Reverend Clarke leaves then for a group at the dining table. What she can hear of that conversation is all about the war. Edwin brings her a sweet tea. He doesn’t know how much she wants something stronger. They suffer sobriety together, she invisibly, he by continual smoking. His voice has taken on a rasp, but it doesn’t matter as he has no desire to return to the stage. “It would choke me,” he says, “to deliver one of Shakespeare’s speeches.”

—

One morning shortly after her arrival, she and Edwin walk the few blocks to Gramercy Park together. She leans on his arm. He matches her stuttering step. They pass though the black gates into the green and blooming springtime. Sunshine turns the tender leaves to pale gold, dapples the pavement. Pigeons walk in the delightful way pigeons walk, with their funny, jutting heads, and the city squirrels are zestful. She takes a deep breath and everything she smells is young and green.

“I can’t believe,” Edwin tells her, “for the millionth part of a minute that Mollie’s deep love for me is buried in her grave.”

“I don’t believe that either,” says Rosalie.

Edwin takes her hand and squeezes it. “I believe that she who sat beside me only a few scant weeks ago is still living and is near me now. But why doesn’t it make me happy to think so?”

Edwin tells Rosalie that, when they were in Dorchester, he and Mother often talked about ghosts. Mother had seen Father twice around the time of his death, though not to speak to, and Edwin saw him once, back when he was in California. Rosalie wonders what she might have said if she’d been present for this conversation. She’s never seen Father herself. She doesn’t want to see him, but it’s hard not to be just a little hurt.

—

Edwin begins to visit a New York medium named Laura Edmonds, daughter of the prominent spiritualist John Worth Edmonds. Laura operates through trance. Edwin invites Rosalie along, but the advantages of summoning ghosts are not as clear to her as they are to him.

He brings back reports of sessions in which Mary and sometimes Father and even once Richard Cary occupy Edmonds’ body and speak to him through her. Mary assures him that she is still his and always will be. It was so hard, Laura tells him when she’s got her own body back, not to seize you and cover you in kisses.

Father is proud of his stagecraft; Richard is at peace. Death seems to turn everyone so pleasant. Rosalie thinks that these banalities are not the way any ghost she’s ever spoken to talks. But it comforts Edwin, so she says nothing. “I’m almost convinced,” he tells her. “I wish I could banish all doubt.”