Bess stretched her legs in front of her and reached for Gladys’s drink. “Is this gin?” She took a sip. It was water; Gladys, like Harry, almost always drank water.
“It was a terrible thing that they put in the papers this morning.”
Bess pressed her hand into Gladys’s. “But you know I didn’t engineer that séance.”
Gladys nodded reasonably. “Of course, you were tricked.”
Bess felt her face flush. She didn’t want to be the object of anyone else’s pity, especially not Gladys’s. They had always enjoyed a cool, levelheaded friendship. And for all her life’s difficulties, Gladys had never felt sorry for herself, and Bess would be damned if she would let some gossip get to her.
Gladys was the one person, besides Harry’s mother, who could do no wrong in his eyes. She had been almost completely blinded as a child in a gas lamp explosion, and when he died Harry had left her with a sum of money large enough for her to purchase her own small apartment and hire a sight companion, full-time. Bess had offered her a room in the town house, but Gladys had wanted to live on her own. The two women weren’t close during Harry’s lifetime, but in the years following his death their friendship had blossomed. Now they met every afternoon for cake and walked back to Gladys’s apartment together after four o’clock closing. It was the twilight hour—the tinkling spoons quieting as the room emptied out, the light settling into evening, the spring air cooling.
As Gladys and Harry’s mother had gotten older, Gladys and Mrs. Weiss had cared for each other; they had a symbiotic relationship that worked well, each doing the things the other could not—Mrs. Weiss still had her vision but was lacking strength, and Gladys had plenty of strength but no vision. But when Mrs. Weiss died it was like a light went off in Gladys. Only with their own growing friendship had Bess seen a change in her.
“I had a little shock this afternoon. You’ll think I’m mad, but I thought I saw Harry—here in the dining room.” She saw Gladys’s frown and added quickly, “Of course, it wasn’t him. It was a trick of the mind.” She looked over at the photograph she had seen reflected in the tray. It was one of her favorites; Harry was facing the camera with his tight, pursed smile. He looked very mysterious, which made it perfect for the tearoom, and she felt silly recalling her earlier panic. “But never mind that. What did you do this morning?”
But something was off, she realized. There was something wrong with the photograph.
“I did manage to get some dictation done earlier,” Gladys said—she wrote advertising copy, from home, for women’s products.
Bess tried to listen, but she was agitated. She couldn’t put her finger on why. “Let me get you another glass of water,” she said, standing up. She wanted to examine the photograph more closely. “Keep talking, I can hear you. I’ll just run into the kitchen.”
“I had a magazine page to do today—about soap. You can’t imagine how horribly boring it is to find something to say about soap.” Gladys had worked for the agency for so long that her blindness was hardly a disability any longer; her longtime employer, a gentleman in his early seventies, had given her the position at first as a favor to Harry. But she had shown such a knack for a quick turn of phrase that he kept her on.
Bess stared at the photograph. Had something changed? It didn’t appear so. It was still the same Harry, in the same necktie, with the same alluring expression. But something felt different.
It suddenly came to her. It wasn’t that the photograph had changed; it was the reflection. In the image she had seen in the tray earlier, Harry had been serious; in the photograph, he was smiling. She felt her whole body begin to tingle. It was a sensation she had experienced only a handful of times in her life, the same electricity she had felt when she’d had the vision of John Murphy so many years ago.
In the kitchen she found the serving tray she had been using earlier. Mamie had left everything in its proper place, washed and dried, and the silver was sparkling. Taking it back into the dining room, Bess couldn’t keep herself from trembling. She was glad Gladys couldn’t see her.
“Bess?” Gladys called. “Are you all right?”
“I’m . . . I was just looking at this photograph.” Bess tried to remember where she had been standing when she’d seen the reflection. She had just turned away from Table 8, where Lou had been sitting. She hadn’t taken more than a step toward the kitchen when she’d seen the image in the silver. Standing in front of Table 8 again now, exactly as she had been, with her back to Harry’s photograph, she held up the tray with shaking hands.
In the silver, she could see only the empty papered wall.
She turned around. Harry’s photograph was on the left. It hadn’t moved; but from where she’d been standing when she first saw his face, she saw now that it couldn’t have been a reflection from the photograph. The picture was simply hung too far over to catch the mirrored surface of the tray.
So what had she seen, exactly?