Hubert Haddad - Rochester Knockings - A Novel of the Fox Sisters

“Not many people tonight at the Golden Dream?” the visitor inquired while taking off his boots and cape.

“Not many. Your friend the coroner is sleeping like an angel in the corner. You didn’t bring the missus?”

“It’s not good for her. She’s playing tonight at the Eastman Theatre. .”

Stretched out, head propped on a cushion and an ivory-tipped cigarette holder between his lips, Lucian watched the manager go off while inhaling his first puff. Propriety demanded that Charlene Obo, who was barely his mistress, be viewed as his wife in such a place. Besides raw opium or the chandoo imported in brass boxes, they also served absinthe, among other alcohols, and black tea. Lucian could very well settle for a hot drink, like this automaton of a police officer, during the times he needed to keep his faculties alert. But tonight would require a descent from the cross into hell. The funeral of Nat, so young and such an old ally, at the Buffalo Street cemetery marked his entry with no return into a grand canyon of loneliness — he’d known it intuitively when looking down at Nat’s coffin earlier and then up at the suddenly indifferent faces hovering above the graves of a few other close friends. Giant cranes swiveled on Pinnacle Hill in the background, where the last building of a large and still vacant hospital was being constructed. Nat Astor had lain at the bottom of his hole for barely three hours, but from now on he would be a contemporary of all the disappeared who’d ever haunted this Earth, a thousand eternities of lived lives. Lucian thought of Harry Maur’s awful words before the still-warm cadaver of his friend, in the winter greenhouse where the servants had moved him: “This is worse than revenge — one doesn’t go kill himself like that in his host’s home.” In his right hand, as if he were going to empty the barrel into the dead man, he grabbed the Colt Paterson with which Nat had shot himself right in the heart. The day before, or two days before his death, last week, they had all three found themselves outside of a reception in the new villa of Leah Fish, on South Avenue. The music teacher and rather mediocre pianist was becoming a celebrity ever since the Hydesville affair. It was Harry, the most superstitious of millionaires, who’d been taken with the oldest of the Fox sisters, a divorcée envious of her maiden name and full of ambition for her little family.

The faint bubbling of the pipe and the snoring of a neighbor lost in illusions mixed with the sounds from outside, the river’s waterfalls and a sudden rain shower falling on the slate or zinctiled roofs. On one of the trays, the wick from an oil lamp was opening a golden fan aged by the fire of centuries; within it very ancient and translucent figures were coming to life, an inexhaustible wildlife where memory silently dispensed its effigies, immediately unfurling in endless floral hybridizations with an exuberance at least equaling nature. The visions of an opium smoker are more entrancing than any siren song. There where a member of the Temperance Society or of the Anti-Saloon League might discern a face or shape in the background, between other inept rebuses, there universes were opening up for him, bringing their demonic engineering to the surface, pulled from unfathomable equations. A pinch of opium was enough to melt the wax of the seven seals. For a few hours, a freedom more elusive than the dream of dying would cease altering all feeling in him. His wells and fountains were now dry; his only friend in the ground, where would he find a semblance of intimacy again in this world? Charlene Obo only expected a bit of fun out of him. And if Harry Maur, whom courtesans and other fawners mobbed incessantly, had gladly paid the lawyer to advocate for clouds or the roses in his park, it was only from the cruel lack of interlocutors.

A filiform servant filed between the smokers’ compartments, which were similar to tiny theatre boxes. A regular, solid man with a bull’s neck and sloping shoulders painfully stood up and staggered in the bronzed half-light of the room, undoubtedly just informed of the time. His sluggish steps managed to keep plantigrade: a bear coming out of hibernation. Lucian didn’t try to hide from him. The coroner knew all the customers of the Golden Dream, most of them lawyers and functionaries. They constituted in all casualness, through a tacit agreement of discretion, a sort of the extrasensory vision club.

Which didn’t prevent the coroner for better or worse from conducting his investigations between two divinatory lethargies. In a state of absolute detachment, he made an excruciatingly slow gesture toward the lawyer.

“A car is waiting for me in front of the old cemetery. I’ll take you along?”

“I prefer to stay until dawn,” Lucian murmured.

The coroner nodded with the simple drooping of the face, eyelids, cheeks, and lips. He had hesitated to say something about the suicide of that wealthy old woman’s young hypnotist. Although his self-sabotaging seemed to leave no doubt, this Nat Astor fellow left quite a riddle engraved on his tombstone: who could have been camouflaging himself so long behind such a name! Wide open to invasions, America was a paradise for truncated, concocted, usurped identities. With the kindness of a judge and a few dollars, one could invent a gilt-edged civil status for oneself without a lot of trouble. Nobody would go verify your qualifications or aptitudes in the archives of the Old World. The graduates of not to be found learned societies, officers of Napoleon, international financiers and English or Russian aristocrats abounded in the city as well as the countryside, not to mention the acknowledged charlatans parading on the village squares or in conference rooms.

The coroner came close several times to falling down those damned labyrinthine stairs that echoed like piles of empty coffins. He told himself that the tea was giving him indigestion. He never should have drunk that tea, blacker than bile. Finally somewhat satisfied to be alone in the night, he began to hum, hand on his pocket revolver:

A house without love

Is an empty homestead

But wherever love lives

Is home indeed

What a whirlwind since our hurried departure from Hydesville! The most bizarre events have followed one after the other with Kate and myself, admittedly the origins of all this disorder, not being able or knowing how to stop any of it beforehand. Spurred on by Reverend Gascoigne, who banished us from his church, the farmers harass us a little more each day, some of them gathering in front of our house with torches. Once, when just the two of us were coming back from the village, a band of cowherds followed us on Long Road screaming horrors. Instead of heading for the farm, Kate ran toward the pond, leaving me no choice but to follow her in that absurd flight. They were throwing pebbles and clods of dirt, treating us like witches or imps of the devil. At the edge of the forest, a dripping figure stood half-naked, holding a white veil like a flag in one hand and in the other, the other. . It was Samuel, the High Point widow’s son. He buttoned up his pants and with a funny smile signaled to us while the pack kept approaching. Without thinking, lacking any other choice, we followed him into a cave hidden by the river, which at that spot falls in a cascade. Inside, there was lingerie hanging from stakes. My sister guessed it immediately: the rags were Violet Gascoigne’s, the drowned woman of the pond. And below that, items stolen from the laundry lines of young farm girls. When the horde had passed, Samuel hid his face in a flannel pajama bottom. Despite his demented air and curious forms of entertainment, he probably saved our lives.