Confessions of Madame Psyche. Dorothy Bryant

Then she hurried everyone out, saying she feared for my health if I did not have absolute quiet and rest. The grateful couple embraced, the woman half-fainting in her husband’s arms as they left vowing to come back tomorrow night.

      Maisie left last, handing the ring to Erika and taking the money Erika handed to her. “You made those two people real happy,” Maisie said to me, as if to calm any pangs of guilt I felt about tricking such helplessly vulnerable people. The guilt I felt was far less than my relief at having again covered a failed trick by inventing another. And I felt the brief, intoxicating thrill of an actor who has held an audience completely in her power.

      The next night Ned’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Robertson, came again. Erika stopped them at the door, pretending that we were “already full,” but promising them reserved places for the next night. It became her policy that no one be allowed to come every night, lest they become bored by the repetition and begin to look too closely at what was happening. Mr. and Mrs. Robertson did become regular attenders, coming faithfully for the next six years and eventually making possible the advances in my dubious career.

      Sophie was the only person allowed to attend every sitting, night after night. After her fiasco at creating psychic effects, Erika decided that the best use of Sophie was as a sitter, a consistently enthralled believer whose credulity was catching. Her other use was as an informant. People came into her flower shop to ask questions about me, and ended up telling the wide-eyed Sophie all about their griefs, hopes, and troubles. Usually, by the time they appeared at a sitting, I knew all about them from Sophie’s chattering while she made dinner. She never saw this as cheating. I think she considered it giving me a head start so as to make the most of the hour during which I exercised my “powers.”

      Over the next three years, while the City was frantically rebuilding, we were just as frantically building my skills. My lessons in writing—I soon wrote in a dozen distinctive hands—continued every morning along with the readings in ancient history and the memorization of line after line of poetry. But that was the least of the work.

      Erika took me to see a man named Victor who lived on Eddy Street near Market in a hotel room stuffed with theatrical apparatus. Victor had been a stage magician. He taught me sleight-of-hand tricks which he said I must practice constantly, “whenever you have a minute. You know, the devil finds work for idle hands, and here’s some of the devil’s work,” he laughed. “Now try it again.” He taught me to palm small items or to slip things into and out of sleeves. He sent us to another man who sold “occult artists’ gear” out of a similar hotel room.

      From the second man we bought steel-tipped shoes with a little spring mechanism in the toe. I learned to snap this spring with my big toe, causing a resounding rap to echo through an object in contact with the shoes, which looked almost normal. In those days of long dresses and feminine modesty, no one would have dared to pull my skirt back to examine even my foot.

      This man supplied us with wire, thread, and gauzy cheesecloth. With practice, a gauze “spirit” could be “materialized” on wires which made the spirit dance a bit in air before dematerializing up my sleeve. He changed my wardrobe to black dresses, less visible in the dark, with full sleeves and deep pockets could hold any number of things. “Darkness and faith,” were our allies, he said. “Darkness and faith, ladies.” He sold us fortune cards, astrology charts, and “the latest thing, ladies,” a crystal ball. “Better take a Ouija board too,” he insisted. “Best to know a little about all these things, cater to the taste of all clients.”

      That was Erika’s theory too. She had set herself to learn every-thing that mediums did and to teach me to do it better. “You’ve got to be the best. There’s a lot of competition.”

      On weekends, when we did not hold sittings, she took me to the sittings of other mediums to study their techniques. We found them all below the level of Signora Renata, whom we had already left in the dust. But one of them repaid us for all our wasted time by telling us about “the blue book.”

      It was not a book at all, but a series of file cards which were mailed periodically to subscribers. Each card carried the name of a person who frequented mediums and psychics, with pertinent details about his or her life and interests. Subscribers were expected to furnish information about their clients, especially those who did much traveling. The fee went to a man—formerly a medium—who collected, printed, and mailed the information throughout the world. Therefore it was possible for someone to consult a medium in New York, then travel to San Francisco and find psychic messages miraculously confirmed by a medium three thousand miles away. This was an expensive service and not one we were sure we could make much use of, but Erika decided to try it.

      Maisie and another girl, Rebecca, were frequent helpers. Both girls were actresses who augmented their small income as prostitutes. They were quick, clever, pretty and absolutely loyal to Erika. They came often to dinner, where their part in the seance was planned, and they left immediately after the seance to carry on their other work. Occasionally, when they got parts in a play or musical, we would not see them for weeks.

      They were so clever with disguises that Erika often used them as materialized spirits, sometimes as white-veiled presences that talked as they walked around the room, sometimes costumed as deceased mothers or husbands or daughters. Maisie, who was tall and had a deep voice, was quite good in the male parts, while Rebecca, a tiny girl, did children very well. On some nights the two girls did five or six roles each, rushing up and down the closet ladder for quick costume changes while I lay back in the trance which supposedly materialized them. I enjoyed these nights because they were so entertaining. They enjoyed themselves too, saying that they were never given such an interesting range of roles when they appeared on stage.

      Then Erika discovered spirit photography, the taking of a photograph during a seance. After Erika took a photo, she would work in the darkroom she had installed in a closet at the back of Sophie’s flower shop. By making a double exposure with a shot of Maisie or Rebecca, or sometimes with an old picture of a client’s deceased relative, she would produce a fuzzy image of the “spirit” attending our seance.

      The spirit photos were especially convincing to men, who considered themselves, usually, to be more skeptical clients. The camera was assumed to be far more objective than it actually was. “The camera does not lie,” was a saying believed by millions of people who knew nothing about the variables possible in the processing of photographs. Even my mistakes in the darkroom when I assisted Erika resulted in smudged shapes or whitened areas which clients accepted as auras, astral bodies, or dematerializing spirits who I said had been hovering in the dark.

      Our success rested on the fact that most of the people who came to seances were in terror at the prospect of their own death or in deep grief and guilt because of the death of someone close to them. They would grasp at any “proof” that the dead went on living in something like their living form. Their will to believe was stronger than any of our talents for creating illusions. They would identify a smudge on a photo as indubitably the face of their mother. Maisie in a topcoat was a beloved brother. The messages they led me to were miracles, especially messages of forgiveness, which I gave freely. I had only to mention the presence of a spirit for a sitter to declare she felt a cold breeze or the touch of a ghostly hand, or even that she saw the outline of a presence I could sketch in with whatever details I chose from her unconscious prompting. What was even stranger to me was that clients often brought friends about whom they first told Erika a great deal, becoming accomplices in deception, as if they would go to any lengths to support their own faith.

      Their credulity did not justify what I did, nor did the fact that I made some of them temporarily happy. It is not true that children have no moral sense. I knew then, as well as I know now, that it was wrong to prey on credulity for profit. At the time my main concern, like Erika’s, was that we seemed to clear so little profit.

      There were so many expenses. Even rent free, the house cost us money in repairs and upkeep. Subscribing to the “blue book” and other psychic publications cost money. So did the costumes, props, wages for Rebecca and Maisie, the camera, the dark-room equipment. Although we charged a high price for a spirit photograph, we could not cheapen the value of this product by making many. There was even an annual license fee for mediums, which