Talking to the Dead (20 page)

“Maggie,” he said, “if I had my way with you, I would send you to school and learn you to live your life over again…. Once that, Maggie, and you would love me; not the sort of
half-affected
milk and water love which you now profess, but a genuine confiding affection….”

Transformed into a proper prospect, an exemplar of womanly virtue, skilled in the arts of music and French, she would become a trusting girl, one acceptable to his parents and one who appreciated him at last.

“Now to you I am nothing but a cute, cunning dissembler,” he acknowledged, “a sort of smart gentleman hypocrite, never really sincere, and amusing himself with a pretty face.”

She was suspicious of his motives, he insisted, not because of anything he did but because of her own guilty conscience, “the suspicious, distrusting eyes which your short intercourse with the world—
your world
—has forced upon you.” He assured her that he was altogether different from other young men who might make opportunistic promises to win a girl over.

Then he went on to place her in a classic double bind, threatening that “until you look deeper, you will never
love
me; and unless you love me I will soon cease to love you.”

Kane's confusing courtship, his promises and retractions, his flattery and his threats, pained her. Both figuratively and literally, she was losing hold of her own world; he asked her to disconnect from her family, spirits and mortals alike, but he promised her no lasting bonds with his.

“This afternoon I went out to do some shopping and lost my way,” she wrote. “I grew so frightened that I was obliged to ask a lady to show me the way home. When I entered the room I cried aloud; and looking up I saw General Hamilton, who asked me what was the matter. I told him that I had lost my way, and that I did not like Washington at all.”

The general had laughed, instantly making the connection between her distress and the real reason for it, and had insisted that “No young lady could ever lose her way in Washington unless she had some
‘affaire du coeur.'
I did not deny the charge,” she told Kane, venturing to mention the subject closest to her heart. “Doctor, there is a rumor—so the General tells me—that you and I are to be married before you go to the Arctic.” The rumor in fact was becoming widespread.

Margaret tried to discourage Kane's attentions to her daughter, but rather than respecting her wishes, he took up writing to Kate as well, stirring sibling rivalry under the guise of innocent affection. “Dear Miss Incomprehensible Kate,” he teased, “I do not see why you should not take half of my correspondence.” He told her about witnessing a scene that saddened him immensely. A medium's answer to a young man's question had been so painful that the “tender inquirer” had fainted.

Kane acknowledged that Maggie and his “dear little open-minded” Kate never went so far, but he warned Kate that she too was on the downward path to becoming “a hardened woman, gathering around you victims of a delusion. Think of that, Katy!”

His concerns about the practices of some mediums were legitimate, but his offers to transform Maggie's life remained ambiguous at best. On the one hand, he assured her of his determination to “raise her above her calling, even to his own level” and “cultivate her mind, give her competence; her sister should be his care.” On the other hand, he accused her of being too heartless and shallow to accept his offer.

“I saw that you loved me,” he sighed, “but not enough. Dear child, it was not in your nature.”

Maggie's tolerance for his behavior is puzzling. The child of a perennially absent and distant father, a man intoxicated with religion if no longer with alcohol, she may have been grateful for and flattered by Kane's attentions, whether negative or positive. But the couple's relationship surely wasn't such an anomaly; they were behaving as many other young men and women have been known to do in the throes of romantic love and in the heat of pursuit. At a time when emotional bonds had begun to replace financial ties in marriage, theirs was a relationship of high emotion.

Kane's courtship technique—accusatory seduction, a time-honored if largely unconscious dance of approach and withdrawal—eventually prevailed over Maggie's hesitations, Leah's dire warnings, and Margaret's weak attempts to exercise good judgment. On a fund-raising visit to Washington, Kane stayed, not at a hotel, but at the same boardinghouse where Maggie was living, hardly a wise move for a man who wished to safeguard
the reputation of his beloved. Visits between floors, not surprisingly, were frequent, and his presence could not have gone unnoticed. He typically interrupted seances to demand her attention, on one occasion, for example, sending in a note that read, “Come out for a moment from those coarse people…. Surely you can rest a minute! Come dearest fluttering bird! Come!”

At this point, however, Maggie may have felt safe enough to commit indiscretions and to indulge his whims, for Kane had inched further toward what seemed to be a permanent bond. He had started to explore schools for her, something he made sound ominous even as he joked about it.

“Listen, Maggie,” he teased, “instead of a life of cherished excitement you must settle down into one of quiet, commonplace repose. Instead of the fun…you will have the irksome regulations of a school, the strict formal precepts of a lady abbess, a
schoolmistress.
”

Intuitively, Kane grasped that Maggie was living a more expansive life than her class and gender otherwise permitted, just as he, through his Arctic adventures, had transcended the limits potentially imposed by his illness and by Philadelphia society. He also recognized that it was her wildness, the Circe in her, the unknown magic, that drew him to her. But he wanted and needed to tame her in order to make her respectable.

To tame her in every arena, that is, except the sexual one. And there, by allowing her to be seen and to participate in compromising situations, he encouraged her to venture far outside the boundaries of what was acceptable at the time. Although Maggie and Kane weren't formally engaged, the relationship had become obvious to many people, and at the very least it was physically intimate. Whether they ever sexually consummated the relationship remains controversial; given their mutual attraction, as well as their individual natures and joint opportunities, it seems unlikely they could have resisted each other for the duration of their affair.

He continued, however, to try to protect his own and his family's reputation. When Maggie returned to New York from Washington in the spring of 1853, Kane persisted in exploring schools for her but implied to those in authority that she was merely the recipient of his selfless charity. He may not have fooled anyone; still, he remained steadfast that any
formal engagement had to wait until she had completed her education and given up the public practice of mediumship.

His dislike of Leah persisted, and the feelings were mutual. He called her “tigress.” She despised him for his influence over Maggie, questioned the sincerity of his intentions, and undoubtedly worried as well about the impact on the Fox family's income and on Spiritualists' morale if her famous sister retired.

He in turn relapsed into fears that Maggie might be leading him on romantically, as he suspected she often led others on professionally when she gave seances even for her most devoted Spiritualist friends, men such as General Waddy Thompson and the former governor of Wisconsin, Nathaniel Tallmadge.

“Here sat dear loveable
whispering Waddy,
” Kane wrote, parodying what happened at seances, “with his
mental
questions; and here cute, but well believing Tallmadge, with his sharp, cunning eye, but foolish, credulous brain…and here I set up a devil of a thinking—as to whether this girl who could lead others would ever be led by me, or whether I too was not a Waddy Thompson of another sort, and Maggie only cheating me in a different way.”

Not that he, even after so many months, seemed at all certain himself about the nature of the raps. “You know I am nervous about the ‘rappings,'” he wrote. “I believe the only thing I ever was afraid of was this
confounded thing being found out.
I would not know it myself for ten thousand dollars.”

Torn between her family and Kane, Maggie increasingly found the demanding routines of her daily life “tiresome,” and she confided to him that she no longer wanted “to meet with all kind [sic] of people” daily. She had glimpsed the possibility of a different kind of life, one shared with him, and it powerfully attracted her.

“What have I ever done that I should be denied the pleasures of a quiet home, the blessings of love—the reward of virtue,” she asked. “I have given my whole time to this subject [of the spirits] for six years.” She added, “I think I have done my part—I feel that I have convinced this skeptical, unfeeling world that I am innocent of making these sounds. I ask no more.”

He was the “only human being” that had ever urged her “to better things,” she admitted. But his imminent departure terrified and saddened her. “What shall I do when you leave for your distant pilgrimage of danger,” she asked. “Who then will extend to me a helping hand?”
¹⁰

A sad event served to seal the couple's bond. On May 4, 1853, Calvin Brown died, having never fully regained his health after his illness in Cincinnati. Permitted to pay his respects, Kane reportedly took Maggie's hand in the presence of a small group of mourners and promised to marry her on his return from the Arctic. Although he still refused to make the engagement public, his vow at such a sorrowful hour, only weeks before his departure on a quixotic, dangerous mission, convinced Maggie of his sincerity. Her ambivalence about abandoning her familiar world vanished.
¹¹

Judge Edmonds delivered the eulogy at Calvin's funeral in New York. Then the family moved on to Rochester, where Isaac Post made the sad arrangements for a second memorial service.

“Bring on your dead,” Isaac had telegraphed. “My house is at your service.”

After Calvin's burial in Mt. Hope Cemetery, the mourners traveled to Arcadia. As their carriage turned into the lane leading to David Fox's farmhouse, his children raced to the gate to meet them. Seven-year-old Georgie, Leah wrote, “was wonderfully struck with the appearance of our deep mourning, and said [to Margaret], ‘Grandma, what makes you all dress so black?'” The next day Georgie fell sick, and on May 12 he died.
¹²

On May 30, 1853, Kane's brig, the
Advance,
left New York harbor, bound for the Arctic and what he hoped would be the discovery of an open polar sea, the legendary warm waters that, like the Spiritualists' vision of heaven, held forth the promise of infinite opportunity and boundless advancement. Unlike the earlier Arctic expedition in which he had served as a naval surgeon, this one was under Kane's command. The
Advance
stopped in Newfoundland in mid-June, then headed north toward the Arctic Circle, traveling up the west coast of Greenland. Not far beyond the last European settlement, Kane counted more than two hundred icebergs, and the
Advance
was still at the start of its journey.

He had arranged for Maggie to spend the summer under the watchful eye of his favorite aunt, Eliza Leiper, who lived near Crookville, a small manufacturing village about eighteen miles from Philadelphia. He urged his aunt that for Maggie's sake nothing be said “of the unfortunate connection with ‘Spirits.'”
¹³
He graciously offered to give the money for Maggie's expenses directly to the Fox family to manage, but since Margaret was uncomfortable with the gesture, he asked his friend and intermediary Cornelius Grinnell to administer the fund. Seeing that the decision had been made and probably not wanting Kane to be her enemy forever, even Leah acquiesced, grumbling that she failed to understand why a young girl would choose to spend the most pleasant months of summer in school. Kane told Maggie that she was free to come and go as she wished and to decide in the fall whether to remain in Crookville or attend one of the fashionable boarding schools in Albany or Troy. Until then, she was to live with the Turner family, who were acquaintances of Eliza Leiper. Susannah Turner, wife and mother of the household, was known to be a kind, responsible woman, and her daughter, whom Kane jokingly but uncharitably called ugly, was to be Maggie's governess.

The message to Maggie was clear: if she was capable of transformation, she might become a suitable mate. Like a spirit, she was to emerge from her sensual, corporeal state a purified being.

Maggie was now triply bereaved: mourning a brother-in-law and nephew who had recently died, in seclusion from her old way of life, and bereft of her love who, for all she knew, might not survive his journey.

W
ITH
M
AGGIE AWAY
at school, supported by Kane and in retirement from public seances, the responsibilities for mediumship in the Fox family—both spiritual and financial—fell entirely to Kate and Leah. Sixteen-year-old Kate was hired by Horace H. Day, a wealthy businessman and the publisher of a magazine called the
Christian Spiritualist,
to hold free weekly meetings open to the public. The annual salary of twelve hundred dollars was excellent, but the work was hard, no longer fresh and exciting. Emma Hardinge, an English actress turned trance speaker and historian, also held meetings in the same building, and she sympathetically observed “poor patient Kate Fox, in the midst of a captious, grumbling crowd of investigators, repeating hour after hour the letters of the alphabet, whilst the no less
poor, patient
Spirits rapped out names, ages and dates to suit all-comers.”
¹
Yet compared to the weekly salary of three dollars made by a woman who worked in a textile factory, Kate was doing well.

Both Kate and Leah continued to hold seances for their private, paying clients, although now the two sisters lived and often worked separately, in part because the breach between Leah and Maggie over Kane had left scars. On her visits from Crookville, Maggie visited only her mother's house.

After Calvin's death in 1853, forty-year-old Leah moved first to Irving Street and then to Ludlow Street in Manhattan; Kate and fifty-seven-year-old Margaret took a home of their own on Tenth Street near Broadway. One visitor there, who called himself “A Searcher After Truth” waxed eloquent on the subject of Kate's appearance, commenting on her hair—black “as the wing of a raven” and parted “in two simple curls, after the Madonna style, giving striking effect to a fair forehead of an intellectual character”—and on her eyes, which he observed were a brilliant black, but pensive beneath long eyelashes. She was dressed modestly in black silk, he observed, with a gold cross at her neck.

His enthusiasm for her beauty didn't extend to her mediumship, however, for a spate of wrongly rapped answers dismayed him. Nevertheless, he remained curious enough to ask whether she had ever actually
seen
a spirit, and her answer seems to indicate that the spirits remained as alive to her, in reality or imagination, as they had been from the beginning. She replied that her grandfather, Jacob Smith, who had died in 1846, was often with her. Although she had never actually
seen
him, she knew by his characteristic actions, distinctive raps, and specific messages when he was close by.
²

Jacob Smith seems to have been an influential spirit guide for Kate. For example, she once held a seance for the publisher and match manufacturer, Charles Partridge, at which a match boy's spirit complained in cruel detail about the hardships of his life. Partridge took pride in his business, one that employed hundreds of people and turned out millions of matches, and he demanded to know who had sent such a rude and accusatory being. In response, the match boy rapped “Jacob Smith,” who apparently had lost none of the zeal for reform that had characterized some spirit messages from Hydesville on.

 

For a few months in the summer of 1853, Maggie dutifully remained at the Turners. Kane had consented to her wish to study German, joking, “You can scold me in German, flirt with country bumpkins in German, write naughty letters to me in German, and I'll be none the wiser.”
³
He had advised her to concentrate on English history and literature and had asked her also to study music because he loved her beautiful voice.

The Turners' pleasant house stood behind a picket fence on an acre of land that smelled sweetly of roses and honeysuckle, and Maggie had a piano of her own in her bedroom. Daily life in the village of Crookville was as quiet as Kane hoped: he had imagined her “counting time by the village clock” or standing “under the shade of some drooping chestnut.” For Maggie, though, the hush of this uneventful existence surely felt claustrophobic rather than comforting. If she had dreamed of a “quiet home,” she had imagined sharing it with Kane.

When autumn came she delayed making a decision about schools, instead fleeing to New York. She avoided Leah, but she visited her mother and Kate often and lived at the Clinton Place home of Ellen Walter, an acquaintance Kane had handpicked as Maggie's city chaperone. Her absence from Crookville grew so long that in November 1853 Susannah Turner sent a concerned letter care of Walter, who replied that Maggie had been too ill to travel or even to write. Suffering from colds, coughs, headaches, earaches, and fevers, Maggie was under the care of Edward Bayard, a noted homeopathic physician from a prominent family.

When Maggie finally returned to Crookville around Christmas, she studied hard and in a neat schoolgirl's hand politely advised Cornelius Grinnell of her wants and needs. In one note she asked for eighty dollars, apologizing in a follow-up letter for not submitting a complete account of her expenses: money owed for board to Mrs. Turner and to Mrs. Walter along with reimbursement for her travel, French books, drawing materials, a bonnet, cape, dress, and doctor's bills for the treatment of her neuralgia. Other notes followed: an apologetic request for fifteen dollars one month, sixty another. Both Grinnell and Turner worried that Maggie spent money extravagantly, a tendency she shared with Leah, who had a liking not only for fine houses but also for pretty furnishings and clothes.

By February 1854 Maggie had already spent the money left for her care, and Grinnell approached Robert Patterson Kane for advice. Robert, Elisha's brother and lawyer, agreed to further support in deference to his brother's wishes, so long as Grinnell took the opportunity to put Maggie in her place. Remind her, Robert wrote, that she was known to them “only as a dependent, as one to whom the doctor bears the relation of a kind hearted friend whose interest in the young lady shows itself by furnishing her with the means of leading an honest life….” Headvised Grinnell that although they both wished to honor Kane's wishes, “Mlle. is not his mistress and holds to him no other relation than that of the recipient of his charity….”
⁴

Whaling ships and other expeditions headed north toward Greenland carried letters and provisions for Kane in the off chance of meeting up with the
Advance.
Maggie, who had heard false rumors of his imminent return, funneled her letters via Walter to Grinnell, and the contents of one are particularly revealing. After telling “Lish” her bits of news—what friends Mrs. Turner and Mrs. Leiper had been to her, how she was hoping to start her German lessons soon—she begged him to hurry home, reminding him that she often thought of his “sacred promise.” Couldn't she share the secret of their engagement with Mrs. Walter? she asked.

“Some lady asked Mrs. Walter if she thought that you had any idea of marrying me. Mrs. Walter told her that she thought not. If any one should ask me that question, what shall I say?” She mischievously scolded the “Preacher” for hypocrisy by adding, “You say and I know it is very wrong to tell stories. I think I had better not answer the question at all.” She seems to have harbored no doubts about Kane's plans to introduce her to his parents, for she mentioned feeling shy about meeting his father.

She also added a telling anecdote.

“I have visited Mrs. Walter. And while there,” she wrote, “the Spirits directed Kathy and Mrs. Walter and myself to magnetize Dr. Bayard. He was suffering very much with the neuralgia in his face.” Dr. Bayard, apparently, had become the patient.

“He had no pain for three or four weeks after that,” Maggie continued. “But I am sorry to hear that it has returned again. Spiritual
manifestations are spreading all over the world. Some of the greatest men in the world have become believers in the Spirits.”
⁵

Apparently she had never entirely disavowed her faith, even to her beloved Lish, who made such a show of disapproval.

During Maggie's stay in Crookville, Kane's book about his first Arctic expedition,
The United States Grinnell Expedition in Search of Sir John Franklin,
was published to wide acclaim, and she requested a copy of her own. When she finally received it, she thanked Grinnell effusively and confessed with a proprietary air that she was very pleased with her famous lover and his bold accomplishments. “Is he not brave to meet so many dangers face to face?” she demanded with heartfelt pride in the explorer.
⁶

That spring of 1854 the British admiralty formally acknowledged Franklin's death, and Maggie must have wondered if the news would reach her lover and if it would speed his return. Lonely for those she cared about and perhaps frustrated as well by the apparent futility of Kane's mission, Maggie requested another chance to visit New York, promising that she would stay at Mrs. Walter's home rather than with her own family and study every day.

It had been almost a year since Kane had set off into uncharted territory, convinced that Franklin, in defiance of the British admiralty's orders, had headed north in search of the open polar sea. Following this projected route, one of Kane's scouting parties came upon a natural wonder that rivaled even the dream of open water: previously known only to the indigenous inhabitants of the Arctic region, it was the largest glacier on earth. From this slow-moving mountain of ice on Greenland's northwest coast, bergs as large as cathedrals floated off into the sea. Kane called the glacier a “crystal bridge” between two landmasses, and he named it the Humboldt glacier after a German scientist and explorer whom he admired.

Scientific discovery came at a price. Two of his men died. Wracked with scurvy, his other crew members were near mutiny against the commander who had led them far north with no sign of Franklin to show for the effort. The
Advance
remained ice locked in August, and a scouting party found no openings in that frozen world to sail south. With their sec
ond Arctic winter already on its way, Kane and his crew were trapped. At the end of October the light vanished.

That month another Franklin rescue party discovered a cache of artifacts: a gold chain, part of a telescope, a key. The Inuit recounted tales of starving men who had dropped dead in their tracks as they hauled their longboats across the ice. It was clear that the stories described some of Franklin's men and that he had traveled a different route from Kane's, far to the south, where he almost certainly had perished.

This news quickly reached the United States. Maggie, who had spent the summer of 1854 in New York but had returned to Crookville for the fall, was back in the city by Christmas. “I suppose all further Search for Sir John or Crew will be unnecessary,” she remarked hopefully to Grinnell.
⁷
He, however, understood that as Kane had not already returned, the future of the
Advance
was in doubt.

Writing in his journal on Christmas Day, Kane described a vision so intense that today it might be called an out-of-body experience. In his waking dream he was no longer on the
Advance
but in his family's festive dining room, watching his parents, friends, and other relatives enjoying themselves around the holiday dinner table. Though he disdained seances, Kane wasn't altogether immune from the pull of the seemingly inexplicable, and the vision was so apt in every detail that it stunned and distressed him. As a self-described pragmatic man of action, he denounced his own tendency to fall subject to what he called magnetism.

On New Year's Eve 1854, outside in the icy, dark night, Kane had another unsettling experience. This time, as he struggled to light a fire, he saw an amorphous, phosphorescent glow envelop his hand. Even more disturbing, the man with him also witnessed the light. The impossible halo glimmered until the fire finally caught and outshone it, inaugurating the year 1855.
⁸

 

If the American public was united in its admiration for and fascination with Kane's story—a brave man with a debilitating illness, risking his own life on a heroic voyage for the sake of knowledge and to save another man's life—it remained critically divided on issues at home. In 1854 Congress effectively erased the borderline it had established thirty
years earlier to limit slavery's expansion north. Instead, the settlers of the newly organized territories of Kansas and Nebraska were granted the right to decide the issue of slavery for themselves upon petitioning for statehood.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act, as the new law was known, constituted a stunning blow to antislavery forces and continued the nation's march toward civil war. Kansas became known as “bleeding Kansas” for the violence that erupted between pro-and antislavery settlers there, some of it incited by outside agitators. The Whig Party, moribund after recent defeats, was replaced by the new Republican Party, which consisted largely of members opposed to slavery or at least to its further expansion in the territories. A lawyer and Whig from Illinois—soon to become a Republican—named Abraham Lincoln began to make a national reputation for himself by criticizing the provisions of the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

Many antislavery Spiritualists worked for abolition through organizations dedicated to the cause, but there's no evidence that the Fox sisters actively participated in any of these or spoke out in public about the developing crisis. The personal, especially bereavement, rather than the political usually predominated at their private seances. The sisters' longtime friendship with reformers such as the Posts and Frederick Douglass, however, clearly points to their political sympathies, and the spirits who spoke through them seem to have used their influence, if subtly, on behalf of abolition and other reforms. The little girl—Kate—who had once urged George Willets to attend the antislavery fair in Rochester and who introduced Charles Partridge to the unhappy match boy's spirit undoubtedly passed along similar messages to others.