Before Helen had finished her thought, the terrible sadness evaporated. The stinging around her mouth and nose stopped. The brief cramps came and went as before. The thick fog, now unpopulated, dissipated, and Iris with it. Helen came back to her surroundings as one wakes up from a long sleep, with gathering alertness.
But her surroundings had changed. Several people were on their feet and staring fearfully at her. Miss Simmons was repeatedly crossing herself. Mrs. Goldberg was leaning against her husband sobbing, and he looked close to tears as well.
“What does it mean?” a woman was saying. “What does it mean?”
“It’s a hoax, that’s what it is,” another woman replied, though she sounded uncertain.
“That’s all for today,” Emilie said politely but firmly. She got up and opened the hall door. “If you’ll exit this way, please. We’ll notify you of future meetings. Thank you for coming.”
Bewildered, the sitters filed out, some of them whispering urgently to one another.
“I can stay, Emilie, if you’d like,” Mrs. Durkin said.
“Thank you, dear, no. What Helen needs now is privacy.”
The large woman had no choice but to leave with the others.
Ursula remained at the table with Helen, mercifully saying nothing. While they waited for Emilie to return from the front door, Helen grasped the edges of her chair seat with both hands and pushed her toes against the floor. She wanted to be sure she was solidly out of trance and back in her own skin. For that’s what the gripping sorrow had felt like—that she was out of herself and inside some horrible world from which there was no escape. Of course, that wasn’t so. It had been a different experience than any she’d had before, but Iris had gotten her out of it. Iris would always help her escape. Nevertheless, she knew absolutely that she never wanted to repeat that kind of trance again.
“What happened?” she said quietly when Emilie had returned to the table.
“There was a materialization,” her mother said.
“A hand?”
“More than a hand,” Ursula said.
“A mist came out of your mouth and nose,” Emilie said. “Then there were faces floating around your head. They were smaller than real faces, and they looked as if they were made out of white smoke or glowing clouds, but their features were distinguishable. No two looked exactly alike.”
“Mrs. Goldberg saw her sisters,” Ursula reported.
“She thought she saw her sisters,” Emilie corrected.
“They came at the beginning, before the crowd,” Ursula argued. “She got a good look.”
“The crowd?” Helen said. “How many faces were there?”
Emilie and Ursula exchanged glances.
“Two, at first,” Emilie said.
“The sisters,” Ursula added.
Emilie frowned at her mother.
“Then more came, slipping out from behind one another. Some seemed to disintegrate, and as soon as they did, three or four more would fill that space. They got smaller and smaller, as if to fit better, though you could still tell they were faces. Men, women, children. It was impossible to count them.”
“I have brought no one, and I have brought all,” Helen said.
“What?” asked Emilie.
“Iris told me that. But I didn’t understand.” Helen rubbed her forehead. “I still don’t.”
“There came impressions to me,” Ursula said tentatively. “From the faces.” She paused. “Only impressions.”
“Tell us, Nanny,” Helen encouraged her.
“It came that they passed through together.”
“So many at once?” Emilie said. “Was it from a bombing?”
Ursula shook her head. “It didn’t feel so.”
“Was there anything else?” Helen asked.
“That they made one family.”
“Oh, there were far too many for that to be the case,” Emilie protested. “Unless you were to go back several generations.”
“Nein,” Ursula said. “These dead were all new.”
“Then how—?”
“There is even a bigger mystery, meine Kinder, and it is the feeling that came to me the strongest. That this impossible one family … that they all belonged to the Goldbergs.”
CHAPTER 30
DECEMBER 1943
After the last seance in July, Helen never again allowed the dining room to be dimmed for a sitting. Keeping the room well-lit was proof positive against materializations, which required darkness like fish require water.
Nevertheless, the first several seances in the fall were jammed. So many people wanted to attend, the members of the home circle had to take turns. Despite Mrs. Goldberg’s upset in July, she returned in September, bringing her rabbi with her, an old man with a voice as deep as a cello.
“So young,” he said, taking Helen’s hand when Mrs. Goldberg introduced him. He looked at her as if he wanted to know and understand her, as if he’d already decided he would like her.
“I don’t know what Mrs. Goldberg told you, sir,” Helen had said, “but I don’t expect that any … that anything very unusual will happen today.”
“My dear, young lady,” the old man replied, “for me, just to be here is unusual enough.” And he laughed softly.
As predicted, nothing spectacular occurred. Helen contacted the spirits of three soldiers. Two had died of wounds, one of dysentery in a POW camp. Each one established his identity to the satisfaction of his relatives. One mentioned his mother’s walnut brownies, another the name of the family dog, the third his father’s habit of falling asleep in his easy chair with his cigar still clenched in his teeth. Their messages sounded the same themes as always—there is no finality, the dead are content and progressing, the purpose of life is to help one another.
More and more, Helen was becoming convinced that it was these more general messages that were the true value of spirit communication. And how many times did people need to hear them? Belief was a decision. Belief without ongoing, tangible evidence was at the very core of being human. In October, she instituted a rule that no repeat clients would be permitted. She also began excluding clients who came wishing to know about the future, clients who sought spirit advice on specific matters, and skeptics who dared her, openly or not, to convert them.
The home circle and a number of Ursula’s regular clients were disgruntled by the new standards. It left them all out. Miss Simmons had snorted something about Helen’s having gotten on a mighty high horse. Ursula tried to get Helen to make exceptions, but the girl relented only in the case of the loyal Mrs. Durkin.
“I’m not a fortune-teller, I’m not salesman, and people can’t turn me off and on like a water faucet,” Helen told her grandmother. “You always said I had a gift. Don’t you think I should spend it carefully?”
They were in the kitchen. Ursula was chopping cabbage. She put down her knife and looked at Helen. There was surprise in her expression and a pained tenderness.
“Du haben recht,” she said, nodding. “Maybe when I was a girl like you, if I said the same, maybe now I could do more.”
By early December, attendance at Helen’s seances had diminished. That was fine with her. Better five or six serious, respectful sitters than a larger group peppered with petitioners, doubters, and thrill-seekers.
It was Emilie’s idea that Helen visit Lloyd at Halloran. After five months in hospitals overseas, he was finally back in the States, in the hospital on Staten Island. A discharge date was still to be set, but he was going to get a furlough home for Christmas. If he’d take it.
Lloyd had refused visits from his mother and older sister, and he’d only let his father come once. He put up with Emilie stopping by because it was part of her work with all the men on the ward and not geared strictly towards him. Emilie felt sorry for Mrs. Mackey, who was severely disappointed and frustrated, though she wouldn’t say it outright, for fear people might take it as criticism of her son.
But Emilie was more concerned abou
t Lloyd himself. She’d seen other young men sunk in gloom, pulled into themselves, frightened and angry and lonely. She’d watched some of them struggle out of these states, or at least successfully disguise them, while others left the hospital still lost. She wondered sometimes about those lost boys, about the confusion they’d raise in their families, about the unexpected paths their broken bodies had set them upon, about the stories you saw in their eyes that they wouldn’t tell.
Lloyd had been wounded by a mortar shell. He’d had several operations to remove shrapnel from his body, but he was still riddled with fragments. The doctors said that some of the shrapnel would eventually work its way out of his muscles and emerge, bit by bit, through his skin, but that most of what was left was there to stay. There would be pain, especially in cold weather, gradually lessening over time, but probably never completely disappearing. Mrs. Mackey had told Emilie that she was sure her Lloyd, strong and stubborn and never a complainer, would be able to handle all that. It was the blindness that worried her. Lloyd had lost his right eye. And it was doubtful he’d have any sight in the left.
“Why do you think he’d welcome me, Mama, if he won’t let his mother or Barbara in?” Helen had asked when Emilie suggested she go with her on her next day at Halloran.
“Well, maybe he won’t exactly welcome you, but I think he might let you sit and talk to him. He seems to enjoy the notes you send when I read them to him.”
“Did he say so?”
“No. But one day I came in and saw another volunteer was rereading them to him. You must have a knack for putting down things he likes hearing about.”
Helen shrugged. “I just write ordinary stuff.”
“He’s supposed to come home at Christmas, you know, and I’m afraid he might choose to stay on the ward instead. It’d be a terrible blow to the Mackeys. But it’d be worse for him, I think, whether he knows it or not.”
“All right. I’ll give it a try. I’d like to see him, actually. And Billy would probably appreciate a firsthand report.”
So it was that on a winter afternoon whose sky was threatening snow, Helen joined her mother on two rough ferry rides across the choppy Hudson River and New York Bay. Emilie went in alone to Lloyd to tell him Helen was there. After a few minutes, she came out into the hall and told Helen he’d agreed to her visit.
“I think we caught him so off guard he didn’t know what to say but yes,” Emilie confided with a satisfied smile. “His bed is the last in the row.”
The narrow ward held eight beds, arranged along one wall. In the opposite wall, windows gave out on a courtyard where a large, rectangular garden lay dormant. In season, Helen’s mother had informed her, the German U-boat prisoners held at Halloran tended vegetable patches there.
The ends of the beds were not far from the windowed wall, requiring Helen to walk down a space only somewhat wider than a sidewalk while the men propped in the beds watched her pass. A wan light was seeping through the windows, giving the room a dingy feel despite the crisp white sheets on the beds and the clean white bandages swathing various parts of the men. Helen felt she must nod and smile at each man, but her stomach lurched every time. None of them was horribly disfigured, and a couple of them responded with greetings as merry as any she might have met with from on-leave soldiers on a park bench—one fellow even managed a broad wink with the side of his face not covered by gauze—but they were all ruptured in some way, and it showed in their labored nonchalance as much as in their damaged bodies. It was this self-awareness that was so very hard to witness.
Helen would not let herself avoid looking at even a single man. She felt that if she did, she’d be adding to his hurt. At the same time, she felt that it was unfair to walk by them, that her youth and health and freedom of movement accentuated their premature dilapidation.
As Helen reached the end of the row, a male nurse was lifting a man out of the bed next to Lloyd’s and settling him into a wheelchair. The man was missing both legs. Helen stepped aside and waited for them to go by on their way out of the ward, then she glanced over at Lloyd. He was lying on his side, with his back to her and the rest of the room. She walked around his bed and scooted a chair close to it so that she could talk in a low enough voice to give them some semblance of privacy. Lloyd’s eyes were bandaged, and he was lying so still, Helen would have thought he was asleep except that she knew her mother had just spoken with him.
“Lloyd?” she said. “It’s Helen.”
He made no answer. He didn’t move. Could he have dropped off to sleep that quickly? Helen wondered. Maybe some medicine was making him groggy.
“Lloyd? Are you awake?”
He rolled on to his back with a grunt.
“It’s Helen,” she repeated.
“I heard you the first time,” he said.
“Oh. I couldn’t tell because—”
“Because you can’t see my eyes?”
“Well, not only that—”
“Welcome to the club. I can’t see them, either.”
Helen’s mother had warned her that Lloyd’s spirits were low, but she hadn’t expected this terse bitterness.
“It looks like it might snow later on,” she said, immediately cursing herself for using the word looks. But it was too late. She had to forge ahead. “The sky is that kind of heavy gray, you know?—like it’s hanging down closer to the earth because it’s too full to stay up where it belongs. The Hudson was gray, too, only darker, like … like the slate sidewalks on Larch Avenue … and just jumping with whitecaps. I stood out on the deck of the ferry—my mother thought I was nuts—to feel the wind. You could smell the snow in it.”
“You can’t smell snow.”
“Yes, you can.”
“All right, then, what’s it smell like?”
Helen couldn’t believe she’d been so mundane as to bring up the weather. And now he was arguing with her about it! But at least he was talking.
“Well, it’s a damp smell,” she began. “Something like when you dig down into the ground in the spring and the mud is still cold. Only it doesn’t have that same dirt smell, not so obvious as that. It’s a fresh smell somehow, like … well, like snow itself, I guess.”
Lloyd’s face was impassive. Helen figured they should move on from the topic of the weather, but she wasn’t sure where to go. Since he’d refused to see his family, she thought she shouldn’t mention them. And why would he be interested in any part of her day-to-day life? Maybe she could tell him about Billy’s latest letter, in which he’d described his first training flight. But maybe Billy had already written to him about that.
“You like to hear yourself talk, don’t you?” Lloyd sneered.
Stung, Helen abruptly stood up.
“I’m happy to go, Lloyd, if that’s what you want,” she said angrily. “You just had to say so.”
“You can smell snow coming,” he replied in a tight voice. “Well, I can smell things, too. And you know what? Pity stinks.”
“Oh, yeah? And who do you smell it on more, Lloyd Mackey, me or yourself?”
Helen instantly regretted her outburst. Lloyd was right. She did pity him. And she saw suddenly how corrosive that would be for someone as proud and fearless as he’d always been. Yet she was right, too. He was feeling deeply sorry for himself. Though justified, it was as dangerous as another wound. But she had no right to upbraid him.
She stood, irresolute, watching him. She could have left if she hadn’t said that last thing. But she had said it, and she felt she owed him the opportunity of a retort. The exchange, though raw, had been too honest for apologies. To her amazement, he began to guffaw.
“That’s the first square thing anyone’s said to me in months,” he said when he’d stopped laughing. “It felt like a sock in the puss, but maybe I needed one, huh?”
“Oh, Lloyd, I—”
“Hey, don’t you get gooey on me now and say you’re sorry or anything.”
“No, I wasn’t going to say I was sorry.”
He laughed again, a short chuckling belch. “Atta girl.”
She sat down. The chair made a little scraping noise against the floor. Lloyd turned his head toward the sound and folded his arms across his chest expectantly. His bare forearms were still browned, even after months away from the Tunisian sun. There were a few small scars on them, but otherwise, looking at his arms in isolation, you’d have said they belonged to a man in the prime of his life, a man able to turn his muscles and his will to any task he chose. Helen wondered what to say next. She almost said welcome home, but it wasn’t quite the right sentiment, and, anyway, he’d be sure to deem it gooey.
“My father and my grandmother said to say hello,” she said. “They want to see you when you’re home for Christmas.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“Are you really thinking of not coming?”
“All the song and dance Ma’s bound to go through,” he said shaking his head. “I don’t know if I can take it.”
“You’re gonna have to let her do it some time.”
“Yeah, I guess.” His brow furrowed. He gently touched the bandages over his eyes, as if checking that they were still in place.
“I should go,” Helen said. “My mother wants me to meet the other Gray Ladies and help out a while in the recreation room.”
“Sure,” he said.
She stood up and walked around the end of the bed, then turned back to him.
“Nanny and I are home most days,” she said. “You could come over to our house sometimes if you needed a change.”
He leaned forward, as if he were ready to take her up on her offer right then.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay, I’ll take my furlough. You can tell my mother.”
Helen smiled and nodded. Then remembering he couldn’t see her, she said, “It’s a deal.”
“I guess it’s about time I got out in the air again.” He grinned. “To find out for myself what it smells like.”
When Helen got home from Halloran, she was delighted to find a fat letter from Rosie waiting. She’d last heard from her friend in October, and that had been only a brief note to let Helen know that she’d transferred to the 6669th Headquarters Platoon, assigned to the Fifth Army under General Clark. She was still on the coast of Algeria, but in Mostaganem instead of Algiers. Helen wondered why Rosie had transferred, since her job had remained the same. She’d never voiced any complaints about her Algiers assignment except that the nightly bombings had made it hard to sleep.
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