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
The 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.
“Yes, I know,” she said finally.
“But how could you know?” Margaret immediately asked with alarm.
“I must have dreamt it,” she replied in a faint voice, as if she were still dreaming.
Paradoxically, the death of their mother was a welcome interlude for the Fox sisters in their trying activity as mediums. On leave due to a death in the family, they didn’t want to hear talk of spirits and the beyond any more than circumstances required. Leah busied herself with the various tasks and the usual formalities. An announcement notified the family and a few close contacts. Among the first to hear were witnesses of the Institute’s increasing renown: some Shakers on pilgrimage, Baptists of the Millerist strain, a couple of Seventh-Day Adventists, and an old Mormon escaped from prison all presented themselves at the Central Avenue address in order to pay respects to the remains laid out between four candlesticks.
On the day of the funeral, hiding in her room, all ready to go, Kate considered the comings and goings on the avenue. A hearse hitched to four white horses was waiting for the end of the casket-closing ritual. Her sisters and Janet were calling her from across the house to come for the farewell kiss. Were they unaware that for her there was no farewell? Dear Mother lived always in her dreams, busy, worrying over the least snail wandering across her thin arms, but she no longer wanted to approach, all of a sudden passed through to the other side of the big glass wall that prevents hands from holding, breaths from caressing the eyelids, and scents from reminding you.
That night, from her bed, an outline had appeared to her behind the glass windows, between the curtains. There had been so many of these in her dreams, these wanderers from the void. Solitary, they came and went from one world to the other and often, in town, they were recognizable by their hunched-over gait and by the steam on their too-smooth faces.
“What are you waiting for, come down!” Margaret cried out, forcing open the door. “It’s the farewell! It’s the farewell!”
Kate, unpredictable, ran into the warm room without saying a word. An undertaker from the funeral home was about to seal the lid of varnished wood. Using both hands as he lifted the plank, she pushed it back down like the god of doors.
“I forbid you!” she screamed, furious, before practically lying down in the coffin, blanketing the dead woman under her flowing hair.
But the box was screwed closed and the convoy reached the Buffalo Street cemetery undelayed. Other cars were waiting in front of the entrance. It was on foot that the Fox family and their friends followed the hearse along a road lined with yews. Placid after her outburst of desperation, Kate walked in a distracted step behind her sisters who, from time to time, threw worried glances back at her. She was astonished by their extraordinary resemblance: the same outfits, black taffeta dresses and bonnets, even the same complicated hairstyle of a bun with raven wings. Despite the age difference, their features seemed copies, with their narrow mouths and those huge eyes of Hindu deities on large faces wide as two hands. It did not escape her that Maggie was fighting in vain against her older sister’s influence, so obvious was the mimicry. Similarly, Kate stud
ied the details of the little formal crowd as they advanced along. Her brother David, whom she hardly knew, was going in the heavy step of a farmer in the company of their father, an old man indifferent to the world. How was it that her father and mother had conceived two distinct generations of offspring, nearly twenty years apart? Had they been separated from one another, the time for each of them to rebuild their lives, or were they hiding some hecatomb of miscarriages and childhood diseases?
The convoy was now walking on the slopes of a vast park planted with stone slabs upright or lying down, crosses carved in granite, steles and truncated columns. The scattered stones seemed to drift like little urban islands on a grassy sea of lawn out of which small areas of chapels and mausoleums emerged, isolated by cypress trees, the sinister enclosure of the common grave.
Each person in his own thoughts, Kate perceived the regulars from one house or the other, their first supporters Amy and Isaac Post, so scrawny on their patch of yellowed grass, George Willets, carrying his dignified colossal head askew above a giant body, Mr. and Mrs. Jewell also, and Charlene Obo under her veil beaded with obsidian pearls. Lucian Nephtali, dressed more somberly than usual, leaned into the tip of an ivory-handled cane and seemed to follow her eyes with the strange fixity of a painted portrait. Was he trying to hypnotize her? The court doctor Brinley Simmons, who was one of the experts in the Episcopalian commission before getting involved in the game of spiritualism and, on occasion, treating mediums, somberly observed the rudimentary work of the gravediggers. Could a specialist in violent death who cut up the cadavers of suicides and murder victims, like a farmer would his chickens, have any feelings about the afterlife?
But now they were tipping the coffin down by means of leather straps and thick ropes. Above the heads of the gravediggers, as if emerging himself from the tomb, Alexander Cruik pronounced a few words about the remission of sins, the resurrection of the flesh, and of life everlasting.
“It’s the living who must be consoled,” he added in his message to the audience. “Come into Salvation free of charge! No salary exists for the soul. God alone is responsible for those gone . . .”
Kate, frightened by that glaring pit, crept backward away from the assembly and fled toward the slopes. While wandering among the stones, she looked here and there at the epitaphs: “Here lie my chains,” “No tears for the sinner,” “Your Word is Truth.” One quotation from the apostle John stopped her the longest: Whoever believes in me, though he die, shall live. Raising her head, she saw a few dozen meters away a waxy specter in a top hat emerge from the misty gloom. What else could she do but go over to meet it?
Having also escaped from the group, Lucian Nephtali stood affected on a mound in the middle of which was placed a slab of pink granite engraved with two names, one encrusted with lichens, the other biting cleanly into the stone.
“Is that you, Kate?” he said, folding up in a quick gesture the handkerchief that until then, he’d kept in between his palm and the handle of the cane.
“Ah,” she whispered. “I’m sorry . . .”
“It’s all right, come here . . .”
Kate yielded to that persuasive tone and was soon in front of the grave. She read a single name: Astor, Nat Astor, but could only decipher the last syllable of the other name taken over by a leprosy, and imagined with no trouble a family connection between the two, surely a son and his mother.
“It’s me who owes you the apology,” said the man. “I snuck out a little early to visit my friend.”
“Yes, I know . . .” stammered the young girl.
“You know?” Lucian Nephtali murmured with a bit of amused disbelief. “You know who rests in this grave . . .”
“I meant that it’s probably a young man and his mother who died when he was still a child . . .”
“That’s exactly right,” Lucian observed without much surprise. “Nat lost his mother when he was much younger than you: tuberculosis. He would never stop mentioning her, talking about her. He had very few images to hold on to, but that doesn’t change anything. Forgetting, on the contrary, clarifies the principle of love. The less one is encumbered with memories, the more whole memory is and the more partiality is definitive . . . He swore only by her, his mother was his only true love. The pension that he received from a father who’d gone back to England left him free, too free undoubtedly, entirely abandoned to this holy absence. He lived in a state of mourning that had no recourse, do you understand? He bullied, drank, gave himself over to the worst excesses, and at the same time devoured with an always-flawless intuition the best American and British writers of today. Have you read Elizabeth Browning? And the great Nathaniel Hawthorne? Herman Melville, he too, is guaranteed to surprise you. As would the extraordinary Emily Brontë who died unnoticed, so young, just one year before that unhappy Edgar Allan Poe, gifted with double vision, stricken by every curse . . .”
Lucian paused, aware of the impropriety of this panegyric in a cemetery. Pensively, he stabbed the tip of his cane into the frozen ground with increasingly pointed blows.
“When they were children,” he continued in a more playful tone, “Emily and her brother and sisters imagined an extraordinary universe, the Glass Town Confederacy, which they made come alive taking turns with all sorts of writings, geographical maps, newspaper articles, dramas, poems, and all this in a sort of always frenzied ever-expanded fiction by all available means . . .”
Kate thought she could sense some irony behind this digression—was it an allusion to the Fox & Fish Spiritualist Institute? More glaring in her eyes was the moral desolation at heart that this man seemed to be struggling with. And then she knew none of the authors he mentioned, but on the other hand had read Longfellow’s Voices of the Night and followed for months Harriet Beecher Stowe’s series, so moving, in the National Era, that abolitionist newspaper Wanda had loaned her.
“What do you think my friend died of?” Lucian abruptly asked the adolescent.
“He was murdered,” she responded in a lost voice.
“You’re mad! What allows you to say such a thing?” he said, losing his temper, before recovering: “Nat Astor, my only friend, my soul mate, killed himself with a bullet straight to his heart on Harry Maur’s property, I know it, I was there . . .”
Some snowflakes flew over the graves without Kate allowing herself, pupils fluttering at the milky pulsation, to openly marvel as was her usual custom on the first snowfalls in winter. Lucian noticed this delightful burst of childlike surprise and couldn’t help but smile. This girl just-become woman was as alive and distracted as the snow, everything in her mind surged thrillingly only to be erased in an opaque mirror. A reflection of Edgar Poe rose to his lips: “This terrible way of life nervous people suffer, when the senses are cruelly sharp and the faculties of the mind dull and drowsy.”
“What are you saying? What people are you talking about?” Uncomfortable, Kate considered in turns this hypnotizer’s smile and the swirls of snow now so prodigious that they were erasing the inscriptions on the tilted stones. Turning back toward where her family was just assembled, she could see only the same curtain of whiteness swaying between the occasional cypress, and was suddenly frightened of being absolutely alone with this man in the wax mask whose gaze insinuated itself within her.
IX.
The Aspiring Medium
Across the territory—from the Champlain Valley to the Great Plains, from the mountain states to the Gulf Coast, or from New England to Main Street America—the new doctrine that wasn’t yet a religion, but rather a credo combining devotion and an aspiration toward the scientific, spread with the quickness of a brushfire that, like a thousand voices in the wind, gave greater credence to the Messianism of the Quakers, Seventh-Day Adventists, or the Mormon pioneers in the West fleeing persecution. They all denounced hell, that pagan invention, and likewise rejected the purgatory of the Catholics, longing for an intimate communication with God and his angels, without counsel or arbitrator of good and evil. Under the cl
ear-sighted protection of the Spirit, spirits could very well populate spaces and worlds.
This providence of Modern Spiritualism very quickly touched hundreds of thousands, millions of Americans rich and poor in an age when the Grim Reaper spared no one in his vast harvests, let alone children of all ages, who were more likely to disappear than to one day follow their parents’ path. One thus saw the emergence of countless mediums, like so many frogs born in the rain, a new species of preachers with their props, a number of whom discovered themselves: pastors at odds with their congregations, itinerant apothecaries, hypnotists dragging along Mesmer tubs in their wagons, retrained street peddlers, rodeo jugglers, professional cheats, and other conjurers. They officiated in every imaginable place after a media campaign or a circus parade, in churches, private homes, convention halls, covered markets, public spaces. Each in his or her manner promised a variety of shivers to gullible crowds for a dollar or a cent per head. These post-mortem communications became so popular in town, where turning tables was the fashion, that it was common among the bourgeois to gather in the evenings around a pedestal table, and anyone could improvise being mediator of the other world, provided that the rest didn’t die laughing.
Encouraged by the aura of the Fox sisters led by Leah and their most fervent disciples, including the poetess Anna Blackwell, the actress Charlene Obo, the miraculously healed rheumatic Achsa W. Sprague, or the enigmatic Wanda Jedna, American women finally held a new way to take their turn speaking without being booed at like those feminists in municipal assemblies advocating the right to vote, or else persecuted and threatened with death, in the wake of intrepid abolitionists like Lucy Stone, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, or Susan B. Anthony, who were running from hills to valleys preaching a holy war against supporters of slavery and males, those predators of a similar breed.
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