“Hush, he’s in the front pew, there. He may hear you,” warns Singsong.
“He did defend her against her Judas sisters, my dears,” says Superior-Tone.
“Indeed, yes, at first,” says Scratch-Voice. “But then our Daniel became very quiet.”
“But we will surely hear a message from our Leah’s spirit soon, I hope.” This from a nervous-voiced woman. “Do you think her sisters might … ah, no, I suppose not.”
“Appalling and atrocious that her sisters haven’t come,” puts in Singsong.
“Dreadful creatures, indeed, yes,” Scratch-Voice says. “And gone to seed. Entirely.”
“Did you expect her dashed sisters to come today, ladies?” Overloud Man asks. “After what they did? Their baseless accusations. The deuced musical hall travesty?”
“Leah became such a recluse, didn’t she?” Nervous-Voice asks. “Is it true she never received callers? But it’s not as if she was being snubbed. I myself was often rather too busy—”
“As was I!” Singsong cries. “I had my own family affairs and business, you see, and—”
“That terrible housekeeper of hers,” says Scratch-Voice. “She was the only one our Leah could find who would stay. Apparently her horrid sisters’ scandalous accusations are known by the even servant classes.”
“Servants are privy to more mysteries than even the finest of mediums, my dears,” offers Superior-Tone.
More chuckling.
“Indeed, yes,” Scratch-Voice continues. “But it was that horrible housekeeper who broke our Leah’s French toile vase and then had the audacity to declare it a fake anywise. Well, you know how Leah was about her things. It put her into such a dreadful rage that she fell instantly to the carpet and—”
“I heard there was no lingering,” Nervous-Voice says.
“No. Not a minute, my dears, all reports agree,” Superior-Tone says.
“Such a shame and pity,” Singsong agrees
“Indeed, yes, a terrible shame,” puts in Scratch-Voice. “No beloved family crowding round to hear her last words or watch her last breath escape. Just that terrible housekeeper. How dreadfully terrible to die so unawares.”
“Mr. Underhill was there.”
“I heard the contrary. That he was out, as always.”
“At least our Leah is in joyous Spirit Land now,” Scratch-Voice says. “Indeed, I have no doubt whatsoever that our Leah will be extremely joyful now that she is a spirit herself.”
“Yes, my dears, and with, you know, all those other spirits for company.”
But will those other spirits be joyful and at peace in her company? Maggie wonders, and nearly smiles.
After the reverend speaks about Leah’s selfless life, her dedication to her husband and family, the injustices heaped upon her, after a long variety of Leah’s favourite music is played and sung, the celebrants are left to mill before the funeral procession. Maggie and Katie help themselves to the punch, discreetly lifting their veils.
The cortège draws perplexed onlookers the entire way to the cemetery. But then, what sort of funeral attendees are white-dressed and sing joyful hymns and toss flower petals, as if at a wedding or a May festival? By the time the cortège reaches Brooklyn’s Greenwood Cemetery on this cold November day of 1890, Katie is so tired and overcome that she collapses on the broad ivory and cream painted coffin just before it is lowered into the grave. The celebrants murmur in outrage. Who is this disrespectful woman? And who is her companion?
“Forget all them,” Maggie whispers to Katie, and gently pulls her off the coffin. “Shush,” she adds, because Katie is weeping loudly behind her veil. An odd, hupping sound that could be mistaken for laughter.
CHAPTER 46.
I arrived early on this day. It seemed best I come before my desire for drink overwhelmed my sense of duty. The sun patterned the ceiling, making near-pretty the mottlings there. August’s birthday was on the morrow and I had not yet completed the coverall.
“Alvah, I’ve had the same dream again. Of the same cemetery.” My patient tried to sit up, anxious for the telling of it.
“The cemetery where you planted Leah?” I asked, and brought out the medicine and some blancmange. I had little hope she would eat, however; she had scarcely eaten the last week.
“No, no, put that away. Listen, before it vanishes. I am in a war cemetery, not just any, but a military asylum one, the Washington one.”
She told her dream in fits and starts while I knitted fast as I could:
She is awander among those endless rows, looking in vain at those identical knee-high lozenges of white marble. But for what? Unknown. Unknown. All are a blank. A cipher. And these headstones, they are undulating in their regiment order, and then not undulating, but wading through the grave dirt and over groomed lawns, down declivities, around stands of trees, as if living things intent on some destination. My patient is not troubled by this, nor by the certainty that she is lost. Then in the distance she sees the high, iron gates. That is where I must go, she thinks, and she runs and runs with her skirts held high, and she feels very young, as young as that day with her sister Katie, in the orchard, before they met the peddler. Then, just before the iron gates, she stumbles and falls prone atop a grave. It had been moving like the others, as if to catch up with her. Now everything stops. The sky is the boy-blue of her Elisha’s eyes and it is as unreachable, but the grass is soft, the ground surprisingly warm. She lies there, catching her breath. The headstone is blank as all the rest. Unknown. Unknown.
“It is the third in from the gate, in the tenth row of that sector. I have had this same dream three times, and each time, Alvah, it is the same headstone.”
I set down my knitting and drank a nip, then spooned up some blancmange. “You must eat.”
By way of answer she asked for the lily box. I gave it to her. She didn’t open it. “Do not forget that this box, and all within, is yours to keep when I pass.”
“Eat, you must,” I repeated.
“You know that is not practical, Alvah,” she said, and with a ghost of her former smile. “You must know that I am done with all that.”
ON AN AFTERNOON nearly two years after Leah’s funeral, Maggie and Katie walk down 45th Street. Katie’s thin shoes are covered with mud and straw. She has lost her coat somewhere. And her hat. She leans heavily on Maggie. They were being stared at. Not that they gave a damn fig. They’ve been stared at nearly all their lives.
“Come and live with me,” Maggie says. “You and the boys.”
“Ah, no, Mag. You’ve reformed. Rah and fiddle-dee-dah!”
This is true. Maggie doesn’t go on sprees any longer. Doesn’t touch brandy or gin or wine. Instead she drinks her poppy tea and with careful rationing. Keeps her head and thus her few clients, the ones who have low expectations. Because she has returned to rapping, there really being no other way for her to feed herself. They come to her at her apartment, one client at a time. She cannot charge much, granted, not after her labelling her own profession a fraud, but she earns enough money to keep herself from the streets. She always hands the clients her card first.
MARGARET FOX KANE. Medium.
—————————————————————
I claim not supernatural powers.
My clients can decide for themselves.
The Spiritualist Society, of course, shuns and derides Maggie. They call her a liar for her confessions. An addled sot because of her drinking. They proclaim her words cannot be trusted, not one syllable. Maggie doesn’t care. She would no more knock on the door of the Spiritualist Society than on the Gates of Hell.
“You must, Kat. We can be together. We should be together. And I’m not so reformed. I still, well, I don’t so much indulge in brandy and such, but I’ve a lovely tea you must try. Dr. Wadsworth in England gave me the recipe. I do miss the man. But people come and go, excepting me and thee.” She smiles. “Do come to my apartment and try it. The tea makes the days pass in coloured dr
eamy whorl.”
Katie halts. Takes both of Maggie’s hands. Sways as if wanting a childish game of ring-around-the-rosie. “No, no, no. I’ll only drag you into the down and down. You’ll take on my habits, and not my nun-like habits, hah! You’ll haunt my taverns. Haunts. Hah! As if I’m one of our ghosts. Perhaps I am. Now, don’t be a worry-all. You’ll always find me, Mag. And I you. Really.”
When the knock on Maggie’s apartment door comes a day later, she opens it expecting Katie. Her relief and joy are short-lived, however. It is not Katie. It is Daniel Underhill. His kindly eyes are hooded and weary. His cravat badly tied. Pleasantries over, he informs her that Leah’s will has finally been sorted.
“She had many assets in her name. And, well, there was complicated accounting in returning those assets to my holdings. But I suppose that you, and Katie, yes, you two, of all people, would know of complicated wills and bequeathments.”
“Alas and such, we know very well.”
Daniel tries for a smile, but manages something more like a grimace. “Leah stipulated that you be given this. Discover what you will.” He hands her Leah’s bible box. “I number myself among the fortunate,” he adds enigmatically as he lets himself out.
Maggie places the bible box on the table. Runs her hands over the lilies of the field, the wasp nestled there.
She opens it to find, as she expected, a wealth of letters. From Katie. From her own self. From her mother. From Calvin. From this society and that. From Leah. There are also newspaper clippings galore telling of the Fox sisters’ triumphs and tribulations through the years. And a great many reporting on the doings of Chauncey Burr.
“Chauncey, old Chauncey,” she murmurs, and takes up the pages that look torn from a journal. A note is pinned to these pages that reads: You’re asking for my damnedo thoughts? Mrs. Foxy Fish Underthehill? Here they are torn out and just for you. A last warning: Don’t waste your beloved time on this earth, Leah, I thought that when we met that last time. We are dust-motes in the eye of oblivion.
Maggie smiles, puts Chauncey aside.
Discover what you will, Daniel had said. Maggie inspects under the strangely thick lid. She taps the inset rectangle that is of a fainter shade. It was obviously added later. Maggie recalls Leah’s phosphorous test and runs her hands over the lilies atop the lid. The secret under-compartment reveals itself after some attempts. Inside are a wad of papers. The familiar writing covers both sides, is dense and crabbed but of easy decipherment. Well, Pa, Maggie thinks. Here you are.
She reads of John Fox abandoning his family in Rockland County because of his wife’s magic spell. Of him labouring on “Clinton’s Big Ditch.” Now he is meeting Erastus Bearcup and the crew of the Morning Star. Now the pitched battle with the crew of the Sweet Eleanor G that left the Morning Star men victorious and famed. Now the twin onslaught of Temperance and the Great Awakening and the canallers’ temporary victories against it.
Maggie reads even more intently. Brother Able arrives at the weigh-lock in Syracuse and makes a sorry attempt at converting the crew. One by one, John’s crewmates fall to the Evangelicals. John stands firm. Ambrose leaves to be again with the Indians. Brother Able finds John aboard the mud-larked Morning Star. Now comes the young man’s unfortunate, accidental death by alcohol, and then his return, worm-infested from the grave, his demand that John abstain, that John convert, that John embrace love both mortal and divine and return to his family and be their protector.
Maggie chuckles. Only when she finishes reading her father’s account does she notice Leah’s bequeathment letter to her and Katie.
Dear Margaretta and Katherina,
One of you asked, years past, if I “just once will say what is really happening.” I am mystified as to why such things are of import, but I will tell you this, my dear sisters—Pettifew, the source of all our contrivances, was the selfsame peddler you encountered on the public road by the orchard when you were younger girls. That is my honest belief. Are you solaced to know you did not kill the man, but created a conspirator to our career? He is dead now, of course. He died just before your Music Hall exposé. He was found surrounded by his wares, and a great many bottles. He had been given to ranting, my source in the NOS told me, and he was very much alone.
I admit that I am sorry we three have fallen out and that we are no longer linked as we were. But I have made it right. Pettifew knew the whereabouts of a resurrection man. I knew the whereabouts of likely bones. And if you read the account Pa sent me of his ten years gone (I have no doubt you will find its hiding place) you will know that they must be Brother Able’s. Do not worry, Pa would approve. Indeed, it is fitting, yes, because Pa did so want to help me, and his other loved ones, in the end.
Now, what you two girls must put about, as I have been doing, is that the cellar in the Hydesville house must be dug up again. The cellar walls in particular should be investigated. And then we will be vindicated, the Fox sisters three.
Yours till death and after,
Leah
Maggie chuckles. She spends the rest of the afternoon searching for Katie. They will laugh like they haven’t in years. The dead, why they return after all. Maggie is not thinking of Able—sitting in the Morning Star, worm infested and wrapped in a horsehair blanket shroud. He was formed, as like, out of her father’s delirium tremens. No, it is the peddler—Pettifew—that she is thinking on now. He died just before the Music Hall exposé, Leah wrote. But surely she and Katie saw his apparition outside the music hall when they made their way through the heckling crowd. The apparition had that selfsame twisted mouth. He was small and had a limping gait, steadied by a cane that was topped with a hound’s head of gold. And he demanded that they apologize, and in the selfsame voice of outrage as he used when Maggie and Katie encountered him by the Hydesville orchard when they were foolish girls. And they did apologize. Better late than never, as they say, and now the wandering soul is all at rest.
Evening draws on, the streets are aglow from the gas lights and electric lamps, and Maggie still hasn’t found Katie, not in any of her cocktail taverns. Maggie even ducks into a Turkish smoke parlour or two. She is not worried. Katie always surfaces eventually. She still has her boys to consider, even if they are grown. She still has Maggie. “You’ll always find me” was what Katie said.
But now it is two days later, and still no Katie.
“Ma came home last night, then left again this morning,” Ferdie says.
Henry adds, “She seemed swell. She said that if we saw you we should tell you not to be a worry-all.”
“But I have such news. It’s about our pa. And Pettifew. And Leah. Oh, the good grief, I dearly miss Leah.”
“Who’s Pettifew?” Ferdie asks.
“And what news could matter so much?” Henry asks, but Maggie is already on her way out to search once again.
Katie has been gone now for over a week. Ferdie reports first that she is in Rochester again, then that she is staying with some wealthy Manhattan benefactor.
“I didn’t get the details,” Ferdie says. “But she’ll find her way back. She always does.”
A day on and Maggie opens the door to find, not her final client of the day but Ferdie, twisting his hat in his hands as if to strangle it. She does not ask him. She dares not ask him. Asks instead, “How’s your brother? How’s the weather? Damn, I’m expecting a client. No time to chat. I need all the clients I can get these days. They only pay half of what they once did. Half the price for half the belief in it all. Alas and such, it serves me right after all that silly recanting and the recanting of the recanting.”
Ferdie cuts in bluntly. Gives the news: His mother, her Katie, is dead. “I found her in a rented garret. It was nearly empty of furniture. But it was clean,” he adds, as if this might ease the telling.
Ah, the wild freedom of being staggering drunk. How Maggie welcomes it after the river-calm of poppy tea. For days she wanders through Katie’s haunts, as if to inhabit her last weeks. The few clients she sees
soon leave in disgust at her rambling, senseless prophecies. Her limbs have a puffed aspect. Her skin aches at any pressure. Her eyes when she dares the looking glass are tinged with yellow.
By January of’93, Maggie knows what she needs to do. She looks through her cherished possessions—Elisha’s white gifts, her books. She reads through Leah’s memoir. She kept the copy Leah sent her years ago, but she has never read it—out of stubbornness, she supposes. She reads it now. She laughs and laughs. The events are so enlarged, the forces against the Fox sisters three so easily swatted down, like flies on a sill. It is amusing and sly, not infuriating at all.
She does not consider taking her own books—The Death-Blow to Spiritualism and The Love Life of Dr. Kane. They are too much her own voice. Katie published nothing, nothing. She cannot be found in books. Still. You’ll always find me was what she said, and so Maggie must go to her, that much is clear.
Elisha’s Arctic Explorations, then, is the sole book she takes, because love cannot be shed as easily as mortal flesh. She searches out a garret that is in accordance with Ferdie’s description of Katie’s last retreat, excepting Maggie’s is even higher up, even farther from it all, bare but for a bed and table and that ladderback chair. She pays for two months’ rent with her last dollars. She intends to be alone when she dies, just as Katie was.
“BUT THE VERY NEXT DAY YOU ARRIVED, Alvah,” my patient said, “and stood there so mysteriously, so insistently in the vestibule, and all haloed by the waning, crackling light of the Edison bulb.”
CHAPTER 47.
To finish: I did not cry in front of my patients. It was a professional rule. And I wasn’t crying. I was merely sniffling hard between swigs from my flask. I had finally finished the cover-all, and it sat bunched in my lap.
“It’s his birthday today. It is March fifth,” Maggie Kane declared, the way one does a simple truth. Her hands were folded atop the bedclothes. As I have said, she was incapable of cracking a toe joint or anything else by that time.
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