In the Louis Seize library, where the bookcases were so like those in the Trianon, they paused to chat briefly with the Duchess of Marlborough, whom they’d met at a séance in Kent. Knowing that her friends, the Burlieghs, were among their guests, they invited her to join their party, and she accompanied them into the adjoining writing room.
The rest of the group had already assembled. “Here’s Sir Arthur and Lady Conan Doyle just now,” barked bluff Brig. Gen. Sir Nevil Soames. After genial greetings, the knight introduced the duchess to those she didn’t know: a couple from the United States, Mr. and Mrs. Frederick Randell; and the spirit medium, V. T. Podmord, a noted clairvoyant. The steward brought drinks and refilled coffee cups. Lady Jean chatted with the duchess and the Randells, who owned a chain of “drug stores” in some improbable place called the Midwest.
Sir Arthur joined General Soames, Lord and Lady Burliegh, and the ethereal Mr. Podmord, a thin young man so pallid as to be nearly translucent. “Dreaming true is the only psychic power I possess, outside of healing,” Sir Arthur said, replying to a question from Lady Burliegh. “Thank God for that.”
“What? No desire to have ectoplasm oozing from every pore?” The brigadier fixed young Podmord with a dubious eye. “Tell him what he’s missing, tell him of the rapture and the joy.”
The clairvoyant’s cheeks flushed. “Perhaps Sir Arthur possesses powers of which he is unaware …” His reedy voice piped in suppressed indignation. “Or wishes to deny.”
“Of whatever small talents I lay claim to, Mr. Podmord, I can certainly assure you that there are none which escape my attention.” Sir Arthur’s cerulean eyes danced, lively with imagination. “It’s the responsibility I couldn’t bear. To be so close to the spirit realm, to hear all those pleading voices, greet so many distant shades… . It would quite consume my life, I’m afraid.”
“It already has,” Soames remarked. “Lecture tours in Australia. America, again. And book after book on spiritualism. Give us more of The White Company and Micah Clarke.”
Sir Arthur felt secretly pleased. The brigadier had praised the historical fictions, his own two favorites among his work. Unlike most enthusiasts, Soames did not urge him to produce more bombast about the odious Sherlock Holmes.
“Might not one be insensitive to his psychic gifts and, at the same time, unconsciously make use of them?” Lord Burliegh wondered.
“Rubbish!” snorted General Soames.
“I shouldn’t be so quick to condemn.” Sir Arthur smoothed his mustache. “First, hear the evidence. In a long life touching every side of humanity, far and away the most intriguing character I have ever encountered is Houdini.”
“The music hall magician?” chirped Lady Burliegh, anxious to demonstrate her familiarity with popular culture, although unsure of the reference.
“The same. I have never met his equal in courage. All the world knows of his daring. Why, he has performed feats the average man trembles to contemplate. Moreover, it is impossible to think of his many miraculous escapes without imagining some form of dematerialization has taken place.”
“Is not this same trickster leading a campaign against spiritualism?” pouted V. T. Podmord. “Is he not the greatest medium-baiter of the age?”
“He has lately embarked on a very public vendetta, attacking every medium, whether false or true, with equal fervor.” Sir Arthur sighed. “I believe this serves Houdini a two-fold purpose. First, he has never been adverse to publicity, however lurid. But, more importantly, there is no better smoke screen than just such an antispiritualist posture, not if you are trying to conceal being the greatest physical medium ofall time.”
Brigadier General Soames swirled his brandy and shook his head. “Why should an entertainer wish to conceal his greatest selling point? Especially one who so courts the press?”
“Houdini is a great student of the history and literature of magic. He, more than anyone, is aware of the fate suffered by those conjurors whose tricks were found to be accomplished through supernatural means. The stake awaits the warlock.”
After the steward cleared the table, they all gathered around. “I’ve had sittings with Hartlepool, the trumpet medium,” Sir Arthur said to Lord Burliegh as the ladies took their seats and the steward closed the drapes. “And with Gladys Piper, the flower medium, not to mention the Bangs Sisters of Chicago. All with remarkable results.”
“We’ve used the Bangs,” Mrs. Randell commented. “Very inspirational … “
The steward retired, shouldering a tray piled with cups and glasses. He turned off the lights and closed the double doors on his way out. It was pitch dark. Shadows masked the gray sycamore paneling and gilded furniture. Sir Arthur had arranged for the disbeliever, Brigadier General Soames, to be seated as far from the medium as possible. It was essential at these times to give the sensitive psychic support and he made sure Lady Jean was placed on Podmord’s right. His wife had the gift of “inspired writing.” Her faith was a beacon.
Following a short prayer, Sir Arthur spoke of the Titanic, mentioning they presently passed through water where more than a thousand bodies had drifted for days, if not weeks. He quoted Thomas Hardy’s poem on the calamity, telling them that his friend, the journalist W. T. Stead, who perished in the accident, had also known the poet. “If his spirit is at large, perhaps he will reveal himself to us here tonight.”
Although Stead had not been personally acquainted with anyone else present, both General Soames and the Burlieghs had friends among the passengers lost on the Titanic. V. T. Podmord expressed his opinion that this would “most exquisitely facilitate contact.” All the psychic signs were auspicious and they sat together holding hands in the dark as the great ship steamed on its course through the icy sea. Other than occasional small talk, nothing of interest occurred.
4
ISIS IN SEARCH
HER HAIR GLEAMED MIDNIGHT black. When she was a farm girl in New Hampshire, it had hung past her waist, but now, fashionably bobbed, it curved like a raven’s wing along the ivory line of her jaw. Blessed with striking features (high sculpted cheekbones, large wide-spaced wave-green eyes, a prominent nose with nostrils delicate as seashells, lips full and red, parted by a slight overbite, giving her smile a perpetually mocking air), she ignored her detractors, who joked about a predatory look, calling her “fox-faced” behind her back. Most people, men especially, found Opal Crosby Fletcher impossibly beautiful.
Born in the final year of the old century, she seemed to belong more to that vanished time. Her rural upbringing kept her distant from the stunning changes bedazzling a new era. Like many imaginative youngsters, Opal had played with an imaginary friend, sharing secret confidences with him. Other children played with invisible fairies and nonexistent talking rabbits. She insisted her phantom playmate was the spirit of a priest of Ra from Old Kingdom Heliopolis, that the secrets he whispered inside her mind were prophetic.
At first, Opal’s casual remarks regarding next week’s weather or the sex of unborn calves seemed nothing more than playtime babble, but the accuracy of her predictions soon made it impossible to deny her gift. Word of her prescience spread. Neighbors dropped by the Crosby farm in North Conway daily, seeking advice from the little girl. Stories appeared in the state’s newspapers and strangers by the drove crowded onto the white frame farmhouse’s elm-shaded front porch.
Inevitably, this led to offers from a legion of one-ring circuses and fly-by-night carnivals. The elder Crosbys were seriously tempted. Their dairy business remained marginal at best, and any extra income seemed a blessing. Young Opal rejected all such commercial considerations, believing divine gifts were not to be sold for profit. A wealthy investor arrived from Boston, waving a big check in exchange for advice on future stock market developments. Opal refused to help. Her inner voice remained obstinately mute.
The onset of puberty brought about changes beyond the merely biological. At fifteen, Opal announced she was the reincarnation of Isis, ancient Egyptian fertility goddess,
and conducted her first séance in the town meeting hall. Looking more innocent schoolgirl than pagan goddess, her dark beribboned braids tumbling across a home-sewn gingham dress, Opal was bound and chained within a sealed wooden cabinet.
After volunteers extinguished the kerosene lamps, manifestations began almost immediately. Bells rang, trumpets blared, tambourines and chairs levitated. Many present in the old colonial building claimed they saw luminous spirits hovering among the hand-hewn rafters. The story ran in the Manchester Union and was picked up by several big-city newspapers. The myth of “Isis reborn” began to spread.
This time, more substantial offers arrived. Telegrams from Edward F. Albee, head of the Keith Circuit, and Martin Beck of the Orpheum Circuit proposed national vaudeville tours. Broadway beckoned when both Flo Ziegfeld and Charles Dillingham sent personal representatives to New Hampshire, contracts in hand. To poor farmers like the Crosbys, the suggested salaries seemed astronomical. Opal would earn more in a month than the dairy farm took in during an entire year.
It didn’t turn out that way. Lacking their daughter’s clairvoyance, the Crosbys imagined a glorious future in the “Follies” or the Hippodrome’s “Big Show.” Isis made other plans. Barely sixteen, the fertility goddess eloped with a sixty-three-year-old textile tycoon.
Walter Clarke Fletcher descended from an old New England family, a long line of merchants and ministers; doctors, lawyers; Yale men, Episcopalians; one a colonel in the Continental Army. His grandfather had built a small woolen mill on the Housatonic. At the start of the Civil War, his father owned three more and finagled a government contract for military blankets. By the time the ink dried at Appomattox, Gordon Prouty Fletcher was a millionaire many times over. Educated abroad, young Walter broke the family’s Old Blue tradition. On the continent, he developed a taste for vintage wine, baccarat, and women who were decidedly not Episcopalian.
On his return to the United States in 1894, Walter left the Fletcher estate in Hartford and commissioned architect Richard Morris Hunt to design an imposing chateau for him in New York, on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Eighty-fifth Street. To this home overlooking Central Park he brought a succession of wives, who raised half a dozen children, none of whom interested him any more than did the textile business. They all survived his indifference and, by some miracle, so did his ever-expanding woolen mill empire. Not even persistent bad luck at the gaming tables made any appreciable dent in his enormous fortune.
The children were all grown by the time Walter Fletcher carried his new teenage bride over the threshold into the vast, echoing marble pile on Millionaire’s Row. As his life was already something of a scandal, none of his blue-blooded neighbors did more than cluck and gossip at this latest development. Other than the usual polite society page squib, scant mention was made of the event in the city’s newspapers. The Daily News, first of the sensationalist tabloids, remained three years in the future and, although no less cynical and hard-boiled, journalists in those days exercised a certain sense of decorum.
Whatever the prurient might have imagined regarding an aging roué ravishing an innocent farm girl, the truth evaded their wildest dreams. Opal was no timid victim. On their wedding night, she stalked Walter Fletcher across his opulent bedchamber like a tigress. Her kisses tore at his lips. Her knowing touch and erotic crooning murmurs suggested much experience, and he thought himself in the arms of a prostitute until he found he had forced a virgin and came away matted with her blood.
From the very first night, Walter remained Opal’s love slave. In his private moments, he reflected on his long libertine life, thinking it a bit of a chuckle to be so thoroughly besotted with his wife. He followed her around like an adoring lapdog, marveling at how prim and decorous she seemed in public. Her newly sophisticated wardrobe erased any vestige of the rural milkmaid and yet, even in sleek Chanel dresses and gauzy Schiaparelli gowns, Opal always appeared chaste and demure.
Another story blossomed in the privacy of their boudoir. The wonder of those silken nights thrilled him to the core: the electric touch of her firm, youthful breasts, nipples gone hard from the warmth of his breath hovering before a kiss; the delicious sweetness of her pouting mouth, her wet, flowing orgasms; the languid magic of pliant limbs enfolding him in an embrace more mysterious than anything he’d ever known, for all his profligate ways. She held him under a spell with the faraway look in her emerald eyes. Ageless, inviolate, she stared into his soul as if across an immutable chasm of lost time.
She definitely improved his standing in society. Although their invitations were accepted at first out of curiosity, everyone coming to meet the new Mrs. Fletcher went away charmed by her quiet, unassuming manner. And what began as mere polite inquiry regarding tales of divination in New Hampshire evolved into weekly séances in the Queen Anne library on the second floor of the big house on Eighty-fifth Street. It became quite the thing to do. In no time at all, young, dark-haired Opal assumed the mantle of psychic consultant to the Four Hundred.
For the best part of five years, life for Mrs. Fletcher remained a constant round of luncheons, concerts, tea dances, nights at the opera, theater openings, and charity balls. Although raised on Elbert Hubbard and the folksy poems of Edgar Guest, Opal now quoted Freud and Amy Lowell. She was a quick study. Whatever lingered of the naive country bumpkin added an appealing edge of self-mockery to her air of fashionable world-weariness.
Mr. Fletcher sported a smug smile his friends found most irritating. Proud of his new, unearned respectability, he delighted whenever he detected glowering envy in the eyes of fellow members at the Century Club. Opal was a strange girl, quiet and introspective. She required a daily quota of solitude. No complaints from Walter, as she never nagged about his club life or the times he came in late. He didn’t stay out all that often, intoxicated more by sleeping with his wife. She twined her downy, slender arms around him, resting her cameo head upon his chest, and dreams more magical than any from childhood transported him through the night.
His luck at cards remained unchanged. He was in the habit of losing frequently at Canfield’s Gambling House, an establishment operating outside the law since before the turn of the century. “You know what they say…?” His eyes always twinkled when he pushed his last stack of blue chips across the felt-covered table. “Lucky at love …” One day, moments after the words left his mouth, he keeled over backwards in his chair. As he lay sprawled on the Persian carpet, his final thought concerned the arched and deeply coffered ceiling. It looked to him like a muffin tin. Everyone said Walter Clarke Fletcher died a very happy man.
The family did not contest the will. The cotton and woolen mill empire went to his children. Opal was left the house on Fifth Avenue, a rustic camp in the Adirondacks (where they’d often made love on a bearskin in front of a roaring fire), and a trust worth five million. She looked very becoming in black, more mysterious when seen through a veil. Two years after the funeral, she still wore no other color.
On frequent trips to Paris, accompanied only by a personal maid, Opal remained unstained by any hint of scandal in spite of her secret private love life. The weekly séances in the library continued whenever she was in town, her guest list more exclusive than the social register. The city’s most prominent citizens believed this slender girl from the country to be a reincarnated goddess.
On New Year’s Day, a thirty-three-year-old revivalist named Aimee Semple McPherson dedicated the Angelus Temple in Los Angeles, a structure crowned with an electrically illuminated rotating cross visible for fifty miles. Three months later, she filled all five thousand seats weekly and Sister Aimee’s Foursquare Gospel began broadcasting over the radio. Opal Crosby Fletcher didn’t listen to radio. She read H. L. Mencken in the Smart Set. His mocking report of the “supernatural whoopee” the “booboisie” reveled in out in sunny Southern California made her sit up and take notice.
Not long afterward, Opal announced her plan to build a temple to Isis. It was to be a sanctuary of spiritual harmon
y, a garden with trees and sparkling fountains, surmounted by a five-story glass pyramid. Under the apex, surrounded by flower beds, reflecting pools, and ancient Egyptian sculpture, the plans called for a windowless onyx chamber: the shrine of Isis in Search.
At first, she informed only a select inner circle and received immediate offers to bankroll the entire venture. These she politely declined. Her spirit-voice told her the cost should be shared among many. To that end, she proposed renting an auditorium and conducting a public séance, admission free, donations welcome. If this proved successful, Opal was not opposed to a return engagement.
Erté designed the posters. They featured a stylized Isis in a striking black-and-silver geometric-patterned robe. Two out of an edition of five hundred were displayed outside Liederkranz Hall, leased by Opal Crosby Fletcher for the final Friday in April. Four hundred and fifty were mailed out with the invitations. The remainder she gave to her office staff, servants, and a group of schoolchildren on their way to a field trip in the park.
Attracted by considerable press coverage, a mob showed up on the night of the séance, crowding outside of the theater on East Fifty-eighth Street between Park and Lexington. Free tickets waited at the box office, first come, first served, for the key social event of the season. Every seat was taken, standing room filled to capacity.
On the bare stage, a single spotlight focused on a stark wooden crate draped in black. For better than half an hour the audience rustled and coughed until, at last, the spotlight dimmed and Isis swept out from the wings, her fashionable outfit covered by the flowing robe pictured by Erté, a multi-branched silver candelabrum in each hand.
No applause greeted her. A distant cello played Bach offstage. After setting the candelabra on either side of the proscenium, Opal stood at the center of the apron, wrapped in her metallic robe. She opened her arms in a regal welcome. “All peace be with you, friends …” Her clear, musical voice filled the hall. “Half of you are here by invitation, another five hundred tickets were given away at the door. Isis, who speaks through me, has commanded a temple be built to celebrate her search for the dismembered Osiris. I come to you for help. If you would like to make a donation, all necessary information may be found in your programs.
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