Out of sorts, mouth dry, Elisha turned to his wife one night to recite one of the poems he’d written for her with edifying ends:
Weary! weary is the life
By cold deceit oppressed
Margaret heard nothing but a groan and, waking instantly, found him dead by her side.
XIV.
And Now We Roam in Sovreign Woods
It was while going down Norton Street headed toward the lake and river that William Pill, at a slow trot on his Quarter Horse, recognized the youngest of the Fox sisters in the back of a carriage loaded with three beautiful leather trunks with gold hardware. He immediately turned around to accompany the car. Accustomed to troublemakers, the young woman mimicked indifference.
“You don’t remember me, Miss Kate? Yet it seems to me that I was of some help to you during a night of rioting in Hydesville . . .”
She stared frankly at the rider, surprised to see that beautiful, cheerful, all-pockmarked face.
“I’ll never forget how you saved us from hanging, you and Miss Pearl . . .”
“Are you leaving Rochester?” he asked, nodding toward the luggage.
“I’m taking the train to New York in half an hour.”
“Well, good luck!” he said. “Maybe we’ll cross paths there someday? They say there’s fortune over there to be plucked like clover on a battlefield.”
Turning back around, Pill thought that there was surely room enough in New York for one more swindler. Soon he heard the great wooden bridge resound as the locomotive squealed. The mention of Pearl—he couldn’t lie to himself—had affected him rather strongly. That woman carried in her every blessing and every perdition. Once again he had tried to forget her after their surprising reunion, which had certainly been a surprise only to him.
Galloping this time toward Lake Shore Boulevard, he remembered in two parallel streams of reverie the vagaries of his career as conjurer and of the incomprehensible success of his new livelihood. At poker or roulette, Lady Luck was linked as much to bluffing as the little fetishistic rituals and would almost certainly elude him once he put faith in her star; but in front of a public gaping at ghosts, every turn was good for filling his wallet. Once the illusion had reached its height, he would be overwhelmed by unexpected phenomena, some kind of uncontrollable fantasy, as if hoaxing the most unsuspecting hearts and consciences sometimes provoked, quite surreptitiously, the repercussions of something supernatural. It was fashionable to assert the nonexistence of chance, that thing concealing a necessity that would answer to higher laws. With their genius for competition, the mediums coming from Europe also claimed that there was no hell, suffering cannot be unpardonable, and that our lives were all subject to reincarnation. So that the present life would come after innumerable others, always revolving, and all of this in order to atone for this exhausting relay of crimes and transgressions that have dragged on since the expulsion from Eden and will go on into the future, ending with incalculable and successive human husks falling one after the other into the dust, perfectly immaculate in the light of God. It amused him, these hobbyhorses of false pastors. He adapted them to his purpose by promising better lives tailor-made: so and so, who toils at boiling wool, will be the son of the governor in the next life, and the old leprous woman pouring with sweat after walking from the hospice will be reborn princess of Grenada or Norway. But metempsychosis didn’t help much with the everyday.
On the shores of Lake Ontario, at this cool morning hour, he set out on his Quarter Horse so quick to pick up speed, holding the reins with one hand and his hat with the other, happy to see her dancing mane the color of beer and blonde tobacco. A cigarillo added its smoke to the low-hanging fog. He told himself that the episode with the blind man and his female guide, dating back now already several months, would have remained suspended in the realm of the absurd, its insane images digging their spurs in his side. For a long time, incomprehensible, it remained inscribed in him, like a living tattoo on the skin of his dreams . . .
One evening last winter, under the unoriginal name of Mac Orpheus, he had agreed to go to this curious solicitor’s home for a private séance at a reasonable price, on the west bank, downstream from the Great Falls. The same young, short-haired blonde woman greeted him at the door of a big sad house in the Rochester suburb. The darkness inside was carved hollow by the light of an occasional candle. Apart from some bituminous paintings on the walls, heavy drapes and rosewood screens, the room where they received him was furnished only with a round table and three chairs. He presented himself with a peddler’s bag containing his basic equipment, his planchette rolling board, an alphabet, some scarves, magnets, a tarot deck, two boxes filled with painted glass plates, a lantern with swiveling magnifying glasses and his precious fumigator scented with pontifical incense. Only after he was settled behind the table did he notice that he was in the presence of the old man, seated several meters away in a dark corner, a leather briefcase on his knees. He was also able to perceive that the young woman now acting as governess was wearing a very flattering though out-of-fashion dress. Dimly lit since greeting him at the doorway, her beauty finally flowered in the candle’s flame. He was stunned once again by a panicked feeling of déjà-vu. At that moment the blind man handed him a photographic plate, face-up. “It’s about this person,” he murmured in a slightly quavering voice. It was a calotype, that method of chemically capturing light invented by Talbot two decades earlier, which showed the portrait of a gracious Puritan woman of not long ago, a white shadow in her faded eyes. The blind man was pressed all the way back in his seat. Behind him his alleged housekeeper, backed by the heavy curtains at the window, motionlessly observed the scene with an absent expression on her face, as if she herself were posing for some cameraman hostile to the least blink. As usual, Pill started out with his huckster hermeneutic of proven clichés before testing out his “rigorously scientific operating technique.” The first raps that he produced from the table, his hands in the air, neither the blind man nor the young woman appeared to have heard. But the lugubrious atmosphere filled with incense fumes was favorable for apparitions. From his improvised medium’s cabinet, he began to project by means of his lantern and his fumigator a materialization in good and due form between the panel of a screen and the angle of a wall. The woman’s silhouette that took shape, moving, on the broth of white smoke, made no impression, as he had expected it to, on his only female spectator, and consequently she remained silent for the blind man. Frustrated by this lack of cooperation, he was resolutely determined, without any more unnecessary effects, to render audible any kind of manifestation coming from anywhere whatsoever. And so he pretended to focus like a paid oracle on the calotype, after inquiring from the old man what he really wanted to know. He quickly lost control of the situation at the moment of the alphabetic transcription of knocks. “Violet! Violet!” the blind man cried out. “I beg you to answer me this time! Was it an accident, was it an accidental drowning?” This pathetic exhortation ended with a groan. Taken ill, the old man suddenly doubled over and toppled head first onto the leather suitcase. The other woman left her prostration, and rushing over, very pale, she began to drag the panting body away from the table and smoke.
“Open the window!” she ordered him. The curtains raised, the full moon inundated the room with metallic clarity. He had helped her lay the old man down on a couch, then unfasten his collar and belt. Several times the hands of the young woman brushed against his. “It’s his heart,” she stated with some hoarseness, wrapping her fingers around the old man’s wrist after having crossed his hands as befits the blind. At this moment, stung with a violent attraction for this woman while being assailed by a vague whiff of decomposition, Pill had still understood nothing of the mixed disorder of his mind and senses.
The wind had picked up on Lake Ontario. William Pill walked along the waterfront where a motley group of porters and sailors bustled between the warehouses and steamships that were docked at the quay. Able to transport at least
a thousand barrels, some of the steamships were carrying giant wheels or railroad ties. A little further on, under full sail, a departing frigate reminded him of his eventful journey across the Atlantic and the Plymouth Brethren evangelist, his shipwreck companion who died of cholera on Grosse-Île. The only thing that remained of his adventure was a moldy and dog-eared Bible. It hadn’t been wars or mildew that had caused his departure for America, before the millions of other starving Irish, but a rather pugnacious boy’s dream to put the Ocean between him and his miserable home back then, family included.
Pill headed back toward Sodus Bay, impatient to get back to his cabin on Briscoe Cove where he was not far from leading, on days off, the natural existence prescribed by that good Thoreau, between a canoe for fishing and the leafy forest. “I am in the frightful necessity of being what I am,” that was his motto and his fate. He could have certainly lived there permanently, dressed in skins, a leather belt around his waist, like Elisha the Tishbite. After all, the soul of a swindler could be just as straight as a stalk in water that optical illusion portrays as bent. It was enough to assume if not completely count on one’s redemption. Faith could very well do without the truth.
Sitting on a fence rail, she was waiting for him in front of the stable. Her blonde hair fell in ringlets across her shoulders. Had he ever known, on all the routes he’d traced in the world, a woman more resplendent with vitality, more built to set aside the black scum of mourning and nostalgia? When she had led him away from the blind man, in another room, he still didn’t know her identity and what contract linked her to this bewitched old man. How could he have guessed, even pierced by a dizzying feeling of familiarity, that the pastor, stricken with amaurosis and selective amnesia after a stroke and his only daughter were reenacting the tragedy of Oedipus at Colonus in this Rochester suburb? But the reverend Gascoigne, haunted by his crimes as a holy man, passed away serenely in the arms of this Antigone, without recognizing his Pearl other than by a lightning intuition at the instant of his death.
William Pill dismounted his horse wild with joy and, not stopping to tie the Quarter Horse, ran to lift the young woman into his arms.
“Ah, I’ve missed you like the devil, did you know?”
“The devil has nothing to do with it!” laughed Pearl.
“Neither does the good Lord! Nor any other master of this world or another!”
XV.
With the Permission of Frederick Douglass and Ralph Waldo Emerson
Crowds were gathering at the John Street Methodist Church newly rebuilt atop the relics of Wesley Chapel. In the climate of excited nervousness reigning in New York, the overall mix, caused by the disorder of those entering the church and the massive presence of Negroes from Harlem and the Bronx under the vaulted ceilings vibrating with echoes, gave the event an air of revolutionary frenzy. Invited to this forum at the initiative of the American Anti-Slavery Society, Frederick Douglass reconsidered his destiny as a fugitive slave from a tender, as we call it, age, in the plantations of Maryland, when children were prohibited from learning to read, when the slave breakers punished ruthlessly over the least infraction. With a thundering voice he recounted his escape by train and steamer to the enlightened city of New York, thanks to the solidarity of a black sailor from Baltimore and some Quakers from Philadelphia.
Frightened by the unstable crowd at the entrance of the church, Kate listened to him while standing in a sea of shoulders. She had lost Miss Helen, her Irish chaperone, right at the entrance, and all the while her searching eyes marveled at the phenomenon of adhesion caused by this outspoken, aging Negro. She’d happened to cross paths with him in Rochester, where this man they’d nicknamed the Lion of Anacostia had founded the North Star, an abolitionist newspaper. Now she was hearing for the first time this confrontation, by turns affectionate, inflexible and passionate, of an inspired speech with its audience. Even the spirits at such a moment had been subjugated, deprived of any recourse in the face of this power of persuasion. Rightly demanding freedom for each of its citizens in America, but also for women and all the oppressed in the world, Douglass claimed to one day make his dream coincide with reality, without violence, solely by the power of faith. After evoking the Dred Scott decision and Bloody Kansas, he strongly disapproved of the call for armed insurrection by the white radical activist John Brown, all while paying tribute to his inflexible ally.
His equalizing homily ended with an ovation when he formulated once more his credo: “Right is of no sex—Truth is of no color—God is the father of us all, and we are all brethren!”
Jostled toward the exit by the crowd, Kate felt a previously unknown sensation of possibility. This pacifist leader couldn’t be taken in by the agitation spreading across the country, revolts and strikes even in New York. Mr. Greeley, her benefactor, had explained it to her at great length: the Southern States were challenging the authority of the federal government; they were consequently threatening to break accords with the Union, more because of the economic ascendancy of the industrial North than for a simple matter of human rights, whereas the Union vaunted the Constitution as a means to rein in this league of rich landowners, pro-slavery farmers, and illiterate pioneers endangering civil peace. There was a life possible in broad daylight, however, even in the peril of action, and this man who’d survived the worst yokes had come to demonstrate that to her without bragging or mystification. Above all, she felt the freshness of a wind on her cheeks and her neck, like the beating of sails on the bow of a ship. Life was not limited to being confined with the spirits of the dead, in the dark confusion of all those tables, those screens, those walls that she had to constantly probe and question to please the experienced. One could, for several hours or even longer, forget the hereafter, so close and so rustling with omens, for a here and now that was perilous but vast as hope.
At the end of John Street, deep in her thoughts and soon surprised to find herself lost, without even enough to pay for a cab, she watched the blue floats on the East River where the steamers’ smokestacks were sending up plumes. Despite the brisk wind, she would go back to Sutton Place then by foot, where they were waiting for her for who knows what visitor at the home of the director of the New-York Tribune, even if it meant muddying her shoes and the skirts of her dress. Ever since being spared the public séances that often turned into a circus and the challenging consultations in the cabinet with rich neurasthenics, it seemed like she opened herself to a thousand exterior details that yesterday were ominous symbols, like the palpitation of the North Star in the blue of the sky, this cloud in the shape of a schooner figurehead, the play of leaves and birds in a maple tree. A large brunette woman pressing the paws of a fox stole against her mouth passed along the row houses. If it only took Kate a glance to understand what drama she was living, she could free herself from it by humming briskly:
O carry me back to my home far away
All quiet along the Potomac tonight
To my one true love, she’s as fair as the day
All quiet along the Potomac tonight
No sooner had she started off on foot toward Sutton Place than her name rang out from the opposite direction. The opulent Miss Helen was rushing as quickly as she could, arms in the air.
“Where on earth have you been? Ah, but let’s go home quickly and change clothes. This is really not the time to be received . . .”
An hour later, still flanked by Miss Helen, who went discreetly to hide in the office, Kate was greeted in the second vestibule by Horace Greeley in a stiff collar and frock-coat. If the progress of his baldness, offset by enormous sideburns and a full beard of an immaculate whiteness, revealed the huge forehead a little more each year, his good smile kept a youthfulness intact. Kate let him embrace her and take her hands. Since the decline and recent death of Mr. Fox, who’d fallen into drunkenness after years apart from his family, Mr. Greeley had become the paragon to her of the fatherly figure, which he found somewhat amusing.
“Come in my dear, tonight we ha
ve some important guests . . .”
There were already thirteen or fifteen people of sprightly humor, women in evening gowns, one of them dressed as a tiger tamer, men of venerable appearance, and some younger men, swirling a glass in their hand. Solemn as a judge, the butler was filling flutes with authentic Champagne.
“My dears,” Greeley announced while turning toward this little world, “I would like to point out to the distracted or unaware the charming apparition of Miss Kate Fox, whom it would be inappropriate to present . . .”
“And her sisters?” blurted out a dandy in ruffles still holding his cane. “I thought they were Siamese . . .”
“So you don’t know Leah Underhill, then?” exclaimed the wife of a Boston publisher. “Ever since her return from London, she only accepts the spirits of lords at her tipping table . . .”
As other conversations intersected, indifferent to their neighbor, the harsh words and fine taunts were hardly of consequence. The topic went from the English question to vice and religion, to the revival of ancient glories, to the truth of miracles.
Kate turned away, a smile on her lips, and pretended to examine the paintings, landscapes, illuminated portraits of the Catskill Mountains, and still-lives imported by Dutch settlers. On the fireplace mantel, in a brass frame, a daguerreotype protected in smoky glass drew her attention. One could make out the infinitely melancholy face of a young woman covered in white lace. The press baron saw Kate’s cocked head and, suddenly nervous, forsook his guests.
“It’s Jennie, my favorite daughter,” he said, approaching the frame. “She died of consumption like three of her younger sisters. I was hoping she would be safe once she reached the age of sixteen, but she died the day after her birthday.”
Rochester Knockings Page 17