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

After the lynch mob, the fortune attached to the fame didn’t fail to attract predators. A certain Norman Culver, distant cousin by marriage, had tried in vain to blackmail them. He ended by declaring loud and clear that Margaret had revealed to him her method of cracking the bones in her toes. With a little practice, he claimed, anyone could deceive the simpletons recruited among the public at fairs. Dealers in bankruptcy were not far behind; one of them, of Irish stock, wanted to sell them the handwritten map of a gold mine in the Rockies bequeathed by an illiterate father, certain that the animal magnetism contained on that flimsy piece of paper would serve as compass. But these vagaries were only the ransom of a glory that promised to be universal.

Leah herself had learned a lot by adversity; although deprived of the natural grace of her sisters, as a medium of some consequence in her own right she felt protected by her great piety from the random charlatans that kept up fertile if inept competition. But who was she to complain? The money deposited each week in the Silvestri bank was fructifying nicely. Reliable friends surrounded and advised her, starting with the devoted Sylvester, as well as George Willets, that good giant who had saved them from lynching after the favorable verdict of the Episcopalian commission, not to mention dear Charlene Obo and that singular Wanda Jedna, figurehead of all great egalitarian causes. Supporters and followers flocked to the private meetings of the Spiritualist Institute, such as the enthusiast Andrew Jackson Davis come from Blooming Grove, the quite amazing Anna Blackwell who carried the spiritual grief of a Luciferian poet from Baltimore, the cloth merchant Freeman, Jonathan Koons, a farmer from Ohio who promised to build a sanctuary for Spirits, and those dozens of war widows, weeping mothers, or theology students all trembling at the invocations like willow leaves when the night wind blows. To such a point that she no longer knew how to differentiate a patient from an affiliate or a courtier from a possible rival.

Also not without influence on Leah’s mood was the languor of their mother, affected all along by all the dramas that had come rushing upon her daughters as much as by the strangers rushing in from endless funerals, and the increasing hostility of Margaret, always a nervous wreck and ready to repay her devotion with tantrums. The Fox & Fish Institute’s success was at its zenith however, since her younger sisters’ latest ingenious discovery. One idle Sunday in the South Avenue villa, they had seized upon a small round table with tripod legs flaring out from a base inlaid with a ring of palmettes, with the idea of card reading in the manner of the Marquise de Fortia. But the table being too narrow, the cards were instead spread on the floor, some on their back, others face-up. Margaret had then claimed that this couldn’t be a coincidence. While she knelt to read the future, her sister, hands flat on the mahogany tabletop, started to invoke the chosen knocking spirit, who seemed to find this new mode of communication very convenient: the delicate little table, literally possessed, started to tap from one foot to the other and spin around like a Bavarian dancer. Alerted by chance about this wonder that she had readily attributed to animal magnetism, Leah knew to draw on it as an immediate option during her private séances. With her most loyal spiritualist friends — all as unaware as she of the ancient mensa divinatoriae —the handling of turning tables was deliberately developed according to many codes and variants, a repercussion that delighted her, and a profound reflection on Science and Progress revealed through spirits by heavenly Intelligence.

Whenever she could, on evenings without obligations, Leah took refuge in her haven on South Avenue and tried to forget the madness for which she didn’t want to believe herself solely responsible. Wasn’t divine will invincible? In these moments, released from the anxieties of the strictest vigilance, she dreamed of gliding over the surface of things, a soap bubble on bare skin.

In her tulle negligee, after taking a bath in a tub her Virginian servant filled by kettle, running between the well in the basement and the coal stove, Leah smoked one of those long cigarettes given to her by Sylvester, her banker friend, thinking of the path she’d traveled since her lousy childhood on some farm in Rapstown. Facing the lights of High Falls that overhung the enormous construction site of the new viaduct, which would allow trains to pass through to New York, Cleveland, or Buffalo, she had the sense of losing her bearings. What kind of life was turned so absolutely toward the incorporeal? A bright blood flowed through her veins. What she felt could be compared to homesickness, but the lost country was that of the flesh, of great rivers and showers of stars. Cracking open the windows, she breathed in the air permeated with spray. She could hear the roaring cascades of the Genesee River between gusts of wind. Leah was taken by a long shiver. There was too much madness mixed into her line of business. Her sisters and her mother, her father taking refuge with their brother David — the entire family was going to disperse in the winter wind and she would remain solitary and sterile amid all the disembodied, like an abandoned garden. The words of a lied came back to her in her head:

The autumn wind,

Will it cry over my ashes

Before blowing them away?

She opened the bay window wide. The sails of her robe floated up to the piano. A jewelry of tears on her lashes, she stroked both hands across the low keys. It was her ruse to overcome melancholy with more melancholy.

The death of their dear mother happened unexpectedly, on a December night. Deeply ingrained for years now, her depression finally started to seem to those around her like a temperament that the damage to her health had come to accuse. Having become loyal to the household, the court doctor Brinley Simmons, always encumbered with his surgery bag, had amenably followed the evolution of her languor, which he had treated primarily with mercury, as with syphilis.

But in the end their good mother gave up the ghost without having complained of any other torments except for an irrepressible fear for her children’s future. It was the youngest that, one fleecy morning, found her in her bed, believing she was asleep, but so still, so identical to herself, the perfect sleeping statue of a life. Kate had just dreamed of her and, happy to keep the memory intact, was eager to go tell her about it at daybreak. “Dear Mother, I dreamed that you were cured of all your pains. It was snowing. You were so happy to be leaving on a trip alone and without luggage. .”

Kate had crossed the cold hands atop the covers and leaned over to brush her lips on that marble cheek. Back in her room, she’d waited more than an hour for either Janet, the maid, or Margaret to make the discovery. Margaret’s agonizing cries were inimitable. Still in the unreality of the present moment, it was with an exalted air that she entered her room crying, “Mother is dead!” Speechless, Kate looked at her without reacting, paralyzed by a terrible sense of déjà-vu.

“Yes, I know,” she said finally.

“But how could you know?” Margaret immediately asked with alarm.

“I must have dreamt it,” she replied in a faint voice, as if she were still dreaming.

Paradoxically, the death of their mother was a welcome interlude for the Fox sisters in their trying activity as mediums. On leave due to a death in the family, they didn’t want to hear talk of spirits and the beyond any more than circumstances required. Leah busied herself with the various tasks and the usual formalities. An announcement notified the family and a few close contacts. Among the first to hear were witnesses of the Institute’s increasing renown: some Shakers on pilgrimage, Baptists of the Millerist strain, a couple of Seventh-Day Adventists, and an old Mormon escaped from prison all presented themselves at the Central Avenue address in order to pay respects to the remains laid out between four candlesticks.