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Authors: Noëlle Sickels

BOOK: The Medium
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“That's why I didn't call,” Franz said softly. “They could be spying on me, too.”
“Oh, surely not,” Emilie said nervously.
“They picked up a Jap at the train station in Newark just because he was holding a map of Brooklyn!”
“You have something to hide,
Junge
?” Ursula queried Franz.
It was in all their minds, Helen thought, though only Nanny could have asked so bluntly and so soon. Even she had tempered the near-accusation by calling him “lad.”
“I don't want Marie to know,” he said, looking pointedly at Walter. “Not that I've done anything wrong, anything to be ashamed of. I just don't want her worrying.”
Walter nodded. “I won't tell her unless I have to. But as her brother, I reserve the right to do what's in her best interest.”
Franz looked at Helen then. She expected to be dismissed from the room.
“If there is nothing wrong or shameful,” Ursula interjected, “our Helen may hear.”
Franz cleared his throat.
“A while ago,” he said, “I went to some meetings of the German-American Bund.”
“What?” Walter said. “You're a member of the Bund?”
“No, I'm not a member. I just went to some meetings. Years ago.”
“The Bund! Hooligans and crackpots who like to dress up in uniforms and march around giving the
heil
salute. Did you know that last summer they burned a cross down at their Camp Nordland in Sussex County? They give us all a bad name, Franz. People start presuming every German is a Nazi. Whatever were you thinking?”
“It's a perfectly legal organization, Walter.”
“You call that an excuse?” Walter said loudly. He tried to reinsert the fireplace poker into its stand, and when he couldn't get it in easily, he threw it down on the hearth.
“Walter,” Emilie said, “Franz didn't come here to be yelled at. The Bund is finished now, anyway.”
Helen knew all about the Bund's recent demise. The organization had been in the news a lot this year because seven of its leaders had been tried for breaking New Jersey's 1935 law prohibiting the promotion of hatred based on race or religion. Her history teacher had used the case as a study in the American legal system. Just last week, two days before Pearl Harbor, the New Jersey Supreme Court had overturned the convictions on the grounds that the 1935 law violated the state constitution. Helen's teacher said the Bund Nazis might gloat that the reversal demonstrated the weakness of democracy, but, in fact, it showed just the opposite. Besides which, the teacher added, Bund Führer Fritz Kuhn was doing his gloating in Sing Sing, where he'd been sent in 1939 for grand larceny after he'd been caught stealing Bund funds for himself.
“Yes, the Bund is bankrupt,” Franz said, “but there may be lists somewhere. Not just of members but of … I don't know … of sympathizers or something.”
“Why
did
you come, Franz?” Walter said coldly. “Trying to pull us all down, are you?”
Franz stood up.
“I don't want to put you or anyone in jeopardy,” he said with, Helen thought, a surprising degree of dignity. “I just wanted to make you aware of what might happen to me so that, I hope, you're prepared to take care of my family.”
“Nothing's going to happen, Franz,” Emilie said, crossing to him and putting her hand on his sleeve. “You're an American citizen.”
“Even so,” Ursula said, “he is right to make ready.”
Walter took a deep breath. He picked up the poker and set it in its place.
“I'm sorry, Franz,” he said. “Of course I'd take care of Marie and the kids. But I doubt that I'll have to. If all you did was go listen to a few speeches, I think you're safe.”
“That's all, Walter. I swear.”
“And if all Erich did was read trash and make beer hall boasts, he and Freida will probably be released soon. But you'd better drum it into his thick head he's got to watch his step from now on.”
“Right,” Franz said and extended his hand to Walter.
Walter hesitated only a moment before shaking his brother-in-law's hand, but Helen noticed it, and she was sure Franz and everyone else had, too. She wondered if it signaled a lingering annoyance that would pass, or if it went deeper than that. Did her father distrust her uncle? Was he trying to draw a boundary between them?
Helen thought she herself would never look at her uncle in the same way. She had never considered before what kind of a man he might be. He was a presence at the dinner table a few times a year. When she was younger, he'd been a dispenser of peppermints and pennies. Now the picture was messier, sadder. He had used poor judgment; perhaps he had even coddled ugly beliefs. She felt sorry for him, even as she realized she didn't
understand him. During the past couple of days, in the lap of war, everyone around her—at school, in the neighborhood, on the radio—had been talking as if the world were a clear, black-and-white pattern of good and evil, right and wrong, with or against. But maybe it wasn't as simple as that. Maybe it never could be.
Four days after Pearl Harbor, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States. So did Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria. That whole week was dense with news. Helen began reading the
Bergen Evening Record
more thoroughly than she ever had before.
Every day the paper carried stories about war-related activities throughout the state. In Newark, the Red Cross set up a blood drive. Students at the New Jersey College for Women started knitting for the Army. Guards and roadblocks were posted at key facilities like the R.C.A. plant in Camden and the Standard Oil refinery in Bayonne. Mines were laid in the ocean off Sandy Hook. Communities everywhere devised strategies for air raids, including siren signals and evacuation plans. Housewives were buying black fabric for their windows, fire buckets to douse incendiary bombs, and crowbars and hatchets to dig out of a caved-in house. In Paterson, the Italian National Circle, a civic club, changed its name to the Panthers of Paterson. Two Jehovah's Witnesses were fired from a factory in Hillside because they refused to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. An “America First” anti-war rally in Jersey City was cancelled. And every day, as the telegrams arrived, obituaries of local men killed at Pearl Harbor appeared.
Many of River Bend's young men enlisted. Recruiting stations all over New Jersey were open twenty-four hours a day to handle the crush. Lloyd, tall for his age and brimming with self-confidence,
managed to convince the Army to take him without proof of age. Billy told Helen that when Lloyd came home with his triumphant announcement, Mrs. Mackey had begged her husband to take Lloyd's birth certificate to the recruiting station, but he had said the deed was done and not worth undoing since Lloyd would be eighteen in six months. Rosie's brother, Owen, had also lied in order to sign up, and he was only sixteen. His mother had provided him a letter attesting that he was of age. The high school band took to playing at the bus station when groups of boys went off for their physicals, just as it used to do when the football team left for an away game.
Billy confided to Helen that he thought it was foolish for Lloyd to drop out of school, but when she was too vehement in her agreement, Billy had snapped that at least Lloyd was a brave fool. Lloyd had worked on his brother to join up, too, but Mr. Mackey convinced Billy he would be more valuable to the war effort working at Wright Aeronautical than in uniform. Besides, Mrs. Mackey wasn't in any shape to see another son become a dogface soldier.
Helen was glad Billy's job made him eligible for draft deferments, but if the war lasted any time at all, he was bound to get restless. She'd already noted embarrassment in his manner whenever they met friends about to go off to boot camp. Shaking their hands to wish them luck, he often held on a moment too long, as if he wished they'd pull him along with them. She'd thought, watching him on these occasions, that a part of him was pulled along with every boy who departed, and that eventually there wouldn't be enough gravity to anchor him at home.
Helen continued to dream about the sailors at Pearl Harbor, and some nights, she also encountered planes crashing in a desert, or contorted bodies strewn in jungles and snowbanks.
She never saw unique facial features or identifiable uniforms. She awoke from these dreams gasping for air, as if she herself were trapped inside the plummeting, smoke-filled plane, or lying facedown in rotting foliage or icy puddles. Her appetite declined, and circles showed under her eyes.
As the war news worsened, so did Helen's dreams. By mid-January, German submarines were sinking American cargo ships off the Atlantic coast at the rate of ten a week. Bodies and wreckage washed up on the beaches of New Jersey and other eastern seaboard states. In one dream, Helen found herself at familiar Point Pleasant, watching a man's body roll up and back with the surf.
Ursula insisted Helen was having visions, while Walter claimed she was only fashioning images out of news reports. He stopped talking about the news at dinner and discouraged Helen from reading the paper. But she caught fragments of radio bulletins, overheard conversations on the bus, got information from classmates and teachers. The war was on everyone's lips, especially since it was not going well. The Japanese were sweeping through the Pacific, driving the British out of Singapore and Burma, battering American and Philippine forces in Bataan and Corregidor. The British Eighth Army had kept the Suez Canal out of the hands of General Rommel, but the crafty “Desert Fox” had not been beaten, and his German and Italian tank divisions were mounting a fearsome counteroffensive. And although at Moscow, for the first time in the war, the Nazis had been forced to retreat, it was due, in part, to “General Winter,” which froze into inactivity guns and radios and engines, as well as the sick and dying. Come spring, Moscow might yet be taken.
After one spate of four straight nights of repeated nightmares, Walter sat with Ursula and Helen at the breakfast table. Emilie was sleeping in. She'd had even less rest than Helen, getting up each time the girl called out and at other numerous times to
look in on her.
“This can't go on,” Walter said.
“You are still against the seances,
ja?”
Ursula asked.
He nodded glumly.
“I don't mind, Papa,” Helen said, “if it'll make the dreams stop. Besides, I think it's something I
should
be doing anyway.”
“I don't want you to,” Walter said firmly.
“All right, Papa.”
Walter reached across the table and patted Helen's hand, but he looked so worn out and worried, she thought it should be she patting him.
“Here is another idea,” Ursula said. “Helen will sleep in my room, and when the dreams come, she will quick tell me their story.”
“What good will that do?” Helen asked.
“Together we will find a path so that you can come and go as you want inside the dreams.”
“You can do that?” Walter said dubiously.
“I can make the good try.”
Walter rubbed his forehead, considering, then stood up. “I'll get the camp cot from the garage. Emilie will want to scrub it down.”
Ursula reached out and wrapped her fingers gently around Walter's wrist. It was unusual for her to make such an intimate gesture towards him.
“Walter, if this ends the dreams or not, still you must let Helen work in spirit.”
“I'm sorry, Nanny, my mind's made up.”
The old woman let go of his wrist. “It is not the right decision.”
“We've been through all this,” Walter said in an aggrieved tone. “You admit yourself that your seances aren't completely aboveboard. You and Emilie say there is always some kind of
truth behind the fabrications. All right, I'll accept that. I'm sure many people leave your seances comforted. Maybe they don't care whether they've been duped. But I don't want Helen entering that world of half-truths. I don't want her thinking it's all right to deceive people if it will make them feel better. I don't want her learning to lie so well she begins to believe her own lies.”
Ursula glared at her son-in-law.
“I could make many answers to you, Walter,” she said, “but I give only one: Helen will not need to lie because Helen is real.”
As tired as she was, Helen felt a thrill, part pride, part fear.
Silence congealed around Ursula's last word. Outside, it had begun to snow. Walter crossed to the door and opened it. Cold air coiled into the room.
“After the seance with the hanged boy,” Ursula said to him, “you said she might try again some day. Her day is here, Walter. She wants to serve.”
Walter looked wearily at Helen.
“Are you sure?” he asked her.
“I think so.”
“As I recall, Nanny,” Walter said, turning to Ursula, “we agreed on possibly
one
other séance.”
“One is enough. If you can keep open your mind.”
“With your home circle only. No paying customers looking for advice.”
“Not so much now do clients want advice,” Ursula replied. “Just one more contact with their soldier. To have a more easy picture than the storm of blood and pain they keep imagining.”
“Nevertheless, no clients.”
“We will do as you say.”
Walter took a wool shirt from a hook beside the door.
“I'll get the cot.”
“
Gut.
To tame the dreams must come first.”
Ursula began by suggesting Helen try to wake herself up when a dream became too frightening. There was a point in every dream when Helen realized she was dreaming, but until her grandmother advanced the idea that she could secure her own release, she had remained ensnared in the dream until some unendurable image or slamming terror jolted her awake.
Eventually, Helen became adept at escaping a dream when she wished, but it was always a struggle, an amazingly physical struggle in which she had to will her heavy, supine body slowly up through an invisible, viscous substance, as if she were hauling a full bucket out of a well. The required effort was greatest at the start, the drag and weight of the thick matter holding her down the strongest then. Once awake, Helen would rouse her grandmother, and the old woman would sit up and calmly ask questions to help her revisit the dream and pick out details.
Ursula told Helen to call on Iris at bedtime to accompany her into the dreams. Helen did, and once in a while in the midst of a dream, she would catch a glimpse of something purple, in the shadow of a shattered doorway, at the edge of a battlefield. Helen came to feel that Iris was with her even when she couldn't find the purple, and so she felt less frightened and almost curious about what she was seeing. She waited longer and longer before waking herself up, and sometimes she let the dream run its course. Oddly enough, as the dreams came to disturb her less, they diminished in both intensity and frequency. By the beginning of February, she was able to move back into her own room.
But she had found no communications in the dreams, beyond the human tragedy of war, which any magazine or newsreel could tell as well. Her grandmother assured her that clearer meanings would emerge during seances. Though Walter had agreed to only one sitting with the home circle, Ursula was
confident that if all went well, he could be convinced to allow Helen to do more. If not, she intimated, Helen would have to decide for herself which dictates were more important, her father's or spirit's.
The seance was set for late March. Ursula wanted to be sure the dreams had been corralled, and she wanted to prepare Helen with exercises like billet reading and self-inducing light trances. She had her try automatic writing again, too, which came a bit easier than it had in the past. No definite messages came through, but she did get a few evocative phrases like “we're going down,” and “sweet rest beyond the river,” and many variations on the word “mother.”
One preparatory task Helen set on her own was to explain to Billy her intention of becoming an active medium. He had always known of Ursula's doings, though he'd never asked Helen about specifics, except to inquire once, years ago, if her grandmother had a crystal ball. The Schneiders and the Mackeys were cordial neighbors, and the Schneiders had helped Mrs. Mackey whenever they could during the hard years Mr. Mackey had been away—sending over cabbage soup or macaroni and cheese, saving Helen's outgrown clothes for Linda, once even giving them coal when they had no fuel and were burning old tires for warmth. Helen was counting on all this history to ease the way for Billy to accept her mediumship.
She chose Valentine's Day. They'd decided to spend the day in New York. Billy had quit Benson's when they lengthened the shifts at Wright Aeronautical, so his Saturday afternoons were free. They went ice-skating at Rockefeller Center, window-shopped on Fifth Avenue, and ate at the Broadway Automat. They'd seen lots of young men in uniform on the streets, prompting Billy to drop into St. Patrick's Cathedral and light a candle for Lloyd, who was in basic training at Fort Bragg in North Carolina.
Twice, Helen noticed auras around soldiers who passed them, but she looked quickly away. Her grandmother had instructed her to close down attention to any psychic information that tried to break through when she hadn't sought it. She'd be more powerful in seances then, as well as more relaxed in her day-to-day life.
It was not until they were on the evening ferry home, leaning tired and dreamy on the outside railing despite the cold, that Helen summoned enough nerve to have her talk with Billy.
“I have something to tell you,” she began.
He was peering over the side of the boat at the dark water.
“Hmm?”
“About some dreams I've been having.”
“Dreams?”
“Things like this have happened to me before, but not as much as now.”
“What do you mean?” He turned his head toward her.
“I've been dreaming about sailors. From Pearl Harbor. And sometimes soldiers. Dead sailors and soldiers.”
“I guess a lot of people have been doing that.”
“Well, maybe. But I'm going to do something about it.”
“You're not making much sense, Helen.”
“I'm sorry. I'm a little afraid to say it out plain. Afraid of what you might think.”
He gave her a quizzical look.
“I guess you better try,” he said. “But give me the real dope, okay?”
Helen nodded, more to bolster her courage than to answer Billy.
“I'm going to try to get messages from spirits. I'm going to be a medium.”
“A medium?” he said sharply. “You don't really believe in that stuff, do you?”
His tone was scornful. Helen felt a spike of fear in the pit of her stomach.
“I kind of have to believe in it.”
“Have to?” Still a breath of scorn, blunted, with some effort it seemed, to mere doubt.
“My dreams aren't like regular dreams, Billy, not even like regular nightmares. And there've been times … times that I've seen things … when I was awake.”
“Holy cow,” Billy said, shaking his head. He turned his gaze away from her, lifting it to the sky, which was full of stars. Helen recalled the perturbed
Astronomer
statue from the World's Fair. Maybe he'd been oriented skyward because there was something on earth he didn't want to face.
“I always figured your grandmother was only pretending,” Billy said after a few moments. “I thought the people who came to see her must just be lonely, or out for some fun, or maybe a little …”
“Crazy?”
He looked at her as if he'd just noticed that she had a big, ugly birthmark on her face.
“You said it, not me.”
He kept on staring, and she couldn't think what to say next. She wanted him to hold her, or blow warmth from his mouth onto her gloved fingertips, or tell her that her hat made her head look like an acorn. Anything but this pensive study.
“Could we wait and see, Billy? Could we just wait and see?”
He let out a long sigh.
“You really think you're gonna talk to ghosts,” he said, shaking his head.
It was almost a question, but Helen decided to act as if it weren't. She also decided not to press him for reassurance. It was enough that he'd softened his voice, that he'd propped his forearms on the railing again and resumed watching the ferry's
wake. When he shifted his observation to the silhouette of blacked-out Manhattan, she slid closer to him so that the padded shoulders of their thick coats were touching. He didn't put his arm around her, but he didn't pull away, either, so she told herself to be satisfied and not go looking for trouble. Trouble was completely capable of finding its own way to her, if it was interested.

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