A Bloodsmoor Romance by Joyce Carol Oates
“You forget yourself, Dr. Stoughton,” Deirdre said evenly. “You are o’erheated: you will, in another moment, cause that pretty Egyptian vase to dislodge itself, from its perch atop the shelf, and fall, to shatter in a dozen pieces, introducing an element of material upset into our discussion, which will quite alarm you: your pulses having begun to flutter already, I sadly suspect, with an anticipation of spirit mischief, or vengeance, in response to your treading too close, in your own figure of speech, to that cornucopia of which you spoke. And so, I pray, do seat yourself: and disburden yourself, of all you have to say, by way of your sacred mission.” These last words uttered with a very light, tho’ unmistakable, irony, as subtle as the bitterness attendant upon even the finest China tea, that has been allowed to steep past three minutes.
Whereupon Dr. Stoughton cast his eyes downward, as if surprised in the most secret recesses of his being; yet, with an air of some relief, which blended most agreeably with his nervous, boyish manner, he did return to his desk, and to his seat; and managed to sustain his hopeful smile. His voice had near-calmed, and regained something of its authority, as he spake: “I can hardly be surprised, my dear Deirdre, that you have taken this tone—indeed, it is a tone well taken—for in my stumbling, blundering, altogether graceless way, I have requested of you something I should be unable to supply, should anyone—however kindly of intent—request it of me. I mean by this, as you so finely phrased it, that I have asked you to consider a mode of action so contrary to all you believe of yourself, and of your unique destiny, that it is a virtual impossibility for ratiocinative exploration: as if some doddering old fool of a philosopher should demand of Substance that it define itself, denuded of its qualities; or some crazed scientist should wish to ‘cure’ a person of that which—whether inclination, or habit, or something so merely superficial as a birthmark—is himself! Yes, I see, indeed I see,” the young man mused, his strong-boned face still ruddy, as his eyes were still somewhat dilated, “and yet, you will forgive me, I hope: I persist in believing, with an unwavering stolidity, that the public career of mediumship is not a destiny forced upon you, by ‘spirits’ or by your own stubborn decision, but one which is accidental to your essence: and one which,” he said, hesitating but an instant, before plunging with great audacity forward, “—one which you might yet be saved from, by the proper guidance, informed with the proper high regard for your worth.”
Again sounded that distant laughter, faint, susurrous, and quite uncanny!
But Deirdre was replying in a calm, albeit melancholy, voice: “Proper has much to do with propriety, I think; and neither, Dr. Stoughton, has much to do with me.”
Dr. Stoughton raised an alarmed gaze to her countenance, and for a long trembling moment could not speak. Then he said hurriedly: “Alas, have I offended you irrevocably? And I meant no harm, I assure you—no harm! I meant only,” the agitated gentleman said, “to suggest with the warmth of a friend or a brother, that a life as a professional medium need not be your fate: for there are others, I assure you, bringing far more rewards, and far greater contentment.”
“And what, may I inquire,” Deirdre said, her expression impassive, but her great dark brooding eyes bright with barely withheld flame, “what are these other fates, Dr. Stoughton?”
Again he bent his gaze upon her, and again looked away, as if confus’d, or, it may have been, dimly apprehensive, as the low distant laughter sounded, ominous as thunder, or invisible waves lapping about the very floorboards of the study!—the which this forthright man of science did his best to ignore. “Ah, perhaps it is wrong of me to speak!—to answer to the compulsion of my heart—to offer succor, where none is desired! For what, after all, have I to set against your destiny—your public career—your practice—your life as ‘Deirdre of the Shadows’? I—I know not—I know not— Perhaps it is even the case that I am grievously deluded, in imagining that I can offer you aid: perhaps it is you who should offer me aid! Nevertheless, Deirdre,” the blushing gentleman said, with an abjuring gesture, and an uneasy smile playing about his manly lips, “nevertheless I must speak bluntly, tho’ I risk your anger, or, excuse me!—the anger of your spirits: I must warn you against sacrificing yourself to a life of Spiritualist ‘service’—answering always to the demands of others, whether deceased spirits, or living clients. Ah, to drain away your life’s blood, in such employ!—in ghoulish darkened rooms, amidst the perpetually mourning! My dear girl, it is a most piteous fate!”
Whereupon Deirdre of a sudden brought both hands to her face, and, in a curious gesture, pressed the gloved fingertips against her closed eyes: at first lightly, and then with more force. It may have been that the agitated young lady was attempting to suppress tears, or a similar untoward response; but when at last she spoke, her voice was not greatly changed, and her manner retained its semblance of glacial calm. “And shall I inquire, Dr. Stoughton, what a fate might be, that, in your professional assessment, is not piteous?”
Dr. Stoughton’s stolid cheeks burnt yet a richer crimson, as he spake, in a voice somewhat quavering, yet withal assertive: “The joyous fulfillment of your sex: the sacred duties of belovèd wife, and helpmeet, and mother. In opposition to the vulgar and mercantile hurly-burly of the great world, the idyllic pleasures of the domestic hearth—the which, I firmly believe, make of one small room an everywhere, indeed; and provide us with that small measure of bliss, which is, if we are greatly fortunate, and deserving, Our Lord’s promise to us, of the Heaven to come.”
Hearing these impetuous words, Deirdre cast upon her interlocutor a gaze radiant—nay, fiery—with maidenly disdain. And, rising with great dignity from her chair, she said: “What, wife, and helpmeet, and mother! And did you say sacred as well, Dr. Stoughton? Ah, it is too amusing: sacred!”
Dr. Stoughton rose with clumsy alacrity from his seat, and would have tendered his apologies, for having spoke, as it were, rather too bluntly, but the haughty young lady inquired of him: “And is your wife, Dr. Stoughton, so joyously fulfilled as to her sex, and so ecstatically immersed in the sacred duties of her lot, as to speak with equal passion of that fate, as you have done? Would that she were here to bear witness!”
“I have no wife,” Dr. Stoughton murmured, “I am unmarried.”
Again the low laughter sounded, and a sourceless sibilancy issued from out the very air; and the gas jets coquettishly quavered. And Deirdre, in some apprehension that her mischievous spirits would rush forward, to make a shambles of the office, and of Dr. Stoughton’s strained composure, betook herself to the door, the dignity of her small erect carriage reflecting none of the emotion she felt—neither the angry amusement, nor the pain. Yet she could not resist a parting remark, uttered in a low and falsely genteel voice, the which I record only with hesitation, for it bespeaks a sensibility formed neither by that devout Christian couple Mr. and Mrs. Bonner, nor by the Zinns, and is, indeed, a libel upon her Bloodsmoor background itself! “I am deeply grateful for your suggestion, Dr. Stoughton, uttered out of that special reservoir of wisdom that is yours, both as a consequence of your profession in life, and your maleness: but you will forgive me, if I demur, in that I much prefer intercourse with the Spirits.”
SIXTY-TWO
Tho’ it was not until the autumn of 1895, after the successful, albeit difficult, exorcism of a malicious spirit, from out an old country manor in Fishkill, New York, that Deirdre of the Shadows was forced to retire from her mediumship, I am hardly amiss in stating that the seeds of the young woman’s destruction were sown many years earlier: I am almost tempted, alas, to say, upon the very day of her birth!
(By which I do not mean solely that that birth, in the autumn of 1863, had been perhaps more shrouded in mystery, and shame, than we would care to think: I mean in addition that, God’s infinite love and mercy notwithstanding, and the sacrifice of Jesus Christ operative at all times, there do seem to be, in our fallen world, souls distinctly marked for sin, and consequently for sorrow, from the first instant of drawing bre
Yes, O Reader, speculate a moment with me, and consider: had Deirdre any intimate companions who valued her, and respected her; had she, let us say, the sweet solace of a loving and devoted sister, or even a brotherly guide, it is possible that her pathetic collapse in the wilds of Fishkill might have been averted. (“Pathetic,” I say, and not “tragic,” for one must consider the circumstances of the breakdown, and the caliber of the young woman’s moral character.) And yet—if we recall Deirdre’s lifelong perversity of will, and her spiteful insistence upon going her own way, I very much doubt that even a sister with the infinite well of sympathy of Octavia Zinn, or a brotherly guide with the steadfast integrity of handsome young Dr. Stoughton, might have saved the headstrong creature from her fate: a fate easily the equivalent in horror, and in degradation, to the loss of maidenhood itself: by which I mean the loss of sanity.
IT HAPPENED THAT less than a twelve-month after the exchange with Dr. Stoughton, that gentleman of surpassing integrity, and Christian compassion, Deirdre boldly betook herself in 1891 to the historic Old World of Europe: and there, traveling with a modest entourage of less than ten persons, the American medium enjoyed a continued success, and was fulsomely rewarded, with both praise from her numerous clients, and money and gifts. In Paris, in Munich, in Vienna, in Zurich, in Rome: in the sunny clime of the South of France, in the beauteous chivalric mountains of Old Spain, in the snowy-white Alpine heights of Switzerland, along the magnificent castle-haunted rivers of Germany, in the graceful albeit melancholy city of Prague, and the tragic city of Warsaw: in that city of incomparable gaiety, charm, picturesque palaces and cathedrals, and steep hills, Buda-Pest, risen like a fairy city on the placid Danube: and even in exotic Turkey, abode of mosque and seraglio!—know, O sympathetic reader, the little American medium found herself most welcome, her fame having been hawked before her, by Spiritualist compatriots in these foreign climes.
Deirdre of the Shadows was reported to have been a houseguest for several weeks of Count János Krúdy, in his great castle on the gloomily picturesque Lake Balaton, in Hungary; and of the Duke and Duchess of Bellegarde, at their country estate in Provence; and of the wealthy shipowning family the Björkös, of Old Uppsala, Sweden. Lord and Lady Kellynch, of Kellynch Hall, Sussex, were said to have been enormously gratified, by the aid of Deirdre of the Shadows, in their communications with their son, lost on a voyage to India: as were the Ingolstadts of Gondol, who had lost a belovèd daughter some years previously: and the Szczyrks of Warsaw, whose anguish at the loss of a belovèd wife and mother, quite overcame their Catholic repugnance for “witchery” and “sorcery.”
It was noted by all, believers and detractors alike, that Deirdre of the Shadows, with her stark, blackly-burning eyes, and her near-translucent skin, and her hushed voice, appeared rather more a spirit herself, than a young woman of some twenty-odd years of age: and that, whether mesmerist, or ventriloquist, or magician, or genuine psychic, she was so clearly convinced of her occult powers, and so totally absorbed by them, the most contemptuously savage of skeptics could not wish to accuse her of fraud. “How wraithlike!—how pallid! She is an angel-emissary, surely,” Lady Kellynch was said to have exclaimed, “and yet, the singular curse of being her!”
IT WAS DURING this ambitious, and greatly exhausting, European tour that Deirdre began to take note of an alteration, at first so subtle as to be near-imperceptible, in the contact spirits’ manner: in both the timbre of their voices, and the messages they conveyed. Mrs. Dodd had long since vanish’d, it is to be supposed as a consequence of her son’s misfortune, and his “crossing over” into Spirit World; yet Father Darien, so generally sober, and wise, and, indeed, fatherly, succumbed upon some occasions to an unexpected testiness, and revealed a most surprising bellicose tone. (The saintly Jesuit had become, Deirdre gathered, to her amaz’d puzzlement, somewhat anti-Catholic in tone!—for, it seemed, the “Popish harlequinade,” to use Father Darien’s own phrase, was a grave disappointment beyond the Earth Plane: there being, evidently, not a whit of truth to its confident assertions, throughout the centuries, regarding the entire pantheon of saints, Popes, and Mary herself.) Puckish Zachariah was no less problematic, and quick to take advantage of the other spirits’ indecisiveness, or the medium’s exhaustion; but, added to this, was an increased malevolent hysteria to his behavior, as if he were no longer capable of controlling his caprices, but quite at the mercy of a demonic pleasure in playing all sorts of tiresome pranks, such as a naughty twelve-year-old boy might conceive of; and in muttering, and cursing, and babbling incoherent threats against his enemies “in both worlds.”
There had appeared, it was true, a new, and gentle, spirit identified only as Sarah, possessed of so frail and tremulous a voice, and, in general, so undependable as to her aid to the medium, that one might presume her to be extremely elderly: albeit a lady of obvious grace and breeding. And, from time to time, a Red Indian emerged from out the cacophonous murmurings, bearing with him, fortunately, no ill-will for the race of white men, and blessed with a surprising command of the English language; and there was a royal son of Thebes, and a lost Czarina, and, infrequently, the loving Mrs. Bonner herself—but so very faint, Deirdre could rarely determine the sound, let alone the sense, of her words. These were, it might be said, “helpful” spirits: but there were others who were less helpful, indeed mercurial and alarming, among them Bianca (who had dramatically changed from her impish state, and was now a shrill and even sluttish girl of some fourteen years of age, noisy with apocalyptic mutterings of the “Great Cataclysm” ahead); and one Margaret Fuller (so choked with rage, she could scarce express herself: save to warn that Man-kind—by which she meant the entire masculine gender!—would soon reap the harvest they most deserved, by the terrible year 1900); and the Raging Captain, whose bullying manner, and incontinent imprecations, earned him, one storm-toss’d eve in Buda-Pest, a vicious response from his fellow spirits: Zachariah in particular, tho’ with the aid of a hot-tempered Father Darien, and a shrill-laughing Bianca, administering to that contumacious shade so severe a beating, as to render him silenced forever!—to the relief of the exhausted young medium, whose head pounded with these invisible battles, and whose sensitive nerves so rang, that, after the most disorderly of sittings, the balm that “knits up the ravell’d sleave of care” would not descend upon her for as long as eighteen, or even twenty-four, desolate hours.
And, on the rain-streaked night of May 8, 1891, a grotesque and altogether unlook’d-for episode occurred: in the midst of a tearful but nobly restrained reunion between the ninety-year-old Baroness Ambaaren of the Norwegian fortress-town of Otterholm, and her deceased spouse, who had died, as a consequence of galloping consumption, at the age of twenty-eight, there suddenly intruded—with what coarse effect, both buffoonish and painful, in the midst of the Baroness’s drawing room, the sensitive reader can well imagine!—a familiar female voice of singular stridency: throaty, rudely jocose, slyly insinuating: the very voice, unmistakable, of Madame Blavatsky!
Madame’s remarks, some of which had to do with “enemies,” and “pernicious detractors,” and the “Great Conflagration” to be visited upon the globe with the advent of the new century, were not entirely coherent: for the poor creature was at that time suffering from the dislocation of “crossing over” (having died but that afternoon, in her sickbed in a patroness’s home in London). She laughed hoarsely; and uttered one or two ribald comments on “rascal celibates”—perhaps in reference to Father Darien, who was trying to restrain her; and chided Deirdr