Marina Favila is a Shakespeare professor at James Madison University. She has published on early modern drama, film, and poetry in Hellas, Modern Philology, Upstart Crow, Cahiers Elisabethains, CEA Forum, and (forthcoming) Texas Studies in Literature and Language. She has also published two short stories in Jersey Devil Press and (forthcoming) Wraparound South.
Knowing
Marina Favila
“It’s not what we were led to believe,” the ghost said. “A hallelujah chorus or a fiery deluge. And you atheists there, for I see you plainly, you were just as wrong. It’s anything but nothingness, or those shades of gray figures crossing and crisscrossing into each other as they wait for the rapture or God or loved ones. What it is is . . . ”
The young mother rapped furiously on the table, her knuckles white with pounding. She startled the medium. ‘No, no, I don’t want to know. I don’t want to hear,” she exclaimed. “It’s not natural! I have children!”
She rushed from the darkened room. Her solitary scream, the pitch of a siren, echoed down the hall, out the door, and into the street. With the circle now broken, the hands that clasped hers reached quickly for each other, but to no avail. The connection was gone.
The medium clutched at her cheap silk kimono and wiped the warm spittle from her dry lips. She sulked a bit at the door—she couldn’t help it—as she said goodbye to her clients. Knowing no better, they had all proved stingy with their pocketbooks and wallets on this miraculous night.
“Never, never,” Madame Stojka muttered, as she closed the heavy door, “will I make that connection again. Too unpredictable, calling up the dead. Next time we’ll use the tambourine and the flickering lights, and put Stanley’s little brother in the shadow of the projector at just the right moment. We too must make a living.”
* * *
Gloria could not go back. There was no question as to what she had seen. Darkness folding into darkness, visible only in its depth, an inversion of space she could not comprehend. It had not sought her; she knew that. But its presence was like some horrible vacuum that drew her from the inside out.
Screaming like that was such a release. Exhilarating—to let go, finally, of all the anger she’d felt for years now, at her husband, at God. It billowed out from her like huge funnels of smoke from an old-time furnace. She felt the heat of it, reveled in it, let it swirl about her, a protective shield to deflect any thoughts but her own.
What had she shouted before running from the room? “It’s not natural! I have children!” But death was the most natural thing in the world, and more puzzling, she had no children. The twins had died years ago.
* * *
Samantha had not wanted to come, had tried to make excuses for weeks, but Tommy had been so excited. “A lark,” he said, his grey eyes bright. “Think of it, Sam, a séance on Halloween night!” But she knew he was thinking of his father, hoping against hope that something would happen to help him let go of the man he had hated, but who died before he could tell him.
And now something had happened. A woman ran out of the séance screaming at the top of her lungs. And then a shadow appeared in the darkness—a shadow that was not of something, but the something itself. It vanished with the woman’s departure, and Madame Stojka clapped her hands and called for the lights.
It was then, in the harsh florescence of that dingy little room, Samantha knew she would not marry Thomas Thorpe. They were not engaged, not yet, but he would ask her, and soon. He had already purchased a blue star sapphire from an estate jewelry store at the edge of town; and she knew that he carried it around in his breast-pocket just in case an occasion arose, for Tommy was big on occasions. She suspected he would present it as an heirloom from his great-great aunt on his mother’s side, for he also liked the idea of legacy and family traditions that could not be questioned or changed. But when she saw his expression, the keenness in those sharp grey eyes, how the corners of his mouth had lifted with anticipation at that dark cloud in the middle of the room, and then glee, yes, that’s what it was, some perverse joy at the piercing scream of the distraught woman, she knew she would never say yes.
“Tomorrow I’ll plan a trip to see my sister in Maine. I will not return.”
* * *
This would be his sixth visit to Madame’s home, but she had told him it sometimes took longer to find the right guide to contact the dead. “Think of it, Sir; spirits are everywhere, millions and millions of them.”
The visits had been impressive enough, he thought: flashes of light, a sense more than a sound of music, bells perhaps? Tommy wasn’t sure. Then the appearance of a child in the distance, Madame’s personal link to the other side. But nothing like that first night, when he had seen death in the shadows. He was sure of it. That had been the night he knew Madame Stojka could help him, that he would see his father again.
And when that happened, and he told his father that he hated him, that he had only forgiven him out of embarrassment in front of the doctors and nurses and his future bride, then Samantha would return. She would see that he had changed, that he was finally rid of the power his father had over him.
“Tonight we call to the heavens,” Madame said. She was sure when the full moon rose in the second house of Saturn, a connection would be possible. She had set up her table in the garden, next to rose bushes thick with blossoms. A single candle flickered before her, as she asked for his hands.
* * *
Pretty cool job, Peter thought, working at Aunt Mitzy’s, and a mighty easy twenty bucks for a ten-year-old. He was to stand in the alcove until he heard “Gustav, my little Gustav, speak for the dead!” Then he would slowly walk, as if in a trance, to the center of the room. He sometimes swayed a bit and shook his arms and hands. But no talking and no improvising, Aunt Mitzy was strict about that. And if he did, if the spirit moved him in a way not sanctioned by her, there would be hell to pay and no twenty bucks to boot. “And no vatrushka!” Aunt Mitzy warned, his favorite Russian dessert, with the creamed cottage cheese and sugar and jam gently folded together and baked in the softest of buns. And no one made it like Aunt Mitzy, not even his mother.
So he wasn’t sure why or what imp had made him utter those terrible, terrible words to the well-dressed man with grey eyes. But out of his mouth, before he could stop them, “I hate you. I hate you. Be gone!" and in his best ghoulish voice.
Aunt Mitzy was a fury that night. He could see her eyes go red in the dark! So when the candle faltered, he rushed through the garden gate, racing a full ten blocks to his brother’s house, not stopping once, not even to catch his breath. Wait till Papa finds out, he thought miserably. I won’t be able to go home for days.
* * *
Martin sat on the garden wall of the All-Souls Methodist cemetery, waiting for his children to appear. He knew they would not disappoint him.
He’d been seeing them for almost a year now. At first it was only glimpses of their faces in crowds, at the bus stop, on the library steps, outside the church he no longer attended. He attributed it to grief, for the images were fleeting, quickly vanishing or merging into other faces, especially those of nearby children. They once even appeared and disappeared in a pet shop window, over and over again, shimmering in the reflection of a litter of puppies. Those beagle-bright eyes, wet noses, and floppy ears seemed to cover the boys’ faces in licks and yelps, as their countenances flashed here, here, and there, on the translucent walls of the cage. But as time went on, those glancing images stayed longer, and the faces filled out, deepened by color and shaded by depth and shadow. And when that happened, Martin would catch the smallest expressions on their round young faces: curiosity, amusement, wistfulness.
He had tried to talk to Gloria, but she was adamant this obsession with their dead sons was unhealthy, even creepy. It certainly wasn’t doing her any good. It had been three years. When would he let her clean out their rooms? When could she donate their bikes to Goodwill? Didn’t he know how much she still missed them? Didn’t he realize this kind of talk tortured her?
And then she had gone to that ridiculous séance. A night out with the girls on Halloween, for dinner and gossip only, they said. But the dinner was promptly exchanged for a movie, and the movie traded for a psychic, and the psychic switched to a fortuneteller, and the fortune- teller . . . Something happened that Martin didn’t understand, for Gloria came home near-hysterical, and she never explained why. Just packed her bags and left. A month later he received divorce papers in the mail. Irreconcilable differences was her proffered defense.
But Martin didn’t care. He had his sons.
* * *
She saw him in the evenings, right before dusk, when she caught the bus home from her weekly mahjong game with Stan and Eva. The man usually sat on the cemetery wall, right across from the bus stop, though sometimes he would prop himself up on the grass, leaning against a gravestone, or perch on the large Welcome Home sign recently put up by the Methodist youth group. A ridiculous affront to the dead, she thought, as if the dead were happy to be home.
At first, she took no notice of him, just a solitary man, sitting on a wall, but then she began to note how animated he was, talking to himself and gesturing. She thought, perhaps, he was an older student studying aloud or a young minister, practicing his sermon, but then he would pause, as if intently listening, then laugh, or raise up his hands as if trying to embrace the air. And once she saw him leaping over the graves and hiding behind the tombstones, as if playing a child’s game by himself.
Then she knew. He was grieving, grieving for his dead child. He would make the perfect mark: delusional, easy to manipulate. Hope to see his loved one would bloom like an onion shoot with little care on her part. She would have to get Peter back, of course. Children always made the mark feel secure. Oh, she had scolded him so after that last debacle, and he had cost her a pretty penny. Though she had to admit, she too had flinched at the gadjo with grey eyes. Something mean and petty about his stance, despite his good suit and expensive tie. And he cursed her too, later, and refused to pay, and threatened to call the Better Business Bureau, as if that would have scared her. Well, Peter could make up for it now. No price was too high for someone who needed to know. This man on the wall would pay anything to recoup his loss, and she would recoup hers through him.
She made a quick decision: I’ll miss the next bus and spend the time studying the man. Observation was key to her profession, and she was a master at unraveling the clues of sorrow. Then she would make her way to the wall where he sat, and say that she saw a light circling around him, a mist, a blue mist, a warm blue shadowy mist. Did you feel that? Do you hear that? A young girl’s voice stealing up from . . . No, no, too specific. A cry in the trees, she would say. No gender or age group there. Sir, do you hear weeping in the hollow?
And then, Sir, Sir, I feel your grief. You have lost—wait, I sense a sweet presence even now, trembling on the edge of . . . What was that? The suggestion of a face, a flash of darkness in darkness, doubled, gone. She was tired. It must be a trick of the sun setting so low in the birches—no, there, there, a face again, a child’s face, faces overlapping, a shadow, but more than a shadow, in the trees, moving. The sense of something staring, glaring at her. Nothing.
Madame Stojka caught the next bus. It’s not like she needed to drum up business. People came to her in droves. All of them needing to know.