Six
CLARA POINTED AT THE HATS in the milliner’s window. “This is the place. Papa said upstairs, above the hat shop.”
A black flat-rimmed bonnet with a large bow the color of over-ripe cherries held Clara’s attention. Then she glanced at the others—the blue silks, the red velvets, the shining delicate brown feathers. There were twelve in all. She longed to go inside and try every blessed one of them on.
“Come on, Clara. Papa is waiting for us. I’m freezing.” Arms tucked under her plaid shawl, Izzie had gone ahead to the stairwell door and was leaning against it, holding it open.
They climbed the dim stairway to the first floor landing. What on earth did Papa have to show them? Clara wondered. While Izzie knocked, Clara rose up and down on her toes. She felt like a kettle about to boil over. On the way here this afternoon, Izzie had told her she was afraid Papa was up to no good and he’d spent even more borrowed money on some surprise. “He’ll get us all in trouble,” Izzie had said. She might be right, but maybe not. She never gave Papa a fair shake. If only Izzie and Papa could get along, everything would be more cheerful.
The door opened and there he was, standing tall and smiling like he had just caught the biggest trout in Seneca Lake. His coat was brushed off and tidy, his spectacles wiped clear of smudges, and his sideburns trimmed neat. He looked like he did the day his gristmill had opened for business in Homer. He and his friends had celebrated by drinking ale inside and outside the mill building all day long. He got so tipsy and silly that Mamma finally came and dragged him home to bed. Before he finally went to sleep, he sang to her for an entire splendiferous hour.
“Come in, my two peaches.”
Stepping away from the door, Papa swung his hand out into the room and bowed, welcoming her and Izzie like they were two princesses coming to court. Two peaches. Bowing like that. He had something big in mind, all right.
The winter sun spilled brilliantly in through three tall, narrow windows on one wall. The room was longer than wide, smelled a little smoky, and was warmed by a fire blazing in a hearth opposite the door. The wood of the mantel was fancy, carved with ribbons, bows, and bunches of grapes. There wasn’t any furniture at all except for the empty ceiling-high bookcases along the walls to their right.
But what was the surprise? There was nothing here except cleaned-up Papa, and a fire. She looked at Izzie to see if her sister understood what Papa was up to, but Izzie was like an iceberg stuck at the door. She hadn’t even stepped inside yet.
An odd smirk on his face, Papa watched them carefully. Suddenly he strutted across the room and leaned on the fireplace mantel, stretching an arm along the top. He held still for a long moment, like he was posing for an ambrotype. Tarnation, what was it?
“Well, girls.” He swept his arm around. “This is where you’ll become famous mediums. This is where the spirits will come and visit all those who enter. It’s your very own place. We’ll call it the Spirit Room.”
“Just for us, Papa?” Clara spun around. “Izzie, we’re going to be famous mediums!”
But Izzie, still the iceberg, wouldn’t budge.
“Where did you get the money for this, Papa?” Izzie asked.
“None of your business. You ought to be proud I’m backin’ you, givin’ you a real chance to do somethin’ with yourself besides marryin’ the first thing in trousers that asks.”
Clara cringed. That did it. They were both going to rile now and, just like night comes after day, a yelling fit was about to explode. Clara turned her back to them and walked toward the windows. She’d wait it out over there where she could see the comings and goings below on Seneca Street. But before Clara even got half way to the window, the door slammed.
She swiveled around. Izzie was gone. Papa stood still, his mouth hanging open a little. He kept his pose at the mantel, almost like Izzie had never been there at all nor said anything at all. He stayed like that a moment, then, shoving his hands into his black frock coat pockets, he rambled across the bare floor to her. “Your sister will come around. I’ll bet my boots on it.” Breaking into his Papa grin, crooked teeth showing, pewter-gray eyes clear, big ears rising up, he pointed back toward the fireplace. “Come back over here, Little Plum. Let me tell you what I have in mind.”
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A FEW DAYS LATER, Clara sat with Izzie and Euphora at their pine table in the Blue Room. After Clara had finished the fifty shirts, she got a new tall stack of seamstress work from the tailor. They were going to be sewing for at least a week, attaching petticoats to chemise tops and ruffles to the bottoms of pantalettes. When they left Ohio, Mamma decided to leave their spinning wheel behind. She said, “My girls, the days of spinning flax are coming to an end. That’s the future. But the days of sewing will never end. Women like us will sew until we’re too old and too tired to lift another needle, but then our daughters will sew and when they are too tired, their daughters will and on and on.”
Clara was already tired of jamming the needle over and under, over and under, over and under. Fifty-one ruffles done. Sixty-one still to go.
Papa burst into the Blue Room. “I need Clara down at the Spirit Room. Billy’s already there. Isabelle and Euphora, you keep at the sewin’.”
Flying out the door behind Papa, Clara felt like a parakeet let out of its cage. When they got to the Spirit Room, which was a short walk from their boardinghouse, Papa took a few items from the bookcase. Gray eyes twinkling behind his spectacles, he presented them to Clara.
“Billy and I are goin’ to work on some mechanical things. This is what you’ll need to make the alphabet sheet like Mrs. Fielding had.”
He handed her a small stack of folded papers with a few inkbottles and metal tip pens sitting tentatively on top.
“There’s some handbills the letterpress man gave me that you can trace over to make the letters look nice. Can you put them in an arc like Mrs. Fielding did?” He drew a curve in the air.
Splendiferous, thought Clara. This was much better than sewing. She smiled and nodded at him, then looked around at the vacant room. Hands in trouser pockets, Billy was stomping with his boots lightly on different spots on the wood floor, like a square dancer, but slower. She carried her materials near the center window, settled herself on the dusty floor in a warm patch of sunlight, and began to unfold the papers.
Papa wandered about the room, tapping on the blue and green striped wallpaper, speaking loudly, then softly, saying, “Hallo there spirits,” and “Dead people, come here.” Clara laughed. He said he was “scrutinizin’” the way his voice resonated. Then he got on his knees and pounded with his fist on a few of the floorboards.
Suddenly he shot up like a firework and started rattling off instructions to Billy. Go down to the waterfront. Get this. Get that. When Papa had finished giving orders, Billy raced back and forth from the Spirit Room to the foundry, the carriage maker, the cabinetmaker, the blacksmith, and even the shipwright, and each time he returned with an assortment of things—pliers, a drill, iron rods, hinges, levers, screws, and other odds and ends, mostly metal.
Papa was going to rig up a secret knocker. He wanted the sound to come from some place in the room far enough away from where the table would be that people wouldn’t think about the rap noise being made by her or Izzie. So he came up with the idea of removing a floor plank and running a long pole out of sight underneath.
He stood near the imagined table. “You or Isabelle will sit here. You’ll step on a pedal under the rug.” He stomped his foot down onto the floor. “The pedal will be hooked to a long rod by a hinge and a spring. It’ll have extra punch, like the trigger on my old Colt Walker.” He held up his hand up, finger pointing, thumb flexing, like a pistol. “Bang. The metal plate on the far end of the rod will hit the floor joist way over there.” Smiling like he just shot a wild turkey, he blew at the tip of his finger, then pointed toward the three windows. It was surely the cleverest thing Papa had ever come up with.
Papa was full of sunshine those few days of fixing up the Spirit Room, not drinking at all as far as she could tell, and singing and whistling like the old days while he cooked up his ideas and tried them out. When he found out that Mrs. Beattie, the milliner landlady from downstairs, had some extra wallpaper, he dug a small hole about shoulder height in the wall near the back of the room and then carved out a skinny tunnel from the hole straight down to the floor. He installed a sweet little bell in the hole, hooked it to a black cord, and ran the cord down the tunnel and then under several floorboards. It ended up at the very spot where he said he would stand during séances. He tied it to his boot, crossed his arms, and just moved his foot a little. Then, ring, ring, ring.
“The spirits’re chimin’ away like boys in a choir,” Papa said.
Then he pasted a fresh strip of the green and blue striped wallpaper over the damage he’d done to the wall. He and Billy swept up some dust and blew it off the palms of their hands and made it look just as dirty as the rest of the wall.
Every time something went right like the bell, he’d grin and slap Billy on the shoulder. Then, every time something didn’t fit right or do what he wanted, he’d blame Billy somehow and cuss at him.
Papa’d say, “You got the wrong damn one,” or “I told you the smallest,” or “Why ain’t you smart like your sisters?” Pulling back her pen from the alphabet paper, Clara clenched her teeth each and every time, waiting for something awful. But just when Billy looked like he was about to yell something back or throw a tool on the floor or maybe stomp out, Papa would break out his grin again and say, “Come on then, my Billy boy, we’ll get it right.”
It was a good thing Papa didn’t kick up too much of a stink, because Billy had been different since they’d come to Geneva. He wasn’t as likely to cast his brown eyes down and wait for Papa’s storms to pass over him, unless of course Papa was pickled, then he just skedaddled. But now, if Papa wasn’t liquorized, Billy’d raise up his face and look right into Papa’s eyes and stare at him.
Mamma always said, “A father and son have to work out between them whether the father is going to let the son be a man and sometimes it ain’t easy.”
Between Billy, who must have finished with being a boy on the road between Homer and Geneva, and Izzie, who had her own mind about just about everything, there weren’t too many quiet times when Papa was around.
Clara slowed her hand as she darkened a letter. She wanted it to be perfect and handsome. And besides that, she didn’t want to go back to the sewing. Those few days of getting the Spirit Room ready were like summertime in the middle of winter. Even though Izzie wasn’t there, the famous Benton Sisters were being born. A new beginning for all of them. It was just what Papa needed. As soon as Izzie saw how clever the secret knocker was, she’d come around. Papa was right about that. Papa was mostly right about everything. Except Billy, anyway.
<><><>
WHEN THE SPIRIT ROOM was finally fixed up for their circles, Clara showed it to Izzie. Papa had told her it was her mission to get Izzie to agree to go ahead as the Benton Sisters, talented mediums. He could make Izzie do it, he’d said, but if Izzie was too ornery she wouldn’t be a charming medium and charming was important. He said that the medium business was the only way he could figure to make money for now and she and Izzie had to do it. Clara had to convince her sister to go along.
After Clara gave Izzie a demonstration of Papa’s floor knocker and the secret bell and showed off her alphabet, she stood with Izzie at the window looking down onto Seneca Street. It was bustling with walkers, horses, wagons and carriages. Except for a patch here and there, snow and ice had melted in the recent warm spell. Fidgeting with a dirty red and white checkered hair ribbon that she held in her hands, Clara leaned against the wall facing Izzie. The wind blew against the window, forcing cold air in.
“We have to work anyway, Iz. Papa has no income. We can do more seamstress work or be chambermaids or maybe shoe binders, but we would have so much more fun and money doing the spirit circles. What are we going to do if not this?”
Izzie was quiet a moment then looked at Clara. “But what if I start hearing voices like Mamma? I heard someone say the name Susan that evening at Mrs. Fielding’s séance. I heard it clearly, but you didn’t and Papa didn’t. What if that was the beginning of being like Mamma? Maybe insane. Loony. Wouldn’t it be better to do something dull and necessary, something honest?
And what if we both could do better than being seamstresses? I could get a governess position with one of the families on Main Street or even up in Rochester or Albany.” Izzie gazed out the window. “Back in Homer, you know my friend Julianna’s family educated me beyond what any girl’s seminary could have. I know I could find a governess position. I should at least try. The hoax shenanigans might turn real for me and make me like Mamma.”
Down on the street, everyone heading into the wind had a hand on their hat and was bent forward. Everyone going the other way was bent back.
“Izzie, you’re nothing like Mamma. You’re smart and strong and can do whatever you want to. You’ll never buckle to anything. That’s the way you are. I don’t want to be a seamstress either. Never ever. I want to be an actress and maybe travel the world.”