Madam Sibyl's First Client: A Victorian San Francisco Story (2 page)

“Because she refused me when I offered to! Said she didn’t want to be that beholden to anyone—ever again. And she knows what a risky proposition it would be—with no guarantee anyone would be willing to take their business to a female stockbroker, which is why I couldn’t convince someone like Schmitt to take her on.”

He stared at the fire for a moment and then chuckled. “Annie also said she didn’t want people thinking I was Cornelius Vanderbilt to her Victoria Woodhull. Said it would ruin both of our reputations. Said Hetty wouldn’t let me hear the end of it!”

Esther inwardly shuddered. She loved all four of her daughters, but the youngest, Hetty, was becoming too judgmental for her mother’s taste. Esther blamed Hetty’s husband George, a stuffy prig of a man. She could just imagine what George’s opinion was of Victoria Woodhull, a beautiful but notorious young woman who campaigned for women’s rights and even ran for the presidency of the United States. Rumors said it was Vanderbilt, the millionaire railroad tycoon, who’d set up Woodhull and her sister as New York City stockbrokers some years ago. In short, Woodhull was the exact opposite of George’s ideal of respectable womanhood.

“Well, Herman,” Esther finally responded, “it does Annie credit that she wasn’t willing to risk your money or her reputation. But, speaking of reputations, I don’t see why you aren’t worried about the effect this scheme is going to have on her reputation. I know she says she never wants to remarry, but I would think that making a living as a fortune-teller would be more damaging to her reputation than being a stockbroker. Not that a man like our Hetty’s George would find either occupation acceptable.”

Her husband just raised his eyebrows at her and took another sip of his whiskey. They did not entirely see eye-to-eye on Hetty’s George, who was a rising star in the Merchant’s Exchange Bank where Herman was one of the directors.

When he didn’t say anything, she went on. “I know, you have said no one need know that Madam Sibyl and Mrs. Annie Fuller are one and the same. But that still doesn’t explain to me why you think that she can make money at this endeavor. If no one will take advice from a stockbroker who is a woman, why would they pay money to get the same advice from a female fortune teller?”

Her husband chuckled again, saying, “Because, my dear, we men are not terribly consistent. And we are an irrational lot. Even your hard-headed father wouldn’t walk between too older women if he met them on the sidewalk—because he said it would bring him bad luck for the rest of the day.”

“My father wouldn’t walk between two women on the street because it would be terribly rude, Herman. But, you are right about him not being consistent. I know he didn’t make a single important decision, business or otherwise, without consulting my mother, and if she disapproved of something, it just didn’t happen. Yet he told me on my marriage day that I should obey my husband in all things. Not that I listened to him.”

Her husband snorted, then said, “But the point is, in private your father might take his wife’s advice, but he wouldn’t admit to it publicly. However, in the public’s eye, a man who is getting advice from one of these modern trance mediums or an old-fashioned gypsy fortune-teller is getting that advice from the spirit world or the stars, not from the woman who is communicating the advice. So, when one of my acquaintances asked me where I got the tip I passed on to Porter, I told him from a clairvoyant named Madam Sibyl who rented a room in my boarding house. And that’s how he came to be Madam Sibyl’s first client.”

*****

The clock on the mantel chimed quarter to four, and Annie made one last circuit around the small parlor, checking to make certain everything was ready. She’d arranged the room the way the clairvoyants she’d visited in Boston arranged theirs. Curtains closed, fire lit, two chairs sitting on either side of a small table covered with a velvet cloth, and a lamp placed to ensure that it would be easy to see the client’s features but difficult for the client to see her face. She’d gone to see these clairvoyants with Lottie Vanderlin, her husband John’s maternal aunt. Lottie’s own husband had died suddenly last winter, and John’s parents had sent Annie to Boston to live with her, with the admonition that Annie keep Lottie out of trouble. She didn’t know what they meant at the time; she was just glad to get some respite from the series of sick rooms where she’d been confined for much of the past few years, attending births, deaths, and every ailment a woman could experience between those two events. She didn’t do the actual nursing, thank heavens, but she’d been the one who spelled the hired nurses, carried out the doctor’s orders, and tried to ease the pain, boredom, and fear that consumed the patients’ waking hours.

Lottie, a healthy woman in her early fifties whose husband had left her very well provided-for, seemed like an easy assignment. In fact, Annie developed a deep affection for the good-natured widow in the six months she lived with her. She soon discovered, however, what John’s parents meant by keeping her out of trouble. Lottie was rapidly throwing her inheritance away on a series of mediums and fortune-tellers who claimed to communicate with her departed husband. It wasn’t the fees she paid these persons that was the main problem. They were certainly no more a drain on Lottie’s substantial income than if her aunt spent her days shopping. No, it was one particular trance medium, who called himself Professor Magnus, who presented the danger. He had convinced Lottie that her departed husband wanted her to invest her capital in a set of very risky investments. Annie feared if the influence of this phony professor wasn’t checked it would mean financial ruin for Lottie.

Annie initially tried, unsuccessfully, to warn Lottie away from him. Then, out of desperation, she told Lottie that attending all these séances had awakened Annie’s own abilities. She convinced Lottie that she could now communicate with a spirit of her own, Madam Sibyl, who helped her forecast the future. Lottie was delighted. She started hosting small séances in her home, where Annie pretended to communicate with this Madam Sibyl and dispensed advice to Lottie and her friends. Regrettably, Madam Sibyl’s business advice proved so accurate, and Lottie and her friends so pleased, that word reached Annie’s father-in-law. Annie had just been recalled back to New York City by him to “explain herself,” when the letter from Herman Stein reached her, telling her of her inheritance from her Aunt Agatha. Two days later, she was on a transcontinental train to San Francisco, having pawned the last piece of jewelry she owned to pay the fare and baggage costs and leaving her miserable years of dependence on the extended Fuller family behind.

She thought she’d left Madam Sibyl behind as well. In fact, she had forgotten that she’d ever mentioned her brief career in mediumship to the Steins when she first arrived in town. Consequently, she was surprised three weeks ago when Herman Stein suggested resurrecting Madam Sibyl. The idea came up during a meeting with him to go over her accounts for the first three months the boarding house was in operation. Double entry bookkeeping was no mystery to Annie, but nothing could make the sums add up. The costs of running the boarding house were barely being met by the income she was generating. Even when the remaining large room in the attic was let, this would only provide a tiny margin of safety. She didn’t know what to do, and she hoped Mr. Stein could offer some suggestion of how to better economize.

The Steins had taken her under their wing from the moment she arrived in San Francisco, and she wasn’t sure she could ever repay them for their support, but the last thing she wanted was to feel economically beholden to them. She felt uncomfortable as it was with their decision to move into her boarding house, knowing that they could afford much grander accommodations in one of the better city hotels. Esther Stein assured her that she was more than ready to leave the home they’d been sharing with their youngest son and his wife and small children. Confiding to Annie that she and her newest daughter-in-law did not rub along well together under the same roof, Esther said, “It wasn’t that I minded handing over the work of running the household, but Myra insisted on asserting her prerogatives as the mistress of the household at every turn. No, it was time for us to move. Our rooms here are just perfect. With Herman off traveling more days than he is home, I would feel so lonely rattling around in some hotel surrounded by strangers. Besides, Mrs. O’Rourke is one of the best cooks in San Francisco.”

Annie smiled, remembering with what relish both Steins enjoyed Beatrice’s pies, and knew that at least in that last statement Esther was telling the truth. But she worried that her motherly friend might be pressuring her husband to loan Annie money, which is why she was nervous about revealing to him the thinness of her profit margin. However, instead of offering to help her, Herman Stein had pulled out a copy of the
San Francisco Chronicle
and placed his finger smack dab in the middle of the front page. She’d leaned over and seen that he was pointing to the section headed “Special Notices” that listed the numerous advertisements by people professing to be clairvoyants of one stripe or the other.

When she realized that he was suggesting she do something similar, you could have knocked her over with a feather! But Mr. Stein was quite persuasive, and after a good deal of discussion, Annie finally agreed that it was worth giving his idea a try. She was adamant that she would not pretend to be communing with the spirit word but would build on the knowledge she had already gotten when living with Lottie on how to read palms and cast horoscopes. Mr. Stein had evidently given the matter some thought, because he already had crafted a draft of the ad he thought she should put into the paper. He recommended that she charge $2 a session, which was higher than any of the other mediums, arguing that this would winnow out the riffraff. He also suggested she schedule appointments, which would give her time to do the necessary research that went into her financial advice.

Annie thought this was an excellent idea, and it would also make it easier for her to keep her identities as Mrs. Fuller and Madam Sibyl separate. At the last moment, she decided to include wording that implied she would be giving more than business advice. She thought the years she’d spent observing and catering to the complex personalities among the Fuller clan should count for something. The resulting advertisement read:
Clairvoyant, specializing in business and domestic advice, consultations by appointment only, fee $2,
with the boarding house address listed as the contact.

What followed was a frantic two weeks of preparation. Deciding on a costume, buying the wig, and locating a copy of the English translation of Rothman’s
Chiromantia Theorica Practica
and several books on astrology that she had found in a used bookstore off Market Street. Rothmann’s 16
th
century treatise on palmistry argued that the mounts and lines of the hand were ruled by the planets so that by looking at a person’s hands you could determine their birth chart and vice versa. This conjunction of the two philosophies was useful for her purposes. Not believing in either palmistry or astrology, she didn’t care if his analysis was correct or if contemporary practitioners accepted his argument. All she cared about was getting the terminology that would make her pronouncements sound reasonable to someone who believed in either discipline.

Two days ago, she finally put the advertisement in the
Morning Call
and the
Chronicle
. While she hadn’t yet gotten any response from these notices, Mr. Stein had drummed up a few clients for her from among his business associates, and the first was due to arrive any moment.

The loud peel of the front door bell sent Annie’s pulse racing, and she walked quickly to the table and sat down, clasping her hands in front of her to keep them from trembling. After a moment, she heard the sound of voices in the hallway. Kathleen, bless her soul, must have been hovering near the front hallway in anticipation of the client’s arrival. The door to the parlor swung open, and Kathleen entered the room, sketched a curtsy, and announced loudly, “Mr. Matthew Voss, for Madam Sibyl.”

*****

“I want to assure you that I am not someone you can bamboozle with a lot of hocus-pocus. As far as I’m concerned, Madam, the whole lot of you are just bunch of charlatans, and the men who spend good money on such are fools. And I can promise you, I am not a fool!”

Mathew Voss, a tall stooped man in his sixties, glared at her from across the room, and Annie felt the heat of anger flush her cheeks. Why ever did Mr. Stein think that this man was going to be willing to take advice from Madam Sibyl? Kathleen even had trouble getting him to hand over his top hat, scarf and gloves, and when Annie had asked him to come and sit at the table in front of her, he’d refused, saying he would prefer to stand. Arrogant old goat. He reminded her unpleasantly of her father-in-law.

“Well it’s a good thing you aren’t a fool, since I have no desire to waste my time or knowledge on a fool,” Annie said, glaring back at him. “Now come sit down, deposit your fee in the bowl, and let me get to work. Or you can ring for the maid to escort you out.”

In the silence that followed, Annie heard the tick, tick of the mantel clock at counterpoint with the blood thumping at her temple.

“Ha!” Voss suddenly barked out. “Good for you.” He moved across the room in a sort of stiff lope and pulled out the chair. As he sat down, he peered at her shortsightedly and said, “Wearing some sort of get-up are you? Well I don’t expect that Madam Sibyl is your real name, either.” Taking a well-worn leather wallet out of his suit coat and holding it cautiously below the table edge, he removed two bills and tossed them into the wooden bowl on the right side of the table, saying, “Well what do we do now, eh?”