Lily Dale (9 page)

“Haven't you had feelings about things that were going to happen?” the mediums asked.

“Not really,” I'd reply. That wasn't exactly true. I do have premonitions. I think I'm going to die every time I get on a plane. If
it's not me who is going to die, it's someone I love. Every time my relatives plan to visit, every time the phone rings after dark, I'm positive that the Old Reaper is rapping. I've been so sure I was going to die that I've left messages on my desk for my kinfolk to open once I'm gone. I used to buy all sorts of food before I went on a trip, as though produce waiting to be cooked would exert some protective force. On the way to the airport, I have reminded my husband more than once that he's to take care of my parents if I don't come back.

I do not tell people about my fears because “death by irony” is another one of them. In the newspaper business, you're always writing or reading some story about somebody who moved out of the city to be safe and got run over by a tractor or somebody who left a note on her desk about dying before she left on the trip that killed her. Those stories often say, “Ironically…,” and that's death by irony.

When the mediums tried to convince me that I had power, I said politely, “No. I don't sense things.” That wasn't a lie, because I'm never right. Thank God. If I believed all the terrors I sense, I'd never leave the house.

I came to Lily Dale as an observer. Nothing more. But Lily Dale doesn't like that. It's an equal opportunity place. “Anybody can do what we do,” the mediums said repeatedly. “You can do it too.”

P
at Naulty, the English professor whose son died playing Russian roulette, was walking away from an afternoon message service at the Forest Temple when a man parking his car waved and called to her. At the service, a medium had given Pat a message that indicated Pat was confused and uncertain. It was the same message that the same medium had delivered to her the night before. Pat wasn't confused and she wasn't uncertain, but Lily Dale itself so entranced her that she was still fairly blissed out and open to almost anything. So she dutifully searched her consciousness to see whether perhaps the medium knew something that she ought to pay attention to. No. There was nothing.

The night before, Pat had slept at Shelley's house in the goddess room, a little upstairs bedroom decorated with paintings of women's faces amid swirling colors. An alcove in one wall had been turned into an altar bedecked with gold cloth and crystals. Like much of Shelley's decor, the altar was just overdone enough to go past reverence into playfulness. On the back of the bedroom door hung Shelley's version of goddess attire, a T-shirt decorated with the words, “You call me a bitch like that's a BAD thing.”

Shelley delighted in warning guests about the goddess room. It has strong currents running through it, according to many of the
sensitives who have slept there. Some women have reported that, as they fall into the darkness of dreams, powerful currents of cosmic energy toss and tumble them. Sometimes they awake in the night and hear a murmuring crowd of indistinct female voices.

As Pat walked back to Shelley's house her second day in Lily Dale, she eyed the pudgy little guy calling to her.

“My God, you have the most beautiful energy,” he yelled across the street.

Pat did feel as though she were glowing with some strange new light, but still. The little man was apparently coming on to her, and she thought,
Oh, please!
New Age jargon was not the way to her heart.

“Thank you very much,” she said in that bright voice women use for the brush-off. She kept walking. But he blocked her path.

He had a questioning look on his face. “Who's Gertrude?” he asked.

Pat stopped. He had her attention now.

“That was my mother.”

“She's hugging you.”

If she's hugging me,
Pat wondered,
why can't I feel her?

Pat was not particularly a believer in such messages, but neither was she unacquainted with psychic strangeness. In her twenties she had precognitive dreams. Only one had been of any value. That one came while she and her husband were traveling to visit his parents in Indiana. It was late, and Pat, pregnant with her older son, Willie, suddenly felt so sleepy that she couldn't keep her head up. So she laid it in her husband's lap as he drove. In her dream she saw their car cresting a hill, gathering speed as it traveled into the night. In the black road, sat a dark car, stalled, without lights and empty. As they crashed, Pat cried out and flung her arm into the dashboard.

She sat up and told her husband what she'd dreamed. A hill was ahead. “It looked like that hill,” she said. Her husband eased off the
accelerator, and, as they coasted down the incline, he braked right behind a dark car, stalled, without lights and empty.

Pat's other prophetic dreams had been confusing and useless. Days before her father died of a heart attack she dreamed that she was attending a funeral. But she hadn't known whose funeral it was. Even if she had known, what could she have done? Years later she dreamed of another graveyard. This one was at the edge of a river and had gravestones that lay flat on the earth. For two months, the dreams repeated themselves. When her sister called to say that their apparently healthy, forty-nine-year-old mother had collapsed with heart failure, Pat asked, “What hospital did they take her to?”

And her sister answered, “Patty, she's dead.” They buried Gertrude in a cemetery with flat gravestones at the edge of a river—just like the one in the dream.

The dreams and forebodings ended when Pat was in her thirties. “I pretty much willed them to quit,” she said, “and when they did I was relieved.”

She hadn't thought about her psychic moments in a long time. They were no part of who she thought herself to be.

“Gertrude wants you to know that she approves of what you've done,” the man said. “She's proud you got your degree and that you're teaching.” How did he know she was teaching? How did he know these words she needed so much to hear?

Gertrude's death had been the reason Pat returned to college. Only Gertrude could have understood how desperate she had been. As a child, Pat often begged her mother to divorce her father, but Gertrude always replied that she had no education, no skills, and no way of supporting the family. When Pat's father died, her mother became young again, Pat said. For two years, she was vibrant and free and excited about life in a way her daughters had never seen. Then she died.

“I was determined that what happened to my mother wouldn't happen to me,” Pat said. So she went to college. When her marriage began to rend under the pressure that decision helped create, she left the house, found a little place to live, and kept going to college. She was determined to get a Ph.D. and become a professor. “I felt like that was what I had to do, what I was born to do,” she said.

She thought her sons would stay with their father until she was settled, and then they would live with her. When she was ready, however, their father wouldn't let them go, she said. Then her son John died, and Pat felt that she had killed him. She should have stayed with the boys, no matter what it cost her, she thought. But it was too late.

The man in the parking lot was looking at her with narrowed eyes. “There's also a teenage boy here,” he said. “He's tall and gangly, and he's wearing a baseball cap.” John was six-foot-two when he shot himself, so big for his age that everyone thought he was older. He had sandy hair and lopsided dimples.

“That's John,” she said.

Pat doesn't remember the man's name, only that he was a visiting medium from Ohio. He was on his way to the Stump, where visiting mediums are allowed to give messages, but he talked so long with Pat that he missed the service.

Pat had been in Lily Dale one full day. The next day, she would get a reading from Lauren Thibodeau, a medium with a Ph.D. in counseling. That night Pat annoyed Shelley and the other guests by talking incessantly. She dominated conversations, talked about herself, asked too many questions. She couldn't shut up, and then she couldn't sleep. It was all too wonderful, like a completely different life. She had evidence that John's spirit was alive and still present. Tomorrow, maybe, she would hear words from him that she longed for but didn't dare hope to hear.

T
he June day I met Murry King was early in my research, before the summer season had actually started. I'd just had my ears boxed, figuratively speaking, by a medium named Rose Clifford. I wanted to talk with Rose because she was to teach a class on spoon bending. People said it couldn't be done anymore. But there was Rose, about to teach it. I wanted to ask this sweet-looking Englishwoman how she did it, but I never got the chance.

Before I could ask my first question, she peppered me with queries about my intentions, my background, my character, and my right to ask anybody anything. Everything I said she called lies. When I mentioned that she wasn't being very polite, she said, “I don't think you're even a journalist.” Fearing she was about to tell me I wasn't married and probably not a woman either, I grabbed my notebook and fled.

At the end of the street, still dazed, I stumbled into Murry King, my first complete, totally committed skeptic. Murry's doubt about all of Lily Dale's supernatural claims caused me to think we were kindred souls. I was wrong about that. Like Shelley, Murry still thought Lily Dale might very well be a place of great spiritual wisdom, a notion that made no sense to me. What somebody says is true or not true. What somebody does is right or wrong. But not
in the Dale. People there live enmeshed in worlds glimpsed between the facts, worlds in which I'm not an easy traveler.

Murry King was a handyman and friend to all stray cats, lost dogs, and little old ladies who needed a chore done and didn't want to pay. A big man with enough belly to be substantial, he had a ruff of gray hair that stood over a forehead expanded by his hairline's retreat, and he talked softly, with calm deliberation.

Raised in a Catholic orphanage, Murry once hoped to be a monk but lost heart after a year during which he spent some time wandering in the forest trying to obey Teresa of Avila's injunction to make every deed a prayer. “I couldn't do it. So I gave it up,” he said. He'd knocked around most of his life, married, divorced, been a Marine, gone to graduate school, and run a restaurant. He arrived in Lily Dale to help a friend renovate a house. Before they finished, he experienced heart trouble and needed a quadruple bypass. He stayed in the Dale to recuperate and hadn't got around to leaving.

Murry's tendency to sink into a funk every winter made Lily Dale, with its long gray winters, a dicey place for him to be. The previous winter he had refused to answer his door or telephone. Neighbors, convinced he'd died, called the emergency squad. People in uniforms were ready to break down the door when Murry answered, annoyed, almost comatose with depression, but completely alive. He went to a doctor, who asked whether he was hearing voices; Murry replied, “Doc, where I live, I'm the only one who doesn't.”

Murry was not a believer, even though he bent a spoon or two in a class taught by Anne Gehman. My attention sharpened at hearing Anne's name because she was Hilda's example of a born medium. During Anne's class Murry held his spoons so the handles protruded from his fists. Spoon benders usually grasp the spoons at each end and apply a little pressure, but Murry wasn't interested in something so easily faked. He merely held his spoons with the handles protruding from his fists and then watched as the handles
twisted into curlicues. I asked to see the spoons, but he had lost them.

This was the first spoon-bending story I heard, but not the last. I was told about whole classes of people who bent spoons while standing on the shore of the lake. Each time a piece of cutlery surrendered itself, the class cheered so loudly that all of Lily Dale could hear it. Anne herself displays a big bag of bent silverware, spoons turned to curlicues, forks with tines as wild as Einstein's hair.

Murry's bent spoons pushed him toward conviction, but only briefly. He tried to do it again and couldn't. “I don't know what bent the spoons. Hypnotism maybe,” he said. But the way Murry sees it, if you can't do it again, it doesn't count. That's an idea that Murry shares with the scientific world, which has looked into the claims of Spiritualism thousands of times. Lots of researchers say they have found amazing things going on amid all the claims. Metal bending, object moving, ESP, conversations with the dead—they've all had their distinguished advocates, bearing evidence, but getting the phenomena to repeat themselves for other scientists has been the rub. It's hardly ever happened.

“I haven't seen anything in Lily Dale to convince me they are communicating with spirit,” Murry said. “There's a lot of exaggeration, and I guess you would say hopeful enthusiasm.”

If the spirits wanted to convert Murry, they had their chance fifty-five years ago. He was a first-grader when his mother placed him in the orphanage. She promised to come back. Instead, she died. Every night while the other children slept, Murry padded across the floor to the window. Looking into the cold, dark sky, he prayed that his mother would send some sign she was with him, but she never did. No voice. No vision. Not even a shooting star. Nothing.

Murry grew up, married, and moved to Georgia. One midnight he was looking toward the starry sky when a thought flashed across his mind.

My father is dead.

Murry and his father didn't communicate, didn't much like each other. Murray rarely thought of his father, which made this premonition so odd that he wrote down the date, September 1, 1976. Ten years later he had a conversation with his stepmother, who told him his father was dead.

“When did he die?” Murry asked.

“September 1, 1976,” she answered. “He had a heart attack at midnight.”

After telling me the story, Murry paused until he got the raised eyebrow he was waiting for, and then he asked, “Was he stopping in to say good-bye on his way out? And why would he?” What kind of pitiless universe would ignore the sobs of an orphaned child and then send a message to a man who didn't even care?

“I'm sixty-one years old now, and the only thing I know is that we don't know nothing, and even that's on shaky ground,” he said.

Some days later I sat near Murry during a Sunday night message service at the Healing Temple, and I saw one secret of Lily Dale's power acted out. True to my usual response when enlightenment presents itself, I dismissed it.

One of the mediums that night looked at Murry.

“May I come to you?” she asked.

“Thank you,” Murry said in polite assent.

“They're telling me that you've had a rough spring,” said the sensitive, “but that new activity is ahead for you. You're feeling some strain about that.”

Everybody knew that he had bid to take over the cafeteria for the summer season. Running the cafeteria was a big job, and it meant a lot to Lily Dale because tourists had only two choices for food, the Good Vibrations Cafe or the cafeteria. The responsibility of operating the cafeteria scared Murry, as everybody knew. The medium didn't need spirit help for that.

I looked to see how Murry, avowed skeptic, was taking what seemed to me to be an obvious bit of play-acting. He was nodding.

“They're saying that you will have some trials. Keep your chins up, and you will do fine,” she said.

Good grief. Even I knew people worried that Murry might not have the grit to manage a staff.

What I could not understand was how that medium kept from laughing as she credited the spirits with ideas that I was certain were her own. Murry couldn't be buying this nonsense. I didn't see his face as the message continued. Afterward the medium came laughing toward Murry.

He grabbed her in a body hug and yelled, “I'll get you for that chins comment.”

Everyone left the church. I didn't speak until we were in the yard.

“Come on, Murry. That wasn't a message. Anybody could have said that,” I said.

Murry peered at me through his glasses and then looked over my head in a thoughtful way. Murry would soon get the chance he wanted, and it was going to be a bigger struggle than anyone knew. He was about to start a three-meal-a-day, seven-day-a-week cafeteria with two hundred dollars for food. During the opening night fish fry, he would run out of fish long before he ran out of customers because he could afford only a couple of dozen fillets. During the first weeks of the season, customers would look for jelly or mustard and find none because Murry had purchased only a little of each. Whenever the cafeteria ran out of supplies, he would raid the cash register and drive furiously to a nearby store. By summer's end, he would have scandalized the community by hiring what looked to be street people, whom he allowed to sleep above the cafeteria with companions and pets.

“When I need them, I know where they are,” he defended himself.

But all that was in the future on the night Murry got his reading. The only thing present tense was his fear.

“I guess you're right,” he said, acknowledging that anybody might have said the medium's words, “but I was grateful. I needed the support.”

Okay. I got it. Murry was about to win the cafeteria contract because no one else wanted it. Now Lily Dale was going to back him, shore up his efforts, and make him a success. I liked it. Later I heard that one of his neighbors worked without pay to help him.
How sweet,
I thought.
How Mayberry of them.

The town is full of star-gazing Aunt Beas and ghost-busting Barney Fifes. Dreamy and full of goodwill, the Dale embraces everybody, calls the spirit world down to help them, and then mixes it up. Lily Dale's charm is as much about being
believed in
as it is about believing.

That's partly why people who move there often think they've found a little paradise. Neighbors help one another. Old people are looked after and included in gatherings. When someone falls sick, everybody knows it and helps. Children can play outside at night. There's no crime to speak of. Volunteer firefighters are the town's heroes. Residents sit on front porches from which American flags wave. A silver tea opens the summer season.

The two churches are so democratic that they have no appointed ministers. Each week a friend or neighbor mounts the platform to talk about what's on his or her mind. Even the spirits themselves are bound by the Dale's fierce love for individual rights. In one town meeting Gretchen Clark Lazarony made the mistake of quoting her spirit guide as she was defending her own opinion. Resident Ron DeChard promptly got up and said his spirit guide came to him while he was on the toilet. After giving a nonsense message, Ron said, his guide instructed him, “Flush.” The assembly laughed as though that were the richest joke ever, and Gretchen apologized.