Lazaretto (13 page)

Linc was speechless. His mouth hung and he looked at Meda. Meda stood and pulled her chair across the room and placed it under the sketch of Abraham Lincoln. She sat and folded her hands in her lap and Bram was struck again by how poised she was with her straight back and graceful way of moving. “And what have the dead said to you during these visits, Bram?” Her voice was soft, almost a whisper.

“That I was born to be a spiritualist, that I need to be their intermediary. That I must quit the piano.”

“You cannot!” Linc said, trying not to yell, but yelling nonetheless.

“I cannot which one?” Bram asked. “Become a medium? Or turn away from the piano?”

“None of them. You can't quit your music. Linc stood and walked from one end of the room to the other. “And besides, what does your playing the piano have to do with talking to some dead people. That is not
possible
, anyhow. Unless you actually die yourself and join them—then you can talk to them, talk to them all you dratted want. But while you are living, you talk to the living, and you play the piano for the living.” Linc had worked himself up to shouting for real. He surprised himself at the desperation he felt over the notion that he might no longer hear Bram play.

Meda told Linc to lower his voice. “Who has come to you exactly, Bram?” she asked.

“For starters, my mother.”

“Truly, Bram,” Linc said on an exasperated breath, “it was the pain, I promise you, Brother, it was. Tell him, Meda. He was close to death. Anything alive will imagine a visit from its mother when it has one foot in the dratted grave—”

Meda held up a finger to quiet Linc. She herself had thought about her own mother so often of late that it sometimes seemed that her mother was in the room with her. She wondered how close to death she herself was. “How did she appear?” Meda asked Bram. “Your mother. What was she like?”

“She was”—his voice faltered—“she was beautiful.”

“And who else has come to you, Bram?”

“There have been scores of souls, Meda, I promise you there have been.”

“Have there been babies?” Meda asked. “Infants only minutes old?”

Bram closed his eyes as if trying to remember. He was hitting
on something then, something only he knew from having spent Saturday after long Saturday in the Benin house when Linc and Meda would travel to Buddy's. The sounds would sift through the walls and he'd hear them between the notes he played. He'd hear Mrs. Benin's anger, so shrill that it attached itself to her face. And when she'd return to the parlor to take her seat next to him on the piano bench, he found it difficult to look at her, her profile was deafening with its shrill outline. Mr. Benin's anger bounced rather than sifted. It was concrete and lent itself to words that pushed on through the walls and hung over the piano, where Bram played faster and faster to shorten the silence between the notes so that he couldn't hear him, but still he did hear him. “I will not tolerate this from you,” Tom Benin's voice would boom. “I demand that you stop it, stop it right now, once and for always. The baby died. She
died
.” That argument seemed to replicate itself Saturday after Saturday with different words spoken in a different order, but the essence of it that reached Bram was always the same. Once when Mrs. Benin returned to the parlor, and Bram stole a glance at her, he could see where Tom Benin's handprint had penetrated the shrillness and bruised her face. He played a long, slow melody then, Stephen Foster's “Beautiful Dreamer.” He sang the words as he played. It was smooth and uncomplicated, and also soothing. She hugged him afterward. He allowed it, and even hugged her back, though he felt he was betraying Linc and Meda because she was often so wretched to them. It was a brief hug and then she pushed him away and cleared her throat and told him to move on to the Chopin Prelude in D flat major.

He looked across the room now at Meda. “I don't recall a infant,” he said. “Though if I knew one to summon, I do believe she would appear.”

“She?” Meda said, then looked away.

Bram closed his eyes again. He could hear Linc's hard breaths,
and Meda's softer ones that were like sighs. He felt the salve oozing under the bandage running toward his eye. Before he could lift his own hand Linc was already standing over him, dabbing the salve away, and Meda was next to him, telling him not to rub too hard because the new skin on his forehead was still forming, still tender, still not healed.

BRAM WENT ON
to make a handsome living as a medium. People trusted him. His eyes were a milky blue, like ink mixed with cream, suggesting childhood and innocence. His manner was easy, patient. And the burn scar only seemed to help. The skin on his forehead was now fused together like hardened spills of melted wax, as if he'd been struck by a lightning bolt of insight that gave him his powers. And he was an honest broker. Even Linc, who could manage no belief in such a thing as talking to the dead, saw how earnest Bram was in his own belief. He'd seen Bram return advances made to him when he'd felt he'd been unable to reach beyond; he knew that Bram was meticulous in the pre-work he conducted before actually trying to hear from the dead. In addition to interviewing the decedent's family and friends, Bram would study their journals and other documents they'd left. Bram maintained that he enjoyed a level of success that many practicing his discipline in a more haphazard way did not because the dead respected his efforts to know fully who they had been while alive. “That's all any of us wants”—he'd push his point with Linc—“to be known fully by people who purport to care.” Linc would counter that such a want must happen after death, because from what he could see, most living people put great effort into trying to cloak their true selves, even from themselves, and the behavior of men at the card table—the bluffed expressions to force an opponent's moves—was a small version of the workings of the world. They'd volley back and forth then the way that close siblings did, critical
on the one hand, indulging the other's hobbyhorse on the other. Bram now protested Linc's penchant for the card table, yet he'd still advance him money when he ran short; and Linc declined to consider the possibility of communiqués from the dead, yet he'd spend hours listening to Bram's recounting his spiritual exploits. Though they'd both feared that Bram's new avocation would prove a wedge between them, their bond was, in fact, strengthened, the way it can be when one person changes profoundly and the other makes a sincere effort to understand, and new circuits are formed between them as a result, reconfigured, firing with possibility.

Bram began to experience episodic bouts of an unnamed malady where he'd vacillate between fevers and chills. He'd vomit, and at its worst he'd turn yellow with jaundice, sometimes even becoming incoherent as if suffering from some sort of brain-wasting disease; other times he'd descend into a trancelike state. Linc hammered him to seek medical attention after the first time. But Bram recovered quickly enough, with no apparent lasting effects. Each reoccurrence seemed less drastic, being that much more familiar. And then Bram revealed to Linc that the sudden onset and departure of his mysterious ailment was merely a consequence of his work, and that he chose to see it as a positive benefit. “It means I've gotten success, it means they're inside of me,” he said, referring to the dead. “I know it with the first taste of a dry mouth, a chalky taste, I know then that it's begun and that I'm reaching them.”

“Better if you knew the truth, you stupid bloke, that a chalky mouth means a body needs a drink,” Linc said. “You could nip it before you got shitty sick by guzzling water—or, better still, gin.”

They went back and forth, then, the way they always had with one another: Bram trying to convince Linc of the merits of his new occupation; Linc straining to convince Bram of its folly, hoping to convince Bram to seek help for his medical condition,
insisting that if he did not, he would
actually
be talking to the dead because he would soon be joining them. Bram waved him off, then commenced to detailing his most recent case for Linc. Linc settled in to listen. Not believing in the possibility of it, but listening nonetheless.

MEDA HADN
'
T THOUGHT
it would be so easy to get into the parlor of the orphanage, where she'd not been in almost a decade. She'd concocted a story of having been sent by her employer to inspect the parlor for new furniture he was planning to donate. But the door to the home was unlocked, and she walked in and stood in the foyer and took in the air that smelled of garlic and thyme. The charcoal stain was still there on the foyer floor after all these years, and she was glad that it was. She cleared her throat and whispered a hello, and hearing no reply, assumed that it was still the quiet time here, when the older ones were at their studies and the youngest down for naps and the staff disappeared on breaks. She made her way directly into the parlor and closed the door and stepped back in time because not a thing had changed. Same velvet fainting couch, same brocaded draperies—blue with flecks of gold—same boxy writing desk with the missing drawer pull. She looked at the space where the cradles had been that first night she came here, and the space was empty save for the dust beams twirling in through the tall window. She sank into the couch and leaned back and kicked her shoes off and swung her legs around and closed her eyes. She felt at once beautiful, the way she'd felt when she and Ann shared this space, and also the sense of fulfillment that she'd get when she sat here and nursed Linc and knew that she was connected to something larger than herself. She nestled deeper into the couch and thought of church.

Dr. Miss had suggested church when Meda saw her earlier in the day. Dr. Miss, like this room, had not changed: still in that high head wrap and long straight dress that hung more like a robe, as if she were a sort of high priestess. She had not been able to tell if Dr. Miss remembered her, she didn't act as if she did, but then Meda thought she was likely an expert liar. This time Dr. Miss examined Meda in a room that was painted yellow, not white like the room where she'd lost her baby. She'd looked around for a picture of Abraham Lincoln on the wall and was disappointed that there was none, and she suddenly missed him with an ache as Dr. Miss inspected her breast—pressed it, turned it, apologized when Meda pulled in her breath sharply from the pain. Meda had tried to read Dr. Miss's face, but she could not. Reasoned that years of doing what she did had molded Dr. Miss's face so it better resembled an ebony carving than something of flesh and emotions. Not that she needed Dr. Miss's face to tell her what she already knew. The thunderclaps of pain in her breast had already told her; the gradual disfigurement; the way that her breast leaked, which Meda thought of as tears; reasoning that her breast was so sorry for what it was doing to her, for eating away her life, that every now and then it broke down and cried. She'd caress her breast then, forgive it, everything deserved forgiveness.

After Dr. Miss had completed her examination, Meda watched her lips move; it seemed that her mouth and her words were not in time with one another. At the point when the words reached her ears, she'd already deciphered them as they pushed through Dr. Miss's mouth. The words were grating to her ear with their redundancy. So she sifted through them.
Cureless
,
pray
,
church
—these were the words that she allowed to register as she assembled herself back into her corset. She fastened the word “church” along with her corset so that it lay against her skin.

She'd not gone to church much as an adult. But during her
childhood she'd regularly experienced two types of religious services. One was the Meeting for Worship that was a daily part of the routine at the Quaker school, where they'd sit in silence, and anybody moved to speak, did. There was generally more silence than speaking, and Buddy would look at her and mouth the words “Tain't doing dis.” Then he'd lean down and scurry the length of the long, hard bench and sneak out to find his relief in the noise of the streets. Meda, however, would luxuriate in the silence. Sometimes the air whispered to her that it loved her, and then she would sit up straighter and let it kiss her forehead the way her mother did when she thought to. Her other churchlike experience was the one she partook of with her mother when the workers would assemble in the courtyard of the prison at the end of their shift. Someone would strike a tambourine, another would let go a throaty hum that grew into a song; Bible verses would flow like stormy rivers; prayers that moaned mixed with dancing, shouting, and convulsive shakes; and handkerchiefs tossed in the air floated through the courtyard, lending grace and softness to the grand display.

Dr. Miss had said “church” like a question, and Meda had come here because didn't people go to church to find God? Had she not found God here in the purity of those infants' soft breaths that first night; in the trembling righteousness of Ann's touch; in the honest laughter when the babies fixed their faces like clowns; in the thoughts that sifted in with the stillness? She'd know things all of a sudden as she'd sit here, and sometimes the knowing made her cry, like the time the knowing floated in with the light of day that had been gray with clouds and she realized that her mother had not been cleaning the penitentiary, that she had in fact been jailed there. Sometimes the knowing made her sigh, like the time she'd seen Miss Ma's granddaughter parading up Fitzwater Street with a little girl who looked white and she'd asked
Miss Ma about her, and Miss Ma said she was kin to Nevada's siddity friend whose people were big-time caterers and she herself was studying to be a nurse. And Meda asked about her people, did her people look white. “'Bout as mixed up as any colored folk, though not white, white like that child. Hear it told from Nevada that all they know 'bout the mother is that she was some kinda gypsy that didn't want to be no mother.” Meda had kept Miss Ma on the subject until she called Nevada's friend by name, Sylvia. Sylvia. She'd wondered about that little girl for weeks. Maybe that was her little girl. Maybe Sylvia had taken her infant that morning and pretended to have gotten her from a relative. Even though the ages were off by two years, she could have lied about the little girl's age. But the knowing of that came to her finally; she was certain that was not her child. That's the knowing that made her sigh the most.

And sometimes the knowing made her laugh, like right this instant as she watched the dust beams assemble where the cradles used to be, the specks gathered so closely, dancing so hard they appeared to be standing still. She doubled over with laughter now, enjoying the feel of the laughter pulling from way deep in her breast, where the sickness couldn't reach. The dust beams twirled and showed hints of color, a little blue, a little yellow; they sparkled. She laughed harder still at this particular knowing, so tickled by the knowing that the pain in her breast went away. My, my, my, she said when she had recovered herself. This one had been the best knowing of all.