Thunderstruck by Erik Larson Read Free Book Online Page B

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.

S TRANGE D OINGS

    T HE I LE R OUBAUD 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