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| Mom before polio |
(Those who are coming to this serialized story for the first time, you can read the complete opus to date by clicking here.)
I opened the door and, as I braved the champaca fumes and
tinkling wind chimes, I thought: fire the art director for crimes of cliché. It
was way too obvious to have a medium operating out of the back room of a New
Age tchotchke shop. Lurking around the crystals, rune stones, wands and massage
rollers were the customers, mainly women who wore a lot of velour and displayed
snaggly toenails, probably from all the running with wolves. I am not one of
them, I told myself. Then again, I had a closetful of velvet back in New York,
and I had taken the train all the way to Andover to consult a medium, carrying
a notepad full of questions for dead people. So, like it or not, I was part of
this crackpot Aquarian tribe.
The back room was carpeted and mostly bare. I took my seat
opposite a 40-ish woman (in velour) who sat six feet away. I’d made the
appointment in the spirit of an escapade, something madcap and probably idiotic.
I didn’t really expect this woman to succeed in convoking my grandparents,
both of whom died in the 1950’s. She herself assured me that she had no control
over which spirits would come forward. Some of them might have no relation to
me, she said, but they were hanging about in case some conduit opened up
whereby they could get a message through. I shrugged inwardly and opened my
notebook: let the shams begin.
Staring slightly to the side of me, she announced that
someone from the afterlife was present. “A younger person in his 20’s. Sandy
blond hair, tall, close to six feet, tan pants with a nice shirt. I have a
sense of someone who took his own life. I can’t breathe, I’m having a hard time
swallowing. Like, I choked to death. Does this mean anything to you?”
“I can’t think of anyone.”
“He wants to say that his suicide was impulsive, not thought
out. Never mind.” She paused as if to shift gears. “Someone with a motherly
energy just walked in. Has your mother passed?”
“Yes.”
“She had a degenerative illness. She’s pointing to the
brain. Parts of her memory were lost. You were the decision maker at that
time.”
I was instantly disconcerted. Yes, my mother had dementia
the last years of her life. Yes, I held the medical proxy.
Without waiting for my confirmation, the medium went on, “Now
she’s holding onto the doorway, and she says, ‘I needed help to stand up.’”
And with that, suddenly, Mom was there in the room. For as
long as I’d known her, she had needed crutches to stand and walk, owing to the
polio that crippled her at age 25.
This was the part of the session called “proving,” which I
learned from my great-great-aunt’s book on séances (see Part 47). The medium transmits a spirit’s identifying details until the client, who may
at first resist believing in the ghost’s presence, is worn down by the preponderance
of evidence, the intimate details that even the most cunning medium couldn’t
invent. The proofs piled up as I sat there listening in amazement.
“Your mother says, ‘Dorothy.’ Now she’s showing me some Oz
books.”
We had inherited a complete set of Oz books, which Mom read aloud to me. I was obsessed with them.
“She says, ‘Ping-Pong.’ Does this make any sense to you?”
Ping-Pong was the one game that all seven members of my
family came together to play, round-robin style. Even Mom played from her
wheelchair.
“She’s showing a set of china, white and gold, that she was
proud of.” I still possess her lovely wedding service, white and gold.
And on it went. At the point I was completely convinced that
my mother was present, her messages began. Among them were her thanks to me for
helping her to die.
I burst into tears. Bed-ridden, incapable, and lost in the
backroads of dementia, Mom had summoned the will to stubbornly refuse food and
liquid. I had administered morphine, read her children’s books, played Fred
Astaire and The Messiah that she
adored, and sat vigil for the eight days it took her to wane and die. I’d felt
her gratitude at the time; but to hear it now, expressed through a stranger, in
this nondescript room off a crystal-and-candles shop, filled up my heart to the
seams.
The medium asked if it was indeed my mother I’d come here to
speak with. Actually, I hadn’t thought of Mom at all beforehand. There was no
mystery there I wanted to solve, no unfinished business, no unbearable grief or
inability to let go. We had closed the book, she and I.
My sole interest had been in contacting my father’s parents,
which I’d assumed to be an improbable venture – like shooting an arrow into the
air and expecting it to land in the bull’s eye of a target hidden in deep woods.
Yet now, after my mother’s appearance, it seemed possible. “I came for someone
else,” I told the medium.
“Give me the first name of the departed, and I’ll see what I
can do.”
I said, “Marshall.”
It didn’t take long before Grandpa arrived.
The medium started by laughing. “Oh, he’s so funny. This man
– I assume this is a man’s name – has such humor. A twinkle in his eye. He was
handsome, mischievous – a teaser – but sweet.”
My grandfather certainly was a known wit, the life of the
party. Could this be he? I waited for more “proving.”
“I’m seeing the Masonic symbol.” I was fully alert now. My
grandfather was a staunch Freemason.
The medium continued, “He was independently wealthy…but…”
She paused to listen. “He’s protesting – he wants you to know, ‘I wasn’t
lazy!’”
I laughed: busted. I had written in Part 5
of this very blog that my grandparents, at least according to my father, were
“indolent.” Apparently he was annoyed by that, in an afterlife sort of way.
“He left this world quickly. There were no warning signs. The
problem was the heart. He was getting set to go to a party – the way he wanted
to go, the perfect death. He liked cocktails and the finer whiskies and other
alcohol, so he might have had a snifter in his hand before going.”
And there he was, as incontrovertibly present in the room as
my mother. It was all accurate: Grandpa had died of a massive stroke, suddenly,
in Martha’s Vineyard as he was getting dressed for an evening with his pals at
the Reading Room, a men’s club on the waterfront pier. I could picture the
snifter shattering on the floor when he fell, the expensive cognac pooling. How many of
those bottles had I opened and swilled, from the racks and racks of his liquor,
stored in my parents’ garage after his death?
“Yes,” I said. “This is my grandfather.”
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| Grandpa (left) with his Reading Room cronies |
She said, “You only had a limited time together when you
were both alive, but he noticed you at an early age. He connected with you, saw
your potential.”
He died when I was eight. Up until now I’d had next to no
memory of him, but all at once I remembered playing him a piece I’d made up on
the piano, perched on a stool at his mahogany Steinway grand, in his Sutton
Place townhouse. I was about six. My composition was called “The Ocean” and
consisted of my rolling my knuckles on all the black keys. In my fragment of
memory, he listened quite respectfully from the couch, hands propped on his
cane. Maybe he saw my songwriting potential then, assuming I would master the white keys.
I snapped back to the present, scribbling notes to catch up
with the medium who was saying, “He seems more like a father than a grandfather
to you. He protects you. You are his co-worker – he sees you doing what he
prepared you for, though what he gave you was changed by what you brought to
it. He has great respect for you. A sense of you two being equals. He says to
you, ‘I admire and trust you.’…He was a muse to you. Does that make sense?”
I merely nodded, overcome by all this validation. It all
came back, the music he fed me from across the cosmic divide when I lay in a
kind of waking sleep, and the pressure to finish these pieces on my own. I
glanced at the list of questions I’d prepared before arriving. “Please ask him,
‘Why did you stop composing?’”
After a second she chuckled, “Oh, he’s getting haughty now.
He says, ‘I didn’t have to!’”
Thinking that this sounded pretty lazy, I pressed him, “Was
it because of the war? Or getting married?” (Grandpa’s output of music had dwindled
to nothing in the years after he returned from his World War I service in
France, where he’d married my grandmother Carrie.)
“It wasn’t the war, but he had a depression – he got blocked
artistically. And the marriage was a challenge. She was a decent woman but he
didn’t have a true connection there. It wasn’t a marriage of desire but because
he was expected to marry.”
We were getting to the heart of it now. Everything so far
had been borne out by the letters Grandpa had left behind, and by the
recollections of my father in his 1990’s memoir. But there was one big question
that had gone unanswered. If I had posed it to my father while he was alive, he
wouldn’t have known the answer, and might have been offended as well. So here
was my chance, with Grandpa floating in the room…
I asked, “Were you gay?”
(To be continued.)
