The Diviners: List 1

“Liar!” the lady in question scolds the heart-shaped scrying piece with its clear glass oracle.

“Make it stop, make it stop!” one girl screeches, and even the jaded boys pale and move back.

The wind swoops over the tenements on Orchard Street, where some of those starry-eyed dreams have died and yet other dreams are being born into squalor and poverty, an uphill climb.

It ran with the buffalo and touched tentative fingers to the tall black hats of Puritans.

If the wind were a sentinel, it would send up the alarm.

A faint glow emanates from that dark, foul-smelling earthen tomb. Yes, something moves again in the shadows. A harbinger of much greater evil to come.

“Your mother is secretary of the Zenith Women’s Temperance Society. Did you think about that? Did you think about how it might look if her daughter were found carousing drunk in the streets?”

I am starting a collection of only right-hand gloves. It’s ever so bourgeois to have two.

Her father kissed her lightly on the forehead and, with a final admonishment to the porter, drove away.

“You don’t mind being seen with the town pariah?”

“You are absolute angels of the first order. If I were Pope, I’d canonize you.”

“So I told her, I may be a scalp specialist, but I am no miracle worker!” the owner, Mrs. Jordan, regaled the chuckling women in the shop.

Maybe it was a portent of good luck, not bad.

She was now in possession of twenty dollars, three new addresses in her brown leather journal, and a porter’s hat, which she wore upon her golden head at a rakish angle.

Uncle Will’s telegram had been quite specific: She was to hail a taxi outside Pennsylvania Station on Eighth Avenue and tell the driver to take her to the Museum of American Folklore, Superstition, and the Occult on Sixty-eighth Street, off Central Park West.

She went the wrong way twice and finally found herself in the enormous main room, with its floor-to-ceiling arched windows and the giant, center-placed clock whose filigreed arms reminded passengers that time was fleeting—as were trains.

Nearby, a very glamorous woman wearing a full-length Russian sable despite the heat was drawing an ever-thickening crowd of followers and shutterbugs.

“All right, then. You with your keen observations—what, exactly, do you find special about me?” she asked coyly, glancing up at him through her lashes the way she’d seen Colleen Moore do in We Moderns.

She didn’t want to make a scene and come off as a complete rube. She was a girl who could take care of herself.

They say the place is in arrears on its taxes.

“Why, I’ve heard so much about you!” Evie blurted out. Mabel would kill her for being so indiscreet.

“This is an excellent history of eighteenth-century mysticism in the colonies if you’d care to pass the time with a book.”

“Ah. Theodicy.”
“Is that a cross between theology and idiocy?”
Will allowed a small smile. “Not exactly. Theodicy is a branch of theology concerned with the defense of God in the face of the existence of evil. It brings about a conundrum: If God is an all-knowing, all-powerful deity, how can he allow evil to exist? Either he is not the omnipotent god we’ve been told, or he is all-powerful and all-knowing, and also cruel, because he allows evil to exist and does nothing to stop it.”

Our history is rife with the supernatural, the unexplained, the mystical.

Toward the end, her prophecies became quite dark. She talked of ‘a coming storm,’ a treacherous time when the Diviners would be needed.

She died shortly after making the prophecy, leaving her brother, Cornelius, bereft.

It dawned on Evie that she was free from the tedium of school.

Evie embraced her friend and waltzed her around the lobby of the Bennington, drawing stares from the denizens of the apartment building.

“She’s from Ohio.”
“Sorry,” Theta deadpanned.

“I’m not rocking the boat. Everything’s copacetic with Unc right now, and I want it to stay that way.”

“Oh. There’s a rally for the appeal of Sacco and Vanzetti downtown. My mother and father are representing The Proletariat,” she said, reminding Evie of the name of the socialist newspaper Mabel’s parents operated and distributed.

“Oh, dear. What’s she got?”
A slow smile stretched the corners of Evie’s lips. “Temperance. In the extreme.”

“That is not how young ladies behave in the social sphere, Miss Rose. This carrying-on is most unseemly.”

“Yes, Miss Proctor,” Mabel said, chastened.

“In the seventeen hundreds, this patch of land was home to those suffering from the fever. Those poor, tragic souls moaning in their tents, jaundiced and bleeding, their vomitus the color of black night!”

“They were exhumed before the Bennington was built, of course—or so they said. Though if you ask me, I don’t see how they could possibly have found all those bodies.”

He pointed to where a couple of drunks slept on the stoop of a flophouse. “Terrible. Someone should clean up this sort of riffraff, turn them back at the borders. They’re not like you and me, Miss Bates. Clean. Good citizens. People with ambitions. Contributors to this shining city on the hill.”

The old furnace flared suddenly to life, filling the room with an orange light that cast macabre shadows.

She looked again at the stick in her hand and saw that it was a bone. Ruta cried out and dropped it in revulsion.

“Don’t be put off by my appearance, my dear. I am only beginning to manifest.”