Confessions of Madame Psyche. Dorothy Bryant

those. straight, baggy pants the women wear in Chinatown. Have some good silk ones made with a fit that shows a neat, uncorsetted body. You know how the clients will swarm in then, Erika. Yet she’ll still be quite respectable—in her ancestral dress.”

      Erika looked at me, biting her lip thoughtfully. “I’ve tried to play down her oriental side because of all the bad feeling against the Chinese.”

      “Well, you can’t change those eyes of hers. Besides, in the occult, prejudice works in favor of the oriental—the mysterious East and all that.”

      “Maybe you’re right. Yes, I think pale blue silk trousers with a long coat.”

      “And one more thing,” said Norman. He paused as if to see if Erika had braced herself for a shock. “You’ll have to stop charging admission.” Erika looked too flabbergasted to answer. “The medium who charges a dollar a sitting puts herself in a class with vaudeville shows—and movies, which are cheaper and more exciting than jugglers and mediums. But the medium who charges nothing is not an entertainer. She is a lady with a sacred gift.”

      “How on earth are we to live?” demanded Erika.

      “On the rich, of course. As soon as you stop charging money, you become more acceptable to the upper classes, who never pay for anything. When the upper class accepts you, the middle class will follow, and they are more likely to give gifts. Madame Blavatsky never owned a thing, but she lived in the mansions of the rich and received gifts. When you charge nothing, you can accept anything. After a few years, Mei-li will meet a rich man, marry him, and retire. Surely that’s what you really want, Mei-li. You shouldn’t go on with this life any longer than necessary.”

      “No rich man will marry a half-breed,” said Erika.

      “Don’t be too sure of that. Spiritualists are eccentrics. They tend to be in the vanguard of progressive movements. Don’t you read those magazines you subscribe to? I glanced through them. They’re against race prejudice, capital punishment, war, and most established churches. So you might find a rich, open-minded man who can appreciate Mei-li. Let him be old fashioned in only one way—that he’ll want her to give up her career after marriage.”

      “And will want to support her beloved family!” added Erika.

      The next day Erika drew a picture of trousers and a high-.collared, long coat, then told Sophie to make me an outfit like it. Sophie made the first set in muslin, then another and another (her mistakes became comfortable pajamas I wore around the house) until she mastered the design. Then she made the first of the silver-blue silk pajama suits that I wore for the next twenty years.

      Erika cancelled my sittings for the rest of the month, telling clients I had accepted an invitation to be examined by the American Society for Psychical Research in Los Angeles. Her hastily invented lie added to my credibility, for the only thing worse than being examined by those suspicious and experienced men and women was being ignored by them.

      Then she stripped the seance room. Within a week, all our occult trappings were sold: the table, my boots, costumes, various bits of hardware, the camera and darkroom equipment, even the drapes and rugs. She let Maisie and Rebecca go. “If we’re careful our money will last a few months.” She bought white paint and we repainted the room, put rush mats on the wooden floor, and stood a Japanese screen in front of the window. Sophie made a dozen pillows covered in black silk, which we scattered on the mats. A few straight chairs we left against the wall. One silver-blue pillow, matching my clothes, we placed in front of the screen. “That’s your place,” said Erika. “Now let’s get back to work and see what happens.”

      Every time I passed a mirror I remembered Norman’s words “… besides being the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen….” and I searched the glass for a sign of that beauty. I saw high cheekbones and my mother’s dark almond eyes, a thin nose, a pointed chin, and close-cropped black hair whose waves clung as if sculpted to my head. Was this beauty? I had always believed that my Chinese eyes cancelled any possibility of beauty. But Norman too bore the “blemish” of some features of a non-white race, and he was handsome. Even Erika thought so. Was it, therefore, possible to be both different and beautiful?

      Norman returned four months later on New Year’s Eve. We sat around the table listening to Erika’s verdict: the changes had been a terrible mistake. “Attendance has fallen off. People like the Robertsons will come faithfully for messages from Ned, but sometimes they’re the only ones here. Even Sophie has lost interest. Thank God for her flower shop. We’re almost out of money.” Erika sighed. “People want darkness and candles and mystery. They want something to happen, a spirit hovering over them or a flower sent from a dead relative. They want what we all want, something real to wipe out the truth, that we all die, that death is final and life is meaningless and all our struggle and suffering—meaningless.” I had never heard Erika talk this way. Did she too feel that awful emptiness at the bottom of everything?

      “So you’ve lost your ectoplasm customers. No need to panic. I can lend you a little money. Give it time. Now, what are you giving them instead of raps and taps?”

      “Not very much,” I admitted. “I go into trance and see things. I answer questions. I’m doing more automatic writing, like you said. I use information Sophie picked up or I just let the sitter lead me.”

      “Fine. A class act. What about a control?”

      I shrugged. “We haven’t decided on the right one.”

      “One?” said Norman. “Why only one? You can try out different ones, drop the ones you don’t enjoy.”

      “I thought Cleopatra would be an impressive control,” said Erika. “She’s read a lot about her.”

      Norman shook his head. “I’d steer clear of real historical figures. Your new clientele will be more educated, more skilled in trapping you. Your controls should be ordinary, common people mostly, especially if they speak a foreign language. Mei-li has a gift for languages, but what she has picked up so far is not the idiom of the gentry—it’s working-class dialect. Any client who speaks another language will notice that.”

      Norman reached out and put his hand over mine, which was lying on the table. “Trust yourself, Psyche. Don’t plan. Improvise. Go into your ‘trance,’ and then make up a game, a game of becoming a different person. You invent the game and you play, and what I’ve seen of you convinces me that you will play it masterfully.” He kept his hand on mine while Erika sat like a stone between us, looking at our hands, but saying, doing nothing. “Look, it’s midnight!” he said, taking his hand away. “Let’s open the champagne!” He opened the bottle he had brought and poured the wine into three glasses.

      I lifted my glass and said, “To the new year, to 1913.”

      The second toast was proposed by Erika. “To the real beginning of May’s career. And to luck. We’ll need it.”

      “And here’s to the rich husband who’ll end her career as soon as possible,” said Norman.

      An hour later we all went to bed—Erika, Sophie and I in one bedroom, Father in another, and Norman in the downstairs flat. I dozed off for an hour or so, then awoke thirsty from the effects of the champagne. I went into the kitchen and poured a glass of water. I drank it, then went quietly down the stairs, through the seance room to stand in the open doorway of Norman’s bedroom.

      “I’m awake,” he said.

      I walked across the room to stand near his bed.

      “What’s this you’re wearing?”

      “The muslim pajamas. One of Sophie’s failures.”

      “I like them better than the silk.”

      “So do I.” I shivered. He pulled back the covers for me to slide under them beside him, put his arms around me. “I can’t be the rich husband, Mei-li. I already have a wife, a good one, and I won’t leave her. Soon we’ll have children and I’ll take over the family enterprises and you won’t see me anymore.”

      “I