That’s what I said in New York, Katie, remember that? The biggest stage of all, right there in New York City, and you stuck in the audience whilst I held the spotlight. How that must have chafed, you always so loved the stage. But there you sat with your face of stone. I saw you! I saw you when I peeked between the curtains before the show. You and the whole house, and what a house it was! A hundred people, all of them in their Sunday best, and the house all shining and gilt by the gaslight chandeliers, and me there to say our whole lives had been a lie.
Leah — the third Fox sister, she styled herself, as if she ever had any traffic with the dead — the way she made us back in Rochester. That’s what she always said. I made you! I was the one who booked the Corinthian Hall in Rochester, I was the one who made you! The Fox Sisters of the Famous Events in Hydesville, that Occurred in the Spring of 1848, tapping and preening like little birds, always her little birds, and we hardly knowing her before Hydesville, her seventeen years our senior, a grown woman and a family of her own. The Queen of Lies! Our sittings with the great and small alike. Oh, Katie, how grand they all were! Mr. Cooper and Mrs. Stowe, the great Sojourner Truth and Mr. Horace Greeley himself, our patron and protector, to them all delivering, each and every one — Lies! And most of all the hundreds, the thousands! that followed, innumerable to count, with their sittings and their gauzy apparitions, their spirit lights, their automatic writing: Lies, all lies. And we the Sisters of the Lie, who birthed a monstrous truth.
“Our whole lives,” you said backstage, your voice quavering with resentment.
“Our whole goddamn lives, Maggs,” you said. “You with your toes popping and your knuckles cracking, all the tricks of the trade. The spirit hands and the voices and the Summerland itself.” All a lie — though it didn’t keep you from taking your half of the money, did it? Seven hundred and fifty dollars each, a small fortune in 1888, like sand through our fingers, it went. You folded it away in your purse with an edge of fierce defiance in your voice. I can hear it now, your fury at all my lies, saying, “But it wasn’t all a lie. Not all of it, Maggs.”
Even lies have some truth inside them, and truth some lies. The Summerland is a cold, hard place. It’s a cold, hard place we go when we die. And there are voices, there is a voice to make you shudder and run all cold inside. Nobody’s going to pay their good, hard-earned money to hear such a monstrous truth — or believe it when they do. Some things cannot be countenanced or believed, not if you want to go on living or crawl inside a bottle where the voice goes silent for a while. Not unless. So we lied. Our whole career a lie built upon a truth, and our renunciation of it a truth built upon a lie.
I sleep a little then, a little slice of death somebody once told me, but I know that it’s not true. Not the sleep of oblivion, but the sleep of nightmare, breeding monsters—
Then Emily is bending over me. It’s morning, a bright shining March morning to make you forget all these truths—
— that awful voice—
— for a while. The confusion has lifted. I’m clearest in the mornings.
“Here, Mrs. Maggie, take some broth,” she says. “I made it special.”
So I take a sip to please her. You have to please people, that’s what we do, you know. But the truth is I don’t want it, I haven’t any appetite any more. Then it’s dark, and here you come bending over me again, saying Mrs. Maggie, Mrs. Maggie, are you there. Your voice is coming from far away, like a voice from the bottom of a well. Why you should call me Mrs. Maggie I don’t know. Plain old Maggs has always been good enough for all these years. I can hear you say it now—Maggs, Maggs, Maggs, your voice dripping with scorn.
You always scorned me so, saying I couldn’t summon the spirits, not the way you could. Yet I never denied it. I never denied the ascendancy of your gift. Why, I remember a time when you said as much, as though I had denied it. We were mere girls then. I wasn’t yet twenty and you just then fifteen-years-old, in your dress of robin’s-egg blue and your hair done up so pretty, with some stray wisps falling down around your eyes, as if they’d just worked loose and you hadn’t planned it that way from the first, so artful, to frame your face just so. In a fine hotel room in New York City, that was. How rich it had seemed, the fine velvet upholstery and the gilt moldings and the golden and red brocade on the curtains, that new smell on everything, as if it was fresh made. Leah said we could afford such fine things by then, the very best, I remember the way she said it: We can afford the very best now, girls, as though she had anything to do with it. That was Leah for you. She was out at the shops, I remember. We had just arrived in the city — where was it we had been before that? I wonder — and she was always out at the shops. We have to look the part, girls, she always said so cheery, but why she should have to look it, I never did understand. I sometimes think that it was just to spite Leah that we renounced it all, and condemned it as a sin and blasphemy.
But that day, that day the sky was clear and blue as the blue in your dress, as though they’d been special made to match. You had tied back the heavy curtains and posed yourself in the most flattering fall of light, as though there were anyone there to see it but me. You were always on stage. Every time in my life I ever saw you, you were on stage.
You said, “Come to the window, Sister. It’s so pretty out.”
So I did. For a time we were quiet, just looking out the window. Fine carriages rolled by three stories below, full of the richest sort — who could say, some of them might have paid for private sittings, we were that well loved in that day. And cabs too, and dray carts rattling over cobbles and flinging up horse apples, which was what our father always called them, remember that? People pushing and shoving on the sidewalks, and newspaper boys, and ballad-sellers singing out the titles of the latest songs, a penny each for the sheet music so that pretty girls in pretty parlors could play them for their pretty boys. We never learned to play, of course, that was not our station in the world, but our station had changed, hadn’t it? And I could almost smell the street below — the hay scattered out across the cobbles, and the horse apples, too, and the smell of perfumes and the like in the press — I could smell it in my mind, the way you can, you know.
And you, whispering right in my ear, “I can do it better, Maggs.”
For some reason that made me feel so ashamed. “Do what?” I said, all innocent, though of course I knew.
I always knew. Both of us knew.
“Why I can call the spirits better,” you said, all innocent, flouncing across the room to pose yourself on a little loveseat they had sitting there, arranging your dress just so.
“You can’t,” I said. I said, “I can do it twice as good as you. I’m older,” the only card I had to play.
“Then do it,” you said.
But I didn’t want to, that’s what I said. I couldn’t, of course, not then and only sometimes later. The spirits came to me of their own accord, I couldn’t summon them. I just wanted to sit at the window and watch the street, I always liked the city so. It reminded me of how far we’d come from Hydesville, where it had always seemed dark to me, and cold. And how we didn’t have to be there anymore, not ever again. That’s what I thought in that day — that we’d never be poor again — not knowing the miseries to come. I was just a girl, so young.
Even then I liked the lie better than the truth. I liked the toe cracking and the finger popping and all the other tricks Leah had taught us, she was as tricksy as you were, almost.