Chapter Three #5
Small indeed, he wrote back, just a week after receiving her reply.
The world is small, wicked, and starved for good news.
That’s why such news travels. He himself was about to be traveling for the purposes of his project, he wrote.
He was heading to Ann Arbor to interview a psychic, and then to Detroit to interview a past-life regressionist. If only Bonhomie were on his route, how happy he would be to meet with Becky in person.
In lieu of that, he wondered if she might answer a few technical questions, then went on to ask whether or not she spoke aloud to the spirits during her séances, and if she employed visuals, and how much compensation she usually received.
Also, what was her greatest number of participants to date?
Lastly, he asked where she’d “worked” and if she’d ever held sessions in Washington, D.C.
, or New York City. If not, had she considered it? You could fill halls, he added.
Washington! New York! She was overwhelmed by the thought.
He gave her too much credit, she wrote back.
To date, six participants at one time (including her) was her maximum.
And she’d never accepted money for what she did, though some people tried to pay her.
She hoped he didn’t have an inflated sense of her practice.
If he ever were to make it to Bonhomie, she would be happy to talk further with him in person.
She felt a little less isolated knowing there were people like Casey LaGrange in the world, and she was trying to think of a way to write that without sounding sappy.
Then she just wrote it: I feel a little less isolated knowing there are people like you in the world.
Cal came in from the garage as she was writing. He looked down at the kitchen table and picked up Mr. LaGrange’s second letter, which was signed the same as the first. “ ‘With awe’? Who’s this joker?”
“Do you mind?” Becky snatched the letter out of his hand.
—
The day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, a miniature Japanese submarine had washed up on Waimanalo Beach, some thirty miles away.
It was seventy-eight feet long and cigar-shaped, and after it was stripped of all its useful information, it was put on a trailer and hauled all around the United States as part of a war bond drive.
It went from Vallejo, California, to Washington, D.C.
, and stopped at every major city in between.
Then it traveled from smaller city to smaller city, and from town to town.
In late March of 1945, it finally made its way to Bonhomie, Ohio.
They parked it in front of the courthouse, between two mounds of plowed snow.
Most of the town came out to see it, pat its hull, have their photo taken beside it.
For a twenty-five-dollar war bond, you could climb into it.
Cal and Becky parked a block away, but as they pushed Skip’s stroller along the shoveled sidewalk and caught a glimpse of the submarine’s dark shape above the sea of hats, eclipsing the steps of the courthouse, Becky changed her mind about wanting to see it.
Or wanting to see it up close, anyway. She told Cal to go ahead, she was going to sit down on one of the benches across the street.
“You sure?” Cal asked. He’d been excited about the sub for days. Excited to show it to Skip, for some reason. She said she was sure. She told him to take his time, and off they went.
Was it unrest outside of the sub? Unrest within it?
She knew from the article in the paper that it had a faulty navigational system, had never made it into the harbor, had never fired its torpedoes.
One of the two-man crew had drowned, the other was in a POW camp.
She didn’t believe in embodying things with power.
The unrest surrounding the submarine, perhaps, was literal: so many people, herself included, had come out on a frigid day to see a machine designed to kill them.
Well, there it was, ringing dull and hollow under the pummel of mittens, its propeller blades streaked with road salt.
The Salvation Army band trudged through the snow and gathered in the gazebo near Becky.
They coughed and sputtered like horses, then lurched into “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” A blond woman waved from the submarine’s tower hatch.
On the ground, at the edge of the crowd, a mustached man in a beige homburg and matching overcoat waved back at the blond woman, but she’d already turned away.
“Inspiring, isn’t it?” a voice said.
There was, suddenly, a man sitting on the bench next to hers.
He was gray-headed and broad-cheeked, wore a hunting parka, and looked vaguely familiar.
She realized he was Reverend Toomey, the Episcopal minister who’d married her and Cal.
He groaned as he stood up, moved over to join her on her bench.
He was grinning, as if they were both in on a joke.
“You might think I’m about to give you a hard time for not coming to church more often,” he said.
“I’m not. That’s your prerogative, of course.
” He changed the tilt of his head and, looking almost proud, said, “I would like to have a word with you, though, about Saint Peter. Can you guess why?”
Becky couldn’t, and didn’t try.
“Saint Peter,” Reverend Toomey said, “is as holy as they come, yes? And he’s been assigned the sacred duty of greeting the souls of the departed at the Pearly Gates, yes? And determining if they’re worthy to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, where they’ll be reunited with their dearly departed—yes?”
It all sounded very thought-out to Becky. Was he really asking her if she concurred? “I’m sorry—what is the question?”
“No question, I suppose. I’m sure you understand—the news of whether or not departed Christian souls will be reunited with their loved ones is something that’s conferred by the Divine, outside the Gates of Heaven. Not on Taft Street.”
“I’m still not sure what you mean,” Becky said icily.
Reverend Toomey said he hoped the stories he’d been hearing weren’t true, and that she wasn’t presenting herself to people as some sort of detour or shortcut. Claiming to have a direct connection with the dearly departed was a disservice to the living, and was—or could be seen as—an insult to God.
“By whom? You?”
He looked surprised by her tone and glanced down at the snow, then back into her eyes. “By God. And, yes, by me. In my authority—”
She stood, wished him a nice afternoon, and walked back toward the crowd.
“Perhaps we should discuss this further at another time!” he called after her.
Perhaps not, she thought.
She walked with her hands pushed into her coat pockets.
A breeze had picked up, flapping the red-white-and-blue bunting strung across the fence surrounding the courthouse yard.
The crowd wasn’t enormous, but people had spilled out onto Main Street and the police were diverting traffic.
She stepped out into the middle of the street and pushed up onto her toes, looking for Cal and Skip.
A hand touched her arm.
It was the mustached man in the beige homburg and matching overcoat. He had a round face and dark little eyes that shrank to folds when he smiled. He asked if she was Rebecca Jenkins. So close to her encounter with the minister, she thought, Who wants to know? But she said yes, she was.
He introduced himself as Casey LaGrange.