There Is a River

by Thomas Sugrue

  The Life Readings were to be especially guarded, as they were considered more personal and revealing than physical diagnoses.

  “Nobody is interested in your kidneys,” Edgar observed, “but everyone is interested in your past lives.”

  He was becoming acutely aware that, if it were true that the early church had dropped reincarnation as a dangerous and impractical thesis, the decision had been a wise one. People almost invariably got the wrong idea about their Life Readings. If a man were told that he had once, as another personality, been rich and powerful, he was inclined to be content with his present mediocrity and regard his past as an inheritance he had just come into. If a woman were told that she had once been glamorous and irresistible, she was inclined to relax smugly, overlooking her present obesity and lack of charm.

  Edgar found it difficult to point out to these people that such records were evidence that the soul was on the downgrade. The Life Reading was a balance sheet, and if an asset once possessed was missing, it was something to be alarmed about. Most souls possessed greater virtue in their earlier lives than at present anyhow, but this virtue was through grace: it was the virtue of innocence. The path of the soul was downward until free will made the turn upward. So there was no reason whatsoever to feel proud of a good or intelligent life ten or fifteen thousand years ago. Only when such goodness and intelligence were attained again, this time by the use of free will, would a measure of satisfaction be permissible.

  There was a tendency also to regard the soul as a permanent personality. People would say, “I was So-and-so. In my last appearance I was in England.” When Edgar tried to combat this notion by saying that each personality of a soul was a separate experience, in no way related to other experiences of the soul except by common inclusion in a large enterprise, he found the going heavy, especially with the ladies.

  “But you said so yourself,” one of them would say. “You said I was a slave girl and was freed by my master because he loved me!”

  “From what you say about me I imagine I was a sort of courtesan,” another lady—usually an old maid—would say.

  Edgar sympathized deeply with the early church Fathers who had set upon the Gnostics. He would leave the ladies and go out to feed his chickens.

  The house was never lonely any more. The squire had come to live with his son, and that summer, 1927, Tommy House came to visit Hugh Lynn. In the fall Tommy stayed to attend the local high school. Morton came to the beach frequently, and Dave Kahn, now married and the president of a furniture company, dropped in frequently. Morton was buying land for the hospital and university. He was determined to get things started. Riding to wealth on a bull market, he could see no reason for delay. One afternoon early in 1928 a short, stocky man with a great many gold keys on his watch chain drove up to the house. He introduced himself as Dr. William Moseley Brown, head of the psychology department at Washington and Lee.

  “Hugh Lynn is one of my students,” he said. “I made a statement that I could expose any medium. He told me to come down here and expose his father.”

  He smiled. Edgar smiled. They shook hands, and Dr. Brown settled down to ask questions. He examined readings, listened to several, and finally, running his fingers through his thinning hair, admitted that he was stumped. “I can’t expose it,” he said. “Still, it’s not the sort of thing you can do nothing about. I can’t ignore it. I’ll have to believe in it.”

  He joined the Association, had a reading for himself, and got others for members of his family. Edgar wagged his head in wonder.

  “The millennium has come,” he said.

  EIGHTEEN

  It was a young spring day, with the tide running high and the wind from the south, when they broke ground for the hospital. The site was a high dune at 105th Street, halfway between the Cavalier and Cape Henry. Standing on it, looking toward the sea, Edgar felt fulfilled. Looking at Morton, he felt frightened.

  Here was all he had ever dreamed or desired; yet it rested for security on the whim of a single man. What went through Morton’s head, what thoughts stirred his mind and heart, governed what would happen to the hospital and the readings. He wished it were not so. There had been others: Ketchum and Noe, Frank Mohr, Dave and the Texas people, his friends in Birmingham, and Lammers. All these had tried, and failed. Was this slight, frail Jew, who stood so placid, smoking a cigar as he watched the workmen, to succeed?

  He hoped so. For, once the hospital was operating, others would come, and an endowment fund that would make it independent of Morton could be raised. That would be the best way. Then Morton could devote himself to the university, which was becoming more and more his main interest.

  While the building was going on, he and Gertrude came to watch it every day. Often he picked up a hammer or a saw and went to work. The carpenters watched him oddly the first time, until they saw he was no amateur.

  “Guess you’ve done a little carpentering before, eh?” one of them asked.

  “I was raised on a farm,” Edgar said. “We did our own work.”

  The carpenter nodded. The others smiled at him. One of them offered him a chew of tobacco.

  During the summer Hugh Lynn and Tommy House worked as laborers on the building. Tommy had finished high school and was trying to select a college. Hugh Lynn urged him to enter Washington and Lee.

  “Finest school in the South,” he argued. “George Washington endowed it; General Lee was its president. It’s a school for gentlemen. Best-dressed school in the South. It has tradition. Everybody speaks to everyone else. Everybody is dressed up. No sweaters or sweat shirts.”

  “I don’t like to dress up,” Tommy said.

  “The professors are really fine fellows,” Hugh Lynn went on. “We have a young English professor who invites us to his home every Sunday afternoon to read plays and drink tea.”

  “Oh, really?” Tommy said.

  “Don’t you want to be a gentleman?” Hugh Lynn asked.

  “Why don’t they have coeds at Washington and Lee?” Tommy said.

  Hugh Lynn was disgusted. “That girl of yours!” he said.

  Toward the end of the summer Tommy changed his mind.

  “I think I’ll go up there with you,” he said.

  “I knew I’d argue you into it,” Hugh Lynn said proudly.

  “My girl’s going to Teachers College at Farmville,” Tommy said. “I can see her weekends if I go to Washington and Lee.”

  Dr. House and Carrie were now at the beach. Dr. House had resigned his post in Hopkinsville and was ready to take charge of the hospital. Carrie was to be its matron.

  “When I was in Hopkinsville all my patients were nuts,” Dr. House said wistfully. “Now I’m the one who’s considered crazy. I’ve been waiting twenty years for this, Edgar.”

  In September the boys left for school. Construction proceeded rapidly. By November the building was finished and ready for occupancy. The cost was in the neighborhood of $200,000. Morton had asked for the best of materials. He got them.

  It was a thirty-bed hospital, but it was a good deal more than a hospital. It was designed to be a home for the patients, especially those who were unable to get around. Temporarily it was also to be a center for the Association’s other activities. There was a lecture hall and library, a vault for housing the readings, and offices for research workers. The living room was spacious, richly furnished, and fronted on a view of the ocean. A porch, screened in summer, glassed-in in winter, ran around three sides. In the rear was a twelve-car garage, servants’ quarters, and a tennis court. In front, terraces stepped down three hundred yards to the ocean boulevard. Every inch of this space was covered with sod, so there might be a lawn—the largest lawn, the only lawn—between the Cavalier and Cape Henry. The bill for the sodding and grading was $10,000.

  Dedication ceremonies were held on November 11th, Armistice Day. Hugh Lynn and Tommy came down from Washin
gton and Lee, as did Dr. Brown, who made the principal address. Morton, Dave, Edwin, and their wives arrived from New York, Brown from Dayton, and Bradley from Chicago. Before the visitors arrived, Edgar wandered through the corridors, now and then walking into a room and standing there, lost in dreams.

  Again and again he said to Gertrude, “It’s just what I wanted. I hope it succeeds.”

  The crowd filled the living room and overflowed to the library and lecture hall. Morton, smiling and happy, turned the building over to the Association. Edgar, hardly knowing what he said, his eyes fixed on the ocean that shimmered in the background, accepted it.

  “When your prayers are answered, you find out that prayers are about the only things that words are good for, so there’s nothing to say, except to give thanks . . . then it’s time to start praying again . . . that we will succeed in what we are trying to do here. After all, though it seems we have reached a goal, this is only the beginning. We have been given a trust. It is ours to execute well or poorly . . . I will do my best, for every one of you and everyone who enters this hospital . . .”

  When he had finished, Morton introduced Dr. Brown. Sitting behind him, listening to him talk, Edgar realized that Dr. Brown had almost as many college degrees as he himself had years of schooling. It gave him a weird feeling of unreality, and the autumn sunset, coming early and throwing shadows over the room and the faces of the people, almost convinced him that it was a dream. He looked at Gertrude, Carrie, Dr. House, Hugh Lynn, Tommy, and little Ecken, who was hunched on a chair in a corner. They looked unreal, too. Would they all wake up and find themselves at the Hill, arguing with Aunt Kate about politics?

  Dr. Brown’s voice droned on:

  “This is a great occasion, and a happy one. I congratulate the founders of this movement—and they are here among us—for the vision which they have conceived of the possibilities of this new line of study and investigation. I honor those who have contributed of their time and means to bring about the realization, at least to some extent, of a dream of years. I believe that this experimental laboratory, which has as its chief object the utilization of any knowledge, any discovery, any invention, which will make life fuller and richer for human beings, will become renowned as a center of truth and wisdom and, to use the expression of Emerson, the world will make a beaten path to its front door.

  “Religion and science, philosophy and psychology, the truths discovered by the ancients as well as by the moderns, will be equally welcome here. Nothing is banned except trickery, sham, falsehood. All truth will be used so far as it may be applicable to the betterment of human life, no matter who was its discoverer or in what country or age it was found. An ambitious project, you say. Ah, yes, but unless we can bring together under one roof, as it were, and into one laboratory, religious, scientific, philosophic, and every other kind of truth, we shall not have that integration of human knowledge which is the sine qua non of all human progress. Here, then, we have a pioneer institution in the field of human endeavor. As human life itself is a most complex process involving all kinds of experience, so we find here a kind of laboratory in which human life will go forward, but under observable and controlled conditions, so far as possible. This is not merely a physical or a psychological or even a theological laboratory, as such. Much more than that, it is a center in which the rather unusual attempt is made to bring every kind of truth together as needed in the solution of the particular problem under investigation. Always, however, the motif is the betterment of human life and all other endeavors are to be subsidiary to this chief aim. So far as I am aware, such an undertaking has never been attempted before in this country, and probably in the entire world. Here will be your expert in medicine, another expert in psychology, another in theology, another in chemistry, another in psychiatry, and so on as many as may be needed and can be provided with the funds in hand. There are in this country today thousands of specialized laboratories, each of which limits itself to one particular field of investigation. But never before has there been a concerted and successful effort to bring together in one single laboratory every kind of discovery possible which will give the patient, or the subject, relief from his trouble, be it physical, mental, or spiritual. Surely this is a pioneer enterprise and more; it is even daring in its scope. And it has every possibility and probability of success!

  “Who can compass the possibilities of such an organization and such a center? Only time can tell the story adequately. It may be that the results of the work done here in this place will mark the beginning of a new era for the cause of humanity. Others will undoubtedly come to observe the methods used and the effects achieved. The advances in the entire realm of human endeavor over the past twenty-five years lead me to believe that we have but scratched the surface of what will be known and achieved within the next century. The radio, the airplane, the automobile, television, and all the advances which are being made in this ‘era of electricity’ are but an image of many still greater things to come. Who can say what we shall soon find out as to mental telepathy, the characteristics of the subconscious mind, the influence of mind on body, and a thousand and one similar things? Indeed, I have come literally to believe that all things are possible to him that believeth. The millennium will be upon us ere we are aware of it!

  “The day of miracles is not past but has only begun. And I recall that, on one occasion, the Master Himself said: ‘The works that I do shall ye do also, and greater things than these shall ye do, because I go unto my Father.’ ‘Greater things than these,’ you will notice; that is, greater things even than the miracles which His humble followers had seen Him perform as He walked up and down in the little country of Palestine and by the shores of the Lake of Galilee. And we have witnessed in our own day the actual fulfillment of these words. ‘The blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, to the poor the gospel is preached.’ Are not all these things true today just as they were nineteen hundred years ago? Yea, verily, and more also.

  “And this building and this spot are here and now dedicated to the bringing to pass of these ‘greater things.’”

  He stopped. The crowd applauded. Edgar found that his hands were clapping, that he was smiling and nodding at Morton, who was saying something to him. It was not a dream. It was real.

  The first patient was admitted next day. He was an old friend of Edgar’s, an engineer engaged in the construction of coke furnaces. In trying to finish a job within the allotted time he had overworked himself, caught cold, and neglected it. He had a chronic sinus irritation and his blood showed diabetic tendencies. His reading suggested baths, packs, osteopathy, medicine, and diet. The treatments were carried out; in two weeks a check reading discharged him as sufficiently well to go back to work, providing he continued some of the treatments at home.

  To Edgar there was a peculiar joy in seeing all the treatments suggested by a reading carried out, with cooperation between the people administering them and an attempt to harmonize their effects on the patient.

  Over the years certain ideas about health, the causes of disease, and cures, had been repeated over and over again in readings. There was a compound that was given for every person suffering from pyorrhea; there was an inhalant suggested for one of the three types of hay fever; there was a salve for hemorrhoids; there were castor oil packs for appendicitis and intestinal complications; there were grape poultices for intestinal fevers; there was the suggestion to some people that they eat a few almonds a day to thwart a tendency toward cancer; there was the suggestion to others that they massage peanut oil into their skin to head off arthritis; there was a dose which time and again had proved efficacious in breaking up a common cold.

  At the hospital these and other remedies could be checked and rechecked until their value was beyond doubt. Then they could be turned over to the medical profession and the public. There were skin lotions, intestinal antiseptics, treatments for stimulating the gro
wth of hair, diets helpful to certain conditions, and mechanical appliances.

  Two general types of appliance had for many years been prescribed in readings. One, the radioactive, was connected so that the electrical current of the body passed through the appliance, which acted as a transformer, sending the current back at a regular rate of impulse. In cases where the circulation was impaired, this meant a speeding up; where the circulation was too rapid, it meant a slowing down. This device was often specified in circulatory conditions, and for nervous disorders.

  The other type, the wet cell, operated on the theory that a very low electrical charge set up in an ordinary wet solution of acid, metal, and copper sulphate can be discharged through solutions of gold chloride, camphor, iodine, etc., and the vibratory impulse can be carried to the body, causing it to extract more of the particular property in the solution from its digested foods. In commenting on the theory behind this, a reading said: “The human body is made up of electronic vibrations, with each atom and element of the body, each organ and organism, having its electronic unit of vibration necessary for the sustenance of, and equilibrium in, that particular organism. Each unit, then, being a cell or a unit of life in itself has its capacity of reproducing itself by the first law as is known of reproduction-division. When a force in any organ, or element of the body, becomes deficient in its ability to reproduce that equilibrium necessary for the sustenance of the physical existence and its reproduction, that portion becomes deficient in electronic energy. This may come by injury or by disease, received from external forces. It may come from internal forces through lack of eliminations produced in the system, or by the lack of other agencies to meet its requirements in the body.”