The Spirit Room (65 page)

I await your answer to my plea.

Your devoted husband,

Mac

Yes
. Yes was the answer that she heard inside herself. She ran her fingers over his handwriting on the letter. She imagined him sitting at his big oak desk in his office writing to her. She saw him pacing the halls of the Upper Falls Water-Cure, training the aides in the water techniques, meeting the inquisitive visitors and giving them tours. She saw him alone at night in their quarters on the third floor. She held the letter to her nose and remembered his lemon smell, his thick wavy hair, the rough feel of his long bushy sideburns on her face. She thought of the way he touched his scar when he was nervous, the way his dense eyebrows rose when he delighted in something new, and the time he sat with his back to her in front of the fire when she was afraid to tell him about the voices. And what a relief to know of Billy. China.
Lawks
. Such an adventure for a young man.

Two of the little squealing girls chased the third past Izzie. Izzie rose and gazed after them tearing through the park. She felt it strongly in that moment. She wanted to go home to Mac. She wanted to be with him. She strode toward the park entrance. It was time to go home. It was past time. It was spring. She could plant flowers as well as the vegetable gardens for the kitchen. It wasn’t too late. And she could wait for Clara and Euphora there, with him. She would wait with him, work with him, and love him.

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EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, Anna and the Fieldings escorted Izzie to the Hudson River Railroad depot on Thirty-first Street and Eleventh. Several train engines, ready for departure spewed and hissed, sending steam into the air.

“
You’ll find your sisters one day. I am sure of it.” Roland kissed Izzie’s hand.

Mrs. Fielding looked Izzie in the eye and clasped her shoulders. “I still believe you will be a great medium, Isabelle. When you learn to be disciplined, your greatness will shine forth. The spirits are your champions.” She kissed Izzie on the forehead.

Then Anna held Izzie close for a long moment and whispered in her ear, “I will miss you more than you know. We will be friends forever.”

“
I’ll write you … but not trance letters,” Izzie laughed.

She felt Anna’s body jiggle in laughter. With carpetbag in one hand and her rolled up ship drawing in the other, Izzie boarded the train. When she took a seat, she watched her three friends wave farewell to her as the train pulled away, their eyes full of sadness. Her heart was heavy as well. She was leaving her first true friends and deserting her sisters all at once.

As the train forged along the rails through towns, past green farms and spring forests budding with young pale green leaves, her grief would sometimes let go of her a little as she started to look ahead to her new life with Mac, a second beginning with him. During the day-long journey, she lurched back and forth between feeling miserable about giving up on finding her sisters and leaving Anna and the Fieldings and then feeling excited about returning to Mac. By the time she arrived at the New York Central Station at Mill Street in Rochester, she was tired out. She hired a hack and told the driver to take her to the new Upper Falls Water-Cure on North St. Paul Street.

As the cab jostled onto North St. Paul in the dark, she breathed in the smell of the Genesee River and wondered if Mac had received the wire telling him she was on the way home. Roland had promised to send it right after her train departed New York City.

When she was standing at the front door with her carpetbag, she considered ringing the bell, but then decided if this was to be her home, she shouldn’t ring to enter. She pushed one of the double doors open and stepped inside.

A young man in transit, dressed in a short black jacket and gray trousers, stopped upon seeing her and smiled. “Good evening, ma’am. Are we expecting you? Do you have a reservation?”

“
I’m Mrs. MacAdams. Is my husband here?”

“
Oh, Mrs. MacAdams. I apologize. Yes. Yes. Please come in.” He took her bag and the drawing from her hands. “He’s dining with Governor Morgan. Follow me.” He set off down the hall.

The neat man quickly clipped away from her carrying her things. The governor? Mac was dining with the Governor of New York?

The young man, sensing that Izzie wasn’t following, skidded and came back toward her. “Please. This way.” He gestured with his free hand. The sound of forks clinking against dishware and the smell of bread and cooked tomatoes sent rumbles through her empty stomach. The Governor. Would Mac want to see her now?

“
I can wait in his office.” Izzie turned around and headed for Mac’s office in the opposite direction.

The young man’s footsteps scuffled behind her. When he had followed her into the office, he set down the carpetbag and drawing. “I’ll tell him you are here.”

“
I can wait until he is finished with the Governor, if he likes. I’ll be content here by the fire or I can go up to our quarters.”

After he left, Izzie glanced around at Mac’s world, his desk full of papers, correspondence, and journals. He had a bookcase with glass doors full of his medical and other books, and several framed pictures she had never seen before. There was a print of a horse perched on the fireplace mantel. Alongside it was a drawing of the Upper Falls Water-Cure building rendered with additions and gardens that didn’t exist yet, and hanging on the southerly wall was a sketch depicting a couple looking over Rochester’s thundering, swirling Lower Falls. She walked over to the desk and touched the back of his chair. She imagined Mac sitting there every day, swiveling to greet patients and aides, reading, writing, ruminating as he stared at his fire. She stroked the smooth wood on the chair arm, then sat.

“
Izzie!” Mac rushed through the door and across the room to her.

“
Mac!” She jumped up from the desk and fell into his embrace.

He felt solid and warm.

“
I got the telegram an hour ago. Thank goodness you are here.” He was grinning ear to ear.

“
What about the Governor? Must you go back to him now?”

He untied her bonnet, removed it, and dropped it on the desk, then ran his hand gently over her hair. “I’ll see him in the morning. He’s here for several days. It’s you I want to see now.” He took her shoulders in his hands and kissed her on the mouth.

Bursting inside, she clasped her hands around the back of his neck and pushed herself against him. His lips were dry and sweet. His mustache tickled the edges of her mouth.

In a moment, she tore herself away. She wanted to see him, his long narrow face, the dear scar on his chin, his brown eyes smiling at her.

“
Will you show me our new home upstairs?”

“
There’s something else I want to show you first.” He offered her his hand and led her out into the hallway.

Even the hallway was lovely with its dark wood and pretty brown and navy blue rugs leading down the center of the building. It was comfortable, like a large home. He probably wanted to show her the dining room with guests enjoying their meal, or the treatment rooms or the gymnasium, which had not been completed when she left.

She stopped at the tall double doors of the small parlor across the hall from his office and peered in. Two women dressed in American Costumes were sitting on a red sofa with cups and saucers in their laps.

She whispered, “Are those the American Costumes I made?”

Mac nodded. “This way.” He tugged at her hand and drew her along.

“
What are you going to show me? The treatment rooms?”

“
No. I have a surprise for you.” He stopped at a closed door just across from the staircase. “Here.” He pointed to gold lettering on the wood.

She read the words. “Mrs. Isabelle MacAdams, Spiritualist.”

“
Mac, I’m still not sure I want to practice Spiritualism.”

“
It’s your room to do with as you please.” He turned the knob and shoved the door open. “You can have spirit circles in here or read literature, anything you want.”

She stepped onto a crimson-and-black carpet. A gas chandelier lit the room and a fire crackled in a small fireplace. There was her rocking chair from the Corn Hill house and her marble-top side table and the lamp she had read and sewed by day and night. At the other end of the room, a small round table covered with a white cloth and surrounded by six ladder-back chairs stood in front of three wood bookcases with glass doors like the ones in Mac’s office. She walked over to the one that had books in it. They were her books.

“
I know you’ll fill at least three bookcases eventually, so I had them built for you.”

She opened the glass cabinet door and reached in. She took out
Leaves of Grass
, Mac’s wedding present to her, and held it to her chest. She ran her fingertips over the other spines—red, green, brown, Flaubert, Fern, Melville, Stowe, Graham.

“
They’re here, all here.”

“
I want you to be happy here, to lead whatever life you want to lead.”

“
You’d allow me to practice Spiritualism in your Water-Cure Institute if I chose to?”

He nodded. “I’ve learned a great deal while you’ve been away. I knew if you were ever to return to me and stay with me, I had to change my mind about many things.”

She looked around the room. It felt familiar, as though it had always been her room, as though she had arranged every item in it for herself years before.

Arms crossed over his chest, Mac stood grinning in the middle of the room. “The windows face east. You’ll have sun in the mornings.”

“
I have a drawing of a ship. I’ll have it framed and put it over the mantel.”

“
Perfect. Now, let me show you our home upstairs. I left Billy’s letter in our sitting room there for you.”

Forty-Six

AS THE COURTESAN HEROINE, blinded and scarred by the vitriol her madam had thrown at her face, was about to die lonely and broken, gloom settled into Clara’s heart. She read aloud slower and slower, trying to stop the inevitable conclusion of George Thompson’s book,
The Gay Girls of New York
. Her back ached against the metal rails of the bed’s headboard. Hannah and Abbie, in their chemises, sat with their backs against the wall and their legs underneath hers.

Ever since Abbie had learned that Clara could read, she had brought her one novel after another filled with courtesans and madams and treachery. The books—written mostly by Ned Buntline, George Thompson, and George Foster—were tattered, read over and over again by the girls at the parlor house. Even though Clara was getting tired of the stories, she loved the long, lovely afternoons lying about with her friends.

A summer thunderstorm had been rumbling off and on all morning. Raindrops spattered and pinged against Clara’s windows. She didn’t want the heroine, Hannah Sherwood, with the same first name as her dearest friend, to die.
Hell-fire
, there were too many prostitutes dying in this story altogether.

“
I’m not going to read anymore.” She snapped the book shut with a thwack.

“
What do you mean? We’re almost at the end.” Abbie’s sweet eyes were moist, about to fill with full-fledged tears in honor of what would certainly be a tragic ending.

Clara slapped the novel’s yellow cover. “She’s going to die. She’s going to die. Do you want her to die?”

Hannah’s eyebrows came down, making her long forehead even longer. Clara knew the look. She was angry too.

“
I know what you mean, Clara. I’m soured on it myself,” Abbie said. “Why aren’t all the sporting men dying? It’s only the girls that die. That author Thompson’s a rat bastard. That’s what I say. I think he likes killing them off for his own satisfaction. But you can’t just stop reading before the story is over.”

“
Abbie, this novel is about us. The women are supposedly like us—seductresses and she-devils trying to get every little thing we can out of the men, then falling into despair. Then we die because we’re fallen and fallen women have to die, or at least be entirely miserable. I’m sick of it. No more reading.”

Clara dropped the book on the nightstand where some bank notes and a single glass with a few drops of whiskey remained from her last customer, Colonel Woodruff of the United States Army. He wasn’t a Colonel, though. She didn’t know what he was. First he said he was from Philadelphia, then later he was from Richmond, then a bit after that, he was from Providence. He knew Cornelius Vanderbilt. He knew Queen Victoria. He knew Henry Beecher. But when she started asking him questions about all these people and places, he’d clear his throat, thick with the whiskey, glance up at her ceiling, and suddenly he was from Boston and not in the army any longer at all. Upon his command, she had to snap his leather riding crop across his back until his skin was red and just about to bleed. Only then did he get aroused and ask her to hold off. It was good that he stopped her because she had begun to get lost in the sound of the cracking, his flesh stinging, his whimpering.