Chapter Three #4
They were there within the hour. Cal finished hanging the last of the un-silvered ornaments in the living room while Becky sat on the sofa in the parlor and answered questions posed by a nervous young woman with a clipboard and a chewed pencil, while a young man in horn-rimmed glasses sat patiently holding a Brownie box camera in his lap.
Neither of them took their coats off, promising not to stay long.
The girl asked Becky when she’d first noticed her psychic abilities, what is was like to speak with a spirit, and if she had visions, and Becky answered. The girl asked if Becky had experienced “tiptology”—spirits tipping the table—and Becky said absolutely not.
“How accurate would you say your communications with the spirits are?”
Becky thought about that for a moment. The question was flawed, she said.
Then explained: it was like this sofa they were sitting on.
Was it real? It felt real to her. But could she say it was accurate?
Not without knowing every sofa, from every angle.
Her rule for herself, she said, was that she would only relay to another person what was discernible and felt genuine.
Sometimes, that was a voice. A word or two, a phrase, a whole sentence that arrived only after intense concentration that often left her with a headache.
Sometimes it was a feeling that was channeled through a conduit connecting her to the spirit, a feeling that translated itself into a kind of cross-dimensional language that was then deciphered as a response.
Did that mean the dead spoke to her directly?
Now and then. Mostly, the dead conveyed.
The young woman wrote and wrote. The young man asked if he could take a picture to run alongside the profile, and Becky, suddenly embarrassed but excited, too, asked them to wait a moment and ran upstairs, then came back down in her cape and beret. She posed, smiling, on the front porch.
—
The profile, called “Comfort in a Time of War,” appeared in the January 1945 issue of The Séance Précis, and two weeks later the Toledo Blade ran an extract of it in the style section.
The Hancock Gazette then reprinted the same extract in a feature called “Notable Local Gals.” As a result, new people began to make their way to Taft Street.
Some brought trinkets or articles of clothing that had belonged to the departed.
Handkerchiefs and pocket watches. A rosary.
An engagement ring. Becky didn’t require these things and certainly didn’t request them, but it seemed to be a commonly held belief that personal items belonging to the deceased would enhance the chances of reaching them.
Mrs. Wollack from the Audubon Society wanted Becky to keep her husband’s dog tags—not forever, she said, but for a week or so, just in case Becky felt the need to try to reach Bud Wollack in between their sessions.
Becky refused to keep the dog tags and assured Mrs. Wollack that she would never try to contact her husband without her being there.
That would be like reading someone else’s mail.
There were some who came just to make contact with their departed. Nothing in particular to convey, just contact. Hello. Others wanted specifics.
“Is he at peace?”
“Does she miss me?”
“Would he mind if I sold his rifles?”
Answers to the more general questions came easily to Becky, but the particular and personal inquiries presented a challenge.
One woman wanted to know where the money was hidden.
One man asked to be told, finally, the nature of his mother’s relationship with a woman named Pru from Wheeling, West Virginia.
There was reluctance on the other side. Resistance.
Other people sent letters. Some requested she perform her services through the mail, but she wouldn’t have known how to do that if she’d wanted to.
There was a letter penned by a mocker with nothing better to do; another tried to warn her that she was condemning her soul to hell by attempting to talk to the dead.
She threw both into the trash. One letter stood out, though.
It arrived several weeks after the extract of her profile ran in the Blade and was from a Mr. Casey LaGrange of Fort Wayne, Indiana.
Written, she noticed, on watermarked stationery, the high-end kind she used to sell at the stationery store.
Dear Miss Jenkins,
I hope you’ll forgive my boldness, but I feel compelled to contact you.
I am a man of many interests and passions, one being the spirit world and those who are able to communicate with the Other Side.
I believe your practice is vital to our living harmoniously with the departed, and I’ve undertaken what I hope will be the definitive compendium on individuals such as yourself.
An amalgam of sorts: historical, accurate, and compelling.
How honored I would be if, at some future date, you would allow me the benefit of your further insights.
I’ve been told by more than a few earnest souls that you are one of the most skilled mediums of our time.
Your insightful (but far too brief) profile published in The Séance Précis laid hint to this.
As you well know, the waters you swim in are teeming with charlatans, one more skullduggerous than the next. I imagine it must be a challenge to exist around such flimflammers, much less succeed! But succeed you have.
I am certain that the portion of my compendium devoted to you, if there’s any justice in this ravaged and war-torn world, would be significant.
Regardless, and even if we have no further communication beyond this letter, I thank you for bringing your talent to the people.
A gift such as yours, in another’s hands, might have been put to less noble use, or have gone unrealized, and what a loss that would have been, both to this world and the next.
With Awe and Profound Respect,
Casey LaGrange
The letter was not only flattering but affirming.
He was right; her profession was as prone to corruption as any other.
Recently, an elderly man had sat across from her, clutching his hat to his chest, and asked if the Germans were going to surrender—and if so, could she pin it down to the week?
When she told him she couldn’t, that prediction wasn’t one of her abilities, he said, “I don’t want you to predict it.
I want you to see it. I’m going to have money riding on this. ”
The mothers and wives of men who’d recently died in the war were the most emotional, of course, and were therefore the most challenging, and these were the people who started coming in from surrounding towns after the ads were placed.
One young widow and her mother came all the way from Port Clinton.
“Is he in Heaven?” some of them wanted to know.
Becky would always tell them the truth: she’d never been contacted by a spirit who was in either Heaven or Hell.
More precisely, the spirits she was in touch with didn’t specify where they were speaking from.
It was as if they came to a place of contact—like a pay phone in the desert—and after conveying what they wanted to convey, they went back to wherever it was they resided.
“Purgatory,” one woman concluded, but Becky said she had no evidence of that.
“If he’s not in Heaven,” another woman said, the flush rising in her cheeks, “ask him what he did that kept him out.”
Most people, though, didn’t ask about Heaven or Hell, and for that Becky was grateful; there were enough tricky patches without bringing religion into it.
“Does he have a body?” a man asked when Becky said she could sense his son’s presence. The man looked as if he hadn’t slept in days.
“Excuse me?”
“Does he have a body, or is he more of a face floating over a wisp?”
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
“The medium in Toledo said he was hovering right over my shoulder, and he had a face, but his body was more of a wisp. She said he look troubled.”
Becky clarified: she couldn’t actually see the man’s son—or any of the dead. Not with any clarity. It was difficult to describe.
She didn’t tell the man this, but, personally, she wouldn’t trust a medium who claimed they could truly see the dead.
That begged for embellishment, and embellishment in her field was akin to showmanship, which was akin to fraud.
She’d seen appalling evidence of it in a book at the library.
The worst frauds, it seemed to her, were the ones from twenty or thirty years ago who’d had themselves photographed mid-séance with “spirits” right there in the photo with them.
Eva Carriére, who’d “materialized” a three-hundred-year-old Brahmin Hindu, which turned out to be a cardboard cutout.
Jillian Wick, who had someone dress up as Helen of Troy and stand behind her, gazing wide-eyed at the ceiling—her own daughter, it turned out.
And the “ectoplasm” spilling from the mouths of so-called spiritualists.
Usually a handkerchief or a strip of gauze, sometimes a scratch on the negative meant to be otherworldly vomit.
There’d even been one of a woman spewing a twist of cloth that had little human faces the size of silver dollars on it, superimposed there by some conspiring photographer.
True and Disturbing Case Studies in Parapsychology, the book was called.
Becky thought again of the young woman who’d been looking for the brother who’d fled to Canada, how exploited she might have been in the hands of one of these charlatans. The sort Casey LaGrange had written about.
She wrote back to him, thanking him for his letter and telling him how moved she was that he wanted to include her in his compendium.
She wrote that she found it rewarding to know she’d brought solace to some of the people who’d visited her but was surprised that he’d heard from anyone who’d done so.
What a small world. She wished him well.