the gift

The gift is the second sight possessed by Madame Claire, the Baltimore medium who reads objects and people for a fee from her dim parlor. It is not a skill she learned or a machine she can switch on; it is a power that comes to her unbidden, that she cannot control and cannot summon, and that has governed her life since she was eight years old. The gift is central to the novel's investigation of Cleo Sherwood's disappearance, because it was Madame Claire whom Cleo's mother consulted in desperation, and it was the medium's vision of green and yellow that offered the only glimpse of what might have happened to the missing girl. Yet the gift is also a burden, one that its bearer longs to return, and its presence in the story raises the question of whether seeing the truth is a mercy or a curse.

The Nature of the Gift and Its Origins

Madame Claire first realized she had second sight when she was eight years old. She had a dream in which her aunt, who was only a teenager, was riding in a car with a man she barely knew. He was driving too fast; she begged him to slow down; the car went out of control. Her aunt was injured and the man died. When she woke up that morning, those very things had happened: her aunt was in the hospital with a broken leg, and the man driving the car was dead. When she told her mother about the dream, her mother tried to talk her out of it, suggesting she must have heard the family talking in the night, or that the dream was jumbled in her head because of the chaos of the day. But Madame Claire believes now that her mother feared for her, because she knew the gift would exact a price. And it has. The medium cannot control it, cannot summon it, and cannot predict which of her dreams will come true and which will not. She is denied the ordinary release of waking from a nightmare into relief, because she must always check to make sure her dreams have not come true. She prays to God, on Sundays, to let her see less, but God tells her, she says, that he does not give the gift to people who cannot handle it.

The gift is sensitive to the weather. It prefers dry weather to wet, cold to hot. On a day when the air has a thin, hard edge, Madame Claire can feel things she cannot feel on other days. It was on such a day, cold and bright and dry, that Cleo's mother came to her. The medium could see inside Mrs. Sherwood's soul, and it was the saddest thing she had ever glimpsed. She could see that the mother loved Cleo more than she loved her husband or her other children, the way some mothers love the child who has been the most trouble. And she could see that Mrs. Sherwood wanted her to find something that would suggest Cleo was still alive.

The Vision of Green and Yellow

When Cleo's mother visited, she brought an object that she believed had great meaning to her daughter: an ermine stole, a very fine piece of clothing. Madame Claire held the stole and stroked it, and it almost seemed to come to life, like a cat getting its back scratched. A scent rose from it, sweet and stale, some kind of perfume, and it smelled like yearning. The medium could tell that Cleo had wanted something awfully bad. As she stroked the fur, she saw green and yellow, all around. She thought it might be the sun, that Cleo was someplace where she could not turn her head and was forced to look into the sun. Maybe it was a room, or a ceiling. But she became confident that Cleo's last living, waking minutes were surrounded by yellow, bright, blinding yellow. She saw a woman whose face was turned to the sun, who maybe flew too close to it, as the old story goes. At the time, she was so sure the girl was still alive. And maybe she was, who knows? Her body could have gone into the lake in late February. But if she was still alive, where was she? Why couldn't she save her? Was the green the color of the walls in a room where she was kept? Was the yellow she saw a lone bulb in someone's basement prison? The medium was left with these questions, unable to answer them, unable to save the girl whose mother loved her so desperately.

The ermine stole itself carries a chain of meaning that the gift illuminates. Cleo's son, Lionel Sherwood, remembers that after his mother moved out, she began wearing fancy clothes with lots of fur, fur on her sleeves, fur on her hat, and then, one day, an entire cape of fur. She said she worked for a clothing store and was allowed to borrow the clothes if she didn't spill anything. When Theodore tried to touch the cape, which she called a stole, Lionel asked, "Stole from who?" His granddaddy laughed, but it wasn't a nice laugh. The stole that Madame Claire stroked was thus not merely a piece of clothing; it was an object freighted with Cleo's ambitions, her secrets, and her disappearance, and it was through this object that the gift reached toward the truth of what had happened to her.

The Gift and Its Limits

The gift does not make Madame Claire omniscient, and it does not protect her from doubt. She admits that anyone who comes to see her gets good advice and gets their money's worth, but not everyone has a true psychic experience. That is not in her control. She is forty-seven years old, has been married three times, each time a disaster, and she never talks about it because people would doubt her abilities. How does a psychic pick such bad husbands? By listening to her heart, she says, and the heart knows nothing, sees nothing, but it kicks up a ruckus and throws tantrums to get what it wants. The gift is not a machine that can be plugged in and turned on. It is sensitive, and it drains her; even the smallest vibration takes a lot out of her. After the lady from the Star leaves, she turns off her light and closes up for the day, although she usually does more business in the evenings, because most people, especially churchy ones, prefer to visit her when it is dark.

When Maddie Schwartz comes to see her, claiming to be from the Star and asking questions about the reading she did when Cleo Sherwood was missing, Madame Claire can tell that the woman is not a believer. She decides to throw a little scare into her, because the woman is not worthy of her gift and does not want to use it for good. She tells her she has a secret, because who doesn't? But she did see the aura of yellow around her, almost in spite of herself, and she could not tell whether it was connected to her or something that has hung in the air since Cleo's mother visited. She could smell the yearning on Maddie too, but there was no sweetness to it. She was like a car engine, revving, revving, revving, making noise, sending sparks out into the world. She wants to get somewhere, the medium thinks, but the trouble is, she doesn't know where she wants to go. That is what makes her dangerous. The gift, which sees so much, cannot tell Madame Claire what Maddie will do with what she learns, and it cannot tell her whether the yellow she saw around the missing girl was a place or a light or a death.

The gift is thus a force of both revelation and limitation. It reveals the yearning of a mother for her lost daughter, the ambition of a young woman who wanted something awfully bad, and the color of a dying woman's last moments. But it cannot save Cleo, cannot tell her mother where she is, and cannot prevent the dangerous curiosity of a woman like Maddie Schwartz. It is a power that its bearer never asked for and longs to return, a vision that makes her see too much and yet not enough. In a novel built on the mystery of a woman who disappeared into a lake, the gift stands as the story's most direct encounter with the supernatural, and its most poignant acknowledgment that some truths can be seen but not changed.