“Helen must come to the seance, and you, Walter, must come, too. Then perhaps, as you wish, you will see for yourself.”
Helen heard her father clear his throat loudly, which meant he was about to agree to something he had originally opposed.
“There can be no tricks,” he said suspiciously.
“No tricks. Of course.”
“Absolutely not,” Emilie added.
“And only this once.”
“So we are settled,” Nanny said. “It was a good idea, Walter. Danke.”
Heart skipping, Helen hurried back to the kitchen to wipe down the stove.
CHAPTER 8
They walked to Mrs. Durkin’s house, Walter and Helen in the lead, Emilie and Ursula behind. Walter was holding Helen’s hand. At another time, she might have objected, but this evening she welcomed the firm clasp of her father’s large, warm hand. Watching their paired shadows lengthening and shortening on the slate sidewalk as they passed below street lamps, she was able to push down the nervousness in her chest.
Still, she’d been glad when they’d got past the Mackeys’ front walk. She’d have hated Billy to spot her in tow with her father like a little girl. She hadn’t spoken to Billy since their encounter in the yard a week ago and had only seen him at a distance twice. She checked every time before leaving the house to be sure he wasn’t around. She knew it couldn’t go on like this, but she had no idea how it would change, much less how she might make it change.
“Mr. Schneider, so nice you could come,” Mrs. Durkin said.
She stepped back and opened her door as wide as it would go, as if Walter were entering on horseback. After she’d taken all their coats, Mrs. Durkin turned to Helen and cupped her face in both hands. Her fingers smelled of onions.
“Helen, Helen,” Mrs. Durkin said, beaming. Helen wondered for one panicky moment if her face were about to be plunged into the broad, hilly expanse of Mrs. Durkin’s flowered dress front. But the woman only repeated Helen’s name once more and let her go.
Mr. Grauer led Helen to a milk glass bowl of hard candies in the living room, his advanced age permitting him the liberty of acting as host in a home not his own. Helen untwisted the crinkly cellophane from around a butterscotch and popped the candy into her mouth.
“Ursula,” Mrs. Durkin said in a confidential tone although she was standing in plain hearing of all of them, “I’ve had to let in one new sitter tonight. She was so anxious. Her son, you see. Only twenty-one years old. Some murky business, I gathered.”
“No matter,” Ursula said.
The doorbell rang, and Mrs. Durkin floated over to answer it. The other sitters had arrived all at once—Miss Simmons from the dentist’s office, this time without her beau; chirrupy Miss Portia Macy, an occasional client; and the first-timer, Mrs. Samuels, her gray hair pulled back into a tight bun, her black shirtwaist dress too loose for her slight form. She reminded Helen of a scrawny, wild kitten. She had that same air of wanting to be fed but also not wanting to be picked up.
While Mrs. Durkin was introducing Mrs. Samuels to the rest of the group, Helen’s grandmother drew her out of the living room into the hallway leading to Mrs. Durkin’s sewing room.
“You remember what I told?” she said quietly.
“That I don’t have to work to make something happen? That I should just wait?”
Ursula nodded. “You cannot tell a tree it must grow faster, or the sun it must come up earlier. So also here. The spirits will decide. And we will accept.”
“But what if nothing happens?”
“You are like the phone, Liebling. It only carries the voice that wants to use it. And we do not blame the phone if no one calls, do we?”
In the dining room, there was some shuffling about before everyone got seated. Ursula specifically did not want Walter beside any member of the family, which meant Mr. Grauer had to give up his accustomed chair. This disgruntled the old man, even though he knew that the proper positioning of sitters was essential to making the spirits feel welcome, and that unsuitable arrangements could not only block visitations, but also might open the door to disruptive spirits.
“Never before have they required me to move,” Mr. Grauer grumbled under his breath. No one inquired whether “they” referred to people on this side of the grave or the other.
He was mollified when Ursula seated him next to her. The places on either side of the medium were the most important ones. Ursula had told Helen these places should be filled by people with gentle, open hearts. Helen was assigned the other seat next to her grandmother.
There was only one slender candle in the center of the table, and all the electric lights in the house were turned off. Ursula explained to everyone that the darkness would encourage communication from Mrs. Samuels’s son, who was recently departed. Apparently, new spirits could be self-conscious.
“Let us put away doubts,” Ursula said, “for this little while. The spirits do not mind the skeptic. They like to come and teach the skeptic. But in the circle we must have harmony of purpose. If you cannot believe, you must at least suppose it may be possible.”
Emilie intoned a brief invocation, and hands were laid flat on the table. Within seconds, Ursula removed her hands to her lap and closed her eyes. Helen did the same.
The regulars began to sing softly, a German lullaby. Helen heard her father’s strong baritone join in after a few bars. Soon, however, no voice was distinct from any other. The tempo of the song corresponded to the tempo of a subtle buzzing in her ears that seemed to be coming from inside her own body. It wasn’t unpleasant, like a mosquito’s buzz. In fact, the sensation was euphoric. Her mouth, seeming to act on its own, slowly formed a smile. The singing stopped. Helen felt as if the top of her head were opening up. Lazily, she opened her eyes. The people around the table looked like silhouettes cut from black paper.
“Are there any spirits present?” Ursula said to the air.
Suddenly, Helen felt a constriction around her neck. The peace and pleasure of a moment ago vanished. She put her hands to her throat and gasped for breath.
Walter pushed his chair back from the table. Mr. Grauer rebuked him with a gesture one might make to a boy squirming in church.
Ursula gently grasped the back of her granddaughter’s neck. “What is it, Helen?”
The constriction began to lessen.
“Something … something around my neck …”
“Hands?”
“Not hands. Like a scarf … but tighter.”
“Are there any spirits present?” Ursula repeated loudly, addressing the ceiling.
The constriction was completely gone now. Helen let her hands fall to her lap.
“Yes,” she said.
It seemed to her that her voice was coming from the back of her head or, impossibly, from behind her head.
“What is your name?”
Mrs. Samuels made a small whimpering sound.
“Mrs. Samuels,” Ursula asked, “does the neck or pain of the neck mean anything to you?”
The woman nodded. A large tear was making its way down one cheek.
“My boy … my boy hanged himself,” she whispered.
Helen coughed.
“Won’t you tell us your name?” Ursula looked at Helen as she rephrased her question.
Helen swayed a little, then nodded.
“Iris,” she said.
“Iris,” Ursula said, engaging the spirit directly while still looking at Helen, “do you have someone with you?”
“Yes,” Helen answered.
“Is it possible to speak to them?”
“I will speak for him.”
“Is it my boy?” Mrs. Samuels interrupted. Emilie put a restraining hand on the distraught woman’s arm.
“Who is with you, Iris?” Ursula said.
Helen leaned back in her chair. She could feel sweat on her brow and on her upper lip.
“Sammy,” she said almost inaudibly.
“That’s him! That’s my Moshe
. His friends called him Sammy. I never liked it. But boys—what can you do with boys today?” She gave a nervous laugh.
“Do you want to ask him anything?” Ursula said to her.
“Are you all right, Moshe?”
Helen saw Iris hovering serenely beside Mrs. Durkin’s sideboard. One sleeve of Iris’s robe was rippling as if she were standing in a breeze. Helen couldn’t see Moshe, but she sensed an agitated presence next to Iris and knew that he was the cause of the sleeve moving. Then Iris’s voice was in her mind, at once strange and intimate.
“Iris says Sammy is on the road to perfection,” Helen said.
“I didn’t get to tell him … to tell him good-bye.”
“Iris says Sammy knows you love him. There is no time for regrets. The past is not here.”
Iris was fading. Helen looked away from her to the sputtering candle. “They’re going,” she said.
“No!” cried Mrs. Samuels.
Mrs. Durkin got up and turned on a floor lamp. Now they were only seven people around a table in an ordinary dining room. Mrs. Samuels was weeping into a large white handkerchief.
“He hasn’t really left you, Mrs. Samuels,” Emilie consoled her.
“Nothing is lost but it changes,” Ursula added. “We are none of us ever alone.”
CHAPTER 9
The next morning, it was raining. The air was the color of pussy willows. Helen was reminded it was Saturday by the fact that no one had knocked at her door to hustle her out of bed.
Just as she reached to push open the swinging door to the kitchen, she heard her name mentioned in conversation. This was getting to be an uncomfortable habit, catching news of herself while hidden behind a door.
“How can you be so sure, Nanny, that Helen wouldn’t have been hurt?” Walter was saying.
“You heard how Emilie begins by calling on good spirits,” Ursula answered.
“But bad spirits can show up anyway,” Emilie reminded her.
“Bad,” Ursula mused. “We must be careful to judge when we do not understand all.”
“I judge someone who would choke a young girl as bad,” Walter insisted.
“He was perhaps only inexperienced in making contact. Suicides do not like to be called.”
“I’m not convinced spirits were involved at all,” Walter replied. “Maybe Helen’s gift, as you call it, is in reading thoughts. Maybe somehow the agonies of that wretched woman emptied into Helen’s innocent mind.”
“Maybe,” Ursula admitted. “But what about Iris?”
The conversation seemed stalled, so Helen entered the kitchen. Everyone was at the table, though they’d obviously finished breakfasting. As usual, her father and grandmother had newspapers spread in front of them. Walter gave Helen a nod in response to her “good morning,” then turned his attention to the front page, and Ursula answered “guten Morgen” quite normally before taking up her morning ritual of memorizing obituaries. Emilie smiled at Helen, put down her coffee mug and got up to fix some Wheatena.
“Feeling better?” she said from the stove.
Helen stared at her mother’s back, unsure how to respond. She did feel differently this morning from how she’d felt last night. Quieter. Cleaner. Was that better? Should she call last night bad? She’d been dizzy on the way home, had leant her head against her mother’s shoulder as they walked, but that hadn’t been bad exactly, only odd, as if she’d just gotten off a fast merry-go-round. At home, her mother had helped her out of her clothes and into bed. Her freshly laundered sheets had smelled lovely.
And before, at Mrs. Durkin’—to say that she’d felt badly then was not a big enough description. The sensation of choking was frightening, but it hadn’t lasted long. And she’d gotten to see Iris again, which was nice, though now that she considered, she didn’t like that Iris had come unasked. Was the mere act of sitting at a seance table invitation enough?
Helen rubbed her forehead. No, she wasn’t feeling better. She was muddled and embarrassed and uneasy in her own skin.
“Yes, I am better, thank you,” she answered anyway.
Emilie set a steaming bowl in front of her. Helen watched a pat of butter melt into the brown sugar, which in its turn was melting into the hot cereal. One by one, the three adults exited the kitchen to attend to separate errands, and she was left with only the thrum and drip of the rain to listen to.
The adults’ careful casualness annoyed her, especially after what she’d just overheard. Suppose she had suddenly sprouted wings? Would her family fail to mention them as long as she kept them neatly folded on her back whenever she was in the house? Would it be deemed her problem to figure out how to deal with them in the bathtub? Would her mother simply remake her blouses and quietly set a bottle of preening oil on her dresser?
Helen began to eat. The first few swallows were tight. She wondered what she really wanted. To be sized up face-to-face and fussed over, or to be granted privacy? Probably a bit of both. She sighed. She’d had no preconceived notion of what this business of contacting spirits would be like, but she’d never thought it would leave her lonely.
The rain and muted light continued all day, which suited Helen’s slack frame of mind. When Rosie called with a plan to go to a matinee, Helen declined. The idea of a crowd and bright noise and commotion was as unappealing to her today as it would have been irresistibly enticing on any other rainy Saturday.
By late afternoon, she was contentedly ensconced in the living-room window seat, reading the latest Nancy Drew mystery. Her mother was in the armchair by the fireplace knitting. Her father had gone out for tobacco, and Nanny was napping.
Coming to the end of a chapter, Helen lifted her head and looked out the window. The movement of someone in a yellow slicker on the Mackeys’ back porch caught her eye. It was Lloyd, stuffing rolled newspapers into a canvas sack in preparation for going out on his route. Helen watched him hoist the sack over one shoulder and trudge down the wooden steps to his bicycle. She watched him pedal down the driveway. He made a crooked path, hitting every puddle. She imagined him laughing, not caring whether his corduroy pants got wet and muddy, not worrying about losing his balance or dropping his bag. Lloyd was a joker and a daredevil. Mrs. Mackey said every gray hair she had was because of him, but everyone inside the family and out knew he was her favorite. When Lloyd turned out of sight, Helen opened her book again.
Nancy Drew was just jumping into her roadster in order to pursue a mysterious stranger she’d spotted lurking near the railroad station, when the print on the page swirled. Trying to focus, Helen saw a flash of yellow. Feeling nauseated, she shut her eyes. Immediately, an image of Lloyd on his bicycle was before her. Lloyd just a block away, making a quick veer as a large black car rounded the corner. Car and bike skidding on the slick street. Lloyd flying over the handlebars. Then motionless and twisted on the wet macadam.
Helen leapt up and ran out of the house. She took the Mackeys’ front steps two at a time and pounded on their door with both fists. Billy opened the door with a bewildered look. His mother was right behind him. She was balancing her youngest, Linda, on her hip, and in her other hand she held a mixing spoon coated with chocolate batter. Helen pulled Billy’s wrist.
“Come on!” she shouted and ran down the steps.
Billy followed without hesitation. At the end of the block, a small crowd was gathering around a black Hudson. When Billy spotted his brother’s bicycle sprawled at the curb, he picked up his pace and passed Helen. Her speed was hampered by being in her stocking feet. She looked back at Mrs. Mackey standing in front of her house peering up the street.
“It’s Lloyd,” Helen yelled to her.
Mrs. Mackey screamed. Frightened, Linda began to cry. Helen saw her mother coming out of their house with an umbrella. She took the little girl from Mrs. Mackey, who rushed up the street. As she dashed by, Helen noticed she was still holding the chocolate spoon.
“Helen?” her mother was calling. “Helen!”
But Helen ignored her
. A siren sounded in the distance, getting nearer. Helen walked to the accident scene. There was Lloyd, just as he’d appeared in her mind’s eye, one leg turned at a sickening angle, a smear of blood at his temple, his newspapers spilled around him. The only addition was Mrs. Mackey, kneeling beside him sobbing, with Billy next to her, gripping her shoulders. And the babble of people telling and retelling versions of what had happened.
Helen forced herself to look at Lloyd in order to check the accuracy of her vision. As she stared at him, she discerned a band of pale light around his body. She glanced at the sky, thinking the clouds had opened and let through a beam of sunlight. But the gray cover was uniformly dense. Looking at Lloyd again, she noticed that around his bent leg and his head the light had a greenish cast. No one else nearby was touched by the soft glow surrounding Lloyd. Was he dying? As soon as she thought it, Helen sensed that wasn’t the correct interpretation. To the contrary, it came to Helen that the strange halo meant just the opposite.
When the police arrived, the onlookers were pushed back, and most moved on. Disregarding the wetness, Helen sat down on a low wall one house down from the accident corner. Mrs. Mackey climbed into the back of the ambulance. Billy watched it pull away, then he began walking slowly home. When he reached Helen’s spot, she joined him. Neither of them spoke. They stopped at his front walk.
“He looked bad, didn’t he?” Billy said.
His voice broke on “bad.” He looked up at the roof of his house as if he were inspecting it for loose shingles. Helen knew he was trying to hold back his emotions. He swallowed, and she saw his Adam’s apple slide up and down under the stretched skin of his throat. She’d never noticed before that Billy had an Adam’s apple. She looked away quickly, as if she’d seen something she shouldn’t have. Billy lowered his head and swiped his sleeve under his nose.
“Where’s Linda?” he said.
“My mother’s got her.”
“Do you think she can keep her a while? I want to go inside and … I want to find my Mom’s rosary and …”
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