Confessions of Madame Psyche. Dorothy Bryant

me. In the pitch blackness of the circle she would ask, “See anything, Psyche?” I tended to say no until she had asked me for the third time. As soon as I answered, “Yes,” she would begin to question me on what I saw, leading me, and I would generally answer only yes or no.

      She explained to the sitters that I fell into a trance that made it hard for me to speak. “So young and shy, afraid of the powers that possess her.” Soon the system evolved to allow sitters to ask me questions about a vision, and this made answering easier, for they showed by their questions what it was they wanted me to see, leading me more surely than Signora did. If I began to get into difficulties, I simply “lost the vision.” One sitter, after the lamps were lit, asked me to recall and describe a detail more clearly. I was dumb with uncertainty and fear of exposure, but Signora Renata came to my rescue. “She no remember after she come out of trance.”

      One impressive part of my visions was that they included messages in different languages. If a client spoke broken English, I would identify her accent, then risk a communication from the spirit world in what I guessed to be her native tongue. A sprinkling of foreign words never failed to impress people, even in later years when my clients were more sophisticated. In fact, the more highly educated people considered it indubitably miraculous that an ignorant girl spoke more languages than they had learned in school.

      So our act evolved through rehearsal. after rehearsal, night after night. Gradually I became more confident and proficient in catching hints of the vision some sitter wanted me to see. Toward the end of the year, when never fewer than a dozen people squeezed into that musty room, Signora Renata made a daring change. She began to leave a lighted candle in front of me on the table, so that I could be watched while my visions came. She judged correctly that a childlike, wide-eyed expression on my face was more effective than darkness, and that I would perform better if allowed to add a wider range of gestures to my act.

      She continued to produce her regular phenomena in total darkness, training me to assist her. When Sophie and I arrived, always a bit early, she sent Sophie to the kitchen to do some little chore while she instructed me in the use of levers and props to produce raps or release ghost messages on scraps of paper that floated down over the sitters. When she was behind the curtain, I moved about unseen, giving little pats or strokes to sitters who accepted them as caresses from a dead loved one (or even, with great titillation, from a ghost who was a total stranger). At the end of a good evening, I would get a few extra coins from the money left on the plate, most of which went for food for our table or for clothing. By the beginning of 1906 I was the main attraction at Signora Renata’s seances. There was seldom enough room for everyone who wanted to come, including an occasional carriage full of ladies and gentlemen from richer parts of the City, wrinkling their noses at the stench of Butchertown.

      The turning point came with a near disaster and exposure. A regular sitter who usually paid well was hoping for some more tangible sign from her dead mother. We gave her ghost music that sent her into hysterical tears. A “spirit drawing” fell into her lap. Under the candle we lit, the scrap of paper showed a pattern that excited her. (It was a hasty scrawl made a few minutes before she came, making no sense at all except what she gave to it.)

      The Signora was building to a climax. She doused the candle again and enjoined us to put hands to our hearts and pray. This was the signal that, with no one touching me, I could slip out of my chair and give a few spirit caresses, or spirit drafts from a small bellows hidden behind a window drape.

      I was just making a feather-light stroke of the lady’s hair when the man who had come with her (I should have taken warning from his sour, skeptical glance when he entered) reached out and grabbed me. Somehow I stifled the impulse to scream. Instead I kicked him as hard as I could while at the same time I jabbed one finger toward his head and, with a lucky thrust, stuck it hard into his ear. The shock loosened his hold, and I was able to squirm loose. As he started to bellow, I dove under the table and back to my chair, drowning him out with my own howls and screeches.

      As the lamps were lit, I continued howling, lying back in my chair with eyes wide, in my “vision trance” position. I screamed and screamed, taking all attention away from the sputtering man. Then I let words babble from my mouth, starting with “Fire!” Improvising from there, I yelled, “…house falling, the wave, the earth is melting, cracking! Falling, falling, all the world is falling!” I went on screaming anything that came to my head, a composite vision of all childhood nightmares, until I collapsed, shuddering and crying. My tears were real enough. I was terrified that I would be exposed, that I had finally been caught. I imagined that playing so many tricks for so many pennies must bring some terrible punishment.

      “Zitti, quiet, all right, stai tranquil/a, Psyche.” Signora’s broad hands were on my head, then on my shoulders. She looked into my eyes and gave me a little wink. Gradually I stopped shaking. “La Psyche has had some terrible vision. The meaning is veiled even from me. Please, all leave at once. Andale via. I must care for the child. At once.”

      When everyone was gone and Sophie had been sent to the kitchen, Signora Renata chuckled at me. “No worry. You scare them good so they pay no attention to anything he say. Next time, watch out. No more touching. You getting too big.” Then she gave me a quarter from the plate and told me to take a couple of nights off.

      I took more than a couple. For that was the night of April 17. Before the sun rose again the Great Earthquake struck the City.

      1906–1914

      Although the quake woke me, I had no idea how serious it was. The house shook and shifted sharply, and the bed Sophie and I shared slid away from the wall, then slammed against the opposite wall. I heard a crash of crockery from downstairs and a grinding creak of timbers, then silence. I rolled over and went back to sleep, continuing to doze through several aftershocks. Opening my eyes during one of them, I noticed that Sophie was gone. I dozed off again until it was light.

      When I went downstairs I found my father and Sophie sitting at the kitchen table dipping bread in bowls of coffee and milk. Sophie was crying, and father was scowling at her. Everything was as usual except that Father was seldom up this early, though he now came home, eventually, every night.

      “Well, she would perch the blasted thing on a shelf,” my father said to me, but his tone was gentle. I saw at once what had happened. A huge, gold-edged plate with crudely-painted red blotches, which Sophie called roses, had stood on edge on a small shelf above the table, secured by metal brackets. Sophie’s daughter had painted it as a Christmas present just before typhoid wiped out Sophie’s family. It was sacred to Sophie, and in all my tormenting poltergeist assaults on her, even I had spared this plate. I felt suddenly guilty, as if I had caused it to fall. The pieces of it lay on the table in a heap.

      “We can glue it together, Sophie,” I said. “You won’t even see the cracks. Really.” My father watched me, probably thinking that I had hardly ever spoken so kindly to Sophie. No one did, least of all my father.

      “I’ll bet you slept right through it,” said Father.

      I shook my head. “I felt it. Did anything else break?”

      “The pipe from the well,” said Father. “We’ll have to haul water in buckets again till I fix it.” (He meant until Sophie or a neighbor fixed it; Father was helpless at such work.)

      So, what I remember from that first hour seemed quite usual after an earthquake. Our wood frame house had creaked and stretched but returned to place on its strong piers. There were no gas pipes or electric wires to break, and we were used to troubles with the pipe from the well. The metal chimney pipe of our wood stove had come apart, but had been shoved together again by Sophie before she started the fire. As usual, after a sharp quake, we were curious to see and hear about the damage suffered by our neighbors, who always gustily exchanged stories of what they had felt when a quake hit. Father suggested we take a walk down along the shore.

      A sudden but slight floodtide that had covered the lowlands with a few inches of water was already ebbing. Everyone was out exploring, as we were. People sloshed about in bare feet, trousers and skirts pulled up, or in wading boots, as we were used to doing