Dancing In The Light

by Shirley Maclaine

  “Yeah, you sure are,” I answered, wondering whether they would be shocked to realize what their daughter was into now.

  “Gosh, Shirl,” said Mom, “this is wonderful. Your daddy and I will really concentrate because we know how hard this will be on your voice.”

  “Okay, Monkey,” said Daddy. “Do your stuff. What new things will you say about us this time?”

  He was smiling in such a good-humored way, as though he adored being a leading character in all of my books. He cherished the influence he knew he had been on me, and to have me state it publicly seemed to mitigate the disappointment he felt in the unfulfilled potentials of his own life. There were many adventures he had longed to pursue, but he had curtailed his own driving passions (“which might have led to nothing”) in order to be a good provider, a husband, and a father to Warren and me. Yet, when he was a young violinist, long before he married Mother, a famous teacher had plucked him out of an amateur symphony orchestra in Front Royal, Virginia, and offered to take him to Europe to teach him and start him on a career as a soloist. But Dad had decided against it, fearing that after long years of musical training, he might just possibly end up playing in the pit of some Broadway show.

  “The competition was too rough, Monkey,” he had explained to me. “And that would have been no way to make a living. It wouldn’t have been dependable. Sure, I would have seen Europe, maybe been wined and dined by royalty, but if I had done it, I probably wouldn’t have met and married your mother and we wouldn’t have had you and Warren. So I think I did the right thing.”

  Somewhere underneath that story I had always sensed a deeper reason, something much stronger than his fear of competition, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Obviously, I had had nothing to do with his career decision. Yet I had felt a sense of inevitability when he first told me the story as a teenager. Indeed, there had been an inevitability to everything he had done with his life, and in that I was certainly a participant. Whenever I looked at Dad, I felt that our relationship had been almost preordained.

  Mother gave me the same feeling too. It was as though she had chosen to meet Dad and marry him. There was a quality of intense predetermination about the way they related to each other. Or so it always seemed to me.

  Many times Mother had described to me the moment when she said good-bye to her mother in Canada. Her father had died when she was a teenager. She had adored him and had done all she could to help her mother with the raising of the rest of the children (two girls and one boy). Mother was the responsible one. But she had met a professor of psychology and education at Maryland College where she had come to teach dramatics. His name was Ira Owens Beaty. He was intelligent, witty, had a good set of values, and a warm sense of humor, and she had fallen in love with him. And felt compelled to marry him.

  She had brought her new love to Canada to meet her family. His mother came with them, and as Mother was saying good-bye to her mother, setting off on a new life in America, she was horrified at the raucous argument Ira and his tyrannical mother were having while packing up the car. Mother told me that for the first time she felt a flicker of fear. She knew Dad had had an “unhappy” childhood and she was now a chilled witness to some of the drama he had grown up with.

  “Am I making a mistake?” she remembered asking herself. “There’s no telling what kind of damage that woman has visited upon her son—and I will very likely inherit it.” She wondered if she should make a life with someone who had a mother like that.

  But she said she couldn’t help herself. It was something she had to do, not only because she loved him and it had already gone too far, but because she also felt Dad needed her. Over the course of her life Mother was always willing to sacrifice herself when she felt she was needed by others.

  So, she stuffed herself in the car with the new family she was marrying into and had a torturously confusing trip back to Virginia.

  She felt compelled to endure each mile of that journey. The dynamics set in motion by meeting Dad were somehow beyond her control. She just knew what she was doing was right, even though so much of it seemed questionable. Again she said she felt “this compulsion” to go through with it. She couldn’t let anybody down. And then when Warren and I came along, she understood why.

  I have always been interested in what caused the “compulsion.” Of course there are all the psychological explanations: the need to sacrifice herself, attraction to chaos, attraction to another family which was volatile and sometimes violently explosive. I remember watching Dad’s mother, armed with a huge metal skillet, chase his father around their Front Royal house with every intention of hitting him over the head; whereas Mother’s Canadian upbringing had been controlled, placid, and preeminently polite. There were many complicated reasons for Mom and Dad deciding to make a life together, not the least of which was their love for one another. But I always sensed there was some other subtlety to their relationship. Let me just say for the moment that from the time I was very small, I wondered whether I had in fact been adopted. There was an element beyond being a daughter that I was picking up. It is one of my enduring childhood memories. There seemed no reason for me to have what psychologists would call “an orphan psychology.” But I would often sit and gaze at them and wonder who they really were. I didn’t know what I meant by that then. I do, however, think I know now.

  So I sat down in the sun room of our Arlington, Virginia, home, with the creaking of the wicker chairs interfering with their hearing aids, and began to read them the manuscript of Out on a Limb. Dad gave me his rocking chair next to the pipe rack and Mother brought me some tea with lemon in one of her china cups. They leaned forward with bright, inquiring eyes and smiles on their lips. We had agreed that I would read aloud slowly until I was tired. It took about five hours a day for three days. They sat openmouthed as I described my affair with a married English M.P. and my useless battering at his rigidly closed mind, the search for enlightenment through spiritual questing, my curiosity about reincarnation and trance medium channeling sessions where I spoke to entities on the other side, Peter Sellers’s description of his own death and his attraction to the loving glow of the white light, my trip to the Andes where I talked with someone who said he had met an extraterrestrial being from the Pleiades, my growing conviction that all of us had lived before and would live again, and my own out-of-body experience which served to validate the answers to many questions—the surest knowledge being derived from experience.

  At the end of the third day, I read the last page and put the manuscript down. I looked up at Mom and Dad. They were both crying. I wondered if they were humiliated.

  “Well, Monkey,” said Dad, “I certainly am proud to know you.” He choked back more tears and tried to go on. “You could get a Ph.D. with that manuscript,” he said. Then he couldn’t talk anymore.

  I turned to Mother. “Oh, Shirl,” she said, “what courage that took to write. There is a lot of it I don’t understand, but let me tell you something.” She brushed away her tears with her long fingers and straightened up in her chair, fingering the frilly blouse around her neck. “You know,” ‘ she began, “this is the first time that I’ve understood the expression on my father’s face when he died. Did I ever tell you about it?” she asked.

  “Not really,” I answered. “Not in detail.”

  “Well,” she began, “I had been out playing tennis with my friends. I knew my father was sick but I wasn’t prepared for what happened. He sent for me. Why me, and not the others, I don’t know. But I went to him. I remember being concerned that I was keeping the tennis game waiting. Daddy was lying in bed. He looked over at me when I walked in and beckoned for me to sit beside him. I did. He took my hand, and then, as though he had only been waiting for me, he squeezed my hand and looked up into my face. Something was happening to him that I didn’t understand. I remember I was nervous and I giggled. I would have much preferred to have been playing tennis. I’ve been guilty about that feeling ever since. His eyes took on
the most beatific glow. I have never seen anything like that since. Then, with his eyes still open, he became almost transfigured—with an expression of such beauty it took my breath away. And he said, Oh, darling, it is so beautiful, it is so, so beautiful.’ Then he closed his eyes and died.”

  Mother had a faraway expression on her face as she remembered, lost in vividly recalling the emotions of a major event in her life. Then she came back to the present and looked slightly confused for a moment. “Do you suppose,” she asked, “that I was watching my father’s soul leave his body and what he described as ‘so beautiful’ was the same thing that Peter Sellers and those other people in your book also describe? Was he seeing that white light that the others said they saw? Why else would he say it was so beautiful? Does that mean death is nothing to be afraid of and old people like your daddy and me should not be so anxious about dying?”

  My breath caught in my throat. What on earth do you say to the woman who gave you life, when her honesty about death is so blazingly open-minded? Here was my darling, self-sacrificing touchstone, a frail eighty years old, breaking a bone every month or so, knowing that her days were numbered, facing sleep every night wondering if she would wake up in the morning, questioning me about what to expect and realizing, and acknowledging, that I had touched on another dimensional reality which might possibly mean there would be no such thing as her death. I had not anticipated such wondrously unlimited courage. I couldn’t speak.

  Daddy came to my rescue, realizing what he was doing.

  “Okay, Monkey,” he said strongly, “now I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told anyone, not even your mother.”

  I sat back in my chair. Both of my parents unceasingly surprised me.

  “Remember,” he began, “when I had my car accident about twelve, fifteen years ago?”

  “Yes,” I answered.

  “Well,” he continued, “I died that night. I literally died. I was dead to the doctors in the ambulance that came. I saw the police say another drunk driver had bitten the dust. But I didn’t see them from inside my body. I was outside of my body. I was above my body watching the whole scene. I saw them all scrambling and milling around, but I knew I was not dead. I felt myself rise out of my body and begin to soar. I saw my body below me. I remember the conversations I heard. Then I saw the most beautiful white light above me. I can’t describe how that light felt. It was warm and loving and real. It was real and it was God or something. I wanted to go to that light more than anything I’ve ever wanted. I was prepared to continue toward the light—and then I thought about your mother and I thought about Warren. I knew they needed me. I knew I couldn’t leave. I knew I had to come back into my body. I didn’t think about you, Monkey, because I knew you didn’t need me. But they did. And as soon as I felt any doubt about leaving, I felt myself come back into my body. Suddenly my body felt heavy and broken and painful. I don’t know how long I was gone, but when I opened my eyes, all the folks around me were surprised. So when you tell me about out-of-body experiences and Peter Sellers and the soul being separate from the body, I know just what you’re talking about because it happened to me.”

  When he finished, Mother was looking at him as though she had just met him for the first time and understood everything he was saying.

  “Yes,” she said, “I can understand what you’re saying. Why didn’t you tell me before?”

  “Because,” said Daddy as he filled up his pipe, “I didn’t want you or anyone else to think I was crazy. If Shirley hadn’t written this, I would still have it locked inside of me. And something else, Scotch [his nickname for Mother was related, I think, more to her heritage than her attitude toward his booze habits], whenever you people get upset with me because I’m sleeping so much, what I’m really doing is a little bit of what happened to me back then.”

  This was a truly amazing statement. Mother’s mouth dropped open, but whether or not she realized my father was saying he deliberately spiritual-traveled, I don’t know. What she said was, “Well, I still think you should get up earlier so I can clean your room. It’s a mess and the dust from it flies all over the house.”

  “Now, Monkey,” said Daddy, “I want to tell you something else. You know how long I studied philosophy at Johns Hopkins University?”

  “Yep.”

  “Well, every Sunday morning after we had finished a week of what they said we should learn, we would all sit around and discuss the things you’re talking about. Why, I remember everybody having a story or two about believing or experiencing these other dimensions. Why, only a fool would categorically claim they don’t exist. I remember the custodian of our dormitory telling us about the vision he had had of the death of his son. He was a nice lookin’ boy who served in World War II, and one night his father had a vision that his son appeared at the foot of his bed. Scared the bejesus out of him because the son was real. And he knew the son was in Europe. But the son said, no, he was here saying good-bye to his father because he had just died. The old man jumped up and came to me in the middle of the night to tell me about it. I suspected what had happened, but I couldn’t be sure. A week later the old man got the telegram saying that his son had died at precisely the same time that he had appeared at the foot of the bed.”

  “So what do you think of all this, Daddy?” I asked, never having anticipated that my parents would be people I could talk to about this stuff.

  “Well,” he said, loving the introduction of metaphysics into our relationship, “I think we should stay open-minded about everything there is to learn. You may be blazing a trail here, to make it more acceptable to discuss. I mean, read your Plato, or Socrates, or your Freud and Jung for that matter. How do we know unless we explore? Of course, we can’t explain it in presently acceptable terms, but who knows how those terms will change? Nobody believed there were microbes crawling around on the skin until someone came up with the microscope. We are each our own microscope.”

  I got up and stretched and went to look out the familiar sun-room window. Had I sensed this capacity for metaphysical truth in both my parents while growing up? Were they the reason I now found such speculations easy and thrilling to comprehend? Had Ira and Kathlyn Beaty been silently instrumental in the forming of this bent of mind I now had? I knew I had responded more to their feelings than to their words during the years we had lived together—emotional truth being more vivid and influential to me than intellectual truth. But never, not once, had I consciously speculated that they might be thinking about the same possibilities I was. I thought I was the only one.

  Mother watched me at the window.

  “You know, Shirl, remember your old Bible?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Why?”

  “Well,” she answered, “you were always reading it and underlining your favorite verses. I have it here, if you want to see it. You have been interested in this spiritual side of life since you were a little girl.”

  “Really?” I asked, not remembering.

  “Yes, you were never much on religion or church or any of that stuff. You wanted to know what was underneath what they were teaching. You really liked reading about Christ. I remember you used to call him a spiritual revolutionary.”

  “I did?” I asked.

  “Sure,” she answered proudly. “Your friends were going to church and you were reading books about religion. You know, both you and Warren could read before you ever went to school. Your daddy and I read to you every night until you began to be able to do it yourselves. You were insatiably curious. Your minds were always clicking over.”

  Yes, I remembered the books, and the discussions that Mom and Dad shared with us.

  Mother always encouraged self-reflection and reverence for nature. I remembered the many times she would suggest a long walk by the stream near our house so that I could commune with myself in the company of the birds and trees and rushing water. During an unhappy interlude in a young teenage love affair, she would say, “Shirl, stop worrying about your boyf
riend and what he’s doing. You should be out in the wind and the rain. Go stand under a tree and then wonder and think about yourself. You’re too young to be so intensely involved with ‘going steady.’ There’s a magical world of nature out there that you’re missing. You’ll know more about yourself if you allow nature to be your teacher.”

  And Dad, as a teacher himself, regarded education as a dedication. He believed knowledge was power. Knowledge was freedom. To help inspire a young mind to search for truth had been the cornerstone of his life. He not only lived up to that dedication in his chosen profession as a teacher and principal and superintendent of schools in Virginia, but he brought that dedication into the home. There was no question I could ask that he would casually brush away.

  Daddy lit his pipe and crossed one leg over the other as though he were about to launch into a lecture.

  “Monkey,” he said, “do you know the definition of the words ‘education’ or ‘educate’?”

  “No,” I said, “I’ve never thought about it.”

  “Well, they come from the Latin words ed, out of, and ducar, to lead. Educar, to lead out of, or to bring out that which is within. What does that mean to you?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it means to lead out of yourself the knowledge you already know.”

  He smiled gently. “Yes, it could. But what do you mean?”

  “Well, if we really never die, if we just leave the body like you did, and then if we do continually come back or reincarnate into new bodies, then we must have done that many times. If we have done that many times, then we each must have tremendous knowledge and experience from lives we’ve led before. So maybe the ancients realized that education was just helping people get in touch with what they already knew. And maybe our higher selves already know everything. Isn’t that what Plato and Socrates believed?”

  Daddy thought a moment. “Yes,” he said, “I think you could put it that way. Plato professed to know that other civilizations such as Atlantis existed. Maybe he was having an imaginary vision or maybe he was speaking from former knowledge of those times. I’m not sure what the difference is. Possibly imagination is simply a form of memory. Most of our great thinkers have professed to have had an intuition or guidance that they couldn’t describe, something they ultimately called a force or God or a higher recognition of truth that required a quantum leap of inspired faith. As Carlyle put it, ‘The unfathomable SOMEWHAT which is not WE.’ Or as Matthew Arnold said, the ‘not ourselves’ which is in us and all around us.”