Rochester Knockings (19 page)

At the initiative of Leah who had hired a manager answering to the name of Franck Strechen, a Scotsman of apparently common strain, the Fox sisters traveled through the great cities of the Northeast: Newark, Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Washington, Buffalo . . . Often hosted by local spiritualist societies, they multiplied demonstrations of mediumship with uninterrupted success, inspiring vocations everywhere and giving rise to emulators.

In Boston as in New York, Paschal Beverly Randolph, having returned still young from a tour of the world as the self-proclaimed Prince of Madagascar, alchemist, and Grand Master of the Fraternity of the Rosy Cross, had acquired an unusual glory thanks to his mixture of genres. Egalitarian and abolitionist, struggling for universal rights including those of sexual freedom, this child of slaves had founded a Bureau of Freedmen and made a reputation as comforter to the poor by invoking spirits specifically chosen to provide the best advice to all the oppressed. He took advantage of his powerful magnetism to connect bereaved widows with their dead companions, giving women access to interesting nervous sensations. Rushing in from all over, his public listened devotedly to his invective: “Remember, oh neophyte, that Goodness is power, Silence is strength, Will reigns the Spirit, and that Love holds the root of the All-Mighty . . .”

A little by chance, William Pill found himself one day listening to him while chewing his cigarillo and, by an even bigger chance, later shared the same carriage and fraternized with him along the ride. Now at Paschal Beverly Randolph's service for the past several weeks under the title of bodyguard, he'd had the time to assimilate certain aspects of his art of persuasion as well as several beautiful phrases. Like, “The only aristocracy is the aristocracy of the mind,” which rang pretty true. However, Pill was not the kind of man to wear a collar for long, even a solid gold one.

Taking refuge in Rochester following a flagrant offence of fraud in a Boston gambling room where he thankfully escaped with his life, William Pill—who had learned unbeknownst to the black medium several mechanisms of suggestion to abolish the will or simply to put an entire assembly to sleep—then launched a new career, after several failed attempts in the realm of clairvoyance, as a merry necromancer.

It was to the Fox sisters, however, ever since that famous night in Corinthian Hall, that he unequivocally attributed his brand new vocation. For the last several months, he'd been able to improve his concepts as a tutor of Chinese wisdom or of the hierarchy of angels among the Catholics and Muslims. Easily convinced of the Great Spirit's love, the values of progress and the telegraphic function of the pineal gland (that antenna to the cosmos), it remained only for him to deck himself out in mourning clothes like any respectable commissioner of the beyond. Something achieved not without elegance, he amassed for himself a complete set of conjuring equipment thanks to his poker winnings: smoke bombs, a pulley system, cardboard heads, bulb syringes, magnetite rollers, fake hands made of resin, silk scarves, trick shoes, a couple
of small tables covered in papier-mâché, some miniature shelves on wheels for automatic writing, screens, and a supply of candles acquired honestly in a Catholic church.

His very first demonstration took place in the private room of a brothel in Rochester before an audience consisting mostly of girls from the establishment and married men of good society. Madame Tripistine, the manager of Cevennes origin who had received him in her room and appreciated his urbanity as well as his way of opening bottles with his teeth, hired him for awhile as a bouncer, then remained friends with him after having made it understood that he was too bellicose for employment. It was she who had offered to let him make his debut at the brothel. “My girls will adore spirits,” Madame Tripistine had assured him, “because of all the sorrows they lug around.” Thus they lined up over thirty chairs in five or six rows, for the pimps and big shots of the area who wanted to be there, alongside the regular clientele slumming it. The stage set up between two screens was hardly bigger than a Guignol puppet theatre, but the apprentice medium found himself at ease and, showing a rare ability to make tables talk, provoked happy swoons among the ladies. Finding the use of mechanical transcriptions rather tedious, Pill even improvised by letting the spirit speak through his voice. A lout with a battered nose and ears shouted out to him at the same moment a cleverly placed fan blew forth a ghost made of silicate powder:

“And what does your spirit think of what I'm carrying under my jacket?”

William Pill, who remembered from his time as a security guard throwing this individual, then dead drunk, out one night after the precautionary confiscation of his weapon, had not forgotten what the collector's object was.

“A Colt 1851 Navy revolver, serial number 27139 . . . Is that right?”

“That's the truth! But as for the number . . . let's see now,” said the man, taking out his weapon in front of everyone.

When he had called out the numbers in the right order, the audience clapped and whistled in amazement. But it wasn't until after having put Madame Tripistine in communication with her dead father—a disturbed and rigid man who, between his daughter's twelfth and eighteenth birthdays, on certain Sundays, had the crazed idea of whipping her half-naked while her arms were tied around a freshly-killed pig whose blood she had to drink to heal her lungs—that Pill knew his reputation as medium was official. In a big city, prostitutes spread rumors faster than syphilis, which competed with the johns who warred with each other, endlessly unaware that they were ushering in their own violent deaths.

Since that inaugural night, Pill multiplied his demonstrations in Rochester and its environs. He hung his own printed posters modeled after a search notice for a fugitive black slave nicknamed Moses, who had become an energetic abolitionist activist:

WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE

HARRIET “MOSES” TUBMAN

For Stealing Slaves

$40,000 Reward

Instead of “Dead or Alive,” he had asked the printer to compose “Death Is Alive,” followed by the smaller headline with his pseudonym, “William Mac Orpheus,” then “Famous Medium.”

This led to his debuts in numerous fortune parlors, a home for Irish and German immigrants run by religious Catholics who thought they were dealing with a buffoon, a theater out of use since the ceiling had collapsed on its actors during the performance of a romantic drama, and a Baptist church in a black community that was an actual station of the Underground Railroad and which protected itself from the intrusion of slave hunters by encoded hymns and songs:

               
Come follow the wind

               
To my father's house

               
We shall all live free

               
In my father's house

William Pill collected contributions himself after his demonstrations. The poorest would go in together to garnish his hat, the richest would invite him to dinner with the idea of solving the mystery of his powers or his science. This was how a blind man of a certain age came to request a private interview with him at his home, in a house outside of Rochester. Of a rare and natural beauty, his short-haired companion was dressed in a sort of uniform of unbleached linen, faded blue like the kind worn by Chinese railroad workers. Pill dreamily accepted the invitation with an acute sensation of déjà-vu. He remembered for no real reason an ancient Mexican fable where a jealous prince inebriates his young brother so that he breaks his vow of chastity, thereby causing him to lose the coveted virgin. The prince will not be rewarded for it in return for, she, the dishonored one, will go rip her heart out on the altar of the sun, condemning the trio to reproduce the quarrel for eternity.

X.

When to Burn Her Diary?

H
ave I already written this? It's amazing what's happening. It feels like our star is spinning so quickly on itself that from now on all the events it promised will follow one after the other in an insane acceleration, for better and for worse. Leah's marriage to a very rich man is going to change our existence. Instead of her banker lover Sylvester Silvestri like we all supposed, she gave in to the advances of a Wall Street broker, a cigar-man with crocodile shoes who seems to crumple wads of bills just to blow his nose. Everything happened very quickly after our return home from Manhattan Island. Leah, Kate, and I had been invited there by Horace Greeley, editor in chief of the
New-York Tribune,
an important person it seems. Influential enough in any case to host us for three months in a sumptuous hotel near the Barnum Museum, in Times Square, in the heart of Midtown, in exchange for some public sessions of our turning tables. We were received at his home, a huge apartment on 59
^th
Street overlooking the city and harbor lights, at the top of a building at least ten stories high with a curious elevator that operated with a steam-powered motor.
Nowadays we can build mountains. If this continues, the spirits in the sky will be able to open our windows all by themselves.

For us, who had been living in the middle of cows and chickens, such luxury had something magical about it. The furniture and the walls, everything was covered in leather and precious woods, with marble and bronze statues in the corners, gilded clocks, impressive mirrors, painted vases, and very somber paintings everywhere. Leah taught us this lesson: it's important to keep one's composure and to appear to find these palaces perfectly commonplace. The child of a poor farmer like us, without any education other than what he taught himself, this Mr. Greeley is now the boss of the biggest newspaper in America, the voice of the Whig Party and the publisher of that H. D. Thoreau, a defender of the Spirit and of liberty. And all that by starting as a simple printer's apprentice! In any case, the reception given at his residence in our honor was a fabulous moment, unforgettable, which left me speechless. Imagine all these ladies sparkling with jewels, gentlemen with white collars and jackets with satin lapels, while mute jugglers called butlers go back and forth. Bald with long grey hair at his temples, with fine glasses that slightly veiled his kind face, Mr. Greeley went from person to person, presenting us as prodigies. Even his political enemies had been invited, starting with the terrible Isaiah Rynders, king of the Irish gangs of Tammany Hall, who in the past, they say, was attacked with a knife on the Mississippi River. This ogre supported with all his might the young president Franklin Pierce whereas Mr. Greeley, who's a vegetarian and friend to Negros, defended the unhappy Whig candidate. And there they both were reunited in a truce of minds! Mary Cheney Greeley, our dazzling hostess marked however by grief, took me aside while the guests reported on the
drama of the presidential couple, who had just lost their son Bennie in a railway accident. “We ourselves have lost five of our children,” she confided to me that evening. “It's the Massacre of the Innocents! We have two daughters left not far from your age and I struggle for them to be free women. But what will become of our dead children?” I read in Mrs. Greeley's face the same pathetic plea as all those other mothers and grieving spouses.

That's the kind of mediums we are, universal consolers! I'm not proud to admit my insufficiency at it here on this page. Reading these words over my shoulder, a spirit would surely be amused. The same people who forgive the setbacks of the boxing champion William Thompson still expect us to always be in our best form, though we're only receiving the blows. When an uproarious room, half filled with lynchers, is expecting the Spirit to manifest itself, how should one react if one would like to keep her skin? At the Empire Club and in other places, all three of us impressed the public, especially Leah, who is such an eloquent speaker and so adept at diverting attention. It was in the conference room of the Barnum Museum that our most difficult demonstration took place. Under the patronage of the
New-York Tribune,
journalists, scholars, and men of letters were invited, quite courteous besides, but who observed us without blinking, like poker players, from the beginning to the end of the séance. There was James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Parker Willis, William Cullen Bryant, who I remember very well, and also Mr. George Ripley. The Wall Street magnate, a certain Mr. Underhill whom Kate had nicknamed “the man with a skeleton of gold” ever since the night at our benefactor's home, installed himself in the front row and devoured Leah with his eyes. Silencing the skeptics, she proved
herself with stunning craftsmanship. I haven't forgotten her audacious gibberish:

“Spirits are freed from the physical laws that govern our world. The medium who serves both as a receiving antenna and a transmission relay requires great concentration to establish a magnetic area permitting communication to be established. By their presence alone, skeptics and the irreligious provoke disturbances in this perimeter that make our work difficult . . .” This was devilishly sneaky. The skeptics felt obliged to cut their whiskey. Kate, just to my right, stuck her tongue out at me while closing one eye. In our code, that means: “Low profile, I'm calling Mister Splitfoot to the rescue.” In the darkness, under the unusual clarity of the candles, the pedestal started to balance from right to left and to turn, like a kite held on a tight string, a bandalore and a fat top all at once. Apparently without any special effects. Unbelievers decidedly do not want to understand that modern spiritualism brings to light energies still unknown, as Leah so well explains it. Neither Kate nor I are going to tell them what is really happening behind the scenes, nor what happened
really
in Hydesville. We were still children then; children are surprised that the world can go on without them. At night we often tiptoed to our bedroom door to check whether a black abyss had not suddenly replaced the staircase. Nowadays, somewhat less naïve, we know that the abyss is inside us, in people's heads, and that only spirits exist. It doesn't bother me at all to cheat a little when none of them are answering.