The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [7]
In accepting Swedenborg, Henry James Sr. believed that he had found a new foundation for his life. His fears and sorrows could be blamed on “ghostly busybodies” seeking to control him. They had infested his life, these spiritual “vermin revealing themselves in the tumbledown walls of our old theological hostelry.” With that knowledge, he could fight them off and accept himself as a goodly creation of God. He could follow Swedenborg’s lessons and see failings and personal crises as tests only; accept strengths and blessings as gifts from the Lord God, without self-congratulation. Therein lay the making of a steady man, a life that much closer to heaven.
Determined to be that man, Henry James Sr. returned with his family to New York. By 1848, he and Mary had two more sons, Wilkie and Bob, and a daughter, Alice. The family moved into a newly built brownstone in Manhattan, just north of Washington Square, along with all the servants that Mary felt necessary to buffer her from domestic duties. The house was also inhabited—as Bob would say resentfully years later—by their father’s “idols, the virgin adoration, the faith in miraculous agencies, all ... the mysteries of the dead.”
Swedenborg’s unearthly specters encircled the James children’s life. When Alice suffered anxiety attacks, her father blamed an intrusive spirit. When William refused to obey his father, the rebellion was undoubtedly made worse by spirit influences. Bob, often the most openly angry of the children, complained that he had never been able to discover a way to achieve simple faith. He had never learned to accept organized religion. The ability to believe “the bed bug priests” demanded comfort and ignorance, and he possessed neither quality.
If there was an afterlife, Bob wrote to his brother William many years later, he did not expect to see their father there. Actually, he hoped not to. There was an ominous possibility that Henry James Sr. would appear trailing Swedenborgian spirits like translucent fish hooked onto a spectral line. Bob James found himself longing for the days of the Crusades, when faith, he thought, must have been as simple as slaughtering a few heathens in the name of God.
BOB’S CRAVING for a simple Christian faith, uncluttered by interfering spirits, defied not just his home life but the times themselves. To the dismay of both scientists and clergymen—united in their distaste for all things superstitious—popular fascination with the spirit world began to spread like a grass fire, driven by that rising sense of moral uncertainty and sparked by events on both sides of the Atlantic. In the year 1848, as the James family settled into New York, a book published in England became an unexpected best seller and—scholars would later say—persuaded generations of readers that believing in ghosts was an acceptable thing:
The footsteps were coming down the hall. They belonged to the son of the house, poor young man. He’d been sickly so long, caught in one of those odd fevers that just kept burning its way back.
He liked to get up, sit with the family in the parlor. It was hard for him, though. His wobbling walks to the sitting room came less, and less often. His leather shoes, so little used, began to dry out, despite attempts to polish them soft.
That was the sound. Not that faint groan of a floorboard. The squeak of dry leather. Step, squeak, step, squeak.
The housekeeper was sitting with his sister when they heard him. They hadn’t expected him; his parents had sent him from their English country home to Portugal, hoping that the gentler climate would ease the illness. He must have returned just now, in the night. The servant caught up her candle, ran to help. The house was dark, the stairs unlit. Surely he would need light on the way to his room.
Step, creak, step. She couldn’t quite catch up with him. There was only the sound of his footsteps moving up the stairs. She hurried after him, heading for his bedroom.
The door was closed. The