Energy is an all-purpose word in Lily Dale. “I don’t like her energy,” someone would say with a shrug if she disliked a neighbor. It was so handy and neat a piece of jargon that I soon picked it up myself.
“Bad energy,” I’d say regretfully when someone rubbed me wrong. Listeners would nod thoughtfully, taking a moment to consider all that meant.
The healers channel energy in order to readjust energy. The mediums raise their own energy to meet spirit energy. They also read energy. More than once when I protested that something a medium told me about myself wasn’t true, she would reply, “I’m getting this from you energetically,” as though that settled the matter and would shut me up for sure.
The spirits themselves are often energy. Mediums might tell a tourist, “I’m getting a male energy,” and be answered with a too-eager guess: “Is it my father?”
“No, it’s a younger energy. Perhaps from your father’s side.”
Healers channel energy while standing at the front of church. Little benches sit before them. When the benches are empty, the healers stare straight ahead with their hands folded. Anyone who wants healing sits on the bench, facing away from the healer, who then starts moving his or her hands over the supplicant. The healers start at the head and shoulders and move down the body, without touching the central body because mediums say that’s illegal in New York unless you have a license. Some use a kind of sweeping motion. One healer told me she could feel the tangles of blocked energy as she smoothed them.
After the healers finish, they often hug the people who’ve been sitting before them, and sometimes they whisper something. Healers flick their hands when they finish, as though they’re flinging water drops off their fingers. That’s to release the pain and illness they have absorbed. Bad energy. Some say they can feel it in their own bodies, especially their hands. Finally, the healers go to a basin at the side of the church, rinse their hands, dry them, and return to their benches.
All the while, sweet music is playing. Being there is restful if you don’t pay attention to how some people act. Certain healers have bigger reputations than others. So some people wait for those benches to be clear. Generally people take turns, but I once saw a woman in a pink suit practically knock an old lady over to get to the healer she wanted.
Marian meditated while her mother and their friend Mary Ellen went up front. As often happens when she meditates, her mind filled with vivid colors, she said. They swirled with such energy that she sometimes felt as if a cool breeze were being stirred up, but unlike previous times, when Marian opened her eyes, the colors didn’t go away. They were everywhere, she said. Because this was her first visit to Lily Dale, Marian thought everyone saw them.
“What’s with the colors?” she asked Mary Ellen.
As they walked toward the Good Vibrations Cafe, passing men eyed Marian, as they always did. With long brown hair, blue eyes, and plenty of curve, Marian had attracted male attention for so long she didn’t know any other reality. She didn’t look back. Marian had the man she wanted. She had the perfect husband. Everyone acknowledged that. Her mind was on spiritual matters.
Mary Ellen explained that she’d never seen the colors, and she didn’t know anyone who had. As they settled at a picnic bench, Mary Ellen spotted a woman she knew, a surgeon from Cleveland, and motioned her over. The woman’s husband had cancer, and, although she was not a medium, she often came to Lily Dale to take classes. They were chatting in a casual, companionable way when the woman abruptly leaned toward Marian and began talking in a stern voice, like a teacher lecturing a poor pupil. Her timbre was low, as though she had suddenly developed a cold or gotten a shot of testosterone.
“You’re going to have to give up everything you know,” she said, her eyes boring into Marian’s. “You’re going to have to jump into the void. It’s not going to be easy. What you’ve done before has worked, but it’s not going to work anymore.”
Ominous words? Not to Marian. She was thrilled.
“I thought she was telling me that the wonderful life I was living would lead me into a new spiritual richness. I thought I’d already begun,” Marian told me.
The next day she went home—to her lovely house that so many people envied, and she told her husband, whom so many women admired. She bragged almost. He listened sympathetically, as he always did. Everything she said interested him, her perfect husband, so handsome, so successful, so thoughtful.
Marian and Jack had met at work. Both were high-powered, ambitious, and successful. They fell in love. Both were married to other people, but that hadn’t mattered. Although Marian’s husband took the divorce hard, he was a good guy, and they’d been able to stay friends. Anyone could see how much happier Marian was.
She and Jack were a Barbie and Ken couple, in love with power and money and their own wonderful lives. Jack’s divorce took years. He told Marian that his wife accused him of things, things Marian thought were absurd, like hiding money. But eventually they won their freedom and everything was perfect, until one day when Marian was in a business meeting and a ringing began in her ears.
“Do you hear that?” she asked the people next to her.
They didn’t. It was a high-pitched piercing sound, something like what a dog whistle must sound like to a dog. Marian could hardly concentrate. When she left the meeting, the sound ceased. But the next day, when she sat down at the conference table ready to deal, the ringing began again. Again no one else heard it.
Inexplicably, her interest in work began to flag. Once eager to start the day early, she now came in late. She began giving tasks to her assistant. She started missing meetings, closing the door to her office. Instead of working, she read magazines and listened to music.
She quit her job with Jack’s support and began renovating a house for them. She painted and gardened, and her life became wonderful again. Once, when working on her house, she dropped a tool, and as she bent to pick it up she muttered, “Fuck it.”
As she raised up, Marian felt the presence of her late grandmother so forcefully that she heard herself say, “I’m sorry. I know you hate that kind of language.”
But of course no one was there, and she felt a little silly. All that time working alone calmed her but also made her more and more reflective.
Jack brought Marian flowers every day. He surprised her with gifts of jewelry. When he was away on business, he sent long e-mails and tender letters. Other women compared their husbands to him and always found them lacking.
At night when Jack fell asleep, Marian would think back over her day. She would count the blessings of her wonderful life, and she would pray. But as she was thanking God and feeling so blessed, a memory of the pain she had caused her ex-husband often pushed its way into the dark room and settled on her like an ache. Her prayer would shift then, and she would ask, “God, how can such a wonderful life have come from so much suffering? Help me understand.”
Marian wasn’t nearly as Catholic as she’d once been. “When we were growing up there was a priest at the end of our dinner table every Sunday,” she remembered. “My father was determined we’d all go to heaven whether it killed us or not.”
When her parents divorced, her dad stopped believing in the God of the Catholic Church, and her mother started believing in all sorts of gods. She moved the kids to Flint, Michigan, and joined the hippie revolution. Marian had dabbled in lots of kinds of faith, but now it was those old Catholic ideas that seemed to be reasserting themselves.
“Help me understand,” she begged God every night.
And he did.
Three years later, she laughed as she told me about her first day in Lily Dale. She had been so innocent, so egotistical, and so wrong. The surgeon wasn’t being cryptic at all. She meant exactly what she said. Marian’s prayers set her on the path toward the truth about her husband and about herself. She was going to lose it all. Everything she had.
5
Before coming to Lily Dale, I had consulted only two mediums. The f
irst was a middle-aged housewife in Texas who told me that a man with animals on his wall would soon become important in my life. I was single then and took the message to mean love was on the way. I did meet a man with animals on his wall, an ornithologist with the natural history museum. He was married and did not become important in my life.
The second medium was a teenage cheerleader prophetess who was visiting churches around Dallas giving messages. I interviewed her over the phone, and she told me she saw a blond little boy close to me. She also said I’d soon receive lots of money and acclaim and buy a black Mercedes. None of that was true. But she did mention that I was having trouble sleeping, which was true. She said God was trying to talk with me, and I was too busy during the day to listen. So he was waking me up. That night when I awoke at 2:00 A.M. I remembered her words.
“God, are you trying to talk with me?” I asked.
I was answered by a silence of such dark depth that my mind went utterly blank before it, and I fell asleep immediately.
Despite my lack of success with mediums, I decided to do my own test of Lily Dale’s powers and made an appointment for a reading with Gretchen Clark Lazarony, a fifth-generation resident of Lily Dale. She is one of four sisters referred to in Lily Dale as the “Clark girls,” after their maiden name. Three are mediums, and all look younger than their years. Three are blondes, and they all have pale, beautiful skin. Thirty years ago, Gretchen was one of Lily Dale’s youngest mediums. Now middle-aged, she’s still one of the most respected.
Her family spent summers at Lily Dale when she was a child. Her parents were not mediums, but they were believers. “When I would tell my mother there was a lady in the corner, she would say, ‘What’s she wearing? What’s she have to say, and what’s she want?’” Gretchen remembered. She and her elder sister, Sherry Lee Calkins, began developing their powers only after their mother died and came back to communicate.
Gretchen’s house, one of the community’s nicer abodes, sits high above the street with the usual screened porch fronting it. Sherry Lee lives across the street. I was later told that the sisters sit behind their drapery and count the number of customers the other has, but I didn’t believe it. They would never resort to such plebian methods. Astral travel would be more their style.
Astral travel, which is the ability to move around without one’s body, isn’t part of official Spiritualism, but a lot of people in Lily Dale say they do it. I once repeated Sherry Lee’s claim of astral travel to another Spiritualist, who sniffed disdainfully.
“You don’t believe people can astral travel?” I asked, thinking I’d stumbled onto a rare critic within the ranks.
“Oh, I believe that,” she said. “I just don’t believe she can do it.”
Lily Dale is a gossipy community. When someone in Lily Dale passes on a good quip, it’s prudent to ask, “Was that person living or dead when he said that?” The word dead isn’t used, of course. They call it “passing over,” “going from the earth plane,” or “leaving for Summerland,” the Spiritualist version of heaven. Dead people are called “spirit loved ones” or the “dearly departed.” Anyone who slips up and goes around talking about dead people, as I occasionally did, is firmly corrected, as I occasionally was.
People say you can whisper gossip on one end of Lily Dale and before you run the half-dozen streets to the other end of the community, people on that side will be ready to repeat it back to you. Because the community has far fewer men than women, some of the men do rather well on the romance front, according to local gossip. As one person put it, “This place is just one big honey pot for some of these guys.”
The hottest controversies, however, aren’t about such mundane matters as debauchery. They’re about matters of the spirit. Lily Dale squabbles don’t address spiritual possibility—which everyone agrees is unlimited—but skill, which plenty of people take grim pleasure in reporting to be in short supply. Behind closed doors, Lily Dale fiercely debates which of its mediumistic sisters and brothers are really tight with the Beyond and which ones couldn’t find spirit if they were dead themselves.
To hang a shingle in Lily Dale, mediums must pass a test. They are required to give individual readings to three members of the Lily Dale board and then give a public reading to an audience made up of the entire board. Although as many as a dozen mediums take the test every year, only thirty-six mediums were registered and able to give readings in Lily Dale the first year I was there. The low number is a matter of great pride among some people in the Dale. They think it speaks to the community’s high standards, a notion they pass on to outsiders. But a sizable portion of the community rejects that contention entirely. “Who gets in is political,” I heard many people say, echoing the suspicions of small-town America everywhere. “Lots of good mediums don’t pass. The people who pass the test are the ones favored by the board.”
Gretchen is a member of the town’s more conservative contingent. A reserved woman, she’s pleasant in a cool way, with an edge that stays sheathed most of the time but not so much that people forget she has it. She looks away from people as she talks and often wears a sort of half-smile, as though she’s hoping you’ll say something interesting but she doubts it. She answered my questions, but she didn’t volunteer much, and she made it pretty clear that she wouldn’t bother trying to convince me of anything.
I was being my most friendly, nonthreatening self, but I slipped up once. “I’ve been told that normal people can do what you do? Is that true?”
“We are normal,” she snapped, “and what we do is perfectly normal.”
I then tried asking a few questions that might puff her up a bit. “Do you have to meditate for long periods of time to prepare yourself for the work?”
“No,” she said. “I don’t.”
“Is the work exhausting?”
“No,” she said. “Not for me.”
I kept tempting her with the chance to make herself sound mysterious and powerful, but she wouldn’t go for it. She didn’t even remember what she told people during readings, she said. “I’m just the telephone that the spirits use to get through,” she said. “Does the telephone remember what’s said over it? Neither do I.”
I knew whom I wanted to contact, but I didn’t expect Gretchen could do it. My Uncle Johnny had died that May. We were especially close, and I was at the hospital when he went in for a heart bypass. The doctor told us this operation had a 1 percent fatality rate. My uncle was sixty-three. His heart was strong. Nothing to worry about, the doc told us. I expected to go home that afternoon and be back at work the next day.
Something went wrong.
All my life I’ve feared loss, but I’ve been uncommonly lucky. So far only two people I’m close to have died. My grandmother and then my uncle. Both times, somewhat to my astonishment, I was sure that their spirits still lived. I can’t say why. I just knew it. I looked at their bodies, and I knew that they had gone somewhere else. I can’t prove it, of course, but I felt it so strongly that it was reality for me, like knowing you’re in love or being sure the sun will come up. So when I went to Gretchen’s house, I didn’t doubt that life continued. What I doubted was that she could contact anyone who had gone to where that life went.
Gretchen ushered me into her reading room, a little parlor at the front of the house. It was a perfectly ordinary, well-lighted room. Gretchen told me she had once hoped to install red carpet and drapes as a way of warming the room up, but every time she stood in the reading room imagining how it would look, a little old lady with a terrible frown would appear in the corner. She’d purse her lips and shake her head. She didn’t speak, and Gretchen didn’t recognize her. So one day the medium asked the man who had sold her the house if he had any guesses about the woman’s identity.
“That would be Mother,” he said. “She hated red.”
Gretchen and I sat facing one another. She said a few things that didn’t mean anything to me. Then she said that she had a man. She put her hand to her chest, look
ed pained, and said, “Oh. He died of something with his lungs? No, his heart. Something with his heart.
“I’m getting the name John.”
Now that might seem like a score, but to me it wasn’t. His name was Johnny. No one ever called him John. My mother sometimes called him Brother John, but I never did. I’d heard about so many spirits named John since I’d come to Lily Dale that I figured, anybody would guess John, and what’s the leading killer? Heart disease, right? Not a tough one to guess.
“Was there some kind of interruption at the funeral?” Gretchen asked, frowning as though she were trying to concentrate.
“No,” I said.
“That’s what I see. I see that the funeral was in two parts. What happened?”
“Nothing,” I said.
“Are you sure? He’s talking about the funeral being in two parts.”
I didn’t want to make the connection, but maybe there was one. My cousin and I argued before the funeral began. My uncle had believed she treated him badly. Maybe she had, maybe she hadn’t. It was debatable, but I was far more angry and partisan once he was dead than I’d ever been when he was alive. The way I saw it, he couldn’t take up for himself anymore but I could.
Sounds like some kind of Sicilian vendetta, I know. But I confronted her. The family took sides, and, just as the limo pulled up to take us to the funeral home, the whole clan broke into something pretty close to a street fight. My surviving sixty-something uncle was chasing my cousin’s teenage son around the yard threatening to kick his butt. The widow was in the street crying. My mother and my cousin’s husband were standing nose-to-nose. Finally an aunt yelled, “Let’s go,” and about half the family climbed into their cars and left in a screaming huff. The funeral wasn’t in two parts exactly, but after the prefuneral fight the family was and still is.
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