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| Carrie in her teens, not yet heartbroken |
(Those who are coming to this serialized story for the first time, you can read the complete opus to date by clicking here.)
It nagged at me, that missing piece. My grandmother Carrie
had a secret: one that prevented her from marrying my grandfather Marshall, or anyone
for that matter. On the face of it, Carrie had steadfastly avoided marriage out
of principle, reluctant to give up her independence to any man. That was her
public position, at any rate. This would have been an unusual stance in those
pre-feminist days, and if an unmarried woman of 32 trumpeted about her freedom,
people could assume she was just masking her humiliation at being a spinster.
Grandpa wasn’t deterred, promising, “I won’t pluck one feather out of that cherished independence
of yours.” Still she eluded him. She returned to New York, writing him that she
needed to go home to find out “how completely I’ve been able to put certain
things out of my mind.” What things?
There was no one left alive to ask. The memoir about his parents that Dad left when he died furnished no clue. Like me, my father remained perplexed about the nature of their marriage because, even though they seemed quite fond of each other, they spent so much time apart. Dad never figured it out, and he wasn’t the type to consult a clairvoyant medium. The idea of contacting his mother’s spirit, so that she could fill in the blanks, was laughable – and frightening as well, since it implied an afterlife that he was dead certain didn’t exist.
He must have done a double take after he died. I imagine it’s
particularly hard for atheists to adapt to eternity when they wake up in its
echoing expanse. Imagine, too, their fearful confusion: what am I here for? A
picnic, or perdition? On the other hand, they must feel pretty happy that they’d
been dead wrong about that death-is-the-end thing. I know Dad was grateful for
his new and refreshed life as a spirit; he enjoyed getting on with the business
of evolving. He told me so, through another medium.
After that first encounter with a clairvoyant, I’d sampled
three others, curious to see if there was any discrepancy in the spirit messages
they transmitted. The results were astounding in two out of three séances,
which took place over the telephone. To contact my grandmother Carrie, I
decided to go back to the very first medium I’d seen in Massachusetts, but this
time we’d be conducting our session by phone.
My belief that Carrie carried a secret wasn’t based on much,
mainly a few passing lines I’d come across in a letter she wrote to her sister
from war-torn France in 1917: “No
more married lovers for me. At least that’s what I say now. You never know.” Grandpa
was a confirmed bachelor, who had avoided marriage for even longer than she. And
while he declared his love ardently, nowhere in her wartime letters did she
tell him, or anyone else she wrote to, that she loved Marshall in return. So
who were the “married lovers”?
My
phone session with Medium #1 went well at first. Carrie showed up front and
center. The medium correctly described her and identified the cause of her
death (Carrie underwent a double mastectomy but in the end succumbed to
lung cancer). More details followed that I knew to be true. The time came to
pose my question: “Why did you avoid marriage for so long?”
The medium transmitted the question, listened to the
response, and relayed my grandmother’s answer. Carrie had had her heart broken
in her twenties, and consequently lost her appetite for love. The man had been
married – or perhaps he had to leave Carrie to marry someone else? There was a
child. Perhaps he’d gotten the other woman pregnant. Or perhaps Carrie had been
pregnant, and had to give the child up because her lover was married.
Perhaps…perhaps?
I realized, with discomfort, that the medium had strayed
into conjecture, was vamping instead of reporting what my grandmother’s spirit
said. I had every reason to expect unequivocal answers from the dead: of course
Carrie knew what she did and why – it was her life, after all. Disappointed, I
concluded the séance early.
I put the mystery aside for a year; my film work had increased, and I had a new album to release.
Then, last month, I happened to hear of a French-Canadian medium, Guy Isabel, who conveyed messages from the departed through automatic writing. I was already familiar with this form of channeling, since my maternal grandfather had practiced it for a time (I’ve written about his experiences in Part 4 and Part 47 of this memoir). I thought “ghost-writing” would be an interesting approach, another way to have that conversation with my elusive grandmother.
Monsieur Isabel and I exchanged emails and arranged a date for a Skype session. A day before our appointment, he sent me the following note:
“While
I was doing an automatic writing session yesterday, a spirit name Marshall came
to me and gave that message:
“Marshall says, ‘I
learn to evolve doing lots of activities based on love and the impact of
developing love in the relationship between minds. This prepares us to choose
our next incarnations. From these teachings, the mind learns the importance of
raising his consciousness through the practice of love with his neighbor. The
human experience is an experience that marks the soul deeply and allows it to
grow significantly in higher levels of vibration. Tell her she is a beautiful
soul and we love her work.’”
I always welcome compliments on my work. I totally preen – on the
inside of course. And I don’t much care where they come from. (Except once,
when I cared very much. A magazine asked former presidential candidate and Southern
Baptist anti-Semite Reverend Pat Robertson what his favorite movies were. My
film Impromptu was on his list. This was ironic, considering my
documentary Marjoe was an exposé of evangelical preachers.) Nevertheless,
the email made me suspicious of Isabel. The text was boilerplate New Age cant,
even if I agreed with every word. And the name Marshall is easily obtained by
reading this very blog.
My suspicions eased as our session commenced. Monsieur Isabel seemed a
very sweet, openhearted man, and my charlatan alarm (cf. Marjoe, above)
didn’t go off. Each time I posed a question to a spirit, I was able to watch
Isabel onscreen as he paused to write the answer in lovely looping script, his
hand never leaving the page but rather connecting words as if they came in a
continuous undifferentiated stream. I asked him to send me the actual pages.
The script was difficult to read:
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| (Hint: the first word is Marshall and the rest is in French) |
Answers were relayed through Isabel’s various spirit guides, whose
names sounded like medications. What they said was sometimes awkwardly phrased,
as if translated from another language by a less than proficient translator. At
one point I asked Isabel if the messages came to his hand in French or English,
in case he was the one translating what he’d written. Both, he said; he had no
control over the choice. Since my French is fairly good, I asked him to read me
answers in whatever language appeared on the page. Even after he complied, the
spirits’ diction remained that of a foreigner (they do, in a sense, come from
afar).
As our session began, right away Grandpa barrelled in, always first to
arrive at a party. I decided to direct my question to him instead of Carrie. I
asked, “Did you know her secret?”
Yes, he knew her secrets. They concerned a person whom Carrie had met,
an affair that continued over the course of their marriage. Marshall was
speaking in French now (he was fluent in his lifetime). “Cette
liaison s'est déroulée avec un médecin.”
A doctor!?
Suddenly I
knew exactly who that was.
I remember nothing of my grandmother, who died when I was
five. But I have a distinct memory of visiting her Martha’s Vineyard cottage.
Not the big summer house in Edgartown, which she shared with husband, son,
guests and servants. Marshall bought the little cottage for her as a refuge
where she could be alone to paint and muse. It was perched on a bluff in
Katama, overlooking the Atlantic, and everything about it was fascinatingly
tiny. Grandma Carrie was a wee woman. The rooms were close and cozy, and,
because I was a child, I loved the diminutive slipcovered furniture:
Goldilocks-size, the chairs were just right for a child’s bottom.
But now I thought, she wasn’t always alone. And I wondered
how the estimable Dr. Taylor squeezed his ass into one of those armchairs.
(To
be continued.)
