Rochester Knockings (29 page)

Busy during the day with his study of the City, on the Queen's Bench Division or in conference with one or other of his clients, George was long unaware of her sleepwalking fugues. Until the night Kate came home late, looking wild, her gloves torn and stained with blood. He figured out that she had been assaulted by a bunch of East End kids where she'd gone to stroll without protection, a defector from the good side of town, and had broken her nails while heartily defending herself. He lavished her with soothing words and nursed her scratches, discovering that she had been frequenting for months perhaps the canvas shelters of the
Christian Revival Society, where the most needy of the countless underprivileged were helped under the leadership of the preacher William Booth. Out of a natural generosity, but suddenly concerned about the mental health of his spouse, as much as he had always hidden from her his own ailments, the lawyer became closer to her and made sure that his driver and right-hand man followed her diligently from the moment that she declined being driven somewhere.

But a happy event—as those usually indifferent to the event love to say—soon changed the mental state of the Jencken couple. Kate gave birth to twins so exceedingly identical, even down to the details known only by mothers, that she herself must have permanently confused them two or three times, leaving to good fortune the choice of identities until their father decided to attach to their ankles thin gold chains engraved with their names. That one would be called Arcady and the other John Elias—or the reverse—before this initiative, was hardly going to change their reciprocal existence a hair. Which one was the eldest by a few minutes, Kate couldn't have said, which eventually disturbed her with generative vertigo. She lived through her pregnancy like a bird hovering so high, so far above the dark marshes. Flesh fertilized opened the mind to the joys of childhood as well as to the white locks of age, with the influx of stars and the dazzling abysses of ice. For her, giving birth was bringing her own self into the world; Kate was born from her own stomach or the bowels of the universe with two twins as a sign of the zodiac. This moment contained all moments, the streaming of generations, the infinite metamorphoses, and the heart of the shadow of death palpitating across the billions of lives with ephemeral stigmatas.

One recovers quickly from birth when taken by frenzy to save the mystery of life by pouring it out in careful sips. In motherhood, Kate distanced herself from the terror of procreation. Her two boys grew strong and got big, still always interchangeable, playing on every occasion with their twinning, Arcady answering to the call for John Elias, the other fooling his parents in false stories, the both of them exchanging their clothes when the adults wanted to tell them apart, up until the day when one of the two, stricken by a purulent meningitis and placed into isolation, was brought out after two weeks of treatment with memory disorders persistent enough for the twins to abandon their favorite game, having become impossible to play by the force of circumstances.

Between the education of her children and a redoubled attention to her husband, Kate no longer felt the need to flee into the London streets or into her cataleptic dreams. The nostalgia for American cities, so different from the big London checkerboard where sooty neighborhoods alternated with parks in undefined suburbs, seized her sometimes unexpectedly. There, everything was possible overnight, glory and madness, unhappiness and fortune. The memory of Horace Greeley, her indulgent patron, who died the year of her marriage after running unsuccessfully in the presidential elections, still throbbed in her, but like a good star about to fizzle out. She missed above all the beautiful days of Rochester and pined for Margaret. She even missed Leah. There comes a day when siblings replace the buried memory of the elders, since in them alone are found now the inflections of voice and the attitudes populating one's intimate background.

From time to time Margaret wrote her long rowdy missives where she cursed everyone on Earth, starting with Leah who gave herself the right to reprimand Margaret publicly in the name of
the spiritualist cause, under the pretext that she was giving herself over to alcohol and, in a series of degradations, to the disloyal charlatans of French and German spiritualists touring Main Street America and the entire East Coast. It was apparent from her letters, without her daring to admit it, that her manager and probably lover Franck Strechen was exploiting her with the cynicism of a pimp or circus-freak showman. Kate sadly felt very glad while reading of no longer having to deal with that spiritual brotherhood, in some respects as fratricidal as it was incestuous, and of having preserved her twins and her husband from the miasmas of the other world, for she no longer had any doubt that frequenting the dead too often meant giving oneself over to them body and soul. George who, in marrying her, had lost Mr. Coleman as his client, was half-ruined but not unhappy to distance his beloved wife from the crowds, more and more numerous, applauding her in their grief from the wars, catastrophes and epidemics that traditional faiths were no longer able to console. Such dangerous heresy was in his opinion more contagious than gangrene.

It was a fact that neither Mr. Coleman nor Charles Livermore, warned belatedly of her defection, were interested any longer in her since her marriage: a woman of family goes better with stoves than spirits. The only company Kate had were George, her children, and her family-in-law. Uncle Herbert visited them once a week, always jovial, so happy to play the great uncle that the twins, delighted at this diversion, celebrated him like one of the Magi. Gifts accumulated in their room, all different: little islands of toys would have sufficed to betray Arcady and John Elias if the illness had not long shut down their mimetic emulation. Although he was a radical atheist, admirer of the Paris Commune and great reader of Karl Marx, starting with his
Contribution to the Critique
of Political Economy,
Uncle Herbert kept the former pythoness of the pedestal table in relative mistrust. He had learned never to judge individuals on their alienation and treated his sister-in-law with the same distant charity that Plague doctors must have had in the time of the miasma theories. Once a month a less amiable grandmother came up, a jealous widow who monopolized the attention of her son and grandsons at Kate's expense, suspicious in her eyes of casting a spell. Wasn't she one of the three Fox sisters, like the three Gorgons with snakes for hair, like the Fates or the monstrous Grey Nuns of legend who had among the three of them a single eye and one lone tooth, taking turns watching and devouring?

Kate was never happier than in the fisherman's house they rented sometimes in the summer, at Gower, between the beaches and cliffs of Wales, when the lawyer could accompany the children. It was upon returning from a week on the peninsula that his health problems, up until then inconsequential, took a dramatic turn. After having gone valiantly to his office in the city with the help of his coachman, several days later, swearing that it was only a little fatigue, George took to his bed and died one summer night in 1881, in the sole company of his wife, to whom he had never stopped promising that it was really nothing serious, that he would go on loving her for many more years and even more once he felt better.

Alone in the house, the children entrusted that night to their grandmother, Kate shook the body of her husband while begging him to respond, screaming at him that it wasn't funny, that he had never ever abandoned her, then wept her fill on his already cold hands, kissed his lips and eyes, and suddenly petrified by
the evidence, searched her empty mind to remember a prayer from her childhood. After a silence that lasted nearly an hour, she stammered the creed of John Wesley she'd so often read, chiseled on the pediment of the Methodist church in Hydesville:

               
Do all the good you can

               
By all the means you can

               
In all the ways you can

               
In all the places you can

               
At all the times you can

               
To all the people you can

               
As long as ever you can

VI.

The Two Widows of Notting Hill

A
t nine years old, nothing about the schemes of adults escapes you. This is what Arcady and John Elias told each other without saying a word on the return home from the cemetery. They conversed and thought by exchanged glances. Needless to bother with words, unless for putting on airs. Silence isn't just for the deaf.

Uncle Herbert, grandmother, all sorts of aunts and old cousins had invaded the apartment after the funeral as if to hide a secret or to take the place of their father. And then those people went home, leaving the house full of shadows. Kate would come to tuck them into their twin beds and, very solemn, tell them stories of blessing and paradise, but she would cry a long chain of iron tears. And it was they, the children, who night after night had to console her. Explain to her that he was there, close by, that George was watching them with his different colored eyes, one blue eye in this world, the green eye in the other.

Weeks later, a thundering night in autumn, Kate started to smile prettily, like Mary of the Images. She promised them a
surprise: Margaret, their aunt, was going to cross the Ocean to come meet them. One more relative or one less, this piece of news was fleeting, but Katie's smile kept up its promise. Arcady and John Elias, for months now, had listened to her lessons of healing while she herself had been using both hands to hold open her own wounds. One night very late, she led them into the room where their father had been laid in his coffin. There was a table with three chairs, just across from the bed illumined by a bedside candelabra. “Who is there?” asked Kate, after having them sit down, their little hands flat on the table. It was winter, an enormous gust shook the roofs and chimneys in a torrent of noise. Sometimes a gust charged with rain seemed to cross the exterior wall. Then the alphabet started to answer Kate's voice with numbers and the table knocked the floor from one foot or another: one, two, three, four, five . . . Was it five? The numbers had to be translated back into letters and words in order, then she read:

A-R-C-A-D-Y-J-O-H-N-E-L-I-A-S-I-L-O-V-E-Y-O-U.

Was that all? They already suspected that their father loved them. Although this game without any playing cards was fun, with the candles, the agitated table and those mysterious noises, their eyelids were heavier than the earth on a grave. Kate had to carry them one after the other up to bed. Another time, the table rose, oscillating like a little hot-air balloon. Arcady could not believe that his father, once so reasonable, was returning from the grave for such mischievous turns. John Elias was of the same opinion and, without either one of them expressing such a thing, declared all of a sudden:

“Mister Splitfoot, will you soon finish with your antics!”

Kate, horrified, stood straight up, letting the table topple. “Who told you about him?” she stammered.

The twins, side by side, looked at their mother with the unusual attention one gives to a loved one confessing to a defect or hidden perversion.

“You did, Mommy!” said Arcady, “when you sleepwalk at night through the rooms . . .”

“My boys, my boys!” she cried, incapable of finding the salutary words, clutching their heads to her chest.

It was by telephone, from the central post office, that Kate made contact with her sister who, just arrived at the port of London, was calling from the offices of the maritime shipping company at the agreed upon day and time. Yes, there was no change, they were expecting her at the indicated address, she was still living with her children in their Notting Hill apartment. Kate wasn't surprised by the hoarse and listless voice on the other end of the line, thinking of the hardships of that voyage.

But when her sister presented herself at her door, two grumbling porters beleaguered with trunks behind her, she could not conceal a startled jump at the sight of her ravaged face.

“I've gone to pot, no?” Margaret said gently to help out. “Soon I'll be ready for the scrapheap! But you, you haven't changed so much. They say that one's face reflects one's heart . . .”

Once the luggage was deposited and the coat hung, seated face to face, the steam from a teapot undulating between them, the dialogue was renewed as if it had never stopped, and the discord between a very real aging and the transience of this decade of not seeing each other was reduced to the point of disappearing entirely: hadn't she always carried Margaret inside her, branded like a cross of fate on her bare skin? Already, she was asking what
there was to drink, some wine, some beer, some whiskey, to get her back on her feet after a crossing drowned in spray.

“By the way, where are my nephews?” she asked in surprise, somewhat confused by this lack of propriety.

“With their Uncle Herbert for the birthday of a little cousin.”

“I'm excited to meet them!” she said, helping herself to a bottle that George had been the last person to open. “And you, you've pulled yourself together some? Here we are, sisters in bad luck . . .”

“You're drinking too much,” Kate whispered.

“It helps me get over the old times . . . Will you take me to visit the Metropolitan? I'd also love to discover the old streets, palaces, churches. Ah! what a fortune we could make here, the two of us, in the largest city in the world . . .”