* * *
—
One morning shortly after her arrival, she and Edwin walk the few blocks to Gramercy Park together. She leans on his arm. He matches her stuttering step. They pass though the black gates into the green and blooming springtime. Sunshine turns the tender leaves to pale gold, dapples the pavement. Pigeons walk in the delightful way pigeons walk, with their funny, jutting heads, and the city squirrels are zestful. She takes a deep breath and everything she smells is young and green.
“I can’t believe,” Edwin tells her, “for the millionth part of a minute that Mollie’s deep love for me is buried in her grave.”
“I don’t believe that either,” says Rosalie.
Edwin takes her hand and squeezes it. “I believe that she who sat beside me only a few scant weeks ago is still living and is near me now. But why doesn’t it make me happy to think so?”
Edwin tells Rosalie that, when they were in Dorchester, he and Mother often talked about ghosts. Mother had seen Father twice around the time of his death, though not to speak to, and Edwin saw him once, back when he was in California. Rosalie wonders what she might have said if she’d been present for this conversation. She’s never seen Father herself. She doesn’t want to see him, but it’s hard not to be just a little hurt.
* * *
—
Edwin begins to visit a New York medium named Laura Edmonds, daughter of the prominent spiritualist John Worth Edmonds. Laura operates through trance. Edwin invites Rosalie along, but the advantages of summoning ghosts are not as clear to her as they are to him.
He brings back reports of sessions in which Mary and sometimes Father and even once Richard Cary occupy Edmonds’ body and speak to him through her. Mary assures him that she is still his and always will be. It was so hard, Laura tells him when she’s got her own body back, not to seize you and cover you in kisses.
Father is proud of his stagecraft; Richard is at peace. Death seems to turn everyone so pleasant. Rosalie thinks that these banalities are not the way any ghost she’s ever spoken to talks. But it comforts Edwin, so she says nothing. “I’m almost convinced,” he tells her. “I wish I could banish all doubt.”
With all the war dead, mediums are enjoying a bull market. John comes to visit and the brothers spend several evenings together with this mystic or that. They return to the house full of the strange and wondrous things they’ve experienced. Edwin’s faith seems to be growing. “It’s making a Christian of me,” he tells Mother and Rosalie. “Not that I wasn’t before. But now I really am.” For a brief period after each session, Edwin seems almost merry. He visits the famous Fox sisters, where ghosts touch his legs beneath the table, rock his chair nearly out from under him.
He hosts his own séances under the crystal chandelier in the long dining room of the Putnam house with no medium in attendance. Rosalie reassures herself that if there are ghosts about, they are Putnam ghosts. There’s no reason to think they’ll want to talk to her and, as it turns out, they don’t.
One evening, from her dark corner, Rosalie overhears Edwin’s friend Adam Badeau, who is visiting on a temporary leave. “Touching Ned’s fingers,” he says, “I received a strong nervous influence like nothing I’ve felt before. My right hand and arm began shaking more rapidly than any human being can shake, so rapidly that you couldn’t see my hand. My hand was then slammed repeatedly down on the table until I’d hurt myself. Afterwards, it assumed the position of a hand writing. A pen was put into it and marks were scratched onto the paper, but they amounted to nothing. This went on for more than an hour.”
The experiment was repeated the next night with the same results. “It was very strange,” Adam says. “I suppose it was just a sort of nervousness on my part.”
No. It had all been Edwin, Rosalie thinks. Edwin’s gift is to make people believe.
* * *
—
John is following the war news hungrily. Off in Pennsylvania, triumphant after his victory at Chancellorsville, General Lee attempts his second invasion of the North. He brings 71,000 men across the Potomac into Maryland and then to southern Pennsylvania. On July 1st, they meet the Union forces in the town of Gettysburg. Three days later, the Union casualties number 23,000, 28,000 Confederate. Lee has lost more than a third of his army. There is a day of thundering rain in which Lee is allowed to retreat. John goes grim and glum.
Edwin has returned to hardly noticing the war, so preoccupied with his own misery and his explorations of the world beyond the veil. Everything but his own grief seems remote again and, honestly, unimportant. As Rosalie comes upon him one morning in the breakfast room, sun streaming merrily through the windows, Edwin says, “I never knew how much I loved her,” and then flees upstairs without another word.
When Rosalie mentions Gettysburg to him, he tells her that the war is a mere matter of bodies. His interest is in souls.
Perhaps this is just as well, Rosalie thinks, now that John is in the house. It’s always best if he and John stay away from politics.
vi
The storm moves from Gettysburg to New York City. In its aftermath, the summer heat is unbearable. Rosalie goes about the large house opening every window at night, closing them and pulling the drapes every morning. She’s sitting in the parlor, holding her book to her face in the dim and curtained room, when Edwin comes to talk to her. She closes the book with her finger inside. It’s The Wide, Wide World, which Rosalie has taken from Mr. Putnam’s shelves. She’s read it before, but never in such a handsome edition. The book’s main message is to meet life’s troubles with Christian faith. There’s also a romance, which is the part Rosalie is rereading.
“I’ve asked Adam to come and stay while he recovers,” Edwin tells her. “He can take my room.”
Adam Badeau was wounded in the foot in the Battle for Port Hudson. When Edwin first heard, Rosalie had found him oddly dismissive. She’d said so and he’d turned those haunted eyes on her. “Which is deeper,” he’d asked, “my wound or his?”
“Don’t say that to him,” she’d said, but too late; the deed is done.
A letter later and Edwin understands that Adam’s injury is serious. His foot was shattered and has had to be surgically reconstructed. He will walk again, but not for many weeks. “Ad should be with people who love him,” Edwin says and Rosalie can’t say no—the house is Edwin’s. Besides, no one should stand in the way of friendship and charity. She does worry that Edwin will get the friendship while, as a woman, the charity will fall to her. That she’ll be the one expected to play nurse.
She doesn’t love Adam. He’s too obsequious where Edwin is concerned. Also quite vain for such a stout little man. And will John behave himself with a Union soldier convalescing in the house? John’s the one Edwin should be asking.
“The world is still beautiful to Ad,” says Edwin wonderingly.
* * *
—
Adam’s carriage arrives. His foot is an enormous lump of bandages and bracing, and he looks older than Rosalie remembers, more lines scratched into his round red face. He has to be carried from the street to the house, put down in the parlor so his bearers can rest, and then taken in one tremendous go up the stairs to his room. John and Edwin carry him together, their hands clasped in a sling beneath him. Rosalie follows with one of his bags.