Among the latter, settled down now in his seat after being rudely jostled, William Pill was smoking a foul-smelling cigar while meditating on his immediate prospects. Thanks to the amnesty of good soldiers and his military certificate, done with the High Plains, he had nearly repaired his reputation in the Rochester gambling houses. But those fine winnings from time to time only allowed him a modest lifestyle, easy women, and a whiskey that was just drinkable. During his escapades in Texas, returning home from pacified Mexico, he’d had some more extravagant days. But now here as elsewhere, luck taunted him. Money, that wind in his hands, only brushed through his fingers until his next ruin. The only thing still in his possession was a Bible recovered from a shipwreck, aside from the smallpox that had hailed down on his face. Reading the Rochester Herald announcement of the spiritualist demonstration that day while in the barbershop, he had hardly suspected the connection to the mischievous Hydesville girls until the journalist’s acerbic comments had refreshed his memory. This “buffoonery of knocking spirits” was an ingenious idea: he estimated eight or nine hundred people had crowded under the columns of Corinthian Hall, the largest auditorium in town, which must have brought in around a thousand dollars, minus the fare-dodgers like him and free entries granted to those in the first rows. William Pill knew how to appreciate mystifications. In Ontario he had known a conjurer in a cabaret capable of swapping the heads of his subjects, chosen among those who’d imbibed the most alcohol. In Philadelphia, he’d had the privilege of observing a ventriloquist up close, the fallen disciple of the Utopian William Abbey, very clever at stripping the bourgeois of their pocket watches while declaiming, with mouth closed, the Declaration of Mental Independence.
Between two Puritan women pale with nausea, his cigarillo stuck to his lip, Pill yawned to unhook his jawbones. The evening running behind, he let himself grow sleepy in the good warmth of the place. Immediately, the gallop of a horse carried him off to an immense dreamed prairie. He too was visited by a ghost, always the same one. Met in the street corner or viewed in an interior, it was a young, very blonde woman, too beautiful to be described. The only thing for certain was that he didn’t know her from Eve and yet loved her madly. Nothing, nothing made sense on this Earth where anything happens except what one expects. A stranger before me who once was me in another time, before an unknown young woman tells me: who are you, faceless man, and what do you want of me with your empty hands, your hands like two corpses . . .
A voice thundered now from somewhere unplaceable. Eyes half-closed, he perceived on the illuminated stage a character dressed in a swallow-tailed coat, with an olive face and raven black hair, who had the formal appearance as master of ceremony. Pill pulled himself out of his somnolent paralysis with a start. The show was finally beginning.
“I have the honor to present to you tonight Corinthian Hall’s invited guests . . .”
With these words, Lucian Nephtali discerned the plump face of the coroner in the third row. He hadn’t seen him since that night of oblivion at the Golden Dream, after the funeral of his friend. The shudder of surprise that suspended his voice for a second was perceived, he thought, in the fleeting ironic grin of the police officer. But he pulled himself together the second after, while imagining a grave veiled in opium smoke.
“Listen to the prophet Ezekiel! It’s on Spring Hill that he was summoned to call back to life the many Spirits of the dead: ‘The hand of the Lord was upon me, and carried me out in the spirit of the Lord, and set me down in the midst of the valley which was full of bones . . . and He said to me: “Son of man, can these bones live? . . . Prophecy upon these bones, and say unto them: O ye dry bones, hear the word of the Lord” . . . Thus saith the Lord God unto these bones; “Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live.” So I prophesied as I was commanded: and as I prophesied, there was a noise, and behold a shaking, and the bones came together. And when I beheld, lo, the sinews and the flesh came up upon them, and the skin covered them above: but there was no breath in them. And Yahweh ordered me: “Prophesy unto the wind . . .” And the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood up upon their feet, an exceeding great army.’ Like Ezekiel, like Ulysses or Hamlet, we have all been in contact with the soul of a lost one, that of a little child or of a beloved spouse, or of a very dear friend . . . It is now possible to provoke at will this gratification of Providence.”
“If only someone would make the undertaker shut up!” a mill-worker shouted unexpectedly.
“Cormorant!” added a sailor, while imitating the bird’s cry.
“Dead body packer!” cried a slaughterhouse butcher, for the sake of balance.
From the back of the room, jeers and laughter continued.
Undaunted, thinking about the challenge thrown down by Leah and her friends in search of a speaker, a challenge that he had accepted with some cynicism but in the manner of a perfect gentleman, Lucian raised his voice:
“The integrity of the Fox sisters has unnecessarily been called into dispute under the pretext that one could counterfeit certain phenomena or attribute them to physical or even psychic causes. But beware! The Fox sisters are championing no sectarian fantasy. With modern spiritualism, we are witnessing the collapse of a wall of silence that separated us from our precious lost ones. This is about a moral revolution that is going to change the face of the planet . . .”
Boos redoubling by this time in all the rows, Lucian Nephtali told himself that he could stop there, that the damn service requested by Leah and her accomplice Charlene had largely been rendered.
One arm stretched toward the wings, he almost danced his gesture of retreat.
“Present here tonight, the Fox sisters will now perform for you according to the rules an authentic demonstration of spiritual telegraphy . . .”
Gaslight lanterns and Fresnel lenses were dimmed, leaving the stage lit only by two astral lamps with bluish globes. Assistants lugged a beautiful oval walnut table, tall chairs, as well as an imposing armoire onto the middle of the stage as if some theatrical drama were about to begin.
There was a sudden spell of calm in the room. The bursts of laughter had stopped; the disruptive ones were themselves taken by surprise at the sight of the three sisters in somber and austere dress making their way from backstage at a mesmerizing pace. Leah, whom many took to be the mother of the other two, separated from the group and broke the silence.
“The world of Spirits pre-exists us. Spirits surround us, they are your dead children, they are your fathers and mothers! Most of them are willing to respond to our call. There are some that are caring, so close to being angels; others, tortured by their terrestrial sins, come back to haunt the scene of the crime. Some of those who suffer most don’t even understand they have died. But all, without exception, journey toward perfection. After their many wanderings the Spirits will reach deliverance at the breast of the Supreme Being. All of them will be saved . . .”
Muffled mutterings and sobs rose up from the crowd. Kate and Margaret, withdrawn in the chiaroscuro of the lamps, waited for the signal from their older sister. The youngest considered the abyss of the auditorium with the same fright she’d had discovering Lake Ontario shaken by a violent gust of wind. An elementary power was at her feet, blind despite its thousand eye-sockets, ready to swallow her up. Who was she to risk such a confrontation? And what more did she know than other girls her age? The surrounding tension was so intense, her skull received such a nervous influx that she thought about fleeing by any means, fainting or hypnotic crisis. However she clenched her fists and invoked Mister Splitfoot with all her might.
Next to her, Margaret, noting her sister’s pallor, discreetly pressed her shoulder. She was also uneasy but despite everything was still amused by the enormity of the phenomenon: an even greater wonder than their story of the knocking spirit was this crowd who had paid just to see them! She told herself, knees shaking, that secrets would abound under her pen as soon as she opened up her diary. Wasn’t she, a silly gir
l, living a pure moment of History?
After a solemn warning to the skeptics who risked scaring off the Spirits, or even of making them dangerous, Leah returned as rehearsed to their side.
“Margaret and Kate Fox will sit at this table under your inspection. In the name of God who has granted them this holy gift among us, do not disturb the mediums in their channeling of extra-sensory powers . . .”
On the brink of panic, Kate and Margaret glanced furtively at one another. The mischievous smile of one behind the shelter of her palm recovered the other’s serenity, while electrical vibrations were already traveling from the depths of their bowels to the ends of their hair, hands, and feet. “Oh oh! Mister Splitfoot, don’t leave me!” Kate begged. For she had no doubt that the peddler’s spirit had followed her all the way from Hydesville. She imagined his cloven foot as being incredibly swift, able to leap in a single bound the distance between the Earth and Moon. In the blink of an eye, Mister Splitfoot could save her from the bottom of a well or from the mouth of a brown bear. Moreover, here he was now leaping without anyone’s knowledge on the table as if to say: “But what do you want from me now, naughty little girl!” “Wow! Did you see that band of ogres and mean crows out there? Here we are, Maggie and me, in a terrible position . . .” “You sought it out, I swear it on the slit of my throat! So let’s talk! What are you waiting for?”
“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
From 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 co
uld 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.
Rochester Knockings Page 12