Rochester Knockings (30 page)

“I'm done with all that.”

“I understand, protect yourself, even faking with all one's might, it still brings out dangerous forces . . .”

“What!” Kate exclaimed. “You were pretending?”

“Everyone fakes it, what are you thinking, you can't always be inspired, and then there are nights when the spirits shun you, so what do you do, in front of an audience wanting knocks, levitation, and the whole shebang, you bluff, you know it well, even a stew sometimes boils over, though sometimes it falls on a gas burner. I don't know a single one of them, of those so-called mediums, who hasn't been caught one time or another with pockets full of tricks . . .”

Chin resting on her fists, Kate gazed at her older sister in a state of deep confusion, less because of her revelations, which entertained as much as scandalized her, than because of the mutations showing in her whole person. Her voice, her language, her
face had suffered ten years of strange insults. Shivering, Kate wondered what her life must have been like since the death of Elisha Kane.

“You're looking at me like a stranger,” declared Margaret. “I'm the same, don't you worry. I've just known some distress and adversity, like a lot of women back home. And Leah didn't help me . . . Would you happen to have anything else to drink?”

They didn't leave each other all night, remembering the fortune of the old days, the lost celebrations, and all the light ghosts of memory, handsome Lee in Rapstown, the children of Hydesville, Pequot, Lily Brown, and Harriet, the girl from the ranch where a slave was hung, and Pearl, their teacher.

“I crossed paths with her in Rochester,” said Margaret. “She became an influential woman, an activist in women's rights. She writes novels . . .”

“And her father, the reverend?”

“Dead and in hell, I hope. He deserves the hell of papists!”

The next day, when the twins were back, Margaret hugged and kissed them to the point of terrifying them, wept about all the children she wouldn't have, while laughing the whole time at herself and singing like an old pioneer:

               
O boys, we're goin' far to-night

               
Yeo-ho, yeo-ho, yeo-ho!

No doubt from the logic of opposites, she turned astonishingly quiet in the weeks that followed, absent by day and plunged at night into the study of religious works. Since she had stopped drinking and becoming angry at every mention of Leah, supreme usurper of the kingdom of ghosts, Kate thought that the distance
had calmed her back down. Maggie was resting in London from the extravagance of energies, spiritual insurrections, and conflicts of all kinds that were overflowing from the American cauldron.

Distraught, with no other desire than some support from beyond, she actually ran to churches and temples. Despite her dyed hair and the powder on her face, age had adulterated the comforting reflection that glances in the mirror used to return. Emptied of any
sentiment de soi
—that hot evanescent roundness that is perpetuated in a waking dream, a sort of inner sanctuary where one waits endlessly for who knows what—she wandered under a changing mask, by turns tragic or as indifferent as the London sky, from a nestled chapel in a dungeon at the church of St. Marylebone so similar to the churches in New York, to the St. Paul Cathedral, then to St. Clement Danes next to Covent Garden. This deserted splendor, under the shadow arches, between two directions of crowds during the divine offices, soothed her without having to determine the nature of the sect at work, be it Anglican, Methodist, or Presbyterian. The misery that circled the city, beyond the buildings and kept parks—in Whitechapel, in the East End, the area surrounding St. George, where weary prostitutes paraded among packs of grimy children, drunkards, and crippled seekers, in Limehouse or Lisson Grove, with its wide streams of human distress between the railways and channel gaps—seemed to her like an unknown, more ancestral species across the Atlantic, flourishing on its own cankers or as if moored to its own shipwreck.

From wandering to wandering, it was in the heart of London, at the end of Whitehall, in the City of Westminster, that she found her haven. The splendors of the abbey astonished her without emotion. Neither the tombs of a king and his queen behind
the altar, nor the heraldic banners of the Knights over the stalls caught more than a moment of her attention. But she came to a stop before a statue of the Virgin, under a big dome fanned with sculpted shields, in the center of the stone circle of apostles and saints.

For several days she returned to Lady Chapel, weary perhaps from a vain wonder, trudging to the old prison yards where the cathedral must have been built, next to the preserved oratory of the former Catholic church adjoining a building probably used as a presbytery. Margaret entered the sanctuary feeling a mixture of oppression and deliverance. The burning bush of candles and the blue smoke from the censers at the foot of an effigy of the Immaculate Conception along with the shadow cast by a large crucifix of the dead Christ, sides pierced, conjured for her in some ways the arrangement of a medium's cabinet. She remained so long in front of the Virgin, haggard, with an imploring look, that a priest sitting in prayer in the shadows of a recess began to worry about her. The apparition came over and leaned down to her, thin in her black dress with red piping and buttons.

“You need help, we have all been in sorrow; are you Catholic?”

Those words of this clergyman, encountered by chance in the remains of a church, shattered Margaret who, after a long interview and a complete confession, feverishly accepted conversion. The influence of the priest over her was immediate and without reservation. She learned later, at the moment of the sacraments of baptism along with the company of other converts, that he was the Archbishop of Westminster, the Cardinal Henry Manning, one of the most influential Catholic theologians, fully committed to John Wesley's idea of social justice. Manning himself had converted after a heretic past and, on one finger along with the
episcopal ring, wore the ring of his young wife who had died shortly after their marriage. A secret necromancer in his own dreams, the inconsolable prelate perceptively understood the emotional challenges of the new doctrine. Margaret was for him an easy prey as well as a trophy: already won by the Virgin Mary, she was persuaded as by her husband before her of the highly terrifying register of damnation. Didn't everything in spiritualism fall into demonic practices? Captivated by the spells of the Catholic liturgy, but duly unbewitched, she felt better in the months that followed, in a convalescence with no pharmacopoeia other than holy water and the bread of angels.

Kate no longer recognized her sister. They had never discussed between themselves the perpetual virginity of Mary or the worship of the Eucharist. Even less in the participation of the unknowable being of the Trinity. The variety of vices and sins, with interior delight or conscious and voluntary transgression, had hardly been their concern up to now. Margaret returned home solemnly each night without swearing or trying to slake her thirst. Temperate and frugal, she considered all things from the point of view of grace. By nature generous, Kate provided for her happiness by offering her all the little things necessary for her asceticism. Since George's death, she used her modest portion of the inheritance without ever counting; but no income led slowly to collapse. The lawyer's old lessors and billers eventually objected to the widow's debts.

When it came time to turn in the keys to the house, proof of their misfortune, Margaret sold her jewelry and some dresses to help with the costs of moving. With the twins, her sister, and two carts of furniture, Mrs. Fox-Jencken went to settle in the East End. School being mandatory only up to the age of ten, a recent
age limit due to recruitment in the factories or the coal mines, she devoted herself to providing the secondary education of her sons, mixing disciplines, teaching the erroneous and the apodictic in the same way, the infestation of evil spirits and some notions of algebra. Fortunately, under the impulse of Maggie who, divided between ecstasy and sagacity, had little by little gone back to drinking, the twins were able to attend courses free of charge in a Catholic institution. At no point in their poverty, deprivation, and eventual destitution, did Kate consider the idea of going to complain to her in-laws, who associated meanness with propriety, or to reclaim her fame on a music hall stage, numerous in London, as a historical medium of quality.

When Maggie, worn out by homesickness and the uncertainty of her own vocation, took the boat back to New York, Kate found herself so distraught that she obediently began swallowing all the remains of the bottles left by her sister. This she did between visits to the immense park of Kensal Cemetery, bordering Notting Hill, where the Jencken family mausoleum, shaped like an ancient temple, stood among mourners and the statues of archangels. Facing her husband's tomb, Kate noticed one day an old solitary tombstone, strewn with daisies, the family name indecipherable, but whose epitaph was still clear:

               
I'd rather hear something to make me laugh

The exclamation from the grave rang mockingly in her. Thinking of her twins, she quickly fled the cemetery and returned with a decided step to her neighborhood on the East End, between the gate and the river.

VII.

Mens agitat molem

N
ew York was smoking like a thousand locomotives under the falling snow. Mills and factories, numerous construction sites where pyramids of brick and scrap iron were being erected—with, as its emblem at the mouth of the Hudson, the immense framework of the future Statue of Liberty on its granite fortification—and likewise the mouths of the metro and the sewer, the conical or terraced roofs, and ferry boats crisscrossing the river and the strait, were all sending up fat clouds of vapor and gray-black plumes. These traveled in a rolling boil denser than a mountain fog toward the plaster casts of the sky, from which the solstice snow seemed to crumble and fall in discontinuous waves.

It was three o'clock in the afternoon on a day that had not quite fully risen and was already starting to wane when, both arms leaning against the back of a chair facing the windows—on the corner of South Street Seaport and with a view of the new Brooklyn Bridge, the dock harbors and fluvial escape toward Governors Island—Leah Underhill wondered humorlessly if her health troubles and annoyances would grant her a reprieve from the end of year festivities. At her age, one could still overcome
the small warning signs of passing time, the creaky wheels of age were still oiled well, provided that one was not constantly worrying about various troubles. “They lose it that do buy it with much care,” she'd heard the other night at the Standard Theatre, at the premiere of
The Merchant of Venice
. And she estimated she'd inherited the bulk, and in tons, of worries, during a life devoted to the Spiritualist cause with its varied fortunes and a constant adversity from the side of barkers, hypnotists, jugglers, snake oil salesmen, and other disloyal competitors marching off in packed rows to distort the message of spirits. They were organized throughout the United States, without ever even thinking of inviting her, these conferences of mediums under big tops, in churches, and community halls. George P. Colby, somewhere in Florida, proclaimed himself prophet of Spiritualism
urbi et orbi.
The Anglican priest William Stainton Moses, another champion of deep trance, claimed to transcribe in shamanic dictation the living conditions in the afterlife. Emma Hardinge Britten claimed to understand in detail the works and miracles the disembodied used to answer us. And what about that half-wit Eusapia Paladino, going out with her sleeves all twisted from her
perispirit,
or of that stuck-up thing Frickie Wonder, who knew so well how to use her breasts and hips to captivate the old geezers of the universities while spouting the worst philosophy for girls, or still yet, to top all this bluffing off, that joker William Mac Orpheus, now one of the star attractions in the new Barnum three-ring circus! The inventory of all this deception and prevarication would have required an almanac. Baffling enough to make her lose her Latin! Leah felt much too old and betrayed to sort the wheat from the chaff. And it mattered little to her whether she was in good or bad faith, since she alone knew how to assemble the flags and drums. Modern
Spiritualism was her exclusive invention, no one could contest it, and certainly not these poor rookies who had benefitted from the enterprise as apathetic and capricious associates. Like John the Baptist, she had given the impetus to a new religion with no messiah or legislator, expanded now all over the world, with crowds of proselytes more or less devoted. Thanks to her, all the dead were like Lazarus, ready to answer as present. There was no longer that plague wall between the world of the living and that of spirits. She had even contributed to the liberation of women, those slaves, white or black, by offering them a spiritual forum impregnable to most men, so stupidly full of themselves with their brute force.

But her pain was mitigated by the spectacle of the snow. Without a doubt it was the virtue of angels, this cottony and indistinct slowness that leisurely dresses the soul. But Leah still had one more demon in her head. In addition to a share of the Underhill fortune, her investments in the railroad had earned her enough to languish for several lifetimes in New York—if it occurred to God to reward her troubles—without having to give conferences on the Doctrine any more. She was abandoning without regret the emptiness of precepts and systems to the teachers of the other world. From spiritualism to spiritism, there was just one syllable missing, cheerfully replaced by the “third revelation of God.”