Receiving an ovation, Kate felt a blush rise to her cheeks, but luckily neither a detailed response nor séance was asked of her. Mr. Harisson and Miss Rosamond Dale Owen, two editors of Spiritualist journal, came over to congratulate her around the buffet.
“Have you ever been attacked by evil spirits?” Miss Owen couldn’t help but ask.
“Would you agree,” Mr. Harisson interrupted her, “that Spiritualism is announcing itself to us as the third revelation of God?”
At that moment a young man of an unhealthy thinness, a diamond in his tie, bowed to the company from the top of the platform.
“The previously unpublished sonata you are about to hear was dictated to me by Mozart’s spirit to Allan Kardec. And it’s the communicator spirit of my deceased master, it’s his biomagnetic energy whose interpretation you will hear through me . . .”
While the skeleton of a man lifted his coat tails to sit on the piano bench, Kate felt the burn of a glance; a little drunk from three glasses of champagne one after the other, she considered a quite ordinary physiognomy that, with simplicity and relaxation, appeared before her in the guise of a cheerful forty-year-old.
“Rest assured,” said the man in jest, “I am not a spirit.”
A little wobbly, Kate felt immediately at ease, a little like when one spots a good place to hold on to while on a merry-go-round. She would have liked to wrap her arms around the neck of this wooden horse, whose first name was George and who camouflaged his left eye with a tinted monocle. The stranger replied with a hilarious jubilation at her tipsy curiosity. Had he had too much to drink, too?
“In fact, I am the lawyer of our three-striped clownfish, for what concerns his purely material affairs.”
“Is Mr. Coleman on trial?”
“An influential man such as your host sometimes has to be defended. But it has to do only with capital and investments. Between us, I don’t think that spirits, if they exist, have much need for lawyers . . .”
For a whole year, sponsored by Benjamin Coleman, whose eager efforts to treat her like a parent and ally did not escape her, Kate was exhibited to the fascination of the London gentry, to the benign curiosity of neophytes up from the suburbs, or to the species of fervent rivalry of international followers. Spiritualist circles, congregations, and learned societies invited her to well-attended séances, with or without conferences of experts, all over England and the capitals of Northern Europe. Kate learned at these meetings much more than what she thought she knew. For instance, the spiritual world preexisted us with its hierarchies of angelic substances not unlike the Catholics’. That souls evolve from the mineral into the human. That spirits, all wandering and more or less dematerialized, are heading toward the indivisible way of perfection and are broken down into the impure, the spirits that knock, spirits who falsely claim authority, neutral spirits, etcetera, on the low scale still dependent on passions and matter; and on the high scale illuminated by divine intuition: the benevolent spirits, learned, wise, and superior spirits, like Jesus, Gautama Buddha, or Zoroaster, just before the beatific erasure into divinity. The formidable challenges of an omniscient seer such as the Scottish Daniel Dunglas Home, of a certain Madame Blavatsky upon her return from Cairo, or of the illustrious Florence Cook who materialized a full-length ghost walking for the first time in her darkroom (that of the not least venerated Katie King, who had died two centuries earlier), were only building in a spectacular way upon a multitude of experimenters of the shadow who, recently, were pronouncing with the projections of ectoplasms and other remarkable phenomena the hypothesis of the perispirit, an intermediary element between spirit and matter, a sort of fluid continuation or electromagnetic division of the astral body in two, with evidence gathered of fingerprints in paraffin molds, the levitation of furniture or operators, the contribution of objects from the other world or even the glimmers on photographic plates, the new infatuation of darkrooms.
Kate however had still benefitted from the prestige of origins and was for many a symbol and an augur. Thus the Empire’s wars and revolutions did not prevent Queen Victoria, eternally mourning the prince consort, from secretly welcoming the little American so that she might comfort her with a thought of the afterlife between two government meetings.
There were other parties at Chelsea. Kate met new faces. The naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace explained to her the effect of rivers on the distribution of inbred animal species and offered her a magnetite from the Malaysian Islands. An old French writer accustomed to exile invited her to Guernesey where he voluntarily resided since the death of his grandson and wife. A blind countess made her the gift of a silver plaque of the divinatory virtues that represented her from the time when she could see, eyes wide open. Several young girls of the aristocracy fell in love with her out of whimsy, mimicry, or contagion.
One night in November, 1871, the lawyer George Jencken resurfaced, invited by circumstance. Suddenly free of his tinted monocle, with one eye gray and the other green, Kate understood while staring at him the agitation that had inhabited her ceaselessly for months. Encouraged by the good omen of her pallor, George, without the knowledge of her protector, dreamily asked her hand in marriage.
V.
A Normal Life
Real life, after so many years of summoning the dead and occult forces, was linked in Kate’s mind with the exclusive love of a man. Just married, she had withdrawn from the social comedy with an unknown emotion, entirely devoted to the service of the lawyer George Jencken, whose name she had donned the way one dons the veil. Freed overnight from the regard of others, that servitude which ultimately turned into torture, she abandoned herself to her new status as anonymous wife with an affinity for detachment close to the confused notion she had of happiness. Incapable of complete serenity because of those difficult skeletons, those detached hands, all those ectoplasmic tentacles that almost naturally inhabited her dreams, she worked to regenerate herself on a canvas of omission whose loose weft gradually wove in the ancestral motions that she had seen carried out in Rapstown or in Hydesville, and that moved her so much to recollect, how her good mother attended to the household chores while humming, suspecting nothing still of the machinations of her abominable little girls. Putting away the towels and bright sheets on the shelves of an old armoire, for example, without counting the suspicious creakings, washing the crystal glasses under running water without listening closely to the rattles or acute vibrations, lighting the phosphorous lamp or candlesticks very simply in order to knit a sweater. And to read the poems of Keats offered by her husband:
O tender spouse of the golden god Hyperion
Or those of Dante Gabriel Rossetti bought at Alexander’s Bookshop, in her neighborhood of Notting Hill:
The blessed damozel lean’d out
From the gold bar of Heaven;
Her eyes were deeper than the depth
Of waters still’d at even;
She had three lilies in her hand,
And the stars in her hair were seven.
That the author, mad with grief, had buried in the coffin of his beautiful and young wife the manuscript of his verses only to exhume and publish them eight years later was something Kate didn’t want to have inflicted on her. George, discovering this editorial novelty in her hands, had reported the anecdote to her while caressing her breasts. After so many evanescent hysterics, libidinous puritans, heavy-handed patriarchs, it pleased her to be desired without hindrance or intercession, like any other woman that one would kiss and undress. The body of a man, its ligaments and strength, occupied her fingertips and her entire body enough to think of nothing else than imminent pleasure—at the small of the back, between the plexus and perineum, from the neck down to the toes—which attenuated her happiness while increasing her love tenfold. Kate couldn’t keep herself from finding an exhilarating taste of death in physical possession, which she brought herself out of each time with a little ritual of childish coaxing that astonished the lawyer after the excess of embraces.
To no longer avoid the world of the living, Mrs. Jencken protected herself from the morbid declivities of her mind by showing her enthusiasm at the worst moments. Joy was for her a symptom of anxiety. She also appreciated more than anything the drizzly and bland languor of autumn days, the vacant nights before a crackling fire and the unsinkable boredom of Sundays: wasn’t she alive in sweet contrast? She loved the oscillation of the large trees in the wind, in the London parks, the clouds above the river, when she would descend on foot to the old Battersea toll bridge, bought back by the Metropolitan Board of Works and again threatened with demolition, and even the strange desolate streets of Whitechapel where thousands of children orphaned by cholera wandered, growing up on the street to become ragpickers, collectors, thieves soon to be hanged—or if lucky, to become apprentices in the factory.
Busy during the day with his study of the City, on the Queen’s Bench Division or in conference with one or other of his clients, George was long unaware of her sleepwalking fugues. Until the night Kate came home late, looking wild, her gloves torn and stained with blood. He figured out that she had been assaulted by a bunch of East End kids where she’d gone to stroll without protection, a defector from the good side of town, and had broken her nails while heartily defending herself. He lavished her with soothing words and nursed her scratches, discovering that she had been frequenting for months perhaps the canvas shelters of the Christian Revival Society, where the most needy of the countless underprivileged were helped under the leadership of the preacher William Booth. Out of a natural generosity, but suddenly concerned about the mental health of his spouse, as much as he had always hidden from her his own ailments, the lawyer became closer to her and made sure that his driver and right-hand man followed her diligently from the moment that she declined being driven somewhere.
But a happy event—as those usually indifferent to the event love to say—soon changed the mental state of the Jencken couple. Kate gave birth to twins so exceedingly identical, even down to the details known only by mothers, that she herself must have permanently confused them two or three times, leaving to good fortune the choice of identities until their father decided to attach to their ankles thin gold chains engraved with their names. That one would be called Arcady and the other John Elias—or the reverse—before this initiative, was hardly going to change their reciprocal existence a hair. Which one was the eldest by a few minutes, Kate couldn’t have said, which eventually disturbed her with generative vertigo. She lived through her pregnancy like a bird hovering so high, so far above the dark marshes. Flesh fertilized opened the mind to the joys of childhood as well as to the white locks of age, with the influx of stars and the dazzling abysses of ice. For her, giving birth was bringing her own self into the world; Kate was born from her own stomach or the bowels of the universe with two twins as a sign of the zodiac. This moment contained all moments, the streaming of generations, the infinite metamorphoses, and the heart of the shadow of death palpitating across the billions of lives with ephemeral stigmatas.
One recovers quickly from birth when taken by frenzy to save the mystery of life by pouring it out in careful sips. In motherhood, Kate distanced herself from the terror of procreation. Her two boys grew strong and got big, still always interchangeable, playing on every occasion with their twinning, Arcady answering to the call for John Elias, the other fooling his parents in false stories, the both of them exchanging their clothes when the adults wanted to tell them apart, up until the day when one of the two, stricken by a purulent meningitis and placed into isolation, was brought out after two weeks of treatment with memory disorders persistent enough for the twins to abandon their favorite game, having become impossible to play by the force of circumstances.
Between the education of her children and a redoubled attention to her husband, Kate no longer felt the need to flee into the London streets or into her cataleptic dreams. The nostalgia for American cities, so different from the big London checkerboard where sooty neighborhoods alternated with parks in undefined suburbs, seized her sometimes unexpectedly. There, everything was possible overnight, glory and madness, unhappiness and fortune. The memory of Horace Greeley, her indulgent patron, who died the year of her marriage after running unsuccessfully in the presidential elections, still throbbed in her, but like a good star about to fizzle out. She missed above all the beautiful days of Rochester and pined for Margaret. She even missed Leah. There comes a day when siblings replace the buried memory of the elders, since in them alone are found now the inflections of voice and the attitudes populating one’s intimate background.
From time to time Margaret wrote her long rowdy missives where she cursed everyone on Earth, starting with Leah who gave herself the right to reprimand Margaret publicly in the name of the spiritualist cause, under the pretext that she was giving herself over to alcohol and, in a series of degradations, to the disloyal charlatans of French and German spiritualists touring Main Street America and the entire East Coast. It was apparent from her letters, without her daring to admit it, that her manager and probably lover Franck Strechen was exploiting her with the cynicism of a pimp or circus-freak showman. Kate sadly felt very glad while reading of no longer having to deal with that spiritual brotherhood, in some respects as fratricidal as it was incestuous, and of having preserved her twins and her husband from the miasmas of the other world, for she no longer had any doubt that frequenting the dead too often meant giving oneself over to them body and soul. George who, in marrying her, had lost Mr. Coleman as his client, was half-ruined but not unhappy to distance his beloved wife from the crowds, more and more numerous, applauding her in their grief from the wars, catastrophes and epidemics that traditional faiths were no longer able to console. Such dangerous heresy was in his opinion more contagious than gangrene.
It was a fact that neither Mr. Coleman nor Charles Livermore, warned belatedly of her defection, were interested any longer in her since her marriage: a woman of family goes better with stoves than spirits. The only company Kate had were George, her children, and her family-in-law. Uncle Herbert visited them once a week, always jovial, so happy to play the great uncle that the twins, delighted at this diversion, celebrated him like one of the Magi. Gifts accumulated in their room, all different: little islands of toys would have sufficed to betray Arcady and John Elias if the illness had not long shut down their mimetic emulation. Although he was a radical atheist, admirer of the Paris Commune and great reader of Karl Marx, starting with his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Uncle Herbert kept the former pythoness of the pedestal table in relative mistrust. He had learned never to judge individuals on their alienation and treated his sister-in-law with the same distant charity that Plague doctors must have had in the time of the miasma theories. Once a month a less amiable grandmother came up, a jealous widow who monopolized the attention of her son and grandsons at Kate’s expense, suspicious in her eyes of casting a spell. Wasn’t she one of the three Fox sisters, like the three Gorgons with snakes for hair, like the Fates or the monstrous Grey Nuns of legend who had among the three of them a single eye and one lone tooth, taking turns watching and devouring?
Kate was never happier than in the fisherman’s house they rented sometimes in the summer, at Gower, between the beaches and cliffs of Wales, when the lawyer could accompany the children. It was upon returning from a week on the peninsula that his health problems, up until then inconsequential, took a dramatic turn. After having gone valiantly to his office in the city with the help of his coachman, several days later, swearing that it was only a little fatigue, George took to his bed and died one summer night in 1881, in the sole company of his wife, to whom he had never stopped promising that it was really nothing serious, that he would go on loving her for many more years and even more once he felt better.
Alone in the house, the children entrusted that night to their grandmother, Kate shook the body of her husband while begging him to respond, screaming at him that it wasn’t funny, that he h
ad never ever abandoned her, then wept her fill on his already cold hands, kissed his lips and eyes, and suddenly petrified by the evidence, searched her empty mind to remember a prayer from her childhood. After a silence that lasted nearly an hour, she stammered the creed of John Wesley she’d so often read, chiseled on the pediment of the Methodist church in Hydesville:
Do all the good you can
By all the means you can
In all the ways you can
In all the places you can
At all the times you can
To all the people you can
As long as ever you can
VI.
The Two Widows of Notting Hill
At nine years old, nothing about the schemes of adults escapes you. This is what Arcady and John Elias told each other without saying a word on the return home from the cemetery. They conversed and thought by exchanged glances. Needless to bother with words, unless for putting on airs. Silence isn’t just for the deaf.
Uncle Herbert, grandmother, all sorts of aunts and old cousins had invaded the apartment after the funeral as if to hide a secret or to take the place of their father. And then those people went home, leaving the house full of shadows. Kate would come to tuck them into their twin beds and, very solemn, tell them stories of blessing and paradise, but she would cry a long chain of iron tears. And it was they, the children, who night after night had to console her. Explain to her that he was there, close by, that George was watching them with his different colored eyes, one blue eye in this world, the green eye in the other.
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