Rochester Knockings (31 page)

Leah told herself that she would have suffered it all, the lynch mob, the skeptics, the scientists incapable of admitting that there is no miracle without faith, the imposters by the dozen, and even spiritism, to top it all off, which had made off with her discovery, just as the converted persecutor Paul of Tarsus's words were taken by a revenant named Jesus. Too old to take the offensive, she had only to look toward her retirement so long as the enemies kept their distance. But they'd been grinning at her front door
ever since her sisters' return. Without resources, always between drunkenness and madness, Margaret had displayed herself grotesquely in music halls for a few dollars, pushed by a crooked manager who had the sole ambition of denigrating her. At seventy-five years old, Leah Underhill was the only one upholding the legacy of Hydesville. And the pitiful Kate, landed back in New York this autumn with her twin warlocks, exposing a spectacle of deliquescence for all to see . . . Leah had given the order to her lawyer, a good man efficient and naturally respectful of propriety, to take legal action to stop these scandals. If he could detain the one for her pattern of repeated scandal before the public, and begin the procedure to remove the children from the other for proven negligence and moral abuse, then Leah would be back on track.

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 24
^th
? 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.