Rochester Knockings (15 page)

At that moment, more than ever, with one hand on his heart, John Humphrey Noyes must have thought about the humanity, pure in blood and soul, that his community had the mission to create, by
passionate attraction,
beyond the abominable sacrament of marriage. Her glorious anatomy, exempt from the tortures of procreation, reminded him painfully of his former wife, with a body deformed by successive aborted pregnancies.

But there was in this improvised baptism an intolerable bacchanalian release. With the title of spiritual guide, he severely inquired about the disorder caused by the intruder, then summoned her into the reflection room. After these water games, dressed now in a short, sleeveless frock furnished by the laundry women, Pearl, her eyelids heavy, had to face a curious interrogation of a paternal firmness, close to a sermon. The man reminded her of the reverend with his austere bearing, his grave voice, and
thin face with strong jaws poorly concealed beneath a beard. But John Humphrey Noyes took on a whole other tone when it came to the question of the Celestial Free Spirit and Universal Love, of the sanctity of work and voluntary confession. There was in his eyes then a great persuasive sweetness. Pearl, helpless, accepted the protection and the lessons of the mentor.

That is how she became his primary companion in bed before agreeing, as was customary at Oneida, on a weekly change of partners. A recruit by chance or by fate, her days were devoted in part to picking fruit, weeding the garden, or in making preserves, and in part in graduated book study. A devoted child of God, she shared by privilege the enlightened appetite of the oldest pioneers of this brotherhood of complex marriage, who initiated her at length in the technique of sexual continence—while the eldest women were in charge of educating novices in the matter with a maternal patience. To prevent unwanted pregnancies and to increase female orgasm, the officiants were forced to master the act, here there was no question of abstinence like in numerous other competing sects, but of dry perpetual copulation: each member of Oneida, once his or her share of tasks were completed, indulged with modest joy in the simultaneous sharing of carnal love and property. Spiritual freedom and contraception being inseparable, the community never ceased to expand by the arrival of new followers rather than by the rare selective births.

The Edenic dream of the austere father Noyes, derived in part by his reading of an imaginative French philosopher and the discovery of Robert Owen's cooperative societies, floated paradoxically over these heads who had forgotten nothing of the Puritan propriety but an evangelical permission that delivered them from
the miasmas and necrosis of sin. Hymns and canticles were sung on all occasions. At night, at evensong, the most beautiful voices raised toward the stars:

               
Let us go, brothers, go

               
To the Eden of heart-love

               
Where the fruits of life grow

               
And no death e
'
er can part love

What Pearl had felt during those long months of the abdication of her integrity resulting from her rash revolt was unlike anything she could imagine. To give up a resolute virginity in a graceful commerce of skin had annihilated in her once and for all that constriction in her virtuous reticences, and all those duplicities of public morality that eventually paralyze bodies and souls. Subject to the Family and its discipline, Pearl nearly forgot about the world—and her father even more. Had she ever had another permanent home, all-powerful and of a tenderness as transgressive as it was strangely respectful?

But this place, where the quest for perfection took unusual paths, had its setbacks that in the end became intolerable to her. Noyes and his council of elders summoned the tribe of God's children two or three times a week, disturbing it from its generous instincts for inquisitorial meetings of mutual criticism. Under the big trees on beautiful days, or in the only stone building—a vast warehouse that in addition to storing grain and fodder was a place of rejoicing, and in other seasons a space for meditation and meals—they stood in silence waiting the call of their name before the council of Perfect Ones. It was everyone's duty to point out
each person's lacks and crimes, his most intimate failings. These sessions of
criticism,
according to the expression used, were intended to be purgative, cleansing one of his pride and selfishness by the sheer force of mutual love and in the apprehension of divine truth. Called to the tribunal in session, in the guise of pardoning, the collective sharing of faults, Pearl was persistently vilified by a majority of female accusers: they accused her of coquetry, reproached her too long hair, her repeated offenses in bewitching the males, her casualness in the children's education, her lack of enthusiasm for household chores. The Perfect Ones nodded meekly. In order to satisfy the biblical communism instituted at Oneida—and to appease the umbrage of the offended women—they would without fail choose her time after time to serve as surrogate mother.

When she started to miss her White Beauty, sold by the community leaders in compensation for their hospitality to neighboring farmers, who never missed a chance to trade with their brood of Christian mongrels, Pearl knew she didn't belong with them any longer. The hymns at night around the large bonfire saddened her with the memory of her orderly life in Hydesville. But there was no question of her going back.

Every night on beautiful days, the Perfect Ones intoned their hymn under the stars.

               
Let's go, brothers, let's go!

               
Soon the true love will live

               
In peace and joy forever

It was through the woods that she left Oneida one night in the middle of evensong without waiting for dawn—her hair short,
wearing the clothes of her poor sisters paid for in
coitus reservatus,
and more impoverished than when she arrived, but with, throbbing, deep inside her, the exquisite violence of freedom.

V.

Like Galloping Carriage Horses

T
wo strong teams of horses were quietly lined up behind Charlene Obo's cabriolet in front of the Central Avenue house. The Fox family and its entourage were getting ready to leave after a rehearsal nervously led by Leah under the expert eye of the actress. In the main room, which was transformed into a theater dressing room, she was bullying her two young sisters in the middle of piles of clothes and sewing notions.

“Look at me with that oafish face of yours!” she exclaimed under the nose of their exhausted and worried mother. “You'll never be anything but little peasants . . .”

She pinned ribbons to collars, tightened waists, removed ridiculous fake jewelry.

“And you, Mother,” she added in a categorical tone, “you can keep that brooch and necklace on. We will not be seeing you on stage . . .”

“But I would have really liked all the same to say a word . . .”

“With your accent and your royal magus naïveté? You must be joking. Our enemies would turn away in derision . . .”

“Your daughter is certainly right,” Isaac Post allowed himself to say, with his wife's consent. “It's first and foremost about convincing these people, and believe me that in this good city of Rochester, the unbelievers can be fierce . . .”

Discreetly facing a window, his enormous body folded in thirds on the piano bench, George Willets reacted fierily:

“But there will also be a crowd of people committed to your cause! Those of our church in particular, you know well that our Quaker friends are devoted to you! And the Mormons whose going astray I cannot agree with. And Adventists! I would bet that the marvelous Ellen White will be in the room . . .”

“You read the newspaper?” Amy Post was alarmed.

“The
Rochester Herald
is nothing but a sanctuary for pathological conservatives!” quipped Charlene Obo. “Tomorrow we will have a panegyric in the
New-York Tribune
!”

Being the professional entertainer, the young woman rushed their departure for Corinthian Hall. One never faces the public without having first inspected the stage and regained one's breath and color backstage. Especially since this was a premier!, and with novices! As for her, Charlene Obo no longer doubted the amazing gifts of the Fox sisters. She had participated with a poignant joy in a performance of retrospective divination: all of her wishes had been granted. Her twin sister Jane, dead of typhus at seventeen, had responded mercifully through the innocent mind of Kate. In the other world, her twin was keeping watch over her, she couldn't doubt it any longer after so many years of horrific nightmares where the same red and black gnomes were incessantly tearing her half apart, an arm, a leg, an eye, and that unspeakable bloody part in her belly. Thanks to her friend Leah, thanks to the singular powers of Kate and Margaret, she had been delivered from these
dwarfs she'd so long identified with theater boxes and orchestras, while she no longer knew, in her confusion, who was acting on stage beneath the rafters, her twin sister or herself, whether Jane or Charlene Obo.

“The horses are stamping their hooves!” she finally cried out on the porch. “They sense our impatience . . .”

The three cars filed through the wide avenues of the city center. On a corner seat in the second coach, forehead against the glass, Kate isolated herself from the talkative agitation that surrounded her. This adventure was taking an ominous turn. Disguised as a model young girl, she had the feeling of being driven to the gallows in the old days like that class of English schoolgirls accused of petty larceny. Across from her, Mother had the stunned face of a large freshwater fish, pale and purplish, which seemed to be coming off and falling at her feet. Kate was astonished at how removed she felt at that moment, those near her unexpectedly revealing their secret aquatic natures inside the passenger compartment, a sort of aquarium of sloshing water. An inappropriate thought made her smile: maybe there were spirits from the other world above baiting the fish down here with invisible lines . . .

Outside, a fine rain illuminated the gray asphalt roads that alternated with the paved esplanades. The gas lamplighters began their rounds, from one sidewalk to the other, and sequined halos followed their quiet steps. Department stores had just closed their doors on the nose of indecisive flâneurs. A number of shadow puppets filed by in front of the backlight of shop windows—clerks, beggars, hawkers, families, prostitutes—swept away each moment by the teams of horses' manes. Kate scrutinized these shooting stars and felt a sense of displacement. Everything was going too fast, nothing resembled yesterday. The adults around
her all wanted to play a game of cat and ghost. They all had a lot of victims on their conscience. Who is ever able to swear that he is not responsible for the suicide of one, the fatal illness of another? Kate was quite certain of her own responsibility in the death of her little brother. She had clearly noticed his lack of appetite and burning cheeks during his first sleep. She should have helped him eat and held him tight against her each night to absorb his fever. But death is unexpected like every other moment down here below. In his final delirium, Abbey was giving her defensive smiles, stammering long words, while pointing with a frightened finger at a tiny crack in the wall. A child knows everything because his fear is not of any world.

Kate looked over at the sleeping expression on her mother's face. The jolting of the carriage shook her cheeks and tufts of her white hair. An old woman filled with dreams while facing a precipice, that was the excruciating feeling each second had for her. What differentiated the two, really, the living and the dead? She rested her forehead on the glass, eyes open, sensitive to how the vibrations changed her view of objects, themselves become shaky, undecided. Among all those shadows scattering in all directions, how many were wandering spirits or corpses reanimated by a magician's breath? To help her sleep as much as to complete her education, Leah had on many nights told, with a witchy pout, stories of the living dead and dark prophecies drawn from English authors, such as the capricious Horace Walpole who loved to wear a wooden necktie, Ann Radcliffe in her fatal castle, Mary Shelley's seam-riddled monster, or of a certain Polidori, so frightfully pale. Whispering at her bedside, eyes wide and teeth sharp, her older sister would lean in to say: “At the side of the bloodless beauty the lord was thirsty for fresh blood.” While
enriching her vocabulary somewhat, she was undoubtedly trying to maintain in her, through fright, the black fire of what was called Modern Spiritualism . . .

Kate listened to the hooves of the three carriages thunder across the stony ground; she thought she saw women's heads flying in the middle of a dance of knives. When Leah would narrate these selected horrors to her, she made a habit of reciting nonsensical counter-spells from the foot of her bed, to keep her from dying of fright:

               
I give my elephant

               
Against its weight in ladybugs

               
Oh, what happiness! what happiness!

Huddled against the carriage door, she wasn't far from using the same strategy to exorcise her anguish at the approach of their destination. They were about to be released to the tigers, she and her sister. Oh Maggie, Maggie let's find a magic formula fast to escape them!