agreed to have the operation.
Soon afterward Cora paid a visit to her sister, Mrs. Teresa Hunn, at her home on Long Island, and showed her the scar. It was still “fresh,” a seam of angry red skin. During a subsequent visit Mrs. Hunn saw the scar again. It was still sufficiently impressive to score itself into Mrs. Hunn’s memory, so that even years later she was able to detail its appearance: “it was healed much better than it was the first time I saw it. It would be about 4 or 5 inches long and about 1 inch wide, but I could not quite exactly say. It was more a cream colour than the rest of her skin, and paler looking. The outside, near the flesh, was paler than the centre of the scar.” One detail Mrs. Hunn failed to note was whether the operation had required the removal of Cora’s navel, a procedure that commonly accompanied such surgery.
The operation meant that Cora would never bear children, which became for her a source of grief. A close friend, Mrs. Adeline Harrison, later would say, “There was only one little shadow in their lives of which I was aware. They both were passionately fond of children, and she was childless.” Whether Crippen truly shared his wife’s longing is open to debate, however, given that he had sent his own son to live in Los Angeles and did not now bring him back.
One of Cora’s half-sisters, Mrs. Louise Mills, said that her sister “craved motherhood” and that the lack of children cast a shadow over their marriage. “When I visited them four years ago they appeared to be perfectly happy,” she reported, except that Cora “would bemoan the fact that she had no child. I fear that in the latter part of her married life she became more and more lonesome.”
In a letter to another of her half-sisters, Cora wrote, “I love babies. I am certain that a baby makes a great deal of difference in a family. In fact, it is not complete without a baby. So I envy you. Oh, I tell you, it makes a great deal of difference when it is your own.”
PRESSURES ACCUMULATED. AFTER RECOVERING from her surgery, Cora threw herself into her singing lessons, which Crippen was glad to pay for. He liked seeing his young wife happy. In May 1893 the nation slid into a deep depression—the Panic of ’93—and the demand for Crippen’s medical expertise plummeted. He paid for Cora’s music lessons as long as he could but soon was compelled to tell her the lessons had to cease, at least for a while. They moved to less expensive rooms. As their income dwindled, they moved again, and again, until at last they found themselves forced to make a decision that Cora at the time of her marriage to the young and prosperous- seeming Dr. Crippen never imagined she would have to face. She should have been on stage by now, living well in an apartment in Manhattan or for that matter in London, Paris, or Rome. Instead she and the doctor found themselves not just back in Brooklyn, a discouraging condition in itself, but having to surrender to an even more humiliating state of affairs. They moved in with Fritz Mersinger, Cora’s stepfather.
For Cora this was a turning point. First there had been St. Louis, little more than a smoke-grimed outpost. Then came a steady rung-by-rung decline as the panic deepened and people lost jobs, and parents struggled to provide their families with food and heat.
Cora pushed Crippen to find work that would yield a better standard of life and get them out of Mersinger’s house and out of Brooklyn, closer to the world she had glimpsed in that first opera of her life, the men in their black suits and capes and tall hats, the women whose diamonds gleamed from the opera house boxes like constellations in a winter sky. Legitimate medicine—and homeopathy still was considered legitimate, though its appeal was fading—had failed to generate the required level of income.
It is likely, given Crippen’s temperament, that he would have preferred simply to wait for better times, when once again a visit to the doctor would be perceived as necessary and affordable, not as a luxury to be done without.
Cora, however, could not wait. To do so, to be patient and accept what fate had to offer, would have been out of character. Filson Young—his full name was Alexander Bell Filson Young—a prominent journalist and author at the start of the twentieth century, described Cora as “robust and animal. Her vitality was of that loud, aggressive, and physical kind that seems to exhaust the atmosphere round it, and is undoubtedly exhausting to live with.”
When Crippen first met her in Dr. Jeffrey’s office, what immediately had drawn his attention besides her beauty and lush proportions was her impulsive, buoyant nature, her energy, and her determination not to let herself be crushed by the exigencies of late-nineteenth-century urban life. But increasingly what had seemed impulsive and charming began to appear volatile and wearing, even alarming.
Years later, referring to Cora in this first phase of their marriage, Crippen said that “she was always rather hasty in her temper.” He knew, however, that others rarely saw this aspect of her personality: “to the outside world,” he said, “she was extremely amiable and pleasant.”
The tension in their marriage increased.
STRANGE DOINGS
THE ILE ROUBAUD STOOD AMONG a group of small islands in the Mediterranean, off the coast of France, and had only two houses, one occupied by a lighthouse keeper, the other, at the opposite side of the island, by a scientist named Charles Richet, a physiologist who a decade later would win the Nobel Prize for his discovery of anaphylaxis, the extreme reaction ignited in some people by bee stings, peanuts, and other triggering agents. The house served him primarily as an escape from the heat of the mainland, but now even the island was hot. The month, August 1894, would be remembered long afterward for the exceptional temperatures it brought throughout Europe. Those gathered at Richet’s house, however, quickly found themselves distracted by a series of events that would have sent any ordinary mortal rowing for the mainland.
The evening was clear, the air hot and still and scented with brine. Oliver Lodge, Richet, and two others—a man and a woman—collected in the dining room of the house, while a fifth member of the party sat outside in the yard just below a window, notebook in hand, to record observations called to him from inside. Curtains of a sheer, ethereal material framed the window but did not move, testimony to the heat and the lack of breeze.
The woman was an Italian named Eusapia Palladino, and she now took a seat at the table in the center of the room. The men placed a device under her feet that would sound an alarm if either foot lost contact. To prevent her from simply using one foot “to do the duty of two,” as Lodge put it, the men installed a screen around each. They extinguished lamps until the room became darker than the night outside, the windows rectangles of soft blue light.
Richet took a seat on one side of Palladino. Another man, a friend of Lodge’s, sat at Palladino’s other side. He was Frederic W. H. Myers, a poet and school inspector and one of the founders of the Society for Psychical Research. Myers had coauthored for the society a catalog of reports of ghostly and telepathic doings called
Now, in the darkened dining room of Richet’s summer house, Lodge walked to the table and stood behind Eusapia Palladino. Richet took her right hand, Myers her left. Lodge placed his hands on opposite sides of her head and held fast.
PALLADINO WAS FORTY YEARS OLD. By most accounts, she was illiterate, or nearly so. She claimed that she had been an orphan for much of her childhood—that her mother had died giving her birth and that when she was twelve her father had been murdered by bandits. She then went to live with a family in Naples and earned her
