Inside, I sat at my kitchen table. One by one, I read those letters, more than twenty of them written over eight months, starting in 1909. I felt like a voyeur, like I was reading something I shouldn’t, a confession, even if nothing was directly confessed. Each was addressed to Opal, written by a woman named Madame de Fleur. M, she sometimes called herself. She wrote directly and indirectly at once. I’ll admit, like a poem, I didn’t understand them, but I could sense what they meant. I couldfeelit. I could glean enough to know why Halley had given the letters to Edith.
Opal Doucet had been pregnant. Pregnant. I don’t know why this news came as such a surprise, as though Opal couldn’t have done bad deeds while carrying a child. Procreation doesn’t make one morally superior. I read about how Opal Doucet had heard a voice, and about a Spirit Machine that could provide some answers, and about the cures she was making for the other Earthshine workers who complained ofemotional disorders. The woman had been expecting Opal in France,but Opal had been delayed. Madame de Fleur wrote of mystics and scientists, of the sun and the universe and of our lives as scale models of such. She wrote of Halley’s Comet, how three wise men followed it. She said she wasn’t afraid of death. Her final letter was dated April 22, 1910. I read from it:
You say I speak in riddles, but now the occasion calls for directness: A spiritualist cannot be held responsible for the messages received from the Other Side. This would be akin to smashing the telephone box for bad news spoken through its lines. You were trying to help those women with your power of mediumship. I believe this, truly. It’s clear to me, from your description, however, that your cures have unintended consequences. I am sorry for the sad circumstances of those women’s deaths and that you’ve been put at the center of it. The Witch of Walnut Street! What an unfortunate insult. And, yet, I’ll tell you what I suspect you already know: This may be an instance of a cure being worse than the disease.
I folded the letter and stacked it along with the others. At the cellular level, I felt changed, different. Joseph Campbell would call this the “dark night of the soul.” It’s a necessary part of the Hero’s Journey. In the movie of my life, the director might have me stare into a mirror, searching for someone recognizable. Was I going crazy? Isn’t that funny—that I’d finally found some tangible proof, and I only questioned myself? But the thing about the dark night of the soul, I’d learned at the conservatory, is that it leads to light. To revelation. To change.
Marriage gives us a witness to all the moments of our lives, even the dull ones—a built-in audience. Friends can provide this, too, of course, but Halley was gone. I called who I so often called in urgent moments—the person I’d relied upon to ground me: Wyatt.
Years ago, Wyatt occasionally answered the phone imitating the sound of ringing, and he perfected this trilling because that’s what Wyatt did, he applied himself. He’d fooled me many times when I called him, and I’d sit on the line, waiting for him to pick up, only torealize he was already there. But now the ringing was just ringing. No answer at all.
Upstairs, I found a business card tucked into my underwear drawer, and I dialed the number.
“My favorite elf,” John Dale said when he answered.
“Let it go,” I said. Click-click. I could hear it so clearly now. I was walking around my house with my cordless phone squeezed between my ear and shoulder. I couldn’t stay. My phone had been bugged. I sensed I was being watched. I began to stuff a bag with clothes, with a toothbrush, with underwear, with Wyatt’s jeans.
“Anger is sexy.”
“Not now.” My Earthshine dress was crumpled on my living room floor. I picked it up and shoved it in my bag. I don’t know why. Some things we do by instinct. “I’ll do the interview,” I said.
“Really? Great.” He grew serious.
“I can’t talk now,” I said. “They’re listening.”
“Come here,” he said.
“Your wife.”
“She’s visiting her sister in Louisville.” Click. Click.
I sat on the line, thinking.
“We have a guest room,” he said. “I’d never compromise my sources. Code of ethics. I’ll make you coffee in the morning. We don’t even have to speak until the interview. I’ll give you my address.”
“Don’t say it out loud,” I said. “I remember.”
THE LIGHTING CREW AT WLAXreadied the set for our interview. John Dale Fox had arranged it. He sat across from me in a director’s chair. He’d done as he promised—made up a bed for me in the guest room, had coffee waiting in the morning; he left before I woke. Now he wore a tie, uncharacteristic for him, which signaled to me he thought this interview might get national air. His hair was parted above his left eye and combed to the side, and he looked like a little boy before church on Easter morning.
Behind him, I could see the line of televisions with the broadcast feed. Today theChallengerwas going into space, taking with it a crew of astronauts and a civilian teacher and a camera to study the comet. The national news was covering it, not the local networks. I was glad my interview would be taped, not live. I thought of the time I said West Vagina instead of West Virginia when I was hosting the Reds’ Opening Day Baseball Parade, and the producer had to cut to commercial. I was never offered live work again.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” he said. We were sitting in director’s chairs across from each other.
“With you?” I said.
“Be nice.” He was holding a yellow legal pad with questions written on it.
“I don’twantto do this at all,” I said, softening.
A makeup girl came over and applied some cake makeup to my face. It felt tight on my skin like glue, dried. “Do you want a wig?” she asked me.
“No,” I said.
“New stylist?” asked John Dale. I shot him a look and he turned serious again. “What will you do if they come after you? When,” he corrected. He arched his back, stretching in his chair.
“I haven’t thought that far.”
“After all the Tuttles have done for you,” he said. “For your career.”
