The Dark (30 page)

Maggie watches Leah, round-eyed. Later, once Leah is elsewhere, she takes the few shaky steps over to the secretary desk and writes to Katie.

The letter Maggie receives back is folded lengthwise and sealed with wax. Katie’s writing is even more difficult to read than usual.

Maggie folds up the letter. She ponders that phrase:
with love
. Maggie knows love. She has a bemused love for her parents. A difficult love for Leah. A depthless protecting love for Katie. Such loves are like furniture—necessary but unnoticed after a while. But hatred? The kind that Katie has for Mary Greeley? The kind that Maggie faced in Troy? That Burr is fomenting against them all? Well. Such hatred has no gradations. No ambiguities. It is an absoluteness. Little wonder, she thinks, that hatred leads people to grievous action in a way that love does not.

Of a sudden Maggie is wind-blasted with fear. She drops Katie’s letter. For in reviewing this villain cast of hatred she has understood for the first time how much their reputations, their very lives, are as a string before a blade.

“A
re you chilled, Mrs. Mellon?” my patient asked. “You’re shivering like a half-drowned cat. Here, draw close, and take the coverlet, for your knees. I’d hate myself if you caught fever on my account.”

“I’m all-fine, duck, not cold. No.” And indeed the garret pipes were giving out the usual furnace heat—though that day the warmth had an oppressive quality, alike damp flannel wrapping tight. “I was only visioning your trials in Troy,” I added. “The mob, and how all that brouha must have unravelled your poor nerves.”

“Well, yes. Afterwards my nerves were as unravelled as your yarn skeins, and tangled, and frayed, the whole yardage.”

“Mobs,” I sighed, and this time kept back the shudder. I should mention that, during the draft riots I’d had my own experience with mobs, and knew well their pitiless fury, the misery left in their wake. I should also mention that I became a physician because of those experiences, and that those experiences changed me utterly; indeed, they rendered me into such a different entity that I might not have recognized the previous Alvah June Mellon if she’d knocked on my door and tried to sell me pudding sticks.

“A mob, yes. The first. And surely not the last,” my patient said. She told me then about the tour she and Leah made of Buffalo and all the brouha that transpired there. “A Dr. Foote came to our hotel door. Foote, hah, that was his true name. Anywise, he warned
Leah and me to escape the city at the once or face a mob. I nearly dropped to the floor in a faint, as if yes, those nerves holding me upright had been snipped easy as any yarn skein or thread. I’d really had enough of mobs. But Leah? She just slammed the door in his face, then summoned up the hotel proprietor and told how this Dr. Foote had dared come to her door in her private hours, and without first sending his card; how he had threatened, insulted and terrorized her, a woman alone—two women alone. I remember how the proprietor gravely assured our safety as he left. And sure enough, there was no mob, not that time. We did not escape the latest investigation, however. Now these Buffalo doctors had unearthed a Mrs. Patcheon, a befuddled old whom-ever. She could make a cracking sound with her knees. This is it! I thought, once and twice and three times again. But nope. Leah, why didn’t she just convince Mrs. Patcheon that she and Leah were old school friends. Soon enough, Mrs. Patcheon was saying that Leah would never ever commit a deception, that her sounds were nothing like ours, and that she hoped and prayed we would raise the spirits of her three sons. They had died from, oh, this and that—I forget.”

“Three sons?” I said. “Poor woman, I am amazed she had even a measure of sanity left. And though you might have forgotten the mode of her sons’ demise, I am stone-sure she did not.”

“No, no … of course not,” my patient said, abashed, as if I had just exposed some failing of hers. “But the doctors had the right tack. As did Chauncey.”

“A
S ONE CRACKS THE FINGERS!”
Chauncey exclaims to the sparse audience at New York’s Hope Chapel this frigid night late in the month of January’51, the last night of his expose. Chauncey sheds his boots, unbuttons his garters, peels off his socks. Heman reluctantly does the same; he had tried begging off this night, and practically on his knees.

The audience does not gasp in realization, nor astonishment. No. A man sniggers. Another heckles Chauncey and Heman on their
caterpillar appendages. A woman flounces out, as if the naked feet of Chauncey and Heman were any more risqué than her ankles, on show there under her rick-racked hem.

“To enhance the sound, a good conductor is all that is needed. And a loose shoe of special design, and a stalwart toe. A warm toe …” Chauncey snaps his toe but the sound is faint in the hall. Heman follows suit, his snap even fainter. The cold is at fault, Chauncey exhorts, when a hiss comes from the audience. The evening goes from this to worse. The audience is unimpressed even when Chauncey explains all of the Fox women’s tricks. How the Fox women use “leading questions.” How they watch the questioner’s countenance when formulating answers. Use plants in the audience. Use mechanical devices. And the worst, pay spies to ferret out information on the dead.

Chauncey hauls his boots back on, stands at his lectern. “Some of us give away so much without realizing it,” he expounds. “Some of us are as transparent as glass. Even I can claim a measure of gullibility for I was, during some little time, pained by a kind of half-hope that my sainted elder brother, Edwin, who, in his lifetime, was a young man of the finest taste and of high poetical genius, would so far forgo the natural dignity and delicacy of his character as to come back to commune with me by making the most vulgar noises, rattling about under chairs and tables and kicking over light-stands and bureaus in the dark, to excite my wonder and horror.”

In truth, Chauncey thinks, kicking over light-stands and making vulgar noises is exactly what Edwin would do if he could return. Chauncey looks over the chapel. Over at Heman, who is morose as a neutered mule. Now Edwin, he had appreciated a laugh, had appreciated life’s joys to the very hilt. He was the one who led the young Chauncey to his first grog hole, his first brothel. Handsome, golden-haired Edwin so afire with his rebellious ideals. How well he had taught Chauncey to act. How proud he would have been to see Chauncey onstage, applauded and attended to. On consideration, however, Chauncey is grateful that Edwin, being dead, cannot bear witness, as the few attendees seem almost bored by the lecture’s
end. They hike their collars and trickle out to the next entertainment. Bowling. Billiards. Grog shops. As if these are all a piece with Chauncey’s display of erudition and insight.

“Guess our time is up and the like. Like over,” Heman says.

“We waited too damnedo long, Heman.” As they had. The Rochester Knockers were all the rage in New York during the summer and early fall of’50. There were souvenirs and songs and newspaper articles galore, and other mediums and ghost-chatters sprouting up in the Fox sisters’ path like mushrooms under a good layer of horseshit. It was a vast misfortune that the Fox sisters left New York nearly five months ago now. Chauncey should have put on an expose the moment he realized the truth. But it has taken much time and practice to become proficient enough at toe snapping to convince an audience. Even now Chauncey’s toes ache from the effort. No, it isn’t as easy as snapping fingers, cracking knuckles. But the sound, who can deny it? And haven’t most of the newspaper reporters lauded his effort? Excepting, of course, the Fox sisters’ cheapjack promoter Eliab Capron, who has called Chauncey and Heman “knaves” and “mountebanks” and “capital puffs.” Excepting the
Tribune
, which published that unjust caricature of Chauncey, his toes the size of pug dogs. And excepting Horace Greeley, who has reported that Chauncey Burr’s soundings are as different from the Fox women’s soundings “as the sounds of a flute and a trumpet.”

Flute? Trumpet? Chauncey takes his showman’s stance and faces the empty chapel. “We are the ‘instruments’ of our own demise, good people, and the Fox sisters? Their knocking is the sound of their own requiems. They are fiddling their own … fiddles, etcetera, while their reputations burn. Hah! How is that, Heman? A neat twist on the bible quote, righto?”

“That’s not from the bible, that’s from, damnit, I dunno.”

Chauncey folds up his lectern. Takes out his pirate-head pipe.

“And smoking’s disallowed, Chaunce,” Heman adds. He points up to a sign that proclaims just that.

Chauncey does not grace the sign, nor Heman, with a glance. He strikes a lucifer, the resulting flame approximating the size of a
gambling chip. He lights his pipe, singeing his fingers, as always. And as always, he does not wince, nor give any indication of pain.

“Make ready, Hemano. We’re not defeated yet!”

Five weeks later, Chauncey, hessian booted, tromps the New York sidewalks. He kicks at a mound of snow; out volcanoes mouldy cabbage, slops, excrement. “God’s a Yankee but I detest March,” Chauncey mutters. “Freezes a man’s arse one moment then blasts him with sun the next. Beware the Tides of March. Bloody betraying month, trust it not. Or is it Ides?” He supposes Heman would know, as would Chauncey if he’d had the benefit of his clod-headed brother’s education.

He stands aside for a covey of women. Taps his forehead in lieu of tapping his top hat, which has vanished in the bachelor disarray of his boarding room. The women glance at him with … What? Curiosity. Suspicion? Admiration? Because what kind of man goes out wihtout a hat? Does he trust that no slops or night water will be chucked onto his head? Why, yes, he trusts no one would dare. Does he think everyone needs to see his close-cropped head? Why, yes, he does. He strides faster, the cape of his Albert coat flaring over his broad shoulders, his steel-tipped cane thumping the sidewalk.

He notes a cut-rate oyster stall. “Get street oysters” was what Heman said as Chauncey left. “We’re near broke. Penniless too. And all because you’re spending a pack of bills on this latest angle and—”

“Righto, brother dearest,” Chauncey interrupted. “I’ll scavenge up a whole slime heap of them.”

He doesn’t. He passes the oyster stall, sweeping aside the strewn wrappers with his cane. He can’t comprehend the craze for the sea-stinking innards’ purses. But then he can’t comprehend a fat lot of things these days, the blinkered faith in ghosties for one, his continued association with Heman another.

He marches abruptly across the street, caught up in his own loud thoughts. Damn and blast to ruin those Fox women! People continue to believe them over him, a scientist. A “commanding man,” as one paper so rightly said, “whose jet-black beard and obsidian eyes bring to mind a fearsome hunter of yore.”

But that is not the worst of it. No. The worst is that his expose has been stolen. And by those pill-rolling quacks known as doctors. Chauncey’s blood roils. All this competition. What’s a nemesis to do?

He arrives on Broadway. Finds the usual jammed chaos of cabs, wagons, carriages. Whips and traces entwine in a giant cat’s cradle. Horses whinny in panic. Drivers bellow curses with a Gotham fluency and a Gotham ingenuity. An omnibus, misshapen by clinging riders, shunts by and splatters Chauncey’s trousers with mud and horseshit. In response, Chauncey stomps on a crocus growing in an edging of dirt. He would like better to stomp on those Buffalo doctors. Knee-knocking, not toe-cracking, was their explanation for the Fox sisters’ raps, as if relocating the expose up the leg could hide their blasted plagiarism. As proof, the doctors had one Mrs. Patcheon who could dislocate her knee at will and thus make the exact knocking sound the sisters do. The Fox women agreed to an “investigation.” The doctors’ report described how they grasped the knees and ankles of the females to detect any vibrations. How they would have bandaged the females’ limbs but this was deemed unseemly.