“This anguish brought me to the study of spiritualism, its techniques and possibilities.”
Her eyes are half shut as she speaks, and Daisy has the odd sense that someone else is lecturing through her mouth. That she has already, in some ways, become the medium she would soon show herself to be.
“I had the privilege, not so long ago, to meet Miss Ada Besinnet of Toledo, Ohio, the famous medium, and we were able to contact my poor boy. The strange part about it, though, was that although he spoke through the personage of Miss Besinnet at the very beginning, he soon switched to me. That is, I began to speak and my voice became very low and it was his. This was when I discovered my small gifts as an instrument.”
Daisy can restrain herself no longer. “Where was he?” she asks.
“He was dead,” Mrs. Wexner says crisply. “However, his spirit had not completed its work on this earth and he continues to exist on the third or fourth astral plane. I have contact with him from time to time. Various kinds of contact, some of it quite…moving.
“He and many many young men are still very close to us, I can tell you. You do not kill eight million boys on the verge of their lives and expect them to leave this earthly existence without a trace.” Her face has become genuinely pained. “They were not finished,” she says quietly. “They are finishing themselves.”
They sit then, unspeaking, listening to the washing rain.
“I know a person who may or may not be dead,” Daisy offers. “I knew him in Saint Paul.”
Mrs. Wexner studies Daisy fondly. She seems to be more awake now, gets up and looks out the window at the wetness, sits back down, making herself comfortable.
“You know, Daisy,” she says, “you must change your name. Daisy Lou is a perfectly sweet name, but it is not suitable for a stage career. It is the name of someone who will always be in the chorus. You know that, of course.”
She does this sometimes, has begun to do this as their friendship has progressed. She will suggest that Daisy wear a certain color more often, for instance, or tip her hat at a more intriguing angle. But the suggestion is always that these are incidentals and there could be no possible offense in suggesting them. The suggestion is that she wants the best possible context for Daisy’s gift—her voice.
Does she believe in Daisy’s voice? Is it actually a distinctive and lovely voice? Mrs. Wexner does not know exactly. It is a fervent and melodious voice—that is certain—and it certainly merits intense training. Beyond that, Mrs. Wexner is content to go on the evidence of the promontories of Tune.
She rises to leave. Then an odd genuine storm develops—sheets of rain, thunder, tumult—and Daisy says again, “I knew someone in Saint Paul who may be alive or dead today. He left under a cloud and I don’t know what makes me think he is dead—I have no cause—but I should like to know. He was a friend of my mother’s. He was my mother’s physician in her final illness.”
Mrs. Wexner’s eyes close, her head tips forward. The eyes open. Daisy watches her guardedly, watches her place her beautiful long-fingered hands on the arms of the chair. And who knows if anything would have been said had the weather not been so extravagant and fierce? But a big clap of thunder shakes the building, and both women jump. And then Penelope Wexner says, in a strange, listless voice: “He lives. On the frontier. He lives with a group of men.” She pulls her closed eyes tighter. “Is it a circus? There is an African animal. A cat, I believe. There are men with bare torsos, like trapeze artists or strongmen. There is a pen, an open cage, a roped enclosure of some sort. He leans on the ropes, calling to something inside.”
She says no more.
Daisy is deeply shocked. The vision does not jibe with any she has held in her mind of the haunted Dr. Sheehan. It is too active, too daylit, too imbued with the dust and grit and noise of the present day.
But she believes. She believes the vision, not least because Mrs. Wexner, the seer, does not quite seem to believe it herself. She seems shocked at the words that have come out of her own mouth. She looks chagrined, as if she had thought herself to be thinking silently and found that she was shouting.
She gets up briskly—the storm has slackened—and she departs. Daisy falls immediately asleep and does not wake until the next morning, when the world again sounds hard-edged and dry. She can hear the traffic sounds and policemen’s whistles; she can hear bright shouts. She can think—what can she think?—that the young doctor who seemed, one hot afternoon, to be the only person on earth to fully understand her, her artistry and temperament and yearnings—that he is alive out West. The person who knows her best self.
She practices with renewed energy. She will sing once more this week for the man at Aeolian and then he will offer a contract or he won’t. She has a new way of practicing. Instead of clasping her hands to her midriff, consciously pushing against them as she has taught all her students to do, she now presses her fingers to the points on her head, just forward of the temples, the protuberances of Tune, and she finds, when she does that, that her voice does not have to seek the proper pitch. She does not even have to be conscious of pitch. She just has it. She knows she does.
Her fingers seem to buzz sometimes, and when that happens, she feels a small trickle of deep comfort. There they are—the manifestations on her boned surface of what lies beneath. She has sung and performed for a decade now. She believes in her talent. But to have actual evidence of it—there is joy in that.
Come forth, she thinks as she runs up and down her scales. Freely show yourself, she murmurs before she jumps into her arpeggios and her warm-up songs. Make me the perfect instrument. Make me the conduit for yourself, she exhorts her latent lovely voice. Send your voice through my throat like the voices of all the beautiful wanderers who float above our shoulders, who drift bravely just beyond the furthest reaches of our sight.
311 W. 88th
New York, N.Y.
Dec. 22, 1922
Dear Jerry, Vivian and little Francis, Maudie and “Tip”—
This will not reach you by Christmas Day and for that I apologize, but I have been absolutely frantic and only now do I get a chance to breathe. The big news is that I have, at long last, signed a contract with Aeolian and shall make a phonograph record within two weeks of the New Year, according to a new manager, a Mr. Higgenbotham. I am so very pleased!!
Mr. Higgenbotham came to the company from Great Britain and brought with him a manner of speaking that is so refined and likable. I trusted his sensibilities the instant I met him and of course I was right to do so. This is what I have worked and hoped for these months and months. I feel that I have never been in better voice, and I owe the improvement, I firmly believe, to the confidence I have come to through my study of Coué, New Thot and the psychical phenomena. Also I believe I have mentioned my spiritual friend, Mrs. Penelope Wexner, who has assisted me greatly in my path to self-knowledge. I have come to believe, with her help, that we greatly underestimate the help and comfort that is available to us through science and the spirit world. She has made a study of the brain organs, for instance, and how the various faculties are reflected on the surface of the skull. Oh yes, I know you are saying bunkum! that is an old idea, that “bumpology.” But its only flaw is that it has ended up in the hands of charlatans who are not scientists and who charge money and turn a science into a vaudeville act. That does not mean the idea itself is invalid. On the contrary, it has confirmed for me all my suspicions about my truest nature and has given me the confidence to proceed on the strength of those strengths I own!
I will send you my phonograph record as soon as it becomes available. Pretty soon I will be saying, “I know the new oil king of Montana because he happens to be my brother.” And you will be saying, “My sister? Oh, she is indeed the new songbird of New York!”
What do you think about King Tutankhamen’s tomb? It is all over the Times and I can’t get enough of it. To think that Lord Carnarvon spent thirty-three years searching for it and might have given up had he not felt a c
onviction grow upon him several years ago as to its whereabouts beneath the tomb of Rameses VI! What will be inside the sealed chambers I wonder? The glorious objects in the anterooms make it almost impossible to imagine more. The solid gold sandals and the crowns with the golden serpents and the wonderful throne crusted with jewels. (My friend Mrs. Wexner believes the presence of golden serpents may be ominous because a live serpent of the same type killed a pet canary of one of the archeologists on the very day the tomb was opened.) And the queen’s beaded net robes, what do you think of those? The Times said the reason for that fashion was that “when King Zoser, 3,000 years before Christ, was afflicted with an attack of melancholia, his physician ordered a number of the most beautiful women in the Capital to be dressed only in diaphanous bead net robes and to row the King’s barge around the sacred lake at Karnak to amuse him.” What a picture that brings to mind!
Well my dears, I would love to send you gold sandals and snake crowns and beaded robes, but I am, after all, only a working girl and these small tokens of my affection will have to do.
You wait, Jerry—this slowdown with the oil and the sale of land is temporary and they will boom the field in the spring like you said. You are very likely in the situation of Lord Carnarvon a year ago when he stopped digging temporarily due to illness. He was, at that point, only six feet from the stairway to the tomb.
I wish you all a happy and prosperous New Year. I truly believe that 1923 will be the best year of our lives.
Love to you all,
Daisy Lou, soon to be known as Amelia (my stage name)
III
EVENING
July 10, 1973
IT WAS the multipurpose room of the grade school, a flatly lit, hard-surfaced room filled with long industrial tables for hot lunch. At the front of the room was a raised platform with a podium. Behind the platform and podium was the stage, with its drawn dark curtain.
Jerry and Amelia and T.T. were led to the front table, the one nearest the podium, to sit with eight others they had known for half a century. These eleven were the featured guests, and they felt overexposed because their number was small and the table was long.
There was a large flower centerpiece on the table, mums, with a sparkly decoration popping out of it. The numbers 5 and 0 in something glittery. Jerry slid the centerpiece down to the end of the table because it was something you couldn’t see around.
On the beige walls of the room were photos of oil derricks. Of a huge arena. Newspaper headlines: “‘Big Fight’ Idea Fails to Grow Up.” “Dempsey Wins After Full 15 rounds; Surprising Showing Made by Gibbons.”
Crepe-paper streamers overhead. A punch-and-cookie table. That unforgiving neon light.
“Feel like I’m in a pen with a blue ribbon on my halter,” George McClintock whispered loudly to the others. Amelia gave him her music teacher’s frown. George was alone because his wife, Suzanne, had fallen off the bottom church step two weeks earlier and broken her hip. Just shifted her weight a certain way and the shell-like bone cracked and sent her toppling to the cement, where it broke again. She was a feisty little woman whose manner had gotten more blunt as she aged. She kept saying in the ambulance, when they took her to Great Falls to get the pins, “I’d suggest you just shoot me. Easier on all of us.”
There, there, the attendant had murmured, bored. We’ll get you all fixed up.
“Don’t be a fool!” Suzanne had snapped back. “I’m eighty-one years old, you sappy child! I know what happens when an old lady breaks a hip in two places.” And, of course, she would be right about the whole thing.
The program began with a welcome by the mayor and a small skit by the fourth-grade class—midgets in gingham and buckskins scanning horizons.
The emcee said the audience was in store for a few speeches, but first he wanted the old-timers to introduce themselves for the record and to comment briefly on their length of time in Shelby, their families, whatever struck them as appropriate.
Good faces, weathered faces. They stood, one by one, crusty and gracious, and said their names and inclined their heads. They said what they had done in their working days, how many years they’d been in northern Montana, where the kids were and the grandchildren. They mentioned a recent vacation, some of them. A child’s triumph.
Jerry said his son Francis still worked for the State Department, though he was making noises about early retirement and coming back to Montana. That Francis’s son, Don, was, as most of them knew, a radar officer who was shot down on an F-4 Phantom off the coast of Vietnam and that the family was holding out hopes that he would be accounted for now; that he was perhaps alive and coming home.
Daughter Maudie had her decorating business in Seattle and had just remarried—a guy in a management position in the fish business. And Tip was now head auctioneer at the Denver livestock yards and the father of six kids, who could all outyell him.
When the others had finished introducing themselves—Amelia described herself with surprising brevity as a “career musician”—Jerry took the podium for the formal remarks he had been asked to prepare.
He had planned his speech far in advance of this night. He had an agenda. That agenda, that plan, was to defuse any ideas Skiff Norgaard might have about cashing in on the coming oil boom. Skiff sat at the table with Alice, who was bent and shaky-headed, and he watched Jerry with the elaborately neutral face he had turned to him for decades.
Jerry held the sides of the podium tightly with big-knuckled, bruised-looking hands, his only sign of any nervousness. He was, in old age, a slim, slightly stooped man of medium height with a thin thatch of hair that had paled to a rosy white. He wore a stiff shirt with cuff links, and a suit, and high-topped shoes. He put on heavy horn-rimmed glasses to read a few scratched notes in his hand. His face was sere, all the flesh used up and the mouth quite thin and straight.
After messing with the microphone for a few seconds, tapping it with a fingernail until satisfied, he began to speak in a rather strong voice that only occasionally slipped into an old man’s plaint.
“I am not a man of extra words,” he said. “So I will speak my piece and turn the stage over to the fulminations of my brethren.” He swept an arm past the other old-timers in their folding chairs. Amelia smiled and inclined her head graciously. She wore a green velveteen hat with a half veil that screened the top of her face. She had not removed her gloves.
“I have lived in northern Montana for sixty-three years as of May the sixteenth,” Jerry said. “I have had my ups and downs like anybody does, but on the whole it has been a good place to be a young man and a not-so-young man and even an old fool with one foot in the grave. My chief regret is that my wife, Vivian, who passed away twenty-one years ago, could not be here tonight to get her own old-timer’s certificate and see our fine fourth graders and give me the high sign on when to cut myself off.” He drew a finger across the front of his throat, still unsmiling.
He paused then and thought for a moment about Vivian. Everything about the measurement of time had come to seem contrived and irrelevant to him. Twenty-one years was not any kind of measurement of Vivian’s distance. She had not been gone two decades in any sense that meant anything. He still smelled her hair, watched her brow furrow, heard her steady breathing in the night. If she were really gone, he would not be trying for a little humor, trying to conjure her beautiful laugh.
“Be that as it may,” he continued, “I would like to make a few short statements about oil and Shelby and the field as we have come to know it.
“As many of you know, oil was for many years my ruling passion. Like many others, I was convinced that Shelby sat on the edge of an oil field that would make us all rich, one way or the other. And like many others, I have sat beside many a dry hole and paid taxes on many a piece of worthless land and kept in my possession many a piece of meaningless paper.”
He thought of Sharleen Norgaard, at his house this very moment, smoking, playing the radio, running the vacuum cleaner, then cutting th
ose pale eyes to the side while she ran her cool fingers through his records and maps. She had already stolen his gold toothpick. He knew that. He had just noticed it missing that morning.
“What has happened in that field is this, of course. It is a steady producer, but not a spectacular one. It’s a factory field—steady and workmanlike. A deposit here, a deposit there—but it’s spread out over eight hundred square miles, or twenty-four townships, and so you have to test awfully wide waters before you’re likely to hit pay dirt, so to speak.
“I guess we all know how that is. You put all your hopes on a quarter section here, a half section there, but it might be just west, just east, of the quarter section where the oil is. You could think of it as a minefield in reverse. You could run through the whole damn thing and never get a scratch, or you could blow yourself up with one step. There’s no surefire way to tell.
“My ultimate point, of course, is that these recent prices on account of the Arabs aren’t likely to translate into any kind of renewed interest by the big boys in our area. The field just hasn’t proved to yield spectacular strikes. So I, for one, am not going to hold my breath that the big boys will be snooping around anytime soon.”
The audience was a little puzzled. Polite and attentive, but they didn’t know what to think about this little speech that stated the obvious. And Norgaard seemed oblivious. He might have been sleeping. He had his hand on his pink face and his eyes fixed on his knee. Or closed. It was difficult to tell.
One Sweet Quarrel (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries) Page 16