Rochester Knockings

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Rochester Knockings Page 23

by Hubert Haddad


  With a migraine and an aching back, Leah moved away from the windows and went to her room. Her two lapdogs, Horace and Wildy, jumped onto her bed once she was lying down. They wagged their tails in search of a caress, tongues hanging out. Touched, the old woman dug her bony fingers into all that white wool. “My little loves,” she said, eyelids heavy. “You’d never make any trouble for your mommy, no . . .”

  Sleep would have resembled a soothing death without these pains and parasitic dreams. Over time, Leah had honestly come to believe in visiting spirits. And never more so than in the floating cities of dream. A business woman suffers more than other women from the idleness of solitude, and there was nothing her lapdogs could do to help that. Waves of images from her youth in Rapstown came back to her in fits and starts, lashing her memory. Amid a lowly breed of people destined for the dirt and the barn, she had rebelled, desperate to one day be like the ladies who came down from the city to do charity work, whether by spending sleepless nights studying books loaned by a sympathetic pastor or giving lessons to the young educated girls to have access to their drawing rooms. Her first ambition, barely pubescent, was learning to play the piano. The rich farmers proudly furnished their ranches with that enchanted sideboard. And the pastor was pleased to have at his disposition a wise young woman to put back to liturgical use a small portable organ donated by the congregation.

  Asleep in an instant, her consciousness asymmetric as her heartbeat, the eldest of the Fox sisters suddenly had the feeling of a great pillaging of the well-ordered cabinets of memory. The images of her life were merging, absurdly and without correlation, reducing a great ocean of light to a desire to urinate or twisting one into the other, like a marshmallow pastry, the faces of the dead and those of the living. She herself was burning, a witch from another century, on a stake where each flame represented a day of her life. “You’re bringing out dangerous forces,” an old man wearing a compass and sextant breathed in her face, while tearing out the flesh of her neck in fistfuls that, thrown in the air, were flying with the cries of a nightjar. How to escape the morgue of dreams? Heads and limbs, parts of cadavers rising up from an autopsy table encircled her in a burlesque sarabande of suicides, drowned persons, and assassins. Dressed in animal skins, her Welsh ancestors were now flocking to steal her things right out from under the old spinster. Do millennia have the same value as a single instant in the other world? A scarlet parrot, sprung from one of her ears, chased the ghosts away with blows of its beak and then the fiendish bird perched on her shoulder, deafening her endlessly with “Mens agitat molem.” Even dead, she thought she could hear herself thinking, she would have had to give birth before she could begin to comprehend such a phenomenon.

  But these vapors vanished. Revived from the grave, mind in tatters, Leah Underhill let out a low groan that frightened her little dogs. She raised herself up to sitting, a little more certain of being safe after each tick of a pendulum clock hanging on the wall. Soon on her feet, she stumbled over to the bay window, hands on her hips. The snow was redrawing the ribs and shoulders of the Brooklyn Bridge. One could barely make out the hills on the other side of the strait, and the islands at the mouth had receded into darkness. Woken up badly, she rubbed her scalp at length as if delousing herself of her dream, then grabbed a silver bell sitting on a pedestal table.

  Impatient, ringing it several times, she admitted that it was useless to doze off in the middle of the day, irritated by a hissing sound in her left ear and even more by her inevitable lateness now to the Spiritualist Circle in Union Square where under her presidency they were receiving the pacifist Colonel Henry Steel Olcott and Mr. William Quan Judge, both founding members of the Theosophical Society. Although their driving force, a Mrs. Helena Blavatsky, also made claims about her mediumship, the two of them hunted in different forests, so to speak. And good for them! It was clear that the spiritualist cause, rather than letting itself be overtaken, should display a healthy ecumenism.

  Finally appeased, Leah saw her Virginian maid coming toward her contrite, curlers on her old head.

  “I could have died a hundred times over,” she let out in a falsely serene tone.

  “But Madam, you had given me the afternoon off . . .”

  “Even if it were three days, or an entire month! You must still be there when I ring!”

  In front of the red dye-job and googly eyes of her maid, she suddenly remembered the scarlet parrot in her nightmare and froze, suspicious.

  “Mens agitat molem!” she exclaimed. “Mens agitat molem? What on earth could that mean . . .”

  VIII.

  Three Letters for a Betrayal

  A part from the blizzard baptized the “Great White Hurricane,” which paralyzed the northern United States and Canada for several days in mid-March under an enormous sheet of ice, fifty-inch snowfalls, hundreds of victims, and tons of iced-over bridges and railways, the journalists of the New-York Tribune had nothing exciting to sink their teeth into. That was according to old Oilstone—his editorial staff’s friendly nickname for him since he’d gone completely bald—who was stuffing himself with cold cuts at Katz’s Delicatessen, a new bistro on the Lower East Side, when he thought he spotted a familiar chin wavering behind the head of a beer tycoon. In his line of work, one ended up being able to recognize any sort of celebrity under the disguises of time. The use of photography in the press had accustomed his eye to transformations: one had to be able to recall the portrait of a beautiful woman who went off her rocker. This puffy old broad, bags under her eyes, a mop of hair like crow’s wings: it was definitely one of the Fox sisters. He had interviewed them during the time of the Barnum Museum. Aside from Mother Underhill, female pope of those devoted to the old school of knocking tables now become a sort of New York institution, the Fox sisters and how many legs they had between them had been forgotten. Novelty, that was the sole watchword in New York. One had to be on the train, a fashion dandy, up-to-date. Old Oilstone, who did not lack for a nose and knew by heart the extent of the public’s intrigue, didn’t have to think too hard to figure out how to take advantage of this revenant. It was an ordinary expedient of the journalist in calm times to make use of a fallen glory, who was sipping her own bile, in order to fill the newspaper plate under the disgusted but complacent eye of the column editor. Scandal always pays, failing a prodigy. One can always turn to the past, provided it’s to stir things up.

  The old journalist kindly offered Margaret another drink, which for an instant made her think he had taken her for a prostitute.

  “Wouldn’t you be Kate Fox, or rather her sister?” he whispered with a feigned enthusiasm.

  Being nearly recognized would have almost flattered her, if the mirror facing her hadn’t been reflecting the mask of a shipwreck. She accepted without protest to answer some questions, letting all the bitterness of her last years rise back up to her lips. Taken into the game in her inebriation, she spared no detail for old Oilstone, who broke his pencil on his notepad several times.

  “Modern spiritualism, as they call it, well I’ll tell you a bit of history from its very foundation. At first, when the whole business began, Katie and me, we were just kids and our damned older sister, already an old woman, played us. As for our mother, she was a fool, a fanatic, if I may say so myself. But our mother had an honest heart and believed in these things. Leah, though, that’s a different story. She prostituted us in exhibitions without any scruples. And all the proceeds, they went straight into her pocket . . .”

  These comments appeared a few days later, rewritten into good English, on the front page of the New-York Tribune, and Margaret, who hadn’t taken this chance encounter seriously, discovered them in a different bar on the Lower East Side, paging through the house copy fastened to a newspaper stick. Immediately paralyzed, she finally shrugged and read the date above the headlines with a renewed superstition: hadn’t she been converted on September 24th? Still clinging to her Catholic faith, Margaret saw in the number of the year a great symbol: 1888.
Nothing less than the divine Unity flanked by the three infinities of the Trinity!

  She wasn’t unhappy about the racket this off-the-cuff interview was going to provoke in the spiritist and spiritualist circles: the world would remember her. She could easily imagine Leah’s fury. But the long letter she received by general delivery a few days later quite cleverly showed nothing of it. Her sister sermonized her for five pages, in the name of the cause, presenting her with her complaints, the unspeakable discredit she was guilty of, the shame that her conduct was inflicting on the family, and in conclusion guaranteed her a lawsuit at the next prank. The stationery was beautifully printed with the name of Mrs. Leah Fox-Underhill, and the handwriting in blue ink was neat and proper. Margaret crunched it into balls that she threw into the fire.

  From a furnished room on the Lower East Side or in Greenwich Village, her only luggage a trunk where she kept her stage outfit and a few accessories, Margaret fell back into a sullen anonymity. Her whim had hardly dented the reputation of Leah, who grandly used her right to respond by inviting the best writers of the spiritualist cult to defend her honor. Cleverly inverted, stigma is only a stepping stone.

  Left to herself more than ever, Margaret dreamt of returning to Monroe County, where she remembered a few people she’d known who were probably still alive, some of whom might be willing to help her. A remote town like Rochester is willingly flattered to have what London or New York are tired of.

  Margaret considered more and more seriously getting a one-way ticket at Grand Central Station when, again by general delivery, two letters delivered on the same day changed her mind. One of them overwhelmed her with sadness and anger, the other handed her the means necessary for that divine justice named revenge. The first came from Kate, who in her despair didn’t leave an address. Leah had now gotten her way. On the basis of her accusations, Katie had been arrested for vagrancy on a public street while looking for a place to live, she and her sons loaded down with luggage. Custody of her children was withdrawn in the wake, under the allegation of abuse. Despite all of her appeals and petitions to the court, before the judges, to the governor, the court decision was upheld. Placed in the Saint Vincent de Paul orphanage, the twins claimed their mother as much as she claimed them. After the judgment confided the custody of Arcady and John Elias to her British in-laws, Uncle Herbert hardly tarried in having them delivered on a liner of the General Transatlantic Company. That was all the contents of her letter. Kate added, a little wave falling over the shipwreck of her signature: “Maggie, defend me! Help me! I cannot survive without my angels.” The other letter she opened with trembling hands and read through her tears:

  Dear Margaret Fox-Kane,

  I had the opportunity to learn with surprise and satisfaction of your disillusioned declarations a while back in the New-York Tribune. You are perfectly right to set the record straight. Leah Fox-Underhill scandalously injured you, you and your little sister. I thought that you might push the envelope further in a profitable way. Essentially, why not make a public demonstration of it to New York itself. The idea occurred to me that we could earn a lot of money by renting the biggest hall in town, that of the Academy of Music. With a good slogan like “The Return of the Fox Sisters” or “Margaret Fox Denounces the Sham,” it’s two thousand dollars guaranteed. I would charge for my services of course, with the usual terms, for the organization, promotion, and success of the event.

  Remember, dear Margaret, what a devoted agent I was for you for a long time, etc.

  Frank Strechen

  The card of a Brooklyn hotel with the telephone number underlined in the same ink accompanied the letter. She got back in contact with the manager that same day and, determined to ruin the reputation of Leah Underhill, agreed with him without going into all the details on the protocol of the event. Strechen wanted a show, something vengeful and bloody.

  In the weeks leading up to it, Margaret had long had a single thought: to find Katie. Margaret returned in vain to the sumptuous mansions of old contacts, financiers, and amateur traders in the unknown, but only their vestibules remained accessible to her. In desperation, and banned entrance to Leah’s building on Cotton Street, she had humbled herself to beg Leah in the premises of the Spiritualist Circle of Union Square. They unceremoniously kicked her out after her sister had demanded the solemn confession of her crimes toward the cause. “I’ll die first!” Margaret had responded. The followers present had carried her out like a sack under Leah’s glacial eye. For entire hours that day, brooding over her hatred in the chalky June light, Margaret had wandered in search of Kate between the ponds and hills of Central Park. At the end of one path, under the inclement glare of the sun, a preacher of the end of the world was perched on a bench, holding forth to himself alone:

  “Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in like a friend to his friend’s house.”

  That was just it, she thought, “if anyone hears my voice,” but no one would answer her anymore in Heaven just like on Earth.

  At the approach of the month of August, impressive storms sliced with torrential rains didn’t diminish the tropical heat wave by even a single degree. The New York newspapers soon announced with various caustic or bemused commentaries, and along with an unattractive photograph, the exceptional performance of Margaret Fox in the grand auditorium of the Academy of Music. Never letting go of the daggers of her anger, Margaret could feel a wave of panic rising in her. Being recognized once or twice in public terrified her like the pronouncement of a curse. Among the bustle of the streets, in one neighborhood or another, she’d stop to catch her breath at the first shop sign for absinthe or any kind of alcohol to revive the part of her that was dying, and was able to pay thanks to the advance of two hundred dollars burning a hole in her pocket. But it was necessary for her to feed this covert fire day and night without losing control, until the moment of surrendering herself to the invisible, several brutal hours where, poked by myriad waxy demons, the hell promised to the intemperate would welcome her in for an atrocious prelude from which she would escape twenty times over in her sleep, dreaming that she was running after a sleepwalker more elusive than a flickering flame. Finally, eyes wide open, crying voicelessly into a stony silence, she thought she was calling for help. But there was nobody in the world to answer her.

  Then, wide-awake, she recognized a little voice:

  O the good times are all dead and gone

  Singin’ hi-diddle-i-diddle

  Still I love you dear, my whole life long

  Singin’ hi-diddle-i-diddle

  IX.

  Poltergeist at the Academy of Music

  A crowd is just a kind of maelstrom of opinion, a whirlwind, an open mouth of hungry souls. Wherever this Leviathan of circumstances arises—cyclonic dragon, serpent of storms—all trace of altruism or of simple humanity disappears and the most one can hope for is a speedy return from primitive chaos, the animal brain, before all cataclysm.

  In the grand auditorium of the New York City Academy of Music, the stampede released into the stairways and halls worried the staff of this institution more accustomed to the airy gait of music lovers. Behind the scenes, trying to get a count of heads coiffed or not, Franck Strechen was rubbing his hands together. This was a turnout to dream of, an audience of great opportunity, even if it augured no future, given the poor state of his contractual associate. At least she was abstaining for the moment and letting herself be made up, ready it seemed to demonstrate being a medium with physical effects according to the rules: they could expect some classic conversations with the table, experiences of directed writing from afar, and of Ouija according to the upside-down-glass technique, as well as some levitation exercises using a single support, partial materialization by densification of the astral body and, perhaps, contributions from the afterlife, a bouquet of flowers or an old Bible, given all the stage equipment Margaret Fox-Kane had taken the time to spread out before the doors opened. Closets
, diversions, miraculous escapes: they were all the rage! He was worried only about the effects of the trance on her weak constitution, for he had never doubted the excessive nervous energy Margaret channeled, as much for conjuring tricks as for the embodiment of spirits.

  Still camped behind the stage curtain, Franck Strechen began to closely scrutinize the first rows: everyone was there! The spiritualist crème de la crème of New York. He recognized, among other luminaries more or less documented, the unpredictable William Mac Orpheus, Thomson Jay Hudson behind his martial handlebar mustache, clairvoyant mediums from the hinterlands, mediums of Christ more dangerous than the Medusa, a quantity of orderlies from spiritualist organizations, and the most faithful of the faithful, Andrew Jackson Davis in the flesh. The yellow, white, or black faces mingled noisily throughout the auditorium. A candid mass of uncontrollable instincts, the curious people—unusual amateurs, spellbound by principle, enthusiastic laymen—were to be feared more in the case of defeat.

 

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