was yes it made an impression and if it was no, it didn’t.
“She was my mother,” Mark might say. “She
brought me and my brothers up on the farm all by herself.”
“I’m sensing some trauma in your childhood.”
But then, almost any Okie farmboy who survived to
adulthood had at least one tale of a life-threatening
accident to tell. “She’s asking how your foot is doing?
Does that mean anything to you?”
“I cut my foot real bad when I was nine hoeing
weeds!” Mark proclaimed, goggle-eyed. “A couple of
my toes went rotten and the doctor had to cut them
off.”
“Were those the two toes on the leftmost side of
your right foot?”
“It was! Tell Ma my foot’s doing fine, except it
aches a little when it’s cold out.” Mark gamely pulled off
his boot and exhibited his toe-stumps to the audience.
Of course, Charlie had seen Mark’s slight limp and
guessed at the missing digits while he was still walking
to the stage.
“Now Margaret is telling me that there was some
dispute between you and her over a third person. A
dispute that was not resolved at the time of your mother’s death.” Again, hardly a rare state of affairs. But then
Charlie’s searching eyes spotted Mark’s hand playing
with his wedding band, and he went in deeper, like a
miner digging down at the spot where he’d seen a golden glitter. “Margaret didn’t approve of your choice of
bride, did she?”
“Oh, those two were always carrying on. I hoped
they’d make peace, but they never did.”
“Yes, that’s right,” Charlie said. “Margaret says she
knows that’s been troubling you for a while now. But
she wants you to know that she has forgiven all of her
grudges against your wife, and wishes that she could
take back the harsh words of the past.” The ghosts only
ever said nice things in Charlie’s tent. Mark gushed his
thanks for passing on the good news. The audience
applauded.
We did three spirits per show, and then I passed
the hat around and peddled horoscope pamphlets for a
nickel apiece. As soon as the audience had left, Charlie
produced a flask from a hidden pocket inside his tuxedo jacket, which had once belonged to a magician, and
drank deep. Spirits were always calling that man.
Charlie and I traveled the circuit together for
years, changing up the act as fashions dictated and
gimmicks grew stale. We were Dr. Franklin Illumina
and his lovely assistant Teresa when we were with the
Old-Time Medicine Show, Swami Gozangi and his exotic acolyte Madam Pearl when we were in the Bonsko
Brothers Carnival, Reverend Arnold Machen and his
wife Sofia when we went through the Bible Belt. When
we did palm readings, Charlie taught me how to read a
man’s profession from the shapes of the calluses on his
hands. We did a two-person mentalist show where I
handled objects that the audience gave me and Charlie
described them in their minutest detail while blindfolded. For that, we used a special code that took me
months to memorize. For a minute or two we even
played a vaudeville act in New
York. The props and the names changed, but the essence
of it remained the same. Figure out what people want to
hear, and tell it to them.
Charlie died in Des Moines in ’33, wet-brained and
climbing the walls while lying in his cot. Towards the
end, he was calling out to folks who weren’t there, almost
like he did in our act.
With Charlie gone, I found myself at a crossroads.
It was lonely without him, and for the first time I understood why the marks were so eager to speak with
their dead. I’d kept my figure nicely but was getting a
little long in the tooth to keep working as a mentalist’s
assistant, and in any case I didn’t relish the prospect of
finding a new partner. Also, while I’d been in the carnival my whole life, I was yearning for a job that paid in a
higher denomination than dimes. With his gifts Charlie
might have made a fortune as a preacher or even a politician, but he didn’t have any worldly ambitions beyond
his next drink.
I decided to get into séances, which I’d heard attracted a better class of mark and didn’t require the rigors of life on the road. Fortunately, I’d been saving like
a miser, so I had some capital to invest in a fresh start. I
left the carnival and found a house in Teabury, Florida
that suited my purposes, a grey, gloomy old Victorian
in a neighborhood dominated by lime and coral-colored pre-fab abominations. That old house gave off just
the right impression of a place that didn’t quite belong
where it was, and where strange and uncanny things
might happen. I picked it up on the cheap in a county
auction. The previous owner had died a few years ago,
and nobody noticed until the sheriff came by to foreclose for non-payment of property taxes, and found him
dead and mummified in his easy chair.
The house did require some renovations before
I could host my first séance, particularly to the parlor.
I installed a metronome beneath the floorboards that
rapped ominously when I commanded the spirits to
make themselves known. I put an air conditioning unit
in the basement that blew freezing cold gusts until you
could see your breath even on a sultry August night.
There were hidden lights that bathed the parlor in a
sickly green glow, and a phonograph in the air duct that
played unearthly music. Artfully concealed foot pedals
operated these devices, so I could produce all sorts of
startling effects from my seat without seeming to do anything at all.