The Ghost of the Mary Celeste

A PSYCHIC’S CONFESSION

My last interview with Violet Petra took place in the lounge of a small, barely respectable Philadelphia hotel in November 1894. She had sent me a message at my newspaper office asking if I would be willing to see her, as she had something to discuss with me, which she could only do in person. My curiosity was aroused, as it always was by Violet, and I replied that I would meet her the following afternoon.

The desk clerk, a pallid, lifeless individual, repeated my name as if it were a puzzle he hadn’t the energy to solve. He then ordered a gloomy-looking boy of twelve or so to run up the dim, thinly carpeted stairs to advise Miss Petra of my presence in the hotel. I wandered into the lounge, where I assumed our interview would take place.

After half an hour of waiting, and having examined the meager collection of books on the shelf over the writing table, I accosted the boy, who had returned to lurk sullenly near the front desk, and ordered tea. He informed me that tea had to be transported from the shop two doors down and I must expect an extra charge for the delivery. “Very well,” I said. “I’d like a pot and two cups, milk, and if there’s brown bread to be had—”

“There isn’t,” interrupted the boy.

“Well, milk and sugar at least.”

“You’re wanting a full service,” he proclaimed, which brought up the head of the somnolent desk clerk, who slid from behind the counter literally wringing his hands. “Be assured, madam,” he cajoled me. “We can provide anything you’d like, including …”—here he rapped the boy sharply on the shoulder—“brown bread, with, I may add, an excellent comfiture of wild strawberries.”

“That sounds very fine,” I said. “I’ll expect it in the lounge.” Which refuge I reclaimed, leaving them to muddle out a scheme for the provision of an “excellent comfiture.”

The newspaper I discovered on the sideboard was a scurrilous rag no person of decency would be caught reading, with the additional noninducement of being two days old. I heard the boy banging out the front door, the desk clerk retreated to his domain behind the counter, and a gloomy stillness fell upon the scene. I pulled a small table in place between a pair of threadbare chairs, took my seat, removed my gloves, and resigned myself to waiting for Violet to make her appearance. We were close in age, both in our fifth decade, and I hadn’t seen her in ten years. But she hasn’t changed, I thought. She still made everyone wait.

I’d had my tea, read the competition, and been stared at secretively for several minutes by a shabbily dressed former gentleman who came in and dashed off a letter at the writing desk. I amused myself with imagining who might be the recipient of his urgent message: a potential employer, a disillusioned wife, a wealthy relative, a friend who cared for him before his fall from grace? He went out and I finished off my bread. At last I heard a step on the stair, and in the next moment Violet stood leaning against the doorsill, holding a small brown parcel against her skirt. “I knew you’d come,” she said.

I hadn’t seen her in ten years, but this echo of her first words to me on that long-ago morning when she opened her hotel room door and welcomed me so confidently into her mad little world made me smile. I had no idea how she’d passed the intervening decade, but my own life had not been unrewarding. I’d carved my little niche in the profession I love; I worked with men and women who admired me and whom I admired. I still lived in a rooming house, but it was a well-kept, bright, and airy house in a respectable street, and my comfortable sitting room was adequately heated in winter and in summer the long windows looked out on a flower garden that perfumed the air.

Violet took a step into the lounge and paused, resting her hand on the edge of a table. The step was unsteady, but she gathered herself with a stiff, determined smile and made the rest of the journey to the chair facing mine without incident. I glanced at the clock over the mantel — it was three fifteen and she was evidently either very late from bed or early to the bottle. “I’m afraid the tea has gone cold,” I said. “Shall I send for a fresh pot?”

“Tea?” she said, sliding into the confines of the chair and cradling the package in her lap. “I didn’t think they served it here.”

“They send out for it,” I said.

Her eyes, after trailing over the china service, the crumb-strewn plate, and the open jam pot, settled on me. “You’re such a resourceful person, Phoebe,” she observed. “I’d forgotten that.”

I ignored this empty flattery. “You’re looking well,” I said.

Which was true. In spite of her muddled entrance, she was still a lovely woman. She’d changed her style from flowing to fitted and it suited her; her figure was lithe, her back straight. Her elegant long neck was exposed at the nape by an upsweep of her black hair, which cascaded in gay ringlets over her forehead. She didn’t, as I knew I did, look her age.

“You haven’t changed,” she said.

She meant my style, I thought. My everlasting skirt and blouse. “I’m still the same,” I said. “But how are you? How long have you been staying here?”

“Can you believe it?” she said, casting a horrified eye over the furnishings of the room. “It’s even more dismal upstairs.”

“It’s not so bad,” I lied.

“I’ve been here a month, but thank God, I’m leaving on Friday. That’s why I asked you to come.”

“You’re leaving Philadelphia?”

“I’m being investigated,” she announced, as if the prospect delighted her.

“Investigated?” I said.

“They try to figure out exactly how I do what I do. They bring in different people and invite me to different rooms. They took me to a graveyard one night; that was horrific. There’s a secretary who copies down every word I say and she types it all up and they send it around to their colleagues.”

“Who are they?”

“They call themselves the Society for Psychical Research. They’re mostly doctors.” She paused, gauging my response to this sudden outpouring.

“Did Mr. Babin tell them about you?”

“Oh no. Jeremiah and I parted company several years ago, just after the Fox sisters’ fiasco. I think that business killed poor Virginia, or at least it drove her to stronger medication and that killed her. Jeremiah remarried a young woman, quite an heiress too. They have a little son now. But he didn’t desert me. He was kind enough to introduce me to Mrs. Bitters, very aptly named as it turned out, whose daughter had died in childbirth. After that there were several others — I won’t bore you — and then Dr. Bishop got wind of me and persuaded me to be a subject for the Society. They’re very keen on me.”

“And have they figured you out?”

“Oh, they’ve given up on that,” she said. “Now I think they’re just trying to kill me.” She made this surprising statement with an air of amused indulgence; wasn’t it silly what she had to put up with. Her eyes sought mine, then darted away. There was something hectic about her, something false. I said nothing, which forced her to lurch on. “You’ll never guess who’s taken an interest, a very great interest, I must say.”

“Someone I know?”

“Someone you’ve heard of,” she said gaily. “Someone everyone’s heard of.”

“Who could that be? The president?” I asked.

“It’s Dr. Arthur Conan Doyle.”

I stared at her. It occurred to me that she’d been shut up in the dismal hotel so long she’d lost touch with reality. “The author?” I said. Even as I spoke, I recalled that this gentleman had passed through our city in the last week — the papers were full of his American tour, and of his audiences’ insistence that he bring back his famous detective, Sherlock Holmes, from the grave. “You’ve seen him?” I asked gently.

“He’s one of them,” she said. “One of their Society in England. He’s a charming man. Very large and talkative, not particularly observant, which is surprising, and full of enthusiasms. He thinks America and Britain should reunite under one flag.”

“I’ve read that,” I said. “The press is having fun with it.”

“You should interview him,” she suggested.

“Authors aren’t really in my line,” I said. She gave me a blank, uncomprehending look. “You do know Conan Doyle wrote that story you were so upset about at Lake Pleasant.”

“What story?”

“The one about the ship. The Mary Celeste.”

Her eyes widened. She didn’t know.

“It was in a collection of his. I read it a few years ago. I thought of you when I found it.”

“I didn’t see it,” she said. “I’ve read some of his Holmes stories; they pass the time. And I looked over The White Company when I learned I would be meeting him.” She paused, looking vexed. “So he wrote that story?”

“Too bad you didn’t know. You could have upbraided him.”

“All that seems so long ago,” she said. “I’d forgotten about it.”

“Then you forgive him.”

“I’ll have to,” she said. “He’s sending me to London.”

“London!” I said.

“He believes his friends at the Society there should have a look at me.”

“Do you want to go?”

She pushed out her lower lip, looking peevish. “I may as well go,” she said. “I’ve pretty much exhausted the possibilities here.” I studied her without speaking. Her mood had changed, the lighthearted bravado dropping away like a mask. “I don’t want to go,” she continued. “But I don’t have a choice.”

“Surely you can decline the invitation.”

“And do what?” she replied sharply. “Learn to type? I’m forty-five years old.”

This was an irrefutable assertion. She stood up, laying her package on a side table, and paced the length of the room. She was steady on her feet; consternation had sobered her. At the door she stopped, looking out at the desk clerk, who was occupied in sorting a stack of mail. “They’re killing me,” she repeated.

“You exaggerate,” I said.

“It’s not just them,” she said. “It’s that I find …” She sighed, touched her fingers to her forehead, and wandered back to her chair, searching for what “it” was. “It’s getting more and more difficult for me to …” Again she paused, frowning at me, recalling to whom she was speaking. “Make contact,” she concluded.

“The spirits have abandoned you.”

She nodded gravely. “That’s a good way of putting it. That’s how it feels.”

“You may find a whole new cast of them in Britain,” I suggested facetiously. “It’s full of ghosts, I hear.”

She considered this absurd proposition. “That could be,” she said. “But I don’t think it’s them. I think it’s me.”

“Perhaps you’ve only come to your senses at last,” I said.

She smiled. “I wish it were that simple.”

“I don’t see why it can’t be simple.”

She bristled. “Could you just give up what you do, what you’ve done for so long now, what you know you do as well or better than most? What people want and need you to do?”

“It’s different,” I said. “I’m paid for a service. I’m not a captive of my audience. My mission is to search out and report the truth.”

She shrugged. “Really? Have you had much luck with that?”

I laughed. I’d forgotten her aptitude for puncturing hot-air balloons. “Well, I try,” I said.

“I know you do,” she replied. “That’s why I admire you. Because most people, you know, don’t even try. They just make it up.”

“And are you most people?”

This question appealed to her. “I didn’t think I was,” she said. “I believed what people told me, that I was specially placed, that I have a gift. And I’ve always had these — I don’t know what they are — these lapses, when I feel I’m both here and not here, that there’s a presence. The sense of a presence.” She paused, and her eyes rested on the teapot. “Is there any left in that?”

“There is,” I said. “But it’s gone cold.”

“I don’t care,” she said, taking up a cup and filling it with the lukewarm brew. She sipped it, savoring it as if it were a rare vintage. “It’s very good,” she said.

I cleaved to our subject. “And do you no longer have these lapses?”

“I think it’s these awful investigators,” she said. “You should see how they look at me. They’re supposed to be skeptical, but they practically drool over me. And that wretched girl with her big teeth copying everything down.”

“It sounds intimidating.”

“Well,” she said, tempering her anger. “I suppose it’s no more than I deserve.”

“Why do you say that?”

But Violet ignored the matter of her just deserts. “I don’t know why they call it a gift,” she said. “It’s more of a curse. Everyone I meet knows one thing about me, and that’s all they want to know.”

“That you can talk to ghosts.”

She drained the cup and set it roughly back in the saucer. “I wish you wouldn’t use that word!”

“What difference does it make what you call people who aren’t there?”

“That’s just it. I don’t know if they’re there or not anymore.”

“You don’t hear them.”

She drew her head back, covering her mouth with her fingers and moving her chin slowly from side to side, struggling against the tears that moistened her eyes.

“Did you ever hear them?”

She continued her struggle, slowly shaking her head in the negative, while the tears overflowed. I extracted my handkerchief from my skirt pocket and passed it to her. “Thank you,” she blurted, and pressed the linen over her eyes, succumbing to a wave of racking sobs.

For a few minutes Violet wept while I watched. I confess I’ve seldom experienced such a profound sense of companionship. I didn’t try to comfort her, nor did she seek reassurance; she just wanted to cry. I had the unexpected realization that I liked her. We were two middle-aged women with not much in common, but we had arrived, through our several conversations, which didn’t total more than a few hours over ten years, at a surprisingly resilient bond. She had drifted into her present life, or been herded into it, whereas I had manufactured mine by a concentrated effort of the will, wresting a career from those who would have been equally content to see me fail as succeed. She envied me my freedom, and I didn’t blame her for that, she was right to envy it. But I knew I had succeeded only because I had found myself at an early age in the position she was in now, when she had neither the youth nor the energy to change it. I’d become what I was because I had had no choice.

An enormous patience settled over me. I could have sat there forever, waiting for Violet to stop weeping and get back to our talk. I even fancied having a drink with her — I knew her to be amusingly caustic when her tongue was loosened by alcohol — and I didn’t doubt there was a bottle of something in her room. I glanced up to see the desk clerk craning his neck over the counter, his face cramped with anxiety. He could see me sitting there peacefully, and he could hear Violet’s disconsolate sobbing, but he couldn’t see her. I smiled at him and he popped back into his cubicle lest I make some impetuous demand.

We were safe there for the time being, I thought, in that seedy lounge with the empty cups and plates, the stained carpet and rachitic furniture; no one would bother us. I had no sense of triumph over Violet, though surely she had just made a damning confession. Instead I felt protective and kindly toward her. That she’d been used, and been willing to be used, by insane gentlemen in frock coats and top hats and wealthy ladies as well — they’d joined the circus with a good will — didn’t excuse her, but it mitigated her guilt. For my part, I absolved her in my heart, and this cheered me considerably. I took up the spoon and served myself a glistening lump of the sweet jam. As the tears were abating, Violet lowered the handkerchief and watched me eat the jam with the expression of a convalescent who has discovered that life is proceeding without her participation. She swabbed her eyes one last time, blew her nose as discreetly as possible, folded the handkerchief, then balled it in her hand. “I’ll wash this and return it to you,” she said.

“Keep it,” I said.

She folded the cloth again and slipped it into her sleeve. “I will,” she said. “I’d like to have something of yours.”

This struck me as enormously sad, and I wished I had more to offer her. The thought of Violet going out, unsure and alone, to confront the British investigators with no more protection than a handkerchief might afford her unsettled me. I was no clairvoyant, but I foresaw more tears in her future. “Did you tell Dr. Doyle about these troubles you’re having?”

“We hardly spoke.” She batted the air with the back of her hand as if to shoo away an insect. “And now he’s gone. He’s in Rochester or Buffalo, or someplace up there. He just stopped in long enough to change my life. They made the arrangements, Dr. Bishop and the London fellow; Myers is his name. I don’t think anyone ever asked me if I wanted to go.”

“How presumptuous,” I said.

The slow smile she sent me was dry with irony; she was herself again. “You don’t see it as a grand opportunity?”

“I do not.”

“I’m wondering what will become of me when they tire of me.”

“They can’t just dump you out on the street,” I assured her, though I knew nothing about what they could do. “You’re an American citizen.”

“That’s true,” she agreed.

“When do you sail?”

“On Sunday. I go up to New York on Friday, then spend two nights with a Spiritualist family who live in Brooklyn.”

“So, you’re packing.”

“Well, that doesn’t take long.” She tapped the parcel she’d left on the table. “But it’s the reason I wrote to you. I have something I don’t want to take with me, something not mine, really, and I want to return it to the rightful owner.”

“Did you steal it?”

“Not exactly.”

“What is it?”

“It’s just a book,” she said. “I have a compunction about taking it with me. It’s not valuable in itself, though there is someone for whom it has great value. If anything happened to me, I fear it would be thrown away.”

“You want me to deliver it to that person.”

“I do. The problem is, I don’t know where he is.”

“I see,” I said. “You want me to play at being a detective.”

“I thought you’d be rather good at that. You’re always investigating things.”

The idea amused me. “I have occasionally entertained the idea that if I couldn’t make my living as a journalist, I might offer my services to Pinkerton’s.”

“That’s perfect. I believe you could do it. You should do it. Phoebe Grant, Pinkerton Detective. You’d be a great success.”

“Detectives are actually a pretty unpleasant lot,” I said. “And they mostly follow rich men’s wives about in the rain.”

“You always take such a dim view of everything,” she complained.

“I’m a realist,” I said. “But I’m willing to carry out your mission, if I can. Who is the missing owner?”

Again she fingered the package, looking embarrassed, perhaps by the notion that she was sending me on a “mission.” “I could pay you a little for your trouble,” she said.

“Does Mr. Sherlock Holmes take payment for the opportunity to solve an interesting case?” I protested. “Never. Nor shall I.”

“Thank you,” she said, lifting the package and passing it to me. I read the name — Arthur Briggs — printed across the top in large square letters. “And who is Arthur Briggs?” I asked.

“He’s Sarah Briggs’s son,” she said. “He was a boy when his parents disappeared.”

The name surfaced in my memory. “From the Mary Celeste.”

“That’s right. I’ve had this book all these years. It was his mother’s, so by rights, it should be his.”

“Does he know of its existence?”

“He doesn’t.”

“And you know nothing of his present whereabouts.”

“I know the Briggs family — what was left of it — moved from Marion some years ago. I suspect they didn’t go far.”

“So, I’ll begin in Marion. That’s in Massachusetts, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” she said. “But there’s no hurry; there’s nothing of an urgent nature in the book. I know you’re very busy.”

“Not at all,” I said. “I’m thoroughly on the case. I’ll begin by contacting the postal authorities.”

“You’re so professional,” she said.

“Naturally,” I assured her, closely scrutinizing the parcel in my hands. “I think I know where this paper was manufactured. It’s a factory near Latham, New York; they get their stock from Alabama. I observe that this knot was not tied by anyone in the nautical line. Now for the string. The string, Miss Petra, the string is fascinating.”

“How funny,” Violet laughed. “Do you like those stories?”

“Of course. They’re clever and amusing. Don’t you like them?”

“I think there’s something mean about them.”

“Really? And did you detect something mean about the author?”

“Not at all. He’s young and very full of himself — well, why shouldn’t he be. There’s something sad about him though. His manner is hearty and he likes to laugh. He’s all beefy and overheated, excitable, like a big child. He’s putting on a good show, but there’s something wounded about him. He’s nothing at all like his famous detective.”

“Will you meet him again when you get to London?”

Her jaw clenched and she touched two fingers to her forehead, as if warding off some pulse of pain. “If I get to London.”

“Now who’s taking a dim view?”

Her mood had darkened again and she ignored my chiding. “I have a terror of the sea,” she said. “It has taken everyone I loved.”

“You mean the Briggs family.”

“I think of them so often now. I was too young to know what a paradise we were in. I felt no one understood me; that I was trapped and must escape. And then they were all gone, just gone. They sailed away …” She lifted her hand, looking up as if she saw a ship in the air. The impression was so strong that I seemed to hear the sound of the oceanic whisper that mysteriously calls from the convoluted depths of seashells, and an image of a ship’s sharp prow slicing through dark water and of enormous wind-filled sails developed in my mind’s eye. It occurred to me that Violet could have been an actress — she had the ability to make her audience see what she saw.

“They sailed away,” she said again. Then she coughed, clearing away the apparition. “And I was left on the shore in this charade of a life.”

I said nothing, reluctant to leave the spell of that marvelous vessel, plowing the waves, sailing into the unknown.

“You remind me of her,” Violet said.

This brought me round. “Of Sarah Briggs?”

She nodded.

“Was she tall?”

“No.” She scrutinized me for the point of comparison. “You don’t look like her; it’s something in your manner.”

“The way I talk?”

“Perhaps it’s only that you don’t entirely approve of me.”

“I don’t disapprove of you,” I lied.

“Of course you do,” she said. “How could you not? I’m a nonentity. I do nothing. I create nothing. I’m a parasite feeding on the blood of fools who haven’t the sense to swat me.”

“That’s going too far,” I objected.

“No. It’s true. It’s the truth. I know what I am, though I’m not exactly sure how I got to be what I am.” This conundrum held her attention and she furrowed her brow, her eyes settling on the package in my hands. “But something is changing in me; I can feel it. I have the sense that even I may have my little moment of courage.”

“I hope you will,” I said.

“Do you?” she replied. “The idea terrifies me.”