At Home With a Ghost - 50

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?

And then, suddenly and unaccountably, she accepted his proposal. What made her change her tune? According to the medium I’d first visited, she knew or suspected that Marshall covertly preferred men. 

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: 

(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.)