Lily Dale (5 page)

B
efore coming to Lily Dale, I had consulted only two mediums. The first was a middle-aged housewife in Texas who told me that a man with animals on his wall would soon become important in my life. I was single then and took the message to mean love was on the way. I did meet a man with animals on his wall, an ornithologist with the natural history museum. He was married and did not become important in my life.

The second medium was a teenage cheerleader prophetess who was visiting churches around Dallas giving messages. I interviewed her over the phone, and she told me she saw a blond little boy close to me. She also said I'd soon receive lots of money and acclaim and buy a black Mercedes. None of that was true. But she did mention that I was having trouble sleeping, which was true. She said God was trying to talk with me, and I was too busy during the day to listen. So he was waking me up. That night when I awoke at 2:00
A.M
. I remembered her words.

“God, are you trying to talk with me?” I asked.

I was answered by a silence of such dark depth that my mind went utterly blank before it, and I fell asleep immediately.

Despite my lack of success with mediums, I decided to do my own test of Lily Dale's powers and made an appointment for a
reading with Gretchen Clark Lazarony, a fifth-generation resident of Lily Dale. She is one of four sisters referred to in Lily Dale as the “Clark girls,” after their maiden name. Three are mediums, and all look younger than their years. Three are blondes, and they all have pale, beautiful skin. Thirty years ago, Gretchen was one of Lily Dale's youngest mediums. Now middle-aged, she's still one of the most respected.

Her family spent summers at Lily Dale when she was a child. Her parents were not mediums, but they were believers. “When I would tell my mother there was a lady in the corner, she would say, ‘What's she wearing? What's she have to say, and what's she want?'” Gretchen remembered. She and her elder sister, Sherry Lee Calkins, began developing their powers only after their mother died and came back to communicate.

Gretchen's house, one of the community's nicer abodes, sits high above the street with the usual screened porch fronting it. Sherry Lee lives across the street. I was later told that the sisters sit behind their drapery and count the number of customers the other has, but I didn't believe it. They would never resort to such plebian methods. Astral travel would be more their style.

Astral travel, which is the ability to move around without one's body, isn't part of official Spiritualism, but a lot of people in Lily Dale say they do it. I once repeated Sherry Lee's claim of astral travel to another Spiritualist, who sniffed disdainfully.

“You don't believe people can astral travel?” I asked, thinking I'd stumbled onto a rare critic within the ranks.

“Oh, I believe that,” she said. “I just don't believe she can do it.”

Lily Dale is a gossipy community. When someone in Lily Dale passes on a good quip, it's prudent to ask, “Was that person living or dead when he said that?” The word
dead
isn't used, of course. They call it “passing over,” “going from the earth plane,” or “leaving for Summerland,” the Spiritualist version of heaven. Dead
people are called “spirit loved ones” or the “dearly departed.” Anyone who slips up and goes around talking about dead people, as I occasionally did, is firmly corrected, as I occasionally was.

People say you can whisper gossip on one end of Lily Dale and before you run the half-dozen streets to the other end of the community, people on that side will be ready to repeat it back to you. Because the community has far fewer men than women, some of the men do rather well on the romance front, according to local gossip. As one person put it, “This place is just one big honey pot for some of these guys.”

The hottest controversies, however, aren't about such mundane matters as debauchery. They're about matters of the spirit. Lily Dale squabbles don't address spiritual possibility—which everyone agrees is unlimited—but skill, which plenty of people take grim pleasure in reporting to be in short supply. Behind closed doors, Lily Dale fiercely debates which of its mediumistic sisters and brothers are really tight with the Beyond and which ones couldn't find spirit if they were dead themselves.

To hang a shingle in Lily Dale, mediums must pass a test. They are required to give individual readings to three members of the Lily Dale board and then give a public reading to an audience made up of the entire board. Although as many as a dozen mediums take the test every year, only thirty-six mediums were registered and able to give readings in Lily Dale the first year I was there. The low number is a matter of great pride among some people in the Dale. They think it speaks to the community's high standards, a notion they pass on to outsiders. But a sizable portion of the community rejects that contention entirely. “Who gets in is political,” I heard many people say, echoing the suspicions of small-town America everywhere. “Lots of good mediums don't pass. The people who pass the test are the ones favored by the board.”

Gretchen is a member of the town's more conservative contingent. A reserved woman, she's pleasant in a cool way, with an edge that stays sheathed most of the time but not so much that people forget she has it. She looks away from people as she talks and often wears a sort of half-smile, as though she's hoping you'll say something interesting but she doubts it. She answered my questions, but she didn't volunteer much, and she made it pretty clear that she wouldn't bother trying to convince me of anything.

I was being my most friendly, nonthreatening self, but I slipped up once. “I've been told that normal people can do what you do? Is that true?”

“We
are
normal,” she snapped, “and what we do is perfectly normal.”

I then tried asking a few questions that might puff her up a bit. “Do you have to meditate for long periods of time to prepare yourself for the work?”

“No,” she said. “I don't.”

“Is the work exhausting?”

“No,” she said. “Not for me.”

I kept tempting her with the chance to make herself sound mysterious and powerful, but she wouldn't go for it. She didn't even remember what she told people during readings, she said. “I'm just the telephone that the spirits use to get through,” she said. “Does the telephone remember what's said over it? Neither do I.”

I knew whom I wanted to contact, but I didn't expect Gretchen could do it. My Uncle Johnny had died that May. We were especially close, and I was at the hospital when he went in for a heart bypass. The doctor told us this operation had a 1 percent fatality rate. My uncle was sixty-three. His heart was strong. Nothing to worry about, the doc told us. I expected to go home that afternoon and be back at work the next day.

Something went wrong.

All my life I've feared loss, but I've been uncommonly lucky. So far only two people I'm close to have died. My grandmother and then my uncle. Both times, somewhat to my astonishment, I was sure that their spirits still lived. I can't say why. I just knew it. I looked at their bodies, and I knew that they had gone somewhere else. I can't prove it, of course, but I felt it so strongly that it was reality for me, like knowing you're in love or being sure the sun will come up. So when I went to Gretchen's house, I didn't doubt that life continued. What I doubted was that she could contact anyone who had gone to where that life went.

Gretchen ushered me into her reading room, a little parlor at the front of the house. It was a perfectly ordinary, well-lighted room. Gretchen told me she had once hoped to install red carpet and drapes as a way of warming the room up, but every time she stood in the reading room imagining how it would look, a little old lady with a terrible frown would appear in the corner. She'd purse her lips and shake her head. She didn't speak, and Gretchen didn't recognize her. So one day the medium asked the man who had sold her the house if he had any guesses about the woman's identity.

“That would be Mother,” he said. “She hated red.”

Gretchen and I sat facing one another. She said a few things that didn't mean anything to me. Then she said that she had a man. She put her hand to her chest, looked pained, and said, “Oh. He died of something with his lungs? No, his heart. Something with his heart.

“I'm getting the name John.”

Now that might seem like a score, but to me it wasn't. His name was Johnny. No one ever called him John. My mother sometimes called him Brother John, but I never did. I'd heard about so many spirits named John since I'd come to Lily Dale that I figured,
anybody would guess John, and what's the leading killer? Heart disease, right? Not a tough one to guess.

“Was there some kind of interruption at the funeral?” Gretchen asked, frowning as though she were trying to concentrate.

“No,” I said.

“That's what I see. I see that the funeral was in two parts. What happened?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“Are you sure? He's talking about the funeral being in two parts.”

I didn't want to make the connection, but maybe there was one. My cousin and I argued before the funeral began. My uncle had believed she treated him badly. Maybe she had, maybe she hadn't. It was debatable, but I was far more angry and partisan once he was dead than I'd ever been when he was alive. The way I saw it, he couldn't take up for himself anymore but I could.

Sounds like some kind of Sicilian vendetta, I know. But I confronted her. The family took sides, and, just as the limo pulled up to take us to the funeral home, the whole clan broke into something pretty close to a street fight. My surviving sixty-something uncle was chasing my cousin's teenage son around the yard threatening to kick his butt. The widow was in the street crying. My mother and my cousin's husband were standing nose-to-nose. Finally an aunt yelled, “Let's go,” and about half the family climbed into their cars and left in a screaming huff. The funeral wasn't in two parts exactly, but after the prefuneral fight the family was and still is.

The funeral was closed casket. A picture of my uncle sat on an easel beside it. None of us were crazy about that particular photograph. He was smiling, but in a kind of sad way, as though life were a little bitter to him. We'd all studied that photo enough to know how it made us feel. We'd been looking at it, crying beside it, for two days.

Now we filed into the church. My mother was beside me. My uncle's only daughter was down the row. As the organ played we
sat facing the photo. But the smile looked different now. There seemed to be a kind of glint in his eyes, and he looked as though he were about to burst into laughter. I thought,
Get a grip, girl. You are imagining things.

But his daughter, Andrea, was whispering to my mother. Then my mother was whispering to me, “Does that picture look different to you?

“Andrea thinks so, too. I didn't like that picture, but now he looks so pleased. Like he's really tickled. Something has happened.”

We all three saw it. I'm not saying that picture really changed. It couldn't have. But it sure looked different to us.

And that brings me to the last part of Gretchen's message. I finally admitted that there'd been an argument right before the funeral—not an interruption, I said, not really, but half the family did go home.

“That's it, then,” said Gretchen in the perky way that she has when she's settling something.

“He says to tell you that he was just real tickled about the whole thing.”

A lot of people would have signed up as a believer right then, but if you don't have the faith, it doesn't matter what happens. You won't be convinced. You'll pass it off as something strange, and you'll let it go. Or if you're like me, you'll get stuck on something that doesn't fit and you won't be able to get past it.

For me, the problem was the name John. If Gretchen really had my uncle, why wouldn't he give the name that I knew him by? I was sure he would have. The interruption in the funeral? Well, the funeral hadn't really started, had it? What I couldn't explain away was that Gretchen had used the word
tickled.
At the funeral his picture had looked exactly like that, like he was tickled. And he would have been. He would have thought that ruckus was about the funniest dustup he'd ever seen.

I
returned to Lily Dale on a cold March night. It was late. When I reserved the room, I told my hostess at the Lakeview guesthouse not to expect me until the next day, but once on the road I didn't want to stop. I pulled into the dirt-packed parking lot, fumbled through the darkness up the stairs of the veranda, and rang the bell. A tiny woman with so much dark red hair that I peered at it suspiciously, thinking it had to be a wig, answered the door.

“I had a feeling you would arrive tonight,” said Jessie Furst, whose yard displayed a neat little sign that proclaimed her a medium.

I snickered somewhat gracelessly. Was she kidding?

No.

This time I planned to stay as long as it took to find out whether Lily Dale really had power. If it did, I wanted to know where that power came from. Were the mediums' messages guesswork? Chance? Telepathy? Fraud? Or was Lily Dale truly what so many of its residents believed it was? They call it a “thin place,” one of those rare geographic locations where the barrier between human realities and spiritual verities is so thin that people can glimpse a universe beyond ordinary sight. The universe Lily Dale posits is far kinder than the one the rest of us live in. Everything that happens has a purpose, they say, and we all have a role.

I didn't believe any of that, but maybe I wanted to. Why else would I have come back?

A couple of signs sat in the foyer of Jessie's house. The first one irked me. It instructed visitors to take off their shoes and “borrow” a pair of slippers from a basket next to the sign. I didn't mind removing my shoes, and the slippers were a nice touch, but the quotes around borrow made me go all schoolmarmish. What did those quotes mean? That we weren't to borrow them but to take them with us? Or that we were to borrow them only and not steal them? Or did they mean nothing?

I was tired and peevish, I guess, because the next sign really made me roll my eyes. It said that Jessie did readings in person and over the phone. Over the phone? Maybe people could do readings in person, and maybe not. But over the phone?
No way,
I thought.

This was not a good start.

I'd been back in Lily Dale less than ten minutes, and I was already quibbling over quotes that were merely an attempt to be gracious and making a big deal over something most of Lily Dale thought of as nothing. Many mediums in Lily Dale do readings over the phone. I was starting way too early with the eye rolling. I didn't know yet about pets that come back with messages for their masters or the Andalusian stallion that invites people to a party. No one had yet talked about Vikings who march in the woods or living people whose faces are transfigured into those of famous dead people. I had a long way to go, and it wasn't going to be easy if I fought it every step of the way.

 

L
ily Dale didn't look the same at the end of winter. The summer's sunlit charm was gone. Without the flowers, it was easy to see the village's cracks. Pastel hues that looked festive on a warm bright day washed out and blended into winter's gray. Ice floated on Cassadaga Lake. The tourists had disappeared as
completely as the robins. Most of the mediums were gone too. Many winter in Florida. Those left were predominantly working folk—carpenters, carpet layers, truck drivers eking out a living in a region where jobs are scarce.

Cars, wearing coats of chalky grime, were the only signs of life. They stuck out around the community's parks like spiked collars, nudged next to curbs, sinking into muddy driveways. At night the blue light of television flickered from occupied houses, and the windows of Lily Dale's many vacant houses turned blind gray stares toward cold streets. If ghosts walk in Lily Dale, they have plenty of room during the off-season.

With the frippery that drapes and softens the community in the summer gone, all that was left was exactly what I wanted to know about—Spiritualist life outside the spotlight of tourists' expectations. One of my first stops was to see Betty Schultz, a tough old gal who didn't worry about choosing her words carefully.

I half-expected that the mediums would revert to normal after the tourists went home. If they did, these middle-aged and older women, most of them without a man and all of them without any money worth bragging over, would be exactly what society told them to be—drab, passed by, unimportant, a little pitiful really with their pretensions and lies. If they did revert to such a life, they wouldn't be the real thing, and I'd leave without wasting more of their time or my own.

But Lily Dale doesn't do what society expects. When the tourists go home, when the mediums shut their doors to the outside world, they don't quiet down. They up the amps.

Betty said she'd see me at two o'clock. “Two o'clock sharp,” she said. “Be on time.”

 

B
etty Schultz is one of the grande dames of Lily Dale mediumship, a woman who speaks her mind and gets her way.
I'd heard about her during my first trip, and she was every bit as formidable as I had imagined. She had a kind of Bette Davis toughness that made you know she might say anything. She's retired now. Some people would pay her whatever she asked for just one more reading, but she won't do it.

As I walked toward Betty's house on a brisk afternoon with five minutes to spare, the trees weren't even thinking green, which was good because Lily Dale had one more blizzard between it and spring no matter what the calendar said. I passed several houses that a more prosperous community would have torn down years ago. Even some of the better houses in Lily Dale look close to collapse, paint peeling, porches sagging. The community has been kept poor by the same rules that have kept it alive all these years.

Only Spiritualists can buy houses in the 167-acre compound, a stricture that can be enforced because the Lily Dale Assembly is a religious corporation made up of community residents. Lily Dale has a volunteer fire department, a post office, and a governing board of elected representatives. Its separation from the settlements around it makes Lily Dale feel like a town, but it is actually a gated membership community within the town of Pomfret.

The rule that residents must be Spiritualists keeps the client base for real estate small, but that's a minor problem compared to the fact that Lily Dale residents don't own the land their houses sit on. They lease the land from the Assembly. This ensures the Spiritualists will never lose control of Lily Dale, but it also keeps real estate prices depressed. Banks generally won't lend money for houses that sit on land owned by someone else. As a result, buying in Lily Dale takes several kinds of faith, and that suits board members just fine.

Some people are repelled by Lily Dale's rough edges. They suspect that anything not polished and slick, not varnished with money, can't be good. Even many Lily Dale residents can't resist
contrasting the shabbiness of little Lily Dale with the Chautauqua Institution, twenty miles away and founded in 1874, only five years earlier than Lily Dale, as a Protestant summer camp. Also on a lake, the Institution is now a grand place, with magnificent meeting halls, condos that sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars, an elegant hotel, and 7,500 residents. It has a symphony, an opera, a conservatory theater, and a ballet.

Some residents of Lily Dale boast that their community has resisted temptations that would have led it away from its founding principles toward the riches and acclaim Chautauqua has. Others bemoan lost opportunities.

In the summer, when Lily Dale leaders try to get big-name New Agers for lectures, it's a tough sell. Not only is the Assembly too poor to pay good money, but celebrities don't like the accommodations. They want modern rooms with air conditioning. They want room service and fine restaurants, all of which Chautauqua has and Lily Dale does not. Some luminaries have come anyway. The author Deepak Chopra spoke in the Dale before he became so famous. Author Wayne Dyer visits every year. Mediums James Van Praagh and John Edward were there the summers I visited. Edward's appearance, before he began hosting his television program
Crossing Over,
was poorly publicized, and he didn't draw the crowd he should have. Van Praagh's sellout appearance was the talk of the season. At the annual meeting, Lily Dale's president bragged so much about the famous medium's prowess that he offended some of his constituents, who felt their own powers were being somehow undermined.

Lily Dale's tatty side gave me a certain ease. Small, cramped rooms, the moldy smell of old walls, weedy yards, and porches with broken furniture don't put me off. I spent much of my childhood in such places, and I like them. They're freer. People don't have to follow as many rules. To the people of Lily Dale, that's important and always has been.

Their beliefs once caused them to be considered freethinkers. Freethinking about religion, which included escape from Christian ideas about original sin and atonement, were important reasons for the original appeal of Spiritualism. Early Spiritualists supported the abolition of slavery, women's rights, and free love, which in the nineteenth century meant the right to divorce. Lily Dale was one of the first platforms to allow women to speak. Susan B. Anthony spoke at the community's annual Women's Day so often that she was known as Aunt Susan. She was not a Spiritualist, but once, when she sat for a reading, the medium said she was bringing through Susan B.'s aunt. Anthony was unimpressed.

“I didn't like her when she was alive, and I don't want to hear from her now,” she snapped. “Why don't you bring someone interesting like Elizabeth Cady?”

Political crusading went out of fashion in Lily Dale long ago. The community's two churches rarely adjure members to go out and redress the wrongs of the world. The idea seems to be to get in touch with the spirits, and they will take it from there.

 

B
etty's screen door rattled. The porch creaked and smelled faintly musty. When I knocked, I could hear her schnauzer barking inside. I was right on time.

Betty was wearing house slippers. She'd fallen not long before while walking her dog in the woods. She lay in the cold for quite some time, and it was close to dark before she was found. Betty reclined on the coach as we talked. I sat in a chair before her, facing an antique photo.

“That's my grandfather on the wall. He's the only one with money, so I put him on the wall.”

An elaborately carved teak chair sat across the room. Betty invited me to sit in it. I did.

“Do you feel anything?” she asked.

No.

“How are your feet?”

Fine.

Betty looked disappointed.

“Once a lady sat there and said, ‘I can't feel my legs. I can't feel my legs.' I said, ‘You better get out. You're sitting on my father.' I knew he was in the chair. He had sugar. He'd had a foot amputated, and his legs were very bad.”

My feet were fine, but I got up anyway. The dog was giving me a strange look.

“Dogs are very aware of spirits,” Betty said. “Nobody has told them spirits don't exist.”

She has four dogs in spirit and a dead friend who takes care of them. “Every once in a while he'll bring me a dog and I'll lose it,” she said, looking mournful. “Show me people, but don't show me dogs. I love my dogs.”

Nobody in Lily Dale seems to doubt that pets live on after death and visit their owners. One medium specializes in pets that have passed over. The best story I heard of that ilk was about a woman worried that her late dog was angry because she adopted a new puppy. When she consulted a medium, he told her, “Your dog doesn't mind the new dog, but he doesn't like the pup using his food bowl.”

“What should I do?” the woman asked.

“Have a ceremony to retire the old bowl,” the medium said, “and buy a new bowl for your new dog.”

At one point in our interview Betty stared at the ceiling, cackled, and said, “Oh, you think so, do you?”

Looking my way again, she said, “Don't mind me. I'm talking to my spirit helpers. I call them ‘the boys.'”

Betty isn't married now, but she once was.

“My husband thought I was a nutcase,” she said.

Imagine that.

She took a drag off her cigarette and said, “I finally divorced him.”

I laughed and glanced at Betty's face to see how that went over. It went over fine.

Betty didn't mind that I might think she was crazy, didn't mind at all.

Gertie Rowe, her mentor who could float seven trumpets in the air, taught Betty not to care what others thought. “They put her in a nuthouse more than once,” Betty confided, “and her sister would have to go and bail her out.”

Betty has seen it all.

When two young men disappeared and were suspected to have drowned in Cassadaga Lake right off Lily Dale's shores, their spirits appeared at Inspiration Stump, dripping water. Betty, saddened to see that they really had drowned and surprised because she had thought the missing boys were much younger, sighed and gave them the comfort they were seeking. “All right, boys,” she said. “We'll find you.” They did.

Once she had a lump in her breast. Her doctor asked, “What do the spooks say?”

“They say ‘not cancerous,'” she told him.

“I don't think so either,” he said, and that was that.

Betty's mediumship has helped people believe there is a God, she said. It has helped them believe in the afterlife, and that's its purpose. As for questions about this life and asking favors from spirit, “You don't ask unless you're desperate” she said. “You don't get piggish. You don't get the lottery, but I've always been taken care of.”

Is her religion real?

“Take everything I have. Take my loved ones. Take my home. Leave my puppy dog alone, but take everything else I have. I will survive. But take my religion, and I won't. My belief in my God, my spirit loved ones, my understanding of natural laws, it's what's gotten me through it all. Bungled as I have, it's what's gotten me through.”