An Inconvenient Wife (30 page)

“He’s terribly shy, really,” Millie said, and everyone laughed. “Could you make him do something truly outrageous?”

“Probably.” Victor eyed Leonard speculatively.

“Oh, please, try,” Leonard said. “Show me how this hypnosis works.”

“Will you, Victor?” Alma asked.

“It’s not a parlor game,” Victor said.

“Well, of course,” Millie put in. “But perhaps seeing it would explain it to us a little better. And it’s been such a dull
week. I’m sure we could all use some amusement.”

It surprised me when he considered it. They were all sitting forward, as if by the very pressure of their movement they could
get him to agree. I found myself urging him as well. He was a brilliant man, and I wanted them to understand him. I wanted
them to think of him as I did. When he looked at me, I nodded and said, “Perhaps you can make them understand.”

He set down his goblet. “Very well,” he said, “but I must remind you that this isn’t a game.”

“Take me first.” Leonard stood, spreading his arms as if sacrificing himself. “I’ve a longing to see how it feels to have
no will.”

“I would have thought you’d already know what that feels like,” Julia said.

The rest of the table laughed, as did Leonard. “Well, then, to see what it feels like to have someone else’s.” He widened
his eyes. “I shall be a new creature. Like Frankenstein’s monster.”

Victor stood. “Perhaps someone less dramatic,” he said. “Perhaps Julia?”

All eyes went to her. Julia set down her napkin, licking her lips with a little nervousness. Her expression was reproachful,
even petulant, but she smiled and said, “Of course,” and rose against Leonard’s loud protests.

“Do you have a comfortable chair, Millie?” Victor asked.

“In the parlor.” Millie got to her feet, ushering us all from the dining room. They followed Victor like rats after the Pied
Piper, seduced by his charisma, as I had been. We went from the dining room into the first parlor, which also was decorated
in a sea theme, with settees and chairs of aqua silk, glass jars of shells, wallpaper flocked in shades of sand. Victor motioned
Julia to the settee and pulled a chair opposite her in a formation that reminded me of his office. I knew what Julia was feeling
as he sat across from her, and I saw with a small shock that it was familiar to her as well. She seemed comfortable and calm,
as if she knew what was going to happen. I felt a keen stab of jealousy. I wondered why he had not chosen me.

“Everyone must be quiet,” he said, keeping his gaze on Julia, who blushed beneath it. “It cannot work if you aren’t.”

“Silent as the tomb,” Leonard said, putting a finger to his lips, and there were nervous giggles and a few hushes. When the
room was quiet, Victor began.

I had only ever been the victim of that gaze, and I watched with a kind of repulsed fascination as Victor took Julia’s thumbs
in his fingers and began to speak in a quiet, singsong voice. “Look at me, Julia, and think only of going to sleep. How you
long for it. How good it will feel to close your eyes. Your eyelids are growing heavy. Heavier. Your eyes are very tired.”

Julia’s eyes began to redden.

“Yes, that’s it. Your eyelids are flickering, your eyes are watering. Your vision is blurring. You want to close your eyes.
Sleep is all you long for. Yes, close your eyes.”

Her eyes were tearing now. When he said the final words, she closed her eyes in obvious relief. I had known that relief once,
the first time he’d put me into a trance. Since then, I had never needed such a ceremony. My fingers curled about my wrist.
There was a murmur from someone, quickly hushed. Victor did not take his gaze from Julia.

“You will no longer feel anything. Your hands are motionless, you see nothing more. You are sleeping. Sleeping.” His voice
trailed off in a whisper.

“That was remarkable,” Leonard said.

“Quiet, Len,” Alma ordered.

Victor released Julia’s thumbs. They fell lax into her lap. “Now,” he said, “I am going to raise your arm. It will stay frozen
in the air. No amount of strength will move it.”

He raised Julia’s arm until it was outstretched, so the candlelight shimmered off the purple silk of her sleeve. The sinews
in her arm were pronounced; her hand was rigid. Gently Victor tried to move it. It did not budge. He turned to Leonard. “Would
you care to try?”

Leonard swallowed and nodded. He came forward and pushed on Julia’s arm. “It’s solid as a bar,” he said in amazement.

“You may use all your strength,” Victor told him.

Leonard put both hands on Julia’s arm and tried to lower it. It did not waver. “My God,” he said.

“Does one of you ladies have a pin?” Victor asked.

“Yes. Yes, of course.” Alma reached into her chignon and pulled out a bejeweled hairpin that glittered citron and amethyst.
She put it in Victor’s hand.

“You may lower your arm now, Julia,” he said, and she did so. He took her hand and turned it palm up. “You will feel nothing,”
he said, pressing the pointed end of the pin into the soft center of her palm, hard enough that it made an impression. She
didn’t move.

“What else can you make her do?” Leonard asked.

Victor handed the pin to Alma, who stood staring as if it held some magic power. He sat back in his chair and said to Julia,
“Rise and open your eyes.”

Julia stood obediently.

“Walk.”

She walked, neatly avoiding the chair, crossing the room as if she could see everything within it. I began to feel strange,
as if it were me Victor was putting through the paces.

“You can’t go any farther,” he said, the tone of his voice never wavering. Low and smooth, with a rhythm that held us as spellbound
as Julia. “On the table beside you is a glass of wine. You will drink it.”

There was no table beside her, but Julia reached out. Her hand curled around an invisible glass. She raised it to her lips.
Swallowed.

“You’ve had your fill of it,” Victor said, and Julia put the glass down. “Now you will return to your chair and sit down.
When I count to three, you will awaken. When you do, you will hear the sound of a violin coming from the beach.”

Julia moved back to him. She sat down, calm and still, and Victor counted slowly. “One. Two. Three.”

She blinked. She saw us watching her and flushed deeply.

Leonard clapped his hands. “Bravo, Victor. That was truly remarkable.”

But no one paid attention to him. We were all watching Julia as she tilted her head. “Do you hear that?” she asked, rising,
going to the window. “Why, it sounds like someone is playing a violin on the beach.”

Victor sat back in his chair, crossing his arms over his chest. He smiled smugly while the others oohed and aahed and crowded
around him, and it was clear he enjoyed their adulation. I looked at Julia, who had turned from the window with a frown. Our
gazes met, and I felt hollow and alone. I remembered a walk in the woods, a singing bird.

“There’s no violin,” I said softly to her, and her expression cleared. She nodded and went again into the dining room, to
where her glass of wine—a real one this time—waited. She took a long swallow.

I heard Leonard ask, “Can you do that to anyone?” and Victor’s assured assent, and then a chorus of “Oh, I’d like to try”
and “Put me to sleep, Victor” and “No, no, it’s my turn now.” I turned away from it all, bedeviled in a way I couldn’t explain.
I went out the screened door and onto the porch that looked over the darkness that was the sea. The moon was slight. I could
see the crests of waves, dimly white and ghostly, floating, disconnected. From somewhere came the scent of roses.

That night, as we walked from the carriage house around to the porch, Victor caught my arm, stopping me before I climbed the
stairs. “You seem quiet tonight,” he said.

“I’m a bit tired.”

“You’ve said nothing about dinner.”

Sadie had lit a lamp that beckoned from the window. It cast Victor’s face in shadow, but I could see the avidity of his stare,
how hungry he was for praise. I said, “You were quite a success. I think they all love you.”

“Yes,” he said with satisfaction. “Did you hear how they all begged for it? Two minutes before they had called it mesmerism.”

“They couldn’t know the difference,” I said dully.

“I had to show them it was a true science. They didn’t believe.”

“Now they do.”

“Yes, now they do,” he said. I felt his excitement. We went up the stairs, and he pressed me against the wall near the door
and kissed me. “They’ll know now,” he murmured into my mouth, and my sense of disconnectedness fled. I felt again the passion
I always felt for him, the longing so intense it took away doubt as he lifted my skirts and plunged his hands beneath them,
holding me in place, taking me there on the porch while the sea rushed onto the beach beyond.

V
ictor became a luminary in Newport. He was invited to the Reading Room, the exclusive men’s club that William had spent most
of three years trying to join before they accepted him last summer. Women could not get past the first step onto the large
piazza without encountering a clubman, so I only heard about how Victor entertained them, how he made Gerald Fister attempt
to light his cigar with a stem of mint from a julep, and how even Cornelius Vanderbilt had clapped him on the back and asked
him to attend one of their parties. When we went to the Casino to listen to the orchestra, he was surrounded by those who
wanted to be turned into trained monkeys, and every supper we went to ended with a display of hypnotism. Even Millicent had
taken her turn on the chair, exclaiming when she woke over how loud the military band on the porch was—where had it come from?

Victor had told me in the past how hypnosis was not successful on everyone, and to others only to a certain degree. I noticed
how carefully he chose—Julia, whom he had hypnotized before; Leonard, who wanted it so badly he would no doubt pretend even
if Victor could not take him into a trance; Gerald, who accepted with alacrity anything that made Alma happy. But never me.
Victor never put me into a trance before a crowd.

It was mid-July already. The sky was clear blue and cloudless, and the mornings came humid and hot, so we woke often before
dawn, bathed in sweat, to open the windows, and we kept them open far into the night. Even the water felt warm when we swam.

We began to live for the night, for the suppers we went to and the ones that we increasingly hosted together. William had
not visited Seaward for the last two weeks. He would come on the fourteenth to spend a week, but he was busier than ever.
He sent his love, along with the invitations to our ball for me to address, and hoped that Victor was not monopolizing my
time.

Victor threw himself into the entertainments, and these scenes played anxiously about my mind. I did not like the game hypnotism
had become; it made too little of my own experience. I did not like seeing how easy it was for Victor to make a fool of someone.
I began to wonder about the control he had over my mind. Though I was uneasy and fretful, my passion for him had not abated.
If anything, it had grown, so my fingers itched for him constantly; I grew less discreet. Occasions like the one on the porch
grew more frequent—once on the beach, along the seawall; once in the carriage house, while David was outside washing down
the landau; once midday in the little rose bedroom that had been mine, with his papers crumpling beneath me and Sadie moving
around downstairs. I searched for ways to bind him to me, because my own doubts plagued me. I did not like my feeling that
the Victor I knew was changing into one of the tricksters he claimed to despise. I wanted his hypnotism play to stop, and
I told myself it was because I feared for him: I knew how soon people’s affections could turn, how the newest entertainment
passed so rapidly into the next. How much longer before hypnotism bored them the way phrenology had? But the truth was that
I didn’t like the intrusion of my own reason; every time he put someone in a trance, I was reminded of the control he must
have over me.

I thought Victor must sense my uncertainty, but he said nothing, though I often found him staring at me as if he could see
into my thoughts.

Early one afternoon, two days before William was due to arrive, Millie came to call bearing rolls of wallpaper and swatches
of fabric and chunks of marble. I welcomed her with a smile, but those things only reminded me of the pile of invitations
on my desk, ready to be sent out, and of the huge mausoleum that I would be returning to, of William’s expectations.

She knew this, of course. Perhaps it was part of the reason she’d come. As she laid a chunk of pink Italian marble next to
one of sparkling marbleized granite, she gave me a sideways glance and said, “I wouldn’t have brought them all this way, but
I do need help choosing, and I thought since you’ve so recently been through this yourself . . . Oh, and Lucy, wouldn’t this
pink look lovely in your new foyer?”

“William has already decided on something,” I said.

“Oh? What is that?”