Confessions of Madame Psyche. Dorothy Bryant

in love with Norman, but only during his absence. When he was with us, talking and laughing at the table, I still found him very handsome and very dear, but close up, a real person, he lost the aura that my imagination whipped up into romantic passion.

      On most days Norman disappeared from noon till dusk, gathering material for his book. On Sundays he took us to a play or a concert, though we never sat together. “The nice thing about the places we used to frequent,” he said to Erika, “was that we didn’t have to worry about race or about rumors reaching my family.” So our best times were those spent around the kitchen table, where I learned about Norman.

      He was the youngest in a Negro family which had been free for at least two generations before the Civil War and was so mixed that most of them looked white. Few had crossed the color line to pass for white, preferring the proud mixed identity of their family and friends. The family had settled in Washington State in the mid eighteen hundreds, building a fortune in lumber and fishing, then founding a newspaper. They now owned a syndicate of twenty such papers and four monthly magazines, some for Negro readership and some general. Norman had been educated in England, then brought home to work as a reporter along with one of his brothers. Another brother worked in circulation. Two sisters wrote for one of the women’s magazines in the syndicate. Norman traveled a great deal on assignments that took him to San Francisco or Mexico City or Paris. It was assumed that eventually he would settle down and take over management of the newspaper chain from. his oldest brother, just as it was assumed that he would marry the woman Erika called Miss Black Society. In one of the funniest sessions we had at the kitchen table, he explained all the social, economic, and racial reasons why he had known from the age of ten (when she was twelve) that she was the only woman he could marry, and that marry her he must.

      “Just like royalty,” said Erika. I gathered that he and Erika had met during one of his first escapes to San Francisco, just after he graduated from college, when he became one of her first customers. What had started as sex for money had turned into a love affair and then cooled to a friendship. I watched the two of them closely, jealously. Erika showed no interest in resuming a sexual relation with Norman or with any man. She was interested only in building my career.

      On the last night before Norman was to return to Washington, we sat up past midnight. Sophie had gone to bed. Erika tried to make me go to bed too, but I refused. “Let’s stay up all night. Let’s stay up till Norman leaves.”

      “But you won’t be fresh for tomorrow night’s sitting.”

      Norman laughed. “You’re a wonder, Erika, a whirlwind of pure ambition!”

      “Lucky for May I am. And you could help, you know.”

      “How?”

      “A story about May in the Examiner.”

      Norman shook his head, no longer smiling. “The only thing I could do on Mei-li would be an exposure.”

      “What do you mean? Hundreds of people believe in her powers. You said yourself that she’s becoming famous.”

      “Yes, and you’d better keep newspapermen away from her. I suspect they’re all ready to descend at any minute. And they’ll tear her to bits if she goes on the way she’s going now.”

      “If she goes on … what do you mean? I see. You call me a wonder, but you think I’m going about this thing the wrong way? What other way is there?”

      “Do you want the truth, Erika?”

      Erika leaned her elbows on the table. “Go ahead.”

      So we did sit up all night while Norman gave his analysis of our situation.

      “First of all, I congratulate you on picking up practically every trick of the trade. That’s the trouble. It’s a standard act, a little of everything, done as well as anyone does it, but just the same old crude tricks.”

      “They work,” said Erika.

      “Yes, they work, for now, but the public is fickle. First raps and table tipping were enough. Now everyone wants spirit photos. But how long do you think it will be before people catch on to that? No, don’t try to answer. Listen. You know about Palladino?”

      Erika and I both nodded. Everyone knew Eusapia Palladino, the great Italian medium.

      “I was in New York a year ago when she came. You know what happened to her?”

      “I know the papers called her a fraud,” said Erika, “but what does that matter? The publicity was good and the people believe anyway.”

      Norman shook his head. “The newspapers killed her. She’s finished. The trouble with you is you read the psychic press, and they still call her ‘the divine Eusapia,’ but everywhere else, she’s dead, just an old woman gone back to Italy, broke and broken.”

      “That won’t happen to May.”

      “No, not if you listen to me, if you understand what happened to Palladino, what it means. It means physical mediumship is dead. Raps and taps and trumpets and, yes, spirit photography too. The sooner you get out of that, the better. There have alreacly been some prosecutions for fraud, because you see, with a photo, you’re selling a product, a tangible thing that can be examined and proven false. Physical mediumship is fifty years out of date. People are still just as gullible, don’t get me wrong, but not that way. It’s too risky, too easy to find the trap doors or grab Maisie under her spirit veils, or find the levers under the table. All those crude things are on the way out.”

      “But then what is left?” cried Erika.

      “Oh, there’s plenty left. Mental effects—with no tangible results but no possibility of exposure as tricks. Like automatic writing. You’ve trained Mei-li in writing, but you hardly use her skill.”

      “She wouldn’t know what to write.”

      “Let her try. If she makes mistakes, she still can’t be called a fraud. And then you have the trances, when she sees the spirits and talks to them … nobody can prove trickery because they don’t expect to see what she sees. She should do more of that. More of just answering questions while in trance. Mei-li is a bright girl and she quickly picks up hints of what they want to hear.”

      “I don’t think she could….”

      “And she probably ought to have a ‘control,’ a really interesting one, none of those Indian chiefs or Tibetan lamas, all that has been done to death. Having a ‘control’ gives range to the act, especially when the medium is young and female and has to act shy and modest … except when a control takes over.”

      “That’s just it. May is too young to … but I have thought about a control. I just haven’t been able to decide….”

      “Don’t. Mei-li should decide. Mei-li, how old are you?”

      “Sixteen,” I said. “And a half.”

      “You see, Erika. She’s not a child anymore. And aside from the fact that she’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen …” There was hardly a pause in his very matter-of-fact voice, yet a great space opened up, and his words fell into that space and disappeared, buried in my mind for later retrieval. “… she’s also very, very intelligent. And you don’t give her credit for that. You keep too tight a rein on her. Why, the only time those sittings come alive is when something you planned goes wrong and Mei-li covers up, or when she takes her lead from the sitter and acts out a pantomime with spirits. I don’t know whether she’s a great actress or a great storyteller or what she is, but when she begins to improvise, she casts a spell over everyone, and that is what convinces, not the raps she makes with those awful boots. What she has is imagination, which you haven’t recognized, Erika, because, clever as you are, you lack it. Well, you asked for it, so don’t be angry.”

      “I’m not angry.” Erika looked fierce. “Go on.”

      “Well … those boots. Speaking of her clothes. You’ve got her dressed up like a child in mourning, a frumpy, fat child with