by Norman Lock
“Ellen, are you all right?” asked Margaret, helping me to a sofa.
“Forgive me, my corset is too tight,” I replied untruthfully. “That and the heat quite overcame me.”
She sat beside me and held my thumb until I felt it begin to numb. Her childlike frame was engulfed by the sofa; her short legs, clad in a striped skirt, were barely able to fold over the edge of the seat. Yet she behaved perfectly, as though not the least incommoded by the oversized world. “You went white as a ghost,” she said solicitously.
“I’m sorry to be such a bother,” I replied, my shamefaced glance taking in Margaret and each of her fellow artistes.
They made noises of concern, which I knew to be genuine.
“Seeing my act for the first time can come as a shock,” said Miss Etta after she had unpacked herself from the cabinet.
“Not at all. I was thrilled!” The truth is that the act had affected me queerly, as if I had happened on something altogether too grotesque for words.
“To put the color back in your cheeks” with a demonstration of scientific fencing, Mr. Matchett and Mr. Engelbrecht each offered me an arm and escorted me onto the porch. I sat in a rocking chair as they produced rapiers—seemingly out of thin air. (It was often so in those days that things came and went without explanation.)
“We have added an enhancement to our performance to edify the public, as well as to entertain it,” remarked Mr. Matchett smugly.
“A classical enhancement!” put in Mr. Engelbrecht, who clearly resented his partner’s superior attitude. A livid scar and a missing earlobe hinted that their tempers were not ideally suited to a combative profession.
With astonishing rapidity, Mr. Engelbrecht assumed the character (and strange to say, the costume) of Mercutio; in a trice, Mr. Matchett had transformed himself into Tybalt. (Mr. James once treated me to a performance of the “lamentable tragedy” at the Booth’s Theatre in Manhattan, with Edwin Booth in the role of Romeo.)
“We salt our swordplay with Shakespeare for the hightoned crowd,” simpered Matchett.
“Edwin Booth praised my fencing!” crowed Engelbrecht.
“Henry Irving said of my performance, ‘I could not have been more staggered by Mr. Matchett’s Tybalt had I been hit over the head with a sledgehammer such as is used to dispatch oxen.’”
Face-à-face, the pair of scientific fencers began to hurl Shakespearean insults.
ENGELBRECHT-MERCUTIO: Tybalt, you ratcatcher, will you walk?
MATCHETT-TYBALT: What wouldst thou have with me?
MERCUTIO: Good King of Cats, nothing but one of your nine lives. That I mean to make bold withal, and, as you shall use me hereafter, dry-beat the rest of the eight. Will you pluck your sword out of his pilcher by the ears? Make haste, lest mine be about your ears ere it be out.
TYBALT: I am for you.
They drew their swords and waggled them at each other.
MERCUTIO: Come, sir, your passado.
They fought with ludicrous ferocity until Tybalt gave Mercutio a fatal wound.
MERCUTIO: A plague o’ both your houses! I am sped.
TYBALT: What, art thou hurt?
MERCUTIO: Ay, ay, a scratch, a scratch. Marry, ’tis enough.
TYBALT: Courage, man. The hurt cannot be much.
MERCUTIO: No, ’tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church-door, but ’tis enough, ’twill serve. Ask for me tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave man. I am peppered, I warrant, for this world. A plague o’ both your houses! Zounds, a dog, a rat, a mouse, a cat, to scratch a man to death! A braggart, a rogue, a villain who fights scientifically.
Passersby had gathered on the sidewalk, and as Mercutio crumpled onto the porch and expired with a most piteous sigh, they clapped and cried “Bravo!”
Not to be outdone by a pair of scientific fencers, George Bliss leaped from the balustrade over the heads of the astonished crowd. The poor man landed on a loose paving stone and broke his ankle. We heard the bone snap and shuddered. In fakir fashion, Miss Etta rolled herself into a doughnut for the approval of the gawkers, who graciously overlooked the immodest result of her art. Spurred by envy, Miss Watson of the Hippodrome had borrowed a Pierre Michaux “boneshaker” from a cyclist and was racing hell-bent for election up and down Broadway, like a cracked-brain Ben-Hur, while the gentlemen ogled Miss Mattie Elliott’s superb legs as she did her famous high kicks. Only glum Mrs. Stoner had no part in the variety; Napoléon was in Flatbush, growing fat on mice fed him by an admirer.
“Hooray for Miss Mattie!” shouted a gentleman wearing a pince-nez, which glittered wickedly in a blast of sunlight.
“Encore!” shouted a man who could have been either a drama critic or an aficionado of dogfights.
“More leg!” shouted a paperhanger whose slurred speech, wobbly gait, and roseate nose betrayed him as a sot. He sat on his book of samples and sighed for love.
A chorus of sybarites took up the inebriate’s theme: “Give us more leg, Miss Mattie!”
She obliged them with a kick of such extraordinary height that her head disappeared into the petals of her skirts. The gentlemen tossed their hats, and Miss Etta, envious of the attention being paid to her colleague, staggered down the porch steps on all fours like a large spider and sang “Father’s a Drunkard and Mother Is Dead.”
“More leg, Miss Mattie, if you please!”
Margaret touched my wrist. “None of this is what you came to see.”
I admitted it was not.
“You mustn’t blame my friends; their roles are engrained. Perhaps I was naïve to think that you could get to know them as they really are. If they were to stop playing their parts, they might vanish. Is it the same for you, Ellen, in your world?”
Not wanting to follow the argument to its conclusion, I gave no answer. I had lost my hold on reality and was happier so. At least for a while, I will be free of all that, I told myself, unwilling to specify even to myself what “that” might be.
Margaret, however, had not finished with me.
“There’s someone else I want you to meet,” she said, leading me upstairs by the hand.
We stopped outside room number five on the hotel’s top floor. My heart was thudding, my mouth parched, my respiration fast. Something in Margaret’s tone had unnerved me, as did the atmosphere of the hotel’s upper stories, their dark staircases and corridors, which could have been modeled on Thornfield Hall’s. My mind is overly susceptible to the intimations of old houses, easily swayed by other people, and liable to be persuaded of hostile intentions by a neurotic fancy. Margaret knocked on the door.
“Who is it?” a thrilling voice asked from the other side. I pictured a room done up like one of Barnum’s attractions: a papier-mâché grotto inhabited by the resurrected Feejee Mermaid, languid in her bath; a fire-breathing chimaera chained in an asbestos-papered parlor; or, prodigy of prodigies, Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy, “a human–Skye terrier, the crowning mystery of nature’s contradictions.” Then, having just read Jane Eyre, I was certain that the room’s unseen tenant was a dangerously distracted creature like Rochester’s mad wife locked inside her tower.
“Margaret and a friend,” replied the indomitable little person standing next to me.
“A friend to whom?” asked the creature inside the room, which, as I recall, smelled of juniper berries.
“To those who work in circuses.”
“You may come in.”
I thought my heart would stop as Margaret opened the door and ushered me inside. To my relief, the room was ordinary, as was its tenant. I insist that there was nothing remarkable or grotesque. I felt the blood that had drained from my face returning, my breathing slow, and the vertigo that had nearly toppled me leave me to find my footing on a threadbare carpet that, in better days, had depicted a Mogul paradise in colored yarns.
“Do sit down,” said the elderly woman cordially.
I sat in one of the two “grown-up” chairs, and Margaret eased into a small one that the woman had
evidently provided for her visits. I thought I should introduce myself and did.
The woman acknowledged me with a smile and nod of her head—a quite ordinary head, neither pretty nor plain. “I am Madame Singleton.”
“Madame Singleton is a clairvoyant,” said Margaret respectfully. “Her intuitions were recognized by the Fox sisters, Kate and another Margaret, when they were stopping at Barnum’s Hotel in the fifties, during the early years of their fame.”
Amy and Isaac Post, a Quaker couple living in Rochester, were the first to proclaim the girls’ gifts after they had rapped out messages sent by the inconsolable Posts’ recently departed daughter. (In another of history’s bewildering entanglements, Mrs. Post attended the Woman’s Rights Convention at the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls and signed the Declaration of Sentiments, authored and presented by Elizabeth Cady Stanton.) We now know that Kate and Margaret were frauds, after the third Fox sister, Leah, confessed to having perpetrated the hoax, which had begun as a childish prank.
I could never make out why the girls’ “psychic abilities” had excited the interest of many radically minded Quakers of the day, the same faction advocating temperance, abolition, and the cause espoused by those two other controversial “sisters,” Elizabeth and Susan. At the peak of their celebrity, the Foxes were championed by luminaries such as William Cullen Bryant, James Fenimore Cooper, Horace Greeley, William Lloyd Garrison, and Sojourner Truth, as well as P. T. Barnum, who appreciated the bamboozler’s art. Two of the era’s fringe movements—suffrage and spiritualism—became conjoined in the public’s mind, to the disadvantage of the first.
“You are thinking that I do not look like a medium and that my room is not furnished as you would expect,” said Madame Singleton.
I must have looked surprised, because she said, “Your thoughts are safe, my dear; I would not presume to read the mind of one of Margaret’s friends without permission.”
“I’m not sure I believe in the supernatural.”
“You are an intelligent young woman who knows her own mind.”
“I’m not sure that I do that, either,” I replied frankly.
“I am not interested in converting you to spiritualism. And you are right to be suspicious; there are a great many charlatans in the field of psychic research.”
Pointing to a framed photograph on the side table, Margaret said, “Here is Madame Singleton in costume.”
In the picture, she was dressed like an Assyrian sorceress. Her eyes had been made up to exaggerate the intensity of her gaze, and her fingers were adorned with gems, whose miraculous properties were said to strengthen her power of spiritual communion with those who had passed over. Her slender hands rested on a “talking table,” with which she would sometimes transmit, as if by infernal telegraph, messages between the quick and the dead. A crystal ball stood beside it, in which Madame Singleton could scry the future. Divination was powerful in her, as was the reach of her uncanny foresight. She was the very image of a medium, spiritualist, soothsayer, or clairvoyant. In that costume and setting, she appeared before the general public admitted to P. T. Barnum’s Grand Traveling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan & Hippodrome.
“It’s all for show,” said Margaret. “Stage props to give the crowd what it expects to see.”
“Then it’s nothing but a confidence game!” I said indignantly.
Mrs. Singleton spoke in defense of illusion: “The public would be disappointed, even enraged, if Mr. Barnum were to exhibit a man who could fly—not a creature with wings, mind you, but an otherwise-ordinary person able to levitate and soar unaided. He’d need to strap on a pair of cardboard wings covered in chicken feathers, such as children wear in Nativity pageants, to satisfy the ‘suckers,’ which they are not, since they know they are being gulled. People enjoy magic because they know there is a trick to it, and they would burn at the stake the magician who needed none.”
There is truth in that, I told myself.
“I require neither costume nor props to interpret etheric transmissions. They bring me secrets that have been locked in the vault of time and also those hidden in the tiny universe inside the human brain.”
“Her powers are stupendous!” exclaimed Margaret.
“They’re a burden,” said Madame Singleton, sighing—without, I hasten to add, ostentation.
“It is your gift,” concluded Margaret, as though the word comprehended the exceptional ability, grave responsibility, and a fate akin to doom borne by this selfless martyr to the spiritus mundi.
I was far from being convinced. At night, in a lightless room, I might almost believe in unseen, gibbering presences. But they were the stock characters of horror tales. I could more readily entertain the idea of Washington Irving’s Headless Horseman or Hawthorne’s devils than the talking dead.
“I’ll read your palm, if you like,” she said. “It’s not as revealing as what can be seen in a dish of water or in grains left on the threshing floor or by eavesdropping on voices in another’s head—by far the most reliable method. But the lines of the hand are an aperçu of destiny.”
I gave her my hand, and, suddenly fearful, took it back before she had glimpsed its palm.
“Don’t be afraid, Ellen,” encouraged Margaret.
But I was afraid and would not let her read it.
Margaret bravely offered hers. Madame Singleton laid the childlike hand on her own and proceeded to ruminate over the lines of destiny inscribed on her palm.
“What do you see?” asked Margaret, and I could hear in her voice a thrill of anticipation.
“Moments of happiness.”
“Is that all?”
“Hours of sorrow.”
A human life, in other words.
“Does it matter that the hand is no bigger than a child’s?” I asked abruptly.
“If you mean by your question, is a child’s hand too innocent to have been marked by life and intimations of the future—you are correct. But Margaret’s hand bears time’s signature, and her story, albeit writ small, is plain to see on her palm.”
“You could have lied to me like the others!” said Margaret peevishly. Madame Singleton was not the only spiritualist in Barnum’s circus. Moreover, she was the least popular of them because she would not tell her customers what they wished to hear. I never understood why Barnum kept her, unless he depended on her predictions for reasons of business. Or maybe he loved her. Who can say what truths are radiant in the mind of a mountebank, what passions agitate his heart?
She gazed at me—her eyes gimlets—and said, “If I can ever be of service, please come and see me.” She offered me her card, which I took. She may have glimpsed my future after all, because, as it turned out, I would have great need of her.
Krakatoa
SHORTLY AFTER THEIR RETURN from Philadelphia, I told Elizabeth and Susan of my visit to Barnum’s Hotel. Their faces darkened like the sky the year following Krakatoa’s eruption in the Sunda Strait. Volcanic ash had been blown aloft into the highest reaches of the atmosphere and left for the upper winds to circulate. An immense wave rolled from the Java Sea to the English Channel. If God had instructed a new and pious family in the elements of carpentry, we never heard, nor was a second ark discovered on Mount Ararat.
Even now in 1904, I remember the dreadful sunsets caused by particles of soot drifting high above Earth’s surface. The sky might have been set ablaze by aerial troops of arsonists, so spectacular was each day’s end. When the Union Pacific tracks reached the hundredth meridian in 1866, the company director, Thomas Durant, ordered the prairie set on fire to entertain the investors who had traveled from Council Bluffs in his Pullman car to celebrate the milestone. Twenty square miles of grassland burned that night. The Pentecostal fires of 1883 were vaster and brighter, though they kindly left the earth unscorched.
On the first night that the fires torched the sky, Holy Rollers thought Heaven had ruptured like a cast-iron stove and was spewing fire through the cracks. Less crackbrained men in New York,
Poughkeepsie, and New Haven sent fire brigades toward an ever-receding horizon, hunting futilely for the combustion’s source. Franklin and I went up onto the roof and waited for the city to be consumed, while in the street, a congregation of Baptists was on its knees and praying in anticipation of the Four Horsemen and the “great voice from Heaven,” which would adjure the seven angels to “pour out the vials of the wrath of God upon the earth.” That year, the sun was lavender, the dusk purple, and the moon blue or green. We tasted ash in the air, or perhaps it was only in our fancies, where nothing is ever inconsequential and less than dire. Later, we read that human remains had been found washed up on the east coast of Africa, having crossed the Indian Ocean on rafts of volcanic pumice. (Some stories cannot seem other than lies, and some truths only exaggeration can convey.)
I could be tempted to find in Krakatoa the cause of all that befell me in that eventful year of 1883. I realize the absurdity of so medieval an explanation, but at the time, I judged the truth of things with the rashness and conviction of a sick mind. I am lucky to see things more clearly now.
Elizabeth and Susan frowned on my visit to Madame Singleton’s. They had no patience for the occult. Their struggle in the visible world was difficult without “entertaining ghosts” in the bargain.
“Would you prefer it if I had nothing more to do with Margaret and her friends?”
“It’s not for us to say with whom you may or may not associate,” replied Elizabeth. “That is something men do, especially husbands, although I made it clear to Henry Stanton when I agreed to marry him that I would not tolerate male despotism.”
“It is better to be wed to an idea than a man!” declared Susan.
“I prefer a tyrant of my own sex,” said Elizabeth, gesturing toward her soul mate. “Wait and see, Ellen; one day we shall have a woman president.”
What a preposterous idea! I thought.