Rochester Knockings (27 page)

“Laws,” he was saying, “there are too many of them, each governor wants his own, we've lost all common sense! I allow that we hang criminals, but look: in Boston, one law forbids playing banjo on the sidewalk, in Idaho, it is formally illegal to fish astride a giraffe, and in Tennessee, one doesn't have the right to lasso a fish . . .”

“I know all about it,” said the singer of canticles. “Where I come from, in North Carolina, it's illegal to sing off-key.”

A middle-aged man opened the door, as if pushed in by the snow, and shaking himself off, came up to the counter. He immediately ordered the best absinthe in the house. His sheepskin coat dripped as he beat a rigid, black, wide-brimmed hat with his palm. Margaret thought she recognized a visitor of the late Spiritualist Institute, or maybe a former guest of Leah's salon—back in the time when she was the very dignified Mrs. Fish-Fox! Who ever heard of such a creature. The olive-skinned man had heavy eyelids, smooth graying hair, and features as delicate as they were bruised, showing the exhausted relaxation of an asthenic reveler.
He lightly set his hat on the counter, then lifted his eyes toward the sparse population of the nightclub. Intoxicated, her head poorly attached, Margaret held her scrutinizing gaze. She had learned never to lower her eyes, which allows one,
presto digiti,
to divert the public's attention when juggling acts.

Intrigued, Lucian Nephtali picked up his hat and walked over to the slouched absinthe drinker, her neck leaning against the rippling marine background of a large mirror.

“We know each other,” he said without taking the time to introduce himself, “aren't you Leah?”

At the moment of pronouncing those words, approaching this creature without makeup, his error appeared flagrant, but how would he justify his interruption?

“Excuse me,” he said, “from far away you look a little like . . .”

“A person twenty years older than myself who is none other than my sister,” she replied in a breath before raising her hand and launching out in a voice pitched too high: “Bring me another one, John, for the love of God!”

“Two!” Lucian corrected while sitting down. “And of the better kind!”

Margaret looked at the intruder with amusement. She reconstituted in fragments the person, his social position, the people he associated with. It was always a point won to show, casually, the amplitude of her memory despite her psychological degradation.

“And what has become of Charlene and that dear Harry Maur?” she said after a brief moment of silence.

“Charlene lost her mind, you didn't know? It's odd, she was playing the role of Mrs. Mountchessington at the Ford Theatre in Washington, the night of Lincoln's assassination. She knew the murderer well. Maybe you remember, she had played
Macbeth
with
that lunatic John Wilkes Booth. That was anything but
My American Cousin.
Once his crime was committed, Booth jumped onto the stage, shouting, ‘So die the tyrants!,' it was like a Shakespearean intrusion on this bourgeois farce. ‘Birds of a feather gather no moss . . .' But all of that has nothing to do with it. Charlene was transferred to Athens, Ohio, shortly thereafter to a luxurious asylum that had just opened its doors. Whereas Harry . . .”

The cafe owner came to exchange glasses, a worried eye on his client. “I hope you'll help the lady get back home,” he muttered into the ear of the more respectable drinker.

Blasé, Margaret smiled and lit a cigarette.

“To you, we're all just a bunch of jokers, eh?” she stammered in a caustic tone. “You never believed in all of that, you! Magnetic fluids, communication with the beyond, knocking spirits . . .”

Taken aback for an instant, Lucian conscientiously wet his sugar. It was quite true, he never believed in any of it, even if he couldn't have admitted to himself that his friend no longer existed. From the grave of his being, Nat had reemerged as his own buried soul.

He leaned over in confidence toward Margaret. “Spirits inside an end table? That's perfectly ridiculous. But once I was able to sense in your sister Kate certain remarkable properties of her psyche that I wouldn't know how to analyze otherwise. A kind of hypnotic dividing in two or an extra-lucid torpor, maybe, a natural empathy, a power of impregnation of things and beings she herself doesn't know . . .”

“Kate's a real medium, that's all.”

Drawing back in embarrassment, Lucian noticed her crow's feet, the fine wrinkles at the corners of her lips, and especially the
way this woman had of biting her lower lip and batting her eyelashes. With a good dye job, the dignified Leah, who was living the good life in New York, could hardly look any older.

“Why were you in need of my younger sister?” Margaret pursued in the shelter of a screen of smoke.

The question was inescapable, at least from himself, the absinthe not permitting lying any more than opium, and he had just come from an underground smoking den that had opened on the port since the closing of the Golden Dream. Although unbelieving down to his marrow, he had long consulted in moments of golden limbo numerous soothsayers living or dead, Simon of Judea, Paracelsus, Robert Fludd, or the Marquis de Puységur, and he himself was on the threshold of disappearance, bombarded by all the morbid influences grief unleashed. But he had survived, still unbelieving, thanks to little Kate. Hadn't she known, on one unforgettable night, to link the tenuous threads of the soul's depths between him and Nat Astor, saving him thereby through the great mystery of the damnation of love?

“Why?” he said finally. “Probably to understand my crime. Your sister enlightened me on the matter. She blew on the fog of my spirit and there I saw a bloody footprint. Subsequently, I turned myself in for the murder of my friend—the Rochester coroner had been expecting it for years. There was a sensational trial. I just missed being sentenced to death, you know. But Harry Maur, cited from the beginning as a witness for the prosecution, testified at the end of the trial that he had been present when the tragedy occurred and that it was in fact a suicide . . .”

Margaret was hardly listening. Blurred images were superimposing themselves, undulating across this face from the past.

“But it was no suicide!” Lucian nearly shouted, stepping back. “No, no,” he went on in a calmer voice, “there are only murders more or less thoughtless . . .”

Margaret shrugged. Would she too have killed her husband without thinking? She saw again the tender and serious Elisha increasingly weakened upon returning from his expedition, and suddenly felt again the sharp pain of lack, that blade lashing the entrails, then she remembered her banishment after the funeral. Without a fortune, driven from her belongings by his family, she found herself back where she started, more alone than ever, chasing after an already strained fame to once again earn her living week by week, under the name of Margaret Fox-Kane. But mediums by that time abounded. America, naïve about leagues, congregations, and multiple sects, had been handed over entirely to new charlatans with hosannas, with no recognition for the two pioneering sisters, while Mister Splitfoot was surely snickering under the snapping banner of Old Glory!

Her mind lost by the alcohol's vapors, Margaret hadn't really followed the substitution of human scenery, Nephtali ceding his place without a word to another figure in her life.

“You're drunk again,” said this one indignantly. “Have you forgotten that we have a séance with two dollar entry tonight?”

“It's coming back to Rochester,” she admitted while re-lighting her cigarette. “It's shaken me up . . .”

“Like what was shaking you up to the point of falling down eight days ago in Philadelphia!”

Frank Strechen pulled Margaret out of the tavern before she had finished her glass. The still dense snow was being matted into a black mud. He hailed a cab and gave the driver the address of their hotel. On their way, Margaret heard from another planet
the bitter reproaches of her manager. She thought about an erased world from which arose clusters of memories quickly covered by this pallid avalanche. The big house on Central Avenue, all shaky on her left, seemed tiny and dull to her under the storm's redactions. At that moment, she remembered a promise and cried out to the coachman, leaving Frank Strechen speechless:

“Buffalo Street, right away! To the old cemetery!”

No one could have forbidden her this visit to her dear old Mother. In the last letter before she left, Kate had written her: “If ever you happen to pass by Rochester . . .”

It reminded her of a song for drinking and crying that she sang with gusto:

               
If ever you pass by the old homestead

               
Pray step right inside for to see if I'm dead!

               
And drink to our love if you find I am gone

               
But love me again if you find me at home

IV.

The Necromancers of the Old World

T
he
Oceanic
's twelve boilers fired one after another, vibrating the ship's rigging and steel plates while the liner's enormous funnel repeatedly exhausted its broth into a motionless sky, subsuming for a moment the two rear masts and nearly motionless sails unfurled by a rakish team of sailors. Leaning on the railing of the promenade deck, the first class passengers watched the maneuvers without understanding anything. Was there a lack of wind or too many crosscurrents? On the stern and bow of the lower decks, the third class crowd, less dense on the way back, made themselves comfortable as if on holiday. Chartered last year by the White Star Line and flying the British flag, the
Oceanic
had left New York and was en route to London without much fanfare, with its contingent of
nouveaux riches
heading home for the new year, disenchanted emigrants, and graying rejects of the British Isles or the old continent.

During the two weeks the crossing lasted, Kate, usually on deck, wrapped in her fur, let herself be invaded by the versatile
breathing of the sky and the sea, sometimes more tenuous than the exhale of a dying person and then suddenly of an abyssal violence. She had never felt more delivered of herself, almost disembodied, stripped of that weight that a dream drags along in the guise of the human. Back in her cabin in rough weather, she couldn't take her eyes off the sea. Poor dragons of foam and spray danced before her. This contrast of grays resembled her life: all the loneliness in the world behind a flashing porthole. Kate imagined an endless voyage to find serenity. After ten days of imprisonment behind the guard rails of bridges and the gangways, the restaurant, or her luxurious cabin, she told herself that nothing would prevent her, one night with a full moon, from letting herself slide overboard. Similar to the miraculous wind vibrating in the light, wandering souls that perished at sea were not burdened with those crippled obsessions around old cauldrons. Even the worst among them would cross one day the Cape of Good Hope on his ghost ship. And then what idiot medium would have the idea of invoking spirits on board a ship—everything there creaked and moved only in accordance to Neptune's wishes! On the tenth day, finally delivered of a fearless sadness and completely astonished by the geyser of a whale or a ballet of porpoises, Kate knew that she wouldn't lose equilibrium. One rolling morning, rushing to catch a flying fish that, while she was alone in her seat, landed thrashing on the deck, she had the vivid sensation of releasing a dove of ice back into the waves.

Approaching the Old World, washed of funereal influences by the ocean, she wanted to believe that everything would work itself out far from those fanatical Puritans, who from lack of roots had crowded around capricious spirits. On this side of the Atlantic,
according to what she'd read, ghosts had the manners of propriety and a sense of family. “I am thy father's spirit / Doomed for a certain term to walk the night,” wasn't that in
Hamlet
?

At the sight of the English coast, an unnamed fright gripped her again. What would they require of her now? And what kind of face to put on before her hosts? Like the end of a dreamed bridge, she crossed the landing stage like a sleepwalker. On land, destitute crowds, staggering women, hordes of raggedy children were bustling feebly at undefined tasks or prowling around the pontoons and docks like hairless dogs in the shadow of sailors and longshoremen. For one distraught second, Kate realized that a matte-complexioned porter was following her, her trunk hoisted upon a trolley. Then, with a determined air, a coachman in purple livery with copper buttons approached her.

An English eight-springed carriage was waiting for her on a quay shining with rain. Inside, after two nights of not sleeping, she gave herself over to the swelling sensation to close her eyes, head nodding, to the sound of the little trot ringing on the road, the carriage making a turn in her dream with the exact sonority of Old Billy's hooves.

Benjamin Coleman's staff had received her without ado in this Chelsea manor. It had the look of a dwarf fortress with its Gothic turrets and narrow windows, its paved courtyard between gargoyled façades and carved projections over an enormous gate armor-plated with fittings. Kate found herself without any transition in another universe, where the uncertain light and fresh air conflicted with the marmoreal mists from which arose antique architectural profiles. Everything there was different, charged simultaneously with mystery, almost of enmity, and with a very
distant familiarity. This insidious sensation of having traveled back in time came over her on certain meanderings, when the cries of children behind the high walls of an institution, the brick-red face of a harmonium player on the corner of a street black with soot, the bird's eye view of a park where a large folded paper bird was thrown, or simply this immutable iron-colored rain—they reminded her of something that she hadn't lived, at least not yet, and that filled her with a mysterious nostalgia. If she'd had a doctrinaire head, like all those fresh zealots steeped in the antediluvian allegories of India or Tibet, Kate could easily have been convinced of spiritualist conjectures about the transmigration of souls, but she could not or would not understand the muddled speech of her peers. Past lives for her were tangible every minute. As for the enlightened progression of souls, Mister Splitfoot had never said a word about it. However, that gave her enough free time to bear with good grace the sagacious interrogations of Mr. Coleman's friends.