They were at dinner table——he, Wickland, his mother and his father.
“No Mills,” his father, tipsy, was saying, “ever pushed his kid into a career, or stood in his way once his mind was made up. He wants to go into songwriting or the pictures, I say let him. I give him a dad’s honest blessing and step out of his way.”
George was trying to remove the bones from his fish. His father, who had been observing the boy’s efforts for some minutes, was inspired to proceed. “Or a career in the surgery profession,” he said. “Or banking, or law. Politics, anything. How about it, George? You thinking of replacing Mr. Roosevelt? You don’t have to be coy. We’re family. I have the honor to include you, Reverend.”
“Thank you,” Wickland said. “Who’d like more iced tea? You, George? Your glass is empty.”
“Yes,” the boy said, “if there’s extra.”
“Certainly. How about you, Mrs. Mills?”
“I’m fine, thanks.”
“The pitcher’s cooling in the fridge, George. Why don’t you bring it out for all of us?”
“Of course,” his father said before George could get up, “of course he might always join his pop in the fallen candy wrapper trade, the chewing-gum-under-the-bench profession, the lawn upkeep calling.”
It had been like this for a week, since Prettyman had told him why the mediums were so interested in him. Though no one had spoken to him directly since the funeral, several had approached his father. There was even something courtly about it, his father had said, as if they were asking for his hand in marriage.
“He might even choose the ministry,” his father said, looking directly at Wickland. “His mother might like that. She might like that very much. Course he might have to move out, live with, you know, his order, but you’d always see him at church.”
“Please, George,” his mother said.
“Now Nancy, you know how proud you’d be. Our loss would be the haunts’ gain.”
For all his sarcasm, his father wanted him to do it. Chiefly it was the extra money, but the boy understood, too, that in a crazy way it had something to do with the honor. He’d winked at him when the boy had relayed Kinsley’s offer. “Lord,” he’d said, “not only have I risen above my station by janitoring and fetching for crooks, but I got One in the family myself now. We’re coming up in the world, George.”
It was a sort of joy his father felt, and though the boy couldn’t identify its source—he hadn’t been around long enough, his father had said, had still to understand the terms of his life, its service elevator condition—he recognized exaltation when he saw it. He’d seen it often enough on the faces of his instructors in the past year or so. As always, it terrified him.
“I’ve seen my sister,” he said suddenly.
But he hadn’t. Not then, not yet. Immediately he regretted what he’d said. He had meant to warn his father. He’d tried to warn him for days, to knock him awake with his knowledge. But the man was too exhilarated, as tone deaf to implication as he was, evidently, to actual sound.
“George,” he said, “they’re crooks. They’re crooks, George. They don’t do real harm or they’d have to shut down. They’re crooks but white collar. Like salesmen, like priests, like anybody alive in the business of making people feel good. Because don’t kid yourself, kid, comfort is an industry. It always was. The king’s wizards and jesters, and the king himself. And all the rest of us too most likely, all us hired hands, on the job, on duty, on call, dishing out concern and comfort and busting our butts to remind the next fellow that it could be worse, that he could be us!
“I won’t lie to you, George. I won’t tell you that plenty of honorable folks before you have done such things, though plenty have. But here, in Cassadaga, on the front lines of grief, you’d be with the rascals, you’d be with the knaves and villains. I say it makes no difference. Knaves and villains never did anything to anybody but take their money. What’s that? We hung on a thousand years without any.” His father looked at him. “Oh, I heard you,” he said. “That’s only Wickland. And I know what bothers you,” he said. “You’re scared of the sincerity, what stands behind it, or could. You’re scared these guys are who they say they are, you think they might be able to deliver.”
“Yes,” George said.
“You got so much faith, you give doubt so much benefit, take this on faith: there ain’t no one, there ain’t no one ever, been able to deliver the goods. And I don’t care,” his father said, “—didn’t I say I heard you?—who Wickland shows you!
“Relax,” he said, “let’s think about the practicals of this thing. We got to decide which one of these figure flingers and ghost brokers to go with. Bone says he’ll give you three dollars a night. That’s about the same bid we got from Ashmore and Sunshine and that woman, Grace Treasury, too. In my judgment it’d be a mistake to go with any of those. Kinsley offered a dime less, but they’re all within pennies of each other. There must be a blue book value, or fixed rates, like meters in taxis.”
“What do you think?”
“I’d have to say Kinsley,” his father said.
“He wants me to work naked.”
His father shrugged.
“I don’t understand,” George said.
“Kinsley’s the one your mother goes back to. She’s been to them all but goes back to Kinsley. The man must have something. If she keeps going back then Kinsley’s the best.”
“I couldn’t do it,” George said. “Supposing I had to be my own sister? Supposing Mother came in and I had to be Janet?”
So his father instructed him, too.
“Supposing you did? It’s Kinsley she goes back to, not his control. You think she doesn’t know, that those other customers don’t know, that whoever it is comes through those curtains or crawls out from underneath that table isn’t just some haunt house stooge? You think she could ever believe in anyone who calls himself Dr. N. M. M. Kinsley?
“It’s the faculty, the power, of which Kinsley is only some petty instrumentality, like the wall outlet or light socket are the petty instrumentalities of the generators, dynamos, dams and racing waters. It’s the power, and if they use controls it’s because they’re not fools, or anyway not fools enough—you were the one who was supposed to take his clothes off, not Kinsley—to go into that room naked without any insulation or just plain honest grounding between themselves and the customers.
“Which is another reason for Cassadaga incidentally. Because all the mediums and their controls are just so much interference and insulation between the madness of grief and loss, and the comfortable luxury of talking out loud to the dead.”
He went with Kinsley. (He’d had his twelfth birthday months ago.) Not only did he not work naked—Kinsley himself had had other ideas about it now—but was required to wear clothing which, in that hot climate, was not even stocked in the stores. He was dressed as a schoolboy. He wore corduroy knickers and a bright argyle pullover over his plaid wool shirt. He wore a peaked tweed cap like a golfer’s and carried his books in a strap.
He was already seated when the others arrived. Kinsley didn’t bother to explain the presence of the boy. He simply introduced him as George Mills, pronouncing the name solemnly, even gravely. Then he proceeded with the seance, warming them up in the early stages with an account of the physical and supernatural planes, their synchronous and contiguous attributes. When Kinsley asked if there were any disembodied spirits among them, George raised his hand, and Kinsley called on him.
Soon everyone at the table was calling out the names of dead relatives as if they were favorite tunes they wanted played on the piano. They asked him questions which the boy would answer in the vaguest and most general way. Kinsley didn’t even allow him to alter his voice. Though he was a young man one moment and an old woman the next, everything was delivered within the familiar, given octaves of his normal speaking voice. It was astonishing to him how effective he seemed to be.
They had nothing to say. The physical and s
upernatural planes might be synchronous and contiguous, but the dead, by dying, had created a breach which could not be mended, only smoothed over there in the semidark, glossed by politeness and the trivial courtesies. They were like people lined up to talk to each other over the long-distance telephone on the occasion of national feast days or the junctures and set pieces of private commemorative.
“How are you, son?”
“Fine. I’m fine.”
“We miss you.”
“I miss you, too.”
“Mother couldn’t come with me.”
“How is Mother?”
“Not real well. She still can’t get over that you were taken from us. She sorrows so.”
“Tell Mother not to sorrow.”
He didn’t even need the coaching and background information Kinsley had supplied him with, passing the time of day with these people as he had with dozens of strangers. Indeed, the aloofness and love which dovetailed nicely on their synchronous and contiguous planes seemed precisely the tone to take by survivor and ghost alike.
Sometimes—this happened less frequently than he would have thought—a client was dissatisfied with his generalities and tried to get him to be more specific, even to trap him.
“Bob, is that you?”
“Yes,” George said.
“What was the name of that cat you found?”
“I don’t recall.”
“You don’t recall? You paid more attention to that cat than you did to your brothers and sisters.”
“I don’t remember any cat. It was too long ago.”
“Too long ago? It was only last year.”
“It was when I was alive. I don’t remember any cat.”
Then they both cried.
It was the same even when his mother called on him. He gave her no more than he had given the others. Evidently it was enough. Only for George it was not enough. One night he volunteered information, then asked his question.
“I met someone you know. Bennett Prettyman?”
“It was very sad about Bennett.”
“He thinks you’re lovely. He says you’re very beautiful. He wanted you to stop by with George and see his show. I think he was sweet on you, Mother.”
“Poor Bennett,” his mother said.
“Were you sweet on him, too?” George asked.
“Of course not, Janet,” his mother said.
“Sometimes,” George said, “I don’t know how I think up what to say.”
“It’s because you’re inspired,” Kinsley told him. “You’re a true vehicle, George. It’s no fake. You have real powers. The spirits guide you. They wouldn’t let you misrepresent them.”
He told Reverend Wickland what Kinsley had said. (He was still seeing Wickland, spilling the beans.)
“He thinks it’s real,” George told him, “that I’m not even faking when I say I’m their wife or daughter or fiancee killed in the war.”
“Let’s have a seance,” Wickland said.
“I’m working tonight.”
“Not tonight, now.”
“It’s not even dark in here.”
“Not here, outside. In the air. On the bench. I’m going to show you your sister.”
They went to the small square where George had stood with his parents over two years earlier. The palm might have been a statue of itself, a memorial like a doughboy or Civil War cannon. No longer strange nor quite yet familiar, George suspected it had the ability to proclaim the seasons, something shifted in the configuration of its pods or missing from its leaves, its long bark wrappings, its careful shadow legible as a sun dial. He regretted that he had not observed it more closely.
Wickland was seated on the little bench.
“You don’t play here much,” he said.
“No,” George said, his back to the reverend. He was browsing the hoarding.
“No. Who would there be to play with?”
The boy wheeled about swiftly. “Is my——?” Wickland was alone on the bench. “Oh.”
“No, not yet,” he said. “By and by. There’s got to be a buildup. Didn’t those other swamis tease you a bit before the main event? Let’s just chat.”
“We’ve already chatted,” George said.
“Anyone would think you’d been close to your sister,” Wickland said.
“I just want to see if you can do it.”
Wickland shrugged. “Jack Sunshine may be a little miffed you didn’t throw in with him when you turned professional. He puts it out you’re a midget.”
George laughed. “He thinks about midgets a lot.”
“His father was one.”
“Really?” George said. “No kidding.”
“Jack was born in Cassadaga,” Wickland said.
“He did what I do!” George said suddenly.
“Jack? I don’t think so. For a while, I suppose, he may have assisted, but—”
“No,” George said impatiently, “not him, not Jack, the father. He was a control. He did what I do!”
“Larry?”
“Right. Larry. He was a control. He was with the circus. Then he came here to Cassadaga. He met the mother here. I don’t know how he managed the courting. He did what I do. I mean I guess it would be pretty tough if you’re supposed to be this disembodied control and then you fall in love with one of your customers and you have to explain that the next time she sees you you’ll be just like everyone else, only shorter. But he must have figured out something to tell her, because they were married and had Jack!”
“You see it very clearly,” Wickland said.
Yes, he thought. He’d told Wickland what he’d told Kinsley, that he didn’t know how he thought up what to say. Calling him Jack like that. The other stuff. Kinsley said he was inspired, that spirits guided him, that he was a true vehicle, that he had powers. Yes, he thought. Yes.
“I do,” he said, “yes. Once you told me his father was a midget then that explained why——”
“Why?”
“It explains why he’s so sour on——Wait. I did see it clearly. Only I didn’t see all of it. What could he say? I mean if she was here to get comforted by visiting some dead person, then it would be pretty hard to take that the fellow who was tricking you one minute was in love with you the next. So she couldn’t have known he was a control. She didn’t do business with him. She just thought he was——She thought he was just——
“Maybe he’d seen her around town, maybe sitting right here on this bench, and he told her that that was why he was here himself, that he’d lost someone very dear to him too, and still wasn’t over it, but almost was, nearly was, and just wanted to get in contact one last time to say good-by because the departed may have died suddenly or gone out of town and there’d been no real chance to say farewell by the book, which is what Kinsley says is all a lot of them really want. Sure,” George said, “and I know from other stuff he’s told me that there used to be more repeat trade than there is today. Probably the roads weren’t as good, the distance to De Land would have been greater back then, so they had to have somewhere to stay, to put up.” He indicated the little neighborhood of a town. “Wait. I know. Some of these places must have been boarding houses before they ever got to be haunted houses, and he knew, Jack’s father did, that she’d be around for a while and they started seeing each other, but only during the daylight hours because he couldn’t let her know that he was in the business. Not after what he’d told her he couldn’t. So then maybe he told her he’d seen whoever it was that he’d come to see because she still couldn’t tell him. Not if she liked him she couldn’t, because then she wouldn’t have any excuse to stay on, and if he told her first that was the equal of saying he liked her without really saying it. Because he was, you know, shy, being so little and all, and would naturally be afraid of saying it straight out. So that was the way they courted, asking each other if they’d seen the spook yet, and Larry, Jack’s father, gradually working up his nerve to tell her well, yes, as a matter of fact he had,
needing the nerve because he was afraid she’d say ‘Well, aren’t you the lucky little man?’ or something even meaner.
“But one day he just did. He said it. And she said ‘I did too, Larry,’ and that was that.”
“Was it?” Wickland said.
“Well sure,” George said. “Oh, you mean what would he do now? I mean about telling her he was in the business. He’d still have to tell her. You’re right, she’d have to know. He had to come up with something fast because he had to go to work that night. He didn’t have the excuse anymore that he was just going around the corner to the seance, and she’d be free, too, of course, so whatever he told her he’d have to tell her right off. Yes, I see. But he couldn’t. He’d just told her he’d said good-by to the specter. There wasn’t anything he could say that could put all those lies he’d told her in a good light. I mean he was so small. He was already at all the disadvantage he could afford. There was nothing he could say. Unless…” Yes, he thought again. I do have powers. It’s all these psychics. Maybe they’re carriers. “Unless she already knew. Sure,” George said, “she knew. But not that he was a control. These were the olden days. Controls were lowered on ropes from the ceilings or rose from the cellars like organs in theaters. That was the old style. They didn’t have sound effects or trick lighting. They didn’t sit up on chairs like I do. So she already knew. But he wasn’t a control. He was the medium. And she wasn’t a customer. You don’t fall in love with the customers. Most of the time you don’t even respect them. You certainly don’t let them know you’re human!”
Even to himself he didn’t sound like any kid who’d ever lived. He’d picked up their lingo, the conversational Urgent they spoke. He used to be the only kid in Cassadaga. Now there were none.
“Why couldn’t they already have been married?” Wickland asked.
“That’s so,” George said angrily, “they could.” He kicked at one of the fallen palm pods. “Damn,” he said, “they could.” And he wondered what he was going to say next, then he was saying it, his voice raised in that High Urgent that had no proper names in it, the trees and people and animals pronoun’d and anonymated into the clairvoyant’s confrontational style. “No,” he said, “no they couldn’t. You said he was born here. She was pregnant. You don’t make a big move like that until after the baby is born. They weren’t married when they came. When they came they——They? There wasn’t any they to it. They didn’t come. He did, the midget. Because he was a midget. A midget and a medium both. Where else could he go? He came! She was already here! Or in De Land!
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