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

That’s the kind of mediums we are, universal consolers! I’m not proud to admit my insufficiency at it here on this page. Reading these words over my shoulder, a spirit would surely be amused. The same people who forgive the setbacks of the boxing champion William Thompson still expect us to always be in our best form, though we’re only receiving the blows. When an uproarious room, half filled with lynchers, is expecting the Spirit to manifest itself, how should one react if one would like to keep her skin? At the Empire Club and in other places, all three of us impressed the public, especially Leah, who is such an eloquent speaker and so adept at diverting attention. It was in the conference room of the Barnum Museum that our most difficult demonstration took place. Under the patronage of the New-York Tribune, journalists, scholars, and men of letters were invited, quite courteous besides, but who observed us without blinking, like poker players, from the beginning to the end of the séance. There was James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Parker Willis, William Cullen Bryant, who I remember very well, and also Mr. George Ripley. The Wall Street magnate, a certain Mr. Underhill whom Kate had nicknamed “the man with a skeleton of gold” ever since the night at our benefactor’s home, installed himself in the front row and devoured Leah with his eyes. Silencing the skeptics, she proved herself with stunning craftsmanship. I haven’t forgotten her audacious gibberish:

“Spirits are freed from the physical laws that govern our world. The medium who serves both as a receiving antenna and a transmission relay requires great concentration to establish a magnetic area permitting communication to be established. By their presence alone, skeptics and the irreligious provoke disturbances in this perimeter that make our work difficult. .” This was devilishly sneaky. The skeptics felt obliged to cut their whiskey. Kate, just to my right, stuck her tongue out at me while closing one eye. In our code, that means: “Low profile, I’m calling Mister Splitfoot to the rescue.” In the darkness, under the unusual clarity of the candles, the pedestal started to balance from right to left and to turn, like a kite held on a tight string, a bandalore and a fat top all at once. Apparently without any special effects. Unbelievers decidedly do not want to understand that modern spiritualism brings to light energies still unknown, as Leah so well explains it. Neither Kate nor I are going to tell them what is really happening behind the scenes, nor what happened really in Hydesville. We were still children then; children are surprised that the world can go on without them. At night we often tiptoed to our bedroom door to check whether a black abyss had not suddenly replaced the staircase. Nowadays, somewhat less naïve, we know that the abyss is inside us, in people’s heads, and that only spirits exist. It doesn’t bother me at all to cheat a little when none of them are answering.

We stayed almost three months in New York. Anyone who doesn’t know this city is a hick. Everyone exists there with the mad agitation of a beheaded centipede. Everything there is immense and opens to the river or the sea, everything there resonates like on a dizzying dance floor where everyone in the entire world, including horses, wears Irish tap shoes. Leah got married there, to the great chagrin of Mr. Strechen, our manager. Kate, that kind of pale lunar creature all men want to protect, became the muse of a media baron who doesn’t believe either in talking tables or any other materializations. Is he expecting instantaneous prophecies of the weather from her? It’s crazy, the journalists’ and bankers’ interest in spiritualism! Let’s just say that without my little sister’s sleepwalking, we probably never would have been put on a big train to Broadway!

Kate and I have a developed a direct method of automatic writing. No need any longer for the rectangular tablet on wheels, equipped with a pencil that you animate with the tips of your fingers. Once the spirit is manifested, it’s enough to separate the arm that is writing from the rest of the body with a little curtain and let the hand equipped with a graphite stick move all alone across a blank sheet of paper. Here, I just tried it myself out of the blue:

A centipede in the staircase

Climbs steps four at a time

His shoes are down on the ground floor

His shoes are up ahead on my landing

A staircase in the elevator

Complains to my sister about only having one foot

I walk on the ceiling in slippers

With a flyswatter and a shoehorn

When to burn my diary? It’s getting to be time, before unfriendly hands seize it. What a shame it would be for me if Leah were to come across it! But she has too much to do with that Under-hill, and soon we’ll hardly see her anymore. She’s a New Yorker now, the spouse of an artist of high finance and holding court, while Kate for her part invokes the spirit of the little peddler from Hydesville and I languish alone in Rochester. Do Prince Charmings have to be rich bourgeois in this damn country? What became of my dear Lee in Rapstown, my beloved with the skin of an angel?

Now that scoundrel Frank Strechen, the unemployed manager, is falling back on me, for lack of any other leads. He is offering me the going rate for a solo demonstration in Philadelphia. I’m off for Philly! City of Quakers and brotherly love. Provided that I do not lose my means along the way!

If you have the time to listen to me

Blow your nose with your toes

And pull the spinach out of your ears

Lady Macbeth and some specters took the stage of the Eastman Theatre. Charlene Obo played the role with an unsettling energy, throwing her audience, all dressed up for the premiere night, into a state of stupor close to terror.

“Why do you make such faces?” she declaimed. “ When all’s done, You look but on a stool! ”

In a side loge of this Italianate auditorium, leaning on the balcony railing, Lucian Nephtali sat paralyzed. Charlene outdid her character in a lugubrious chiaroscuro where the shadowy recesses were contending with the purple of a perpetual twilight.

The sad Macbeth himself seemed to be trembling more at the hallucinatory determination of his wife than of the consequences of their crime:

Ay, and since then too, murders have been performed

Too terrible for the ear: the times have been,

That, when the brains were out, the man would die,

And there an end but now they rise again,

With twenty mortal murders on their crowns.

Soon, in the midst of walk-on actors, the usurper reacted with a bewildered terror at the sight of the specter of his victim, which he alone could distinguish:

Approach thou like the rugged Russian bear,

The arm’d rhinoceros, or th’Hyrcan tiger;

Take any shape but that, and my firm nerves

Shall never tremble. Or be alive again,

And dare me to the desert with thy sword;

If trembling I inhabit then, protest me

The baby of a girl. Hence, horrible shadow!

Unreal mockery, hence!

A cold sweat stung Lucian’s neck. Alone in his loge, hands trembling on the guardrail, he had the impression that all the faces below, haloed in a vermillion light, were turning ostensibly toward him. Sponging his temples dry, he had to admit he was still feeling the effects of his time at the Golden Dream that afternoon, magnified tenfold by the playwright’s thunderous parables. Sometimes it happens that a mild discomfort takes on such an intensity that one would willingly leap into a pyre to escape from it. The nearest real person at this moment, the only one who would be able to help him, was separated farther from him than the ghost of the King of Scotland! For almost another hour, Charlene belonged only to the stage, as did for that matter the audience transfixed by her performance.