The Spirit Photographer Read online

  She was silent, and now her hands betrayed her nervousness.

  “Isn’t that what you desire, Mrs. Garrett—more than anything?”

  She stared at him.

  “The gratification of seeing William Jeffrey again?” he pressed. “Reunion, in this life—and the next?”

  A sharp pain gnawed inside her. She knew that it could never be the same as it once was, and yet—

  “Yes, Mr. Moody,” she replied. “That is what I desire.”

  WILLIAM GARRETT’S DEATH some eighteen years before that first encounter had marked the beginning of Elizabeth Garrett’s struggle with her own beliefs. The day William’s silver rattle appeared on the entry hall table, for instance, a full two years after the child’s passing, had initially convinced Elizabeth of nothing more than Jenny’s mischievousness. Jenny had been against purging the house of William’s playthings; she warned that doing so would only result in angering the boy’s spirit. “You know how Master William loved that rattle,” Jenny had said, “and you know that he’s going to miss it.” Outraged, Elizabeth had only grown more determined, and tossed the rattle into a wooden box designated for one of the West End orphanages.

  But when the rattle appeared—worse yet, when it appeared on what would have been William’s fifth birthday—Jenny was nowhere to be found. The day before, she had gone to see her sister who worked in Cambridge, and did not plan on returning until later that evening. Elizabeth had passed by the entry hall at least twenty times since Jenny’s departure. She had seen nothing unusual, and no one else was in the house. Yet on that morning, when she passed the front door, there was William’s toy.

  Elizabeth immediately jumped to conclusions—Jenny had always found subtle ways of retaliating. Elizabeth knew that when she had commanded Jenny to get rid of the rattle, Jenny had not liked it, and would remember. The negroes had their own ways of thinking about these things, and even Elizabeth had come to appreciate that. But she was the mistress of her house, and no matter how much equality her husband liked to preach, she was not going to comply with taking instructions from her own housemaid.

  And so the rattle was there, two years after she was sure that she had ordered Jenny to send it away in the wooden box. But was she sure? She looked at it—its dull glow growing in the morning light. And as she moved toward it, hesitating with each step, the unevenness of the glow seemed to make the rattle pulse.

  He had been holding the rattle when she lost him.

  “It will be gone soon,” he had said.

  “What will be gone, my little darling?”

  But the child never answered. The child never spoke again.

  As successful as Elizabeth was at forgetting things, that was one moment she never forgot. Then she remembered—the rattle had not gone off to the orphanage with William’s other things. She had plucked it from the box at the last minute. There was a part of her that realized that Jenny was right, that the rattle should have remained in the house; but there was also that part of her—the unyielding part—that never could have surrendered to Jenny. And so once the box was full, and Jenny was out of the room, Elizabeth had quickly seized the rattle and hidden it where even Jenny would be unlikely to find it.

  The rattle. She had taken it! And she had found it in her pocket one day, too, long before that day when the rattle appeared on the entry hall table. The child had been dead for only a few months, and Garrett had been gone, in Washington. She had just wanted to hold the rattle for a little while, to have her moment alone with it, which was something that she had taken to doing in those months following William’s death. This impulse signified what Elizabeth thought of as a weakness, but she had succumbed to it, until she heard Jenny’s footsteps in the hallway. She had quickly shoved the rattle into her pocket—yes, she remembered now—she had shoved it into her pocket, wrapped tightly in her handkerchief so as to muffle the rattle’s sound. Even so, when Jenny entered the room Elizabeth sensed that she suspected something. Jenny was never very careful about suppressing her suspicions.

  There was some house matter or other to deal with, Jenny had said—what it was Elizabeth could not quite remember—but hours went by before Elizabeth reached into her pocket again, only to discover the rattle. It had been a narrow escape. Jenny had not found her out. Elizabeth would need to keep the rattle hidden—forever.

  But on William’s fifth birthday, when the rattle appeared in the entry hall, Elizabeth was forced to remember that narrow escape. She remembered the sense of panic that had overcome her on that day, when she had plunged her hand into her dress pocket to find William’s rattle wrapped within her handkerchief.

  It started there—with the rattle on the entry hall table, two years after William had gone. It was the first event that she could not explain. Others followed, of a less physical nature, most of them involving sounds, and at times William’s voice. She was always alone when it happened, and extremely thankful for that, for the notion of Senator Garrett’s wife having “Spiritualist tendencies” was not something she could have accepted in those days. After all, public outcry had forced John Edmonds to resign. The papers had excoriated him, claiming that his championing of the Spiritualists had rendered his intellect “unreliable.” It was not, the papers said, “befitting of a state Supreme Court justice to be seen gadding about with people who believed in ghosts.”

  By the time the war came though, the influence of the Spiritualists was reaching far beyond that set, and Elizabeth was becoming more convinced that William had not entirely “moved on.” When Constance Merriwhether, the wife of Garrett’s former law partner, invited the Garretts to a séance at their home, Elizabeth admitted her desire to attend. Constance’s brother had fallen at Gettysburg, and Constance was one of thousands who was desperate to reconnect with someone who had never returned. “I need to know that he died a good death,” she told Elizabeth. “I need to hear that his death was honourable.”

  When Elizabeth told Garrett that the Merriwhethers were hosting a séance, his reaction was quick and predictable: “Elizabeth, can you imagine a bunch of lawyers sitting around a table with their wives, waiting for some rap-tap-tapping or the meowing of a cat? Ridiculous. Merriwhether has gone out of his mind.”

  But she knew that even he experienced his own doubts. When the death tolls reached him by messenger, one night in September after Antietam, he had retreated to the drawing room and asked to be alone. After three hours had passed and he had still not emerged, Elizabeth interrupted him. He was sitting before the fireplace, staring at it, motionless, and she guessed that he had been in that position for several hours. Drawing closer, she immediately noticed his expression—the emptiness, the utter despair of all hopes lost. She recognized that look as one she had never wanted to see again. William had been dead for ten years at that point.

  She placed her hand on his shoulder, and still Garrett did not move.

  “McClellan has lost over twelve thousand of our men,” he said. “The dead will never forgive me.”

  It was then that she truly understood that her husband also feared his own secrets—not simply the practical kinds, the kinds that could ruin families and careers—but the deeper, intangible, recalcitrant secrets that could destroy the foundations of everything one believed in.

  III

  ON THE MORNING of the photograph, the sky was black and gray, and by that afternoon, when the Garretts left their house, light drops of rain had been falling for some time. As the carriage rocked, crawling down toward the Common, Garrett could not help reflecting on how much Elizabeth had changed. They had been married for over twenty years, and he still remembered how she had first captivated him. There was an absolute self-assuredness about her that had set her apart from other women. Of course she was Elizabeth Beauregard back then—a distant third cousin of the notorious Confederate general. Her family was from Philadelphia and supported the abolitionists, though they had also maintained relations with their plantation kinfolk in Louisiana.

  During
the first years of their marriage Elizabeth had won over the women of Boston, whose envy of her self-confidence surfaced as deference, rather than resentment. She was beautiful, intelligent, and circumspect with her opinions—progressive enough to sit comfortably with the abolitionists, yet conservative enough so as not to offend the other side. There was a great deal of mystery about her, too, which was at the heart of the draw for many. One could never quite tell exactly what she was thinking, and it made you want to know. Garrett, clearly destined for the Senate even then, had a natural ability to command rooms and crowds; but she could command people. There was such a fine distinction.

  Even Dovehouse—Garrett’s closest confidant since his undergraduate days at Harvard—liked her. Or at least it seemed that way. Dovehouse had originally opposed the marriage, warning Garrett that a man with an eye on politics could not risk the association with “southern skeletons.” Her family’s ties to the old Louisiana sugar plantations, Dovehouse said, would not be of small concern, especially to Garrett’s opponents. But when Dovehouse realized that Elizabeth was nothing if not a realist, his opinion changed, and he accepted her as one of his own. This woman from Philadelphia was certainly no fool, and all the better that she was ten years Garrett’s junior. Her charms—and certainly that was what Dovehouse considered them, charms—would help propel Garrett toward his political destiny.

  When the baby arrived, Elizabeth lost little strength, and Garrett remembered how the speed of her recovery had astonished Boston society. Garrett was not yet in the Senate then, but he was already involved in the debates over the western territories. Publicly, he spoke out in favor of abolition and the limitation of the South’s influence as the country expanded; but in more private settings, where people aired their prejudices with less restraint, it was Elizabeth who promoted the virtues of her husband’s positions. She was, after all, someone who had relations in the South, and she could testify to the brutality she had seen there. When Garrett was elected to the Senate, he was not unaware of how instrumental his wife’s support had been.

  But the baby’s death just two years after Garrett’s election had left Elizabeth disconsolate and muttering in her sleep about “punishments.” What was strange, however, was the inconsistency of her sadness. In those early years following William’s death, Garrett would often find her in a stupor, unwilling to look at him or speak; then only hours later, she would be entertaining Constance Merriwhether with all of the usual gregariousness that people had come to expect from her. He did not understand the secret thoughts his wife harbored, and the irregularity of her behavior frightened him.

  By the time the war came, many years later, the legacy of that dark period had receded. There were days, of course—there would always be days—but new forms of darkness had pervaded the nation. Garrett’s attentions turned almost exclusively toward the advancement of the cause, and Elizabeth’s mission remained that of a surveyor over Boston’s drawing rooms. She continued in her role as Garrett’s domestic ambassador, but now when she spoke, she did so with noticeable reserve. She had never been a firebrand, and he had never expected her to be one, but there was something different, even indifferent, about the way she communicated during the war years. She was strong—that was one attribute of hers that had remained constant—but her passions were a mere ember of what they had once been.

  Those were the war years, when everyone’s passions were uncontrolled, and when families’ differences split them apart in ways unexpected and horrendous. Had the impossible occurred, and had they grown apart? Garrett hated the idea because he knew how much he had relied on her. And sometimes he would go even further in his private thoughts, and admit that he would have been a failure without her. Such a belief was somewhat dangerous—a type of shameful surrender. Dovehouse would certainly have thought so, but then again Dovehouse knew that his friend had indeed surrendered, much to Garrett’s own benefit. If Elizabeth were retreating, there was not much Garrett could do to stop it. There had never really been a period when she adored him. She admired him, yes, but she had never adored him.

  She was withdrawing—not abandoning him, never that—just withdrawing. She would do his deeds for him, support his ideas, maintain his status—and hers. But she did withdraw. The confirmation came for him that September following the end of the war, when Johnson ordered the return of all confiscated land to the plantation owners. The president’s “odious decree,” as Garrett called it, was a strong blow to the radical cause, and to Garrett in particular, since he had been arguing for years that it was the government’s responsibility to redistribute the land to the freedmen. He thundered as much about it at home as he did in Washington, until one night Elizabeth finally said: “James, you can’t give them everything.” Her coolness was shocking, and in that very moment, in hearing that mere fragment of resignation, he realized that somewhere, somehow, he had lost her. He also realized that he had been losing her for over a decade, and that their connection had slowly been … disintegrating. Of course, anyone watching from the outside would be inclined to trace her detachment back to the loss of the baby, but Garrett had come to believe—knew instinctively in his heart, rather—that it had always been more than that.

  And so there they were, some years after the war, the senator and his wife, going to sit for a spirit photograph with Mr. Moody. Once partners in everything, from drawing rooms to the national stage, they had now become strangers, even as the carriage’s sway pressed them intimately against each other. The drive across town to Moody’s gallery was not a long one, but to Garrett, trapped in the narrow compartment, the ride seemed interminable. He did not entirely understand or remember how it had come to be like this. He only knew that he had agreed to accompany his wife more out of fear than understanding.

  IV

  HE HAD SENT her the letter—a summons.

  It was important that she had received it as a summons. When she had entered that first time, he had not been surprised. She was aloof, aristocratic—like one of those fine ladies in the British novels.

  Moody had wondered if in that first meeting he had been right to bring up her husband. In Moody’s mind, a successful photograph of Senator Garrett would cause even more of a stir than the vice president’s portrait. Schuyler Colfax had struck Edward Moody as a simpleton, but Senator Garrett was different: he was renowned for his acumen.

  It had been a risk, but Moody had taken it. He could see that she was already questioning.

  Then he had startled her—into submission almost. This woman who was steeled against even the subtlest flatteries. But it did not make a difference who Mrs. Garrett was, for she had lost something, and that would make her a believer. He did not think about this callously, or with any kind of disrespect. It was simply how it was: there were those who would believe, and those who wouldn’t.

  “The photographs—” Moody had offered, “They give us an opportunity to go back …”

  He could take her back, as he had taken so many others. It was, after all, what Elizabeth Garrett desired. And why should he not give this sad woman what she longed for? He had helped many hundreds of people reunite with their loved ones, and he would do whatever it took to ensure Mrs. Garrett’s gratification. There would be such sweetness in her eyes when she at last saw her child.

  It was a sweetness that Moody himself had tasted, over and over again.

  OF COURSE, ELIZABETH Garrett’s visit to the spirit photographer had followed on the heels of a great public debate. Were the ghosts in Edward Moody’s photographs real, or weren’t they? Every newspaper, coffeehouse, and drawing room had been taking part in the argument for years. The “enemies of truth,” as the Spiritualists called them, were of particular concern, for these were the most vocal of the doubters—different from the common prattlers—and they shouted their accusations in every place they could. But Moody did not fear them. He had providential support, and whenever the cry of these enemies grew rampant, Providence seemed to intervene to counter them.

>   It had happened, so easily, in the case of Samuel Fanshaw, the renowned portrait painter who had come to Moody in search of a likeness of his mother’s ghost. The spirit photographer had obliged, and the next day the man was running about Boston, proclaiming the likeness “more truthful and more accurate than I myself ever painted of her in life.” The Banner of Light, Boston’s leading Spiritualist newspaper, also published Moody’s response to the “miracle.” Mr. Fanshaw’s testimony was so valuable, Moody said, “inasmuch as it disproves what is so often stated by skeptical people—namely, that my pictures are likenesses only when persons imagine them to be so.”

  Moody enlarged the Fanshaw portrait and hung it prominently in the gallery.

  Soon though, the challenges to Moody’s art intensified, and the editorials took bolder steps in raising the question on everyone’s mind: Could he, Edward Moody, the spirit photographer, produce a spiritual likeness under conditions of strict monitoring, and with another person selecting the glass for the negative? Of course he could. Edward Moody could do anything! He was not afraid of whatever silly contests they might throw his way.

  Then one day the three men from New York appeared unannounced, and even Moody’s faith in himself was tested.

  They were a strange delegation—Moody recognized none of them—and they spoke to him with their hats on, as if they did not plan to stay. “We were entire strangers to each other,” Moody would later tell the Banner, “this being the first time I had ever encountered any of these gentlemen. I remember every word that passed between us as vividly as though it happened but an hour ago, from the fact that I was confident that I should astound Mr. Gurney, who as everyone knows is one of the great masters of photography.”