Lily Dale (14 page)

I
hadn't known Shelley Takei a week before she invited me to stay in the lavender house on the hill where she lived. “I've got lots of room,” she said, taking me up the green-carpeted stairs, past the little angels that sit on the steps. “Pick which bedroom you want.”

Shelley and her sister Danielle each selected three bedrooms on the second floor to decorate according to her own taste. Danielle's bedrooms tend toward flowered wallpaper and color-coordinated bedding. Quite lovely and tasteful in an English sort of way. Shelley goes for a different ambience. Her rooms have themes: angel, goddess, and zodiac.

“I want this to be a sacred space,” she said.

This is clearly a house where men have no say about decor. It contained 672 angels by the last count, and more have been added. Stained-glass windows made by Shelley's husband, Frank, cast a multicolored glow across the rooms. The living rooms feature gold lamps with cherubs cavorting around them, lampshades with long fringe, a crystal end table, and heavy-petaled artificial flowers languishing over drapery.

In the peach-colored angel bedroom, where I slept, there are more than one hundred images of angels. They're on a poster in
the closet smoking cigarettes. They dance around the trash can, hold up the soap, tie back curtains, skip across the walls, and lounge on the dresser.

The downstairs bathroom, sponge-painted a rich purple, has stained-glass windows and a lamp that features a winged fairy. The house's upstairs bathroom is black and silver. Silver stars and moons dangle from the ceiling. Artificial magnolias grace the walls. A huge plastic shell filled with pink, orange, and purple bath fizzies sits ready for anyone who wants to relax. The shower curtain is white with the black silhouette of Norman Bates dressed as Mother, knife raised, ready to stab into the unsuspecting body of Janet Leigh—or if she's not available, whoever is.

Downstairs in the basement is the psychomanteum. A psychomanteum is a setup that's supposed to allow spirits to be seen in a mirror. Shelley's psychomanteum is screened off from the rest of the basement by panels of fabric that hang to the floor. A mirror is tipped up slightly so that people who sit in the chair before it can't see themselves but can see spirits if they materialize in the glass. The psychic explorer Raymond Moody, who said the psychomanteum had allowed a number of spirits to appear to him, suggested using a low-wattage light. Shelley has candles, which makes it even better. Shelley has never seen a spirit in the mirror, but at least one of her friends says she saw one. From the minute I saw the setup, I knew it represented opportunity.

What if we could make someone appear? I asked Shelley. What if we got some mediums together and tried to get someone to show up, someone like, say, Gretchen and Sherry Lee's brother, the late Chapman Clark? Shelley and Chapman had been great friends. On the wall leading to the basement, she had a picture of him mounted with the words, “See you, Chapman,” next to it. Shelley believed that Chapman really might have had the power to communicate telepathically, to disappear, and to astral travel. She said
he'd once described a room in her sister's hunting camp that he could not possibly have seen.

She was game to try. So we invited Gretchen and Sherry Lee to come over and see whether they could summon their brother. They brought a favorite book from his childhood and a bottle of liquor he'd made. We all took a drink of the stuff, which was pretty bad, and went to the basement. Sherry Lee took the chair, and the rest of us sat on the floor. Candle wax and brandy scented the air, which pressed closely around us.

A number of signs that Chapman might appear had occurred at other times. One of Shelley's guests, who'd never met him, dreamed that a balding, blond man tiptoed through the living room into the basement with his forefinger held to his lips, as though cautioning her to keep a secret. Another friend had seen wisps of smoky material coming up from around a little ceramic firedog that sits on the mantel. Chapman had been a fireman. Shelley's sister Danielle bought the dog to give to him, but he died first. So she put the dog on the mantel. She and Shelley had been watching it for two years, hoping that Chapman would come back and move it. So far he hadn't.

Gretchen had earlier given Shelley a message that seemed to bode well. We were in the auditorium at a Monday night circle during which anybody with five dollars can sit and get a quick message. When Gretchen came to Shelley, the medium's eyes filled with tears. “I have someone you know,” she said.

“Is it Chapman?” Shelley asked.

Gretchen nodded. “He's saying something about the color blue. Does that mean anything to you?”

Shelley looked blank, and then she nodded. “Yes. I think so,” she said, her voice practically a whisper. A few days before, Shelley had planted a garden at the side of her house in honor of Chapman. While she was digging, Sherry Lee came by, and they began
to talk. Shelley looked up. When she looked down again, she saw a blue stone.

“It wasn't there before,” she said. Chapman had blue eyes, and he often carried stones in his pocket to give away. Shelley immediately thought of him.

“I just knew he put that stone there to let me know he was around.”

“It was him,” Gretchen confirmed. “He wants you to know that he's with you often. He's been telling you things, but as usual you aren't listening.”

Shelley laughed at that. Chapman always said she knew far more than she allowed herself to admit.

As we settled into our watch before the psychomanteum, my heart was thumping so hard I could hear the blood in my ears. If Chapman appeared and we all saw him, I'd have to be a believer. I wasn't sure I wanted that.

We stayed for about an hour, staring at the mirror in the dim light of a candle flame. The sisters said Chapman was there, and they gave several messages from him to Shelley. The messages were pretty cheeky. He talked about things like dancing with Shelley and sitting on her lap. Shadows roiled across the mirror, swirling into various colors. We all saw them, but it was hard to tell whether something was really happening or whether looking so long at the darkened mirror caused the brain to fabricate optical illusions. But Chapman didn't show up in visible form. We all agreed on that.

Some weeks later we tried again. Sherry Lee couldn't come. So we invited Anne Gehman. Years before, after the death of Anne's second husband, Chapman had courted her all one summer. He sat on the front porch of her big white and pink house, rubbing her feet and telling her stories about his psychic prowess. Anne didn't believe most of what he said but, when she told him so, Chapman merely laughed and told another tale. He talked to her of love and
marriage, but the courtship stopped abruptly after two women came to Anne separately for readings, each crying over her love for Chapman and his unwillingness to commit.

Anne fasted all day to get ready for the psychomanteum. We prayed prior to the event and settled ourselves as before. Again, Gretchen relayed some slightly naughty messages for Shelley. None of the rest of us heard so much as a good moan, inside or outside our heads. As an apparition, Chapman was even less impressive than before. This time he didn't even make good shadows.

I was more disappointed than logic allowed me to admit. Anne still had hope for the psychomanteum and talked about trying again. We might need to sit several times to make sure conditions were right, she said. The messages Chapman's sisters delivered alarmed Shelley a little. She and Chapman had been friends, but nothing more. Over the years he had romanced a lot of Lily Dale women, but with her the flirtation had been innocent. “I'm a married woman,” Shelley said. “I'd never do anything like that. I wonder if his sisters think I did.”

She called Sherry Lee the next day to ask. When Sherry Lee said she wouldn't have cared if Shelley and Chapman were lovers, Shelley was really confused. Were the messages that the sisters gave in the psychomanteum actually from Chapman or were they the sisters' projections based on false assumptions?

“How can they not know that I would never do such a thing?” Shelley asked.

“Should they know better because they're your neighbors or because they're mediums?” I wondered.

“Both,” Shelley said, exasperated.

As for our failure with the psychomanteum, Shelley shrugged it off. “I realized I'm more comfortable not having to commit either way,” she said. “The tension of opposites is what interests me. That's where I like to play.”

We spent hours debating different answers to the questions Lily Dale poses. Why weren't the mediums better, wiser people if they were in touch with all this infinite wisdom? Why did they do so many unwise things? Sherry Lee gave much the same answer that Dr. Neal, the physician-medium, did. The mediums are learning their own lessons.

“We're polishing our physical skills in this life. Every painful moment in your life is a spiritual birth pain,” she said.

The mediums never claimed they were more holy or spiritual than anyone else. As Gretchen often said, “We're like a telephone just relaying what's given.”

But Shelley and I still debated. If the spirits come to help heal people of their psychological wounds, why don't they heal the mediums? Why do the spirits say so many inane things? Why are the mediums so often wrong? Could the mediums be getting the same inklings that everyone gets but that most of us are too modest to make such great claims for? Could it be that the mediums' greatest distinction is merely an alarming inability to recognize that they are wrong more often than they are right? Are they merely sweet, deluded souls who puff up their own imaginings?

Shelley's willingness to debate questions no one else wanted to talk about allowed me to listen to some of her other ideas, ideas that were radical to me, and way scarier than dead people talking. She learned most of them from Lynn Mahaffey—the grandmother who spends so much of her time on five-mile bike rides while making intercessory prayers for the world.

H
ere is the short version of Lynn's creed. People's hearts are good. Love is in control of the world. People are on earth to connect with each other, with their own good hearts, and with the spirit of love around them. Connecting enables people to give their gifts, which is what humans are here for and what they want most. And, finally, people can trust the spirit of love to guide them. So people ought to follow their own inclinations, do what they like, and not do what they don't want to do. They ought to trust their own good hearts and their good sense, no matter what anybody says.

Most of that, especially the last part about doing what you please, I found scandalous. Dangerous even. I wasn't a Baptist anymore, but I still knew that people are bad and that you have to keep them tied down and trussed up. You have to curb their evil impulses. People can't go around doing what they want. The world depends on us to sacrifice ourselves for the good of others, and it doesn't make one bit of difference that doing so makes us miserable and ill-tempered and the kind of long-suffering cranks no one in his right mind wants to be around. We aren't here to be happy. We're here to be good. Most of us don't have what it takes to be good, of course, which means we have to be guilty.

Lynn wasn't the first person I'd heard espouse the idea that people such as Shelley, blithely confident souls who always listen to themselves, are on a higher track than the rest of us. Shakespeare said it: “This above all: to thine own self be true, / And it must follow, as the night the day, / Thou canst not then be false to any man.” Joseph Campbell advised following your bliss and said it would align you with an inner knowing. Edith Wharton talked about the “inmost self where the unknown god abides.” I'd heard it before, and yet to me Lynn's ideas smacked of soft morality and the license to act with utter abandon. They scared me.

Lily Dale's creed was informal, unwritten, and debated, but it matched Lynn's, as far as I could tell. I would have never taken this creed seriously or given it much thought except that Lynn said it was true.

And something about Lynn made me hold my doubts in abeyance. I didn't give them up so much as I set them aside while I listened to what she said. Why? I didn't exactly know. Maybe it was her humility. Some people are convinced by bluster and bravado, by big stories and great deeds. I'm not. I suspect such tales, and the people who tell them.

Lynn hardly ever spoke unless someone drew her out. She was too shy to attend Shelley's parties. If the crowd was over three or four, she would sit on the edge of the group, listening intently, fiddling with her hearing aid when she needed to.

I heard someone liken her to Clarence the angel in
It's a Wonderful Life.
She has a strong nose, a wide-open face, and a sometimes slightly befuddled air. One woman likened her to the absent-minded Fairy Godmother in Walt Disney's
Cinderella
with her spell-casting chant of “Now where were we, for goodness' sake? Bippety, boppety, bippety, boppety, bippety, boppety, boo.”

Lynn doesn't cast spells, of course. She reads the runes, an occult system of divination that relies on stones imprinted with
symbols. She isn't a medium and hasn't consulted a medium in years. She did once take away the pain of a woman named Joyce Parker. For years, Joyce suffered from back pain that nothing could allay. Lynn was reading Joyce's runes one day when Joyce mentioned the pain.

“Let's send it away,” Lynn said.

“Can you do that?” Joyce asked.

“I don't see why not. You've carried it long enough. We'll pray and ask that it go somewhere else.”

Then she put her hands on Joyce's back, and the pain left. That was several years ago, and it's never come back, Joyce told me. When I mentioned the story to Lynn, she didn't remember it.

Walking down the street, Lynn often becomes so engrossed in thought that she walks more and more slowly until she stops completely, often in the middle of a street. Lily Dale being the town it is, people rarely honk. They merely wait, engine idling, until Lynn finishes her thought and moves on. The cafeteria's three entrances invariably confuse her. She is always talking as she walks in, listening as she walks through the line to order her food, and completely disoriented by the time she has her loaded tray. “Which way is out of here?” she often asks Shelley.

When someone asks her opinion, Lynn sometimes says, “Oh, dear,” and looks about the room in a vague way. It might take a while to give her thought words, but, when she answers, she never dithers and never equivocates. She always says something no one else has thought to say, and, to me, what she said always seemed wise, even when it seemed ridiculous. Ridiculously wise, maybe.

“She's the smartest person I've ever known. Not just the wisest, the smartest,” Shelley said.

Maybe I listened so closely to Lynn because I agreed with Shelley, or maybe it was because her ego never enters the argument, and she isn't afraid of any question. Or maybe it was because
of her laugh, which has a soft quality, like wrinkled chamois slipping across your skin. It often starts as everyone else is getting revved up about something they think is infuriating and stupid. Lynn's laughter sometimes takes over her body so that she draws her feet off the floor and throws out her arms. There is no meanness in her amusement, only purest delight and total faith that love is in control, no matter what life tosses her way. Shelley calls it “Lynnie's Buddha laugh.” Her goodwill is like peace stealing into your soul. I had to struggle against believing every word she said.

Once she told me about a drive through the country with her husband. They passed a dead deer by the side of the road. Seeing such innocence and beauty turned into a carcass, Lynn was overcome with despair. Weighed down with a dark awareness that suffering is immense and everywhere, Lynn groaned inwardly and asked, “Why is there so much pain?”

As she did, she heard an answering voice in her head. It said, “I know, Lynn, but will you accept it?”

I could see that the story had great import for Lynn, and so its meaning was important to me too, but I didn't get it. Accept it? What did that mean?

“It meant, would I go on believing that love is in control?”

And do you? Can you?

“Of course,” she said. “If it isn't, then forget it. Nothing makes sense. Nothing. That's the end of joy; that's the end of hope. But I do believe it. I believe that our greatest sorrows lead to our greatest joys. I believe they can.”

If the horrors we see around us come into our lives, we will endure and find meaning in them, she said. “The bruised reed I will not break. The flickering flame I will not quench. That's the promise,” she said. “This unconditional love is in you, and you can trust it.”

Even if we die?

“What do you mean ‘even'? Especially if we die. That's not the worst thing that can happen to us.”

Lynn formed her beliefs through terrible times.

Her brother killed himself because he was unable to control his alcoholism, and her oldest son, Johnny, died in a car accident when he was twenty-two. Lynn was a Catholic and had been for years, but the faith didn't mean much to her then, and Johnny's death left her in a state of grief that threatened to kill all the light within her.

Her son had loved philosophy. After he died, she often sat leafing through his books, thinking about how his eyes had gone over the pages. She was taking a community education class from Frank Takei before her son's accident. A country girl and mother of five with only a high school degree, she didn't understand a lot of it, but she kept at those thick books of heavy thought, and eventually she unknotted their dense meanings.

After the accident, Lynn began studying in earnest, looking for some clue that would help begin her life again. As she studied, she felt close to Johnny. “I could feel him right there with me,” she said. She marked up the books, underlining and highlighting the sentences she liked. Then she read them again and marked more passages, sometimes putting stars and exclamation points in the margins. She read the theologians and the mystics. She took everything they had to say, sifted it, weighed it, and made it her own.

As her personal theology began to take shape, Lynn looked around for verification. She found it in Shelley Takei. Shelley had been a quiet, almost shy, girl when Frank married her. Once after their marriage, during a rare visit to church, Shelley was asked what she thought God was like. She said she thought he was like Frank. But in truth, “I thought Frank
was
God,” she said.

Lynn first came to their house for a class Frank was convening in their basement. One evening when Frank was teaching Carl Jung, Shelley put their two-year-old into her crib and settled the
older children before an episode of
The Dukes of Hazzard
so that she could join the class. Shelley thought of herself as nothing special, somebody whom few people paid heed to, but Lynn seems to have loved her from the beginning. Perhaps it helped that Shelley was exactly Johnny's age and remembered him from grade school.

By the time Lynn knew her, Shelley had a huge collection of Christmas houses that she had hand-painted and displayed through the holidays. To her, they were wonderful and slightly embarrassing. “One of those things that you do when you're a housewife,” she said.

But, to Lynn, the love and care Shelley put into the houses made them “an altar to the sacred.” Shelley laughed at such a notion. “I don't even go to church,” she said.

By now, however, Lynn saw things differently. When Shelley made a meal, when she planted a garden, when she talked with her children, she was giving her gifts to the world.

Everything Shelley did was magical, Lynn thought.

When Shelley disparaged some whimsy she was creating or denigrated some thought she had, Lynn said, “That's not true. You're right.”

“She retranslated my life for me,” said Shelley.

“No, darling, I held up a mirror so you could see who you were,” said Lynn.

Lynn told Shelley that her ideas were right, that her actions were right, that everything she did was perfectly right. And, after years of hearing it, Shelley believed her. She started to follow her own thoughts and to see the value of them. At the same time, she questioned whether Lynn's ideas were giving her a false sense of herself, an illusion that shouldn't be trusted.

One day Shelley was sitting alone in her dining room when she experienced what she would now call kundalini rising or a spiritual awakening, but that wasn't what it seemed to be at the time. She
began to feel bigger. She felt as though she were getting bigger and bigger and bigger. She was horrified.
This is ego,
thought Shelley, who was in graduate school at the time.
This is what they mean by overblown ego.
This terrible thing was happening because she was starting to believe what Lynn told her. Her ego was inflating monstrously.

She expanded to fill the room and the house and the block and Clarion, Pennsylvania, where she lived, until finally she was everywhere and everything. Then it was as though all the energy popped and rushed back into her. She began crying and hyperventilating, but in some quiet part of her mind she thought,
That was not ego. That was the force of love.

“I finally understood the essence of what Lynn had been giving me,” she said. “I trusted Lynn, and I trusted myself, and I knew I could give others what she had given me.”

She began telling other women that they were right—in what they thought, how they acted, and who they wanted to be. She wrote a grant for federal money to start a displaced homemakers program. She got the grant, and, when women took her class, she told them, “Don't let that man knock you around. Don't let those people say you are stupid. Dream some dreams. You can make them happen.”

When they believed her, it caused quite a stir in the little country towns around Clarion. In her class, which she called “New Choices,” she told women with many kids and no education, women whose best job ever had been cleaning houses or taking money at the gas station, that they ought to go to college. She took them to college herself and signed them up, getting government money to pay for it. Weary-faced, quiet women who had once been perfectly reasonable and resigned started acting strangely—staying home from church to study, talking about things their husbands didn't understand, demanding that someone else cook dinner and do the wash.

Some husbands and boyfriends sent flowers and made lunch for the classes. Others protested. They hid the women's books. One rammed the family car into a tree. Several threatened to shoot themselves and their wives. One called out to his girlfriend, looped a rope from a beam, and was in the process of strangling himself when his girlfriend finally put down her books and came out to see what was wrong.

But the women didn't quit because of such resistance. Instead, they won scholarships, awards, and acclaim from their professors.

“People didn't like it when we started to think we could do more than rub our husbands' feet and take care of their kids,” said Joyce Parker, one of Shelley's students, a single mother and former meatpacker who now has a degree in philosophy. “Well, that was too bad.”