Lily Dale (4 page)

Billy Turner, who died about twenty years ago, started as a wildly popular child medium. Billy's mother wanted him to
become a lawyer and to marry, but Billy was gay, and he also had the gift. So he stayed in medium work, but the work never made him happy and he drank. When Billy went on a bender, he didn't hide out, as Slater had. He liked singing to the tourists as they sat over coffee and cake in the cafeteria. “Yes, Jesus loves you. Yes, Jesus loves you,” he would warble sweetly and then break off abruptly to tell the crowd, “That's a lie.”

 

S
keptics often say mediums get their messages by picking up nonverbal cues and unconscious hints. I don't think so. Many mediums are so sweetly vague that I have wondered how they find their way home. Some of the Dale's best sensitives are awkward in one-on-one conversations. Trying to talk with them can be like George Burns talking to Gracie Allen. You're always the straight man faced with a wacky kind of wisdom you can never quite grasp. If it is your turn to speak—and it usually isn't—the medium's eyes start to waver and a distracted look comes over her face. Mediums treat conversational cues like gnats, ignoring them or swatting them away. If you have something to say, talk fast, because whatever the medium is paying attention to, it isn't you. Otherworldly input is many mediums' best hope.

Martie is fairly tuned in to the world around her. She makes eye contact, seems to hear living voices even when they aren't talking about her, and responds in a fairly earthbound way. Occasionally, she will get a preoccupied look and make a pronouncement that's a little more personal or a bit more philosophical than anything we “insensitives” are saying. She reattaches pretty quickly, often with the words, “I don't know why I said that,” which I have taken to mean that whatever she just said was of a cosmic nature.

That evening Martie sat down, took a glass of water from Frank, and apologized to Carol.

“I would have called on you,” she said, “but I really needed to talk with that woman in the hat.”

During the daily free message services, each medium is allowed to give messages to three different people, and then another medium comes forward. The free events are Lily Dale's way of helping humanity, but they also give student mediums practice, and established mediums can pick up new business. Martie's third message went to a woman wearing a baseball cap over what looked to be a bald head—obviously a woman in cancer treatment.

“She thought she was going to die soon,” Martie told Carol, “and I saw that she wasn't going to die until November. I needed to tell her to start enjoying the time she has left.”

Carol received this bit of information with a murmur. Perfectly understandable. Of course. Did she want Martie to give her the message that came to her at Forest Temple?

She did. Of course. Believing Noel still existed was Carol's only solace. If she knew that her darling was happy, she could bear the dark stretch of lifeless time before her, but if Martie said something trivial or obviously false, if she turned out to be a faker thinking she could lead grief-addled widows astray with fanciful tales, that would kill all hope.

Carol took the chance. “Can you give me the message?”

Martie could, and so she began.

“Your husband was an avid golfer,” she said.

That could have been a guess. Carol knew that. She is white, middle-class, middle-aged. Someone might have told Martie that she lived in South Carolina, where golfing is a year-round activity. But it was true that Noel had been a passionate golfer. They both were. They had done almost everything together. They worked in the same high school where he taught chemistry. They rode to and from work together. They sometimes lunched together. And they golfed together, although Noel was much better than Carol.

So yes, he was a golfer. Determined that she would give away as little as possible, Carol nodded.

“Yes.”

“Well, he wants you to know that he has made a couple of holes-in-one since he passed over.”

Is she being flip?
Carol thought.
Why would he say that?
Carol hadn't spent much time imagining heaven, but holes-in-one were never part of what she did imagine.

Martie wasn't laughing. She put her hands out in front of her body, palms down.

“It's as though he is sitting at a table,” the medium said, “and he's working his hands on the table, moving them. He says for me to tell you that you still aren't placing your feet correctly. He moves his hands to show you how to place your feet.

“If you don't, he says, you're going to…” Martie stopped and flicked her eyes up as though she were thinking. “If you don't…”

She pantomimed holding a golf club in front of her body, and she swung to the side in a way that would have made the ball slice.

Carol began to cry. Martie looked at her with the saddest, most tender expression.

“He's telling me that he likes it better when you are laughing.”

When Carol's sobs subsided enough for her to speak, she said, “He always said that I was never going to make my shots unless I placed my feet differently, and he always used his hands, not his feet, to demonstrate. I used to get angry, and he would say, ‘Fine, you stand the way you want to stand, but this is what's going to happen.'” And then he would slice through the air in the same kind of pantomime that Martie had used.

No one else could have known those things, Carol said. “It was something that Noel and Noel only would say.” Her tears were coming from relief. “Martie was confirming what I had so much
wanted to believe. I felt a sense of peace that couldn't have been more palpable if someone dropped a sheet over me.”

The medium wasn't finished.

“You spent a lot of time delving into and trying to discover information about your husband's illness, didn't you? You became obsessive about it.”

Carol laughed. “I'm sure there are people who would call me obsessive.”

“I see piles of notes.”

“You need to look again because I have those notes in three-ring binders.”

“I feel, and your husband feels, that you need to put that behind you. When you go home, I would like you to wrap those binders as nicely as you want to, and I see a big red bow. And then I want you to put them in a box and put them away.”

Carol knew that Martie was right. “A big part of me still anguishes because in spite of everything, I came up short. I had to let that go.”

Everything the medium said comforted and amazed Carol. But Martie wasn't entirely accurate. “Your husband passed away months ago,” she said.

“Well, it's been a few months,” Carol replied. Their conversation was taking place in early July and Noel had died on April 8.

But Martie shook her head. “No,” she said. “That's not what I'm getting. I'm getting that he died six to eight months ago.”

When Carol told me her story, she stopped at that point and said, “Hold that in abeyance. Keep it in mind until I tell you what happened the next day.”

P
icnic tables scattered around the grass near the Good Vibrations Cafe were filled with visitors eating sandwiches. It was her first visit to Lily Dale, and Marian Boswell had come from a service at the Healing Temple. Every day during the summer season Lily Dale hosts two services for hands-on healing. Healers don't promise that the blind will see or the lame will walk, but they say it could happen. They're channeling divine healing energy, they say, and it will at least make you feel better.

Energy is an all-purpose word in Lily Dale. “I don't like her energy,” someone would say with a shrug if she disliked a neighbor. It was so handy and neat a piece of jargon that I soon picked it up myself.

“Bad energy,” I'd say regretfully when someone rubbed me wrong. Listeners would nod thoughtfully, taking a moment to consider all that meant.

The healers channel energy in order to readjust energy. The mediums raise their own energy to meet spirit energy. They also read energy. More than once when I protested that something a medium told me about myself wasn't true, she would reply, “I'm getting this from you energetically,” as though that settled the matter and would shut me up for sure.

The spirits themselves are often energy. Mediums might tell a tourist, “I'm getting a male energy,” and be answered with a too-eager guess: “Is it my father?”

“No, it's a younger energy. Perhaps from your father's side.”

Healers channel energy while standing at the front of church. Little benches sit before them. When the benches are empty, the healers stare straight ahead with their hands folded. Anyone who wants healing sits on the bench, facing away from the healer, who then starts moving his or her hands over the supplicant. The healers start at the head and shoulders and move down the body, without touching the central body because mediums say that's illegal in New York unless you have a license. Some use a kind of sweeping motion. One healer told me she could feel the tangles of blocked energy as she smoothed them.

After the healers finish, they often hug the people who've been sitting before them, and sometimes they whisper something. Healers flick their hands when they finish, as though they're flinging water drops off their fingers. That's to release the pain and illness they have absorbed. Bad energy. Some say they can feel it in their own bodies, especially their hands. Finally, the healers go to a basin at the side of the church, rinse their hands, dry them, and return to their benches.

All the while, sweet music is playing. Being there is restful if you don't pay attention to how some people act. Certain healers have bigger reputations than others. So some people wait for those benches to be clear. Generally people take turns, but I once saw a woman in a pink suit practically knock an old lady over to get to the healer she wanted.

Marian meditated while her mother and their friend Mary Ellen went up front. As often happens when she meditates, her mind filled with vivid colors, she said. They swirled with such energy that she sometimes felt as if a cool breeze were being stirred
up, but unlike previous times, when Marian opened her eyes, the colors didn't go away. They were everywhere, she said. Because this was her first visit to Lily Dale, Marian thought everyone saw them.

“What's with the colors?” she asked Mary Ellen.

As they walked toward the Good Vibrations Cafe, passing men eyed Marian, as they always did. With long brown hair, blue eyes, and plenty of curve, Marian had attracted male attention for so long she didn't know any other reality. She didn't look back. Marian had the man she wanted. She had the perfect husband. Everyone acknowledged that. Her mind was on spiritual matters.

Mary Ellen explained that she'd never seen the colors, and she didn't know anyone who had. As they settled at a picnic bench, Mary Ellen spotted a woman she knew, a surgeon from Cleveland, and motioned her over. The woman's husband had cancer, and, although she was not a medium, she often came to Lily Dale to take classes. They were chatting in a casual, companionable way when the woman abruptly leaned toward Marian and began talking in a stern voice, like a teacher lecturing a poor pupil. Her timbre was low, as though she had suddenly developed a cold or gotten a shot of testosterone.

“You're going to have to give up everything you know,” she said, her eyes boring into Marian's. “You're going to have to jump into the void. It's not going to be easy. What you've done before has worked, but it's not going to work anymore.”

Ominous words? Not to Marian. She was thrilled.

“I thought she was telling me that the wonderful life I was living would lead me into a new spiritual richness. I thought I'd already begun,” Marian told me.

The next day she went home—to her lovely house that so many people envied, and she told her husband, whom so many women admired. She bragged almost. He listened sympathetically,
as he always did. Everything she said interested him, her perfect husband, so handsome, so successful, so thoughtful.

Marian and Jack had met at work. Both were high-powered, ambitious, and successful. They fell in love. Both were married to other people, but that hadn't mattered. Although Marian's husband took the divorce hard, he was a good guy, and they'd been able to stay friends. Anyone could see how much happier Marian was.

She and Jack were a Barbie and Ken couple, in love with power and money and their own wonderful lives. Jack's divorce took years. He told Marian that his wife accused him of things, things Marian thought were absurd, like hiding money. But eventually they won their freedom and everything was perfect, until one day when Marian was in a business meeting and a ringing began in her ears.

“Do you hear that?” she asked the people next to her.

They didn't. It was a high-pitched piercing sound, something like what a dog whistle must sound like to a dog. Marian could hardly concentrate. When she left the meeting, the sound ceased. But the next day, when she sat down at the conference table ready to deal, the ringing began again. Again no one else heard it.

Inexplicably, her interest in work began to flag. Once eager to start the day early, she now came in late. She began giving tasks to her assistant. She started missing meetings, closing the door to her office. Instead of working, she read magazines and listened to music.

She quit her job with Jack's support and began renovating a house for them. She painted and gardened, and her life became wonderful again. Once, when working on her house, she dropped a tool, and as she bent to pick it up she muttered, “Fuck it.”

As she raised up, Marian felt the presence of her late grandmother so forcefully that she heard herself say, “I'm sorry. I know you hate that kind of language.”

But of course no one was there, and she felt a little silly. All that time working alone calmed her but also made her more and more reflective.

Jack brought Marian flowers every day. He surprised her with gifts of jewelry. When he was away on business, he sent long e-mails and tender letters. Other women compared their husbands to him and always found them lacking.

At night when Jack fell asleep, Marian would think back over her day. She would count the blessings of her wonderful life, and she would pray. But as she was thanking God and feeling so blessed, a memory of the pain she had caused her ex-husband often pushed its way into the dark room and settled on her like an ache. Her prayer would shift then, and she would ask, “God, how can such a wonderful life have come from so much suffering? Help me understand.”

Marian wasn't nearly as Catholic as she'd once been. “When we were growing up there was a priest at the end of our dinner table every Sunday,” she remembered. “My father was determined we'd all go to heaven whether it killed us or not.”

When her parents divorced, her dad stopped believing in the God of the Catholic Church, and her mother started believing in all sorts of gods. She moved the kids to Flint, Michigan, and joined the hippie revolution. Marian had dabbled in lots of kinds of faith, but now it was those old Catholic ideas that seemed to be reasserting themselves.

“Help me understand,” she begged God every night.

And he did.

Three years later, she laughed as she told me about her first day in Lily Dale. She had been so innocent, so egotistical, and so wrong. The surgeon wasn't being cryptic at all. She meant exactly what she said. Marian's prayers set her on the path toward the truth about her husband and about herself. She was going to lose it all. Everything she had.