There is one letter between Ouida and Ouija. I have lost an entire day inside it.
In 1890, Helen Peters placed her fingers on a talking board and asked what it wished to be called. The pointer spelled O-U-I-J-A. When she asked what the name meant, it answered, good luck.
An excellent answer if you want someone to keep asking questions. Or an ominous warning if you want them to fear what they might summon.
Afterward, Helen showed the others a locket she was wearing. Inside was a woman’s portrait with a name beneath it. The men said the name read Ouija. A talking-board historian thinks they may have read it wrong. He thinks it said Ouida.
I looked her up.
Ouida was the name Marie Louise de la Ramée chose to write under. It grew out of the way she pronounced Louise as a child. She took a sound from her own young mouth, put it on the covers of her novels, and made it famous.
She was alive when Helen Peters wore the locket. I checked that first. Then I checked what she wrote. When I found out she liked purple writing paper and Lord Byron there went the afternoon. Head first into the rabbit hole.
Her final novel was left unfinished and published after her death.
I closed that page. Eventually I opened it again.
Suppose the name in Helen’s locket really was Ouida. A woman chooses a name for her books. Another woman wears it near her heart. Her fingers rest on a board, and the name comes back altered by one letter. The board spends the next century taking credit for naming itself.
The historian thinks Helen may have loved Ouida’s books enough to wear her portrait. That I understand. What I cannot work out is whether Helen knew what the name beneath it said. If she did, whose hands changed the D to a J? If she didn’t, why did she wear the woman’s portrait at all?
I thought that was the end of the rabbit hole. It wasn’t even the bottom of the first page.
Five years after Ouida died, Pearl Curran sat at a Ouija board with a friend. The first message from the person who appeared there announced that she had lived before and gave her name: Patience Worth.
Patience said she had been dead for centuries. She also had books to write.
Through Pearl came poems, stories, plays, and novels. Critics reviewed them. Readers argued over whether Patience had existed and whether a ghost could be a gifted author. There are volumes of her words in an archive. Pearl’s hands were there for every page.
Pearl. Evelyn kept books for Kitab Engraving on Pearl Street. In the photograph, her gloved hand rests at her pearls. I have written the word three times now. I am trying not to decide what that means.
I keep going back and forth between those two women. Ouida took a name and made herself an author. Pearl made books and insisted the author was a spirit.
Helen eventually stopped trusting the board. When it accused someone in her family of stealing a collection of Civil War buttons, she said it lied. I found that part after I had bought mine.
This began with a question about a locket. I now have three women’s names written across my desk, a chapter of my own that I cannot seem to finish, and a Ouija board I told myself I bought for research.
I meant to ask it about Ouida.
I have not written down the name it gave me instead.
—Lore