“Now, just one last crumb, my friends: How did this boo hag character get into the house in the first place? How’d she find poor John?”
The LeBlancs looked at one another, and even Mary’s softheartedness was beginning to be troubled by the intensity of the young woman. It wasn’t merely the oddness of her situation, dressed for labor and wandering around at night; it was the way her face seemed lit with a gaslamp glow of its own making, the way she seemed simultaneously to be the hunter and the hunted, running away from something and toward something else.
But few people can leave a story unfinished, with a raveled end left trailing. “Same way a hag gets into anybody’s house, miss. They find a crack, or a hole, or a unlocked door.”
The girl gave the couple a beatific smile, swept them a bow, and headed west.
She wasn’t seen again for sixteen days, when a group of young boys rolling hoops down the street saw a white woman emerge from St. Ours. They described her appearance as “witchy”: her practical clothing hung in ragged tatters around her, supplemented by a strange cloak of oiled black feathers; her eyes were wind-whipped and her smile at the night sky was sly, as if she and the stars were on familiar terms.
When the boys questioned her about her activities, the girl failed to provide any clear explanation beyond a few senseless descriptions of high mountain peaks and black pine boughs and lights in the sky like pink silk pinned to the stars.
When I asked her myself what she’d seen through the door—for there must have been a door—she only laughed. “Why, the boo hags, of course!” And when I frowned at her she shushed me: “Listen, not every story is made for telling. Sometimes just by telling a story you’re stealing it, stealing a little of the mystery away from it. Let those witch women be, I say.”
I did not know what she meant at the time. I had a scholar’s hunger to reveal and explain, to make the unknown known—but in the case of the St. Ours door I was foiled. I traced her footsteps up Elmira Avenue and found a whitewashed mansion sinking into the sweet rot of magnolia blooms, simultaneously grand and half-forgotten. I made plans to return in the evening to conduct further explorations, but that was the night of the Great Algiers Fire of 1895. By midnight the sky was golden orange and by dawn the entire block, including the St. Ours mansion, was nothing but a sooty skeleton of itself.
Remember this fire. Remember that it raged from no clear origin and paid no heed to hoses or buckets of water until every grand, sagging inch of St. Ours was burned to ash.
But still, I record these recollections because St. Ours was the first door I found in this world, and the second door Miss Larson found. With the finding of a door comes change.
Later, Ade would refer to the period between roughly 1885 and 1892 as her “hungry years.” When asked what she was hungry for, she laughed and said, “Same thing as you, I bet. Ways-between. Nowheres. Somewheres.” She scoured the Earth, wandering and ravenous, looking for doors.
And she found them.5 She found them in abandoned churches and the salt-rimed walls of caves, in graveyards and behind fluttering curtains in foreign markets. She found so many her imagining of the world grew lacy and tattered with holes, like a mouse-chewed map. I followed her in my own time and rediscovered as many as I could. But doors by their natures are openings, passings-through, missing-places—and it has proved difficult to record the precise geometry of absence. My notes are full of dead ends and uncertainties, whispers and rumors, and even my most careful reports are full of unanswered questions hovering like gray angels in the margins.
Consider the Platte River door. Ade’s iridescent trail led back up the Mississippi and westward and eventually to a gentleman named Frank C. True. When I spoke to Mr. True in 1900, he was a trick-rider in W. J. Taylor’s Great American Double Circus, Huge World’s Museum, Caravan, Hippodrome, Menagerie and Congress of Wild and Living Animals.
Frank was a dark-haired, flint-eyed man whose charm and talent expanded his presence far past the bounds of his own small frame. When I mentioned Ade, his performer’s smile turned wistful.
“Yes. Course I remember her. Why? You her husband or something?” After assuring him I was no jealous lover come to claim a decade-old slight, he sighed back into his camp chair and told me about their meeting in the hot summer of 1888.
He saw her first in the audience of Dr. Carver’s Rocky Mountain and Prairie Exhibition, where Frank was wild-westing as a Genuine Plains Indian for a dollar a day. She was conspicuously alone on the wooden benches, tangle-haired and grimy, dressed with a scavenger’s abandon in oversized boots and a man’s shirt. She stayed through the bloody reenactment of Custer’s Last Stand, cheered during the demonstration of mustang lassoing even though the “mustang” was a round-bellied pony no wilder than a house cat, and whistled when Frank won the Indian Race. He winked at her. She winked back.
When Dr. Carver’s Rocky Mountain and Prairie Exhibition rolled out of Chicago the following evening, Ade and Frank were both crammed in his cubby in the performers’ railcar. In this way Ade suffered precisely the sort of fall from grace her aunts and grandmother most feared, and in so doing made a discovery: fallen women are afforded a species of freedom.6 There were certainly social costs—several of the women performers refused to speak to Ade at the lunch tents, and men made unfortunate assumptions about her availability—but in general Ade’s horizons expanded rather than shrank. She found herself surrounded by a bustling underworld of men and women who had each fallen in their own ways through drink or vice or passion or the mere colors of their skin. It was almost like finding a door within her very own world.
Frank reports a few weeks of contentment, rattling up and down the eastern United States in the blue-and-white painted cars of the Rocky Mountain show, but then Ade began to grow restless. Frank told her stories to distract her.
“Red Cloud, I said, now, have I ever told you about him? I swear I never met a woman more in love with a good story.” Frank told her about the valiant young Lakota chief who brought a new and terrible hell to the U.S. Army and the Powder River garrisons. He told her about the chief’s uncanny ability to foresee the outcomes of battles using a handful of carved bones. “Now, he never would say where he got those bones, but there were rumors that he’d disappeared for a year as a boy, and returned carrying a bag of bones from some other place.”
“Where did he disappear to?” Ade asked, and Frank recalled that her eyes had grown round and black as new moons.
“Somewhere up the North Platte River, I guess. Wherever it was, maybe he went back there, because he disappeared after they found gold in the Black Hills and broke the treaty. Heartbroke, I guess.”
Ade was gone before dawn. She left a note, which Mr. True declined to share but which he still possesses, and the oversized boots that fit Frank better anyway. Mr. True never saw or heard from her again.
If there was a door someplace on the North Platte, Nebraska, I never found it. The town when I found it was brutally poor, wind-scourged, bitter. An old man in a dingy barroom told me flatly that I ought to leave and not return, because if there was any such place it certainly didn’t belong to me, and he couldn’t see that the Oglala Lakota had ever come to any good showing off their secrets to strangers. I left town the following morning.
This was merely one of dozens of doors Ade discovered during her hungry years. Included below is a partial list of those that have been confirmed by this author:
In 1889 Ade was on Prince Edward Island working for an aged potato farmer in pursuit of something she called “silky stories,” which were probably selkies. The farmer told her about a long-dead neighbor who found a young woman down by the sea caves. The woman’s eyes were set oddly far apart, oily black, and she didn’t speak a word of any human language. Ade spent the following days exploring the coastal caves herself, until one afternoon she failed to return. The poor potato farmer was convinced she’d drowned, until she reappeared eight days later smelling of cool, secret oceans.
In 1890 Ade was working on a steamer weaving its way through the Bahamas like a drunken seagull, when she apparently heard stories about Toussaint Louverture’s rebellion and the way his troops simply melted into the highlands and disappeared, almost like magic. The shipping routes at that time curved around Haiti as if it had the plague, so Ade abandoned her post on the steamer and bribed a fisherman to take her from Matthew Town to the wrinkled green coast of Haiti.
She found Toussaint’s door after weeks of stumbling along the mud-slicked logging trails of the highlands. It was a long tunnel, tangled in the roots of a gnarled acacia tree. She never described what she found on the other side, and we may never know now: the acreage was purchased, logged, and converted to sugar production several years later.
In the same year she followed stories of ice-eyed monsters whose gaze could turn unwary persons to stone and ended up in a tiny, forgotten church in Greece. There she found a door (black, frost-limned) and went through it. She discovered a wind-torn, brutally cold world on the other side, which she would have happily abandoned except that she was immediately set upon by a band of wild, pale folk dressed in animal skins. As she later reported, they stole everything she owned “down to her underthings,” shouted at her for a while, then dragged her before their chieftainess, who did not shout but merely fixed her gaze on Ade and whispered to her.
“And I could almost understand her, my hand to God. She was telling me how I ought to join their tribe, fight their enemies, add wealth to their coffers, et cetera. I swear I almost did. Something about those eyes—light-colored, powerful cold. But in the end I declined.” Ade did not elaborate on the consequences of her refusal, but Greek locals report seeing a wild-eyed American woman wandering the streets with nothing but a fur cloak, mild frostbite, and a rather vicious-looking spear. (My own experience with this particular door will be recounted at a later date.)
In 1891 Ade discovered a tiled archway in the shadows of the Grand Bazaar of Istanbul, and returned with great golden disks she claimed were dragon scales. She visited Santiago and the Falklands, contracted malaria in Léopoldville, and disappeared for several months in the northeast corner of Maine. She accumulated the dust of other worlds on her skin like ten thousand perfumes, and left constellations of wistful men and impossible tales in her wake.
