When she finally stopped talking, I opened my eyes and looked into hers. There was something like respect in them. She gave me a rough smile, another long look, then asked, “Tipiace un cookie?” I nodded. That was what I had come for. She went to the kitchen and returned with a small plate of little white mounds. “Ossi di morti,” she said, bones of the dead, sugary white chunks hard enough to break a tooth. “La mezza cina, she have the power, ma too shy. Don’t be nervosa. Come back con Sophie. More cookies, eh?”
After that I went to Signora Renata’s house at least three evenings a week with Sophie, and after the first night there were always at least three or four other people there. I could hardly sit still for ten minutes, let alone for a full hour of boring “phenomena.” Signora Renata sensed my restlessness and began slipping bits of candy and cookies into my pockets at the beginning of the evening, as well as producing delicious almond cookies at the end.
Signora Renata was a shrewd, talented woman, illiterate but intelligent and quick. She had calculated that I would be a valuable addition to her circle. The young, she told everyone there, were closer to the spirit world, and she hinted that a touch of oriental blood made me even more sensitive. She made her clients, who despised all orientals, respect me, almost. These were people who even despised Signora Renata, feeling that their French or Russian heritage was superior to hers, though nearly all were uneducated immigrants like her.
The group would sit in total darkness around the velvet-covered table waiting for raps much like those I produced at home. Sometimes Signora Renata went behind the flowered drapes and produced “spirit music” or gauzy figures who floated out from the drapes and were always instantly recognized by Sophie or someone else as manifestations of loved ones. These figures often dropped souvenirs, a flower or a scrap of paper with a name on it. Sometimes Signora Renata stayed at the table and went into a trance, her convulsed body invaded by entitites which spoke, shouted, sang, ranted fascinating if incomprehensible sounds usually ending with a clear but boring message, “I’m happy in the other world.” At the end of the sitting a plate of cookies was passed, then left empty on the table. The sitters would plac a few coins on it before they left. It was clear that although Signora had a more regular income than ours, it was not great. She too had her vegetable patch, and I often saw her at the slaughterhouse picking up free entrails just as we did.
After about five months I knew Signora Renata’s entire repertory of psychic effects. Most were obvious tricks dependent on darkness and draperies covering the production of a blast from a spirit trumpet or a rap from the table, which might then wobble or even rise an inch or two. Other effects, like the vivid stories told through her by weird entities she called “controls” or her sudden thrusts into unspoken thoughts of sitters, were less easily explained and more interesting to me. But not very.
One warm evening in June, when the licorice with which Signora Renata had filled my pockets was not enough to placate me, I grew bored and brave enough to entertain myself by playing a trick. It was entirely unpremeditated.
Seven of us sat around the table that night; Sophie, Signora, and I were joined by a couple whose three-year-old child had just died of meningitis, a middle-aged widower, and a woman who hoped Signora Renata could find a lost or stolen pearl brooch. It was hot and stuffy in the pitch black room, and the widower was engaged in an interminable and tedious exchange with Signora’s table raps, which told him, yes, his dead wife entirely approved of his impending remarriage.
“Someone is standing behind you,” I said.
After a brief silence the Signora took over. “Behind who, my child? Tell me, carina.”
“Him,” I said, speaking toward the widower who sat across from me, almost invisible in the darkness. I could hear him shifting on his squeaky chair. The person holding my left hand (we often held hands around the table) dropped it, but Signora Renata, who held my other hand, gave it a little squeeze of encouragement before I defiantly pulled it away from her.
“Is it my wife?” said the widower, his voice apprehensive rather than eager.
I did not know what to answer. The boring evening had suddenly become full of excitement, but also full of danger. These adults were not so simple nor so easy to trick as Sophie. I had started a game I did not know how to play. If I said it was his wife, he might demand that I describe her. “No.”
“Who is it?”
“I … I don’t know.”
Everyone began to speak at once.
“Wait, wait,” said Signora, her voice smooth and low. “Now, piccina, don’t be afraid, I will help you. You others, keep the silence, please, no disturb. You see clear or not so clear?”
“Not so clear.”
“A big person or a little one?”
“A … big one.”
“Man or woman?”
“Man.”
“Ah. Now maybe you tell what he look like.” She went on talking for a moment, giving me time to think. I knew that she knew that I saw nothing at all, that I needed time and coaching to imagine and construct the ghost standing behind the nervous widower. “His clothes. You see clear enough to get color? Like his suit, or shirt or ….”
As she named things, putting before me an array of choices, constructing the ghost for me—so that I need only answer yes or no-I became resistant. I kept answering no … no … no. I needed her help but refused her authority, determined not to let her take over my game. “No clothes.”
There was a gasp of shock all around the table. “Va bene,” murmured Signora, “the spirits come in clothes only for the eyes of who needs clothes, but an innocent child sees in purity, the spirit no in corpo.”
Again I thought Signora was trying to take over, to extricate me from my place of exciting danger. She was moving the talk away from “my ghost.” She even produced a rap or two, irrelevant as they were at that moment, before I interrupted her. “He is tall and naked. There is a strap over his shoulder. It holds a … a quiver full of arrows. On the other shoulder he has a bow. A big long bow.” I was describing the picture of a statue of Eros from the book of mythology Miss Harrington had given me. I was about to describe the wings when the widower screamed and jumped up from his seat.
“He touched me! Don’t let him … stop, lights! Someone light the lamp! Henry, don’t hurt me, I didn’t mean it, please don’t!” The lamps were lit and the widower stared at me in terror. “Where is he now?”
I blinked. “Gone.” I looked deep into his eyes, the way I did whenever I was lying to Sophie. “Gone.”
The man jumped up, threw a dollar onto the table, ran out. I never saw him again. Much later I heard my father say that the widower was suspected of having killed the Indian man for whom his wife had left him. His wife committed suicide. He was never prosecuted for the murder, Indians, like orientals, being hardly considered human. Full of guilt, he had been attending seances. The bow and arrows of my Eros figure had been enough to trigger hysteria even though Henry, his wife’s lover, had been a farm laborer who probably never had held a bow.
Both Sophie and Signora embraced me protectively as the others stared at me. I suspect I looked appropriately pale and confused. Sophie babbled about all the psychic activity I incited at home and kept saying, “At school they all call her Psyche.” Signora kept nodding at me and patting my shoulder, calling me La Psyche. After passing the cookies and leaving the plate to receive coins, she took a coin from the dish and pressed it into my palm as we left, murmuring, “Don’t see too much, carina. The ones you scare away, they no come back.”
That was how I became a regular feature at Signora Renata’s