The Clairvoyants(15)
The organ sound led us into a grove where the temple stood—a white clapboard building with tall windows and double wooden doors propped open to allow in the sea breeze. Inside, folding chairs made an expanding half-circle, and people had begun to file in and take their seats. That day, according to the placard at the front of the room, Reverend Earline Morrissey, a medium from New London, was scheduled to hold a spirit communication circle. We were told by a lanky man, who bent at the waist so we could smell the moth ball odor of his dress shirt, that children weren’t allowed. Del, sensing my disappointment, waited until the doors had closed, then tugged me into the viburnum shrubs beneath the open windows where we could hear the event commence.
Reverend Earline said she was getting a message for someone named “Jean,” and a woman, supposedly Jean herself, gasped, and Earline and Jean had a conversation—a back-and-forth about who the message was from (her grandmother’s childhood friend) and what she wanted to say (she was the one who stole the silver sugar tongs). The hour went on in this way, with Earline calling out messages, and people claiming them—“Why, that’s my uncle Gem” or “Oh! Mother! That’s Susan Merriman, my mother.” The messages were specific enough that they felt very real to me—the red bike with the basket, the boat named Lucky Again, a child’s hatred of rhubarb, a man’s quirky addiction to warm buttermilk. It didn’t seem possible that Earline would make these things up. But there were also moments when she called out messages and no one claimed them, when she’d struggle with a message that the audience member couldn’t understand.
“My mother never enjoyed going to the movies,” a woman said, sourly. “She was agoraphobic. I think you have the wrong person.”
In my great-grandfather’s manuals, “A Student” had described how often messages were inaccurate, and how this made charging fees and offering yourself as a medium unethical. To confuse the fitful and unstable sights and sounds of the lower astral plane, which seem so wonderful to the novice, with the steady, pure radiance of the Divine Spiritual Light is profanation! The messages coming from the lower astral plane, “A Student” claimed, were always confused and misleading. I wanted to approach Reverend Earline with this bit of advice. I wasn’t sure what reception I’d receive, but I was looking for acceptance at the time and was intent on corralling her.
As she finished up the circle, she called out one last message. “I have a message from an older gentleman. He is trying to speak to his daughter. Has anyone recently lost a father, or a father figure?”
Earline’s voice, grating, high-pitched, rang out into the room. I heard a few mumbles, some shuffling feet. No one claimed the old gentleman, but I thought of my grandfather, and even though his message wasn’t for me, I wanted to call out, to hear what his message might be. Del pinched my arm, cautioning me. I closed my eyes and smelled the fresh oil paint on the clapboards. “He is enamored of our organ, and once looked forward to hearing its notes in the evenings,” Earline said.
The circle proceeded like an auction, the souls of the dead and their lost messages divvied up among this group of strangers. How sad, I thought. I waited for Earline to say more, but she did not. I planned to confront her once the circle was finished. Soon the folding chairs clattered along the wood floor. The attendees’ voices swelled, and the doors fell open, and everyone came out. Clusters of people emerged, their feet moving past us. Del and I remained behind the viburnum, the large leaves keeping us hidden, until a pair of Bernardo sandals joined the group, and I peered out to note the woman’s wicker purse—our mother’s purse. She wore large sunglasses, the skirt and blouse she had on that morning when she left the house.
Del nudged me, having seen her, too. Our mother moved among the Spiritualists until we lost sight of her on the lane leading down between the cottages. We crept from our hiding place, but by the time we entered the temple, Reverend Earline had gone.
“She’s disappeared into the ether,” Del said, her eyes wide.
“Our mother, too,” I said.
“Why didn’t she answer when the old gentleman wanted to speak to her?” Del said.
We walked down to the little beach to sit in the sand and eat our sandwiches. I didn’t want to believe then that it may not have been her “old gentleman.”
“She must not want to hear his message,” I said.
“Then why come?” Del said. She broke off bite-size pieces of her sandwich and put them in her mouth.
The Spiritualists’ children were gone—all called in to lunch. I buried my feet in the warm sand. “There may be someone else she wants to hear from.”
We couldn’t conceive who our mother might wish to contact, who she’d known who had died. We knew very little about our mother’s life. Sometimes, our grandmother would talk about old boyfriends our mother had spurned, boys who drove from college in their sports cars to the house.
“Drove five hours from Penn and she wouldn’t even come downstairs to say hello,” my grandmother had said.
“Maybe one of the old boyfriends,” I said. This idea was tantalizing, and it overshadowed, somewhat, my regret at not hearing my grandfather’s message.
We both knew that we couldn’t let our mother know we were there, but it would be our mother, and the chance of eavesdropping on her, that brought us back down the wooded gravel road again and again that summer, hoping for a glimpse of her in the medium’s cottage, eager to hear her claim a message in the spirit circle. If she ever returned, we never saw her, and once we were caught playing clairvoyants Del lost interest. Eventually, my attraction to the Spiritualists ended as well. I’d grow to dislike the way their mediums drew people in with false hope and provided paltry messages that might not have come from anyone they knew. Those of the lower astral plane were tricky, tiring, and deceitful. You could trust the messages just about as much as you trusted the things you saw in your sleep.