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

“The horses are stamping their hooves!” she finally cried out on the porch. “They sense our impatience. .”

The three cars filed through the wide avenues of the city center. On a corner seat in the second coach, forehead against the glass, Kate isolated herself from the talkative agitation that surrounded her. This adventure was taking an ominous turn. Disguised as a model young girl, she had the feeling of being driven to the gallows in the old days like that class of English schoolgirls accused of petty larceny. Across from her, Mother had the stunned face of a large freshwater fish, pale and purplish, which seemed to be coming off and falling at her feet. Kate was astonished at how removed she felt at that moment, those near her unexpectedly revealing their secret aquatic natures inside the passenger compartment, a sort of aquarium of sloshing water. An inappropriate thought made her smile: maybe there were spirits from the other world above baiting the fish down here with invisible lines. .

Outside, a fine rain illuminated the gray asphalt roads that alternated with the paved esplanades. The gas lamplighters began their rounds, from one sidewalk to the other, and sequined halos followed their quiet steps. Department stores had just closed their doors on the nose of indecisive flâneurs. A number of shadow puppets filed by in front of the backlight of shop windows — clerks, beggars, hawkers, families, prostitutes — swept away each moment by the teams of horses’ manes. Kate scrutinized these shooting stars and felt a sense of displacement. Everything was going too fast, nothing resembled yesterday. The adults around her all wanted to play a game of cat and ghost. They all had a lot of victims on their conscience. Who is ever able to swear that he is not responsible for the suicide of one, the fatal illness of another? Kate was quite certain of her own responsibility in the death of her little brother. She had clearly noticed his lack of appetite and burning cheeks during his first sleep. She should have helped him eat and held him tight against her each night to absorb his fever. But death is unexpected like every other moment down here below. In his final delirium, Abbey was giving her defensive smiles, stammering long words, while pointing with a frightened finger at a tiny crack in the wall. A child knows everything because his fear is not of any world.

Kate looked over at the sleeping expression on her mother’s face. The jolting of the carriage shook her cheeks and tufts of her white hair. An old woman filled with dreams while facing a precipice, that was the excruciating feeling each second had for her. What differentiated the two, really, the living and the dead? She rested her forehead on the glass, eyes open, sensitive to how the vibrations changed her view of objects, themselves become shaky, undecided. Among all those shadows scattering in all directions, how many were wandering spirits or corpses reanimated by a magician’s breath? To help her sleep as much as to complete her education, Leah had on many nights told, with a witchy pout, stories of the living dead and dark prophecies drawn from English authors, such as the capricious Horace Walpole who loved to wear a wooden necktie, Ann Radcliffe in her fatal castle, Mary Shelley’s seam-riddled monster, or of a certain Polidori, so frightfully pale. Whispering at her bedside, eyes wide and teeth sharp, her older sister would lean in to say: “At the side of the bloodless beauty the lord was thirsty for fresh blood.” While enriching her vocabulary somewhat, she was undoubtedly trying to maintain in her, through fright, the black fire of what was called Modern Spiritualism. .

Kate listened to the hooves of the three carriages thunder across the stony ground; she thought she saw women’s heads flying in the middle of a dance of knives. When Leah would narrate these selected horrors to her, she made a habit of reciting nonsensical counter-spells from the foot of her bed, to keep her from dying of fright:

I give my elephant

Against its weight in ladybugs

Oh, what happiness! what happiness!

Huddled against the carriage door, she wasn’t far from using the same strategy to exorcise her anguish at the approach of their destination. They were about to be released to the tigers, she and her sister. Oh Maggie, Maggie let’s find a magic formula fast to escape them!

The king’s page from neck to sole

Swims flat on his belly all the way to the North Pole

“What gibberish are you saying now, Katie?” asked the skinny Amy Post, sandwiched in the middle.

Without answering, suddenly perfectly consoled, she thought back to the elf with scraped knees from the woods and streams of Hydesville. But childhood had swallowed those days like spun sugar. A young woman should find her strength in the folds of her gray dress rather than on the swirling flimsy checkerboard of her dreams. However, speak of the devil! She squeezed up close against her noisy old ally. Right, Mister Splitfoot?

Big dry knocks resonated in the cramped lodging of wood and leather, provoking a burst of anxiety among the passengers.

“Oh!” their mother exclaimed. “That’s the announcement that we’ll be arriving soon!”

Kate wasn’t the only one noticing the quantity of beautiful coaches, carriages with inlaid mahogany, curricles, and horse-drawn vehicles of every kind being slowed down by a mixed crowd, where groups of bony and bearded Puritans lurked menacingly next to great ladies in hats and rather cheerful old men dressed like dead trees. But where were these multitudes headed? Isaac Post stuck his long narrow head outside the coach.

“What could we have as competition? A well-known choir, surely, or a preacher of the Second Coming. .”

“Giddy up, old girl!” Amy Post exclaimed, crazy with exaltation. “This beautiful crowd is here for us, for our cause! O sweet Lord! It’s hope that brings them!”

It had been a long time since the high walls of Corinthian Hall had been the scene of a mob: the place was overtaken and conquered beyond all expectations and the organizers, starting with the director of the hall, were already envisioning future events. People crowded in through every entrance to save a numbered seat or to claim ones for themselves. Public rumor, amplified by the telegraph and the press, had brought together everyone the state of New York and its environs could call amateurs —the erudite or the merely curious — nonconformists or the rebellious enticed by the sulfurous scent of a new Reformation, astrologists and itinerant hypnotists passing through Flour City, most of them fervent followers of Franz Anton Mesmer, credentialed scholars, men of letters, and academics envious of their merits — all these people in tandem with the Puritans who were swarming like ants, not yet knowing if they should applaud or boo.

In the first rows, protected by guards from the invasion, important personages were taking their seats after entrusting canes, top hats, and furs to the cloakroom. Students and preceptors gathered in the aisles of the balcony waited patiently by putting names to faces of the more or less elite who, one by one, slid like playing cards behind the backs of velvet armchairs. The wealthy cart manufacturer James Cunningham could be made out, as well as the banker Sylvester Silvestri, and the businessman Henry Maur, joined by a famous actress dressed in perpetual mourning. Also in attendance were the very influential director of the New-York Tribune, Horace Greeley, and Alexander Cruik, the famous evangelist suspected of occult collusion with the Redskins, worshippers of the Great Spirit. Political luminaries campaigning in Monroe Country preferred to keep their anonymity by hiding in the corners of back boxes. In this way, the presence in a personal capacity of the old lion of the Whig party Henry Clay, current Speaker of the House of Representatives, went unnoticed by journalists. The solemn entry of Judge Edmonds, eminent lawyer, of the chemist James J. Mapes, a professor at the National Academy, or of his colleague Robert Hare, aroused less interest than the arrival of local owners of mills and textile factories. The town mayor, grandson of Colonel Rochester, and his lymphatic wife, received applause and whistles. . Nobody noticed the numerous figures of spiritual renewal scattered throughout the room, some accompanied by their disciples: the Adventist visionary Ellen White, all dressed in white and wearing a headband; the publisher of the deist Thomas Paine, author of Age of Reason, which threw the baby Jesus out with the baptismal bath water of the Gospels; the withering Andrew Jackson Davis, already devoted to the picturesque Leah Fish; and many others who had no celebrity yet — not to mention a host of merrymakers interested in various illusions, and dubious fortune hunters focused on finding the deal of the century or at least of the evening.