and her baby son have come over,” she said. “They are happy, they send love to Aunt Jane.” She paused while Aunt Jane, who had revealed neither her own name nor that of her niece, burst into tears. “I hear another name,” Violet continued. “It’s Jack. No, it’s Zachary, Bridget is watching over him. All will be well.”

Zachary, the sobbing Aunt Jane testified, was Bridget’s younger brother, a boy of ten who was very ill; in fact, it was feared, near death’s door, and under the doctor’s watchful care.

Violet closed her eyes, her head tilted to one side in an attitude of listening. The room grew silent, but for the subdued weeping of the questioner, as all attempted to hear what the medium was evidently no longer hearing. Perhaps thirty seconds passed before she fell back in her chair and opened her eyes, a smile of pure serenity lingering about her lips. “Have I been helpful?” she asked pleasantly, hopefully. Mr. Wilbur’s enchanted guests burst into wild applause.

How wild a guess was it that a pregnant girl on her way to California wouldn’t survive the trip? Or that a child sick with fever would recover? The odds are even, and an educated surmise tips the scale this way or that. In the case of the sick child, his death could be passed off as the result of his dead sister’s calling him home to her. Either way, Violet Petra’s prediction was pretty safe.