Excerpt of The Spirit Photographer by Jon Michael Varese

ON THE DAY before Senator Garrett’s departure for Boston, news of impending storms had disrupted the city, and so by the time his brougham began climbing up Pinckney Street toward Louisburg Square, nearly all of the windows on Beacon Hill had already been locked and shuttered. Up ahead, on the corner of Pinckney and West Cedar, Garrett spied two lone figures, their hands firm on the brims of their hats. It was old Dovehouse conversing with the new choirmaster from King’s Chapel.

The carriage approached, its wheels rattling in the street.

“Back again, old boy?”

“I am, sir,” Garrett replied.

“Good to have you. Congratulations on your victories. I never doubted them for a second.”

The senator returned a nod. Dovehouse never doubted anything—a characteristic that had been amusing Garrett for close to forty years. The “victories” to which old Dovehouse referred were the many Republican triumphs from the previous congressional session: the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, giving freedmen the right to vote; the passage of the first Enforcement Act, empowering the Federal Government to prosecute the Klan directly; and the election of Hiram Revels, a black Mississippi minister, to Jefferson Davis’s old seat in the Senate chamber—a change unimaginable twenty years earlier, when Senator James B. Garrett, at the age of thirty-nine, had begun his career as a statesman.

“I suppose we can move on with things now!” Dovehouse called out as the senator’s carriage continued up the street.

Garrett offered no reply. With the readmission of Georgia—the last of the outcast Confederate states—back into the Union, there were those, like Dovehouse, who had emphatically declared the country reunited. But Garrett had no intention of “moving on”—at least not until he had secured fundamental rights for all the country’s citizens.

When the senator at last arrived at his house, it too was dark and motionless, except for the swirling clusters of maple leaves in front of it. The house glared at him as if it were displeased with his lateness, and its unblinking frown gave him no comfort. When the front door opened, and Garrett descended from the carriage, a sudden gust of wind scattered the leaves from his path. In the doorway stood a heavyset woman wearing a gingham dress.

“Welcome home, sir,” Jenny said.

“Dear Jenny . . . is something the matter?”

“It’s Mrs. Garrett—she’s received a letter. She’s waiting for you in the drawing room.”

His Jenny. She had been with him for nearly twenty years now. He stepped inside, handing her his hat and his gloves. His face, he knew, betrayed him.

“Sir?” Jenny said.

“Thank you, Jenny,” Garrett said.

The groans of the hinges welcomed Senator Garrett as he opened the great doors of the drawing room. The room’s curtains were drawn, blocking out most of the day’s remaining light, and outside the wind howled unmercifully.

“Elizabeth?”

In the dimness, his wife’s profile emerged.

“James—” she said. “We’ve heard . . . we’ve heard from . . .”

Elizabeth’s chin fell, and Garrett moved toward her. She released what was in her hands with a surprising lack of resistance. Garrett approached the curtains and held the letter near the split of light.

17 July 1870

Dear Mrs. Garrett,

I write to inform you of the miraculous news—we have received word from your son, William Jeffrey. He has made contact through a dream, and he is bathed in flowers and sunlight.

I realize that this message arrives sooner than I had predicted, but the movements of those in the spirit world can be rather sudden, and as such we must move with great speed. Please come to the gallery tomorrow at one o’clock in the afternoon, so that we may execute your photograph immediately.

Yours sincerely,

Edward Moody, Photographer

258 Washington Street, Boston

Garrett read the “news” with a mixture of uncertainty and disdain. Two weeks earlier, Elizabeth had written him in Washington to tell him that she had made a visit to Mr. Moody—the so-called “spirit photographer” who had achieved notoriety in recent years. “It appears that Mr. Moody has a gift,” she had told her husband, and when he read those words he was surprised, for his wife had always been the more skeptical of the two of them. A man who could photograph spirits? It was not something one would have expected Elizabeth to believe in. He had thought that her initial letter might have described a whimsy; but when a second letter arrived, citing Colfax’s highly publicized visit to Moody, he recognized that his wife had become attached to this idea.

Now she was looking over at him imploringly, which was another strange thing, because his wife usually demanded rather than implored. But he understood, for just the sight of his son’s name scribbled on a folded piece of paper was enough to unbury what so much rehearsed forgetting had kept secreted away for years.

“Elizabeth—” Garrett said.

And when he said her name she knew, because she was able to read him better than he could ever read himself.

“James,” she said, “I know your thoughts on this matter. I too have my reservations. But if he is a man of extraordinary power, as some claim, and if he could provide us with—”

She paused, no longer his supplicant, but his commander.

“Think of what it could mean.”

He studied the letter again, read it from beginning to end.

“James, we must waste no time.”

The senator inhaled deeply.

“Very well then,” Garrett said. “We’ll go tomorrow afternoon, as he says.”

That night, as Elizabeth breathed quietly beside him, Garrett clenched the bed sheets and stared at the moving shapes above his head. The wind had grown even more impatient, causing a violent parade of shadows on the ceiling.