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

While arranging bouquets of callas and lilies on the dressers and coffee tables in the room, the eldest of the Fox sisters wondered with a hint of anxiety if she wasn’t asking for a little trouble by renting Corinthian Hall from the manager of the Lecture Society, after the talks given in this high place by some of the most prestigious orators in the country like Oliver Wendell Holmes, a famous man of letters, the director of the New-York Tribune, Horace Greeley, the great theologian Charles Finney, author of the so subtle Heart of Truth, the very boring Ralph Waldo Emerson whom she could have heard last year, or even the preacher Alexander Cruik, who needs no introduction. Leah sighed with pride at the thought that he had agreed to be in their company at her soirée. The invitation of a divorced woman, a musician certainly and actually quite literate, can only be accepted by great minds. There would be other singles there this evening, like the superb Wanda Jedna, who campaigned for women’s liberation, that priceless Lucian Nephtali with his fake Manfred airs, as well as frightfully old men who were always useful for finances and promotion.

The bell from the nearby Presbyterian Church rang seven o’clock.

Nervous, Leah called out to the youngest of her two servants: she had forgotten the cinnabar lamps and incense to burn!

“No need to light the chandeliers,” she added. Ambiance is really just a matter of scents and shadows.

She went to close the lid of her baby grand piano, certain that she would be begged to reopen it after dessert. Overtaken that moment by light-headedness, she leaned against the corner of the piano and saw the days and nights marching on the ivory keys. All the events since she had taken charge of the family’s destiny for its own good resembled a series of favorable tarot cards. This sudden celebrity almost worried her though: it was happening as an omen, a probationary period of sorts. The other world — its angels or its demons — had visited Katie and Maggie, incontestably. But it was she who, as shrewd proselyte, upheld the communication to her own spiritual level. Neither her sisters nor her poor mother were any good at doctrine. They had only understood the most trivial or absurd aspects of what had happened to them in Hydesville, that invisible neighbor beating against the door from the other world. As if holy Nature gave its place over to fantasy! As the granddaughter of a pastor, even if her father was just an uprooted drunkard, she immediately understood the quasi-liturgical dimension of this telegraphy of souls, notwithstanding that such a process could be laborious in comparison to the Eucharist. Leah stifled a little laugh. She’d liberated two useful sacraments to Rochester, out of the grasp of priestly ministers. She had long leaned toward the natural religion of her sister deists, those rational lovers of God who made fun of prophets and miracles. The Hydesville revelation had managed to restore her childhood faith in mystery, but no longer being a child, she envisioned a mystery that was a real object of study and devotion. Couldn’t we arrive one day at a kind of practical science of the beyond?

The macadam road was soon clanging with iron harnesses. Convertible and sedan coaches followed one after the other on South Avenue. Upstairs the panoramic rooms pulsated with bursts of voices mixed with intelligent laughter. Couples greeted each other according to custom. More circumspect, the single guests distractedly examined the scene. A monocle screwed into his left eye, Lucian Nephtali silently raved to himself about the hostess’s bad taste. There was, however, poorly hung, an acceptable watercolor of a small master of the Hudson River School. The tulle curtains of the plate glass windows let in a view of the Genesee River, wine-colored in the evening twilight, and of the three partly illuminated waterfalls. Wanda Jedna, nicknamed by her fans The Only One, serenely contemplated the view while wondering what it was Leah Fish wanted from her now. In the back of the room, the industrial clothing manufacturer Freeman and his spouse were already talking about investments and capitals with the nurseryman, Barry Nursery, who owned all the forests along Braddock Bay and Mendon Ponds.

“We are seriously considering a bridge for the railroad on Upper Falls. A huge wooden bridge, the biggest ever constructed, around fifty thousand cubic meters of wood is already on its way!”

“Perhaps we should build a train station first!” Mrs. Freeman dared.

“But why? Bridges, first we need bridges!”

An old retired soldier, displaying all his medals, imposed himself into the conversation; his eye was on the new aqueduct.

“I myself was present in 1829 on the right bank, a young and dashing officer, when Sam Patch, a real daredevil, made his leap of death from the top of the waterfalls before all of Rochester. Bah! The unhappy man broke his neck there. .”

Leah pretended to be helping behind the bar where a black servant in livery was in charge of aperitifs.

“You don’t have anything stronger?” drolly grumbled a blond financier with a little moustache maintained in the fashion of an Alta Italia aristocrat.

Knowing for a fact that Sylvester Silvestri, in addition to being the nephew by marriage of Colonel William Fitzhugh, Junior — cofounder of the city with his counterpart, Colonel Nathaniel Rochester — had been the local vice president of the Independent Order of Good Templars, one of the more active temperance societies, it was with a wink of complicity that Leah served him his lemonade.

“There will be French wine at the dinner table, my dear!”

The arrival of the preacher, followed by Harry Maur puffing on his cigar, and the actress Charlene Obo dressed as queen of the night, provoked a bustle of curiosity that visibly offended the latter. Among the first to arrive, the Post couple stood side by side, stiff in their Puritan outfits, looking bored, wondering if there had been some kind of mistake. The former telegraphist — rendered temperate by the proximity of his wife — missed Hydesville and its saloon more than ever. The two of them were astonished not to see a single other member of the Fox family or its entourage in the group.

But the guests all found their assigned seats around the Arthurian table. Amy and Isaac Post were relieved not to have neighbors who were too awful, like that effusive actress or the somber character dressed like a buccaneer, who had fallen into each others’ arms with a shocking affectation. Framed by the young Andrew Jackson Davis on her right — a brilliant supporter of mesmerism with thin glasses and a patriarch’s beard — and the Milanese banker on the left, the mistress of the house did not expect that the preacher placed across the table would exclaim loudly enough to turn a dozen heads.

“But where are your dear sisters, Mrs. Fish? I was so hoping. .”

“They are too young!” Leah responded defensively while throwing embarrassed glances at her nearest guests. “And soon you will be able to applaud them at Corinthian Hall. .”

The two servants back-to-back served a boiling soup until, bowl by bowl, the steam had formed a circle.

“Yes, of course, at their age!” added the booming voice of the gaunt Alexander Cruik. “But it would have been so pleasant to talk with them. Especially the youngest. .”

“With Kate? Is that so?” was the only way Mrs. Fish knew to respond to hide her confusion, seeing that the evangelist of the Redskins, with a voice accustomed to outside gatherings, was the kind who would pursue his idea without fail.

“Your Kate is gifted with an exceptional sensitivity, she captures psychic waves not perceptible to the common man. It’s an acute form of intuition of beings and situations without being able to actually deduce anything herself. I’ve known Cherokee Indians capable of a similar extrasensory perception, one of them above all, a sorcerer with a mustang’s mane who could read the future in the wrinkles of the dead. In his trances, he pointed out without fail warriors who would be condemned, women soon to be pregnant, children struck by our maladies. .”