Chapter Seventeen

Mack had a splendid time in Charleston, a giddy succession of fetes and parades and bonny girls with warm, honey voices. Not that it was all magnolia trees and mint juleps for Mack; on Thursday, two reporters with unkempt beards and oily hair dangling in their eyes–Mack suspected they were Russian radicals–requested an interview that deteriorated into an interrogation that declined into vicious accusations. They circled Mack like two flea-bitten hyenas nipping at a noble lion, and all the while, they scritchy-scratched his responses in black books with lined paper. When the session ended, Mack had to smoke a cigarette in the garden behind his hotel. It's also true that a jealous boyfriend challenged Mack to a duel, but it ultimately came to nothing because the boyfriend shot himself instead. But the strangest event occurred at a seance at the home of an old woman who lived on King Street.

With your forbearance, I'll recount the good times first: Mack's triumphant entry and his merry masque of revelry. Of course, Glenn prepared the way for Mack by telegraphing articles and ads to the Charleston papers for a full month prior to his arrival. By the time Mack finally rode into Charleston on the 6th of January, the city was agog with excitement, and the throngs welcomed Mack as if he were the Prince of Wales returning from Agincourt; December 25 was forgotten as a poor adumbration of Mack's splendiferous appearance.

Now for the details. Mack did indeed speak at the Charleston Country Club–that much is true–and he congratulated the self-important, well-tailored aristocrats on their good taste and hospitality; they in turn congratulated Mack on his courage and romantic spirit. Mack and the aristocrats continued praising their mutual virtues in hearty, back-slapping reciprocity: They raised toast after toast to their racial superiority and happy wealth and the chastity of their women until the meal was served–prime rib and roast potatoes and candied carrots and carafes of wine–followed by bourbon and tobacco and pleasant conversations in cliques and coteries around the sparkling table.

You should know there really was a Melinda, a pretty girl in a lavender gown who whispered to Mack to meet her upstairs and then excused herself from her friends and fiancé to "step to the ladies room." After waiting a few minutes, Mack excused himself as well. He was making his way down the corridor when Melinda emerged from the shadows and led him to a dusky nook. Her hospitality was superb in every way. Mack tied his mask on her face, slipped his boots over her feet and up her naked calves, and placed his chapeaux on her head. How Mack loved the rustle of her gown as she pulled it to her waist! With eager fingers he untied the periwinkle bow that held her knickers.

It wasn't the first time for either of them, and Melinda whispered honeyed words into Mack's left ear. Her hot breath and her gown bunching in hillocks of satin and her firm, young legs and her moist lips pulling on his ear and the rising and falling of warm waves and the whimpered moans inducted Mack into a pleasure that was dark and wild and nearly sacred. He understood at last how a couple years of maturation could immeasurably compensate for the pleasure of exploiting innocence, and Mack grew in wisdom and stature. Months later he was dining on a train as it crawled around the edge of a Rocky Mountain peak, when he chanced to see far below a stream dashing white and wild through a chasm. For some reason, the steep crevice and frothing water reminded him of Melinda, and in his mind, he formulated a poem about the girl, which, while not exactly pornographic, was too anatomically precise to be printed here.

So much for Mack's afternoon rendezvous with Melinda in a shadowy alcove at the Charleston Country Club. The couple returned to the main hall as tea was being served, and the only indications of their amour were the slightly flushed cheeks of Miss Mincy and an errant wrinkle in her gown. Well, that and Mack's self-satisfied and confident, almost swaggering, demeanor. He had bested a room full of rivals: fathers, brothers, and eager young suitors.

The next morning, the City of Charleston mounted the usual parade, and with his feather stiff and doublet brushed, Mack and Roz processed down King Street. The wind was chill, and though the spectators were scarfed and bundled, they nevertheless flogged their mittened hands together in wild, thudding enthusiasm. Behind Mack marched the Citadel Drum and Bugle corps, the drums booming like a muffled cannonade and the bugles brassily braying in the pale midwinter sun; then–oh, look!–dwarfs decked in purple like miniature Macks, tumbling in cartwheels and tossing candy to the children and sticking their tongues out at the ladies; behind the dwarfs tramped the Sons of the Confederacy in stiff formation, their rifles upright and their faces grim; and finally, a vision of virgin loveliness floated along the boulevard in a cloud of lavender tulle, the ravishing Otis Island Harbor Queen, Miss Melinda Mincy. She was enthroned on the high bench of a gilded, rococo chariot whence she waved her gloved hand at grizzled men whose toes stuck through their cracked boots and hard-faced women in brown dresses with gray shawls and especially at the little children whose mouths were sticky with peppermint and grit. When the parade ended, Mack received the Key to the City from a typically pompous mayor whose name he forgot, and he accepted invitations to parties from typically officious matrons whose names he never learned.

Except for one: He would not forget the elder Miss Melinda Mincy, who was, in fact, no matron at all but the spinster aunt of young Miss Melinda Mincy. The sound of drums drew the old woman from her parlor and onto the balcony where she gazed at the approaching parade with the narrowed eyes of a baroness searching for her faithless husband. Over the years, rumors had seeped into her apartment that her niece was a dissolute girl. Wayward. That she had gone to Columbia to slink a baby. That the girl was worse than a whore because she couldn't plead poverty as her defense, indeed, that she bestowed quite freely and with reckless gusto what her suitors craved.

That she liked "doing it." Disgraceful!

When the elder Melinda heard that her namesake had entertained the Purple Knight with carnal pleasures in the Jefferson alcove while the gentry chatted over coffee and cigars, the old woman decided it was time to act. She wouldn't destroy her niece–the girl seemed capable of doing that on her own–but she could, by God, destroy "that fraud of a knight." Had he been her niece's only lover? No. Was he a symbol of the other gallants who enjoyed the girl? He could be construed as such. Would the Purple Knight's downfall be immensely gratifying to her? Absolutely. As she stood among the urns of hopeless pansies and debilitated ferns and watched the procession pass below, her eyes grew fiercer, and she clenched her frilly handkerchief. Gowned in beige and despondent lace, her spine erect as though her head supported a temple pediment, and her lips pursed and etched with tiny fissures, the Spinster began plotting the ruin of the young man in purple. She had three strengths that she would deploy to full effect: her wealth, wit, and contempt.

She turned from the spectacle and entered the parlor where she rang Mrs. Edmondson, the wife of Reverend Edmondson, who was hosting the Fox sisters, Maggie and Kate, on their tour of the Eastern Seaboard. The sisters were celebrated Spiritualists, mediums who conducted seances and spoke with the dead and opened a conduit for the dead to reply via sharp knocks and levitations, ghostly manifestations and the mysterious cursive of "automatic writing." In so doing, they bestowed comfort on the grieving and an uneasy sensation of eerie awe on the others; the girls also raked in a whole bunch of money they telegraphed to their eldest sister, Leah Kane, a bulldog-faced woman who managed the girls' affairs from Rochester, New York. In contrast to Leah, Kate and Maggie were young and reasonably attractive: They had slim corseted figures and porcelain cheeks with that cadaverish Victorian pallor praised by opiated poets and their tubercular mistresses. Many prominent men attended their seances and vouched for their credibility, and a banker financed a tour to England, where the girls grew even more pallid and powerful; indeed, by themselves the Fox sisters created the Spiritualist phenomenon, a tsunami of metaphysical folderol that continues to wash through dorm rooms, curtained parlors, and Silicon Valley retreats to this day.

The week before, Reverend Edmondson had invited the Spinster Mincy to attend a lecture by the Fox sisters to the Dorcas circle; their topic was the compatibility of spiritualism with Christian doctrine, and after their talk, which, incidentally, was warmly received, he introduced Miss Mincy to the girls. The old lady was entirely civil in her courtesies, but she apprehended the slightest whiff of wine on the breath of Kate and a calculating canniness in Maggie's eyes. The Spinster concluded at once that the Fox sisters were frauds, and she wondered even then if she might be able to turn their trickery to her own advantage. So, she invited the girls to her home for coffee and listened with feigned interest to their stories and even cajoled them into performing an impromptu seance at her dining room table. Maggie produced a skull that she placed in the middle of the table; the curtains were drawn, candles were lit, and hands were held. It should be noted that the Spinster herself was an old hand at masking her motives, and she demonstrated complete faith in the mystic proceedings. When a strange knocking sounded from the hem of Kate's dress, the Spinster suppressed a smile.

The Fox sisters proceeded to communicate with departed souls who never existed–the Spinster affirmed any names the girls suggested–and when the table rose an inch from the floor, the Spinster gasped in feigned amazement. An intermission followed the initial performance, and an elderly black woman entered to pour more coffee. When she saw the skull on the table, she muttered, "Oh, Lawd," crossed herself, and bustled back to the kitchen.

Then Maggie produced another wonder from her bag: a planchette, a heart shaped plaque of walnut with three small wheels mounted beneath and a hole in the middle that held a pencil. She asked the Spinster if she had any stationery, and, of course, the Spinster did. The paper was spread on the table, the planchette was placed on the paper, and the pencil was pushed down to touch the page. Kate bade the Spinster to touch her fingertips to the side of the planchette. The Spinster obeyed, and Kate placed her fingers on the opposite side, whereupon Maggie closed her eyes and asked in a husky whisper, "What is your name?"

A pause and the planchette began drawing in elegant cursive the name "Bertram Mincy."

In a delicate voice, Kate asked, "Mrs. Mincy, who is Bertram?"

"Miss Mincy, if you please. He was my father, dead for many years now."

Maggie asked the planchette, "What would you ask of us, Bertram Mincy?"

Immediately this time, "To save my errant granddaughter."

"What is her name?"

The planchette began drawing the name, "Melinda Mincy."

The Spinster quickly clarified. "He is speaking of my niece who shares my name."

The planchette wrote, "I fear for her."

The Spinster asked, "How can you feel fear, dear father? Are you not in heaven?"

But the planchette would not answer.

Other questions followed, mundane inquiries about lost dogs and servants who died years ago and who would win the next gubernatorial election. By the time of the election, the Fox sisters would be back in New York and so didn't give a damn whether their prophecy came true or not.

When the afternoon faded into twilight, and the Fox sisters began putting away their equipment, the Spinster stood shakily from her chair, extended an alabaster forefinger at the girls, and proclaimed, "You are frauds! Nothing more than common swindlers, and you should be ashamed of yourselves, trying to deceive an old lady! Spiritualists indeed!"

Kate acted shocked and offended. "Madam," she replied. "We have conducted seances for President McKinley in the White House and Queen Victoria at Windsor. Our veracity has been confirmed in every arena!"

And the Spinster said, "Humbug! It's all humbuggery! My father's name was William not Bertram. I guided the planchette to write the name 'Bertram.' If you were indeed privy to knowledge of the afterlife, you would have corrected me. But you did not! Whether or not you deceived the President or the Queen or the Pope in Rome matters nothing to me. And besides, listen to this."

The Spinster sat down and cracked her toes with the same resounding "knock" that Kate produced.

Maggie said, "Oh, dear."

And Kate rejoined, "So what do you intend to do?"

"I'm not sure, but if you do as I ask, you need not fear exposure, at least not from me. What you do is your business, but I worry about my niece, and I think a message from the grave might frighten her into more respectable behavior. But when I call, you will answer, and when I ask, you will do as I say. Understood?"

"Yes'm," said Maggie.

"Yes'm," said Kate.

As I say, all this happened a week before the parade. The Spinster Mincy now had a plan clearly in focus, and that's why she left the balcony to call Mrs. Edmonson to speak to the Fox sisters. She would save her niece and expose the Purple Knight at the same time: so have vengeance and redemption ever been leagued.

"Hello?" said Mrs. Edmondson.

"Clara, this is Melinda Mincy. Are the Fox sisters in?"