Rochester Knockings (13 page)

Which didn't prevent the coroner for better or worse from conducting his investigations between two divinatory lethargies. In a state of absolute detachment, he made an excruciatingly slow gesture toward the lawyer.

“A car is waiting for me in front of the old cemetery. I'll take you along?”

“I prefer to stay until dawn,” Lucian murmured.

The coroner nodded with the simple drooping of the face, eyelids, cheeks, and lips. He had hesitated to say something about the suicide of that wealthy old woman's young hypnotist. Although his self-sabotaging seemed to leave no doubt, this Nat Astor fellow left quite a riddle engraved on his tombstone: who could have been camouflaging himself so long behind such a name! Wide open to invasions, America was a paradise for truncated, concocted, usurped identities. With the kindness of a judge and a few
dollars, one could invent a gilt-edged civil status for oneself without a lot of trouble. Nobody would go verify your qualifications or aptitudes in the archives of the Old World. The graduates of not to be found learned societies, officers of Napoleon, international financiers and English or Russian aristocrats abounded in the city as well as the countryside, not to mention the acknowledged charlatans parading on the village squares or in conference rooms.

The coroner came close several times to falling down those damned labyrinthine stairs that echoed like piles of empty coffins. He told himself that the tea was giving him indigestion. He never should have drunk that tea, blacker than bile. Finally somewhat satisfied to be alone in the night, he began to hum, hand on his pocket revolver:

               
A house without love

               
Is an empty homestead

               
But wherever love lives

               
Is home indeed

II.

Maggie's Diary

W
hat a whirlwind since our hurried departure from Hydesville! The most bizarre events have followed one after the other with Kate and myself, admittedly the origins of all this disorder, not being able or knowing how to stop any of it beforehand. Spurred on by Reverend Gascoigne, who banished us from his church, the farmers harass us a little more each day, some of them gathering in front of our house with torches. Once, when just the two of us were coming back from the village, a band of cowherds followed us on Long Road screaming horrors. Instead of heading for the farm, Kate ran toward the pond, leaving me no choice but to follow her in that absurd flight. They were throwing pebbles and clods of dirt, treating us like witches or imps of the devil. At the edge of the forest, a dripping figure stood half-naked, holding a white veil like a flag in one hand and in the other, the other . . . It was Samuel, the High Point widow's son. He buttoned up his pants and with a funny smile signaled to us while the pack kept approaching. Without thinking, lacking any other choice, we followed him into a cave hidden by the river, which at that spot falls in a cascade. Inside, there was lingerie hanging from stakes. My
sister guessed it immediately: the rags were Violet Gascoigne's, the drowned woman of the pond. And below that, items stolen from the laundry lines of young farm girls. When the horde had passed, Samuel hid his face in a flannel pajama bottom. Despite his demented air and curious forms of entertainment, he probably saved our lives.

The next day we left Hydesville forever.

So there we were, our dear mother, Katie, and I setting out in a stagecoach for Rochester. Before joining us, our father had to work alone for a little longer at the farm. Our older brother David, whom my little sister and I hardly know because of the many years' difference in age, was willing to take over the operations of the farm, which brought in a better yield than his. Obviously it was Leah who had organized all of it. We look up to her for her discernment and her resourcefulness. With her corsets and satin dresses, she doesn't look a thing like the farmwomen of Hydesville! Our big sister is also a piano virtuoso who can play sonatas by Bach and Mozart without missing a note. At thirty-seven years of age, she could easily be our mother. It is so much more chic to have an elegant mother.

Kate and I have had a hard time making sense of our new life. It's crazy, all that's happened to us thanks to Mister Splitfoot! A real fairy tale, even if the Puritans treated us like witches. Our mother, who only knows how to read out loud, received dozens of letters a day, often anonymous. Hearing them, there was a lot to be afraid of!

But this is too emotional, I'm mixing everything together, I no longer know the purpose in even telling this. Leah found us a big furnished house on Central Avenue, even more beautiful than her own, a palace compared to our Hydesville dump, with at
least a dozen doors, not to mention closets, and ceilings as high as those in churches. We each have our own room, with beautiful new linens acquired at Fashion Park folded in our dressers and chests. Leah of course took care of everything. Even our mother now has the air of a member of the English bourgeoisie. In her fine clothes, she no longer talks such nonsense. At the recommendation of her eldest daughter, she makes herself heard as little as possible.

Leah promised to attend to our education. She's teaching us how to sing correctly and not to swear about everything like country people. We try to make her happy by being accomplished young girls and no longer crying about goblins under the pretext that Old Billy's mane is all in fairy knots. But Old Billy died of old age this winter! Katie cried about it just like she'd recently cried about our dog Irondequoit, and, sempiternally, our little brother in Rapstown.

Katie hasn't changed too much, despite having the waist of a dragonfly and small, pointed breasts. So weird, a little coquettish, she has in her such a damned naïveté and a sadness that comes from far away. We've remained accomplices so that people could imagine she and I shared the same powers. From my end, I learned plenty of tricks from our nights in Hydesville, as opposed to Katie, who, like all awake dreamers, never lacked resources (they say that sleepwalkers are born with one eye too many). The secret that must remain in this journal is that Mister Splitfoot hasn't left us. Like cats, ghosts choose their masters. They're not homebodies so much. Now the spirit accompanies Katie wherever she goes. It was him who asked us to reveal his story to the whole world, on one of the last nights at Hydesville. We know almost
everything about his past life, when he was a peddler weighed down by a heavy briefcase full of haberdashery. A spirit, if I've understood correctly, is an inkling from infinity struggling with past feelings, or else the shadow of a soul full of regret, still captive either way to our pettiness as living creatures. All because of a violent death, a suicide or assassination, or an immense sorrow or some terrible disappointment at the moment of entering the door to the afterlife.

When her eyes mist over and fix into a stare, Kate sometimes starts to say terrifying things. She claims for example that the drowned woman in the Hydesville pond follows our former teacher Miss Pearl around everywhere with abominable intentions, and that she should run away, far away, otherwise she will depart this world or go mad. How could a mother want to harm her daughter? She also says that there are thousands of shadows watching us, everywhere, but that only some of them try to break their silence. And then her eyes get cheerful again and she invites me to a game of hearts or dominoes. I get the feeling that she is unaware of what happens to her in those moments, like when she gets up at night, all disheveled, arms stretched out, her white nightgown dragging behind her.

When I invoke the spirit, since that is what is expected of us here, there is so much tension around me, such an attention in all the people that surround me, that by the end it makes a noticeable sound of creaking in the furniture and in my skeleton, at the ends of my hands and feet, in the joints of my knees. Even my teeth are involved. Kate, on the contrary, is not contracted, tensed-up like a bow; it seems more like she abandons herself entirely to the mystery, imperturbable and quite sad. Even at the brink of
fainting, she smiles absently. Mister Splitfoot is surely goading her from the other side of appearances so that she doesn't turn her eye away.

We don't lack for visitors in our sumptuous lodgings. Worldly people, as Leah says. Rich businessmen, the middle class from all the professions. And then there are the journalists who file in, insolent, mocking, or conversely so attentive that they put their fat paws on my arms or brush a finger against my thigh or blouse. Their questions are sometimes surprising: what are your tricks? Do you believe in animal magnetism? Do ghosts remain good Americans? Have they ever been abusive toward you?

Without wasting her time with that hullabaloo, our big sister solicited a very fashionable decorator from downtown who came to install what she called “a cabinet for spiritualist consultations,” with rosewood panels and bronze chandeliers with nine branches, and thick curtains of crimson velvet. Also called in by Leah was a bald coppersmith wearing spats, who soon installed on our front façade a copper plaque with the inscription:

F
OX
& F
ISH

S
PIRITUALIST
I
NSTITUTE

Our role consists in putting visitors in contact with their dear departed ones. Even Leah gives consultations. Our mother, meanwhile, is responsible for collecting payments and keeping the accounts up to date. She applies herself to this with joy. In just a few sessions, it seems, each of us brings in several months' worth of rent.

On some nights, Rochester personalities come to talk with us. Among them scholars of I don't know what talk seriously
about expert commissions and inspections. Not all of them are benevolent. Even the police and churches get involved, sometimes claiming that we are hiding vile deeds. Fortunately we have our supporters, like the Quakers Amy and Isaac Post, or that large sequoia of a man of the same denomination whose name I forget. And so Leah, to put an end to all these slanders, has rented the biggest room in Rochester. We are going there soon to make a public demonstration monitored by a group of experts. Kate is terrified. I'm ill at ease about it myself. Girls like us aren't used to self-exhibition. We don't know anything, we're just intermediaries to the other world. Kate comes out of her divination séances as if from a dream, with no memories. For me, it's worse, I have the feeling that I'm stepping out on a bridge that's collapsing, or steering an enormous boat into a black abyss where everything is creaking and streaming with water. And in those conditions, I still have to maintain the look of being tranquilly seated in a salon, awaiting the deluge! So, when nothing comes, it's true, I crack my toes. What charitable person would expect someone dying not to cheat with death?

III.

Exploration of a Mining Field

A
fter getting rid of a lusterless husband who left her a nice pension, Leah Fish went on to leave the Irondequoit Music School, where she had for so long taught piano and music theory to inept damsels of the new middle-class. The Spiritualist Institute, her creation, demanded her full attention. She seemed to have taken on all the responsibilities of running a theater: administration, directing the actors, budget, props, stage setting, all the way down to costumes and makeup. Not to mention diction instructor, one of her most thankless tasks with a family that chews their English like cud! It was a mystery to her, and doubtless to any number of her fellow citizens of second, third, or umpteenth generations, this indigent extraction she'd managed to wrench herself free from thanks to a childless marriage. And where had they all come from themselves, those wretched Puritans, all branded with Sin, if not the putrefactions of the Old World and abysses of misfortune? But good blood wouldn't know how to lie—and everyone around here armed his heart, kept a rifle behind the door, ready to play double or quits in order to obtain prosperity and his due share of salvation.

While arranging bouquets of callas and lilies on the dressers and coffee tables in the room, the eldest of the Fox sisters wondered with a hint of anxiety if she wasn't asking for a little trouble by renting Corinthian Hall from the manager of the Lecture Society, after the talks given in this high place by some of the most prestigious orators in the country like Oliver Wendell Holmes, a famous man of letters, the director of the
New-York Tribune,
Horace Greeley, the great theologian Charles Finney, author of the so subtle
Heart of Truth,
the very boring Ralph Waldo Emerson whom she could have heard last year, or even the preacher Alexander Cruik, who needs no introduction. Leah sighed with pride at the thought that he had agreed to be in their company at her soirée. The invitation of a divorced woman, a musician certainly and actually quite literate, can only be accepted by great minds. There would be other singles there this evening, like the superb Wanda Jedna, who campaigned for women's liberation, that priceless Lucian Nephtali with his fake Manfred airs, as well as frightfully old men who were always useful for finances and promotion.

The bell from the nearby Presbyterian Church rang seven o'clock.

Nervous, Leah called out to the youngest of her two servants: she had forgotten the cinnabar lamps and incense to burn!

“No need to light the chandeliers,” she added. Ambiance is really just a matter of scents and shadows.