Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

One night many years later than the event described above, when we were living in Springfield — in the fall of ’47, it must have been, the year before Father made his first journey to North Elba — after several nights of listening to John preach the virtues of some of the newer sciences and health therapies, such as phrenology and Mesmerism, which he was then studying in a mail-order course from New York City, Father, who had been airily dismissive of all such notions, agreed to attend a demonstration by a well-known hypnotist, a Professor La Roy Sunderland. Coming from Father, this was a considerable and unexpected concession, and John was delighted by it.

Together, the three of us, Father, John, and I, marched off immediately after supper to the Palace Theater, where we took our seats as near to the front as possible. The Professor was an imposing figure of a man, with a flowing blond beard and a scarlet face and a grand, oratorical voice and manner. Most if not all of the people in the audience that night were true believers in the powers of hypnotism, so the Professor had the pleasure of speaking to the already converted, and his demonstration was laced with sarcastic, condescending references to those ignorant folks who, like Father, “preferred superstition to science.” This did not sit well with Father, naturally, and he squirmed and muttered throughout, as the florid Professor, with charts of the brain and diagrams of nervous impulses and connectors, explained how hypnotism successfully blocked off pain and could be used wonderfully, if only people were sufficiently enlightened, in surgery and in the treatment of fractures and injuries.

He had many anecdotes to bolster his reasoning, and after a while, when he felt that his audience had been adequately instructed and prepared, he called for some volunteers, so as to demonstrate before our very eyes the power of this marvelous new science. Immediately, a half-dozen men and women, mostly young, left their seats in various sections of the auditorium and made their way to the stage.

“The man’s a charlatan,” Father grumbled in a low voice. “His ‘volunteers’ are no more genuine than play-actors.”

“So why don’t you volunteer, Father?” John suggested.

“I think I’ll enjoy the show more from here, thank you.”

“What about you, Owen?” John said.

“No,” I said. “I’ll just watch, and make up my mind later.” I was shy about being seen up on a stage like that. Because of my arm, perhaps, but mainly because of an innate desire to blend in with the crowd and not seem showy or self-advertising. Besides, I did not particularly want to play a role in this ongoing quarrel between John and Father. It was their fight, not mine. For some years now, John had seemed intent on converting Father to his belief in “science” and “objectivity!” which Father well knew was merely a covert way of arguing with him about the truth of the Bible and religion. I had long since decided to keep my apostasy as private as possible and never tried to defend it against Father’s faith.

From his group of volunteers, Professor Sunderland selected the most attractive person, a buxom, fair-skinned young woman with brown hair wound neatly around her head, and drew her to the center of the stage. He asked her if she had ever been hypnotized before. She responded in the negative, and he said, “Excellent, excellent,” and invited her to sit down on a stool that his assistant had placed there. When she was seated, he proceeded to wave his fingers lightly before her face and then asked her to count aloud backwards from ten. Before she reached five, she had ceased counting altogether and was gazing insensibly out at the audience.

“This lovely young lady,”the Professor announced, “has not left us. She hears and understands my every word. She has, however, been rendered insensible to pain.”

“Nonsense,”‘ Father muttered.

The Professor informed the young woman that she would not remember any of what was about to occur, that he would do nothing to harm her or anyone else, and he would not ask her to do or say anything that was morally repugnant to her. She gave no indication that she had heard or understood him but merely sat there on the stool with a small smile on her lips, as if she were remembering a pleasant incident from earlier in the day. She seemed quite peaceful and at rest.

At a gesture from the Professor, his assistant suddenly appeared beside him with a lit candle. “Extend your left hand, palm to the floor, please,” the hypnotist said, and the woman instantly complied. When he brought the flame of the candle to within an inch of her palm, she showed no evidence of having felt its heat. For a long time, he held it there, before taking it away and handing it back to his assistant, retrieving this time a bit of ice. He told the woman to turn her hand over, which she did, and he placed the ice into her hand and closed her fingers over it. Her pleasantly calm expression and relaxed physical manner did not change; the cold bothered her no more than had the heat.

At this point, the Professor’s assistant brought out a medium-sized anvil, an object he carried with obvious difficulty, due to its great weight, probably some seventy-five pounds. The hypnotist hefted the anvil, then passed it to one of the sturdy young men amongst the volunteers still on the stage, and noted that the young man had difficulty hefting it. “Is it genuine?” he asked the fellow, who grinned and said yes. “Our frail young woman” he said, “will handle this anvil as if it were made of paper. It will seem to her as light as a sack of feathers.”

Suddenly, Father stood up and was calling out to the Professor. “Hold on there, mister! Just hold on a minute!”

“Sir?” The hypnotist was clearly startled and perhaps a little alarmed. Father’s manner was severe, and he seemed, even to me, in a fume.

“The woman is insensible to pain, you say!”

“I do, indeed.”

“Well, sir, I do not believe you or her! You have not sufficiently tested her, as far as I am concerned. I believe that I can make her instantly sensible to pain, if given the opportunity.”

Professor Sunderland hesitated a moment, as if taking the measure of his opponent. Then he smiled politely and said, “Sir, you may yourself test the subject. But only if you yourself are willing to undergo the same test.” The man had met this sort of challenge before.

Father, who had already moved from his seat to the aisle, stopped in his tracks. “Well, sir, I am not the one claiming to be insensible to pain. No one has waved his fingers before me and said abra-ca-dabra.”

“To be sure. But to protect my subject from injury, I must insist that you yourself endure whatever pain you wish to test her with. How do you propose to test her, may I ask?” He smiled broadly at the audience.

Father would not back down. His face reddening noticeably, he made his way down to the front and mounted to the stage, where, to my surprise, he produced from his coat pocket two small vials. Then, turning to us, he announced that one of the vials contained ammonia, which he was sure would cause the girl to flinch and weep. In the other, he said, was a strong medicine known as cow-itch, which he was sure many in the audience were familiar with, although I suspected he was wrong on that. The ammonia alone, he said, would do the trick, and he uncorked the bottle and held it under the nose of the girl. He held it there for nearly a full minute, to be sure that she inhaled it. She made no response at all.

The crowd was delighted and applauded cheerfully.

“Ah, but now, sir,” said the Professor, “you must undergo the same test.”

Father said, “She may have held her breath.”