Rochester Knockings (14 page)

She went to close the lid of her baby grand piano, certain that she would be begged to reopen it after dessert. Overtaken that moment by light-headedness, she leaned against the corner of the piano and saw the days and nights marching on the ivory keys. All the events since she had taken charge of the family's destiny
for its own good resembled a series of favorable tarot cards. This sudden celebrity almost worried her though: it was happening as an omen, a probationary period of sorts. The other world—its angels or its demons—had visited Katie and Maggie, incontestably. But it was she who, as shrewd proselyte, upheld the communication to her own spiritual level. Neither her sisters nor her poor mother were any good at doctrine. They had only understood the most trivial or absurd aspects of what had happened to them in Hydesville, that invisible neighbor beating against the door from the other world. As if holy Nature gave its place over to fantasy! As the granddaughter of a pastor, even if her father was just an uprooted drunkard, she immediately understood the quasi-liturgical dimension of this telegraphy of souls, notwithstanding that such a process could be laborious in comparison to the Eucharist. Leah stifled a little laugh. She'd liberated two useful sacraments to Rochester, out of the grasp of priestly ministers. She had long leaned toward the natural religion of her sister deists, those rational lovers of God who made fun of prophets and miracles. The Hydesville revelation had managed to restore her childhood faith in mystery, but no longer being a child, she envisioned a mystery that was a real object of study and devotion. Couldn't we arrive one day at a kind of practical science of the beyond?

The macadam road was soon clanging with iron harnesses. Convertible and sedan coaches followed one after the other on South Avenue. Upstairs the panoramic rooms pulsated with bursts of voices mixed with intelligent laughter. Couples greeted each other according to custom. More circumspect, the single guests distractedly examined the scene. A monocle screwed into his left eye, Lucian Nephtali silently raved to himself about the hostess's bad taste. There was, however, poorly hung, an acceptable
watercolor of a small master of the Hudson River School. The tulle curtains of the plate glass windows let in a view of the Genesee River, wine-colored in the evening twilight, and of the three partly illuminated waterfalls. Wanda Jedna, nicknamed by her fans The Only One, serenely contemplated the view while wondering what it was Leah Fish wanted from her now. In the back of the room, the industrial clothing manufacturer Freeman and his spouse were already talking about investments and capitals with the nurseryman, Barry Nursery, who owned all the forests along Braddock Bay and Mendon Ponds.

“We are seriously considering a bridge for the railroad on Upper Falls. A huge wooden bridge, the biggest ever constructed, around fifty thousand cubic meters of wood is already on its way!”

“Perhaps we should build a train station first!” Mrs. Freeman dared.

“But why? Bridges, first we need bridges!”

An old retired soldier, displaying all his medals, imposed himself into the conversation; his eye was on the new aqueduct.

“I myself was present in 1829 on the right bank, a young and dashing officer, when Sam Patch, a real daredevil, made his leap of death from the top of the waterfalls before all of Rochester. Bah! The unhappy man broke his neck there . . .”

Leah pretended to be helping behind the bar where a black servant in livery was in charge of aperitifs.

“You don't have anything stronger?” drolly grumbled a blond financier with a little moustache maintained in the fashion of an Alta Italia aristocrat.

Knowing for a fact that Sylvester Silvestri, in addition to being the nephew by marriage of Colonel William Fitzhugh, Junior—cofounder of the city with his counterpart, Colonel Nathaniel
Rochester—had been the local vice president of the Independent Order of Good Templars, one of the more active temperance societies, it was with a wink of complicity that Leah served him his lemonade.

“There will be French wine at the dinner table, my dear!”

The arrival of the preacher, followed by Harry Maur puffing on his cigar, and the actress Charlene Obo dressed as queen of the night, provoked a bustle of curiosity that visibly offended the latter. Among the first to arrive, the Post couple stood side by side, stiff in their Puritan outfits, looking bored, wondering if there had been some kind of mistake. The former telegraphist—rendered temperate by the proximity of his wife—missed Hydesville and its saloon more than ever. The two of them were astonished not to see a single other member of the Fox family or its entourage in the group.

But the guests all found their assigned seats around the Arthurian table. Amy and Isaac Post were relieved not to have neighbors who were too awful, like that effusive actress or the somber character dressed like a buccaneer, who had fallen into each others' arms with a shocking affectation. Framed by the young Andrew Jackson Davis on her right—a brilliant supporter of mesmerism with thin glasses and a patriarch's beard—and the Milanese banker on the left, the mistress of the house did not expect that the preacher placed across the table would exclaim loudly enough to turn a dozen heads.

“But where are your dear sisters, Mrs. Fish? I was so hoping . . .”

“They are too young!” Leah responded defensively while throwing embarrassed glances at her nearest guests. “And soon you will be able to applaud them at Corinthian Hall . . .”

The two servants back-to-back served a boiling soup until, bowl by bowl, the steam had formed a circle.

“Yes, of course, at their age!” added the booming voice of the gaunt Alexander Cruik. “But it would have been so pleasant to talk with them. Especially the youngest . . .”

“With Kate? Is that so?” was the only way Mrs. Fish knew to respond to hide her confusion, seeing that the evangelist of the Redskins, with a voice accustomed to outside gatherings, was the kind who would pursue his idea without fail.

“Your Kate is gifted with an exceptional sensitivity, she captures psychic waves not perceptible to the common man. It's an acute form of intuition of beings and situations without being able to actually deduce anything herself. I've known Cherokee Indians capable of a similar extrasensory perception, one of them above all, a sorcerer with a mustang's mane who could read the future in the wrinkles of the dead. In his trances, he pointed out without fail warriors who would be condemned, women soon to be pregnant, children struck by our maladies . . .”

“May the Lord preserve our sorcerers!” cried out Mrs. Freeman, a fat woman with a hairdo in the form of a crow's nest.

“So natural and so candid,” the preacher continued in the same tone, “little Kate is a sort of shaman who is unaware of it which, however, grants her the powers that the first apostles must have had. She is an intercessor between two spaces of perception and comprehension usually hermetically separated, a kind of . . . of
medium,
if you will allow me the neologism . . .”

“Medium, medium . . .?” Leah exclaimed. That's the word they were missing! “But allow me to explain that modern spiritualism, if I may use your expression, is as much the business of
Margaret Fox and of myself, not to exclude our dear Kate, nor my mother or my old father . . .”

“It's a family business!” joked the corpulent Barry Nursery from a distance.

“Do you consider yourself to belong to the current Religious Revival?” her neighbor on the right, the magnetizer Andrew Jackson Davis, asked more cautiously.

“Assuredly,” stammered Leah, a little sorry to see her soup growing cold. “We are, my sisters and I, passionately enflamed in our faith, and this mystical fire spreads especially today, waking in each of us our piety for the afterlife where our dear lost ones continue to exist. The dead are our angels, believe it. Wasn't the resurrection of our Lord the first manifestation of spiritualism?”

“There have been plenty of others since Osiris, Dionysus, or Orpheus,” sighed Lucian Nephtali wearily, mopping his brow.

“And the prophet Elijah!” boomed the preacher with an amused zest. “Remember the widow of Sarepta in the time of Ahab, the idolatrous king: ‘And it came to pass after these things, that the son of the woman, the mistress of the house, fell sick; and his sickness was so sore, that there was no breath left in him . . .' Housed in a room above the widow, Elijah brought the little corpse up to his room, stretched himself three times over him, and cried to the Lord: ‘Yahweh, my Lord, will thou also hurt the widow hosting me, for that you make her son die?' Immediately, the soul of the little boy was returned to his body by divine will. Elijah brought him down to his mother and declared: ‘See, thy son liveth.'”

“But this isn't about reviving the dead! We have, God willing, much humbler ambitions than prophesying the Messiah. Our mission is simply to put mourners in the presence of spirits, thus enabling consolation, opening the world finally to hope . . .”

The women present, wives and celebrities, loudly applauded Leah.

After dinner, Wanda Jedna, charmed by this new cause, prioritized it now in her mind just after those of Negros and women—for didn't our virtuous dead participate in the full rights of the great human family?—and caught the hostess off guard, who pushed passed in surprise on her way to open the baby grand to perform a recent air from Paris. The martial harmonies were so stirring that Charlene Obo and the banker with the fine moustache started to clap their hands.

               
L'homme, ce despote sauvage

               
Eut soin de proclaimer ses droits

               
Créons des droits à notre usage

               
À notre usage, ayons des lois!

IV.

Oneida! Oneida!

N
o one asked any explanation of Pearl Gascoigne when she presented herself one summer night at the doors of the commune. On the way back from haying, tools over their shoulders, the Perfect Ones stared with amazement at this sublime mare and her thoroughbred, still intertwined in the same energy, both of their manes flowing, the woman and her horse visibly out of breath. It seemed like this girl was fleeing a fire, the lightning of God, and some band of Algonquin cannibals all at the same time. While the frightened horse raced back and forth between the fences and log cabins, several young women wearing short dresses for evening service appeared.

Pearl found herself staggering in the middle of a strange assembly of bearded farmers looking like magi, of farmwomen looking like old queen regents draped in dark colors, an indefinable smile on their lips, in their lightweight dresses or frocks with straps, and very young children suddenly frozen in their games. Pearl had immediately noticed the short hair of the teenage girls, their cheerful and at the same time defiant air, and a type of hierarchy belonging to animal herds in the physical appearance of the
males, according to age, but also a sort of relaxed quiet on their faces. This pastoral tableau, worthy of a genre painting of the epoch from the thirteen colonies, inscribed itself upon her, a little unreal, after that entire day of galloping aimlessly in the dust of the roads.

She had left Hydesville without explanation, mind on fire, on a stormy night. Suddenly following a clash with her father on the question of her clothing and the expense of lace ribbons, she had turned away in silence. Running to his stable after putting on her riding clothes, Pearl didn't have the least concern about the following day, like someone anesthetized, abandoning without the least regret both her little treasures and large responsibilities. The thoroughbred, an extremely rare White Beauty bequeathed by a farmer of the county, was the sole luxury of Reverend Gascoigne. Submerged in anger, having decided impetuously to flee as far as possible, she didn't think twice about whether to instead seize the ordinary horse hitched to an English wagon. And it was with a worn out bridle, in the sweltering midsummer night, dizzied by the scents of the thatch and the bland exhalations of stagnant waters, that she'd traveled half of Monroe County and all of Wayne, before galloping erratically the days that followed between mountains and forests, then through the endless plains, in Oswego and Oneida territories where, thinking she was lost in an Indian reservation, Pearl had unwittingly found herself hostage to a most curious tribe of pale faces.

She will remember for a long time the welcome given by the women her age under the hungry eyes of the men, once over the general amazement upon her arrival—a beautiful equestrian archangel filthy with sweat and dust but dazzling in the twilight. Several of them grabbed hold of her after a few words. Pearl was
hungry and thirsty, she wanted a deep sleep after her hypnotic ride. Once she slid off the saddle, the women, almost carrying her, led her to the bottom of a narrow valley where a river flowed. Laughing, they took off her boots and completely undressed her while the patriarchs stood above at a proper distance. Then they immersed her like those statues of Durga, inaccessible goddess in the waters of the Ganges, half-naked themselves, soaping and scrubbing her down from head to foot, kissing her hair and her mouth, saving her from nearly drowning. Dripping wet with her long hair plastered to her hips, there was a murmur of almost religious admiration around her. Washed, the statue had the beauty of seraphim and demons, a mortifying perfection, marble sculpted in the fire of a desire that blinds the overexcited. Even children pale with emotion came to the hillside.