“You are thinking that I do not look like a medium and that my room is not furnished as you would expect,” said Madame Singleton.
I must have looked surprised, because she said, “Your thoughts are safe, my dear; I would not presume to read the mind of one of Margaret’s friends without permission.”
“I’m not sure I believe in the supernatural.”
“You are an intelligent young woman who knows her own mind.”
“I’m not sure that I do that, either,” I replied frankly.
“I am not interested in converting you to spiritualism. And you are right to be suspicious; there are a great many charlatans in the field of psychic research.”
Pointing to a framed photograph on the side table, Margaret said, “Here is Madame Singleton in costume.”
In the picture, she was dressed like an Assyrian sorceress. Her eyes had been made up to exaggerate the intensity of her gaze, and her fingers were adorned with gems, whose miraculous properties were said to strengthen her power of spiritual communion with those who had passed over. Her slender hands rested on a “talking table,” with which she would sometimes transmit, as if by infernal telegraph, messages between the quick and the dead. A crystal ball stood beside it, in which Madame Singleton could scry the future. Divination was powerful in her, as was the reach of her uncanny foresight. She was the very image of a medium, spiritualist, soothsayer, or clairvoyant. In that costume and setting, she appeared before the general public admitted to P. T. Barnum’s Grand Traveling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan & Hippodrome.
“It’s all for show,” said Margaret. “Stage props to give the crowd what it expects to see.”
“Then it’s nothing but a confidence game!” I said indignantly.
Mrs. Singleton spoke in defense of illusion: “The public would be disappointed, even enraged, if Mr. Barnum were to exhibit a man who could fly—not a creature with wings, mind you, but an otherwise-ordinary person able to levitate and soar unaided. He’d need to strap on a pair of cardboard wings covered in chicken feathers, such as children wear in Nativity pageants, to satisfy the ‘suckers,’ which they are not, since they know they are being gulled. People enjoy magic because they know there is a trick to it, and they would burn at the stake the magician who needed none.”
There is truth in that, I told myself.
“I require neither costume nor props to interpret etheric transmissions. They bring me secrets that have been locked in the vault of time and also those hidden in the tiny universe inside the human brain.”
“Her powers are stupendous!” exclaimed Margaret.
“They’re a burden,” said Madame Singleton, sighing—without, I hasten to add, ostentation.
“It is your gift,” concluded Margaret, as though the word comprehended the exceptional ability, grave responsibility, and a fate akin to doom borne by this selfless martyr to the spiritus mundi.
I was far from being convinced. At night, in a lightless room, I might almost believe in unseen, gibbering presences. But they were the stock characters of horror tales. I could more readily entertain the idea of Washington Irving’s Headless Horseman or Hawthorne’s devils than the talking dead.
“I’ll read your palm, if you like,” she said. “It’s not as revealing as what can be seen in a dish of water or in grains left on the threshing floor or by eavesdropping on voices in another’s head—by far the most reliable method. But the lines of the hand are an aperçu of destiny.”
I gave her my hand, and, suddenly fearful, took it back before she had glimpsed its palm.
“Don’t be afraid, Ellen,” encouraged Margaret.
But I was afraid and would not let her read it.
Margaret bravely offered hers. Madame Singleton laid the childlike hand on her own and proceeded to ruminate over the lines of destiny inscribed on her palm.
“What do you see?” asked Margaret, and I could hear in her voice a thrill of anticipation.
“Moments of happiness.”
“Is that all?”
“Hours of sorrow.”
A human life, in other words.
“Does it matter that the hand is no bigger than a child’s?” I asked abruptly.
“If you mean by your question, is a child’s hand too innocent to have been marked by life and intimations of the future—you are correct. But Margaret’s hand bears time’s signature, and her story, albeit writ small, is plain to see on her palm.”
“You could have lied to me like the others!” said Margaret peevishly. Madame Singleton was not the only spiritualist in Barnum’s circus. Moreover, she was the least popular of them because she would not tell her customers what they wished to hear. I never understood why Barnum kept her, unless he depended on her predictions for reasons of business. Or maybe he loved her. Who can say what truths are radiant in the mind of a mountebank, what passions agitate his heart?
She gazed at me—her eyes gimlets—and said, “If I can ever be of service, please come and see me.” She offered me her card, which I took. She may have glimpsed my future after all, because, as it turned out, I would have great need of her.
Krakatoa
SHORTLY AFTER THEIR RETURN from Philadelphia, I told Elizabeth and Susan of my visit to Barnum’s Hotel. Their faces darkened like the sky the year following Krakatoa’s eruption in the Sunda Strait. Volcanic ash had been blown aloft into the highest reaches of the atmosphere and left for the upper winds to circulate. An immense wave rolled from the Java Sea to the English Channel. If God had instructed a new and pious family in the elements of carpentry, we never heard, nor was a second ark discovered on Mount Ararat.
Even now in 1904, I remember the dreadful sunsets caused by particles of soot drifting high above Earth’s surface. The sky might have been set ablaze by aerial troops of arsonists, so spectacular was each day’s end. When the Union Pacific tracks reached the hundredth meridian in 1866, the company director, Thomas Durant, ordered the prairie set on fire to entertain the investors who had traveled from Council Bluffs in his Pullman car to celebrate the milestone. Twenty square miles of grassland burned that night. The Pentecostal fires of 1883 were vaster and brighter, though they kindly left the earth unscorched.
On the first night that the fires torched the sky, Holy Rollers thought Heaven had ruptured like a cast-iron stove and was spewing fire through the cracks. Less crackbrained men in New York, Poughkeepsie, and New Haven sent fire brigades toward an ever-receding horizon, hunting futilely for the combustion’s source. Franklin and I went up onto the roof and waited for the city to be consumed, while in the street, a congregation of Baptists was on its knees and praying in anticipation of the Four Horsemen and the “great voice from Heaven,” which would adjure the seven angels to “pour out the vials of the wrath of God upon the earth.” That year, the sun was lavender, the dusk purple, and the moon blue or green. We tasted ash in the air, or perhaps it was only in our fancies, where nothing is ever inconsequential and less than dire. Later, we read that human remains had been found washed up on the east coast of Africa, having crossed the Indian Ocean on rafts of volcanic pumice. (Some stories cannot seem other than lies, and some truths only exaggeration can convey.)
I could be tempted to find in Krakatoa the cause of all that befell me in that eventful year of 1883. I realize the absurdity of so medieval an explanation, but at the time, I judged the truth of things with the rashness and conviction of a sick mind. I am lucky to see things more clearly now.