The Ghost of the Mary Celeste (8 page)

I said nothing to Hannah that evening, only watched her at dinner, careful not to stare, yet on the alert for anything that might hint at her true state. She talked about the songfest the students are planning for the end of the session, which Mrs. Tabor has kindly invited me to join. I attempted to express sufficient enthusiasm for this invitation, and indeed these singing rounds are great fun, but I was distracted and fearful of overdoing my responses. Hannah was natural, but I felt perfectly false.

I had resolved that our conversation should take place outdoors. Today was again bright and cool, pleasant in all its aspects and unlikely to incline any but the most obdurate heart to gloom. Occasionally, if I’m shopping in town, I stop by the school to walk home with Hannah, and it was my plan to meet her in this way. She came out of the schoolhouse in a group, chatting with Amy Wemberly, and she showed no surprise to find me waiting there. Farewells were
said to Amy and we set off for home. Hannah, taking a package from my basket to relieve me of the weight, asked, “What’s in it?”

“A capon,” I said.

“Oh,” she said. She settled the package in her arms like a babe. “Poor fellow.”

I smiled, amused by her concern for the bird, and I thought that really nothing could be more normal, more companionable, than strolling through the town with my sister. She was looking particularly well, her cheeks lightly flushed, her gray eyes, which can sometimes be so dark, so brooding, now were clear and light. She’d wrestled her wild hair into a single braid but it had loosened and stray tendrils played about her neck and forehead. “How was school?” I asked.

“Mr. Finley lectured us on the subject of his rock collection.”

“Oh, yes,” I said. “I do recall Mr. Finley’s rocks.”

We could have gone on like this. I felt no desire to bring her to the subject of her correspondence with Dr. Chandler, though that name was burning in my brain, along with the clear consciousness that when I spoke it, my relations with my sister would be seriously altered, possibly forever. I reminded myself of the articles, the strange writing, and most of all, of Benjamin’s conviction that the problem of Hannah was best addressed by me.

And so I addressed it. We were passing the Universalist Church, which Father calls “the Univices,” and we both glanced up at the screech of a hawk circling near the tower. “Dearest,” I said, as we resumed our walk. “I have to ask you about something.”

“It sounds like something serious,” she said.

“It is. It’s that. Well. It’s been noticed that you are corresponding with a Dr. Chandler in Boston.”

“Noticed by whom?” she asked calmly.

I hesitated. Was I compelled to keep secret the name of the instigator of this conversation? “Mother Briggs,” I said.

Her lips compressed in a smirk; her eyelids lowered, then flashed open wide. “She’s lying,” she said.

This possibility hadn’t occurred to me, and for a moment I turned it this way and that in my mind, but unlikelihood remained its distinctive feature. “Why would she do that?” I asked.

“She dislikes me. She blames me for Natie’s death.”

“Surely not,” I protested.

“She made it up to hurt me. Have you told anyone else? Please tell me you haven’t told Father this libel.”

“No, I haven’t. I came straight to you. But evidently Dr. Allen has seen the letters as well. I don’t think he would lie about the mails.”

She pressed her upper teeth into her lip, her head bowed, the picture of guilt in search of an escape.

“Hannah?” I said.

“Everyone in this town is so small-minded and mean. I’m suffocating here. I can’t breathe.”

“That’s not true,” I countered. “Your family cares for you very much.”

“As long as I’m docile, as long as I sit through Father’s sermons without protest.”

“Why should you protest?”

She was silent. At the turn toward the house we both stopped, still without speaking. “Let’s walk to the harbor,” I suggested.

She nodded and we went on. “It seems to me you’ve something burdening your mind,” I said. “You must know that you’ll find no more sympathetic listener than me.”

Again she nodded. We walked out Harbor Lane, where the workers have wrapped the hotel in scaffolding, adding a third floor. The breeze off the water was fresh and brisk enough to make me wish I’d brought my shawl. Then my sister sent an icy dart to my heart.

“Mother talks to me,” she said.

“In dreams,” I suggested hopefully.

“In spirit,” she said. “I see her.”

“Oh,” I said.

“And others.”

“Others?”

“People who are with her. William and Harvey are there.”

William and Harvey were our brothers who died before we were born. “Where do you see them?” I asked.

“In the spirit world. They speak to me too.”

“Often?”

“Not so often. I have to concentrate very hard to hear them.”

“I see,” I said.

“But Mother is with me often.”

I looked out at the sun, still high enough to wash a pinkish light over a fishing schooner just setting out, its triangular sails churning up the masts. A charge of pity and fear ran through me and I was unable to speak. What could I say that might restore my sister, whom I loved with my whole heart, to sweet reason? She was of a fanciful nature, but she wasn’t a liar, at least not a good one; her effort to discredit Mother Briggs had folded almost at once. What tack should I take to relieve her of these delusions, which had evidently taken her over almost entirely? Sensing my hesitation, she spoke.

“I have a gift,” she said. “It’s like a gift for music or painting. I can’t just ignore it. I can’t make it go away because other people don’t like it.”

“Is that what Dr. Chandler says?” I asked, feigning an interest I hardly felt.

She gave me a quick, hard look. So Dr. Chandler could be admitted to without a fight. “He does say that. But I didn’t need him to tell me.”

“How did you come to be in touch with him?”

Here the glance was furtive. “I read an advertisement in the New Bedford paper. He prints a journal; it’s called
Spiritual Condolence
, and I was curious about it, so I wrote to him. Well, his name wasn’t in the advertisement. I wrote to the journal.”

“To offer your mediumistic services,” I suggested. “Is that the right word?”

“No, I didn’t do that. Not at first. I just inquired about the journal, about how it came to be.”

“And Dr. Chandler wrote back at once.”

She nodded. Something stronger than anger was closing my throat, not at my sister, but at this charlatan in Boston.

“Oh, Sallie.” Hannah sighed. “It’s such a relief to tell you. I send in messages that I receive, that I don’t always understand, because they’re not really for me, and he puts them in the journal.”

So my sister was Mercy Dale.

I took her arm in mine. We’d come to the end of the promontory and stood gazing out at the outer harbor. “I know everyone here thinks there’s something wrong with me,” she said. “And Father is so adamant against those who believe … who believe as I do. He wants us to keep our minds and efforts always directed upon the living, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but why should we turn our backs on those we have known, those we have loved, who are only waiting for us to listen to be heard?”

“What sorts of things does Mother tell you?” I asked, to show my goodwill.

“She’s pleased about your engagement.”

“That’s a blessing,” I said.

“She’s sad that she can’t reach Father.”

It’s difficult to describe my feelings at these tender messages, which might as well have been nursery rhymes, for all the import of them. So the dead were as banal as the living, I thought.

“She is happy in the place where they are,” Hannah concluded. Still holding her by the arm, I turned away from the harbor, and she came along without comment. As we entered Allen Street, she said sadly, “Even you don’t believe me.”

“I believe you miss our mother very much and wish she was still with us. And I share that wish.”

“So you think my seeing her is just wishful thinking.”

“If you like.”

“Well,” she said lightly. “It doesn’t matter, Sallie. There are people who do believe me. Quite a few of them in fact.”

“Not just Dr. Chandler,” I said.

“Many of them are ladies of excellent reputation and good society in Boston. No one makes a fuss there and my gift may provide great solace to many.”

Again I was at a loss for words.

“Are you going to tell Father?” she asked.

We had come to our house and I lifted the latch of the gate. “I don’t know, darling,” I said. “I don’t know what to do. I’m vexed past reason at you for being so credulous.”

She stepped back, as if struck. “I’m not credulous. I just can’t pretend I don’t see what I see. It’s cruel to try to stop me. If you tell Father, Sallie, I don’t know what he’ll do.”

“How can I keep such goings-on a secret, these letters to a man you know nothing about, these publications! Does he know your age? No, I thought not. How can I keep this from Father, who is responsible for you to God and man alike?”

“If I promise to give up writing to Dr. Chandler, will you not tell him?”

I felt I had been reduced to accepting a scurrilous deal in order to protect my sister from herself, and from Dr. Chandler, whoever he was. “That would be a start,” I said. “Yes. If you promise to cease this correspondence, I won’t tell Father what you have told me.”

“I may as well, then,” she said wearily. “If you do tell him, he’ll make me stop. He’ll snatch the letters from the box and lock me in my room, so I may as well give in.”

And with that agreement, unsatisfactory as it was, we went into the house.

There was such a fierce storm last evening, it seemed the heavens were in a rage. The thunder rolled, the lightning flashed in jagged bolts, and the rain poured down all at once as if a tub had been turned over. The west wind drove it in horizontal sheets. Father, Hannah, and I sat in the parlor, he reading, we pretending
to embroider, and at each boom of thunder my sister raised her eyes and lifted her needle with a faint smile.

In the morning, Benjamin came calling, and we walked out to the graveyard to refresh the flowers on the markers of the Briggs and Cobb families. Of course he wanted to know what I’d learned from Hannah, but, perhaps for shame, I felt unwilling to say more than that she had agreed to cease all correspondence with the gentleman from Boston. “Well, what manner of correspondence was it?” he asked frankly.

“I’m not at liberty to say,” I replied. “Her promise that it would stop was very clear and final. I think we need worry no more about the subject.”

“Sallie,” he said, laying his hand on my arm as we arrived at the grave. “You’re so serious. Of course I won’t press you.”

I smiled. “I appreciate that,” I said. “I just can’t say more, not yet.”

Benjamin took up the old bouquets much pummeled by the storm. The stone vases were full of rainwater, so we had only to replace the flowers and we were done. At Mother’s marker, I pulled a few weeds that had cropped up among the columbine I planted there some years ago, which has done well there, being shade tolerant. The blooms are fading now, but the plants are healthy. Then Benjamin and I stepped back and gazed at the grave that contains the remains of my mother and the two boys I never knew. I couldn’t help thinking of Hannah’s remark, that Mother was pleased about my engagement. Well, she would have been, had she lived. Benjamin remembers her well; he was eighteen when she died and she was fond of him. He had his heart set on following the sea and she teasingly called him “shipmate,” and “sailor boy.” As if he read my thoughts, Benjamin said, “Your mother was light at heart. She always brightened a room when she came in.”

“She did,” I agreed. “When she could no longer leave her bed, she claimed her illness was a grand opportunity to read frivolous novels.” Whereas, I thought, Mother Briggs will still be chewing over the Bible at death’s door.

“Well,” he said, “I wish she was with us now.”

And oh, I did too. I need my dear mother to tell me what to do about my sister.

“By their fruits, ye shall know them.” That was a favorite saying of Mother’s, especially when her children were idle. She took her religion to be a practice, not a test, and she was an active, not a submissive, Christian. She wanted her children to be alive to the possibilities of life, to show in our actions our moral engagement with our fellows. And, of course, we were her fruits and by us she would be known; I do think that was implied in her remark. I’ve been thinking of her so much today, though, unlike my sister, I haven’t seen her lurking about the house. Does she watch over us here? Does Father believe that? After her death he said, “She will always be with us.” Presumably he meant in our memories and in our hearts.

I confess that there is a shred of jealousy in my conflict with my sister. Why wouldn’t Mother show herself to me, if she could? That is a thought not worth pursuing.

But what I’ve been thinking about Mother is how she would feel, and what she would say, if she were here to guide Hannah past this crisis in her young life. She never gave orders or forbade actions, unless we were rude in public, which merited a frank rebuke. She had a way of looking at you with sympathy and understanding and hope and then asking the exact question that placed the matter in a clear moral light. The answer came of its own accord, and one cheerfully mended one’s ways.

Have I done this with Hannah? Have I asked her the right question, the one that will bring her back to me?

I have not.

Last night I woke from a frightening dream. Benjamin and I were running through a forest, running away from something,
an animal or a man. We held hands, but the ground was uneven and I tripped, losing his grip. When I got to my feet, I found he had gone ahead without me. I followed, but the space between us grew wider and wider and I could hear the pursuer, whatever he/it was, coming closer. There was a harsh sound, very close to my ear, a snarl of rage, and then I woke.

I lay still in the bed, waiting for my heart to slow, and wondering, in a dreamy sort of way, why Benjamin hadn’t waited for me. Gradually I became aware of an odd sound in the real world, a kind of scratching, like nails against wood. It was soft, barely audible, but insistent. I thought it might be a mouse nibbling inside the wall. I closed my eyes, waiting for the embrace of Morpheus, but the scratching distracted me. I listened and listened; was it in the hall? At last I decided to get up and investigate. I lit the candle, crossed to the door, and looked into the hall. A thin, milky light spilled across the floor from beneath Hannah’s door. She was still awake.