Talking to the Dead (21 page)

During the middle years of the 1850s the Spiritualist movement itself continued to grow, like the nation spanning the continent from the East Coast to California. But controversy surrounded its adherents. Under pressure for his unorthodox beliefs, Judge Edmonds resigned from the bench; he later issued a statement that brusquely reminded his colleagues that he was nobody's fool and that in fact he had used the same skills to investigate the spirits as those he had employed in his thirty years of successful practice at the bar.
⁹

Edmonds's prominence and the attention he received provoked
envy among some of his fellow Spiritualists. “He talked well,” commented one acerbic critic after a lecture, “but said nothing but what was & is familiar to inteligent [sic] Spiritualists, but as it was Judge Edmonds it created a good deal of excitement, filled a large Hall and was no doubt productive of some good.”
¹⁰

The former judge estimated that the number of Spiritualists in the United States had risen to several hundred thousand. In 1854, convinced of strong popular interest, Nathaniel Tallmadge, former governor of Wisconsin and a friend of the Fox family, presented a petition to Senator James Shields, Democrat from Illinois, and asked him to sponsor it in Congress. Signed by more than a thousand people, the petition proposed the creation of an official government committee to examine Spiritualist phenomena. Shields, however, betrayed Tallmadge, first by making a public joke of the document, then by calling Spiritualism an “occult science,” a label that believers vehemently rejected, insisting that there was nothing arcane or supernatural about their faith. The bill died.
¹¹

Attempts to create stable organizations also marked these years, although the democratic and individualist nature of Spiritualism presented obstacles. In June 1854 Edmonds, Tallmadge, and Horace H. Day—Kate's employer—helped found the Society for the Diffusion of Spiritual Knowledge. In a book published a year later,
Modern Spiritualism: Its Facts and Fantasies, Its Consistencies and Contradictions,
Eliab Capron dismissed the society as a pompous group of intellectually pretentious newcomers, stating that they had called their first meeting in secret and excluded “old and tried friends”—himself among them.

Capron's
Modern Spiritualism
was a seminal work, the first substantial history of the movement. Although the author didn't hesitate to criticize some of his fellow believers, in general the book constitutes an unabashed ode to spirit communication. He remained a loyal promoter of the Fox sisters, whose reputations he in fact had helped to create, and stressed their unique position among the hundreds of mediums who followed them. Kate, as always, seemed to interest him most, for he wrote that it was she who in 1848 “seemed to be required in order to obtain the communications…. This was the first discovery of mediumship in that family.”
¹²

Capron, always the promoter, drew on every theatrical story or colorful rumor that had surfaced since Hydesville. The peddler, for instance, had produced not only raps but other, far more horrifying, noises: “A sound like the death struggle, the gurgling in the throat…of a man whose throat was cut; then the sound of dragging a lifeless body across the room, down the stairs, the feet striking on each step…then a sound as if shoveling dirt in the cellar, the nailing of boards, and the filling up of the hastily-made grave….”
¹³

 

During the winter and spring of 1855, Maggie ricocheted back and forth between Susannah Turner's house in Crookville and Ellen Walter's in New York. She often visited Kate, whose own routines—generally a matter of holding seances at Tenth Street—also remained largely unchanged from the previous year. With a touch of flattery and nostalgia, Kate wrote to Amy Post, “I am very lonely: oh, how I do wish that you were here, you know we always loved you. I can not think of you as a mere friend but as something dearer.”
¹⁴
But she was equally eager to relay her pleasure with both the spirits and her new friends. She was always happiest when with trusted comrades, and she felt she had found a warm circle in New York.

“Last evening the Bayard family met at our house for spiritual manifestations,” Kate said. “The piano was sweetly played upon by spirit fingers, the guitar was played, then taken up and carried above our heads, each person in the circle was touched. The room was perfectly dark and
all hands held.
Dr. Bayard and family said that they had never passed a happier evening in all their lives.” Kate cheerfully confided that her headaches had been cured by a healing medium and that she was planning to attend the opera with Mrs. Walter that night.

Although the Turners were hesitant to allow Maggie to take another trip, in July they agreed to one at Ellen Walter's request. As usual, much to Susannah Turner's frustration, Maggie postponed her return. In August the prodigal student accompanied her mother and Kate to Wayne County for a weeklong reunion with family: her father, David and Elizabeth Fox, Maria and Stephen Smith, and a half-dozen nieces and nephews. Joseph Post, Amy's son, came along. “We do have merry times
enough,” he wrote to his mother, commenting also that “David is one of the kindest souls….”
¹⁵

Kate added a postscript: Maggie and Joseph tried to play a prank on gullible David by pretending to be married. How the couple planned to convince him, with what pantomime of affection, can only be imagined, but the presence of “an old Methodist lady” who wore “a face nearly as long as a steeple” inhibited the jokesters and spoiled the joke. The anecdote suggests that Maggie, much as she may have missed Kane, could still be flirtatious and enjoy herself.

That August of 1855, twenty-seven months after their departure, Elisha Kent Kane and his men were rescued by a merchant ship off the southern coast of Greenland, more than a thousand miles from where they finally had abandoned the
Advance.
They had spent the previous winter living in the shell of the brig, which had been crushed by collisions with icebergs and ground between ice floes that had locked it in place, then carried it north as they drifted. With the
Advance
unfit for sailing, Kane and his crew had set out in late May to travel by foot and longboat across thirteen hundred miles of Arctic ice, hauling their supplies on sledges, which also carried the sick, until they could launch their boats in open water. One-sixth of his party had died in the attempt to find Franklin, but Kane had mapped regions never charted before, in the process accumulating a wealth of new information on the Arctic and its people.

His return was preceded by a spate of newspaper articles that not only announced his rescue but also reported the rumor that “the celebrated Dr. Kane would shortly lead to the altar Miss Margaret Fox, of spirit-rapping celebrity.” Cornelius Grinnell suspected the items had been planted by Leah in a determined effort to force Kane's hand. If Kane's parents had turned a blind eye to the relationship before, they certainly couldn't do so any longer.

On October 11, 1855, Maggie learned that Kane was aboard a steamer entering New York Harbor. She had spent September in Crookville, but she was back in New York by the time he returned. She waited at Ellen Walter's, certain that he would visit. No word came the first day, and none the second. She crept to the house on Tenth Street to
be with her mother and Kate. Later that evening Walter sent a message and carriage for her: a visitor was at the door of her Clinton Place home, and Walter was sure he was Kane.

Walter unfortunately had jumped to conclusions, for her guest wasn't Kane at all but his loyal friend, Grinnell, sent to retrieve the explorer's love letters. Walter apologized to Maggie, hiding the truth from her and saying that the guest had been some gentlemen on business.

Dressed in full naval regalia, Kane himself arrived the next day and asked Maggie to sign a document disclaiming any romantic relationship between them. Understandably wretched but dignified, she did so. Apparently stirred by the sight of her, Kane found his resolve evaporating. He didn't go so far as to renew their engagement, but he returned the following morning, handed the document back to her, and told her to tear it up.

And the cycle of approach and withdrawal began again with a battery of letters that castigated her even as they surely titillated them both. Since Kane had reneged on his commitment, Maggie returned to holding seances, an act that, not surprisingly, provoked him.

“Do keep out of spirit-circles,” Kane begged, but his reasons now had less to do with ethics and duplicity and more to do with sex. “I can't bear the idea of your sitting in the dark, squeezing other people's hands,” he wrote. “I touch no hands but yours; press no lips but yours; think of no thoughts that I would not share with you; and do no deeds that I would conceal from you. Can you say as much? Will the spirit answer?”
¹⁶

Dressed in her glamorous white silk cloak, she accompanied him to the opera; bundled beneath buffalo robes, they went for sleigh rides in the country. He apparently was a marvelous mimic, with a boyish charm that delighted her. During one of their frequent separations, she wrote, “Lish', I have not laughed since we parted. By the time we meet again I fear I shall quite have forgotten to laugh; and then you will clothe me in the habiliments of a nun, and send me to a convent to count my rosary.”

Once, after her temperamental poodle had nipped Kane's hand, she responded with a tongue-in-cheek twist on the notion of supernatural powers.

“I am very sorry that little Tommie bit your hand,” she apologized,
clearly amused instead. “I hope it does not give you pain. Tommie is very cross to many. You must not be superstitious, and attribute his unkindness to any fault of his mistress. Dogs are very strange things, and Tommie is very sagacious, and thinks himself
very
smart.”

When work consumed him and he couldn't get away, she wrote to him in bittersweet, sentimental cadences. “What duties have you, my Ly, which claim your presence in Philadelphia this evening?” she asked in one letter, adding a few sentences later, “I shall surely expect to see you Monday evening, and now as the ‘shadows lengthen' and the hours grow sad and dull, my soul will leave New York and fly to its treasured love.”
¹⁷

The newspapers had seized on the story of the love affair and wouldn't let it go. Horace Greeley grumbled avuncularly that the couple should be left alone. In a passage that points to the stunning celebrity of both Maggie and Kane, he demanded, “What right has the public to know anything about an ‘engagement' or non-engagement between these young people? If this were a monarchy, and one or both of them were of the blood royal, there would be an excuse for reports and speculation with regard to their relations to each other….”
¹⁸

Appropriately, Maggie nicknamed Kane's parents, whom she had never met, “The Royal Family.”

Margaret Fox was less sanguine about the relationship than her daughter and tried to discourage Kane, but he stubbornly persisted in visiting two to three times a day. Then a crisis occurred, possibly precipitated by old rumors of Kane's illegitimate child. As friends pressed Margaret to end her daughter's relationship, she finally erupted in a maternal rage at the explorer, threatening that she would “publish” him to the world if he didn't leave her daughter alone. She cried, “I from this moment
forbid
you ever again entering my house. I
forbid
my daughter ever receiving you while she is under my care…my child is as pure as an angel, and if you are seen coming here the world will censure her.”
¹⁹

Kane responded by writing to Maggie that he would never believe such a ban unless it came directly from her own lips.

She firmly replied, “I must either give you up from this moment and forever, or give up those who are very dear to me, and who hold my name and reputation as sacred.”
²⁰

But the story wasn't over. In April 1856, six months after Kane's return from the Arctic, he attended the funeral of one of his friends and was left feeling sad and depressed. That day he demanded to see Maggie, set siege to the house, and wouldn't be turned away. As at Calvin Brown's funeral three years earlier, he apparently had been moved to action by loss: he reiterated his offer of marriage.

According to the Fox family's account, Kane sealed the engagement by placing a cherished ring from the Arctic on her finger and by giving her a locket that contained a few strands of his deceased brother Willie's hair. Yet Kane continued to insist that no one other than Maggie's family and a few close friends be told about the engagement until he had finished his book and started earning an income. Until then, he was dependent on his parents' financial support.

A few weeks later Maggie, Kate, and their mother moved from the Tenth Street house to a more spacious residence on Twenty-Second Street. By then, Margaret's ambivalence and concern seem to have lessened, the change propelled no doubt by Kane's promise to marry her daughter. Maggie was permitted to have her own private domain on the third floor, with a bedroom and pretty parlor to herself. There, despite Margaret's objections, Kane became a frequent visitor to Maggie's unchaperoned quarters.

“Tell your mother not to distress herself about the third story room,” he reassured her. “I regard it as a sort of sanctuary: a retreat to which we are driven by mischief-making eyes and tongues.”

But his thoughts weren't always so pure; he concluded one of his notes to Maggie by reminding her that “there is not a single naughty word, and what is better, not a single naughty thought, in all this letter.”

The Victorians approved of flirtation, courtship, and declarations of passion, but they expected women to remain chaste until marriage. Given the blatant appearance of impropriety, Maggie's reputation—what was left of it—was surely as good as ruined. Up to a point, the Kanes may have recognized their son's responsibility for pursuing the romance. But he, of course, was their much-loved child: easier for them to imagine him as the innocent who had been seduced by a social climber with a sorceress's powers than as the seducer.