Confessions of Madame Psyche. Dorothy Bryant

and colors, all charged without question. She discarded everything she was wearing, putting on some of the clothes, ordering the others packed in boxes. Now indeed she was Mrs. Newland in a conservative brown suit with a soft green hat that matched her lightly veiled eyes.

      Then she turned to the problem of dressing me. I was at an awkward age, almost out of childhood, my arms and legs growing longer but my chest still flat, my waist undefined. I had replaced my out-grown cotton dresses with donated ones. The week before our shopping trip I had tried on one of my mother’s old dresses but it was already too small. I had almost gained my full adult height, not very tall, but taller than my mother had been.

      Erika bought me two black skirts and three plain white shirtwaists, suitable, the shop woman agreed, for any occasion at which a respectable young girl should appear. Reluctantly I tried on several of the flat, round lids considered suitable hats for girls in those days, but Erika had to agree I looked ridiculous and let me go bare-headed.

      Loaded with parcels, we started for home, taking another street car. down Van Ness, then out Mission, transferring at Sixteenth. Erika no longer pointed at the blackened squares to tell me what buildings had perished. She seemed quite cheerful, sitting erect, facing the opposite seat where she had piled our packages, occasionally brushing the sleeve of her new jacket with great pleasure. As we crossed the fire line at Howard Street, suddenly out of the ruined area, we looked out the window at little houses with their vegetable gardens beside the Mission District foundries and mills. The street-car stopped for a freight train whose tracks ended at the cork factory at the foot of Potrero Hill.

      “Let’s see, we transfer again at Third, I think.” Erika peered out the window again, squinted, then reached into her purse and pulled out a pair of metal-rimmed, round spectacles. When she put them on, her face changed completely. Without the glasses, it had been composed for the world to look upon and admire. With the glasses her eyes became more active, restless, avid, less thoughtful, more cunning. From then on she wore her glasses more often than not.

      Erika and I took our streetcar rides every week, sometimes shopping, sometimes meeting a gentleman for lunch in a restaurant hastily opened in a house on the edge of the burned district. We even lunched at the Fairmont Hotel when it finally opened on the first anniversary of the quake. These gentlemen listened to Erika, then looked at their plates and talked about their grave losses in the quake. We never saw any of them more than once. I began to dread these lunches as events which put her into a terrible temper as soon as the gentleman had gone and she had put her glasses back on. I was glad when there were no more elegant lunches and no more gentlemen.

      I continued to work at Signora Renata’s house three nights a week. The long hours Erika spent teaching me showed results. When at a loss for answers to questions, I could babble a few lines from Pushkin in Russian, a Latin chant, or a simple message in the language of the client, who was suitably impressed.

      But inevitably, as recovery accelerated, people began to leave Hunters Point. First to go were the soldiers (who had done more to destroy order than to keep it), then the prosperous families, then the single men. One by one the tents and campsites disappeared as people moved back to their homes or to new homes in other towns where they found work. By late 1907 those who were left were, like the usual population of Butchertown, poor families. Attendance at seances began to fall off, and soon Signora Renata could no longer charge an admission fee, but only take shrinking contributions.

      “It isn’t that people don’t want to see May. Her reputation is spreading!” I would hear Erika’s voice downstairs late at night after I was in bed, and I could imagine Father and Sophie listening respectfully as they always did now. “That woman who came in a carriage last week, do you know who she was? Her husband is one of the richest men in the City. But he’s not going to have her driven out to this godforsaken place every week!”

      Soon after that speech, Erika announced that she was moving with me to a furnished house on Haight Street just above Market. Sophie could come along to keep house for us. Father could come too if he promised to keep his drinking under control; it wasn’t a bad idea to have a man in the house. “Here, sign,” she said to Sophie. She was selling the house at Hunters Point for eight hundred dollars, “More than we’d ever get for this shack if it weren’t for the housing shortage. Better get it now.” How she managed to get the house on Haight was a mystery. Probably one of the gentlemen had come through after all.

      I ran to tell Miss Harrington, who took the news solemnly, sitting me down opposite her in the little library, taking my hand. “Listen to me, Mei-li, and try to remember what I say. Leave Butchertown, yes. Go out into a larger world. But be sure it is larger. You are still a child and decisions are being made for you. In a few years, you can make the decisions. You have great gifts. Promise me you will keep asking yourself for the true answer to how you should use your gifts.”

      I promised, knowing that I was lying, knowing that Miss Harrington knew I was lying. I ran from the library, ran from any thought, any memory of Miss Harrington. I was moving into the Real City where, Erika said, I would become rich and famous. I didn’t want to think about true answers or even true questions. Thinking only uncovered the desperate emptiness which had lain at the bottom of thought even before my mother’s death. Plotting and scheming to fool people and become rich and famous—what-ever that meant-created an excitement which covered the emptiness.

      Our new home seemed an almost unbearably exciting location. We were only two blocks from Market Street, which sparkled and rumbled with trolleys and even an occasional motor car. Haight Street was a double line of two- and three-story houses rising to the northwest, all touching, no space between, windows like huge eyes staring straight into each other across paved streets where wagons rattled and people walked and children played all day long. Actually, by today’s standards, it was a quiet street, but compared to the rural spaces of Hunters Point, it seemed the center of a teeming urban world.

      The house on Haight Street was actually a pair of narrow flats above what had been a shoe repair shop, empty since the quake. The tiny flat above the store had a square front parlor, kitchen, bedroom and bath. Up another steep stairway was a similar narrow flat. The building—badly built on a brick foundation—had suffered from the quake. Wide cracks opened floors, ceilings, walls. Broken windows were boarded up. But the plumbing worked, and some furniture remained undamaged except for being covered with plaster and dust. The upstairs flat was damaged by rain that had come in through unrepaired cracks in the roof. Erika explained that we had use of the house for three years in exchange for making repairs. She had hired a carpenter, but we would all have to work along with him. We would live in the upper flat, hold seances in the lower flat.

      Father suggested renting out the shop, but Erika refused because her plans for repair included certain alterations. Both the floor and ceiling of the seance room were repaired with openings to the shop below and the flat abqve. A skillful carpenter installed trap doors which were almost invisible. He also altered the back wall of a closet in the seance room so that it would open orito a ladder which went up a lightwell to a window of the flat above. The floor of the closet became a cleverly fitted trap door with a ladder descending to the shop below. He and Erika experimented with tiny levers worked into the woodwork or under the mantelpiece of the false fireplace and attached to metal or wooden tubes which, when the lever was tripped, made sounds echo through the walls. Finally he built a table to Erika’s specifications with an underside full of levers and compartments. At the touch of one concealed lever, the center of the table would expel the contents of the central compartment, closing quickly so that, in the dark, with the attention of sitters directed elsewhere, whatever popped out would seem to have appeared from nowhere.

      This table, along with replacement of the front windows, nearly exhausted our funds. We had barely enough to buy paint and drapes to make the parlor presentable for clients. Everything else-our broken kitchen stove upstairs, even the leaks in the roof-would have to wait. We slept the first winter on the floor among buckets set to catch the rain. Later we were able to make our living quarters more comfortable. One modern convenience we never added was electricity, Erika maintaining that no one should be able to suddenly switch on a bright light during a spirit visitation.

      Father was of no use in all this work. Now that he was living in town again,