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:
FOX & FISH
SPIRITUALIST INSTITUTE
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
After 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.
She went to close the lid of her baby grand piano, certain that she would be begged to reopen it after dessert. Overtaken that moment by light-headedness, she leaned against the corner of the piano and saw the days and nights marching on the ivory keys. All the events since she had taken charge of the family’s destiny for its own good resembled a series of favorable tarot cards. This sudden celebrity almost worried her though: it was happening as an omen, a probationary period of sorts. The other world—its angels or its demons—had visited Katie and Maggie, incontestably. But it was she who, as shrewd proselyte, upheld the communication to her own spiritual level. Neither her sisters nor her poor mother were any good at doctrine. They had only understood the most trivial or absurd aspects of what had happened to them in Hydesville, that invisible neighbor beating against the door from the other world. As if holy Nature gave its place over to fantasy! As the granddaughter of a pastor, even if her father was just an uprooted drunkard, she immediately understood the quasi-liturgical dimension of this telegraphy of souls, notwithstanding that such a process could be laborious in comparison to the Eucharist. Leah stifled a little laugh. She’d liberated two useful sacraments to Rochester, out of the grasp of priestly ministers. She had long leaned toward the natural religion of her sister deists, those rational lovers of God who made fun of prophets and miracles. The Hydesville revelation had managed to restore her childhood faith in mystery, but no longer being a child, she envisioned a mystery that was a real object of study and devotion. Couldn’t we arrive one day at a kind of practical science of the beyond?
The macadam road was soon clanging with iron harnesses. Convertible and sedan coaches followed one after the other on South Avenue. Upstairs the panoramic rooms pulsated with bursts of voices mixed with intelligent laughter. Couples greeted each other according to custom. More circumspect, the single guests distractedly examined the scene. A monocle screwed into his left eye, Lucian Nephtali silently raved to himself about the hostess’s bad taste. There was, however, poorly hung, an acceptable watercolor of a small master of the Hudson River School. The tulle curtains of the plate glass windows let in a view of the Genesee River, wine-colored in the evening twilight, and of the three partly illuminated waterfalls. Wanda Jedna, nicknamed by her fans The Only One, serenely contemplated the view while wondering what it was Leah Fish wanted from her now. In the back of the room, the industrial clothing manufacturer Freeman and his spouse were already talking a
bout investments and capitals with the nurseryman, Barry Nursery, who owned all the forests along Braddock Bay and Mendon Ponds.
“We are seriously considering a bridge for the railroad on Upper Falls. A huge wooden bridge, the biggest ever constructed, around fifty thousand cubic meters of wood is already on its way!”
“Perhaps we should build a train station first!” Mrs. Freeman dared.
“But why? Bridges, first we need bridges!”
An old retired soldier, displaying all his medals, imposed himself into the conversation; his eye was on the new aqueduct.
“I myself was present in 1829 on the right bank, a young and dashing officer, when Sam Patch, a real daredevil, made his leap of death from the top of the waterfalls before all of Rochester. Bah! The unhappy man broke his neck there . . .”
Leah pretended to be helping behind the bar where a black servant in livery was in charge of aperitifs.
“You don’t have anything stronger?” drolly grumbled a blond financier with a little moustache maintained in the fashion of an Alta Italia aristocrat.
Knowing for a fact that Sylvester Silvestri, in addition to being the nephew by marriage of Colonel William Fitzhugh, Junior—cofounder of the city with his counterpart, Colonel Nathaniel Rochester—had been the local vice president of the Independent Order of Good Templars, one of the more active temperance societies, it was with a wink of complicity that Leah served him his lemonade.
“There will be French wine at the dinner table, my dear!”
The arrival of the preacher, followed by Harry Maur puffing on his cigar, and the actress Charlene Obo dressed as queen of the night, provoked a bustle of curiosity that visibly offended the latter. Among the first to arrive, the Post couple stood side by side, stiff in their Puritan outfits, looking bored, wondering if there had been some kind of mistake. The former telegraphist—rendered temperate by the proximity of his wife—missed Hydesville and its saloon more than ever. The two of them were astonished not to see a single other member of the Fox family or its entourage in the group.
But the guests all found their assigned seats around the Arthurian table. Amy and Isaac Post were relieved not to have neighbors who were too awful, like that effusive actress or the somber character dressed like a buccaneer, who had fallen into each others’ arms with a shocking affectation. Framed by the young Andrew Jackson Davis on her right—a brilliant supporter of mesmerism with thin glasses and a patriarch’s beard—and the Milanese banker on the left, the mistress of the house did not expect that the preacher placed across the table would exclaim loudly enough to turn a dozen heads.
“But where are your dear sisters, Mrs. Fish? I was so hoping . . .”
“They are too young!” Leah responded defensively while throwing embarrassed glances at her nearest guests. “And soon you will be able to applaud them at Corinthian Hall . . .”
The two servants back-to-back served a boiling soup until, bowl by bowl, the steam had formed a circle.
“Yes, of course, at their age!” added the booming voice of the gaunt Alexander Cruik. “But it would have been so pleasant to talk with them. Especially the youngest . . .”
“With Kate? Is that so?” was the only way Mrs. Fish knew to respond to hide her confusion, seeing that the evangelist of the Redskins, with a voice accustomed to outside gatherings, was the kind who would pursue his idea without fail.
“Your Kate is gifted with an exceptional sensitivity, she captures psychic waves not perceptible to the common man. It’s an acute form of intuition of beings and situations without being able to actually deduce anything herself. I’ve known Cherokee Indians capable of a similar extrasensory perception, one of them above all, a sorcerer with a mustang’s mane who could read the future in the wrinkles of the dead. In his trances, he pointed out without fail warriors who would be condemned, women soon to be pregnant, children struck by our maladies . . .”
“May the Lord preserve our sorcerers!” cried out Mrs. Freeman, a fat woman with a hairdo in the form of a crow’s nest.
“So natural and so candid,” the preacher continued in the same tone, “little Kate is a sort of shaman who is unaware of it which, however, grants her the powers that the first apostles must have had. She is an intercessor between two spaces of perception and comprehension usually hermetically separated, a kind of . . . of medium, if you will allow me the neologism . . .”
“Medium, medium . . .?” Leah exclaimed. That’s the word they were missing! “But allow me to explain that modern spiritualism, if I may use your expression, is as much the business of Margaret Fox and of myself, not to exclude our dear Kate, nor my mother or my old father . . .”
“It’s a family business!” joked the corpulent Barry Nursery from a distance.
“Do you consider yourself to belong to the current Religious Revival?” her neighbor on the right, the magnetizer Andrew Jackson Davis, asked more cautiously.
“Assuredly,” stammered Leah, a little sorry to see her soup growing cold. “We are, my sisters and I, passionately enflamed in our faith, and this mystical fire spreads especially today, waking in each of us our piety for the afterlife where our dear lost ones continue to exist. The dead are our angels, believe it. Wasn’t the resurrection of our Lord the first manifestation of spiritualism?”
“There have been plenty of others since Osiris, Dionysus, or Orpheus,” sighed Lucian Nephtali wearily, mopping his brow.
“And the prophet Elijah!” boomed the preacher with an amused zest. “Remember the widow of Sarepta in the time of Ahab, the idolatrous king: ‘And it came to pass after these things, that the son of the woman, the mistress of the house, fell sick; and his sickness was so sore, that there was no breath left in him . . .’ Housed in a room above the widow, Elijah brought the little corpse up to his room, stretched himself three times over him, and cried to the Lord: ‘Yahweh, my Lord, will thou also hurt the widow hosting me, for that you make her son die?’ Immediately, the soul of the little boy was returned to his body by divine will. Elijah brought him down to his mother and declared: ‘See, thy son liveth.’”
“But this isn’t about reviving the dead! We have, God willing, much humbler ambitions than prophesying the Messiah. Our mission is simply to put mourners in the presence of spirits, thus enabling consolation, opening the world finally to hope . . .”
The women present, wives and celebrities, loudly applauded Leah.
After dinner, Wanda Jedna, charmed by this new cause, prioritized it now in her mind just after those of Negros and women—for didn’t our virtuous dead participate in the full rights of the great human family?—and caught the hostess off guard, who pushed passed in surprise on her way to open the baby grand to perform a recent air from Paris. The martial harmonies were so stirring that Charlene Obo and the banker with the fine moustache started to clap their hands.
L’homme, ce despote sauvage
Eut soin de proclaimer ses droits
Créons des droits à notre usage
À notre usage, ayons des lois!
IV.
Oneida! Oneida!
No one asked any explanation of Pearl Gascoigne when she presented herself one summer night at the doors of the commune. On the way back from haying, tools over their shoulders, the Perfect Ones stared with amazement at this sublime mare and her thoroughbred, still intertwined in the same energy, both of their manes flowing, the woman and her horse visibly out of breath. It seemed like this girl was fleeing a fire, the lightning of God, and some band of Algonquin cannibals all at the same time. While the frightened horse raced back and forth between the fences and log cabins, several young women wearing short dresses for evening service appeared.
Pearl found herself staggering in the middle of a strange assembly of bearded farmers looking like magi, of farmwomen looking like old queen regents draped in dark colors, an indefinable smile on their lips, in their lightweight dresses or frocks with straps, and very young children suddenly frozen in their games. Pearl had immediately no
ticed the short hair of the teenage girls, their cheerful and at the same time defiant air, and a type of hierarchy belonging to animal herds in the physical appearance of the males, according to age, but also a sort of relaxed quiet on their faces. This pastoral tableau, worthy of a genre painting of the epoch from the thirteen colonies, inscribed itself upon her, a little unreal, after that entire day of galloping aimlessly in the dust of the roads.
She had left Hydesville without explanation, mind on fire, on a stormy night. Suddenly following a clash with her father on the question of her clothing and the expense of lace ribbons, she had turned away in silence. Running to his stable after putting on her riding clothes, Pearl didn’t have the least concern about the following day, like someone anesthetized, abandoning without the least regret both her little treasures and large responsibilities. The thoroughbred, an extremely rare White Beauty bequeathed by a farmer of the county, was the sole luxury of Reverend Gascoigne. Submerged in anger, having decided impetuously to flee as far as possible, she didn’t think twice about whether to instead seize the ordinary horse hitched to an English wagon. And it was with a worn out bridle, in the sweltering midsummer night, dizzied by the scents of the thatch and the bland exhalations of stagnant waters, that she’d traveled half of Monroe County and all of Wayne, before galloping erratically the days that followed between mountains and forests, then through the endless plains, in Oswego and Oneida territories where, thinking she was lost in an Indian reservation, Pearl had unwittingly found herself hostage to a most curious tribe of pale faces.
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