Rochester Knockings (17 page)

“Spirit, are you there?” Kate exclaimed out loud in direct response to Mister Splitfoot. “If you are there, knock twice . . .”

The table was immediately the instrument for two powerful knocks that had the dryness of actual bullet shots or of a hatchet thrown at a hollow tree.

There was revolt in the room, and one woman let out a sinister howl. Shaken with convulsions, Charlene Obo frantically applauded. Camped behind the backstage exit after his buffoonish performance, invisible to the public and protagonists that he could
now observe at leisure, Lucian Nephtali was smoking a cigarillo while pondering the degree of fantasy the Great Watchmaker placed in his work. Quite curious phenomena surrounded these young girls. The furniture seemed to respond to them as feeling persons, like paralytics in fervent skeletons. And why the devil did the dead act so turbulently at the least invocation? Leah monitored her sisters with the eye of a night owl: white moon rabbits, surrounded in a gloomy forest of Puritans, they were frolicking between two coffins of old wood, one in the shape of an armoire and the other a table.

The dry knocks turned into a rain, more regular than the clangor of a gallows, and the afflicted crowd roared in anger and dismay. Were they afraid under the livid light of the astral lamps of the apparition of a vast population of numb souls, with scythes and fangs, such as Breughel had depicted in his
Triumph of Death,
coming by the thousands of millions to put an end to the scandal of the separation of the beyond from here? If little girls had the power to abolish such borders, logically an apocalypse should follow. Lucian burst out laughing at the prospect. He himself would be ready to give credit to all this nonsense to see his friend again, to ask his forgiveness and press him once more against his chest. But Nat Astor was without a doubt still in the old cemetery on Buffalo Street. And what could answer to the mystery of the abyss? O you who do not enter,
or not yet,
abandon here all hope!

VII.

Fox & Fish Spiritualist Institute

F
rom then on the house on Central Avenue with its
Fox & Fish Spiritualist Institute
sign was frequented by all the polite Rochester society. They even came from New York City and Boston, from Illinois and Pennsylvania in order to consult one or the other of the Fox sisters. Leah managed the business with determination and rigor, selecting the clientele, taking care of the ritual of welcome, and the staging in each of the three rooms decorated without ornamental overload in a neo-Gothic style. The most difficult for her was banning any semblance of a desire for independence in the two sisters, who were certainly both of marrying age—Margaret especially. The little farm girls were growing refined thanks to her lessons and now knew how to appreciate beautiful corseted dresses, taffetas or black satin, tasteful jewelry, and smart hairstyles with hairbands and chignons at the neck that looked so nice with thick hair. They'd become so beautified that contenders flocked, even among the widowers coming with the hope of corresponding with their deceased wives. Why bother with a
husband, that's what she, a divorcée and happy to be so, repeated to them at leisure. Thanks to the paid séances and the donations from their wealthy followers, they lacked neither the ordinary nor the extravagant—even if the bank accounts remained hidden to them. A fortune acquired outside of marriage has for a woman the exquisite taste of revenge.

Leah held bitter memories of the tests they'd had to pass before actually establishing themselves and building their reputation beyond Monroe County, the state of New York, and then in the whole Union! The episode in Corinthian Hall, however decisive for their careers, fed her worst nightmares, where an anonymous voice suddenly destabilizes the precarious equilibrium of the believing public. “Witches!” the crowd had cried at the moment when a randomly chosen spectator was learning from the counting of knocks a shameful secret. Then there was a battle of insults carried out in full force by the Puritans, ready to take action. The demonstration happened to be coming to its end, but the released audience congregated outside, unleashing their animosity. The most virulent of them had stolen thick ropes from the storefront of a saddle shop that they were brandishing in the half-light of the evening. Perched on a horse cart, a sententious pastor named Ryan excited the lynch mob. “Whoever plays with Satan will not take delight in God!” he started to proclaim, among other cookie-cutter slogans.

Press correspondents gave considerable coverage to the event, though their reports contrasted wildly. Whereas the papers of the South and Midwest spoke of the shameful deception of abolitionist clans and women's rights movements, the
New-York Tribune,
under the pen of a young follower of transcendentalism, in fashion
with progressives in the North, announced it a fundamental discovery proving nothing less than the immortality of the soul. The article ended with a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson: “There are persons, from whom we always expect fairy tokens; let us not cease to expect them.” The Quakers on their end were heavily engaged in the spiritualist path, in competition with the Mormons who had the aim to recall, by their lawful baptized name or with good reason, all the souls that ever lived on Earth since Adam and Eve, without neglecting anyone.

The lawyers and scientists present at Corinthian Hall, however, suspecting a hoax, joined together to assemble a commission of experts. Seeing this merely as a ploy and case of bribery, the populace threatened to hang the three girls and their protectors in the case of favorable findings. It was at their risk and peril that they presented themselves at those meetings in the form of a public hearing at Corinthian Hall. Neither the first commission nor the second could detect the least stigma of fraud. All sorts of tests, however, were conducted by a clerk of the court. They listened inside the armoire and the table with a stethoscope. They placed felt pads under the chair legs. After having inspected under all their garments and up to their private parts, they bound the young women's hands and legs during the invocations. The court doctor Brinley Simmons restricted each girl's diaphragm with straps to thwart any attempt at ventriloquism. Nothing suspicious could be detected in the course of these extravagances. The experts confined themselves to stating the absence of mechanical causality between the mediums' action and the various means by which the knocks were produced. An Episcopalian commission headed by an itinerant bishop of the Evangelical Association even concluded
the entire good faith of the two youngest sisters without explaining or endorsing the phenomenon.

After the lynch mob, the fortune attached to the fame didn't fail to attract predators. A certain Norman Culver, distant cousin by marriage, had tried in vain to blackmail them. He ended by declaring loud and clear that Margaret had revealed to him her method of cracking the bones in her toes. With a little practice, he claimed, anyone could deceive the simpletons recruited among the public at fairs. Dealers in bankruptcy were not far behind; one of them, of Irish stock, wanted to sell them the handwritten map of a gold mine in the Rockies bequeathed by an illiterate father, certain that the animal magnetism contained on that flimsy piece of paper would serve as compass. But these vagaries were only the ransom of a glory that promised to be universal.

Leah herself had learned a lot by adversity; although deprived of the natural grace of her sisters, as a medium of some consequence in her own right she felt protected by her great piety from the random charlatans that kept up fertile if inept competition. But who was she to complain? The money deposited each week in the Silvestri bank was fructifying nicely. Reliable friends surrounded and advised her, starting with the devoted Sylvester, as well as George Willets, that good giant who had saved them from lynching after the favorable verdict of the Episcopalian commission, not to mention dear Charlene Obo and that singular Wanda Jedna, figurehead of all great egalitarian causes. Supporters and followers flocked to the private meetings of the Spiritualist Institute, such as the enthusiast Andrew Jackson Davis come from Blooming Grove, the quite amazing Anna Blackwell who carried the spiritual grief of a Luciferian poet from Baltimore, the
cloth merchant Freeman, Jonathan Koons, a farmer from Ohio who promised to build a sanctuary for Spirits, and those dozens of war widows, weeping mothers, or theology students all trembling at the invocations like willow leaves when the night wind blows. To such a point that she no longer knew how to differentiate a patient from an affiliate or a courtier from a possible rival.

Also not without influence on Leah's mood was the languor of their mother, affected all along by all the dramas that had come rushing upon her daughters as much as by the strangers rushing in from endless funerals, and the increasing hostility of Margaret, always a nervous wreck and ready to repay her devotion with tantrums. The Fox & Fish Institute's success was at its zenith however, since her younger sisters' latest ingenious discovery. One idle Sunday in the South Avenue villa, they had seized upon a small round table with tripod legs flaring out from a base inlaid with a ring of palmettes, with the idea of card reading in the manner of the Marquise de Fortia. But the table being too narrow, the cards were instead spread on the floor, some on their back, others face-up. Margaret had then claimed that this couldn't be a coincidence. While she knelt to read the future, her sister, hands flat on the mahogany tabletop, started to invoke the chosen knocking spirit, who seemed to find this new mode of communication very convenient: the delicate little table, literally possessed, started to tap from one foot to the other and spin around like a Bavarian dancer. Alerted by chance about this wonder that she had readily attributed to animal magnetism, Leah knew to draw on it as an immediate option during her private séances. With her most loyal spiritualist friends—all as unaware as she of the ancient
mensa divinatoriae
—the handling of turning tables was deliberately developed according to many codes and variants, a repercussion that
delighted her, and a profound reflection on Science and Progress revealed through spirits by heavenly Intelligence.

Whenever she could, on evenings without obligations, Leah took refuge in her haven on South Avenue and tried to forget the madness for which she didn't want to believe herself solely responsible. Wasn't divine will invincible? In these moments, released from the anxieties of the strictest vigilance, she dreamed of gliding over the surface of things, a soap bubble on bare skin.

In her tulle negligee, after taking a bath in a tub her Virginian servant filled by kettle, running between the well in the basement and the coal stove, Leah smoked one of those long cigarettes given to her by Sylvester, her banker friend, thinking of the path she'd traveled since her lousy childhood on some farm in Rapstown. Facing the lights of High Falls that overhung the enormous construction site of the new viaduct, which would allow trains to pass through to New York, Cleveland, or Buffalo, she had the sense of losing her bearings. What kind of life was turned so absolutely toward the incorporeal? A bright blood flowed through her veins. What she felt could be compared to homesickness, but the lost country was that of the flesh, of great rivers and showers of stars. Cracking open the windows, she breathed in the air permeated with spray. She could hear the roaring cascades of the Genesee River between gusts of wind. Leah was taken by a long shiver. There was too much madness mixed into her line of business. Her sisters and her mother, her father taking refuge with their brother David—the entire family was going to disperse in the winter wind and she would remain solitary and sterile amid all the disembodied, like an abandoned garden. The words of a
lied
came back to her in her head:

               
The autumn wind,

               
Will it cry over my ashes

               
Before blowing them away?

She opened the bay window wide. The sails of her robe floated up to the piano. A jewelry of tears on her lashes, she stroked both hands across the low keys. It was her ruse to overcome melancholy with more melancholy.

VIII.

Farewell Dear Mother

T
he death of their dear mother happened unexpectedly, on a December night. Deeply ingrained for years now, her depression finally started to seem to those around her like a temperament that the damage to her health had come to accuse. Having become loyal to the household, the court doctor Brinley Simmons, always encumbered with his surgery bag, had amenably followed the evolution of her languor, which he had treated primarily with mercury, as with syphilis.

But in the end their good mother gave up the ghost without having complained of any other torments except for an irrepressible fear for her children's future. It was the youngest that, one fleecy morning, found her in her bed, believing she was asleep, but so still, so identical to herself, the perfect sleeping statue of a life. Kate had just dreamed of her and, happy to keep the memory intact, was eager to go tell her about it at daybreak. “Dear Mother, I dreamed that you were cured of all your pains. It was snowing. You were so happy to be leaving on a trip alone and without luggage . . .”

Kate had crossed the cold hands atop the covers and leaned over to brush her lips on that marble cheek. Back in her room, she'd waited more than an hour for either Janet, the maid, or Margaret to make the discovery. Margaret's agonizing cries were inimitable. Still in the unreality of the present moment, it was with an exalted air that she entered her room crying, “Mother is dead!” Speechless, Kate looked at her without reacting, paralyzed by a terrible sense of déjà-vu.