Weeks later, a thundering night in autumn, Kate started to smile prettily, like Mary of the Images. She promised them a surprise: Margaret, their aunt, was going to cross the Ocean to come meet them. One more relative or one less, this piece of news was fleeting, but Katie’s smile kept up its promise. Arcady and John Elias, for months now, had listened to her lessons of healing while she herself had been using both hands to hold open her own wounds. One night very late, she led them into the room where their father had been laid in his coffin. There was a table with three chairs, just across from the bed illumined by a bedside candelabra. “Who is there?” asked Kate, after having them sit down, their little hands flat on the table. It was winter, an enormous gust shook the roofs and chimneys in a torrent of noise. Sometimes a gust charged with rain seemed to cross the exterior wall. Then the alphabet started to answer Kate’s voice with numbers and the table knocked the floor from one foot or another: one, two, three, four, five . . . Was it five? The numbers had to be translated back into letters and words in order, then she read:
A-R-C-A-D-Y-J-O-H-N-E-L-I-A-S-I-L-O-V-E-Y-O-U.
Was that all? They already suspected that their father loved them. Although this game without any playing cards was fun, with the candles, the agitated table and those mysterious noises, their eyelids were heavier than the earth on a grave. Kate had to carry them one after the other up to bed. Another time, the table rose, oscillating like a little hot-air balloon. Arcady could not believe that his father, once so reasonable, was returning from the grave for such mischievous turns. John Elias was of the same opinion and, without either one of them expressing such a thing, declared all of a sudden:
“Mister Splitfoot, will you soon finish with your antics!”
Kate, horrified, stood straight up, letting the table topple. “Who told you about him?” she stammered.
The twins, side by side, looked at their mother with the unusual attention one gives to a loved one confessing to a defect or hidden perversion.
“You did, Mommy!” said Arcady, “when you sleepwalk at night through the rooms . . .”
“My boys, my boys!” she cried, incapable of finding the salutary words, clutching their heads to her chest.
It was by telephone, from the central post office, that Kate made contact with her sister who, just arrived at the port of London, was calling from the offices of the maritime shipping company at the agreed upon day and time. Yes, there was no change, they were expecting her at the indicated address, she was still living with her children in their Notting Hill apartment. Kate wasn’t surprised by the hoarse and listless voice on the other end of the line, thinking of the hardships of that voyage.
But when her sister presented herself at her door, two grumbling porters beleaguered with trunks behind her, she could not conceal a startled jump at the sight of her ravaged face.
“I’ve gone to pot, no?” Margaret said gently to help out. “Soon I’ll be ready for the scrapheap! But you, you haven’t changed so much. They say that one’s face reflects one’s heart . . .”
Once the luggage was deposited and the coat hung, seated face to face, the steam from a teapot undulating between them, the dialogue was renewed as if it had never stopped, and the discord between a very real aging and the transience of this decade of not seeing each other was reduced to the point of disappearing entirely: hadn’t she always carried Margaret inside her, branded like a cross of fate on her bare skin? Already, she was asking what there was to drink, some wine, some beer, some whiskey, to get her back on her feet after a crossing drowned in spray.
“By the way, where are my nephews?” she asked in surprise, somewhat confused by this lack of propriety.
“With their Uncle Herbert for the birthday of a little cousin.”
“I’m excited to meet them!” she said, helping herself to a bottle that George had been the last person to open. “And you, you’ve pulled yourself together some? Here we are, sisters in bad luck . . .”
“You’re drinking too much,” Kate whispered.
“It helps me get over the old times . . . Will you take me to visit the Metropolitan? I’d also love to discover the old streets, palaces, churches. Ah! what a fortune we could make here, the two of us, in the largest city in the world . . .”
“I’m done with all that.”
“I understand, protect yourself, even faking with all one’s might, it still brings out dangerous forces . . .”
“What!” Kate exclaimed. “You were pretending?”
“Everyone fakes it, what are you thinking, you can’t always be inspired, and then there are nights when the spirits shun you, so what do you do, in front of an audience wanting knocks, levitation, and the whole shebang, you bluff, you know it well, even a stew sometimes boils over, though sometimes it falls on a gas burner. I don’t know a single one of them, of those so-called mediums, who hasn’t been caught one time or another with pockets full of tricks . . .”
Chin resting on her fists, Kate gazed at her older sister in a state of deep confusion, less because of her revelations, which entertained as much as scandalized her, than because of the mutations showing in her whole person. Her voice, her language, her face had suffered ten years of strange insults. Shivering, Kate wondered what her life must have been like since the death of Elisha Kane.
“You’re looking at me like a stranger,” declared Margaret. “I’m the same, don’t you worry. I’ve just known some distress and adversity, like a lot of women back home. And Leah didn’t help me . . . Would you happen to have anything else to drink?”
They didn’t leave each other all night, remembering the fortune of the old days, the lost celebrations, and all the light ghosts of memory, handsome Lee in Rapstown, the children of Hydesville, Pequot, Lily Brown, and Harriet, the girl from the ranch where a slave was hung, and Pearl, their teacher.
“I crossed paths with her in Rochester,” said Margaret. “She became an influential woman, an activist in women’s rights. She writes novels . . .”
“And her father, the reverend?”
“Dead and in hell, I hope. He deserves the hell of papists!”
The next day, when the twins were back, Margaret hugged and kissed them to the point of terrifying them, wept about all the children she wouldn’t have, while laughing the whole time at herself and singing like an old pioneer:
O boys, we’re goin’ far to-night
Yeo-ho, yeo-ho, yeo-ho!
No doubt from the logic of opposites, she turned astonishingly quiet in the weeks that followed, absent by day and plunged at night into the study of religious works. Since she had stopped drinking and becoming angry at every mention of Leah, supreme usurper of the kingdom of ghosts, Kate thought that the distance had calmed her back down. Maggie was resting in London from the extravagance of energies, spiritual insurrections, and conflicts of all kinds that were overflowing from the American cauldron.
Distraught, with no other desire than some support from beyond, she actually ran to churches and temples. Despite her dyed hair and the powder on her face, age had adulterated the comforting reflection that glances in the mirror used to return. Emptied of any sentiment de soi—that hot evanescent roundness that is perpetuated in a waking dream, a sort of inner sanctuary where one waits endlessly for who knows what—she wandered under a changing mask, by turns tragic or as indifferent as the London sky, from a nestled chapel in a dungeon at the church of St. Marylebone so similar to the churches in New York, to the St. Paul Cathedral, then to St. Clement Danes next to Covent Garden. This deserted splendor, under the shadow arches, between two directions of crowds during the divine offices, soothed her without having to determine the nature of the sect at work, be it Anglican, Methodist, or Presbyterian. The misery that circled the city, beyond the buildings and kept parks—in Whitechapel, in the East End, the area surrounding St. George, where weary prostitutes paraded among packs of grimy children, drunkards, and crippled seekers, in Limehouse or Lisson Grove, with its wide streams of human distress
between the railways and channel gaps—seemed to her like an unknown, more ancestral species across the Atlantic, flourishing on its own cankers or as if moored to its own shipwreck.
From wandering to wandering, it was in the heart of London, at the end of Whitehall, in the City of Westminster, that she found her haven. The splendors of the abbey astonished her without emotion. Neither the tombs of a king and his queen behind the altar, nor the heraldic banners of the Knights over the stalls caught more than a moment of her attention. But she came to a stop before a statue of the Virgin, under a big dome fanned with sculpted shields, in the center of the stone circle of apostles and saints.
For several days she returned to Lady Chapel, weary perhaps from a vain wonder, trudging to the old prison yards where the cathedral must have been built, next to the preserved oratory of the former Catholic church adjoining a building probably used as a presbytery. Margaret entered the sanctuary feeling a mixture of oppression and deliverance. The burning bush of candles and the blue smoke from the censers at the foot of an effigy of the Immaculate Conception along with the shadow cast by a large crucifix of the dead Christ, sides pierced, conjured for her in some ways the arrangement of a medium’s cabinet. She remained so long in front of the Virgin, haggard, with an imploring look, that a priest sitting in prayer in the shadows of a recess began to worry about her. The apparition came over and leaned down to her, thin in her black dress with red piping and buttons.
“You need help, we have all been in sorrow; are you Catholic?”
Those words of this clergyman, encountered by chance in the remains of a church, shattered Margaret who, after a long interview and a complete confession, feverishly accepted conversion. The influence of the priest over her was immediate and without reservation. She learned later, at the moment of the sacraments of baptism along with the company of other converts, that he was the Archbishop of Westminster, the Cardinal Henry Manning, one of the most influential Catholic theologians, fully committed to John Wesley’s idea of social justice. Manning himself had converted after a heretic past and, on one finger along with the episcopal ring, wore the ring of his young wife who had died shortly after their marriage. A secret necromancer in his own dreams, the inconsolable prelate perceptively understood the emotional challenges of the new doctrine. Margaret was for him an easy prey as well as a trophy: already won by the Virgin Mary, she was persuaded as by her husband before her of the highly terrifying register of damnation. Didn’t everything in spiritualism fall into demonic practices? Captivated by the spells of the Catholic liturgy, but duly unbewitched, she felt better in the months that followed, in a convalescence with no pharmacopoeia other than holy water and the bread of angels.
Kate no longer recognized her sister. They had never discussed between themselves the perpetual virginity of Mary or the worship of the Eucharist. Even less in the participation of the unknowable being of the Trinity. The variety of vices and sins, with interior delight or conscious and voluntary transgression, had hardly been their concern up to now. Margaret returned home solemnly each night without swearing or trying to slake her thirst. Temperate and frugal, she considered all things from the point of view of grace. By nature generous, Kate provided for her happiness by offering her all the little things necessary for her asceticism. Since George’s death, she used her modest portion of the inheritance without ever counting; but no income led slowly to collapse. The lawyer’s old lessors and billers eventually objected to the widow’s debts.
When it came time to turn in the keys to the house, proof of their misfortune, Margaret sold her jewelry and some dresses to help with the costs of moving. With the twins, her sister, and two carts of furniture, Mrs. Fox-Jencken went to settle in the East End. School being mandatory only up to the age of ten, a recent age limit due to recruitment in the factories or the coal mines, she devoted herself to providing the secondary education of her sons, mixing disciplines, teaching the erroneous and the apodictic in the same way, the infestation of evil spirits and some notions of algebra. Fortunately, under the impulse of Maggie who, divided between ecstasy and sagacity, had little by little gone back to drinking, the twins were able to attend courses free of charge in a Catholic institution. At no point in their poverty, deprivation, and eventual destitution, did Kate consider the idea of going to complain to her in-laws, who associated meanness with propriety, or to reclaim her fame on a music hall stage, numerous in London, as a historical medium of quality.
When Maggie, worn out by homesickness and the uncertainty of her own vocation, took the boat back to New York, Kate found herself so distraught that she obediently began swallowing all the remains of the bottles left by her sister. This she did between visits to the immense park of Kensal Cemetery, bordering Notting Hill, where the Jencken family mausoleum, shaped like an ancient temple, stood among mourners and the statues of archangels. Facing her husband’s tomb, Kate noticed one day an old solitary tombstone, strewn with daisies, the family name indecipherable, but whose epitaph was still clear:
I’d rather hear something to make me laugh
The exclamation from the grave rang mockingly in her. Thinking of her twins, she quickly fled the cemetery and returned with a decided step to her neighborhood on the East End, between the gate and the river.
VII.
Mens agitat molem
New York was smoking like a thousand locomotives under the falling snow. Mills and factories, numerous construction sites where pyramids of brick and scrap iron were being erected—with, as its emblem at the mouth of the Hudson, the immense framework of the future Statue of Liberty on its granite fortification—and likewise the mouths of the metro and the sewer, the conical or terraced roofs, and ferry boats crisscrossing the river and the strait, were all sending up fat clouds of vapor and gray-black plumes. These traveled in a rolling boil denser than a mountain fog toward the plaster casts of the sky, from which the solstice snow seemed to crumble and fall in discontinuous waves.
It was three o’clock in the afternoon on a day that had not quite fully risen and was already starting to wane when, both arms leaning against the back of a chair facing the windows—on the corner of South Street Seaport and with a view of the new Brooklyn Bridge, the dock harbors and fluvial escape toward Governors Island—Leah Underhill wondered humorlessly if her health troubles and annoyances would grant her a reprieve from the end of year festivities. At her age, one could still overcome the small warning signs of passing time, the creaky wheels of age were still oiled well, provided that one was not constantly worrying about various troubles. “They lose it that do buy it with much care,” she’d heard the other night at the Standard Theatre, at the premiere of The Merchant of Venice. And she estimated she’d inherited the bulk, and in tons, of worries, during a life devoted to the Spiritualist cause with its varied fortunes and a constant adversity from the side of barkers, hypnotists, jugglers, snake oil salesmen, and other disloyal competitors marching off in packed rows to distort the message of spirits. They were organized throughout the United States, without ever even thinking of inviting her, these conferences of mediums under big tops, in churches, and community halls. George P. Colby, somewhere in Florida, proclaimed himself prophet of Spiritualism urbi et orbi. The Anglican priest William Stainton Moses, another champion of deep trance, claimed to transcribe in shamanic dictation the living conditions in the afterlife. Emma Hardinge Britten claimed to understand in detail the works and miracles the disembodied used to answer us. And what about that half-wit Eusapia Paladino, going out with her sleeves all twisted from her perispirit, or of that stuck-up thing Frickie Wonder, who knew so well how to use her breasts and hips to captivate the old geezers of the universities while spouting the worst philosophy for girls, or still yet, to top all this bluffing off, that joker William Mac Orpheus, now one of the star attractions in the new Barnum three-ring circus! The inventory of all this deception and prevarication would have required an almanac. Baffling enough to make her lose her Latin! Leah felt much too old a
nd betrayed to sort the wheat from the chaff. And it mattered little to her whether she was in good or bad faith, since she alone knew how to assemble the flags and drums. Modern Spiritualism was her exclusive invention, no one could contest it, and certainly not these poor rookies who had benefitted from the enterprise as apathetic and capricious associates. Like John the Baptist, she had given the impetus to a new religion with no messiah or legislator, expanded now all over the world, with crowds of proselytes more or less devoted. Thanks to her, all the dead were like Lazarus, ready to answer as present. There was no longer that plague wall between the world of the living and that of spirits. She had even contributed to the liberation of women, those slaves, white or black, by offering them a spiritual forum impregnable to most men, so stupidly full of themselves with their brute force.
But her pain was mitigated by the spectacle of the snow. Without a doubt it was the virtue of angels, this cottony and indistinct slowness that leisurely dresses the soul. But Leah still had one more demon in her head. In addition to a share of the Underhill fortune, her investments in the railroad had earned her enough to languish for several lifetimes in New York—if it occurred to God to reward her troubles—without having to give conferences on the Doctrine any more. She was abandoning without regret the emptiness of precepts and systems to the teachers of the other world. From spiritualism to spiritism, there was just one syllable missing, cheerfully replaced by the “third revelation of God.”
Leah told herself that she would have suffered it all, the lynch mob, the skeptics, the scientists incapable of admitting that there is no miracle without faith, the imposters by the dozen, and even spiritism, to top it all off, which had made off with her discovery, just as the converted persecutor Paul of Tarsus’s words were taken by a revenant named Jesus. Too old to take the offensive, she had only to look toward her retirement so long as the enemies kept their distance. But they’d been grinning at her front door ever since her sisters’ return. Without resources, always between drunkenness and madness, Margaret had displayed herself grotesquely in music halls for a few dollars, pushed by a crooked manager who had the sole ambition of denigrating her. At seventy-five years old, Leah Underhill was the only one upholding the legacy of Hydesville. And the pitiful Kate, landed back in New York this autumn with her twin warlocks, exposing a spectacle of deliquescence for all to see . . . Leah had given the order to her lawyer, a good man efficient and naturally respectful of propriety, to take legal action to stop these scandals. If he could detain the one for her pattern of repeated scandal before the public, and begin the procedure to remove the children from the other for proven negligence and moral abuse, then Leah would be back on track.
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