At Home With a Ghost - 51

Dad with his parents: hoisting Carrie as Marshall looks on. Note the cigarette in her hand: small wonder she had a "graveyard cough."

(Those who are coming to this serialized story for the first time, you can read the complete opus to date by clicking here.)

My long-departed grandfather wasn’t done spilling the beans through this Montreal medium. Across the dimensional divide, Monsieur Guy Isabel’s spirit guide continued to compel his hand as he covered another page with automatic writing, in a script that appeared both elegant and awkward.

I waited, still recovering from the news that my grandmother Carrie, through all thirty-five years of her marriage, conducted an affair with her doctor, and with Grandpa’s full knowledge.

I knew all about Dr. Taylor from my father’s memoir, and from the letters Carrie wrote to her family from France during World War I.

At the height of the war, Dr. Kenneth Taylor, a New York pathologist, volunteered his services to an American military hospital in Paris. While there, he developed a successful treatment for gas gangrene, for which he later received the Légion d’Honneur. In 1915 he returned to New York. The following year he was summoned back to Paris to take over as hospital chief. He boarded an ocean liner with his wife Ann and a volunteer nurse named Caroline Hatch.

The three had become friendly in New York. I surmise that Ken Taylor encouraged Carrie Hatch to come along and serve in the war effort. Maybe their attraction had already begun. He put her to work in the wards, where she found her calling as angel to the wounded. He found her placements at other hospitals; he made house visits when she was ill, which was often. (It wouldn’t have aroused any suspicion when she had a man in her room at her pension, if that man was her doctor.)

“What I should do without him I cannot imagine,” she wrote her sister.

She didn’t have to do without Dr. Taylor, as it turned out. Along came Lieutenant Marshall Kernochan with a marriage proposal, along with his assurance that, if she said yes, he wouldn’t “pluck one feather out of that cherished independence” of hers. She would be free to do whatever she wanted.

Even adultery?

Carrie put off accepting Grandpa’s proposal. She sailed back to New York without giving him an answer; she needed more time, “to try to put certain things out of my mind.” Likely she believed her affair with Ken Taylor was hopeless. Continuing as the backdoor woman of a married man was an unthinkable demotion; she was too proud for that. But what if she too was married? Marshall’s wealth and social position guaranteed her respectability and, if he kept his promise, the freedom to pursue her heart.

So she said yes to all that. Her return passage and visa were arranged by Ken Taylor. The Taylors were witnesses at Carrie and Marshall’s wedding. At the end of the war, the four reassembled their weird ménage in New York. Marshall and Carrie Kernochan had a son named Jack (my dad). Ken and Ann Taylor had a daughter. Carrie instated Ken as the family physician; if little Jackie Kernochan had a sniffle, Dr. Taylor would instantly appear. Marshall bought a studio for Carrie where she could enjoy some privacy; the apartment was practically next door to the Taylors. The four got together sometimes for evening musicales or theater outings, but more often Marshall was off at the Freemasons or his mens’ clubs, and Carrie and Ken were off doing…something or other together.

When he got older Dad became aware that something in this picture wasn’t right. He started teasing his mother about it. Whenever she announced she was going to sunny Florida (for her lungs), with the good doctor in attendance (for her lungs), Dad would start rotating his pelvis and singing a current pop song, “Hear that savage serenade/ Down there in the Everglade/ Goes boom-a-diddy booma-diddy booma-diddy-boom.” Later he took to referring to Dr. Taylor simply as “Booma-Diddy.”

“She would be embarrassed,” he wrote, “blushing and giggling uncomfortably, but in no way daunted.” Finally Dad asked his father “point-blank, how he felt about my mother’s absences and her obvious inclinations toward the doctor. His response was: ‘When I look around and see some of the women my friends have married, I consider myself a lucky man.’”

Grandpa was probably referring to Mrs. Booma-Diddy.

When Marshall first met the Taylors in Paris, he wrote Carrie that “Mrs. T seemed a bit difficult. Dr. T scarcely opened his head.”  Their act never changed. My dad observed that whenever the T’s came a-calling on the K’s, Ann Taylor invariably showered contempt on her husband, and she didn’t seem to care who was witnessing. While she loudly berated him, the doctor shrank a few sizes and said nothing. She was also rumored to be having an affair with a Columbia professor. Carrie’s studio increasingly became Dr. Taylor’s home away from home as he escaped his ballbusting wife’s company.

And what better companion for Carrie than a doctor? “She was both morbidly obsessed with illness and prone to it,” my father wrote. From his earliest years Dad found that a surefire way to get his mother to pay any attention to him at all was to fake alarming symptoms, for she loved nothing better than to play nurse. The woman herself was a dartboard for afflictions. A partial list of her chronic ailments would include: hay fever, bronchitis, pneumonia, brucellosis, back pain and agonizing periods. Even the World War I courtship letters between Carrie and Marshall often jokingly referred to her “g.y.c.,” which stood for “graveyard cough.”

With the dear doctor, she had someone who took her every ache seriously, and was only too willing to talk symptoms and treatments. (Though she might have lived longer if he had made her stop smoking.) He was hopeless company when it came to her other interests, like music and painting; Dr. Taylor was “unmusical to his fingertips, and as a painter he would have flunked a Rorschach test.” They did have bird watching in common; they embarked on their hikes alone and often in Martha’s Vineyard, where the Taylors were frequent guests. When not hunting herons, Carrie and her medicine man could always repair to her little house on the bluff, far from the madding wife and the unfazed husband.

Dad wondered, “Was there a sexual relation between my mother and the doctor? I will never know. Perhaps at this point in life she was entitled to yield to inclinations that made her one and only life happy and bearable.”

If I believed the ghostwritten messages conveyed by this clairvoyant medium by Skype, my Dad’s question was now answered. And there was more to come. I watched Monsieur Isabel onscreen as he put down his pencil. He then read aloud what the spirits had just written through his hand: “Marshall says he tolerated her affair because he wasn’t always there, and he felt guilty about the life he led and he wanted Carrie to be happy…”

“He says ‘I myself saw other people. I too had sexual affairs, though not with women.’”

Guy Isabel was the third medium to mention my grandfather was gay, which I had suspected for some time. As my Skype session wore on, I learned that Marshall had loved a fellow Freemason, someone from Europe whom he must have met in his travels. The Masonic temple, a brotherhood shrouded in secrecy, provided the perfect camouflage for their affair. Sixty years after his death, Marshall wrote his confession on the medium’s page: “I discovered my soul could join with another soul in love, even if that soul was in the body of a man.”

This, then, was the essence of my grandparents’ marriage. Carrie put up with his homosexuality, and he looked away from her adultery.

When I consider this bizarre minuet between the T’s and K’s, I think of a photo I found among Marshall’s effects. The occasion shown is the annual Tuxedo Park costume ball. We inherited a trunk full of disguises from this fabled affair, which Grandpa adored dressing for, ordering custom-made outfits for himself and Carrie every year. We kids used to try on the stuff, swimming in silks and velvet brocade: there was a Revolutionary War soldier getup, a toreador, a sheik, a harem girl, Queen of the Night. There was also an oversize white satin smock with huge buttons of real mink. No one knew what that was about until I found this photo. The men are clad as lovelorn Pierrots in fools’ hats and satin nightshirts. On bended knee, they court their wives dressed as alluring Columbines. 

Tuxedo Park costume ball, or, go figure the rich

Once we get done laughing our asses off at this spectacle, we can open our ears and hear the chamber orchestra playing; we can see the dancers change partners. We can ponder, how many aristos in that ballroom were conducting secret affairs, like Marshall and Carrie? Meanwhile they keep step with high society’s twirl; keep up appearances in custom disguises.

  

I had no more questions for Monsieur Isabel or any medium after that. The last pieces of the puzzle, thought to be lost, had been retrieved and pressed into place.

You may well wonder how any sane person could accept as truth the ad-libs of clairvoyants and mediums (I consulted five in all). But I am not sane. I’m something worse: a fiction writer. I’d inherited an unfinished history, with massive plot holes and cloudy characters. I needed to understand my grandfather, who I believe has been with me in spirit form since his death. Frustrated, I wanted to fix the story and restore its flow, and I really didn’t care where the missing answers came from, so long as loose ends got tied and one could put the book down with a sigh of satisfaction.

And so my tale is done.

My attachment to spirits, and Grandpa’s ghost in particular, was not continuous throughout my life. When I got married in 1985, I gave up ghosts. It was time to dial it down the wack and get back to my day job: to be a presentable wife and mother, a person of sound reasoning – though if someone prodded me I might tell a ghost story or two. For ten years I concentrated on putting hot meals on the table and achieving success as a screenwriter.

One day I got a call from Nina Jacobson, who had just gone to work at a brand new studio called DreamWorks. I’d done a script for her before, when she was a development executive at Universal; the script had been about a satanic college fraternity, so she knew I was fluent in paranormal. Would I, she asked, be interested in writing a script for Steven Spielberg, one of DreamWorks’ three partners? The project was then being referred to as “Untitled Ghost Story.”

(To be continued.)