We went back to see him together. I grilled him for nearly an hour. He walked us through each stage of his developing and printing process, showing how he had prepared the glass plates in solutions of collodion and silver nitrate only minutes before our sitting, explaining that the exposures had to be made while the plates were still wet.
“So no previous image could exist on the glass?” I asked.
“Absolutely impossible,” Daviscourt said.
“So something had to be there with us when you took the pictures?”
“I would conclude so,” he said reluctantly.
“Have you heard of this sort of thing before?”
“Not among recognized photographic artists,” he said archly. “Of course one reads of it among spiritualist Summers and fakers.”
“Enough, Samuel,” said Cait, sounding distraught and tired. “There’s no explanation here. I think we knew that before we came. You’re not at fault, sir.”
“Madam, if you wish it . . . removed,” he said tentatively, “I believe it is within my means.”
Which raised an interesting question: Could he remove the intrusive image? But Cait would have none of it. She shook her head violently and tugged me through the front door.
Outside, she looked me in the eye and said, “Will you help me with something?”
“If I can.”
“You can,” she said. “We’ll talk to someone.”
I knew before she told me. I’d seen the advertisements. Clara Antonia was in town. Scheduled to speak Friday evening at Greenwood Hall.
“After her lecture we’ll find our answers,” Cait said firmly, “if any are to be obtained.”
“Why after?”
“Because that’s when her seances are.”
It was not a wonderful week. I dropped by Cait’s evenings after practice—all her boarders seemed to have vanished—to deliver little gifts and to chat. I worried about both of them. Cait looked drawn and tense. Timmy seemed tired and weak all the time.
The specter of the photographs haunted us, though we pretended otherwise. I developed an eerie and pervasive sense that we were not alone. Colm filled my thoughts. Why had he appeared to us, seven years after his demise? Was he jealous? In the pictures he hadn’t looked jealous. Just intent.
The Fenian question also lay between us like a bog. I didn’t want to spoil our time together by raising the subject. For her part, Cait didn’t bring up the money issue. We were probably trying to nurture our feelings for each other. Not easy, under the circumstances. Love surely feeds on mystery—but only to a point.
Tensions also continued on the team. Gould accused Allison of loafing during practice, and the two nearly came to blows. George was absent one day, provoking dark mutterings from Sweasy and Waterman.
Trying to capitalize on the Stockings’ cresting fame, Waterman and Brainard had each lent his name to a local cigar store. These were not the tiny magazine-and-smoke stands I had known in San Francisco, but were spacious halls with pool tables and chairs and spittoons, hangouts for the sporting life. Kimball’s, on Fourth, became Brainard’s and Kimball’s, while Schipper’s Cigars, on Vine, became Fred A. Waterman & Company’s Red Stocking Headquarters, and there business reportedly boomed even more than at Brainard’s.
At practice, however, Waterman still groused over Champion’s threatened temperance pledge. Brainard, on the other hand, went about his chores like a model citizen.
“Settle up with you before long, Sam,” he told me one afternoon.“Oh?” I said, surprised. “Things going that well at the store?”
“Could be,” he said. “Could be.”
I thought I heard a note of smugness.
Greenwood Hall was narrow, gloomy, and jammed. With four hundred others we sat on creaking, straight-backed chairs and waited for Madame Clara Antonia to appear on a small stage heaped with flowers. The gathering’s size surprised me. I recognized several professional men, affluent members of the club. A cross section of the city’s population seemed to be there, including boys making predictably rude noises. With no preamble, a short and very fat woman appeared from the wings. Applause swept the hall, undercut by the boys’ guffaws. She moved calmly to the lectern.
I’m not sure what I expected—a nun in exotic habit, a flamboyant gypsy in headdress and gold bangles—but whatever it was, I felt disappointed. Clara Antonia wore a plain dun-colored dress trimmed in dark velvet topped with a lace collar. It hung on her like a grocery sack. The boys’ observations grew creative. But it no longer mattered what she wore when she lifted her eyes to us; the irises—pale gray or blue, it was impossible to tell—were opaque, almost luminous. They scanned us like unfocused cat orbs, seemingly oblivious to what lay immediately before them. Was she blind?
“The spirit world is not entirely alien,” she began, her voice girlish and piping, almost comically incongruous with her bulk, yet carrying distinctly through the hall. “We catch inklings of forces at work in the spirit world—electricity is one—in our daily lives, and certainly in our dreams.”
A deep-voiced man behind us scraped his chair and said, “Least she don’t grope all over the landscape for words, like most female elocutionists.”
Cait turned and glared at him.
“Spirits exist in an atmosphere etherealized around our tangible world,” Clara Antonia said. “The forces in this spiritual ether are unnamed because they are largely uncomprehended. And yet, as with electricity, they can be used, though they are not fully comprehended.”
She explained that clairvoyants received certain emanations from the spirit world. She had realized early on that she herself had such capacity. It had come unbidden and, until she learned to help and comfort others with it, she had thought herself cursed.
Snickers came from the rude-boy contingent.
Clara Antonia’s eyes tracked slowly to them. “Your twenty-five cents does not buy you the right of disrespect,” she said matter-of-factly. “It’s also inappropriate since one of you—that boy in the sweater—grieves over a dear companion recently arrived among the spirits.”
“Cripes, Willy,” one of them blurted. “Yer brother, how’d she know?”
It sent a ripple through the crowd. Too pat,
