1910
Bertie had been right: The Earthshine strike stopped the sale of the factory. But it did not stop Charles Tuttle. A week later he stood on Opal’s stoop.
He wore a dark suit and a fedora, and he smelled of cologne. He held a strange-looking box. Opal studied it more closely. A wooden bell box. Atop it were two bronze call bells, and Opal couldn’t help but think that all objects designed by men resembled breasts.
Standing behind Tuttle were two others, whom Tuttle now introduced: an alderman named Arnold Jenkins and Colonel Davis Bloodworth, a medical doctor and a veteran of the Spanish-American War.
She tried to put it all together: the men, the bell box. Jenkins wore a camera on a strap around his neck and produced an official-looking document from his suit pocket. “We understand it was you who encouraged the Earthshine Girls to strike,” he said. “This is my district.”
Suddenly she understood. She took the paper, and the whole world stilled.
In eighteen days she’d receive the Dowd money.
Now she imagined herself wearing the uniform of a workhouse inmate: shabby shift, gray apron, a skirt made of material that would chafe—punishing women even sartorially.
She wondered if Bertie knew where her husband was right now, and, if so, if she’d tried to stop him. Why hadn’t Opal been warned?
She pleaded with Tuttle. “Gentlemen, you’re mistaken. Albert Bremen spoke to them. Not me.”
“Hogwash,” said Tuttle.
“If Bremen delivered the message, then we’d like to speak to him,” said Jenkins. “Directly. You can do that, yes?” He stepped up to the landing. Opal took a step back into the doorway.
“We’re simply here to observe,” Colonel Bloodworth said. “I assure you that’s our only goal this evening.” He had a scar beneath his eye from an old injury. It resembled the track a tear might take, and as such made him appear tender from the start.
Within minutes they all sat in Opal’s parlor.
They brought two chairs from her kitchen.
She took her time extinguishing the fire by heaping ashes on the flames.
She drew the window shades. She’d done this before, she told herself.
She tried to take deep breaths to calm herself, but still she felt lightheadedness coming on.
Colonel Bloodworth watched her as she withdrew candles from the sideboard.
She felt the pressure of his gaze, like his eyeballs were an instrument he was using to measure her.
While the other men busied themselves taking off their coats, he removed a small journal and a pencil from his pocket and jotted some notes.
Opal lit the candle at the center of the table, the smoke from the extinguished match curlicuing away from the burnt tip.
The room smelled of musk and shaving cream, of sweat and gasoline.
Of men. Jenkins slumped a bit forward on his chair, tapping his foot.
His lips were pursed, not unlike a kiss, but a pained one.
“Ready?” she said. She tried to affect calm. She smiled at Jenkins to set him at ease, and he ceased his foot tapping. Tuttle scowled.
Despite the candlelight, the room was dark, and shadows bounded off the wall in sinister shapes: a scythe, a bone, a revolver. Colonel Bloodworth’s gaze pressed upon her again; she could sense he was the kind of skeptic who badly wanted to believe. He took out his journal and made another note.
She asked the men to join hands.
She closed her eyes. She began to hum, and she instructed the men to hum along with her. When their voices were finally in unison—like a quartet—that’s when she felt it, the presence, descend upon her like an inviting fog.
“Someone’s come through,” she said. She held Jenkins’s hand on one side and the Colonel’s on the other. She tightened her grip. “The old man is exhausted. We take something of our former lives to the Other Side, you know, and he’s in a weakened state. Unwell.”
“We’ve come to ask him a few simple questions,” said Tuttle. His voice was full of air and condescension, like he was talking to a pretty bank teller whom he didn’t trust to count the bills.
More silence. Thirty seconds passed, then thirty more. She felt a headache coming on. She remembered that Ida McKinley took up knitting to distract herself from her condition, darning thousands of socks to give away to charities, but Opal loathed the dull repetition required of needles and yarn.
Without letting go of the men’s hands, she pressed her forehead to the table.
The pressure gave her some relief. Once Madame de Fleur thrashed upon the floor in what looked like an epileptic fit so violent, someone called for a doctor.
It takes so much out of me, she said later from her cot as Opal pressed cool rags to her forehead.
She liked imagining a life where she could care for the woman.
In her parlor, Opal rocked her forehead against the cold relief of the table.
She began to moan, and the noise released something in her, not headache pain, but some unexpressed feeling.
The Colonel touched her between her shoulder blades.
He may have been checking for a pulse or a sign of medical distress, but she let his hand rest there because she longed for touch, even this kind.
After a few moments, she jerked upright and said, “Charles Tuttle, how dare you?”
A German accent. Albert Bremen.
In the candlelight, Tuttle’s mouth looked cavernous, his teeth stalactites. It was Colonel Bloodworth who spoke first. His voice was a glass of water. Cool. Refreshing. “Please forgive the interruption,” he said. “And the hour. Where are you now?”
“What does it matter where he is?” said Tuttle.
“I’m trying to establish a record of fact,” Bloodworth replied.
Opal waited for someone else to speak.
“Personality can extend beyond the body. In theory,” Bloodworth said. The candlelight reflected in his eyes; it amplified the contours of his scar. He was a man who’d known loss, who’d felt it deeply.
“Please, Mr. Bremen,” said Jenkins. “Can you tell us why? Why have you instructed the Earthshine Girls to strike?”
“This is preposterous,” Tuttle said.
“The laws of business,” Bremen’s voice said, “differ from the laws of humanity.”
“And you still consider yourself human,” asked Bloodworth, “on the Other Side?”
“For the love of God, what does it matter if he considers himself human?” said Tuttle. “Tell us something we don’t know—something to prove yourself already. Otherwise we’ll know this is gas!”
Opal pressed her forehead to the table again and grew quiet. Her head throbbed now. Jagr had warned her about the strains of pregnancy. He was a good doctor. She shouldn’t have doubted that.
Jagr and his measly reward. $100. She would not go back to him. Never. She refused to even imagine it.
“My daughter,” said Opal in Bremen’s voice. “Bertie. She’s expecting. A surprise to you both, yes? Congratulations.” Everyone turned toward Tuttle to register the dismay on his face. “An heir at last.”
Silence.
“Is this true?” Jenkins asked.
“Impossible,” said Tuttle.
“So it’s not true?” the Colonel said.
“Lucky guess. Any married woman—”
“Swore you to secrecy. Didn’t want her name in the paper again. Didn’t want to jinx it, did she?” asked Bremen. “Didn’t want to see all those pitiful looks like when the earlier pregnancies didn’t take. We have papers over here, you know. The Expired Times. News so old it’s news again.”
Colonel Bloodworth laughed, and Opal was encouraged by the sound of it.
“Rubbish. All women gossip,” said Tuttle. “Why, Bertie was just—”
“She drinks milk all day to fortify the child,” Bremen said. “You’ve had to double your dairy deliveries. Perhaps you should keep a cow in your drawing room, next to that portrait of your first wife you insist on keeping hung there.”
Now nobody laughed. Nobody said anything—not Opal, not Tuttle, not the other men. Opal could hear the city noises outside her window: Horns. Hooves. Shouting. The domestics returning home for supper after a day of work.
“It’s true then,” said Bloodworth, finally. “The spirit has told us something only you could know. You’ve said so yourself.” He made a note in his journal, then tucked it back into his pocket.
Tuttle now pulled a box up from the floor—the one he’d arrived with.
“This,” he said. Between the bells was a piston and crown that, when pushed, caused the bells to simultaneously ring.
Tuttle demonstrated now. “You want to clear your name, yes? I’m talking to you directly, Ms. Doucet.
You want to prove you did not incite a riot? ”
“A strike,” Opal said.
Tuttle set the contraption on the table.
“You want to prove you can talk to ghosts? The test is simple. You’ll channel a spirit to ring this bell,” Jenkins explained.
“Telepathically,” Tuttle said.
Jenkins, who brought with him some baling twine, now stood, then began trussing her arms and legs to her chair, ensuring she could not reach the box.
“Gentlemen, is this necessary?” Opal asked. Perspiration slicked her underarms, the back of her neck. She was forced to sit at an angle that cramped her ribs. “I am not a physical medium.”
The twine, intended for hay or kindling, dug into her skin when she moved, so she tried her best to remain still, unfazed. When Madame de Fleur performed, her hands were often tied, and somehow she’d always found a way to unbind herself. Opal wriggled her wrists.
“One of my workers reports she heard rapping in the cafeteria as you led a séance. Do you not consider that a physical feat?” Tuttle asked.
She assumed the worker in question was Amanda Mahooney. After all she’d done to help the girl—but Opal didn’t have the luxury of wounded feelings at present.
“Just one ring of the bell,” said Jenkins. “One tiny ding-ding. Now that can’t be difficult for a woman of your abilities, especially considering the circumstances. See, it’s easy.” He tapped the bell.