Face-à-face, the pair of scientific fencers began to hurl Shakespearean insults.
ENGELBRECHT-MERCUTIO: Tybalt, you ratcatcher, will you walk?
MATCHETT-TYBALT: What wouldst thou have with me?
MERCUTIO: Good King of Cats, nothing but one of your nine lives. That I mean to make bold withal, and, as you shall use me hereafter, dry-beat the rest of the eight. Will you pluck your sword out of his pilcher by the ears? Make haste, lest mine be about your ears ere it be out.
TYBALT: I am for you.
They drew their swords and waggled them at each other.
MERCUTIO: Come, sir, your passado.
They fought with ludicrous ferocity until Tybalt gave Mercutio a fatal wound.
MERCUTIO: A plague o’ both your houses! I am sped.
TYBALT: What, art thou hurt?
MERCUTIO: Ay, ay, a scratch, a scratch. Marry, ’tis enough.
TYBALT: Courage, man. The hurt cannot be much.
MERCUTIO: No, ’tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church-door, but ’tis enough, ’twill serve. Ask for me tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave man. I am peppered, I warrant, for this world. A plague o’ both your houses! Zounds, a dog, a rat, a mouse, a cat, to scratch a man to death! A braggart, a rogue, a villain who fights scientifically.
Passersby had gathered on the sidewalk, and as Mercutio crumpled onto the porch and expired with a most piteous sigh, they clapped and cried “Bravo!”
Not to be outdone by a pair of scientific fencers, George Bliss leaped from the balustrade over the heads of the astonished crowd. The poor man landed on a loose paving stone and broke his ankle. We heard the bone snap and shuddered. In fakir fashion, Miss Etta rolled herself into a doughnut for the approval of the gawkers, who graciously overlooked the immodest result of her art. Spurred by envy, Miss Watson of the Hippodrome had borrowed a Pierre Michaux “boneshaker” from a cyclist and was racing hell-bent for election up and down Broadway, like a cracked-brain Ben-Hur, while the gentlemen ogled Miss Mattie Elliott’s superb legs as she did her famous high kicks. Only glum Mrs. Stoner had no part in the variety; Napoléon was in Flatbush, growing fat on mice fed him by an admirer.
“Hooray for Miss Mattie!” shouted a gentleman wearing a pince-nez, which glittered wickedly in a blast of sunlight.
“Encore!” shouted a man who could have been either a drama critic or an aficionado of dogfights.
“More leg!” shouted a paperhanger whose slurred speech, wobbly gait, and roseate nose betrayed him as a sot. He sat on his book of samples and sighed for love.
A chorus of sybarites took up the inebriate’s theme: “Give us more leg, Miss Mattie!”
She obliged them with a kick of such extraordinary height that her head disappeared into the petals of her skirts. The gentlemen tossed their hats, and Miss Etta, envious of the attention being paid to her colleague, staggered down the porch steps on all fours like a large spider and sang “Father’s a Drunkard and Mother Is Dead.”
“More leg, Miss Mattie, if you please!”
Margaret touched my wrist. “None of this is what you came to see.”
I admitted it was not.
“You mustn’t blame my friends; their roles are engrained. Perhaps I was naïve to think that you could get to know them as they really are. If they were to stop playing their parts, they might vanish. Is it the same for you, Ellen, in your world?”
Not wanting to follow the argument to its conclusion, I gave no answer. I had lost my hold on reality and was happier so. At least for a while, I will be free of all that, I told myself, unwilling to specify even to myself what “that” might be.
Margaret, however, had not finished with me.
“There’s someone else I want you to meet,” she said, leading me upstairs by the hand.
We stopped outside room number five on the hotel’s top floor. My heart was thudding, my mouth parched, my respiration fast. Something in Margaret’s tone had unnerved me, as did the atmosphere of the hotel’s upper stories, their dark staircases and corridors, which could have been modeled on Thornfield Hall’s. My mind is overly susceptible to the intimations of old houses, easily swayed by other people, and liable to be persuaded of hostile intentions by a neurotic fancy. Margaret knocked on the door.
“Who is it?” a thrilling voice asked from the other side. I pictured a room done up like one of Barnum’s attractions: a papier-mâché grotto inhabited by the resurrected Feejee Mermaid, languid in her bath; a fire-breathing chimaera chained in an asbestos-papered parlor; or, prodigy of prodigies, Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy, “a human–Skye terrier, the crowning mystery of nature’s contradictions.” Then, having just read Jane Eyre, I was certain that the room’s unseen tenant was a dangerously distracted creature like Rochester’s mad wife locked inside her tower.
“Margaret and a friend,” replied the indomitable little person standing next to me.
“A friend to whom?” asked the creature inside the room, which, as I recall, smelled of juniper berries.
“To those who work in circuses.”
“You may come in.”
I thought my heart would stop as Margaret opened the door and ushered me inside. To my relief, the room was ordinary, as was its tenant. I insist that there was nothing remarkable or grotesque. I felt the blood that had drained from my face returning, my breathing slow, and the vertigo that had nearly toppled me leave me to find my footing on a threadbare carpet that, in better days, had depicted a Mogul paradise in colored yarns.
“Do sit down,” said the elderly woman cordially.
I sat in one of the two “grown-up” chairs, and Margaret eased into a small one that the woman had evidently provided for her visits. I thought I should introduce myself and did.
The woman acknowledged me with a smile and nod of her head—a quite ordinary head, neither pretty nor plain. “I am Madame Singleton.”
“Madame Singleton is a clairvoyant,” said Margaret respectfully. “Her intuitions were recognized by the Fox sisters, Kate and another Margaret, when they were stopping at Barnum’s Hotel in the fifties, during the early years of their fame.”
Amy and Isaac Post, a Quaker couple living in Rochester, were the first to proclaim the girls’ gifts after they had rapped out messages sent by the inconsolable Posts’ recently departed daughter. (In another of history’s bewildering entanglements, Mrs. Post attended the Woman’s Rights Convention at the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls and signed the Declaration of Sentiments, authored and presented by Elizabeth Cady Stanton.) We now know that Kate and Margaret were frauds, after the third Fox sister, Leah, confessed to having perpetrated the hoax, which had begun as a childish prank.
I could never make out why the girls’ “psychic abilities” had excited the interest of many radically minded Quakers of the day, the same faction advocating temperance, abolition, and the cause espoused by those two other controversial “sisters,” Elizabeth and Susan. At the peak of their celebrity, the Foxes were championed by luminaries such as William Cullen Bryant, James Fenimore Cooper, Horace Greeley, William Lloyd Garrison, and Sojourner Truth, as well as P. T. Barnum, who appreciated the bamboozler’s art. Two of the era’s fringe movements—suffrage and spiritualism—became conjoined in the public’s mind, to the disadvantage of the first.