If You Are There Page 4

  “The photographer came down with a fever and there’s no one to man the cameras. You know how to work a twelve-shot Facile?” He looked hopeful, but it was a fragile hope. Gabriel thought that his brother was preparing himself for disappointment.

  Charles was an older version of Gabriel, the same blond hair closely cropped; only his was nearly gray. They had similar moustaches like twin sheaves of wheat over their upper lip. Gabriel was thinner than Charles, yet more solid, with strong arms and legs from his recent passion for cycling. They both had their father’s long, horsey face, Charles’s becoming more equine with worry. Clearly, he was worried now. And he had a right to be. The Facile was a complicated camera that took twelve dry plates at once and so could capture twelve shots without reloading. Nevertheless, it was tricky to reload if more shots were needed. Gabriel wasn’t a photographer, only a Sunday enthusiast, but as a journalist for Le Matin he had access to exotic equipment and had even used the camera once.

  “It shouldn’t be a problem,” he said, moving to the back of the room where the Facile sat perched on its tripod.

  Charles’s face lit up. “Really?” he said, combing his fingers through his hair and smiling at his brother. “I have six sitters coming in less than an hour for a new medium. I didn’t want to have to cancel.” Then he stopped, his grin fading, “What about the flash lamp? It’s complicated I hear.”

  It was lying on its side on the table, a metal tube attached to a smaller tube with a horizontal arm at one end to hold the magnesium powder. Gabriel had never used one before, but just the other day a photographer at the paper was going on about them. Apparently, they were electrical now, using dry batteries to create a spark to ignite the magnesium. Push a button and the magnesium exploded into a bright white light.

  “I think I can manage.”

  “You’re sure?”

  Gabriel nodded. At this Charles’s features softened and his shoulders relaxed.

  Gabriel knew that something of note had just taken place. His brother had come to him for help. Charles had thought enough of Gabriel to ask for his aid at a time when he needed it most. For a moment Gabriel felt as if he had just taken a sip of fine whiskey. A warm rush coursed through him, giving him a sense of well-being, a light-headed expansiveness. For one brief moment he had expertise in an arcane field. He was valued, perhaps even respected.

  Unfortunately, the feeling left him all too quickly, before he could even commit it to memory. The truth was he wasn’t an expert in photography. He had never used the flash lamp before and wasn’t at all sure he could reload the twelve-shot Facile. Soon he would be asked to produce results or disappoint his brother, embarrass himself in his brother’s circle, and experience yet another failure that his brother would avoid mentioning.

  Gabriel had spent too much time in the café-concerts, the brothels, and the brasseries de filles of Pigalle and Montmartre not to be suspicious of his brother’s séances. As a journalist he was often in the company of con men, pimps, and grisettes, working-class women who worked on the laundry boats, in the bakeries, and in the small factories during the day but at night occasionally prostituted themselves. A few passed themselves off as fortune-tellers or mediums. Fewer still acquired regulars for their séances and built a reputation. He knew them. Mostly they were guarded when it came to the secrets of their trade, but there was one who, given enough whiskey, liked to brag about her tricks. She told him enough to make him suspicious of the whole field that his brother and the other scientists found so fascinating and investigated with such vigor.

  The medium that night held no resemblance to the grisettes of Pigalle. She was from a world away. Charles said that she grew up in Algiers, where her father was an official in the Foreign Service. He said that she had been discovered there by Éléonore Bonnard, the wife of Colonel Bonnard, that she had sat for them on many occasions, and that they swore she had a genuine gift.

  The medium, Alais Bonnet, arrived with her companion, Juliette Denis, the widow of Bernard Denis, the well-known sculptor. He had died recently and left his wife a large flat in the rue Soufflot in the Latin Quarter that was always filled with artists and writers, a boisterous crowd who typically came for an evening and stayed through to the morning. Gabriel had been there a number of times, although he doubted if she would remember him. He had even spent a night on her floor once, passed out in front of the French doors that looked out on the Panthéon.

  “So where do you want us?” Juliette asked, after she introduced herself and Mademoiselle Bonnet. “I expect you’ll want to examine her.”

  Juliette Denis was truly a beautiful woman. Gabriel surmised that she was perhaps ten years older than the medium, probably closer to Charles’s age than to his own. She wore her hair long in a mass of different lengths down her back. He supposed that she wore the style of a young girl because she considered herself to be one. She was wild and reckless, still looking for surprises, still eager to be shocked.

  “Will she submit to a search of her clothing?” Charles asked, his eyes briefly straying to Alais. The medium remained behind her companion, content to let Juliette proceed on her behalf.

  “Of course,” Juliette replied, without hesitation.

  “And her body.”

  “A thorough search, you mean.”

  Charles nodded. He was careful. The controls he used in his experiments were as rigid as any he used in his laboratory. He always made sure the medium was thoroughly searched before, during, and even after the séance, so there would be no question as to whether she smuggled in any tricks: thread, hooks, bits of netting, masks, or devices of any kind that could aid in creating illusions. Of course, there were always questions, especially in the press. There had even been a few cartoons in Punch that a colleague had sent to Gabriel from across the channel, and one or two in his own paper that he had no power to stop. They were a satirical look at séances in general and Charles in particular. One showed a caricature of Charles holding a butterfly net chasing a figure wearing a bedsheet. No one in the family made mention of it.

  Gabriel glanced at Alais Bonnet, whose features had stiffened at the suggestion that her body be searched. He could not tell if she was blushing or not. She was dark, an exotic-looking woman, not attractive like Juliette, but boxy and ungraceful with muddy brown eyes and a layer of down on her upper lip. She wasn’t young, perhaps thirty or so, and did not carry herself well. She stood with her head slightly forward on her neck, shoulders rounded, her body heavy, unyielding, and defenseless. Her whole attitude telegraphed a life full of small disappointments.

  Juliette whispered into Alais’s ear and took her arm. Alais shrank into herself and shook her head. She was shy if fierce in her objection. A hurried exchange passed between them. After that the medium seem to relax a little, to give in, however reluctantly.

  Juliette looked over at them. “Yes, it will be all right,” she said, still holding the medium’s arm. “She asks only that I am allowed to be with her.”

  There had been talk about these two women. Alais had moved in with Juliette a few months after her husband died. No one was quite sure what to make of their relationship, except that Alais was devoted to Juliette and content to follow her everywhere. She even drove with her in her phaeton, and no one ever did that. Juliette was a crazy driver, who often gave her horse its head. Once she nearly got them killed when the carriage careened around a corner and collided with a steamroller. A picture of it had run in Gabriel’s paper.

  Gabriel took great care with the cameras, setting them up properly, each with their own tray of magnesium. He positioned them in the adjoining room, keeping the door open. He made sure they were focused on various points around the room to satisfy his brother’s obsession with recording every detail. He pointed one at the sitter’s table, another at the medium’s cabinet, and still another at a little table that held a bugle, a guitar, and a small bell, essential accoutrements to any materializing séance.

  The medium’s cabinet was nothing
more than a corner of the room draped off by black curtains. A chair had been placed inside the space for the medium’s comfort and to give her the privacy she needed to gather her psychic powers. There, she would sit with the curtains closed, sometimes for an hour or two, until the manifestations began to appear. At that point the curtains could be opened or remain closed depending on the wishes of the medium.

  Gabriel didn’t think much of the idea of a space where the medium could remain hidden from view while she conjured up her spooks. He thought that tricks of all kinds could be performed behind those curtains, and the sitters would never know it. He brought up his objections to his brother once a few summers back, while they were staying at Charles’s house on Île Roubaud, a tiny island he owned off the coast of Hyères in the Mediterranean. The pink stucco house with its red tile roof and blue shutters sat wedged in a niche halfway up a craggy hillside dotted with pines, oaks, and scrub. They sat under the grape arbor next to the house looking out at the fishing boats anchored in the bay. The water was a patchwork of turquoise and azure, so clear that the shadows of the boats could be seen all the way to the bottom.

  Gabriel hadn’t planned on voicing his objections. He was sensitive to his brother’s opinion of the press, and since Gabriel had just been hired on at the paper, he supposed he could be considered one of them. Charles was the one who brought up the recent experiments at his house. Gabriel only wondered out loud if the cabinet might not nullify the controls by keeping the medium hidden from view.

  Charles let his eyes drift out over the water as he listened to his brother’s objections. “Yes, I suppose ordinarily that would be a problem,” Charles said, making an effort to sound unruffled and reasonable. “But you’ve seen my records. Maybe there is something I’m missing, but I’ve always thought my controls were rather complete.”

  Gabriel smiled uncomfortably and shifted in his chair, causing the brown wicker to creak under his weight. He wasn’t used to questioning his brother’s methods. Charles was so much older, more like a father than a brother. Their own father was a surgeon at Hôpital Pitié-Salpêtrière; he had already spent whatever paternal energy he had on his two older sons. So it was Charles who helped Gabriel with his studies, took him boating, and shared his interests in poetry, novels, and gyroplanes.

  “Keep in mind that I examine their bodies, every inch of them inside and out. Even the women. I don’t see how they could manage to smuggle in tricks without my knowledge, even from behind a curtain.”

  “Yes, of course,” Gabriel said, wishing that he hadn’t brought it up.

  Charles wasn’t listening, however. He had slipped away into his thoughts, his gaze still on the boats in the bay. “Still, I suppose it is possible.” He turned to his brother. “Have you heard of a way? Do you have something in mind?” Charles knew the kind of places his brother frequented.

  Gabriel shook his head, wishing he had something to offer. A warm tide of blood rushed to his scalp as he took another sip from his glass. He felt foolish bringing up his reservations without anything to back them up.

  “There is nothing wrong with questioning my methods, Gabriel,” his brother said. “I don’t mean to imply that. I question them all the time and so do my colleagues. We take great care with the controls. Otherwise our experiments wouldn’t be of much use.”

  A little later their brother Etienne arrived and the conversation was forgotten. A chair was brought out to the arbor and a new bottle was opened. The talk soon turned to flying machines and the family of anti-Dreyfusards, who had just bought the hotel on the neighboring island where Gabriel and his brothers liked to go for oysters. Of course, no one mentioned their younger brother, Victor, who always came to mind at the mention of oysters. Victor, who at twelve bragged that he could eat three dozen and at fourteen had died in agony when typhus desiccated his body. Now, it was just the three of them. Etienne was a bacteriologist working at the Pasteur Institute. He was only a few years older than Gabriel and already he was the leader of a team working on antitoxins for snakebites. Gabriel was the only member of the family who was not a surgeon or a researcher—a fact his father never failed to bring up at family gatherings.

  Gabriel watched Juliette Denis lead Alais back into the room and help her into the chair that stood in front of the cabinet. Alais had shed her clothes and was now wearing a leotard that hugged her body, concealing nothing. Over the leotard she wore a pair of overalls like those worn by schoolboys in the countryside. The sitters took their places at the table. They were scientists from different disciplines: a mathematician, a chemist, two psychologists, and a physicist; most were well known in their fields and even somewhat known by the general public, especially in Paris. The gas was turned down and two candles were lit, one for the table and one for the volunteer stenographer: a physicist, a gangly fellow with closely cropped hair whose long, tender fingers kept combing the thick beard on his chin. The only other light came from a high window that captured the flickering gaslight from the street below.

  Juliette Denis took up the candle on the table and held it up for Alais to see, instructing her to concentrate on it, to let her mind go quiet, to watch the glimmering light, now the only bright spot in the room. Juliette’s voice soon matched the rhythm of Alais’s breathing, urging the medium to give in to the heaviness, to let her eyelids close, to relax her body: her feet first, then her legs, pelvis, stomach, chest, and finally her head. Alais’s eyelids flickered and closed. Her breathing became regular. Juliette urged her to go deeper still, to let herself drift down into the well. She described the well as a warm, safe place overgrown with vines and brightly colored tropical flowers. She urged Alais to go deeper yet, past the water, past the vegetation to its velvety inner core, which she described as a fur-lined bed.

  Finally when Juliette was satisfied that Alais was in a deep trance, she asked Gabriel to help her settle the medium in the chair behind the curtains. He took one arm and Juliette took the other, and together they lifted her up and walked her over to the cabinet. As soon as she was settled, her head slumped forward on her chest and a thin line of drool ran down her chin. Juliette wiped it off with her handkerchief. She did it in such a perfunctory way that Gabriel got the impression it was a common occurrence during their séances.

  Charles tied the medium to the chair with a new rope, making sure it was taut and secured with heavy knots. When he was done, he called up the sitters to test the bonds. They tugged on the ropes, examined the chair, and once they were satisfied, returned to their seats where they took up hands. Juliette closed the curtains around Alais and joined the others at the table. Gabriel stood in the doorway by the cameras, fingering the ignition button on the flash lamp, peering into the gloom with equal parts of hope and dread.

  For an hour nothing happened.

  Gabriel grew tired of holding the flash lamp and put it down. He brought over a chair and sat down, wondering how long until Charles gave up and sent them all home. Several times over the course of the hour, Juliette Denis led the sitters in “Chez Nous, Soyez Reine,” and “J’irai la Voir un Jour!” She said these hymns were a particular favorite of the spirits and singing them would help them come through.

  Gabriel remembered these hymns from his childhood but didn’t join in. He was bored and tired and just wanted it to be over. His mind kept wandering to a girl he had met at a party the other night. She fancied herself an anarchist and a painter, although his friends said she had money and belonged to an old family from the faubourg. He was thinking about running into her again and wondering how he could accomplish this when his brother suddenly shouted, “Camera!”

  Gabriel jumped to his feet and grabbed the flash lamp. He swung the Facile around searching in the dark for his subject, until he found it—the guitar floating about twelve inches above the table. He didn’t even have time to react. The hairs on his arms were standing straight up as he held the flash lamp and pushed the ignition button. Instantly the room exploded into a bright white light and the air f
illed with fumes from the burning magnesium. As the light began to fade Gabriel realized that he had forgotten to press the shutter button. By the time he remembered the light had faded considerably. In a panic he pushed the ignition button again and the flash exploded, only this time the guitar was gone. In the time it took him to realize he had forgotten to take the picture, the guitar had floated back down to the little table and now lay inert next to the bugle.

  “Did you get it?” Charles asked anxiously.

  “Yes.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes, yes, I got it.” Gabriel sounded impatient. Actually, he was suffocating under the certain knowledge that he had failed.

  Another hymn, “Reine de France,” and this time Gabriel joined in, not quite believing that it would usher in the spirits, but singing out all the same.

  A groan drifted out from the cabinet, soft at first, then punctuated by weighty sighs. More groans. They sounded erotic to him and eerie, as if they were very close and yet far away—an icy whisper in his ear. The others shifted uncomfortably in their seats and avoided each other’s eyes. Only Madame Denis seemed unaffected. At first Gabriel thought the noises heralded a new manifestation, but when they grew louder he recognized them as decidedly human. Finally he assigned them properly to Alais Bonnet.

  Over time, Mademoiselle Bonnet’s breathing became more pronounced and her groans began to grow in intensity. Sometimes she would cry out as if caught in the throes of a voluptuous fever, panting like an animal in heat and moaning with pleasure. It lent the séance a voyeuristic quality, launching it from the realm of scientific inquiry into something more elastic.

  “It won’t be long now,” Juliette said, still unfazed by the display.

  Alais Bonnet called out to her friend from behind the curtain. She urged Juliette to examine her.