The Medium (14 page)

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Authors: Noëlle Sickels

BOOK: The Medium
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“I was just tellin' Pop,” Lloyd said, jumping up, “he's gotta sign for me so's I can join up first thing tomorrow. Don't want to miss the show. 'Course, there won't be any problem for you, ya lucky slug.”
Helen's whole body flushed hotly, and she looked quickly at Billy. There was nothing in his profile to reveal whether or not he agreed with Lloyd. She was possessed by an urge to grab hold of Billy, to force him to face her. She wanted to wrest his attention away from Lloyd's wild talk. But his posture and his silence forbade such dramatics. Helen swallowed hard. As dazed as she'd been by the news of Pearl Harbor, she had not, until now, thought how it might reach into her life to touch her directly.
“We'll talk more later,” Mr. Mackey told Lloyd. To Helen he said, “Mrs. Mackey and the girls are in back.”
Helen left the room. Her legs felt like they were made of wood.
She found Mrs. Mackey sitting blankly at the kitchen table, a damp handkerchief clutched between her fingers. Barbara was at the stove making a pot of coffee. She greeted Helen with a warm hug. Perched on a stool near the table, Linda was licking a large, round sucker, her nose and chin sticky red. The women exchanged a few comments on what they'd heard and how awful it was and how awful it was going to be.
“Are the Japs gonna bomb us, Mommy?” Linda piped up.
“Be quiet, Linda,” her mother said.
“But are they gonna come here? Are they?”
Mrs. Mackey twisted around in her chair and gave the seven-year-old a resounding slap on her bare arm. The child dropped her lollipop on the floor and started to cry.
“I told you to be quiet, missy,” Mrs. Mackey shouted.
With great effort, Linda stifled her sobs. Her sister picked up the lollipop, rinsed it in the sink, and gave it back to her. The child judiciously slid her stool beyond her mother's reach.
Helen was surprised at the outburst. She'd never known Mrs. Mackey to strike her children. It was a measure of her upset, Helen supposed. She felt sorry for Linda, but she was glad for the ensuing quiet. She couldn't have said more or listened well. She kept imagining the bright, innocent Hawaiian morning with maybe people playing tennis or eating breakfast in a flowering garden or on the deck of a ship, maybe walking dogs and pushing baby carriages, setting out for church or sleeping in, when the noise of the bombers first boiled up. Like herself on Main Street, people must have been confused and curious, then unnerved. But unlike her, they had turned around to find death and destruction pouring down on them.
That night Helen dreamed she was treading water in the inlet of Pearl Harbor, surrounded by men sinking beneath the churned surface, planes roaring overhead. Some of the men stretched out burned, blackened hands towards her, some only threw her anguished stares, but she knew that for all of them, she was the last of life they had beheld.
The strongest feeling that lingered as she lay staring at dawn light on her bedroom ceiling was a sense that she had let the dream-men down, not by being unable to save them, but in some other worse way. But what could be worse than not being able to rescue someone from death?
She walked through the morning at school in a fog. She had to keep pushing the desperate faces from her dream out of her thoughts. Some teachers were carrying on lessons as usual, but most gave the students a study period and didn't scold if they talked among themselves. Helen spent those periods gazing out the window and humming to herself, locking her mind onto the nonsense lyrics of
Hut Sut Ralston.
At noon, everyone filed into the auditorium to listen to President Roosevelt demand that Congress declare war on Japan, which it readily did. Afterwards, the principal brought a Navy recruiting officer on stage. When the officer said it was not only the senior boys, but the sophomores and juniors who'd win this war, clapping erupted in several parts of the auditorium. Lloyd, seated at the end of Helen's row, put his fingers in his mouth and whistled loudly.
Walking home, Helen tried to recall every detail of her experience from Saturday, the flash of the blank sea and the surge of engines. Her head ached with trying to figure out how she could have read a message there.
When she found her grandmother in the living room listening to the soap opera
Life Can Be Beautiful,
Helen sat down on the floor near her chair, waited for a commercial, then rapidly explained her dilemma. Ursula turned off the radio.
“So, this is a big question you are putting.”
“Questions, Nanny. Questions, plural. Not only what was it that happened to me, and what could I have done with it, but why me? Why leave something so important with me?”
“Such signs were probably not given only to you.”
“You think other people saw and heard the same things?”
“Or something like.”
“Good.”
“Good?”
“Because then it's not all my fault. I mean, it's not my fault that I didn't tell anyone, that I didn't give the warning.”
“But you did not understand.”
“Right,” Helen said eagerly. “So how
could
I give a warning?”
“Not understanding: that, maybe, is the fault.”
Helen drooped. Her own train of thought had already taken her to her grandmother's position. There was no getting around the possibility that if she had continued to study with Ursula, if she hadn't banished Iris, she might have been better equipped to understand the vague portent that had come to her.
“It's a long time you have kept the world of spirit from your doorstep.
Nicht Willkommen,”
Ursula said, tapping her chest over her heart.
“I thought it would go away,” Helen muttered.
“Nein.
There is too much
Liebe.”
“Love?”
“How else do you imagine spirits can return but through love?”
Helen leaned back against the couch, tucking her legs under her skirt. She remembered the well-being she'd felt in Iris's presence and supposed it could be called love. She remembered the gentle approach of Mrs. Steltman's father, and the clear sense of attachment to the living that she'd gotten from both the crying little boy and the young suicide. And would she have received her visions of Mr. Mackey, or Lloyd, or Billy in the woods if she hadn't had affectionate ties with the family?
“But what about the children in the
Life
photo? Or the sea and the noise the other day?”
“The spirits send messages like … like radio waves,” Ursula said, pointing to the Philips. “Where there is someone who can receive it, he does. If the radio is on, we get sounds, whether we want them or not. If we turn the dial, we clean the static, we have a better chance to understand.”
“You mean I'm a kind of radio, only I didn't know I was on?”
Ursula nodded.
“Well, how do I work the dial?”
“You must begin again the seances. When the student is ready, a teacher always comes. For you, I think, are spirits already waiting.”
Helen didn't like that answer, though it was what she'd expected.
“If I go to seances, will I know what it means when I see things? Will I be able to explain it to other people?”
“It is not like reading the newspaper. More like telling stories about pictures. And spirits can make mistakes. Just to be dead does not mean you know all things. But many spirits are very wise. We always hope for such ones to come.”
“If it's so ticklish, why should I bother?”
Helen couldn't help but feel petulant. Here were these spirits tapping her on the shoulder, interrupting her life, and when she was finally about to give them her undivided attention, they turned the game into hide-and-seek.
“You should bother because the spirits have chosen you. Because otherwise you will live with static in your ears and confusion in your heart.”
Ursula rose. She tenderly stroked the top of Helen's head.
“And you should bother,
Liebling,
because now especially, in these black times, it is needed.”
Without waiting for a reply, the old woman left the room. Helen knew Ursula believed only one answer was possible. She didn't need to hear it said.
 
The following evening, Helen was in her room doing algebra homework when the doorbell rang. She went to the landing and peered down to see who it might be. Her uncle stood in the foyer taking off his hat and coat.
“Marie and the children are fine, Emilie. I've come about something else,” he was saying.
“You should have called, Franz. Walter would have picked you up,” Emilie said. “It's a cold walk from the train.”
Apparently he hadn't been expected. Helen started down the stairs.
“Hello, Uncle Franz,” she said.
He looked at her without seeming to see her.
“What?” he said. “Oh, yes, hello, Helen.”
They went into the living room, where Ursula and Walter were sitting on either side of a well-banked fire. Walter got up to shake Franz's hand. Franz had to say again that there was nothing wrong with his wife or children.
“I didn't want to call,” Franz said, stretching his hands
towards the warmth of the fire. “I didn't want to take any chances.”
Helen took a seat at the far end of the couch. She was trying to be inconspicuous so that she wouldn't be banished from this fascinating scene.
“Can I get you some coffee?” Emilie offered.
“No, thank you.” Franz smiled politely at her, but it was unconvincing, as if he weren't quite sure how a smile worked.
“Well, let's have it, then,” Walter said.
Franz stepped away from the hearth and put his hands into the pockets of his pants. He appeared to be gathering his thoughts, though it seemed to Helen that the trip from Brooklyn should have provided ample time to figure out what he was going to say, whatever the bad news, because, of course, it must be bad news.
“It's my brother, Erich,” he said at last.
Helen had a vague recollection of Erich. His wife Freida and their two little girls had once accompanied Helen and her cousins and aunt on a trip to the Natural History Museum, and they had stopped by the garage where he was employed as a welder to bring him his lunch pail. Erich had a thick shock of white-blond hair, Helen remembered, and skin as pink as a guinea pig's. Erich and his family had moved to Alabama last summer because he'd gotten a well-paying job helping build the Huntsville Arsenal.
“Erich was arrested last night,” Franz continued, “and this afternoon they came back for Freida and the children.”
“The children?” Emilie said, alarmed. “What do you mean they came for the children? Who came?”
“Erich and Freida arrested? What for?” Walter said.
“They are accused of disloyalty.”
Franz spit the word out as if it made a foul taste in his mouth.
“Disloyalty!” he said again, with equal disgust. “Simply
because Erich and Freida have been here twenty years without becoming citizens. That's enough, it seems, for the FBI to brand them as suspicious.”
“But the children?” Emilie insisted.
“They had to go along because there was no one to leave them with,” Franz explained. He waved his hand in the air. “They'll be all right,” he said, “It's Erich I'm worried about.”
To Helen, keeping the children with their incarcerated parents did have a horrible kind of logic, but she couldn't believe they were really all right. What would their days be like? Long, idle hours among strangers with no books or playthings, maybe even no windows to look through. And what of the nights? Foreign sounds, unfamiliar pillows, lights in the wrong places.
“I am not a citizen,” Ursula said quietly, “and I am here longer than twenty years.”
“Yes, but do you subscribe to
Social Justice
?” Franz blurted out.
“That pro-Nazi rag?” Walter said, sounding appalled. “Erich's a first-rate idiot!”
“Social Justice
?” Emilie said. “Isn't that the newsletter from the radio priest, Father Coughlin?”
“He's become such a vile hothead, his Archbishop is threatening to pull him off the air,” Walter said.
“Maybe Father Coughlin is vile, Walter,” Franz objected, “but does the FBI really have the right to imprison a man for what radio shows he listens to or what he reads? I tell you, my brother is not a Nazi.”
“Are you sure of that?”
Franz paused before replying.
“Well, he's not dangerous. I'm sure of that. He just likes to spout off when he's got a few beers in him. He went through some pretty rough times, you know—years out of work, head split open at a union march, evicted. The four of them were living
in one room for a while. One room, Walter. With rats.”
“And he thinks things like that couldn't happen if Nazis were in charge?”
Franz slumped into an easy chair and leaned back, loosening his tie.
“I don't know what he thinks. I just can't believe he deserves to be in jail. Good lord, we're not even at war with Germany!”
“But war with Germany can't be far away now,” Emilie said.
“Of course, we
will
be at war. That's not my point.”
“Then what do you mean?”
“Erich dropped his subscription to
Social Justice
more than a year ago. So for the FBI to know about it, they must have been watching him for some time.”
“Or someone told them,” Ursula said.
“Yes, possibly. But why gather information on Erich in the first place? Unless they planned to do something with it—with him—in the future. They've been getting ready, don't you see? That's why they were able to act so quickly. God only knows who else they've been watching and for how long, where else they've been digging around.”
Franz's pace had sped up as he spoke, enhancing the urgent tone of his voice. When he'd finished, it was as if someone had clamped a hand over his mouth. In the ensuing silence, a log toppled in the fireplace with a soft
whoosh,
and a small spray of sparks leapt up the chimney. Helen remembered being impressed by the sparks from Erich's welding torch. Could Erich really be a traitorous Nazi? Had he been one even then, on the day they brought him his lunch? Helen wondered if her uncle had told the whole story. She didn't think the FBI would have acted so extremely without a sound reason.
Helen surveyed the adults. Emilie was staring into space, distractedly smoothing her skirt over her knees. Nanny was watching Walter stir the fire with a poker. Franz had repositioned
himself so that he was perched on the edge of his chair, with his elbows resting on his knees and his hands clasped together. They all looked concerned, and the men also looked angry. But Helen detected something more in them than worry and anger. As she waited for one of them to speak, it struck her that they were afraid. Not for Erich and Freida, but for themselves. This made Helen, too, suddenly afraid.
“Mama?” she said feebly.
Emilie came out of her reverie and turned to Helen, but she didn't answer her.

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