Rochester Knockings (26 page)

Estelle had been a young woman of the Southern aristocracy, daughter of a Tennessee plantation owner, a man with opinioned ideas who employed a good thousand slaves flanked by a militia that was under his thumb. She had fled her town and family after being forced to attend the public hanging of a runaway slave that she had seen fit to help. Cursing any affiliation with them, Estelle reached New York by railway where Mrs. McCords, a relegated parent, received her without too much grumbling. Through the involvement of the latter, an educated woman who, in addition to her good company, served as his private secretary, the financier was one day put in the presence of Estelle. He was immediately smitten to the point of reforming all his old ideas for her and investing considerable sums in the anti-slavery struggle. It was a few months before the default election of Jefferson Finis Davis as
president of the Confederacy. The battle of Fort Sumter hadn't yet taken place, but with Lincoln surrounded in Washington, the outrage did not weaken after the hanging of John Brown, the radical abolitionist hero who led his own army, ten men strong, again the federal arsenal of Harpers Ferry in Virginia.

In the context of dislocation from clan and family ties that augured dark days, the marriage of Estelle and the financier undoubtedly participated in the social upheaval underway. But neither the ostracized young wife nor Charles Livermore lived those hours on the planet any differently than Adam and Eve. Although he was her senior by more than twenty years, Estelle still found herself loving him with an ever-increasing amazement. Nobody in the world could have shown her such a tender, soothing, and sensual attention. In the face of this ever-present sun, the many treasures of seduction that he lavished on her in the name of attraction had, in contrast, the pallor of a moon. Always available despite the ups and downs of the profession of international trader, Livermore loved Estelle like an absolute, without intelligible comparison. Everything that was not her had almost no value, his own life included. The exacerbated passion of love took on an almost quasi-cannibalistic aspect in him—covering her with kisses, he had to restrain himself from nearly devouring his wife. The businessman gave the impression of being present everywhere around her; the better to adore her, he would certainly have abandoned his fortune in exchange for being able to be ubiquitous. At the mansion, there was alarm at his metamorphosis into a tribe of gallant ogres. Joyful but languid, Estelle lost her strength. The more she abandoned herself to the devouring love of her husband, the less she offered resistance to the seasonal illnesses and other maladies. She took to bed one icy and snowy
day. The doctors diagnosed a galloping consumption. She died without lament after having called the staff of the mansion to her bedside to declare solemnly that no human being would ever be loved like her.

Livermore had a kind of igloo built on a hill in the immense park, and until snowmelt kept vigil night and day over the dead woman wrapped in an ermine cloak. He had a grave dug in the same spot in the park, and built on top of it a tall chapel of white marble, an altar window on either side, an alabaster angel, and a statue of John Calvin. In his outfit typical of the Renaissance era, Calvin had Livermore's exact traits, at least his profile looking at the other figure. Kate, who'd been led here on her second day by the Jamaican with the cockney accent, assimilated all at once the angel that was Estelle. This image of beauty offered by the rock's durable phosphorescence left her confused, in an enigmatic silence. Nothing came to her anymore from the world nearby. No one had the thought to inform her of the assassination of President Lincoln, let alone the recent crimes in Estelle's hometown of an organization of former Confederate soldiers with a name like a Mongolian tribe. Kate felt the atmosphere of places with a pathological acuity; decidedly nothing of her interlocutors' mental states escaped her. She could endure the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian in front of the tree flayed by lightning or of Saint Stephen finding some frog stoned by a scamp. Kate refrained from this sensitivity in isolation; she turned by predilection to places free of any influence and to beings manifesting a healthy indolence, like the cook or the gardener, who was dumb but not deaf. Attentive to her desires, and perhaps to her thoughts, he helped the young woman be less of a foreigner in this place devoted to the worship of a dead woman.

Charles Livermore, for his part, divided himself into two mental planes, his body coming and going. The Wall Street financier, handicapped in no way in his abstract operations, would fall back into a great melancholy upon returning to the mansion, ready for any of the mantic arts to touch the illusion of a relic. Lost in a Kabbalah of signs, his meeting with Kate Fox, one year after losing Estelle, had seemed to him a good omen. This young woman had given him the look from the beyond. He sought out mediums in vain in New York, Boston, or Rochester: all betrayed a prosaicism and even a vulgarity of the soul incompatible with his needs. The charlatans among them, easily visible, boasted the gifts both of mediumship and hypnotism, a Janus with a twisted neck. The authentic psychics, he'd figured out over time, were only passive intercessors, simple transmission belts; many were recruited from the washers of corpses or uneducated cowboys, assuredly the ones most apt at annihilating consciousness and will in themselves. It was, however, impossible for him to conceive of a communication with the world beyond via an unbalanced person, or some crook or ecstatic moron. Aside from her reputation, Kate had immediately attracted him by her quality of presence, a childlike simplicity and a graceful charm so close to the core of his memory of Estelle. Livermore had a pretty keen awareness of her nervous condition, but her melancholy was a refuge for him and it mattered little to him that insane asylums these days were teeming more with spiritualists than syphilitics.

For years, two or three nights a week, in the room where Estelle had passed away, séances were perpetuated, all doors and windows closed. In a trance state, before a little pedestal table clearly in view of her host, Kate was free to proceed with any kind of invocation, to write with her bare hand or through a rolling
planchette. On the forty-third séance, between the four-poster bed and an armoire mirror that reflected the motionless flame of a single candle, Livermore perceived a halo to which he could not give a name. The phenomenon amplified in the sessions that followed, without any sound. When the first knocks were heard, he no longer doubted the success of the experiment, but in his thirst for certainty, he imposed all sorts of precautions and controls on Kate Fox, binding her wrists and even holding her bare feet in his palms. When the knocks didn't stop, wild with the darkest happiness, Charles Livermore wanted to add evidence to his certainty and on a few nights invited over unimpeachable witnesses, authorities such as Professor Mapes of the National Academy or the jurisconsult Edmonds, who had eventually gone along with the late Robert Hare of the University of Pennsylvania, fighting on the side of the Fox sisters after having long constituted an inquisitorial tribunal persecuting the new heresy. By different operating strategies, Professor Mapes was able to anticipate or thwart all the usual ruses of illusionists and other falsifiers. Kate Fox was one of the very rare mediums with physical effects never caught in the act of deception. The energies set in motion in her presence could never be assigned to any artifice, unless the whole thing was faked. Satisfied and confident after all the tests and audits—hands isolated in an aquarium, zinc separator plates, levers arranged on a spiral scale with a mobile indicator to measure the forces in action—Livermore asked Kate to intercede with the spirit of Benjamin Franklin, whom he had worshipped from a young age. That one of the founding fathers of the United States agreed to appear in Estelle's company had been a transcendent confirmation for him, more credible than all the physical evidence, of the substantial incarnation of his late wife. Estelle never
ceased to write with the lead pencil held in Kate's left hand, and what she recounted, her style and written form, brought back so well the happy life of yesteryear, with warmth and in the smallest details, that Livermore soon found himself overcome beyond any consolation. That he was transitorily in love with Kate, through whom the voice and appearance of Estelle kept manifesting, in no way contradicted his passion for the marble angel. The materializations followed one another with ever more influence, and the weak Kate, permanently besieged by a monstrous energy, disintegrated little by little like a straw mannequin between two burning lenses.

On her three hundred eighty-eighth apparition, Estelle announced that it would be her final one, that the hour of deliverance had come for her. Kate must have fainted at the end of the session. She woke up in a nightshirt, in her room on the pavilion, at the dawn of the new day, and realized that she had been entirely undressed.

Charles Livermore, become once again the respectable man she had known in town, left to her the choice between a life of leisure and study next to him, or freedom. Knowing that her mental and physical health were hanging only by a thread, Kate bade him farewell before visiting one last time the angel of the chapel. As a sign of gratitude, in order that the cause of spiritualism might progress, the Wall Street banker offered to her, whom he considered his savior, a stay in England and the means to pursue her investigations for some time. In a long letter vibrant with praises and saturated with exhortations, he recommended in advance Kate Fox to his correspondent Benjamin Coleman, freemason and fervent follower of what was now referred to overseas under the
name of spiritism, imposed by the very scrupulous Allan Kardec, coauthor with the spirits themselves of the
Book of Spirits.

Sitting in his upstairs office with large bay windows overlooking the entrance to the park, the banker reread his letter with the mild recoiling one always feels in front of the written expression of a well-kept secret:

“Miss Fox is incontestably the most marvelous medium alive. I received so much more from her during these grim years of grief than I can say, in my own house, to the point of feeling indebted to her. It's now to you, my faithful companion, that I entrust her. Above all that you will take good care of her while she is away from her family. At thirty-five years of age, Kate still has the heart and spontaneity of a child; she feels the particular atmospheres of each individual so strongly that she can become excessively nervous and apparently capricious. Take measure quickly of her natural genius and learn well how to tame her, it's on her esteem and trust in you that her extraordinary receptivity to other dimensions will depend . . .”

At the moment of sealing the letter, Livermore saw down below, leaving the chapel, Kate's silhouette headed into the tall trees of the park, and felt, without wanting to explain it to himself, a sharp twinge of sorrow.

III.

The Green Fairy and the Murderer

S
low waves of snow fell obliquely onto Floss Avenue. Margaret was immobilized among other passersby in front of the windows of the J & M Nicols department store, where frightening mannequins with human figures dressed in manufactured clothes had just been installed, immediately evoking the materializations of the so-called medium William Mac Orpheus, barker at Barnum's Great Circus Museum and Menagerie, which had pitched its tents for a few days in Rochester. Such a novelty brought forth the gloomy memory of a beautiful dead woman embalmed with an injection of vitriol and nitric acid, whom Margaret had had to work to make speak.

Collar gripped tight against the cold, she made her way close to the buildings' façades to avoid the splashes of mud from the carts and carriages. Her return to Rochester, in deep winter, had the effect of a private cataclysm on her. She had lived a fairy tale in this city in her youth; here she and Katie had known a kind of glory under the yoke of their older sister. Fortune, even managed by a third party, made everything back then obvious and right. Wasn't it Mister Splitfoot who had encouraged them to bring the
good word to town? The spirits loved fashionable furniture, high wood-paneled ceilings and heavy drapes. In their former home on Central Avenue, Margaret had long believed in these stories of communication with the afterlife. Besides, the tables really were tipping, there was no doubt about it. And when she forgot her failures and resentment, certain phenomena still occasionally occurred. But a part of her had been consumed in the dreary fire of the years. Her living forces devoured all along by a public of vampires, she turned sometimes, more and more often, to various contrivances, expertly calculated ruses. The conjuror's tricks of this Mac Orpheus that she could have seen at the Barnum circus were without mystery for her now. Moreover, spiritualism was no longer what it had been since the mass arrival of spirits with the flow of new Catholic immigrants. Margaret understood nothing of all these spiritual hierarchies nor of the purgative effects of reincarnation on the soul in transit to the divine light. From what she could tell, except for the women suffering seizures and a few authentic necromancers in a pact with obscure powers, everyone was faking and mystifying in that domain.

But she had to live somehow, and despite everything she still kept a little of the Fox sisters' prestige in the shadow of Leah Underhill, now become high priestess of a religion of five or six million converts. Her own immortal soul she continued to sell off for a few dollars' representation. Margaret shrugged before a blind beggar crouched under an awning who, dark glasses on his forehead, was counting his money. She turned onto a dark narrow street where, like feathers from a plucked chicken, thick flakes flew in every direction. The shop sign of the Good Apostle creaked in the wind, adorned with a stalactite beard. She pushed open the yellow-paned door and was comforted by the stove's
warmth. Thankfully, one could have the green fairy in the wet states. Nose in her glass, the absinthe of dubious quality and the cheapest in the house, a woman no longer has a reputation; it made no difference to drop her guard alongside the sailors and the millers. She poured only a thin stream of water on her slotted spoon and the sugar never entirely melted. At her third or fourth absinthe, its color like that of zinc sulfate, she felt better, finally able to examine the world. There behind the counter was John, the cafe owner, distiller, and brewer behind the scenes, among his bottles, glasses, and barrels, holding forth with a hymn-singer and the driver of the next stagecoach to New York, ahead by a few drinks.