Talking to the Dead (22 page)

Through the spring and summer of 1856 Kane worked day and night on his book. Although he'd returned from the Arctic looking healthier than ever except for more gray in his hair, now the long hours of lecturing and writing left him pale and sick. His manuscript, called
Arctic Explorations: the Second Grinnell Expedition in Search of Sir John Franklin,
was completed in August 1856. It was a “centre-table book” with magnificent illustrations and a text that was evocative and poetic as well as scientific. It was wildly popular—second in popularity that year, it was said, only to the Bible.
²¹

Kane planned to go to England to present a copy of the book to John Franklin's widow and to plan another expedition. In August Maggie accompanied Kate and her mother to Canada to visit her sister Elizabeth, and she wasn't certain that she'd return in time to see him before he sailed. In a letter from Canada she teased him about the dances and balls to which she'd been invited, then struck a more serious note.

“I have often dreamt of you since I left, and have twice dreamt that you were
very
ill, and wakened each time weeping bitterly,” she said, “but fortunately my dreams always prove false, unless they are of a pleasing character.

“I am no great believer in dreams whether pleasant or unpleasant,” she added.
²²

A postponement of Kane's trip gave the lovers a few weeks for a brief, happy, reunion. From Philadelphia he wrote affectionate notes, calling her his “dear, darling little ‘spirit!'”
²³
On his visits to New York they took drives, went to the opera, and spent time in the privacy of the third floor. He bought her a diamond bracelet from Tiffany's and arranged to have a photograph taken of her, joking about subjects that once had distressed him.

“Don't be afraid of your neck and shoulders,” he told her, advising her on how to dress for the portrait. “I want you to look like a Circe, for you have already changed me into a wild Boar.” She attached the locket that he had given her to his watch chain so that it would go with him, a powerful reminder of the bond between them.

According to Maggie, one evening he suddenly summoned Kate, Margaret, and another witness into the parlor and swore in their
presence, “Maggie is my wife, and I am her husband. Wherever we are, she is mine, and I am hers. Do you understand and consent to this, Maggie.” Although no longer common, the custom of marriage by mutual consent had a long history, and Kane may have felt that he had happened upon a romantic solution to a problem that, on the eve of his imminent departure, he had been unable to resolve in any other way.

Afterward, he called Maggie “wife” and assured her that she would be taken care of should anything happen to him. He left the United States for England soon after this secret little ceremony.

By the time Kane reached England he was so ill that Lady Franklin dropped any plans she had except to nurse him. When he didn't recover, his doctors exiled him to the tropics, where it was hoped that the warm weather would cure him.

“I am quite sick, and have gone to Havana; only one week from New York,” he wrote to Maggie. “I have received no letters from you….”

She sent back a note immediately, writing with caution, as she usually did with letters that threatened to fall into his family's hands.

“Could I only see you,” she said, “I would say much that I cannot write.”

He didn't answer; perhaps her letter was never delivered or he was too weak to respond. On February 16, 1857, thirty-seven-year-old Elisha Kent Kane died. His flag-draped coffin was received in state at the port of New Orleans, carried by steamboat up the Mississippi, then transported by locomotive across the country to Philadelphia. Crowds of weeping men and women saluted the fallen hero along the way. His exploration of the Arctic, a world as mythic in its foreboding beauty and mystery as the spirit world, had captured the public's imagination; his courage in confronting his own lifelong illness and his indomitable determination in facing the perils of his journey had won him admiration and devotion. In all but his love life, Elisha Kent Kane had been a brave man.
²⁴

His family not only denied that Kane had ever intended to marry Maggie, they also claimed that his only motives for helping her had been fraternal and benevolent, the impulse to rescue an unfortunate girl.

In the wake of Kane's death, Maggie experienced what can only be described as a total breakdown. Later she remembered her condition as “brain fever.” Often ill with headaches and neuralgia under less stressful
circumstances, she now fell into a depression and nervous collapse no doubt exacerbated by the narcotic medicines of the day; she was in a state of near delirium.

For Kate, who early on had acted as Kane's go-between and who had been his “dear open-minded” girl, the explorer's death must also have been crushing. He had promised to save her too from the tiresome rounds of seances with strangers and to provide her with a life that as she grew older would be satisfying and fulfilling, to raise her up to his own level of secure upper-middle-class gentility, even as he had vowed to raise Maggie. The hopes Kate had harbored for her sister undoubtedly had seemed bright for her own future. Content to be with those in whose affections she felt safe, she must have thought about a time when she'd be valued, not necessarily as a medium, invisible behind the spirits, but as a woman loved for who she was, as Maggie was loved by Kane.

What message was Kate sent, not by Kane's immortal spirit, but by the reality of his death? Surely it was one about false promises and betrayal. Although she may have mourned the loss of Elisha Kent Kane, her grief certainly was more intense for Maggie and herself.

In April 1857 Margaret Fox wrote to one of Kane's brothers, Robert, telling him that their mutual acquaintance, Mrs. Cornelius Grinnell, had implied that a small bequest had been left to Maggie. Robert, a lawyer, had helped arrange his brother's affairs.

“Her trials have been (as you must already know) greater than she could bear,” wrote Margaret, “and we fear that unless changes soon take place she cannot survive them much longer.”
²⁵

Although Kane had willed almost everything to his family, he had placed five thousand dollars separately in Robert's care. Kane's family swiftly denied that the explorer had intended the money for Maggie.

By May Maggie was strong enough to write to Robert herself, asking not for money but for some posthumous word. “I know the Dr. must have left some message for me,” she said, “and know that you will not refuse to deliver it even though it gives you much pain in recalling the name of him whose memory is and ever will be sacred. I have always held a religious faith in the deep sincerity of the Dr.'s love and his memory will always remain a beautiful green in my unchanged affections.”
²⁶

1857–1888

F
OR ALL
K
ANE'S OBSESSION
with secrecy, the newspapers, hungry for gossip about two celebrities and happy to print rumors side by side with facts, had tracked the romance at every stage. Although many people who knew Maggie, and some who didn't, sympathized with her situation, the outcome was not only a tragedy but also an embarrassment, as Leah had long feared. At the sight of her sister's misery, however, Leah relented, and for the present they forgave one another for their mutual recriminations.

And life in this world went on. In 1857 Leah was still holding seances on Ludlow Street, where she was visited on at least one occasion by the lawyer George Templeton Strong. A diarist who wrote about almost every aspect of life in the city, Strong had met the Fox sisters in 1850 and continued to be interested in Spiritualism, although his ideas changed through the years. He initially had believed a natural cause such as electricity might produce the manifestations, then a year or two later had
suggested that “opium, drink, and mental excitement” played a role. When a respected chemist, Robert Hare, converted to Spiritualism in the mid-1850s Strong commented, “Hare seems as mad as one of his quadrupedal namesakes in the month of March.”
¹

When Strong emerged from his visit to Leah, he was sure she practiced what he called “mind-reading.” He had posed questions “about an imaginary transaction, fixing my thoughts on an answer—and that answer was given with great precision.”

Strong wasn't the only person to grow increasingly skeptical about Spiritualism, or at least about the Fox sisters, as the years went by. Even some of the sisters' old Rochester friends, among them George Willets, developed doubts. By 1857 he had moved to New Jersey, where Leah agreed to hold regular seances for a group of his friends and relatives, a circle that included Daniel Underhill, a widowed businessman who may have been distantly related to the Post family.

After witnessing luminous orbs floating around the room, some members of the group became suspicious that Leah had coated her hands with granules of phosphorus. She in turn protested that the spirits themselves had produced the granules, much to her surprise. Not everyone was convinced by her explanation, but Daniel Underhill was. His interest soon turned from otherworldly to earthly matters, and he began to court her. He was a desirable suitor in every way: a committed Spiritualist, well-to-do, from an old and respected family, president of an important insurance company, and about eight years younger than forty-four-year-old Leah.
²

In June 1857, four months after Kane's death, Leah and Kate accepted a challenge that, for the sake both of Spiritualism and the Fox family's name, they felt they couldn't ignore. The
Boston Courier
had offered a reward of five hundred dollars to any medium who could prove the existence of spirit communication to a panel of four distinguished Harvard professors, including the renowned mathematician and astronomer Benjamin Peirce and Louis Agassiz, the most famous natural scientist of his day. A proponent of the theory of an Ice Age, the latter was the man for whom Elisha Kent Kane had named a remote Arctic promontory, calling the point Cape Agassiz.
³
The scientist, however,
wasn't universally loved; the philosopher William James, who studied under him, later described Agassiz as “such a politician & so self-seeking and illiberal to others that it sadly diminishes one's respect for him.”
⁴

In sponsoring the investigation, the
Courier
was capitalizing on an earlier controversy. A Harvard engineering professor, after attending a few seances conducted by a divinity student, had accused the medium of fraud. The student was expelled, but arguments over the case raged on.

The Harvard professors and the reporter assigned by the
Courier
all found the mediums—about ten in all—entirely unconvincing. Two of them, the young Davenport brothers, were called “Cabinet Mediums” for exhibitions in which they allowed themselves to be tightly bound head and foot, then locked inside a portable cabinet along with an assortment of musical instruments. While the two teenagers presumably sat immobile within the cabinet, listeners on the outside could hear rapturous melodies being played behind its locked doors.

This time, however, the Harvard professors assigned Benjamin Peirce to join the brothers in the cabinet. Once the Davenports had been tied up, Peirce entered, grabbed up all the instruments—two tambourines, a fiddle, a banjo, and a horn—and clutched the items between his knees.

The
Courier
's reporter described the scene with undisguised delight:

“Before the last jet of gas was turned off, the aspect of Prof. Peirce, looking out from the shadows of the tabernacle, with the spiritual youngsters on each side of him, and vigilantly guarding the instruments which were soon to be toned by the supernatural orchestra, was something pictorial to behold.”
⁵

After ten minutes of silence, during which the spirit ensemble played no music, the jets were relit and the gloating professor emerged from the cabinet.

At the conclusion of the two-day investigation, the reporter wrote that only the Fox sisters had produced manifestations, and these he and the professors chose to dismiss as just “a little rapping by the Foxes, easily traceable to their persons and easily done by others without the pretense of spirits; not a table or piano lifted or anything moved a single hair's breath…. So ends this ridiculous and infamous imposture.”

The mediums claimed that the manifestations had been predictably weak because of the investigators' hostility, and they organized a second set of demonstrations for a different group of reporters, who turned out to be more enthusiastic. The Harvard professors, however, remained steadfast and fierce in their denunciation of what they considered out and-out fraud, signing a statement that argued that “any connection with spiritualist circles, so called, corrupts the morals and degrades the intellect.” The panel members deemed it “their solemn duty to warn the community against this contaminating influence, which surely tends to lessen the truth of man and the purity of woman.”
⁶
Although Spiritualism had long been accused by its opponents of causing everything from adultery to insanity, this denunciation may have more personal, expressing in part Louis Agassiz's attitude toward Maggie Fox for her “contaminating” influence on “the truth” of a man who had named a geographical promontory in his honor: Elisha Kent Kane.

 

By the autumn of 1858 Maggie had forged an erratic relationship with Kane's brother—and lawyer—Robert Patterson Kane. His family had asked him to retrieve the explorer's love letters, and whether for that reason alone or because of genuine affection for her, Robert occasionally visited and brought gifts. She often responded flirtatiously, as though trying to reassure herself that she had lost none of Circe's old powers. But sometimes, when he pushed too hard, she reacted with understandable rancor over his family's attitude toward her.

“The letters are mine to guard and cherish so long as I live and when I am no longer able to guard them, I will place them with you,” she wrote. “But do not think me so lost as to ever allow them to be published—”
⁷

She insisted on her own and Kane's integrity, no matter the ambiguities that had clouded the sad situation. “The private marriage you can think of as you please,” she told Robert, admitting that she herself thought “a private marriage is quite as disgraceful as to stand in another light….” But she added—bravely if unrealistically—that neither Robertnor his parents could ever deny Kane's honorable intentions, at least not to her.
⁸

In devotion to his memory, in August 1858 Maggie converted to
Catholicism, explaining that even before his death Kane had urged her to do so. His choice for her is puzzling since he himself had been baptized a Presbyterian. Moreover, anti-Catholic feeling, largely associated with a virulent nativism sparked by fears of immigration, was running high in the United States in the 1850s. Kane had been a Mason too, and the antagonism between Freemasons and Catholics was no secret.

Perhaps Catholicism, which at the time seemed to some Protestants to be imbued with medieval mystery and drama, had appealed to Kane's romantic nature, and he had come to believe that the church's pomp and splendor would suit the passionate Maggie. Catholicism also provided firm, paternal guidance in moral and religious matters, along with the frequent opportunity for the parishioner to confess sins and to be granted absolution. The church may have seemed to Kane ideally capable of fulfilling the role of stern but compassionate and loving teacher, a part in which he so often had cast himself.

Maggie's baptism sparked a warm response and the gift of a rosary from Robert Kane. Newspapers reported on the event sympathetically, but they offered different interpretations of it. Did Maggie's conversion to Catholicism mean that Spiritualism was insufficient to sustain her or that the spirits themselves were nonexistent? Horace Greeley tried to separate her conversion from any overall judgement on Spiritualism, emphasizing that she had “never dreamed of saying or implying that any of her family were guilty of fraud or deception in the matter of the ‘Rappings.'”
⁹

He was right in his attempt to distinguish the two. Maggie renounced her association with Spiritualism without publicly denouncing either the spirits or her family. Whatever Catholicism may have meant to Kane, to Maggie it meant absolute deference to his wishes, those desires of his that, for a host of reasons, some under her control and some not, she often had defied in his lifetime: by playing truant from Crookville, by participating in seances, by seeming to him to be too dangerously alluring, by seeming to him to be not loving enough. In accepting Catholicism, she rejected Spiritualism as Kane had asked her to do and as in her guilt and despair she surely wished she had done years earlier.

The house at 50 East Twenty-Second Street now seemed expensive, all the more so with Maggie dependent and in seclusion, and the
third-floor apartment especially was filled with sad memories. Horace Greeley came to the rescue, inviting Kate, Maggie, and Margaret to move into the home he maintained at 35 East Nineteenth Street. The Greeleys, who traveled and also spent time at their country residence, were grateful to have caretakers there, and the situation was a boon to the Fox family. The house on Nineteenth Street, moreover, soon became the site of the one joyous event that took place during this sad time.

It was with Robert Kane that Maggie shared the good news, confiding that Leah planned to marry Daniel Underhill. “Now I am going to tell you the best news you have listened to for many years,” Maggie glowed, apparently without envy that Leah's romance was to end more happily than her own.

“Leah poor Leah that has had so many ups and downs in this weary world is to be married
honorably
and by a minister at this house next Wednesday Nov. 3rd—Her husband is wealthy, his family are Quakers, and there is no end to his relations here and in Philadelphia….” Maggie admitted that the “Doctor disliked Leah and for that reason I almost despised her; but she has been very kind to me since he died, and has talked so affectionately of him that I have forgiven her.”
¹⁰

John Fox attended the wedding, which was held in the Greeleys' parlor, and then stayed on. His little house next to David's in Wayne County had been destroyed by fire; he also may have had other reasons for making the change. Old and frail, he may have wanted his wife's companionship in his last years or believed he could be of some comfort to the grieving Maggie.

The newlyweds, Leah Fox Fish Brown Underhill and her husband, Daniel, moved into a home at 232 West Thirty-Seventh Street in Manhattan, and she retired from public seances. She was now in her midforties, stout, enlarged to formidable proportions by the huge petticoats popular in her day. Her square, open face had thickened with age but retained its pleasing expression, so much like her mother's. She had found herself a husband who was dignified and attractive, with a wavy abundance of fair hair, whose fire insurance business supported her in style, who treated her siblings and parents kindly.
¹¹
Leah's nieces and nephews—the children of her brother David and her sister Maria—vis
ited the house on Thirty-Seventh Street so frequently that Leah urged them to call her “Ma.” Eventually she and Daniel, either formally or informally, adopted a daughter named Lillie, who also may have been David's or another relative's child.
¹²

Leah had become the bourgeois housewife that she had yearned for so long to be, a life very different from the one she had led as a single mother in Rochester or as the doyenne of mediums in New York. She was as stodgily respectable as any of the notorious Fox sisters could hope to be. Her house reflected the then-current version of the American dream, its two adjoining parlors a warren of carved rosewood chairs, polished side tables, gilt mirrors, ornately framed paintings, bric-a-brac, dizzily patterned area rugs, and lace and velvet draperies. The centerpiece, of course, was her piano, as it had been since her days as a music teacher. Birds warbled in the nearby aviary, a sunny space that she used to entertain and that blossomed with flowering plants all year long. The Underhills' home in Manhattan was a perfect Victorian showplace.

 

Despite the newfound calm and security of her marriage, Leah wasn't about to surrender her hold on spirit communication entirely, perhaps because she thoroughly enjoyed the personal power and pleasure it gave her. In private and for free, she continued to dazzle family and friends with her mediumistic prowess. Emma Hardinge called her “the best test, rapping, and physical medium I ever met, as well as one of the kindest and most noble-hearted of women,” pleased perhaps to have a more socially substantial member of the Fox family to praise than the increasingly woebegone Kate or Catholic Maggie.