Lily Dale (6 page)

One thing puzzled me. Why would she retire? Mediumship is a good way to pick up a buck. All it takes is sitting in a chair and talking. Why retire?

“It's hard on your body. It takes a lot of energy, and the right chemistry,” she said. “Gertie Rowe always said, ‘Have the good sense to know when to get out.'”

It isn't that Betty has lost her powers. If she's at the Stump listening as mediums work, she tunes in to check their accuracy. “Ninety percent accurate is real good,” she said.

I left Betty's house in high spirits. By the time you get to her age, society has definitely cast you aside. You aren't in the movies. You aren't in the songs. You aren't even in the books because, if you were, they'd be so depressing no one would buy them. Betty was an old woman, living alone with nothing but an old dog to keep her company. And she wasn't pitiful.

She had enough powers left to check on the youngsters, and she had spirit men flitting about the house. Once, she sent them upstairs to look for a book and then excused herself after yelling into the air, “All right. If you can't find it, I'll help you.” Another time, apparently tired of chatter only she could hear, she snapped, “Fellows, while you're not doing anything else see if you can get someone to come up here and take care of that tree before it falls and breaks the house. Please. Thank you.”

She always says please and thank you.

I couldn't verify anything Betty said, not with facts and not in my own experience. Some might suspect she wasn't latched on too tight, but maybe Lily Tomlin's Trudy the Bag Lady was right. Reality is just a collective hunch.

I didn't think Betty was faking it. She was not some trumped-up gypsy pretender peering into a crystal ball. As far as I could tell, she was the real thing. What I wasn't sure of was what the real thing is.

I
picked my way carefully across the wet ground at the back of the big Victorian that sits on a corner of Cleveland Avenue. Stone angels guard the steep walk at the front of the house owned by Shelley Takei and her sister, Danielle. A lighted star can be seen in the house's uppermost window. White Christmas lights are strung along the white banisters of the long veranda. As I opened the door to a screened back porch that ran the length of the house, I faced a poster of Dorothy and Toto from
The Wizard of Oz.
On the floor of the porch, sticking out of the wall as though the house has fallen on them, are two cylinders of striped material stuffed to look like skinny legs. On the feet is a pair of glittering ruby slippers. It's the Wicked Witch. On the poster is the quote, “Toto, I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore.”

“That's for sure,” I muttered.

When I knocked, Frank Takei, Shelley's husband, opened the door, invited me inside, and called his wife from somewhere in the depths of the house. I always think of Shelley as having come toward me with arms outstretched. I know she didn't. She also didn't say, “I'm so glad to see you, darling.” She didn't know me, and Shelley disdains such “crunchy-granola” ways. But I remember it that way, probably because she often greeted me with those
words later, and even that first day she acted as though seeing me was just the purest delight. She seemed to think I was so wonderful that I almost immediately began to wonder whether maybe I was. This is not a greeting reporters often get. People are more likely to back away like I'm a rabid weasel.

I felt pretty lost and lonely those first months in Lily Dale as I wandered among aroma therapists, Reiki practitioners, and people who study irises looking for disease, folks who, when asked what they do for a living, are likely to say, “I'm a healer.” Before Lily Dale, I'd never heard anybody but Jesus called a healer, and I'm not sure even he touted himself that way. I'm not saying I doubted they were healers. I just didn't understand what they meant, and asking didn't get me anywhere. The community was full of happy-hearted, perky people, believers in humanity's essential goodness, the kind of people who said, “God is love,” and addressed the deity as “Mother/Father God,” the kind of people whose outlook contrasted so drastically with my own that they depressed me.

I would eventually find that Shelley wasn't all that different in terms of optimism, but, with a Ph.D. in transpersonal psychology and plenty of skepticism about what she saw, she at least spoke a language I sometimes understood. Her claim to Lily Dale fame is that she has spent summers in the Dale for more than twenty years, has taken practically every course offered, has spent untold hours practicing mediumship, and has never been able to conjure so much as a good “boo!” She calls herself a “remedial reader” and formed a club for the likewise impaired called the Lower Archy of the Pink Sisterhood of the Metafuzzies and Blissninnies. “Lower Archy because we're not the hierarchy, and Pink Sisterhood because we're not the White Brotherhood,” she always explains. She claims to have twenty members, but with no dues, no meetings, and no rules, membership is hard to track. The club motto is, “We don't know jack shit, but we care.”

Shelley likes to say she analyzes everything in Lily Dale with Occam's razor, meaning that she shaves off all that can be explained in a rational, normal way and then looks at what is left. Often there isn't much.

“I listen to everything the skeptics say, and I usually agree with them,” she said.

I'd heard that Lily Dale is full of energy vortexes. Shelley is a human version. Reporters are experts at instant intimacy, but Shelley had me beat. Talking with her was such a quick connection that it was close to eerie.

She was delighted that I was a reporter. Nothing about my intentions scared her. She never even asked what they were.

“I know lots of people,” she said. “I'll introduce you to them all.”

I hadn't been more than an hour in Shelley's purple-carpeted living room, sitting under the golden gaze of the life-size papiermâché angel at the end of the room, listening to stories of the women who came through her house all summer, before I realized a fact that many women before me had noted and been similarly mesmerized by. Shelley is free. She isn't bound in the same way that I am and have been all my life.

She has cropped brown hair, short stature, medium build. She dresses with a little more style than most middle-aged women at an upstate New York summer community—Capri pants, soft flowing shirts, and sandals. At fifty-five, she moves like the dancer she once was, light on her feet and quick. Whether she is lying on one of the room's two white sofas or sitting in the overstuffed old chair, she always seems to have draped herself—a little like Cleopatra, one friend said, queen of her domain, perfectly comfortable with herself and everything around her. She dislikes freeways and constricting underwear. Pretty normal.

Except. She never wears a watch and says she is always on time. She stays up late every night and sleeps until ten in the morning
no matter who is in the house. She rarely goes to church even though belonging to a Spiritualist church is a requirement for buying a house in the Dale, and she does not meditate. That is heresy in Lily Dale, where meditation is the way to the spirits and the way to wisdom. Shelley's refusal has ruffled folks so much that some have put their faces into hers and shouted, “You've got to meditate.” But she doesn't.

“Most people who meditate are trying to deal with some problem I don't have,” she said.

When I say she is free, I don't mean free in the ways people often mean when they say that about a woman. Shelley is married, has grown children, hopes for grandchildren. In fact, her life is ordinary in many outward ways. She married Frank, who was her philosophy professor, more than thirty years ago. She stayed home with her children, only going back to school for her Ph.D. when they were able to toddle after their own pursuits. She and her sister first came to Lily Dale out of curiosity. They stayed because the place charmed them.

Still, Shelley isn't like any adult I've ever met. She has a business card that identifies her as a licensed femologist and certified joyologist, titles she affirms by living them out. Frank told me that when their kids were little they would often clamor for attention as soon as she started talking on the phone. Shelley kept a box of cereal on the counter. Without interrupting her phone chat, she would sit on the counter and toss cereal about the room while the kids scrambled for it like puppies after treats.

When her son was a teenager, he composed a song about penises and mothers and things that might be done with both. Other mothers would have been horrified, and Shelley did hope he kept it from them. Meanwhile, she was his best audience.

“What else do sixteen-year-old boys think about but sex, and who do they most need to break away from but Mother? It made
perfect sense,” said Shelley, who can still sing parts of it. She supports anybody who is killing the demons they need to kill, and if they can be funny doing it, so much the better.

“Quinn would sing that song, and I'd fall off my chair laughing,” she said.

She and a gray-haired former nun named Mary Ockuly often greet each other by bumping hips. Once when we were standing with medium Sherry Lee Calkins and her two grandchildren, the adults were discussing an upcoming musical performance. As Shelley stood to the side with the kids, I noticed all three swinging their arms, clapping in front of their bodies and then clapping in back, just idly swinging and clapping. Not saying a word, just entertaining themselves.

The nine-bedroom Victorian house had no rules as far as I could tell, except that you had to strip your bed of the sheets and pillowcases before you left and remake it with a set of sheets from the closet. At one time a sign on the back door outlawed any talk of negative things, but Shelley took the sign down when it wasn't needed anymore. Now a sign says, T
HIS HOUSE IS PROTECTED BY ANGELS
.

Anybody can smoke cigarettes in Shelley's house, and most people do. Profanity is completely accepted. A favorite Takei story is of the time their older daughter returned from a school that teaches healing and mediumship and threw herself over the sofa, groaning.

Her brother Quinn asked, “What's wrong? Too spiritual?”

“Too much fucking love,” she yelled.

The only word that ever ruffles Shelley in the least is
should.

“There are no
shoulds
in Lily Dale,” she told me, cigarette in hand, feet propped on the kitchen bar.

Shelley likes to think of her house as a salon where women come every summer to discuss ways their lives have been touched
by the eternal. Women can say things there they've never said before, tell stories that would cause the rest of the world to call them insane, and talk as long as they want. That's all anyone does. They rarely clean house or cook. They rarely read and only occasionally watch television. They talk for hours, for days, for weeks, and nobody ever runs out of things to talk about.

In any given week, the house may contain women telling any number of strange stories. Mary Ann Spears, a therapist who sees dead relatives of her grieving clients, might be in town, or C. J., who was color-blind until she came to Lily Dale.

“Would you like to talk with C. J.?” Shelley asked. “The last I heard she was outside the gift shop. She saw the color blue and started following it. I'll have to see if I can find her.”

I talked to C. J., who confirmed the story. She now sees color whenever she comes to Lily Dale. The ability lasts for some time after she leaves the community and then gradually fades away.

Lorie might also be in town. She's a therapist for autistic children and perhaps the most spiritual person Shelley knows, Shelley told me. One of the first questions Lorie asked Shelley about Lily Dale was, “Why do they have artificial flowers?”

Lots of yards have tattered plastic flowers stuck into weathered old vases, and Lorie couldn't understand why a place that claims so much spirit power wouldn't be able to conjure up enough real blooms to go around. A quiet, often solemn, woman who has never had much money and has never seemed to care, Lorie told me that one morning well before dawn she was walking down the hill after milking the cow her family owned when she saw a blazing light coming from the window of her toddler son's upstairs room.

Thinking the house was on fire, she dropped the milk pails and began running toward the house. Streaks of white light continued shooting out of her son's room. It looked like lightning, but the sky was clear. When she entered the bedroom, her son was standing in
his crib, jumping up and down, yelling, “Light. Light.” But the room was perfectly safe and normal and dark, no fire, no light, and no evidence of anything like that.

Emmie Chetkin, reputedly the richest woman in Lily Dale and certainly the most powerful personality, is also a friend of Shelley's. Emmie's family is Spiritualist backwards and forwards. The Lily Dale museum has a newspaper photo of her trance-medium grandmother at a table, eyes closed, slack-jawed, floating a trumpet in front of two stunned witnesses. Some of Emmie's grown children live in Lily Dale with their children. Her family runs a fancy restaurant called Lazaroni's, about a mile away on Dale Drive. Chetkin family arguments spill out into the community occasionally as Emmie, who does everything at top speed, roars about in her SUV, braking if she sees a friend so she can hang out the window and talk about the latest fracas. “She's got all the money in the world and just as many troubles,” one Lily Dale dame said.

Several people said Emmie was buying up houses so she could take over the town. The idea that rich people, gamblers, and greedy developers covet the community's lakeside acres and plot to wrest them from Spiritualist control is a common worry.

Emmie laughed at her neighbors' suspicions. “Why would I want to do that?” she asked, rolling her eyes, throwing out her hands. She had a point. Nobody in the Dale can stand against the force of her will as it is.

She travels all over the world looking for psychics and healers. The best ones seem to come from Brazil, she told me. She once brought back a guy named Mauricio Panasset, who was also championed by Shirley MacLaine. He did healings on Emmie's friends, who said balls of light came out of his hands. The room was so bright that you could see the light through solid walls, they said.

“What stories!” Emmie said, hooting at the thought. “You couldn't see light through walls.

“People will say anything,” she said, as she went on to tell about the time she saw a South American healer stick a huge butcher knife in someone's back. “There wasn't a bit of blood.”

The women rarely bring their husbands or their children. Shelley's husband, Frank, comes to Lily Dale every June and usually leaves at the end of the month when the community starts its summer season and, as he put it, the estrogen gets too high.

There was much talk about the rise of the feminine and how the way women relate to each other is the new paradigm for spirituality. The idea that women have suppressed their innate knowledge and wisdom is a central theme of a book Shelley is writing. What kind of knowledge and wisdom?

“What are women always talking about?” Shelley asked.

Men. Relatives. Relationships.

“Relationships,” she said triumphantly. “Why? Because they are the most important thing in the world, and women know it. Men don't.”

Not that Shelley embraces every woman who manages to get through the gate. At the cafeteria, when we found ourselves seated with wacky pilgrims full of mysterious hints about their cosmic connections and eager willingness to tell us about their pain, Shelley would fall unusually silent.

“Fake orphans are all over the place,” she once said after we left.