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

“Laws,” he was saying, “there are too many of them, each governor wants his own, we’ve lost all common sense! I allow that we hang criminals, but look: in Boston, one law forbids playing banjo on the sidewalk, in Idaho, it is formally illegal to fish astride a giraffe, and in Tennessee, one doesn’t have the right to lasso a fish. .”

“I know all about it,” said the singer of canticles. “Where I come from, in North Carolina, it’s illegal to sing off-key.”

A middle-aged man opened the door, as if pushed in by the snow, and shaking himself off, came up to the counter. He immediately ordered the best absinthe in the house. His sheepskin coat dripped as he beat a rigid, black, wide-brimmed hat with his palm. Margaret thought she recognized a visitor of the late Spiritualist Institute, or maybe a former guest of Leah’s salon — back in the time when she was the very dignified Mrs. Fish-Fox! Who ever heard of such a creature. The olive-skinned man had heavy eyelids, smooth graying hair, and features as delicate as they were bruised, showing the exhausted relaxation of an asthenic reveler. He lightly set his hat on the counter, then lifted his eyes toward the sparse population of the nightclub. Intoxicated, her head poorly attached, Margaret held her scrutinizing gaze. She had learned never to lower her eyes, which allows one, presto digiti, to divert the public’s attention when juggling acts.

Intrigued, Lucian Nephtali picked up his hat and walked over to the slouched absinthe drinker, her neck leaning against the rippling marine background of a large mirror.

“We know each other,” he said without taking the time to introduce himself, “aren’t you Leah?”

At the moment of pronouncing those words, approaching this creature without makeup, his error appeared flagrant, but how would he justify his interruption?

“Excuse me,” he said, “from far away you look a little like. .”

“A person twenty years older than myself who is none other than my sister,” she replied in a breath before raising her hand and launching out in a voice pitched too high: “Bring me another one, John, for the love of God!”

“Two!” Lucian corrected while sitting down. “And of the better kind!”

Margaret looked at the intruder with amusement. She reconstituted in fragments the person, his social position, the people he associated with. It was always a point won to show, casually, the amplitude of her memory despite her psychological degradation.

“And what has become of Charlene and that dear Harry Maur?” she said after a brief moment of silence.

“Charlene lost her mind, you didn’t know? It’s odd, she was playing the role of Mrs. Mountchessington at the Ford Theatre in Washington, the night of Lincoln’s assassination. She knew the murderer well. Maybe you remember, she had played Macbeth with that lunatic John Wilkes Booth. That was anything but My American Cousin. Once his crime was committed, Booth jumped onto the stage, shouting, ‘So die the tyrants!’ it was like a Shakespearean intrusion on this bourgeois farce. ‘Birds of a feather gather no moss. .’ But all of that has nothing to do with it. Charlene was transferred to Athens, Ohio, shortly thereafter to a luxurious asylum that had just opened its doors. Whereas Harry. .”

The cafe owner came to exchange glasses, a worried eye on his client. “I hope you’ll help the lady get back home,” he muttered into the ear of the more respectable drinker.

Blasé, Margaret smiled and lit a cigarette.

“To you, we’re all just a bunch of jokers, eh?” she stammered in a caustic tone. “You never believed in all of that, you! Magnetic fluids, communication with the beyond, knocking spirits. .”

Taken aback for an instant, Lucian conscientiously wet his sugar. It was quite true, he never believed in any of it, even if he couldn’t have admitted to himself that his friend no longer existed. From the grave of his being, Nat had reemerged as his own buried soul.

He leaned over in confidence toward Margaret. “Spirits inside an end table? That’s perfectly ridiculous. But once I was able to sense in your sister Kate certain remarkable properties of her psyche that I wouldn’t know how to analyze otherwise. A kind of hypnotic dividing in two or an extra-lucid torpor, maybe, a natural empathy, a power of impregnation of things and beings she herself doesn’t know. .”

“Kate’s a real medium, that’s all.”

Drawing back in embarrassment, Lucian noticed her crow’s feet, the fine wrinkles at the corners of her lips, and especially the way this woman had of biting her lower lip and batting her eyelashes. With a good dye job, the dignified Leah, who was living the good life in New York, could hardly look any older.

“Why were you in need of my younger sister?” Margaret pursued in the shelter of a screen of smoke.

The question was inescapable, at least from himself, the absinthe not permitting lying any more than opium, and he had just come from an underground smoking den that had opened on the port since the closing of the Golden Dream. Although unbelieving down to his marrow, he had long consulted in moments of golden limbo numerous soothsayers living or dead, Simon of Judea, Paracelsus, Robert Fludd, or the Marquis de Puységur, and he himself was on the threshold of disappearance, bombarded by all the morbid influences grief unleashed. But he had survived, still unbelieving, thanks to little Kate. Hadn’t she known, on one unforgettable night, to link the tenuous threads of the soul’s depths between him and Nat Astor, saving him thereby through the great mystery of the damnation of love?

“Why?” he said finally. “Probably to understand my crime. Your sister enlightened me on the matter. She blew on the fog of my spirit and there I saw a bloody footprint. Subsequently, I turned myself in for the murder of my friend — the Rochester coroner had been expecting it for years. There was a sensational trial. I just missed being sentenced to death, you know. But Harry Maur, cited from the beginning as a witness for the prosecution, testified at the end of the trial that he had been present when the tragedy occurred and that it was in fact a suicide. .”

Margaret was hardly listening. Blurred images were superimposing themselves, undulating across this face from the past.

“But it was no suicide!” Lucian nearly shouted, stepping back. “No, no,” he went on in a calmer voice, “there are only murders more or less thoughtless. .”

Margaret shrugged. Would she too have killed her husband without thinking? She saw again the tender and serious Elisha increasingly weakened upon returning from his expedition, and suddenly felt again the sharp pain of lack, that blade lashing the entrails, then she remembered her banishment after the funeral. Without a fortune, driven from her belongings by his family, she found herself back where she started, more alone than ever, chasing after an already strained fame to once again earn her living week by week, under the name of Margaret Fox-Kane. But mediums by that time abounded. America, naïve about leagues, congregations, and multiple sects, had been handed over entirely to new charlatans with hosannas, with no recognition for the two pioneering sisters, while Mister Splitfoot was surely snickering under the snapping banner of Old Glory!

Her mind lost by the alcohol’s vapors, Margaret hadn’t really followed the substitution of human scenery, Nephtali ceding his place without a word to another figure in her life.

“You’re drunk again,” said this one indignantly. “Have you forgotten that we have a séance with two dollar entry tonight?”

“It’s coming back to Rochester,” she admitted while re-lighting her cigarette. “It’s shaken me up. .”