Rochester Knockings (24 page)

His equalizing homily ended with an ovation when he formulated once more his credo: “Right is of no sex—Truth is of no color—God is the father of us all, and we are all brethren!”

Jostled toward the exit by the crowd, Kate felt a previously unknown sensation of possibility. This pacifist leader couldn't be taken in by the agitation spreading across the country, revolts and strikes even in New York. Mr. Greeley, her benefactor, had explained it to her at great length: the Southern States were challenging the authority of the federal government; they were consequently threatening to break accords with the Union, more because of the economic ascendancy of the industrial North than for a simple matter of human rights, whereas the Union vaunted
the Constitution as a means to rein in this league of rich landowners, pro-slavery farmers, and illiterate pioneers endangering civil peace. There was a life possible in broad daylight, however, even in the peril of action, and this man who'd survived the worst yokes had come to demonstrate that to her without bragging or mystification. Above all, she felt the freshness of a wind on her cheeks and her neck, like the beating of sails on the bow of a ship. Life was not limited to being confined with the spirits of the dead, in the dark confusion of all those tables, those screens, those walls that she had to constantly probe and question to please the experienced. One could, for several hours or even longer, forget the hereafter, so close and so rustling with omens, for a here and now that was perilous but vast as hope.

At the end of John Street, deep in her thoughts and soon surprised to find herself lost, without even enough to pay for a cab, she watched the blue floats on the East River where the steamers' smokestacks were sending up plumes. Despite the brisk wind, she would go back to Sutton Place then by foot, where they were waiting for her for who knows what visitor at the home of the director of the
New-York Tribune,
even if it meant muddying her shoes and the skirts of her dress. Ever since being spared the public séances that often turned into a circus and the challenging consultations in the cabinet with rich neurasthenics, it seemed like she opened herself to a thousand exterior details that yesterday were ominous symbols, like the palpitation of the North Star in the blue of the sky, this cloud in the shape of a schooner figurehead, the play of leaves and birds in a maple tree. A large brunette woman pressing the paws of a fox stole against her mouth passed along the row houses. If it only took Kate a glance
to understand what drama she was living, she could free herself from it by humming briskly:

               
O carry me back to my home far away

               
All quiet along the Potomac tonight

               
To my one true love, she's as fair as the day

               
All quiet along the Potomac tonight

No sooner had she started off on foot toward Sutton Place than her name rang out from the opposite direction. The opulent Miss Helen was rushing as quickly as she could, arms in the air.

“Where on earth have you been? Ah, but let's go home quickly and change clothes. This is really not the time to be received . . .”

An hour later, still flanked by Miss Helen, who went discreetly to hide in the office, Kate was greeted in the second vestibule by Horace Greeley in a stiff collar and frock-coat. If the progress of his baldness, offset by enormous sideburns and a full beard of an immaculate whiteness, revealed the huge forehead a little more each year, his good smile kept a youthfulness intact. Kate let him embrace her and take her hands. Since the decline and recent death of Mr. Fox, who'd fallen into drunkenness after years apart from his family, Mr. Greeley had become the paragon to her of the fatherly figure, which he found somewhat amusing.

“Come in my dear, tonight we have some important guests . . .”

There were already thirteen or fifteen people of sprightly humor, women in evening gowns, one of them dressed as a tiger tamer, men of venerable appearance, and some younger men, swirling a glass in their hand. Solemn as a judge, the butler was filling flutes with authentic Champagne.

“My dears,” Greeley announced while turning toward this little world, “I would like to point out to the distracted or unaware the charming apparition of Miss Kate Fox, whom it would be inappropriate to present . . .”

“And her sisters?” blurted out a dandy in ruffles still holding his cane. “I thought they were Siamese . . .”

“So you don't know Leah Underhill, then?” exclaimed the wife of a Boston publisher. “Ever since her return from London, she only accepts the spirits of lords at her tipping table . . .”

As other conversations intersected, indifferent to their neighbor, the harsh words and fine taunts were hardly of consequence. The topic went from the English question to vice and religion, to the revival of ancient glories, to the truth of miracles.

Kate turned away, a smile on her lips, and pretended to examine the paintings, landscapes, illuminated portraits of the Catskill Mountains, and still-lives imported by Dutch settlers. On the fireplace mantel, in a brass frame, a daguerreotype protected in smoky glass drew her attention. One could make out the infinitely melancholy face of a young woman covered in white lace. The press baron saw Kate's cocked head and, suddenly nervous, forsook his guests.

“It's Jennie, my favorite daughter,” he said, approaching the frame. “She died of consumption like three of her younger sisters. I was hoping she would be safe once she reached the age of sixteen, but she died the day after her birthday.”

“She's not dead!” Kate exclaimed without thinking, in a voice that was just a breath.

The old man's glasses fogged up. He caught his breath and, pivoting slowly on his heels, playfully addressed the person
approaching, his hands crossed behind his back, leaning forward like a skater on the parquet floor.

“Ah, there you are! ‘The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty.' Wasn't it you who wrote that? Well then you cannot help but be understood by this child of light . . .”

The director of the
New-York Tribune
headed off toward other civilities, leaving Ralph Waldo Emerson to consider with an amused eye the woman who came over to be presented in a whirlwind and before whom he didn't know what to say. It was indeed one of the Fox sisters, those mad, gentle girls capable of apprehending in its own individuality the genius of a dead butterfly! The ashen face of his son, snatched from the world twenty years earlier by scarlet fever, superimposed itself onto that of the young girl. Memory, that's the eyes' daily bread!

Kate for her part was timid and unsteady on her feet under the attentive eyes of the man of letters, whom she had read, pencil in hand, under the advice of her mentor. “Every soul is a heavenly Venus for every other soul”—he'd thought of them, those hardly intelligible and so deeply moving words? Did he really imagine that there was a single and unique Oversoul in all the universe from which each creature received a reflection or a wound? He looked like a great hieratic bird with the beaked nose of a hornbill. Beyond a nice smile of abnegation, his silver eyes stared at her so profoundly to the point that the anodyne woman's self-awareness helplessly dissolved.

While the shouts of voices and laughter multiplied around them, a lady interrupted this silent
vis-à-vis.

“Mr. Emerson, you who are our Goethe, what credit do you accord to these stories about mediums?”

Kate didn't have time to hear the response. She watched the couple move away into the hubbub. Other famous figures, or those who enjoyed coming across as so, accosted her for a friendly conversation, a compliment, or a dig—but she appreciated not being the center of attention, just a low-level curiosity like that elegant man with an ivory cane or of this adventuress known for improvising her way, depending on the circumstance, as a medium, actress, or businesswoman and who was pressed close against a rich entrepreneur of the railroad and maritime industry nicknamed the Commodore. This woman presented herself frankly to Kate.

“I am Victoria Woodhull, my name will perhaps mean nothing to you. But I find it overwhelming to approach you. We are many in America who owe you an eternal gratitude. It's your example that we all follow on the path of spiritualism . . . Isn't that right, Cornelius . . .?” she added.

“Look who's coming in!” the entrepreneur cried out without listening, his arm around her waist.

A clamor arose in the rooms. The guests clapped their hands, moving toward the newcomer. Kate, motionless by the fireplace, recognized without real surprise the wavy mane of the Lion of Anacostia. Where else would an activist on tour like Frederick Douglass finish his day's tribune than at the home of the most influential reformist in New York? A lively exchange was heard where words like liberty, rights, and equality rang out.

Then, imagining herself forgotten, thinking of rejoining Miss Helen back in the office, another individual appeared as if engendered from a dream and addressed her in a flat voice.

“Kate, do you remember me?”

The young woman paled, brought back to some unplaceable time. But she pulled herself together, certain she did not know this stooped man with dull eyes and sickly skin, who seemed to have mustered a Herculean effort to approach her.

“No,” he said, “you do not remember me. I am Charles Livermore, New York financier. You have before you a desperate man. I need your help. You are my final hope . . .”

Cheers rang out around Frederick Douglass. The brilliant speech of the former slave drowned out the whispered confidences of the banker.

“Once you let the black man get upon his person the brass letter, U.S., let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket, there is no power on earth that can deny he has earned the right to citizenship . . .”

Kate promised whatever was wanted by the banker and escaped to the stairs, taken with the impression of imminent danger beyond anything she could dread in this world. “It's nothing, it's nothing,” she repeated to herself, subtly terrorized by the idea that something bad could have happened to Margaret. Entering the kitchen, she discovered with disbelief Miss Helen, seated on a bench, legs splayed, drinking a strong whiskey in front of the enormous stoves.

“Oh, I'm so happy!” Kate cried out from far enough away to allow her chaperone time to regain composure.

“And by what good fortune?” stammered Miss Helen, gathering up her skirts.

“I spoke with Emerson, imagine that!”

While the good woman showed her ignorance with a dignified silence, Kate went on to recite with pressing eloquence:

               
Far or forgot to me is near;

                    
Shadow and sunlight are the same;

               
The vanished gods to me appear;

                    
And one to me are shame and fame.

Part Three

New York

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

—William Butler Yeats

I.

Recent Disagreements

A
s a consequence of the election of Abraham Lincoln, who promised the abolition of slavery left in abeyance since the 1820 Missouri Compromise, South Carolina's secession precipitated a national divide in a matter of weeks. In New York as in Rochester, one watched with a sort of stupefied amazement the escalation of events that could only mean a general uprising was on the horizon.

No one had yet experienced the battle of Bull Run, in July 1861—three months after the overall benign confrontation at Fort Sumter at the origin of hostilities—but it was definitely war. Convinced of the superiority of the Loyalists and even more of the efficacy of industry at the Union's service, the brand new Republican President flanked by two young telegraphists launching his orders, firmly incited a staff of armed forces hardly familiar with such grand military maneuvers.

It all began with disappointment. In position after an exhausting night march, it was in front of the political and financial elite of Washington, come to watch on lawn chairs the announced defeat of the rebels, that the Yankee troops led by General Irwin
McDowell surrounded, not without panache, the area of Bull Run. But the skirmish at Blackburn's Ford improvised by senior officer James Longstreet quickly turned into a fiasco, with a hundred killed and more wounded. After some uncertain exchanges with swords drawn, the Confederate Generals Beauregard and Johnston, veterans of the Mexican War, supported by the Virginia brigade of Colonel Thomas J. Jackson, under the imperious command of Generalissimo Robert E. Lee, rushed in to defeat the enemy camps, tearing off the foot of an eighty-year old widow who couldn't leave her bed in the process. All of this happened over the course of a few hours around a hill and a stone bridge. Following this panicked start that had had the worst outcome, McDowell's undermined forces retreated to the outskirts of the capital, on the other side of the Potomac, leaving a crowd of prisoners behind. At the Executive Mansion in Washington, which had just missed falling into enemy hands in this first real battle, it was clear that the war was just beginning and would require important sacrifices in material and in men. The subject of riots in New York, a presidential decree soon launched the mobilization of half a million citizens. Hardly a year later, there were victims in the tens of thousands on both sides of the fluctuating line of the front.