The Ghost Orchid (14 page)

“And what I ask you is, if it wasn’t a real spaceship, then why did I begin to have dreams about Nefertiti afterwards . . . ? Do you want me to spell Nefertiti?”

“No,” Daria says, “I’ve got it.” She cracks open her eyes as I walk by and twirls her finger in a circle by her ear and mouths the word
kooks.

I roll my eyes in agreement even though Mira once spent an entire summer channeling the fourteenth-century-
BC
Egyptian queen’s memoirs. I suddenly have the queasy feeling that the forces of New Age mysticism have followed me to Bosco—a feeling that’s confirmed when I enter Diana Tate’s elegantly appointed office and spy on the quartersawn oak surface of the director’s vintage Stickley writing desk one of Mira’s crystal necklaces coiled between the base of a Tiffany lamp and a white stone paperweight.

“Please have a seat, Ellis,” Diana says, gesturing toward a Morris chair in front of the desk.

The cracked leather upholstery lets out a sigh as I sink into it, as if the chair had absorbed every demeaning experience it had ever witnessed: every servant dismissed by the head housekeeper (whose office this was until the early twenties) and every secretary admonished for lateness, sloppiness, typographical errors, bad spelling, misfiling, and petty thievery by the administrative director.

As I sit back in the chair I remind myself that I’m a guest here, not an employee.

“Thank you for taking time out from quiet hours to see me,” Diana begins, touching a manicured hand to her pearls. She’s dressed in slacks, a silk pullover, and a pale green tweed jacket—casual office clothes that make me acutely aware of my jeans and moth-eaten cardigan and SUNY Binghamton T-shirt, but then, as Diana has just said, these are
quiet hours,
working hours. I’m not meant to be dressed for an interview.

“Not at all,” I murmur, trying to sound, if not offended, then at least slightly put out that my work’s been interrupted.

“I’ll get to the point because I know you’re anxious to get back to your book. How’s it going, by the way?”

“The book? Oh, very well, thank you . . . I mean it’s hard . . . trying to get the period details down and establish the characters, but it’s really beginning to flow . . .” I stop myself on the word
flow,
realizing that if I’m not careful, I’ll lapse into “Mira-talk.” It won’t be long until I’m blathering on about unblocking energy chakras.

“Good,” Diana says curtly. “I know the atmosphere at Bosco isn’t always salutary for first-timers. The freedom from work and family responsibilities can lead to an unhealthy lassitude instead of the flourishing of creativity that Aurora Latham envisioned for Bosco. And the presence of well-known novelists can be . . . distracting. Especially to impressionable young women such as yourself.”

Great. She’s heard I’ve been smoking pot with Nat and she thinks I’m sleeping with him. She thinks I’m an author groupie trading sexual favors for letters of reference and agents’ phone numbers . . . but then Diana leans forward in her chair and picks up the crystal beads and interrupts my paranoid fantasies. “We found this in the garden and footprints leading from the
giardino segreto
to the back gate, which has been chained closed for over a century. This was found on one of the gateposts”—Diana unfolds a piece of white cloth and hands it to me; the feel of the gauzy fabric instantly reminds me of my dream, the fabric turned to flesh—“and one of the guests saw you from her window talking to a woman dressed in white at the bottom of the garden,” Diana concludes, sitting back in her chair.

“Yes,” I admit, “it was my mother. She came because she was worried about me.”

“Had you given her any reason to be worried?” Diana asks, arranging her features into a look of concern. “In your letters, perhaps?”

As if I were a homesick camper writing hysterical letters home to Mommy.

“No, not at all. She had a bad dream.”

Diana lifts one eyebrow, but says nothing.

“My mother puts a lot of stock in her dreams,” I say. “She’s . . . well, she’s sort of a psychic.”

“Ah, so that explains your interest in Corinth Blackwell. I didn’t realize that your Blackwell novel was autobiographical.”

I’m not sure what to be more offended by: the idea that I’m using my mother as source material for the book or the accusation of autobiography. It had been, in Richard Scully’s classes, the fatal flaw in all juvenilia—the taint of the personal. It was understood that every writer must write a poorly disguised autobiographical bildungsroman, but that was the book meant to be discarded and moved past.

“I’d hardly call a novel about a nineteenth-century spiritualist
autobiographical.
And it’s not as if I believed in all that—”

“Well, of course not. If the Board had believed you were writing a supernatural thriller, you would never have been invited here. You’re not, are you? Writing a supernatural thriller?”

“No, of course not. I mean, there are scenes in which it might look like supernatural occurrences are taking place, but they’re meant to be ambiguous—like in
The Turn of the Screw.
”

“Oh. Not my favorite Henry James. But how you’re handling your material is your own business. My concern is that the rules of Bosco, which were set in place to assure the optimum working conditions for all the guests, are respected. The guest who saw your mother in the garden was quite distracted. She said she thought she’d seen a ghost!”

Diana finishes with a dry little laugh. I know that the note of levity is supposed to signal that I’ll be forgiven if I apologize properly, but the description of my mother as a ghost brings to mind the image from my dreams of the white-dressed girl fleeing through the ilex grove and her stone-smooth face turning on the brink of the path’s descent into the underworld. Although the girl’s features have been washed clean as the paperweight on Diana Tate’s desk, I imagine there’s a faint smile and the shadow of a taunt in the girl’s eyes:
Follow me,
the look says. It’s the same look that I see in Diana Tate’s eyes right now, daring me to notice what she’s let slip.
She said she thought she’d seen a ghost.
The feminine pronoun repeated three times as if it were a charm. The only other female guest at Bosco is Bethesda Graham.

I deliver my little speech of apology. It’ll never happen again. I’ll make sure my mother understands. No, there’s no one else in my family likely to pay a surprise visit. It’s always been just me and my mother. And I’ll apologize to my fellow guest for scaring her.

Diana Tate looks satisfied—at the sparseness of my family unit
and
that I’ve caught on to the fact that it was Bethesda Graham who informed on me.

“It sounds like Bethesda’s jealous of you,” David tells me.

I’d been too upset after my interview with Diana Tate to go back to work. I couldn’t go to Nat to complain about Bethesda, of course, even if I weren’t still smarting from Diana’s comment about
impressionable young women such as yourself.
So I’d made my way up to the room I’ve come to think of as the animal den because of its carvings of bears and eagle. Sitting on the edge of David’s bed, I feel that I have indeed found my way to an animal’s lair, one padded and lined with blueprints and maps instead of fur and feathers. The clutter on the bed has grown to such thickness that I can’t imagine where David finds a place to sleep. Not that he looks as if he’s been getting much sleep. The healthy outdoors look he had when he came to Bosco has been replaced with pale skin and dark shadows under his eyes. His black hair hangs lankly over his forehead. He’s been skipping breakfast and dinner, so I haven’t seen him in several days.

“Why in the world would Bethesda Graham be jealous of me?” I ask.

David shrugs and looks away from me. “Maybe because you’ve been smoking pot in Nat Loomis’s room.”

Ah, I think, so that’s why he’s been avoiding me. “David,” I say, moving a few inches closer to him on the bed. “I was only hanging out with Nat because he seemed so lonely that day . . .”

“You don’t owe me an explanation,” he says, his voice cold.

“But, I do . . . I mean, I don’t want you to think there’s anything going on between me and Nat . . .” As I say the words, I realize how false they sound.
Is
there something going on between Nat and me? I wonder, remembering that ghostly kiss I’d felt in his room.

He looks up, his dark hair falling in front of his eyes, and moves toward me, the old mattress creaking under his weight and sinking into a trough that pulls me toward him, almost as if the bed itself were delivering me to him. But when his hand touches my face, I hear a sound like beating wings and I can’t help looking toward the headboard to see if the carved eagle has come to life as it does in my dreams. When he feels me tense, he shifts away from me and stands up.

“You should get back to work,” he says, his back to me, and then, as if regretting the preemptory dismissal: “Here, I found this in an old trunk up in the attic. I thought you might find it interesting.” David riffles through the stacks of paper on his desk and extracts a yellowed and dog-eared poster for the Lyceum Theater, Gloversville, New York, advertising the program for July 9, 1882. The headliner is a woman called Queen Eusapia, “The Clever Lady of Mystery.” Below Queen Eusapia, “Retained for one week longer owing to her enormous success,” is Corinth Blackwell, “The girl who talks to ghosts.”

“Wow, this is great,” I say, wincing at the false brightness in my voice. “I knew that Corinth appeared on the stage before she did private séances, but I never pictured her performing alongside juggling acts and burlesque dancers.”

“Look at the bottom of the bill,” David says, turning and sitting on the edge of his desk.

I look at David first, searching his face for a sign that he’s forgiven me for taking up with Nat, but it’s as if a film has settled over his eyes, as if a part of him isn’t really here. I look down at the poster and see the last act on the bill:
The Great Quintini, Master of Disappearances.

Chapter Twelve

Tom watches Corinth enter the grotto with Milo Latham’s arm around her waist. He was a fool to think she’d leave with him now when she wouldn’t wait for him ten years ago. He moves back into the niche and sits on the bench by the small statue and rinses his hands in the water trickling from her upturned vase into the basin below. Violet had shown him the statue when they first arrived at Bosco and told him the story behind it. It was the kind of story she enjoyed: a nymph who’d been so grief-stricken by her husband’s death that she’d melted into water. Mrs. Ramsdale’s heroines were always wasting away, but in Tom’s experience women very rarely melted away from grief. Such transformations, he believed, were illusions, and illusions were something he knew about. They were all about misdirection, leading the audience’s attention away from the real trick, which, in a way, was the trick Corinth had practiced on him.

In those first few weeks with Corinth, all he saw was a girl who’d been badly hurt. It wasn’t just the rope burns on her wrists and ankles, although those were so bad that she was unable to stand or lift so much as a spoon to her mouth, or her cracked ribs, which had to be taped because that brute Oswald had pulled the ropes around her chest so tight. Something inside her had been squeezed out by those ropes, as if her spirit had been forced out of her body. She lay on the bed in the boardinghouse where he took her from the Lyceum, staring up at the ceiling, her eyes open but unseeing.

Corinth’s father came and looked at his daughter lying still on the bed and said, “This is what her mother was like before she died. It won’t be long.” And then he’d left. Tom found out later from the manager at the Lyceum that he’d collected Corinth’s wages and said he planned to try his luck out west.

The doctor came and examined Corinth. He said it was shock and would pass, but Mrs. McGreevey, who ran the boardinghouse, said she’d seen this happen before to Indians from the settlement up at Barktown who’d come to live in the town and lost their way. “Like a light gone out in them,” she said, not unkindly, but letting Tom know what he might be up against.

“Indians? But she’s not . . . ?”

For an answer Mrs. McGreevey had slipped her fingers under the neck of Corinth’s nightgown and pulled out a blue beaded leather pouch hanging from a leather thong around her neck. She drew out from the bag some dried green leaves and crumbled them between her fingers, releasing a sweet aroma.

“Sweetgrass,” Mrs. McGreevey told him. “I’ve seen the Indian medicine men burn it to bring back those lost souls.” She held a pinch of the dried grass under the girl’s nose and she stirred faintly. “Mind you, I wouldn’t like my neighbors to know that pagan ceremonies were going on up here,” she said, placing the leaves in Tom’s palm. “I’ve got my four girls to think about and their reputations. I’d smoke a pipe, if I were you, to cover the smell.”

And so for four days Tom had burned the sweetgrass in a copper saucer beside Corinth’s bed while he sat on the window ledge and puffed pipe smoke into Mrs. McGreevey’s backyard. The four McGreevey girls sat outside in the shade of a white viburnum tree and sewed gloves. They did piecework for one of the local glove shops—nearly all the women in Gloversville did. “Respectable work,” Mrs. McGreevey said. “A man could do worse than marry a woman who can contribute to the family with such respectable work done in her own home.”

The leather pieces, already cut, were dropped off in the morning by one of the factory cutters, and the finished gloves were picked up by another man in the evening. The cutters all wore gleaming white long-sleeved shirts and ties and striped waistcoats. Watching them reminded Tom of his brief stint as a watchmaker’s apprentice. He’d been good with his hands, but he’d found the regular hours dull. Then he’d found other uses for his nimble fingers and gone on the stage. He’d been touring for seven years—since he was fourteen—and had thought it a decent life up until now.

On the fourth day he’d heard a rustle from the bed and saw that the girl had turned her head and was looking at him. When Mrs. McGreevey came up with the lunch tray, she helped him get her into a chair so she could look out the window “and get some air on that white face of hers.”

A few days later the girl spoke for the first time. “What are they making?” she asked Tom, tilting her chin toward the circle of girls under the viburnum.

“They’re sewing gloves,” he told her. “We’re in Gloversville. That’s what people do here.”

She’d looked down at her own bandaged hands, which lay like slaughtered doves in her lap, and smiled. “I like that. A town named for what people do in it.”

When the bandages came off, Tom asked one of the McGreevey girls (they were named Nora, Jane, Elizabeth, and Sue, but he could never quite tell them apart) for some of the leather and thread and asked if she would show Corinth how to sew gloves. “To help her get the use of her hands back,” he said.

She agreed and the next morning—it turned out to be Nora, the second-to-oldest sister—came upstairs with a packet of white kid leather and white thread. She drew a chair up close to Corinth’s and patiently showed her how to sew the delicate leather, their heads bending together—Corinth’s dark, red-flecked hair and Nora’s pale yellow curls—in the sunshine.

Corinth learned fast. The nimble fingers that could pick apart knots now learned to make tiny, almost invisible stitches in the leather. In a few more days she was well enough to sit with the other girls in the yard and, soon after that, to take walks with Tom in the meadows that sloped down from the McGreevey house to the edge of the millpond. She told him about the town she grew up in—a lumber town with the same name as hers. She mentioned the name of the man who owned the lumber mill, and he said he recognized it from one of the bigger glove factories in town. A shadow had passed over her dark eyes then, but Tom hadn’t asked her to explain. He remembered it, though, later.

He told her about the orphanage in Brooklyn, the apprenticeship, and then his exploits on the stage. He did simple tricks for her: producing a bouquet of wildflowers from behind her ear and walking coins across his knuckles. He asked her to show him how she slipped her wrists and ankles out of the ropes during her séances.

“How did you know about that?” she asked.

“You can’t trick a fellow magician,” he told her. She showed him the knots she knew and how to release them, even though, he knew, she hated touching the ropes.

They found a stone icehouse on the other side of the pond, its wide-planked floor covered with the sawdust used to store the ice in winter, which was cool even on the hottest days and held in its old stones the smell of snowmelt and the mountains. Lying side by side on the sawdust-cushioned floor, she told him the names of the rivers and streams that flowed out of the mountains. Saranac, Raquette, Moose, and Chateaugay. Shroon and Black, Beaver and Salmon. All the tributaries and rivers that carried spruce logs from the heart of the mountains down to the Big Boom at Glens Falls. The Saint Regis and the Oswegatchie, Mill and Trout Brooks, Otter Creek, and the Sacandaga, which flooded the marshes of the Big Vly, where her mother’s people came from. While she named the rivers, Tom traced the lines the sun made, shining through the slats of the roof, on her skin. Turning to him, her dark hair falling over her bare shoulders, the light rippling over her breasts and hips, she was like a river herself. Making love to her was like being pulled into a strong current.

When the grass in the meadow began turning purple, he asked her if she wanted to travel with him. They’d make a great act together. But she said no, she didn’t want to ever go onstage again after what had happened with Oswald. More than anything, she wanted to stay in one place so that if her soul ever left her body again, it would know where to come back to.

It had been her idea to stay in Gloversville.

He reminds himself of that now, coming out of his memories to find himself staring at the blank and featureless face of the little nymph. The plan was to save enough money to start their own glove shop—only he’d seen a way to do it quicker. He had an engagement in New York City that fall. He’d keep it and make enough money to get them started. He’d be back by Christmas.

He left her safe in the bosom of the McGreevey family—in that circle of white-dressed girls sewing beneath the viburnum tree, the blossoms of which had turned tea-colored and rattled in the wind like dry paper when he kissed her good-bye. It was true that he hadn’t made it back by Christmas—the engagement in New York had lasted longer than he’d expected and then he’d gotten sick—but he had written to explain. It was March before he made it back to Gloversville, and by then she had left the McGreeveys and gone to work at Milo Latham’s factory. He’d gone to look for her at the dormitory where she’d lived since late December, but one of the girls said she’d left the week before—taken in one of Mr. Latham’s carriages.

Tom pats the little statue on the head and gets up. He stands at the hedge for just a moment, listening for voices, but the servants have come and gone, carrying the body of Frank Campbell up to the house on a stretcher. Milo and Corinth have gone back to the house as well.

He slips behind the statue of the river god into the grotto and finds it empty. There’s a dark stain on the stone bench and splotches of white where the paint from the hand marks on the ceiling has flaked off. A damp footprint near the dark stain. Latham must have stood there and inspected the marks. He was a thorough man, one who liked to make sure personally that any job he commissioned was done to his satisfaction. He paid well enough to see that it was. In the end, Tom can’t really blame Corinth for tossing in her lot with him. He kneels down by the stone bench—like a man come to this pagan shrine to do homage to the resident god of the place—and reaches under the bench, where he finds a telescoping rod and a bow. He pushes both implements farther under the bench and then, flattening himself against the cold stone floor, crawls into the tunnel.

Corinth walks up the fountain allée two steps behind Milo Latham and the doctor, who have ceased discussing Frank Campbell’s cause of death and gone on to more interesting topics: the effect of the current drought on the logging business, the legislature in Albany’s creation of the Adirondack Park and that bill’s effect on logging, and the threat that further legislation might curtail logging on state-owned land. In short, the body borne before them on a canvas stretcher (an implement generally used in the Latham household to transport firewood) might as well be made of wood as far as the two men who precede Corinth onto the terrace are concerned.

They are greeted by the lady of the house, in a subdued fawn-colored robe, her red hair hanging in two long braids over her shoulders. The
déshabillé,
to Corinth’s eye, is carefully calculated.
A man has died in my house,
it says,
and I won’t stand on ceremony.
The dark circles under her eyes also speak of the effect the painter’s death has had on her, but beneath the pallor of her skin, Corinth senses a tremor running through her hostess’s thin frame that is closer to excitement than nerves.

“Thank you for coming so quickly, Dr. Murdoch. We are grateful for your assistance in these dreadful circumstances.”

“Not at all, Mrs. Latham. It must have been quite a shock to you.”

“I only wish I could have prevented . . .”

“You mustn’t blame yourself. It is clear from Mr. Campbell’s color and physique that he suffered from a congenital weakness of the heart.”

“So it wasn’t the arrow—”

The doctor purses his lips together and pushes out a puff of air. “A mere child’s toy that barely pricked the gentleman’s shoulder. It was the shock of the thing that killed him. Of course, in the excitement of the moment and in the poor lighting of the grotto, some of your guests might have thought they saw an arrow protruding from the dead man’s chest, but that would have been a delusion, as I’m sure they will all see in the calm light of morning. And I hope,” the doctor continues, his voice acquiring the patronizing tone he uses with recalcitrant patients, “they will also see the folly of such experiments.”

Aurora inclines her head and lowers her eyes demurely, an attitude of humility Corinth has never seen her hostess adopt before. Her deference to the doctor’s words gives Corinth some hope. If Aurora chooses not to pursue the séances, Latham might be forced to let her go, after all.

“Would you mind,” Aurora asks, lifting up her head, “seeing to one of my guests? Mrs. Ramsdale, whom I believe you met when she stayed here last year, was quite undone by the incident. Her health is not the best to begin with . . .”

“Of course,” Dr. Murdoch replies. “I’m an admirer of Mrs. Ramsdale’s work. I’ll be happy to look in on her.”

Milo escorts the doctor into the front hall and up the stairs to the second floor, their conversation as they go progressing from logging to hunting and a promise from Latham that he’ll take the doctor up to his camp on the Sacandaga in the fall. The servants, at Aurora’s instruction, carry Campbell’s body to the east parlor, where he will await the arrival of the undertaker. Corinth would like to slip into the house and up to her room, but Aurora catches her at the doors to the library and pulls her back out onto the terrace.