The Medium

by Noëlle Sickels

  “It could be you can help a little tonight,” Ursula said, not looking up from the ironing board.

  “Help?”

  Ursula slipped Helen’s dress onto a hanger.

  “You’ll wear this,” she said. “And we make your hair into nice, shiny braids. So you look like the sweet girl.”

  “But what am I going to do, Nanny?”

  Ursula shrugged. “We will see.”

  Helen was glad to encounter in Mrs. Durkin’s living room several familiar faces. Mrs. Durkin herself, pillow-bosomed and round-faced, gave Helen a hearty welcoming hug, as if it had been years since she’d seen her, though she’d passed Helen’s yard only last week while walking her collie. Old Mr. Grauer made a courtly bow in Helen’s direction. Miss Simmons from the dentist’s office smiled at her. It was strange to see her without her white uniform. Instead she wore a red blouse with a pleated plaid skirt and red ankle socks and loafers. Her hairy calves seemed mildly indecent absent the accustomed white stockings.

  Mrs. Durkin, Mr. Grauer, and Miss Simmons were all “regulars.” Tonight, Miss Simmons had brought her young man, Mr. Howard from the Esso station. He put out his hand for Helen to shake. It was thick and hard, black grease outlining his cuticles. When her hand touched his, Helen caught a momentary image of a violin.

  There were two other people, a man with thick bifocals that made his eyes look as round as those of the fish on ice at Dohrmann’s market, and a stylish woman wearing two red fox pelts over her tailored suit, each fox grasping the tail of the other in its pointy mouth. It was an unusual costume for August, even though the evening was cool, the air freshened by a promise of rain. These strangers stood apart from the others, at opposite sides of the small room. It was, overall, a rather large group. Perhaps, Helen thought, that’s why her grandmother had wanted her along, though she still didn’t know how she could help.

  Mrs. Durkin led the way to the adjoining room, lit only by four candles in a silver candelabra in the center of her circular dining table. A squat vase of dark red roses sat beside the candelabra, and there was a row of potted geraniums and violets on the windowsill.

  The man with the thick eyeglasses sat across from Helen. Candle reflections danced on his lenses. Ursula sat on Helen’s right, Mr. Grauer on her left. The old man smelled of Old Spice and shoe polish.

  Although the ages of the people around the table entitled every one of them to wield authority over her, Helen somehow did not feel subject to them. In a quick series of glances, she detected in each person some degree of wishing or wanting. It was in the eyes, or in the nervous, foraging movements of hands and fingers. In some, it had grown into need. And she saw that it was their wishes and their neediness that had diminished their power. It was a novel feeling, a bit disconcerting, but interesting, too.

  At a nod from Ursula, the group placed their hands flat on the table, the pinky fingers of neighboring sitters touching.

  “May the Divine Spirit and the Spirits of the Universe guide us this evening,” she said.

  Staring at the candles, Ursula asked if anyone had a particular spirit they wished to contact. The regulars didn’t answer. They were content to accept whomever came.

  Mr. Stewart pushed his thick glasses up higher on his nose. “My daughter Dorothy,” he said hoarsely. “She was just a little girl when … Is that all right?”

  Ursula made no sign of having heard his question, but Mr. Grauer sent him a reassuring nod.

  “My late husband,” said the lady with the fox pelts. Her voice was crisp and challenging.

  Mrs. Durkin handed Ursula a Bible.

  “This belonged to Mrs. Vole’s husband,” she explained.

  Ursula placed the book next to the flower vase and rested her hands in her lap. Helen was just wondering if she ought to stretch her right arm toward Miss Simmons to bridge the gap in the circle when her grandmother tapped her elbow, indicating Helen was to place her hands in her own lap. Copying her grandmother, she crossed her wrists left over right. At a nudge from Ursula’s foot, Helen also crossed her ankles. When her grandmother shut her eyes, again Helen copied her. She heard Ursula breathing loudly and deeply beside her.

  The noise of the breaths slowly grew softer, as if her grandmother were walking away from her, until Helen couldn’t hear them at all anymore. The perfume of the roses filled her nostrils, the flowers warmed by their nearness to the candle flames.

  When she heard a child crying, Helen tried to open her eyes, but her lids felt immovable. Then she saw the child, though her eyes were still closed. It was a young boy in short pants, crying in a corner. Over his crying, she began to discern another sound. Music. The boy raised his face and stopped weeping. The music grew louder. It was a violin, plaintive and lonesome, but at the same time sweet and soothing. Helen felt the desire of the little boy that the playing go on and on. He desired it the way small children do desire things, with absolute totality.

  “He wants you to keep playing,” Helen said aloud, not knowing or caring whom she was addressing. The boy’s desire was so strong, she just had to communicate it.

  “You have a message, Helen?” came her grandmother’s voice, distinct but far away.

  “Play the fiddle some more, Buddy. Never stop playing,” Helen said. It was her voice, but the child’s words.

  “Oh, my lord,” a man exclaimed, also from a distance.

  The image of the boy began to fade. The sound of the violin wavered and also faded. Helen was aware, all at once, of the hard seat of her chair and of the presence of other people. Her limbs felt heavy and tired.

  “Buddy—that’s what my family calls me,” Mr. Howard was saying excitedly. “It was my little brother started it, ‘cause he couldn’t say Bertie. My little brother that died of the scarlet fever. He was only five. I never thought … I came tonight just ’cause Molly hounded me to. I never thought I’d—”

  “But you don’t play the violin, Bertie,” Miss Simmons said.

  “I used to, Molly. I used to. And he did think it was swell, too. Only one that did, in fact.”

  Helen opened her eyes. Everyone was staring at her with frank curiosity. Mrs. Durkin brought a tall glass of water, and Helen drank half of it down.

  “Did you get a little boy?” her grandmother said carefully, as if Helen might not understand her.

  Helen nodded.

  “Children come more easily to their own,” Ursula explained to the sitters.

  “Then my daughter might—?” Mr. Stewart ventured.

  Ursula raised her hand to cut him off. Then she closed her eyes and bent her head back.

  “Yes, now I see the boy. His cheeks are red.”

  “From the scarlet fever,” Mr. Howard interjected.

  “He wants to thank you for playing for him,” Ursula said. “He remembers it still.”

  A small moan escaped Mr. Howard. Miss Simmons laid her hand comfortingly on his arm.

  “He has someone beside him,” Ursula continued. “Another child. He’s pulling her forward. She has something in her arms. A doll, perhaps. A rag doll, worn out with use. Does that sound like Dorothy, Mr. Stewart?”

  “Dorothy never had a rag doll. But she had a teddy bear she carried most everywhere.”

  “Yes, now I see it more clearly. It is a teddy bear. With long arms and legs, like a rag doll.”

  “That’s it. That’s my little girl’s bear. What does she say?”

  “She’s holding the bear close to her face,” Ursula said. “She’s too shy to speak in front of all these people. She’s stepping back.”

  Ursula rubbed her forehead.

  “There’s someone else trying to come through. A man. He’s feeling … pleased … . Pleased to see …”

  Ursula reached for the Bible. She smoothed her hand over its cover.

  “He’s pleased that his book is here. He watches you, Mrs. Vole, when you take it out and hold it.”

  Mrs. Vole leaned forward and scrutinized Ursula, whose eyes were still shut. The tip of
a fox tail swung forward and brushed the tabletop.

  “Why did he do it?” Mrs. Vole asked, each word hard and singular.

  “He says … He says he had his reasons.”

  “Oh, Al, why did you do it?”

  “He says he didn’t ever mean to hurt you.”

  Ursula opened her eyes and regarded Mrs. Vole, who remained canted forward. Helen looked at her grandmother. No one seeing that face could imagine its owner able to be prevailed upon a moment longer.

  “Let us each quietly thank the spirits who visited tonight,” Mrs. Durkin said, lowering her head as if in prayer.

  All the regulars, plus Helen and Ursula, immediately followed suit. The three agitated newcomers felt constrained to lower their heads as well. When Mrs. Durkin rose, everyone except Helen and her grandmother also rose. Mrs. Durkin ushered the sitters out of the dining room and into the process of retrieving their hats and handbags. Helen heard Mrs. Vole inquiring about future meetings. Mr. Stewart was asking about a private sitting.

  “Was there anything else?” Ursula asked Helen when they were alone. “Any one else?”

  Helen shook her head.

  “I should maybe have let you hold that Bible,” Ursula mused.

  She smiled, patting Helen on the knee. “No matter,” she said. “There’s ways to call the spirits. You will learn.”

  “Do they always come?”

  “Nein. They got their own business, just like us. But there’s ways, too, to make it look like they come. That you can learn, also.”

  It sounded to Helen as if her grandmother’s suggestion was very close to, if not the same thing as, outright lying. Her concern must have showed on her face because her grandmother gave her an encouraging wink.

  “We keep open the doors, Liebling. The doors to the spirit world, and the doors to Mrs. Durkin’s house. Because what is the good when the spirits do come, if no one is here to listen?”

  CHAPTER 4

  “First, how to sit,” Ursula was saying. She crossed her wrists and her ankles.

  “I know that already,” Helen said, recklessly unwilling to edit resentment from her voice.

  She longed to be outdoors in the final hours of the afternoon. Instead, she was sitting at a card table in her grandmother’s overfurnished bedroom. She wished she’d gone with her mother to do the marketing. That would have been dull, too, but at least she would’ve been out. In only a week’s time, school would begin again, cooping her up on a regular basis.

  To Helen’s surprise, her grandmother did not reproach her, but only nodded.

  “But do you know why we sit so?”

  Helen allowed herself a loud exhale.

  “To be comfortable?”

  Ursula shook her head. “It is not comfortable, sometimes, to meet spirits. Nein, we cross our hands and feet to shut off from the other people and to save our energy.”

  “Okay. Then what?”

  Ursula stood up, folding her arms over her chest. She was a short woman, but her erect, stout figure was imposing in the small room where the only sound was the pointed ticking of an antique Bavarian clock.

  “Maybe we are not ready for ‘then what.’ Maybe you are not so special as I think, but just a girl with a too big imagination. Or maybe you want to stay only skipping rope and singing songs, and make believe you are not different.”

  Helen had regretted her recalcitrance the moment her grandmother pushed back her chair to stand, but now she regretted it more deeply because Ursula’s words had delivered a sting. She was, in fact, different and had always been so.

  “I’m sorry, Nanny. It’s just that I wanted to go outside a while. All morning I was helping Mama make jelly.”

  Ursula sat down.

  “I would not keep you in, but our lessons must stay a little secret for now. So, when your mother went to the shops, we could not miss the chance.”

  “Why do we have to be secret?”

  “It is like how Emilie starts her seedlings in the kitchen window in spring. She does not put them out in the dirt until they are strong enough for some cold night or some day of sleet.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “There are people who will be afraid, Helen, when they know what you can see and hear. Or they will think you make it up, or that you are a little crazy. They will say things to make you feel bad, maybe bad enough to stop. That is why, first, you must become a strong seedling.”

  Helen sensed truth in this. She’d noticed the whispers at their backs when she and Ursula passed certain neighbors on the sidewalk. When her parents had told her it was not proper to discuss family matters with outsiders, she knew they meant the seances. Hadn’t even Billy Mackey succumbed to teasing her about it? What might someone who was not her friend be capable of?

  “Could I make it stop, Nanny?”

  Ursula stared out the window with a faraway look in her eyes. She turned her diamond wedding ring with her thumb, a habit when she was mulling something over.

  “If you are in a room,” Ursula began, still staring out the window, “and there is an opening to another room, you can turn your back and pretend you are alone. But you can not make the other room disappear.”

  The old woman faced Helen.

  “I have only a keyhole to look, but for you, Helen, there is maybe a wide doorway. Better to learn how to live in two rooms than how to move always carefully to keep away from the other room.”

  In reply, Helen crossed her wrists and ankles.

  “So,” her grandmother approved. “That is for a mental circle. The medium alone will hear and see the spirits. In his mind. For a physical circle, the medium leaves uncrossed the hands and feet.”

  “A physical circle?”

  “When there are things everyone can see and hear. When the table moves or there are raps, or when a spirit takes form and shows itself. Uncrossed lets you draw up energy.”

  Ursula reached across the square table and tapped Helen’s wrists, indicating she could relax them.

  “But not so much anymore do spirits materialize. Not like you read about one hundred or even fifty years ago.”

  “Did you ever see one, Nanny?”

  “Nein. But Mrs. Durkin, she is hoping all the time. So she keeps her plants near our circle. Such a romantic. Waltzes she likes, too.”

  Helen knew that her grandmother insisted on cut flowers on the seance table. She said flowers, especially dark flowers, increased the vibrations of spirit voices and made them easier for her to hear. But Helen had never considered that the rows of potted geraniums and violets on Mrs. Durkin’s windowsills played any part.

  “How do the plants help?”

  “To take physical form, a spirit must pull energy from people in the circle and from magnetic currents in the earth and pass it through the medium’s body. A growing plant has energy strength the same as several people.”

  “Jeepers, I don’t know if I’d want a spirit to … to …”

  “Materialize.”

  “Isn’t it scary?”

  Ursula shrugged.

  “You see them in your mind, you see them in the house—not so different, I think. And everyone else gets to see them, too. It could be good for sitters coming back and telling friends.”

  Helen wasn’t so sure about that. Mightn’t Mr. Howard have been badly shaken if he’d actually seen his little dead brother crying in the corner? What about when the spirit left? Wouldn’t its loved ones get upset then?

  “Don’t worry, Helen. This won’t happen. There are special ways the room must be, and still, the spirits may not show themselves, even with a medium practicing for years. But we don’t say this to Mrs. Durkin, because hope is not a thing to push down.”

  There it was again, Helen thought, another slippery version of honesty. She looked hard at her grandmother’s face, as if it might provide some clue to explain this unsuspected side of her. There was nothing, of course, but the same face she had known all her life, although Helen did see in sharper relief than eve
r before the signs of old age on her grandmother’s features—the deep wrinkles around her eyes and the lavender shadows below them, the soft folds of skin at her neck, the brown spots on her cheeks.

  “You can go outside now. We are done for today,” Ursula was saying. “Next time we will try the automatic writing.”

  Helen hesitated, consumed by a tender affection for her grandmother. She felt the urge to embrace her, but no one ever embraced Ursula except at her instigation.

  “Go, go, child, or you will be a fidget at supper, and I am too tired to hear your father complain.”

  Reluctantly, Helen left the room. At the doorway, she glanced back and saw Ursula still seated in her chair, again playing with her ring and staring out the window into the golden glow of the summer dusk.

  CHAPTER 5

  SEPTEMBER 1937

  The automatic writing was not going well.

  Helen followed her grandmother’s instructions scrupulously. She would get comfortable in her chair and listen to her breathing until she felt sleepy. Then she’d pick up a pencil, hold it loosely in her fingers over a sheet of paper, and wait. Once, her hand had trembled and she’d felt it being pulled to the paper, but she produced only a few unrelated letters, which her grandmother said were the spirits getting used to the feel of Helen’s muscles. The start of school had limited Helen’s free time, but Ursula had admonished her to keep practicing.

  “Just ten minutes,” she’d said. “Every day.”

  “Every day?”

  “So the spirits know you are serious, and maybe a guide will come.”

  “Do you have a spirit guide, Nanny?”

  Ursula considered a moment, and then she nodded.

  “What does it do?”

  “Sometimes he calls other spirits to come, ones that the sitters want. Sometimes he speaks for them. But …”

  Ursula clasped her hands in her lap and looked down at them.

  “My guide comes not so much.”

  “Why not?”

  Ursula looked at Helen.

  “It is no matter,” she said. “Every sitter brings spirit companions. In the seance, other spirits visit. Always I find one who will talk. Or I can guess good at what they would say.”