Talking to the Dead (19 page)

 

It's not clear why he attended his first seance in the fall of 1852. He may have been curious about the manifestations or looking for an hour's entertainment or perhaps seeking relief from his suffering over Willie's death. Whatever his reasons, he was thunderstruck at first sight of Maggie and in the following months returned repeatedly to see her.

For a while Kane observed conventional rules of propriety. He invited Maggie out for carriage drives in the country, but he always brought along a female chaperone such as an older friend or favorite cousin on their outings. He sent gifts of flowers, books, and music, but he politely directed them to the attention of Margaret rather than to Maggie herself.

Maggie, thirteen years his junior, initially seems to have shown little interest in her new suitor and to have behaved with reserve, as genteel young women were expected to do. Perhaps she found other men more attractive or appealing, or she doubted his intentions. But Kane, as his life course had already demonstrated, was nothing if not determined, and he won her over.

Slowly his tone turned more proprietary, and his gifts grew more personal and lavish. In December 1852 he wrote to Margaret, “I could not resist the temptation of sending the accompanying little trifle of ermine for Miss Margaretta's throat. As I know you to be carefully fastidious as to forms, permit me to place it in your hands.”
⁷
He gave Maggie a white camellia, comparing her delicacy to the flower's with the words, “like you, it must not be breathed upon.”

He took her to visit the beautiful cemetery where his brother Willie lay buried in the Kane family vault, an intimate and sentimental journey. She was delighted by her worldly suitor, their trips through the rolling Pennsylvania countryside, and her pretty gifts.

Early in the new year 1853 he professed his love then admitted to being virtually engaged to a woman of his parents' choosing, a relationship he vowed to end. Maggie assumed she too would soon meet the Kanes, but this didn't happen. Kane undoubtedly realized that his proper Presbyterian parents would be scandalized by his romance with—in the heated opinion of some commentators—a notorious woman, and one whose family was beneath his in social class. In fact, John and Margaret's relatives were respectable middle-class farmers and artisans, but the Fox family boasted no influential professionals, wealthy manufacturers, or distinguished members of learned academies. It's also possible that the Kanes, if they knew about their son's previous romances, were impatient with what they regarded as his escapades. Kane kept his relationship with Maggie a secret from his parents.

Instead, he asked whether Maggie would be a trusting girl and place her future in his care. Soon afterward, he gave Maggie a diamond ring set in black enamel (she was said to have modestly declined a more extravagant one set in pearls), and the couple began to behave as if they were engaged. She took his arm when they went out for walks; under the not-
so-watchful eye of mother Margaret, the lovers slipped one another private, teasing notes.

His friends, some for amusement and others perhaps for more serious reasons, consulted the spirits, and he sometimes did so himself, mostly as a ploy for seeing Maggie. The lure of forbidden fruit was powerful and the intrigue of the romance stimulating. For Kane, the excitement may have substituted for a different sort of danger that he had faced in the Arctic.

“I was unwilling to call upon you to-night for fear of
talk,
” he breathlessly wrote Maggie one evening, “but I told my brother if you had company to show my ring, so as to avoid mentioning names. Do not let him suppose that you have anything more than spirit business with me. I say this on your own account.”

Undeniably a ladies' man, Kane probably had started the flirtation with Maggie as a lark, only to discover that he couldn't give her up. Enchanted by a woman who was unacceptable not only to his family but also to a part of himself, he expressed his frustration and ambivalence even in his compliments. After receiving one of her letters, he advised her, “I need hardly say [I] am gratified to find that you write so ably. You have more
brain
than I gave you credit for.”

Then he went on to express unambivalent disapproval. The newspapers had linked Leah's name with the suicide of a man who had attended her seances, and the thought of Mrs. Fish's influence on her younger sisters outraged him.

“Oh, how much I wish that you would quit this life of dreary sameness and suspected deceit,” he admonished Maggie. “We live in this world only for the opinions of the good and noble. How crushing it must be to occupy with them a position of ambiguous respect!”

Distressed by his vacillations and accusations, Maggie struggled with ambivalent feelings of her own, mistrust mingled with affection. One afternoon, anticipating that he might cancel one of his visits, she challenged him to explain himself.

“Now, Doctor—be candid!—am I not correct when I say that you are an enigma past finding out?” she demanded, her tone light but her question serious. She hinted at the similarities between them, the paradoxes each found at once unsettling and intriguing in the other, when she
added provocatively, “You know I am.” She had chosen a word,
enigma,
that symbolized their developing relationship. Just as the Arctic and spirit worlds were enigmatic, inviting exploration into their farthest regions, so too the lovers were to each other.

Her question riled him, for he viewed it less as an honest expression of her feelings than as manipulation: she was the clever one, he was her victim.

“You say ‘that you do not understand me'—‘I am a riddle'—‘an enigma,' and all that nonsense. Dear Maggie,” he seethed, “you understand me very well. You know that I am a poor, weak, easily deceived man, and you think that you are an astute, hardly seen-through woman, managing me as you please. Now tell me the truth—don't you?”

Fiercely asserting his masculine superiority, he thundered, “I am a man rather of facts and stern purposes, than of woman thoughts and dreamy indolence…. I will leave after me a name and a success.

“But with all this,” he added gloomily, “I am a weak man and a fool, weak that I should be caught in the midst of my grave purposes by the gilded dust of a butterfly's wing; and a fool because, while thus caught, I smear my fingers with the perishable color.”

In an effort to demolish the butterfly or half hoping to drive her away, he assured Maggie that she was unworthy of his permanent regard. “You could never lift yourself up to my thoughts and my objects,” he wrote. “
I
could never bring myself
down
to yours.”

But even as he emphasized the disparities between them, reminding her that his was a destiny different from hers, he too highlighted their similarities. He conceded that “just as you have your wearisome round of daily money-making, I have my own sad vanities to pursue. I am as devoted to my calling as you, poor child, can be to yours. Remember then, as a sort of dream, that Doctor Kane of the Arctic Seas loved Maggie Fox of the Spirit Rappings.”

In Maggie, Kane had met his match. He understood intuitively, as did she, that there were powerful bonds between them. Both had dared to live outside the narrow confines of polite society, he as an Arctic explorer, she as a spirit medium. Both were ambitious for money and
fame. And both were passionate, willful individuals, committed to the uncertain paths on which they traveled.

In January 1853 Margaret and Maggie left Philadelphia and returned to New York City, moving back into the house on Twenty-Sixth Street with Leah, Calvin, and Kate. Under Leah's suspicious eye, Maggie retreated from the relationship with Kane. Resentful of his criticism of Spiritualism, Leah must also have felt that he had compromised her sister, courting Maggie without making any public commitment to her. Leah, whose own situation had been ambiguous for many years, probably worried that Maggie would make the same mistakes.

Not surprisingly, distance stoked Kane's fires.

“Why do you not write to me?” he demanded. “Have you forgotten your friend? Or does your new life drive from you the recollection of old times?” Speaking of himself in the third person, he begged Maggie to “remember his warm hands, his glowing kisses, and his steadfast, trusting heart.”

He followed this letter with a copy of the fable
Undine,
a popular novel about a sea nymph by that name. In the novel the whimsical, carefree Undine lacks what is most vital in a human being: a soul. She receives one on her marriage to her mortal suitor, but there's no happy ending. He betrays her, and she ultimately serves as the agent of his destruction. The book undoubtedly reflected Kane's views and fears of Maggie: despite Undine's innocent charm, as a sea nymph she was kin to the Siren.

One of Kane's New York friends, Cornelius Grinnell, son of the whaling tycoon who was helping to finance Kane's new venture, delivered the explorer's notes and gifts secretly, sometimes slipping them to Kate if Maggie was busy or holding a seance. A sophisticated New Yorker who enjoyed the social whirl of balls, dinner parties, and private theatricals, Grinnell surprised himself by finding the mediums interesting, the seances impressive, and the groups who attended the sittings an intriguing array of skeptics, converts, and those in search of education or entertainment.

When Kane himself visited New York on business, he tried to set up secret meetings with Maggie, on occasion using Kate as a decoy. “Maggie,
do you know Satler's Cosmoramas in Broadway near Twelfth street, on the right hand side going down?” he asked. “If you and Kate will walk past it at exactly four o'clock on Saturday afternoon, I will be there.”

Although he often succeeded in arranging tête-à-têtes, this time Maggie kept her distance, coolly responding, “You will pardon me, my dear friend, for not meeting you. Strange that I should have made such a promise—so imprudent!” She added that she would be happy to see him if he called for her at home.

 

Margaret, Kate, and Maggie spent February 1853 in Washington, where congressmen on working vacations from their families, government officials, and restless soldiers frequently sought advice from the spirits. Within a short time, so too would the wife of the nation's newly elected president. A few weeks earlier Franklin and Jane Pierce had been en route to Washington when their trail derailed, an accident that killed their eleven-year-old son before their eyes. In the aftermath of the tragedy, Mrs. Pierce sat in her room late at night writing notes to her dead son, and later in the year she met at least once with Maggie Fox.

Old friends and devoted Spiritualists visited the girls' suite for messages, but so too did others with less concern for the sisters' well-being. Some ostensible seekers of spiritual knowledge, as Kate discovered, were dissolute drunks and rakes out for a good time. Accustomed to men like Horace Greeley and Judge Edmonds, who treated her kindly, Kate found the place oppressive. “I am tired of my life,” she sighed. Out of twelve “fine gentlemen” who had visited her the night before, ten had arrived drunk and subjected her to “mean, low remarks.”

“Only imagine Maggie and me, and dear mother, before a crowd of drunken Senators,” she wrote to Leah. One of the gentlemen had shown the gall to proclaim, “‘This is all a humbug, but it is worth a dollar to sit in the sunlight of Miss Kate's eyes.'”
⁸

These episodes upset her so much that, with a certain amount of characteristic drama, she swore that she wished to be laid in a peaceful grave, that she would live on a crust of bread to have a different life. “Washington is a mean city,” she exclaimed.

Kane continued to barrage Maggie with love letters and complaints.
He lamented, “When I think of you, dear darling, wasting your time and youth and conscience for a few paltry dollars, and think of the crowds who come nightly to hear of the wild stories of the frozen north, I sometimes feel that we are not so far removed after all. My brain and your body are each the sources of attraction, and I confess that there is not so much difference.”
⁹
He once again had acknowledged a similarity, although as always to her disadvantage. This time he placed her in a category akin to a prostitute.

Few of Maggie's letters to Kane from this period seem to have survived, but his letters to her paint a vivid portrait of a dazzlingly alive young woman. Her body obsessed him too, and his notes overflowed with sexual desire: “Is it any wonder that I long to look—only to look—at that dear little deceitful mouth of yours,” he demanded, “to feel your hair tumbling over my cheeks.” He lavished attention on her appearance and clothes, sending her sets of lace undersleeves and underhandkerchiefs, pretty lingerie designed to fill in a décolletage or to cover an arm laid bare by the fashionably wide sleeve of the day. He hounded Maggie to remember to wear them, for he wanted her to appear ladylike and well dressed. He had given a set to his sister and planned to send one to Kate as well.

Knowing that Maggie wasn't the sort of young woman to shyly retreat from the social scene, he also allowed distance to provoke his jealousy. “How does Washington come on?” he demanded. “Many beaux? Many believers? Many friends? Answer these questions you wicked little Maggie!”

And he continued to chastise her for her apparent indifference to his ardor and misery, complaining that he was the one who did all the writing and, he feared, all the loving too. He frequently signed his letters “Preacher,” a tongue-in-cheek acknowledgment of his own frequently patronizing tone.

One rainy Sunday afternoon in Boston, he sank deeper than ever into a morass of self-pity. Recalling “lazy days” of “talking nonsense,” he assured her that he was the one writing true spirit messages, “from another world—
our
world, Maggie—the world of love.”

And then, exhausted by work and longing for her presence, he began to fantasize about a different future.