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

Real life, after so many years of summoning the dead and occult forces, was linked in Kate’s mind with the exclusive love of a man. Just married, she had withdrawn from the social comedy with an unknown emotion, entirely devoted to the service of the lawyer George Jencken, whose name she had donned the way one dons the veil. Freed overnight from the regard of others, that servitude which ultimately turned into torture, she abandoned herself to her new status as anonymous wife with an affinity for detachment close to the confused notion she had of happiness. Incapable of complete serenity because of those difficult skeletons, those detached hands, all those ectoplasmic tentacles that almost naturally inhabited her dreams, she worked to regenerate herself on a canvas of omission whose loose weft gradually wove in the ancestral motions that she had seen carried out in Rapstown or in Hydesville, and that moved her so much to recollect, how her good mother attended to the household chores while humming, suspecting nothing still of the machinations of her abominable little girls. Putting away the towels and bright sheets on the shelves of an old armoire, for example, without counting the suspicious creakings, washing the crystal glasses under running water without listening closely to the rattles or acute vibrations, lighting the phosphorous lamp or candlesticks very simply in order to knit a sweater. And to read the poems of Keats offered by her husband:

O tender spouse of the golden god Hyperion

Or those of Dante Gabriel Rossetti bought at Alexander’s Bookshop, in her neighborhood of Notting Hill:

The blessed damozel lean’d out

From the gold bar of Heaven;

Her eyes were deeper than the depth

Of waters still’d at even;

She had three lilies in her hand,

And the stars in her hair were seven.

That the author, mad with grief, had buried in the coffin of his beautiful and young wife the manuscript of his verses only to exhume and publish them eight years later was something Kate didn’t want to have inflicted on her. George, discovering this editorial novelty in her hands, had reported the anecdote to her while caressing her breasts. After so many evanescent hysterics, libidinous puritans, heavy-handed patriarchs, it pleased her to be desired without hindrance or intercession, like any other woman that one would kiss and undress. The body of a man, its ligaments and strength, occupied her fingertips and her entire body enough to think of nothing else than imminent pleasure — at the small of the back, between the plexus and perineum, from the neck down to the toes — which attenuated her happiness while increasing her love tenfold. Kate couldn’t keep herself from finding an exhilarating taste of death in physical possession, which she brought herself out of each time with a little ritual of childish coaxing that astonished the lawyer after the excess of embraces.

To no longer avoid the world of the living, Mrs. Jencken protected herself from the morbid declivities of her mind by showing her enthusiasm at the worst moments. Joy was for her a symptom of anxiety. She also appreciated more than anything the drizzly and bland languor of autumn days, the vacant nights before a crackling fire and the unsinkable boredom of Sundays: wasn’t she alive in sweet contrast? She loved the oscillation of the large trees in the wind, in the London parks, the clouds above the river, when she would descend on foot to the old Battersea toll bridge, bought back by the Metropolitan Board of Works and again threatened with demolition, and even the strange desolate streets of Whitechapel where thousands of children orphaned by cholera wandered, growing up on the street to become ragpickers, collectors, thieves soon to be hanged — or if lucky, to become apprentices in the factory.

Busy during the day with his study of the City, on the Queen’s Bench Division or in conference with one or other of his clients, George was long unaware of her sleepwalking fugues. Until the night Kate came home late, looking wild, her gloves torn and stained with blood. He figured out that she had been assaulted by a bunch of East End kids where she’d gone to stroll without protection, a defector from the good side of town, and had broken her nails while heartily defending herself. He lavished her with soothing words and nursed her scratches, discovering that she had been frequenting for months perhaps the canvas shelters of the Christian Revival Society, where the most needy of the countless underprivileged were helped under the leadership of the preacher William Booth. Out of a natural generosity, but suddenly concerned about the mental health of his spouse, as much as he had always hidden from her his own ailments, the lawyer became closer to her and made sure that his driver and right-hand man followed her diligently from the moment that she declined being driven somewhere.

But a happy event — as those usually indifferent to the event love to say — soon changed the mental state of the Jencken couple. Kate gave birth to twins so exceedingly identical, even down to the details known only by mothers, that she herself must have permanently confused them two or three times, leaving to good fortune the choice of identities until their father decided to attach to their ankles thin gold chains engraved with their names. That one would be called Arcady and the other John Elias — or the reverse — before this initiative, was hardly going to change their reciprocal existence a hair. Which one was the eldest by a few minutes, Kate couldn’t have said, which eventually disturbed her with generative vertigo. She lived through her pregnancy like a bird hovering so high, so far above the dark marshes. Flesh fertilized opened the mind to the joys of childhood as well as to the white locks of age, with the influx of stars and the dazzling abysses of ice. For her, giving birth was bringing her own self into the world; Kate was born from her own stomach or the bowels of the universe with two twins as a sign of the zodiac. This moment contained all moments, the streaming of generations, the infinite metamorphoses, and the heart of the shadow of death palpitating across the billions of lives with ephemeral stigmatas.

One recovers quickly from birth when taken by frenzy to save the mystery of life by pouring it out in careful sips. In motherhood, Kate distanced herself from the terror of procreation. Her two boys grew strong and got big, still always interchangeable, playing on every occasion with their twinning, Arcady answering to the call for John Elias, the other fooling his parents in false stories, the both of them exchanging their clothes when the adults wanted to tell them apart, up until the day when one of the two, stricken by a purulent meningitis and placed into isolation, was brought out after two weeks of treatment with memory disorders persistent enough for the twins to abandon their favorite game, having become impossible to play by the force of circumstances.

Between the education of her children and a redoubled attention to her husband, Kate no longer felt the need to flee into the London streets or into her cataleptic dreams. The nostalgia for American cities, so different from the big London checkerboard where sooty neighborhoods alternated with parks in undefined suburbs, seized her sometimes unexpectedly. There, everything was possible overnight, glory and madness, unhappiness and fortune. The memory of Horace Greeley, her indulgent patron, who died the year of her marriage after running unsuccessfully in the presidential elections, still throbbed in her, but like a good star about to fizzle out. She missed above all the beautiful days of Rochester and pined for Margaret. She even missed Leah. There comes a day when siblings replace the buried memory of the elders, since in them alone are found now the inflections of voice and the attitudes populating one’s intimate background.