The Medium

by Noëlle Sickels

  Ursula told Helen to call on Iris at bedtime to accompany her into the dreams. Helen did, and once in a while in the midst of a dream, she would catch a glimpse of something purple, in the shadow of a shattered doorway, at the edge of a battlefield. Helen came to feel that Iris was with her even when she couldn’t find the purple, and so she felt less frightened and almost curious about what she was seeing. She waited longer and longer before waking herself up, and sometimes she let the dream run its course. Oddly enough, as the dreams came to disturb her less, they diminished in both intensity and frequency. By the beginning of February, she was able to move back into her own room.

  But she had found no communications in the dreams, beyond the human tragedy of war, which any magazine or newsreel could tell as well. Her grandmother assured her that clearer meanings would emerge during seances. Though Walter had agreed to only one sitting with the home circle, Ursula was confident that if all went well, he could be convinced to allow Helen to do more. If not, she intimated, Helen would have to decide for herself which dictates were more important, her father’s or spirit’s.

  The seance was set for late March. Ursula wanted to be sure the dreams had been corralled, and she wanted to prepare Helen with exercises like billet reading and self-inducing light trances. She had her try automatic writing again, too, which came a bit easier than it had in the past. No definite messages came through, but she did get a few evocative phrases like “we’re going down,” and “sweet rest beyond the river,” and many variations on the word “mother.”

  One preparatory task Helen set on her own was to explain to Billy her intention of becoming an active medium. He had always known of Ursula’s doings, though he’d never asked Helen about specifics, except to inquire once, years ago, if her grandmother had a crystal ball. The Schneiders and the Mackeys were cordial neighbors, and the Schneiders had helped Mrs. Mackey whenever they could during the hard years Mr. Mackey had been away—sending over cabbage soup or macaroni and cheese, saving Helen’s outgrown clothes for Linda, once even giving them coal when they had no fuel and were burning old tires for warmth. Helen was counting on all this history to ease the way for Billy to accept her mediumship.

  She chose Valentine’s Day. They’d decided to spend the day in New York. Billy had quit Benson’s when they lengthened the shifts at Wright Aeronautical, so his Saturday afternoons were free. They went ice-skating at Rockefeller Center, window-shopped on Fifth Avenue, and ate at the Broadway Automat. They’d seen lots of young men in uniform on the streets, prompting Billy to drop into St. Patrick’s Cathedral and light a candle for Lloyd, who was in basic training at Fort Bragg in North Carolina.

  Twice, Helen noticed auras around soldiers who passed them, but she looked quickly away. Her grandmother had instructed her to close down attention to any psychic information that tried to break through when she hadn’t sought it. She’d be more powerful in seances then, as well as more relaxed in her day-to-day life.

  It was not until they were on the evening ferry home, leaning tired and dreamy on the outside railing despite the cold, that Helen summoned enough nerve to have her talk with Billy.

  “I have something to tell you,” she began.

  He was peering over the side of the boat at the dark water.

  “Hmm?”

  “About some dreams I’ve been having.”

  “Dreams?”

  “Things like this have happened to me before, but not as much as now.”

  “What do you mean?” He turned his head toward her.

  “I’ve been dreaming about sailors. From Pearl Harbor. And sometimes soldiers. Dead sailors and soldiers.”

  “I guess a lot of people have been doing that.”

  “Well, maybe. But I’m going to do something about it.”

  “You’re not making much sense, Helen.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m a little afraid to say it out plain. Afraid of what you might think.”

  He gave her a quizzical look.

  “I guess you better try,” he said. “But give me the real dope, okay?”

  Helen nodded, more to bolster her courage than to answer Billy.

  “I’m going to try to get messages from spirits. I’m going to be a medium.”

  “A medium?” he said sharply. “You don’t really believe in that stuff, do you?”

  His tone was scornful. Helen felt a spike of fear in the pit of her stomach.

  “I kind of have to believe in it.”

  “Have to?” Still a breath of scorn, blunted, with some effort it seemed, to mere doubt.

  “My dreams aren’t like regular dreams, Billy, not even like regular nightmares. And there’ve been times … times that I’ve seen things … when I was awake.”

  “Holy cow,” Billy said, shaking his head. He turned his gaze away from her, lifting it to the sky, which was full of stars. Helen recalled the perturbed Astronomer statue from the World’s Fair. Maybe he’d been oriented skyward because there was something on earth he didn’t want to face.

  “I always figured your grandmother was only pretending,” Billy said after a few moments. “I thought the people who came to see her must just be lonely, or out for some fun, or maybe a little …”

  “Crazy?”

  He looked at her as if he’d just noticed that she had a big, ugly birthmark on her face.

  “You said it, not me.”

  He kept on staring, and she couldn’t think what to say next. She wanted him to hold her, or blow warmth from his mouth onto her gloved fingertips, or tell her that her hat made her head look like an acorn. Anything but this pensive study.

  “Could we wait and see, Billy? Could we just wait and see?”

  He let out a long sigh.

  “You really think you’re gonna talk to ghosts,” he said, shaking his head.

  It was almost a question, but Helen decided to act as if it weren’t. She also decided not to press him for reassurance. It was enough that he’d softened his voice, that he’d propped his forearms on the railing again and resumed watching the ferry’s wake. When he shifted his observation to the silhouette of blacked-out Manhattan, she slid closer to him so that the padded shoulders of their thick coats were touching. He didn’t put his arm around her, but he didn’t pull away, either, so she told herself to be satisfied and not go looking for trouble. Trouble was completely capable of finding its own way to her, if it was interested.

  CHAPTER 20

  MARCH 1942

  Rosie and Helen were walking home in a light rain, having stayed late at school to take first aid classes with the Junior Red Cross. The early evening air was minus the bite of winter. Though it was only March, the day’s mildness promised an early spring. Rosie was telling Helen about a visit to relatives in south Jersey.

  “There’s an INS camp in Gloucester City,” Rosie was saying, “and my cousin Harry took me and my brother Joe to watch them bring in some Germans from Philadelphia.”

  “Why’d you do that?”

  “The boys aren’t old enough to go fight, and they said it was their only chance to see the enemy.”

  They stopped at a corner, standing back from the curb to avoid getting splashed by passing cars. When traffic cleared, they crossed to the other side of the street.

  “Harry and Joe had counted on seeing a bunch of tough guys marching around,” Rosie continued, “but there were only a few people, and some of them were ladies. They were pretty ordinary, too, all loaded down with suitcases and packages. It looked like they’d slept in their clothes. Most of them kept their eyes down, like they were ashamed.”

  Listening to her friend, Helen, too, felt something like shame. She wanted to defend the internees, but she was tongue-tied. For one thing, she didn’t know if they were guilty of anything or not. More than that, she felt a desire to distance herself from them, to avoid any stain of similarity.

  Helen had told Rosie about her upcoming seance. Rosie’s reaction had been more moderate than Billy’s. She liked to consider herself
unflappable. She’d asked a few questions, then let the subject drop. But to know that members of Helen’s family were internees might strain even Rosie’s tolerance.

  She hadn’t told Rosie about Erich and Freida and their children, who were still in custody, now on Ellis Island. Hearings had finally been scheduled for them, though Erich was considering voluntary repatriation to Germany.

  Franz claimed that the only reason the United States was rounding up so many Germans was so that they could exchange them for thousands of Americans trapped in Germany. The Swedish ship Drottningholm had already taken six hundred German diplomats and their families to Portugal, where they traded places with six hundred American students, tourists, and businessmen arrived from Germany on another humanitarian ship.

  Walter had advised Franz to keep his theories to himself. But when FDR signed Order 9066 in February, Franz once again began spouting suspicions and worries, though only to other German-Americans.

  Order 9066 allowed the War Department to create restricted zones anywhere in the United States and to exclude anyone they wished from living in or entering those areas. General De Witt, commander of all the Army units west of the Mississippi, had already evacuated thousands of Japanese and Japanese-Americans from the West Coast to “planned communities” inland.

  “A Jap’s a Jap,” General De Witt told the newspapers.

  He said even Japanese born on American soil could never be Americanized enough to dilute their race loyalties. News of Japanese ferocity against American prisoners of war forestalled public sympathy for Japanese-Americans being forced to leave their homes.

  The general also wanted to relocate German and Italian aliens from coastal areas. But, as Walter took pains to point out to Franz, a congressional committee had opposed that mass roundup. The Japanese had to be evacuated as a group, the reasoning went, because their habits and biology were so different from other Americans, it was impossible to distinguish saboteurs from harmless people, while Germans and Italians could be evaluated case by case.

  “You know, Rosie,” Helen finally managed to say, “just because they’re Germans doesn’t make them the enemy.”

  “Maybe,” Rosie said.

  “My uncle knows a man who was arrested because somebody said they heard him say he hoped Germany wins the war. One of those civilian hearing boards interviewed him for two hours, and he had to fill out eighteen pages of questions.”

  “Did he get sent to a camp?”

  “No, they let him go. He told my uncle he never said anything to anybody about wanting Germany to win.”

  “What about the person who heard him say it?”

  “They wouldn’t tell him who it was. He thinks it’s a neighbor he had an argument with about her noisy dogs.”

  “I don’t know,” Rosie said dubiously. “If they ask somebody that many questions, he’s probably fishy somehow.”

  Helen and Rosie had come to the street where their paths diverged. They hesitated, neither wanting to part on an awkward note.

  “We got a letter from my brother at boot camp,” Rosie said.

  “What’s he say?”

  Though Helen didn’t feel she’d successfully made her point about arrests and detentions, she was happy to move on to a new topic.

  “He’s got bags of complaints. The sergeants are crabby, the uniforms are too big, they have to get up at five in the morning. Mostly, though, he’s homesick.”

  “Is your mom sorry she let him go?”

  “Yeah, I think so. It made her cry when he told about seeing some fellows from Pearl Harbor who were missing arms and legs. But he had really pestered her to let him sign up.”

  “What about Jimmy?”

  Rosie’s older brother Jimmy had been in the Army since 1940 and had trained for jungle combat in the swamps of Louisiana. He was fighting in the Philippines, where things were going so badly, the President had ordered General MacArthur to escape to Australia, leaving the troops to fight on under General Wainwright. MacArthur had said he would return to help them, but no one knew when that might be, since the Navy remained crippled from the Pearl Harbor attack, and much of the rest of the armed forces consisted of raw recruits still in training.

  “All we know is he’s somewhere in Bataan,” Rosie said. “In his last letter, he said we might not hear from him for a while ’cause things were heating up.”

  “When was that?”

  “Beginning of February.”

  “Oh, well, that’s not so long ago.”

  “Yeah,” Rosie said. “I keep writing him every week anyway. I guess he’s not too busy to read a letter.”

  “Give me his address, and I’ll send him a note, too.”

  “Okay.”

  The rain started to come down harder, making little drumming sounds on their umbrellas.

  “Better get home,” Helen said.

  Rosie nodded and turned away, then quickly back again.

  “Say, Helen,” she said shyly, “you know you’re aces with me, right?”

  Helen smiled. She felt both relieved and guilty about being relieved.

  “Right,” she said.

  Gathered around the Schneiders’ dining-room table were Helen, her parents and grandmother, Mrs. Durkin, Mr. Grauer, and Miss Simmons. Walter had insisted the seance take place at home as a guard against artifice. He trusted Ursula, but he knew the members of her home circle were eager for Helen to join them on a permanent basis and so might be tempted to enhance her performance somehow. He himself had provided the pencil and blank papers for automatic writing, should Helen be moved to that. The long, draping tablecloth had been removed so that the area underneath the table was clearly visible. At Walter’s request, all the women were wearing short-sleeved dresses, and Mr. Grauer had removed his jacket and rolled up his sleeves.

  The usual candles stood in the center of the table, but Walter had carried a floor lamp in from the living room. It gently illuminated the entire room. Ursula hadn’t liked this addition. Darkness, she’d declared, was required for many everyday happenings, and no one found it sinister then. Babies grew within their mothers in darkness, seeds sprouted deep in the soil, photographs were printed in darkrooms.

  “How would you see stars if the sky never was dark?” she’d complained.

  Helen sat between her grandmother and her father. Neither of them was touching her except at the tips of her pinkies, yet she itched to stand up and stretch, to throw them off as she would a heavy coat on a warm afternoon. She knew they each had her welfare at heart despite the fact that they had opposing hopes for the evening. She was bound to disappoint or confound at least one of them. She gave her head a little shake to clear away these thoughts. Her grandmother had told her that being anxious or doubtful could make it difficult for spirits to approach.

  “We expect, tonight, to meet with war dead,” Ursula said to the circle, “as have often come to us when we do not call for anyone by name.”

  She gave Walter a sidelong glance.

  “But, as always,” she continued, “we receive whatever happens with patient, unlocked minds. And because Helen is new in her mediumship, we will not expect to understand everything we hear.”

  Ursula nodded across the table at Emilie.

  “I chose tonight’s invocation from Proverbs,” Emilie said. “It says: the hearing ear and the seeing eye, the Lord has made them both.”

  “Let us sing,” said Mrs. Durkin, and Miss Simmons began I Dream of Jeannie, her voice as clean as a bell. Mr. Grauer’s gravelly atonal voice joined in, the two forming a surprisingly pretty harmony.

  By the time the others also began to sing, Helen had already started to enter her trance. She was picturing herself in front of a door, her hand on the knob. The knob was smooth and warm, and as she imagined her fingers wrapping around it, the bones in her neck and spine seemed to loosen, and she felt as if she were pleasantly floating. In her practices with her grandmother, this was as far as Helen usually went. Ursula had had her call up Iris a couple
of times, but no other spirits.

  Now, Helen silently summoned Iris. The darkness behind Helen’s closed eyelids slowly thinned to a dawn-like softness, and she was able to discern her green-robed guide standing there waiting.

  “She’s here,” Helen informed her grandmother.

  Helen could not have said where her grandmother was, nor where she herself was, though somewhere at the far back of her mind, she was aware that she was in her dining room and that her grandmother was right beside her.

  “Ask Iris if she has any spirits to bring through,” Ursula instructed, her words reaching Helen as if through a thick curtain.

  Helen put the question wordlessly to Iris, who responded by stepping back a few paces. A shadowy form was emerging to her right. Because of all the dreams, Helen quickly recognized it as the form of a young soldier.

  “A soldier,” she said, “in light-colored clothing.” She was performing as trained, giving a description without interpretation, attending to the spirit without making any demands on it.

  “He’s next to a tank with a big hole in its side,” she added as the vehicle shimmered into view. “In the desert. He’s not alone.” Other soldiers had appeared behind the young man.

  Helen felt as if there were cobwebs on her hands. She divined that she was meant to write, that the first soldier was yearning to tell her something long and intricate. She groped for the pencil and papers. Someone shoved them within her reach.

  As soon as Helen had grasped the pencil, the young soldier began talking, and she raced to get down his every word. It was exhilarating. A current of radiant energy swept up and down her spine, with occasional bursts travelling across her hips and down her legs in fluttering waves. Her body felt large, soft, joy-ridden. Nothing else mattered. There was no family, no home circle, no Iris. Only herself and the soldier and the labor of her writing.