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

With a migraine and an aching back, Leah moved away from the windows and went to her room. Her two lapdogs, Horace and Wildy, jumped onto her bed once she was lying down. They wagged their tails in search of a caress, tongues hanging out. Touched, the old woman dug her bony fingers into all that white wool. “My little loves,” she said, eyelids heavy. “You’d never make any trouble for your mommy, no. .”

Sleep would have resembled a soothing death without these pains and parasitic dreams. Over time, Leah had honestly come to believe in visiting spirits. And never more so than in the floating cities of dream. A business woman suffers more than other women from the idleness of solitude, and there was nothing her lapdogs could do to help that. Waves of images from her youth in Rapstown came back to her in fits and starts, lashing her memory. Amid a lowly breed of people destined for the dirt and the barn, she had rebelled, desperate to one day be like the ladies who came down from the city to do charity work, whether by spending sleepless nights studying books loaned by a sympathetic pastor or giving lessons to the young educated girls to have access to their drawing rooms. Her first ambition, barely pubescent, was learning to play the piano. The rich farmers proudly furnished their ranches with that enchanted sideboard. And the pastor was pleased to have at his disposition a wise young woman to put back to liturgical use a small portable organ donated by the congregation.

Asleep in an instant, her consciousness asymmetric as her heartbeat, the eldest of the Fox sisters suddenly had the feeling of a great pillaging of the well-ordered cabinets of memory. The images of her life were merging, absurdly and without correlation, reducing a great ocean of light to a desire to urinate or twisting one into the other, like a marshmallow pastry, the faces of the dead and those of the living. She herself was burning, a witch from another century, on a stake where each flame represented a day of her life. “You’re bringing out dangerous forces,” an old man wearing a compass and sextant breathed in her face, while tearing out the flesh of her neck in fistfuls that, thrown in the air, were flying with the cries of a nightjar. How to escape the morgue of dreams? Heads and limbs, parts of cadavers rising up from an autopsy table encircled her in a burlesque sarabande of suicides, drowned persons, and assassins. Dressed in animal skins, her Welsh ancestors were now flocking to steal her things right out from under the old spinster. Do millennia have the same value as a single instant in the other world? A scarlet parrot, sprung from one of her ears, chased the ghosts away with blows of its beak and then the fiendish bird perched on her shoulder, deafening her endlessly with “ Mens agitat molem .” Even dead, she thought she could hear herself thinking, she would have had to give birth before she could begin to comprehend such a phenomenon.

But these vapors vanished. Revived from the grave, mind in tatters, Leah Underhill let out a low groan that frightened her little dogs. She raised herself up to sitting, a little more certain of being safe after each tick of a pendulum clock hanging on the wall. Soon on her feet, she stumbled over to the bay window, hands on her hips. The snow was redrawing the ribs and shoulders of the Brooklyn Bridge. One could barely make out the hills on the other side of the strait, and the islands at the mouth had receded into darkness. Woken up badly, she rubbed her scalp at length as if delousing herself of her dream, then grabbed a silver bell sitting on a pedestal table.

Impatient, ringing it several times, she admitted that it was useless to doze off in the middle of the day, irritated by a hissing sound in her left ear and even more by her inevitable lateness now to the Spiritualist Circle in Union Square where under her presidency they were receiving the pacifist Colonel Henry Steel Olcott and Mr. William Quan Judge, both founding members of the Theosophical Society. Although their driving force, a Mrs. Helena Blavatsky, also made claims about her mediumship, the two of them hunted in different forests, so to speak. And good for them! It was clear that the spiritualist cause, rather than letting itself be overtaken, should display a healthy ecumenism.

Finally appeased, Leah saw her Virginian maid coming toward her contrite, curlers on her old head.

“I could have died a hundred times over,” she let out in a falsely serene tone.

“But Madam, you had given me the afternoon off. .”

“Even if it were three days, or an entire month! You must still be there when I ring!”

In front of the red dye-job and googly eyes of her maid, she suddenly remembered the scarlet parrot in her nightmare and froze, suspicious.

“ Mens agitat molem! ” she exclaimed. “ Mens agitat molem? What on earth could that mean. .”

A part from the blizzard baptized the “Great White Hurricane,” which paralyzed the northern United States and Canada for several days in mid-March under an enormous sheet of ice, fifty-inch snowfalls, hundreds of victims, and tons of iced-over bridges and railways, the journalists of the New-York Tribune had nothing exciting to sink their teeth into. That was according to old Oilstone — his editorial staff’s friendly nickname for him since he’d gone completely bald — who was stuffing himself with cold cuts at Katz’s Delicatessen, a new bistro on the Lower East Side, when he thought he spotted a familiar chin wavering behind the head of a beer tycoon. In his line of work, one ended up being able to recognize any sort of celebrity under the disguises of time. The use of photography in the press had accustomed his eye to transformations: one had to be able to recall the portrait of a beautiful woman who went off her rocker. This puffy old broad, bags under her eyes, a mop of hair like crow’s wings: it was definitely one of the Fox sisters. He had interviewed them during the time of the Barnum Museum. Aside from Mother Underhill, female pope of those devoted to the old school of knocking tables now become a sort of New York institution, the Fox sisters and how many legs they had between them had been forgotten. Novelty, that was the sole watchword in New York. One had to be on the train, a fashion dandy, up-to-date. Old Oilstone, who did not lack for a nose and knew by heart the extent of the public’s intrigue, didn’t have to think too hard to figure out how to take advantage of this revenant. It was an ordinary expedient of the journalist in calm times to make use of a fallen glory, who was sipping her own bile, in order to fill the newspaper plate under the disgusted but complacent eye of the column editor. Scandal always pays, failing a prodigy. One can always turn to the past, provided it’s to stir things up.

The old journalist kindly offered Margaret another drink, which for an instant made her think he had taken her for a prostitute.

“Wouldn’t you be Kate Fox, or rather her sister?” he whispered with a feigned enthusiasm.

Being nearly recognized would have almost flattered her, if the mirror facing her hadn’t been reflecting the mask of a shipwreck. She accepted without protest to answer some questions, letting all the bitterness of her last years rise back up to her lips. Taken into the game in her inebriation, she spared no detail for old Oilstone, who broke his pencil on his notepad several times.

“Modern spiritualism, as they call it, well I’ll tell you a bit of history from its very foundation. At first, when the whole business began, Katie and me, we were just kids and our damned older sister, already an old woman, played us. As for our mother, she was a fool, a fanatic, if I may say so myself. But our mother had an honest heart and believed in these things. Leah, though, that’s a different story. She prostituted us in exhibitions without any scruples. And all the proceeds, they went straight into her pocket. .”