Rochester Knockings (22 page)

               
Heard the voice of Minnehaha

               
Calling to him in the darkness,

               
“Hiawatha! Hiawatha!”

Kate looked with surprise at her visitor and, as if the words were being dictated to her, continued the poem in a weary tone:

               
Then they buried Minnehaha

               
In the snow a grave they made her

               
In the forest deep and darksome

“I myself have spent time with the Ojibwa Indians of whom the author speaks so well . . .” Alexander exclaimed, distracted by this evocation before continuing,
mezza voce
: “However tonight is not about the Ojibwas but about your future, my dear Kate! Mr.
Greeley believes in you, he thinks that you deserve better than cabinet consultations. He appears determined to take charge of your affairs and support you financially and morally in your studies. Isn't that wonderful?”

“I don't know, why didn't he address me directly?”

“A man like him is very busy with his duties. To be frank, he asked me to sound you out. If you accept the idea, you will be hearing from him very soon . . .”

XIII.

The Conquest of Ice

N
othing resembles the life of a hero. The most intrepid man still has the heart of a child. Margaret regrets having burned her journal because of the final pages where she had recorded, or rather affixed, like rare or common flowers in a herbarium, the first moments of their love, back when intimacy was still limited to letters and some sighs exchanged lip to lip. She had met doctor Elisha Kent Kane at an evening gala in Philadelphia. It was a celebration for the victory of Democratic abolitionist William Bigler in the governmental elections, but she cared little about the event and the heated debates that erupted here and there about the indignity of agricultural states of the south and Republican potentates. Here at this party, where she was finally left alone with the spirits, she had just abandoned the lively hustle, between the orchestra and the dance floor, when she abruptly found herself facing him. Was that before her mother had died? She no longer remembers much. The stranger's gray eyes immediately invaded her mind and soul. He had a large curly beard that mingled at the temples with waves of long hair, the head of a prophet framing an intelligent mind and of a severe beauty. “We know each
other, Miss Fox,” he had said to her just after the long look they'd exchanged. Her anonymity was suddenly broken, but he did not bother her about her public life. Undoubtedly they danced, and discreetly entwined, thoughtfully felt the possibility of happiness.

She saw him two or three more times in Philadelphia. Doctor Kane, so reserved and careful of judgment, was also an adventurous scholar, a hero of the Mexican War, a tireless traveler, and an explorer returned from Africa and from a relief expedition in the Arctic area. But his ambitions remained unfulfilled. Talents, knowledge, diplomas, and successes supported by a nice family fortune had not yet conjoined with that brilliant beam of fame that would have finally given him proof of his native election and salvation. A preceptor of his own destiny, Doctor Kane secretly lacked confidence in himself. From anywhere in the world, he could hardly escape its clutches; Margaret, who had suffered plenty of servitude, had ample time to see it in this magistrate's son, affecting the independence of a rationalist mind. Audacious and refined, Elisha loved poetry and the arts as much as the crossing of a Himalaya or a sea of ice; distant sirens called him and, having just survived a shipwreck or scurvy, he would already be dreaming of the next departure with an incomprehensible longing. Back under the Stars and Stripes, the weight of Puritan conformity—the Victorian version of which he'd had a taste of in London—had caught hold of him at the same time as ailments from the Tropics and the persistent mortifications of an education based on the necessity of consideration.

For a long time the only proximity Margaret had known was an epistolary intimacy with this ambassador of the wind. In his letters Elisha showed a sentimentality both heightened and recriminatory. Brimming with requirements for the present and the
future, he of course disapproved of her spiritualist activities and urged her to break with that entourage of charlatans, convinced that Leah had exploited her two young sisters for greedy ends. Having had the opportunity to meet Mrs. Underhill up close in New York, his verdict remained unchanged.

Deeply moved at being able to be an object of passion without her spiritualist trappings, Margaret quietly allowed herself to be persuaded. Presented to his patrician Pennsylvanian family, to the parents and allies of the rich heir, she kept her role of promised one with all the required discretion. She could not hold his hand or touch his shoulder in public, though he begged her to be all his in her letters, to scent them with her perfume or to include a lock of her hair. Resolute, after going to the point of threatening her manager with prosecution, Elisha eventually forbade her psychic exhibitions. Reduced to a trifle by the man she loved, Margaret was tempted to strike back. When he was giving lectures in Boston or Washington at the invitation of scientific societies, she tried in vain to win back equivocal powers. But the credulous excitement around her was missing. In morgues or cemeteries, on certain nights of intolerable solitude, she went to invoke the silence of the dead that, in the lightheadedness of the unspeakable, sometimes strangely resonates from the depths of the grave or the void. No one ever answered, however, no spirit, no expeditionary from the kingdom of shadows, and she no longer had the heart to crack her knuckles to deceive that fact. Margaret could have recited her letter of surrender word by word: “I explored the unknown as far as the human will is capable. I went to death in order to obtain from it any manifestation, even symbolic. Nothing ever happened, nothing. I was in cemeteries in the middle of the night. I sat down alone on a tombstone, hoping that the sleeping
spirits would rise up to me. I tried to obtain a sign. No, no, the dead will not come back, and no one knows how to escape hell with impunity. Spirits cannot come back. God didn't want it.”

Flattered that she would accept leaving an unhealthy glory behind for him, but doubting that it was her deliberate choice, Doctor Kane showed her his gratitude in a missive full of leniency, addressed from Boston where he was giving a series of lectures: “I understand well the necessities that were yours, poor child, don't I in the end have quite similar obligations? Facing the crowds come to hear my wild stories of the Far North, I sometimes feel just like you. My brain and your body are sources of attraction and I admit that there's not that much of a difference . . .”

Thwarted in its prerogatives, the religious establishments of every denomination—from Methodists to Anglicans—then tried hard, in the name of the Christ Resurrected, to win back the sheep under the influence of imposters, while the academies of science on their end were sanctioning those apostates of Cartesianism and the same experimental method that the already elderly chemist Michel-Eugène Chevreul was working to formalize. He and Michael Faraday, spearheading a general outcry, harshly criticized the spiritual doctrine's new claims to objectivity. Doctor Kane, who was pulling out all the stops to disenchant his beloved once and for all, likewise summoned Catholic dogma and its theater of punishment. Shamelessly, in a bitter play, he made her a list of the mortal sins to which she'd been exposed. More than the arguments of accurate science, the Catholic fulminations decided her renouncement. With a devil that Elisha didn't believe in, he managed to disabuse Margaret; didn't he have the right to use all means imaginable? The spirits that not long ago she actively
believed she was divining, along with the quite convenient deceptions linking the invisible to physical occurrences were thus nothing more than the work of the Prince of Darkness . . . For she had no doubt about the irrational. All the instruction that her volatile fiancé was imposing—at the home of his Aunt Susannah, who'd been assigned the task of chaperoning her—only deepened her belief in mysteries and her fear of endings.

In order to please her lover on the page, Margaret solemnly read
The Wide, Wide World
of the very Victorian Elizabeth Wetherell. The
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
seemed equally incredible to her. Was it really possible that, even if black, an infant could be torn from its family, that innocent women of color could be hung upside down and whipped to the point of bleeding, and that a miserable little black boy had to swap bits of bread in order to learn how to read from the little white boys almost as poor, but at least in school? Taken with the invocatory game of reading—this sweet interview with phantoms—she also discovered, though not without trouble, a translation of Friedrich de La Motte-Foucqué's
Ondine,
which recounted the story of a water sprite who, in order to acquire a soul, marries the knight Huldebrand.

At least she was taking a rest from the general din of the dead, and for her it was a blessing to be excited in her living body, even at the expense of a meager intellect. Tables stopped turning for her and the bones of armoires stopped creaking. She hardly had news of Kate anymore, also in the hands of educators. Considering the multitude of scholars converted to spiritualism, the instruction couldn't be a panacea against the bedlam of spirits, but undoubtedly it was enough to enlighten simple souls. Leah alone persisted with her symposia as well as salons, firmly established
with the authority of being founder of this new doctrine, despite the competition now coming from Europe under the auspices of the French pedagogue Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail—a.k.a. Allen Kardec—who evangelized his religion of salvation through metempsychosis wherever it had some resonance, particularly in Brazil and the Philippines. Encouraged by her fiancé, who was indignant about the press's intrusion into one's private life, Margaret no longer read the publications of the mediumship societies where her name had so often appeared these last several years. “Don't trouble yourself with the world,” he wrote her. “Never answer the questions of journalists. How horrible a life is autopsied while still alive!” As she'd done with her private diary, yesterday she fueled the stove with three notebooks filled with articles carefully cut out and pasted.

Finally satisfied with her renunciations and at how she'd applied herself to learning, Doctor Elisha Kane promised to marry her upon his return home. By the way in which he phrased it, Margaret could read between the lines the conditions implied in this promise: that she would remain steadfast in her conduct and that his impending expedition would go without pitfalls. For this had to be one of the most dangerous and risky operations ever undertaken. It was nothing less than chartering a specially streamlined vessel to break the barrier of the polar Arctic in order to find the trail of Sir John Franklin's lost expedition. Chief Medical Officer during the initial foray financed by the rich philanthropist Henry Grinnell, Kane had decided to lead under his own command this second mission leaving from New York. His services in the United States Marines or the Africa Squadron, like his missions in China and Europe, hadn't cured him of a sense of adventure. The vocation of explorer only meant something with
the discovery of new spaces. He worshipped the Scotsman David Livingstone, doctor and missionary who departed on the quest of locating the sources of the Nile and who would not rest until he'd made that latitude legendary on the map of the world. Or his defunct compatriot John Franklin, who, on his three journeys to the boreal arc, would end up mapping most of the northern coast of Canada, continuing up the Mackenzie River to the Beaufort Sea, and finally, aboard two ships fitted with steam engines and reinforced to last years, ventured in search of the northwest passage, wandering in the Greenland ice floes and disappearing with his crew in 1847. But for the most part, wasn't it more exciting to discover, ice pick in hand, an unknown mountain than to lose oneself in conjectures on the smoky hallucinations of the afterlife?

Elisha Kane's farewells on the eve of his departure on an express train to the port of New York filled Margaret with apprehension, but she had the perspicacity not to let on about these forebodings, knowing that he would only see them as a hardly promising symptom of irrationalism. Aboard the expeditionary ship, along the inhabited shores, Elisha did not fail however to write long letters posted at each stop to his sweet and disciplined promised one.

Grinnell's second expedition would fail to further explain the endpoint of John Franklin's arctic line, but because of it, the whole North coast could be mapped up to a latitude of 82º2'3. At the risk of being trapped by walls of ice that, barely broken up, would close back up right behind their ship, and suffering from scurvy and malnutrition, Kane and his crew heroically crossed Smith Sound to the ice floes of the then-unnamed Cape Constitution. Nearly a year without news after the rare missives that had come from the Atlantic shores of Canada, Margaret rebelled against her
superstitious nature, vowing to forget the spirit-chasing devil if Elisha came back safe and sound. Saved
in extremis
from the grip of ice by a British bomb vessel with a steel rostrum, the explorer indeed reappeared with an almost-intact crew.

He returned home safe to Philadelphia, burning with tragic and sumptuous recollections that he started to transcribe with a sort of dazzled haste, but his health declined quickly after their wedding. Although tolerated by her in-laws after this test of interminable waiting, Margaret, who had only her husband's financial support to count on, had to defend tooth and nail her assets as woman and spouse. Without any regard for the love she had bore for him, they sought every means to take over her duty to care for her sick husband under the pretext that she lacked the experience and quality of judgment assumed proper by the cream of society. Margaret drank deep draughts of the waves of fever that intermittently struck her companion. Vestal virgin over his breath, she watched for each sign of weakening and at night stood awake beside his burning flesh with the feeling of drowning.