A spectacle had been expected, no doubt, but the announcement, a tad bit sensational, added some spice to the event:
Modern Spiritualism
exposed for the first time
by one of the Fox Sisters
The tremor behind the curtain didn’t escape the notice of a spectator from the two-dollar seats who had slipped in between two blind cohorts. So tiny, unrecognizable, Kate Fox-Jencken hid unnecessarily beneath a floppy hat with folded edges and black veils despite the stifling heat. Hours earlier, checking the hallways, offices, emergency exits, she had tried unsuccessfully to reach her sister to beg her not to put herself into peril. The bottled-up negative energies that they had released without the crowd’s knowledge had accumulated to their own loss. Kate was convinced of this ever since her despoilment by the law; after a rebellious and struggling time, she remained concealed in the shadows. It was necessary that she protect herself from a universal conspiracy. Diverted by Leah, the obsessive little fears of Hydesville had taken on a crazy amplitude, disturbing all the dead in cemeteries, channeling millions of slaves to their devotion. Soon the spirits would overwhelm the living. What might happen then surpassed all understanding . . .
Wearing a dark dress with a headband in her hair, Margaret greeted the room after the presenter’s disclaimer: it was necessary to observe a religious silence conducive to demonstrations. Very pale in her medium’s cabinet reconstituted for the stage, she initially produced the expected effects: various noises and knocks, the movement of objects, the spontaneous combustion of a sheet scrawled with the directed writing in a closed and locked cabinet. One moment she even seemed to take up spiritual telegraphy, her eyebrows frowning as she invoked Benjamin Franklin and Abraham Lincoln. Then, standing up to face the audience gratified to applaud her, she announced there would be an exceptional second component to her presentation.
To everyone’s amazement, she then said very calmly: “Spiritualism is from one end to the other a deception. It is the biggest fraud of our century. Kate Fox and I embarked on this adventure while still little girls, much too young and innocent to understand what we were truly dealing with, the two of us propelled on this path of deception by unscrupulous adults . . .”
“That’s shameful! She’s crazy!” someone exclaimed from the front rows.
Before the rumblings and indignant exclamations had time to discourage her, Margaret, back at her cabinet, undertook a demonstration of each of her turns. Calmly, she began to deconstruct for all to see all the phenomena of conjuring and apparitions. Then she revealed her method of knocking by exposing a sounding board installed under her feet and a quantity of compartments under the table top. Barefoot, she cracked her toes together to produce the desired sounds. She proceeded with a clinical determination, as if reconstituting a crime scene. Her slowed-down gestures and the extraordinary expressiveness of her face substituted for paranormal manifestations with a power that seemed even greater. A deathly silence fell over the stunned audience. There was nothing more to see. The theater of the Fox sisters was forever destroyed. “It’s madness, a well-planned suicide,” was whispered from one part or another. Strangely, the crowd left the Academy of Music in the biggest calm, as if at the end of some funeral ceremony.
Outside, on the twilit square where the blue lights of the gas lamps danced, people dispersed with lowered heads, not looking at each other, some toward public transportation, whereas others, impatient despite the mildness of the air, waited in the endless line for their horse-drawn carriages. An old man still alert, with large shoulders, showing a slight limp in the weakness of a hip, appeared to be looking around for somebody and, suddenly raising an arm to a retreating figure, walked as quickly as he could in its direction. Kate found herself caught in a narrow and badly lit street when the individual reached her.
“How you run, wait up!” he said. “Don’t be afraid, I recognized you in the stairway of the Academy of Music, wait!”
As the silent shadow went on her way, William Pill, alias Mac Orpheus, placed himself firmly in front of her, blocking her from every direction, and gazed at her, overwhelmed to find again through the wrinkles of the years the face of a Hydesville girl.
“We knew each other well,” he said, “don’t you remember?”
“Yes, yes,” Kate murmured, “but let me go.”
“Why did your sister do that? Do you know?”
“I don’t know anything about it, it’s her problem, now let me leave . . .”
He stepped aside without leaving her, limping alongside her. Kate gave the impression of hardly being aware of his presence. Looking like a raw-boned elf under her veils, she seemed to move outside all reality, in some parallel world where things were perfectly identical, although of a different substance.
They passed vagabonds, puzzled women smoking along shop windows, drunkards in the grip of their demons. Out of breath, misty-eyed, William Pill wondered over the strangeness of this little woman who, despite their lack of acquaintance, was the source of his good fortune. Thanks to her, he had become rich enough to be honest, from his point of view, and had met his angel, the fickle love of his life, a damn bluestocking fled today to Rochester with a trunk of books.
“Were you ever loved, Kate?” he couldn’t help but stammer, seized by that uncontrollable emotion of old men.
As she remained silent, he gently took her arm and, while walking, leaned toward her ear.
“Of course you were loved, and even passionately. During the Civil War, in the battle at Chancellorsville, a man who you’d often spent time with gave me, at the moment of his death, his only treasure to give to you. It’s an Indian necklace, I’ve carried it with me for twenty years, hoping to be able to hand it over to you one day . . .”
“A man?” Kate said.
“Alexander Cruik, the preacher,” Pill answered, unclasping the necklace from his neck. “This amulet will bring you fortune, it contains the umbilical cord of a Sioux chief killed in combat . . .”
The necklace held tight in one hand, Kate looked at the slightly vacillating shadow of this secondary actor in her life who’d appeared out of nowhere and who, after walking her to the hotel where she claimed to live, returned to the great residence of oblivion into which disappeared everyone we have met on this Earth. Taking up her way toward the Hudson away from any of the numerous walkers in the summer night who might have tried to bother her, she opened her hand to look at the amulet, which a street child would immediately have run to snatch with the vivacity of a bird. Facing the shifting constellations of the river, while a ferryboat descended to its mouth, all pennants lit, she undid her veils and cape to taste the sea breeze.
Two sailors went up along the dock without seeing her. Falling down drunk, they bellowed loudly an incomprehensible tune:
Adieu foula’, adieu mad’as
Adieu guenda, adieu collier-chou
Dou-dou à moi, y va pa’ti’
Hélas, hélas, c’est pou’ toujou’
X.
With Congratulations from Mister Splitfoot
Some years later, all the water in the sky had passed over the memory of men, and the death of Leah Fox-Underhill one winter night in 1890, who was significantly less influential after the family betrayal, was less widely talked about than the excruciating death of William Kemmler, the first person sentenced to execution in an electric chair thanks to the work of Thomas Edison, or the arrest and assassination of the Sioux chief Sitting Bull, followed by the massacres at Wounded Knee and Pine Ridge, which spared neither women nor children, or the vote of new segregationist laws in Mississippi and the southern states, or even the inauguration of the New York World Building, the tallest building in Manhattan. Spiritism, the uncompromising religion that, without recourse to hell or purgatory, assured the salvation of everyone through positive transmigration and the upward path of spirits toward the celestial light, had supplanted Modern Spiritualism and its avatars worldwide. Which in no way caused braggarts, fanatics, or speculat
ors to give up, or any kind of the socially confused, those multitudes without imagination who had never known how to behave confronted by the unknown.
Masses of immigrants continued to rush in from Europe and Asia. To the Irish Catholics were added those from Poland and Italy. The Germans fleeing cholera or Weltpolitik, the Taoist Chinese or the Buddhists from Fujian and Guangdong, the Jews from the Russian empire escaping pogroms, all landed continuously by the thousands on Ellis Island and its pontoons on the East River. Each of them wandered like convalescents in exile, distraught under the same sky, with their nostalgia returning as a foolish hope. In this anthill of fermentation, the margin was a fine line between the asocial needy and the workers, reckless or trafficking bourgeois, dignitaries and mafia, excited devotees and foolish free spirits. But all were working blindly, in various ways, under justice or outside the law, for the grand melting pot in the making.
Away from that human cosmos, living from begging or mysterious gifts, sleeping here and there, in shelters, rooms where a cot cost a dollar or two a night, or under the stars between the high walls of buildings, Kate Fox managed to keep her appearance neat and shoes clean, letting her hair be done by charitable prostitutes, keeping her clothes spotless thanks to the helping hand of the laundry room of an evangelical home. She’d only seen Margaret again once since the catastrophic revelations at the Academy of Music. Both of them, overcome with remorse when learning of Leah’s illness, had attempted to seek her pardon. The moment after, downing whiskey upon whiskey in a port-side tavern and forcing Kate to drink along with her, Margaret got carried away, cursing again their madam of a sister who had to give up the ghost without a word of reconciliation. The two younger sisters separated shortly after that, frozen in the lucidity of intoxication, and the weeks and seasons had flown by like the clouds in a great wind, with a sort of disenchanted haste.
Vagabond, Kate was at home in her meandering. She could no longer see herself as wandering, going from one palace of leaves illuminated by a bright round moon, to the distracted temple of a bar from which she left drunker than five giants sunk in the soil. In her bewilderment, everything finally made sense, forever, forever, forever! How beautiful reality was, finer than a cigarette paper between the fingers and charred lungs of God. She perceived the voices of Creation, barely audible, and the geometric figures of an infinite precision that were endlessly in the middle of her skull. She laughed all alone sometimes, passed by the faces mixed in crowds between Fifth Avenue and the Harlem River. Who hears the Spirit? You or me?
O sister in the bath, the water is so cold
That your tears burn me
An eternal Negro came to take her in his arms, one night when she’d fallen, a footprint in the shape of a heart on his forehead. Don’t cry Madame, God doesn’t forget you, don’t cry, life is not down here. She stood up, very small, like in the days of Pequot. There remained for her the path between the Palace of Leaves and the Temple of the Bar. Alcohol is like eternity. Lost secret, I’m coming to you, hair already white. One night, in a dollar-a-night hostel, a princely man came to inhabit her dream. Oh Katie, little sorceress, it’s almost time to end this play-acting.
“But who are you, I don’t recall.”
“The ghost of a man who didn’t love women and who loved you, star of the final hour.”
“It’s you, Lucian, you’re dead, you too?”
“Dead? Living? Who can affirm that he isn’t sleeping?”
“I remember. You told me: don’t be afraid.”
“I told you, when you were sleeping, forever, forever, forever, I will be next to you. What importance is today or tomorrow, and all the kings covered in sweat?”
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s necessary for us not to stray from the path of flowers.”
“I don’t understand.”
Kate loved the pigeons rising all of a sudden, like a saber dance. In Central Park, for entire days, she watched other people’s twins, all the children were twins. She told herself there was no sound louder than memory. Her children were playing next to her, grown up, now bigger than her, they were there in spirit. Why should one weigh the soul and matter? No, no magic. She would have liked for Margaret to be with her, not angry, in the violent insomnia of specters. She knew well, Maggie, that all their lies hid a bigger truth, immense, knees bent on the misty hillside, in a dying autumn in Hydesville . . .
Am I your sad king
Your lover on the last night
When the Salvation Army sanitation services, quite busy in winter, found her on a bench, a blanket of snow barely scrawled on her chest, she was smiling in archangelic crystals, perfectly alive, and endlessly murmuring words that the ambulance volunteers couldn’t or didn’t want to understand. Was it, “don’t come to console me,” was it, “the fallen life is homeless,” was it, “we are all wandering spirits”? In the rickety cart, at the exact moment of being all finished with flesh and these memories, Kate bristled, her eyes immensely open.
“Oh!” she said, frightened. “You are very funny, Mister Splitfoot, perched in my lap like that.”
“I don’t weigh that much, Katie darling!”
“Oh!, oh! Mister Splitfoot, how I’ll miss you!”
“Don’t worry about anything, Katie, spirit’s blood, I’m waiting for you under the light scarves.”
In the Bellevue Hospital emergency room, a doctor on call casually noted the death of the incoming patient and crossed himself just in case.
“What should we do with her?” he asked the service nurses.
“No paperwork, she’s homeless, probably an immigrant escaping scurvy or typhus who caught cholera instead.”
To ward off the risk of an epidemic, the corpse was not sent to the anatomical theater. It was delivered to the gravediggers, who for compensation hardly got anything more than the gold or silver teeth and, on rare occasions, a little furtive affection. They made a pile of other remains at the bottom of a trench and covered them all with quicklime. Was it at Woodlawn Cemetery? Though hardly consoling, the common grave does accomplish the ideal community. And the morning dew passes for human memory. One marvels at the hardened mortals who swear that their minutes have the weight of turnips and squash blooming in their garden!
A few months later, in a funereal intoxication, Margaret Fox dreamt so strongly of her little sister that it killed her, her body rotten with lethal ulcerations. Lacking resources or identity, she too had a common burial.
Thus ended—as precisely as the concentrated work of mediums in these pages would allow it—the uplifting and pathetic adventure of the Fox Sisters.
No one will ever meditate or dance on their remains. Who ever takes the time to bow over a mass grave?
Epilogue
Good-bye my Fancy!
Farewell dear mate, dear love!
I’m going away, I know not where,
Or to what fortune, or whether I may ever see you again,
So Good-bye my Fancy.
Now for my last—let me look back a moment . . .
—Walt Whitman
Behind the wheel of a Panhard-Levassor with a two-cylinder engine, whose original owner had passed away, Pearl Gascoigne quickly developed the taste for speed. The whole way from Rochester to Hydesville, they had only passed one other automobile, an Auburn looking like a luxurious carriage, and a few fiacres and peasant carts. The road, in the process of being asphalted, crossed or ran alongside the railway tracks several times, but they saw no locomotive.
“Don’t forget that you’re driving with a thirty-six horsepower engine!” William Pill was frightened. “Would you like me to drive?”
“No!” Pearl replied. “It’s too exhilarating . . .”
“Well, slow down then. You’re going at least twenty-five miles per hour on the uphill slopes!”
They reached their destination in the early afternoon, under a cold sun white as snow. It was a sharp day in April, bright, with an Eastern wind carrying a marine taste. Severa
l kinds of fruit trees were already in bloom after the early start of the season. The outskirts of Hydesville seemed unrecognizable to them. They had expanded the roads, drained ponds, erected electric power lines, and built a water tower, stone houses, and a rather beautiful building that must have been a school.
The automobile having reached the center of town, Pearl missed a gear-shift and nearly ran over a procession of geese, with other animal witnesses—goats, pigs, dogs—scattering out of the way at the first sounds of backfire. Two horses hitched to a drugstore railing flinched and whinnied. Children wild with joy ran by the dozens and circled around once Pill managed to apply the brake. Housewives curious about the uproar leaned out of windows. Several of the regulars came out from the saloon with laughing faces, legs spread as if standing on a ship’s deck.
Pearl took off her leather cap and goggles under the amazed eyes of the farmers, who had certainly never seen an elderly woman so pretty and determined in her kidskin boots, with thick, milk-colored hair, and a delicately drawn face and eyes of an almost alarming clarity. The solid old man who accompanied her, barely stooped in his suit, looking like a rich farmer or circus director, aroused vague suspicions among the elders without being able to translate them into memories. A grandfather leaning on his cane, which was quite useful upon leaving the bar, stepped in front of the car, with a look that seemed to say, “Now that is an automobile!” Then he raised his stubbly chin toward this interesting bourgeois couple.
“It seems to me, sir,” he began while rubbing his hand over his forehead, “I have the impression . . . Well, it wouldn’t surprise me if, sometime, that we’d met before . . .”
“Of course!” the other answered while lighting a cigarillo. “But it was well before the Great Depression, the strikes, the invention of the automobile, the Civil War . . .”
“In those days, I was a man of the law, just in this lost hole of a place . . .”
Rochester Knockings Page 24