The Medium

by Noëlle Sickels

  “You saw something?”

  “A sort of smoke? Then pow, there was this pain in my stomach—like a blow. What happened, Nanny? Was it something bad?”

  “Nothing bad. Something special. Something rare.”

  Mrs. Durkin came in with a tray. On it were a tall glass of iced tea and three small glasses of sherry.

  “I thought it was called for,” Mrs. Durkin said in response to Ursula’s raised eyebrows. “It’s not every day, after all, that such a thing … It’s not every day.”

  “Our good frau has waited a long time for this,” Ursula said to Helen.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You don’t know?” Mrs. Durkin said. “We had a materialization today. A spirit hand. Right on this very table. It was wonderful, wonderful. Who knows what would have followed if that silly woman hadn’t interfered. Oh, Helen, I’m proud to know you. Proud.” She picked up a sherry and drained it in one gulp.

  “You are on a new step now, Helen,” Ursula said. “I would not be so surprised at it if your wedding had happened. Such life changes can give a medium more power. But you have gone ahead without the help of becoming a married woman.”

  Helen took a hefty swallow of sherry.

  “You must sip,” Ursula scolded gently. “You took so much your cheeks are flushed.”

  “I can’t wait to tell the rest of our circle,” Mrs. Durkin said.

  “Yes, they will have the proper respect. But we must be even more careful now who comes to Helen’s seances,” Ursula said. “She can be very badly hurt if someone grabs like that again.”

  The two women went on to discuss how best to screen sitters, what physical conditions of the room might promote more materializations, other ways to protect Helen. Helen herself did not participate. She got up and raised one of the shades so that she could look out the window. She stood there nursing her iced tea. A new step. But towards what?

  CHAPTER 29

  JULY 1943

  After the materialization of the hand, everyone in Ursula’s home circle began attending Helen’s seances. This left less room for strangers, which Walter judged a good thing. Emilie sat in on three seances in order to witness Helen’s new ability, but when nothing happened despite Ursula’s careful re-creation of the darkened conditions of the first materialization, Emilie resumed her hospital schedule.

  Ursula said that physical signs like the hand were very rare because so many conditions had to be just right. Obviously, Helen was able to attain the necessary degree of receptivity. That was why her automatic writings were so profuse. But physical manifestations depended as much on the thoughts and conditions of the sitters as on the medium.

  “One person in a circle can make a block,” Ursula told Helen. “And all sitters must have enough chemicals and energy for the spirits to pull out and pass through you.”

  “And there’s nothing I have to actually try to do?” Helen asked.

  “Only to concentrate and be meek.” Ursula looked speculatively at her. “It is a help, too, if you want for it to happen.”

  This was, in fact, the problem. Helen wasn’t at all sure she wanted another materialization.

  Except for the stab in her stomach, which had been the result of interference and not an intrinsic part of the phenomenon, the production of the hand had caused her no strain and only minor discomfort. In fact, after that seance she’d felt a cascade of vitality, which was very different from the enervation she was accustomed to. It was as if she’d been infused with something, rather than having had something drained from her. So there were no physical costs to give her pause.

  It was the requisite giving over of her will that troubled her. She began to wonder why she had the abilities she did if she was to be denied control; why, beyond easing grief, spirits bothered to contact the living at all; why she should offer herself as an avenue for them, an avenue unimpeded by any personal traits or wishes. Where was she in all this?

  Helen decided that for the time being she’d continue entering seances prepared to generate physical phenomena. But she was going to pay more careful attention to every aspect of the experience—her sensations and emotions; the reactions of the sitters; the roles, if any, of Iris and her boys. If a broader purpose existed for her gift, she was going to find it. If one did not, she would find that out. And then, she hoped, she’d know what to do, how to take hold of the reins.

  Ever since her time with Billy at the inn, the future had assumed a more definite shape for Helen. In that one afternoon, the future had become real. She could picture herself in it. She could feel herself moving towards it. Whether her psychic abilities would have a place there or not must not be left to chance. Billy would have a hard enough time accepting her continued mediumship if it were well thought through and demonstrably worthwhile. She couldn’t ask him to be tolerant of something she hadn’t made an effort to comprehend fully herself. The time for coasting and letting her parents and grandmother determine what was best had come to an end. She was an adult now. Her afternoon with Billy said so. Even the spirits said so. For wasn’t that one way to interpret the astonishing arrival of the hand?

  Helen sat at the picnic table in her backyard with letter-writing materials spread around her. She’d just folded a V-mail to Rosie, congratulating her on becoming regular Army. The “Auxiliary” designation had been dropped on July 3, when Congress passed the Women’s Army Corps bill into law. WAAC members were given the choice of returning to civilian life or joining the Army. The newsreels said seventy-five percent of the women had chosen to join up. Helen didn’t need to hear from Rosie to know she was one of them.

  From next door came the flapping sound of wet sheets being shaken out. Above the fence, Helen could see Mrs. Mackey’s hands and forearms as she hung out the washing.

  Helen took up her pen and began a letter to Billy by describing this ordinary sight, the rhythm of his mother appearing and disappearing from view as she bent to take clothes out of her basket, the brightness of the sun on the top edges of the tautly pinned white sheets. Helen wrote to Billy daily, so her notes often contained such small scenes.

  She wrote to Rosie twice a week, and once a week or so to Rosie’s brother Owen and to Lloyd, all by V-mail. Because it was put on film and then reproduced at its destination, V-mail was more compact than a normal letter and so could be sent by plane, reducing by a whole month the length of time it took to get a letter overseas. Helen had read in a magazine article that 1,700 V-mails would fit in one cigarette pack.

  Helen was also writing regularly to three soldiers she didn’t know, having gotten their names from a list in the newspaper of young men who received little or no mail. She sometimes found it easier to write to them than to her friends. To the soldiers she’d never met, Helen wrote about the food and the band music at the Independence Day picnic at Brinker’s Green; about the girls’ club, Little Orphan Annie’s Junior Commandos, scouring the town’s alleys for scrap metal; and about the sheen of the full moon on the river. She could tell her friends, too, about these things, and she did, but she couldn’t write about the thoughts and events that most engaged her, namely the seances and her struggle to understand their larger meaning. For one thing, she worried that there might be details from her seances that shouldn’t be put into a letter going overseas. V-mail was less likely to be captured than letters that went by ship, but the possibility still existed, and letter-writers were constantly urged not to include any information that might be useful to the enemy. For another thing, letters to soldiers were not supposed to make them anxious about friends and family at home. Wives were admonished not to mention money problems or leaky roofs or babies with colds. Helen figured her dilemma fit the category of problems better left unrecorded.

  But the main reason Helen did not write about her quandary was that she didn’t quite know how. She’d never gone into real depth with her friends about her abilities, except when she and Billy had argued about the stories dictated by her boys. A letter to someone on o
r near a battlefield wasn’t the place to start. Billy was still safe on American soil, but he was preparing every day for combat, and she just couldn’t clutter his mind with her ponderings, still so maddeningly vague.

  Helen finished her note to Billy and sealed it in an envelope. She’d planned to write to Rosie’s other brother, Jimmy, today, but she was hanging back from the task. It was so tough to imagine what news might cheer up a POW. Sometimes, she wondered if the Red Cross even managed to get those letters through. From all she’d heard of Japanese soldiers, she found it hard to believe they’d extend themselves to bring comfort to their prisoners. She decided she’d write to Lloyd first and work up to Jimmy’s letter. Maybe she’d tell Lloyd, too, about his mother hanging the laundry.

  Just as that idea was crossing her mind, she heard Mrs. Mackey’s voice raised in a loud wail. She rushed to the fence and peered over it. Mrs. Mackey was sitting on the ground, her upper body sprawled across her laundry basket, her fingers gripping its rim. Bending over her and trying to get her to stand up was an elderly man in a messenger’s uniform. Helen raced down her driveway, around the end of the fence, and into the Mackeys’ yard. The man turned a doleful face towards her and held out a Western Union telegram.

  Regret to inform you your son Staff Sergeant Lloyd F. Mackey was seriously wounded in action tenth July in Sicily. Mail address follows direct from hospital with details.

  July tenth. Nearly three weeks ago. Helen shoved the telegram into the pocket of her skirt and gently grasped Mrs. Mackey’s shoulders.

  “Come on, now, let’s go inside,” she coaxed.

  Mrs. Mackey lifted her face from the mound of wet laundry. She seemed baffled at finding Helen there, but slowly she got to her feet.

  “You’ll take care of her, Miss?” the messenger asked, obviously anxious to leave.

  “Yes. But there’s no phone in her house. Her husband works at the Curtiss-Wright plant. Gerald Mackey. If you could get in touch with him? Or their daughter Barbara? She’s there, too.”

  The man nodded. “Yes, all right. Yes, Miss, I can do that.”

  Helen made Mrs. Mackey lay down on the sofa. She brought a sheet from the linen closet and lay it over her.

  “Lloyd, Lloyd,” the woman kept whispering. “My Lloyd.”

  “Try not to let your imagination run away with you, Mrs. Mackey,” Helen said, speaking as much to herself as to the stunned woman. “You’ll know more when you get the hospital report.”

  Helen stayed at the house until Mr. Mackey and Barbara got home. When they hurried in the back door, she was in the kitchen with Linda cutting her a slice of watermelon. Helen had thought it more important to stay with the anxious nine-year-old than to sit with the oblivious Mrs. Mackey. The girl, who’d been down the block at a friend’s house, was almost as alarmed by finding her mother stretched out on the sofa in the middle of the day as by hearing the news about her brother. Mr. Mackey went straight in to his wife, and Barbara sat down at the table with Linda.

  Helen gave Barbara the telegram. She read and reread it. She even turned it over, as if she expected more or different news on the back.

  “Do you think it’s good or bad we haven’t heard anything more yet?” she said. “I mean, if he was … worse … or if he … They’d be quicker to get you really bad news, wouldn’t they?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Barbara slid her fingertips over the adjutant general’s name at the bottom of the telegram.

  “Thank God you were here, Helen.”

  “I’m glad I was.”

  “All done,” Linda said, sliding off her chair. She headed for the back door.

  “Here, wipe your chin,” Barbara said, holding out a dish towel. “You’ve got watermelon juice.”

  “I’m only gonna go sit on the swing.”

  Barbara continued to hold out the towel, so Linda came and took it from her. She wiped her mouth and chin and fingers, then held her face forward for her sister to inspect. Barbara pulled the child close in a sudden, tight embrace. Linda endured the entrapment for a few seconds, then wriggled free and ran outside, letting the screen door slam behind her. Barbara rose.

  Helen had an impulse to squeeze Barbara’s hand or stroke her back, but there was a precarious composure about the young woman that made Helen hesitate. She recalled wanting to avoid her mother’s touch right after she’d heard from Billy that he was on his way to South Dakota.

  “I should show my father this,” Barbara said, holding up the telegram.

  Helen nodded and turned to go.

  “We may want to come over later to call Billy if that’s all right.”

  “Of course.”

  Helen walked slowly back home and returned to the picnic table. She didn’t want to go inside to her grandmother yet. She sat there thinking about Lloyd, remembering little things about him—the way his voice cracked when he was talking excitedly; his fierce, sweaty speed on the varsity basketball team; his hammy performance of “Lydia the Tattooed Lady” at the Fall Follies senior year.

  “Stop it,” she scolded herself. “He’s still alive.”

  To reassure herself of this, she smoothed out a V-mail form and printed “Dear Lloyd” in large bold letters. She’d have to leave the address blank for now, but she wanted to write to him today. She would tell him how still and hot it was on the day they’d learned of his being wounded, yet how the air became even thicker when the telegram arrived. She’d tell him about the sweet smell of the watermelon, how it snapped open under the touch of the knife, it was that ripe. She’d tell him they all missed him and were praying for him and were proud of him.

  Helen’s weekly seance was scheduled for that evening. It was the final one of the summer. She was going to take three weeks off in August to go with two girlfriends to pick blueberries near Tom’s River in south Jersey under the auspices of the Women’s Land Army. The girls would get paid, at an unskilled labor wage of thirty cents an hour, and out of that they’d have to buy food and lodging, but it was a patriotic thing to do, and, for Helen, it offered a break from the agog surveillance of the home circle. She hadn’t liked the higher expectations of sitters since the materialization of the hand.

  Helen thought later that perhaps her awareness that this would be the last seance for a while, plus the disconcerting news about Lloyd, still fresh in her mind, had rendered her more than usually receptive to the spirit world. Perhaps distraction was as powerful a state as concocted passivity. Perhaps the key was not to care what happened. But all these theories came to her later, when she tried to explain the remarkable events of the last seance in July, as she and her family would always call it.

  Ursula and her home circle took up four seats, and Emilie filled another one. There were five newcomers: three strangers, plus Mr. and Mrs. Goldberg from up the block. The Goldbergs had a son in the Army, currently in California being trained in amphibious landings. They hadn’t come about him, but about Mrs. Goldberg’s sisters in Warsaw. After the Nazis took Poland, letters still managed to straggle through Switzerland, but she’d had no word in a long time. Mr. Goldberg made no bones about his disbelief in psychic powers. He was there only because his wife had been after him for months to come and because in recent weeks she’d been unable to sleep for worrying.

  “She wanders the house like a ghost—you’ll pardon the expression,” he told Emilie and Ursula. “Just imagine—a man wakes up at three o’clock and finds himself in an empty bed. And where is his wife? Standing in the dark living room looking out at the trees, sitting in the dark kitchen turning around the sugar bowl in her hands.”

  Mrs. Goldberg stood beside him wearing a small, expressionless smile.

  Emilie wanted to exclude them, but Ursula pointed out that the people they wanted to know about were not soldiers, so there could be no harm in seeing if Helen could discover something. Because the Goldbergs were long-time neighbors and because Mrs. Goldberg looked so haggard, Emilie agreed to let them stay.

  Mrs. Goldberg
had brought along the last letter she’d had from her sisters. Ursula let Helen hold it a few moments. The envelope was wrinkled and stained. The letter was written in Yiddish on soft, limp paper.

  The seance began normally enough, though Helen thought her limbs might be feeling more leaden than usual. She slid into a deep quiet while the group sang When the Lights Go on Again All Over the World, their untrained voices wavering with emotion.

  Helen became aware of a gray, twilit fog. She saw no figures, heard no sounds, not even, any longer, the singing. Either they had finished the song, or she was too deep in trance. A coolness washed over her skin. She felt a little crampy, as if her period might be starting, then that ebbed. Her throat and mouth and nostrils began to sting.

  The center of the fog grew denser, until Iris became visible. The emerald green of her robe was muted to moss, and her flower was a dark, colorless silhouette against the drapery.

  “I have brought no one, and I have brought all,” Iris communicated.

  “Pardon me?” Helen questioned silently, thinking she must have missed some part of this odd message.

  “The living can not grasp the meaning. The living can only let it break their hearts.”

  Helen began to have a sense of many presences around Iris, but she still couldn’t see anyone. She felt the presences multiplying. She thought that if she opened her eyes, she might find they’d invaded every corner of the room. Yet here, in Iris’s territory, the fog hid them all. No one stepped forward with a message. No pictures appeared in Helen’s mind. But slowly, a great heaviness entered her heart, a bottomless sorrow more profound than any she’d ever known. The feeling was coming from the fog, or from the spirits hidden there. They were drowning her in it. Helen felt pressed down, smothered.

  “Iris!” she appealed. “I can’t—”