Lily Dale (Plus)

by Christine Wicker

  One day, I was reading some old clippings in the Lily Dale museum when the two of them came in. Bill was beaming so hard it hurt my jaws to watch him. The boy was a journalism major, and Papa was eager to talk of his son’s accomplishments. I praised everything they told me and talked about the boy’s bright future. I was about to leave Lily Dale for the summer, and I didn’t think any more of it.

  The next time I saw Bill, a year had passed. I nodded politely and looked away, but now Bill was eager to talk with me, to tell whatever I wanted to know. All I had to do was listen.

  His father, a violent alcoholic, had left when Bill was an infant. The boy grew up blaming himself. At seven, Bill concluded that there was no Santa Claus and no God. One Sunday his grandmother sent him to the Methodist church with money for the collection plate. He walked past the church and spent the money on popcorn and peanuts at the Sault Sainte Marie locks. He grew up angry and without hope. He took any drug he could find and unleashed his fury on everyone around him.

  At about thirty-five, he sobered up. Without drugs and drink to cushion reality, life was grim, and he started looking for a reason to live. He read Bertrand Russell and Albert Camus. He faced how powerless he felt in a world that lacked purpose or meaning, one in which his actions were dictated by cause and effect.

  One night in 1977, after he had been sober for nine months—a period he finds most significant (“smacks of gestation, doesn’t it?”)—he came home after the second shift at the machine shop where he was a foreman. He began writing in his journal and suddenly, without warning or forethought, he popped out of his body and floated to the ceiling, where he hovered and watched himself writing. The room was filled with a bright white light, like the flash of a welder’s arc lamp.

  And the thought came to him as he looked down on his other self, Man, he takes himself way too seriously.

  Then he had another thought, You’re half-right. You’ve been shaped by your circumstances, by cause and effect over which you have no control, because that’s what you believed, but not anymore. From now on, you will shape your own life. You can never again point to the past as the reason for your behavior. You are in control.

  Then he popped back into his body. “It was the big ‘Oh, shit’ moment,” he said.

  As I listened, I wondered whether his unconscious mind had rescued him. He was in a period of great despair, having realized that rationality can make our lives quite nice in material ways but “cannot assuage our sorrow,” as author Karen Armstrong puts it. Maybe his mind, with its infinite creativity, had begun to reach beyond the reasonable.

  Bill went to the library looking for explanations. He found William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience and Jiddu Krishnamurti’s The Awakening of Intelligence. Both authors assured him that others had also experienced such events. He was filled with excitement and energy.

  But old habits hold on. Rage and despair still claimed him again and again. A year later, he awoke one morning to see a pair of huge, liquid eyes staring into his eyes. The eyes came out of a broad face with a gray beard. He could see only the naked torso of this figure, which was life-size and robust and appeared to be a human form of about the Homo erectus period.

  “I am one of your guides. I have been every conceivable life form, done every conceivable act. I have been a priest, an amoeba, a virus. What you have done by comparison is child’s play,” the figure said.

  To Bill, this message meant that all his guilt amounted to nothing. He should drop it and move on. The figure disappeared.

  Bill went back to the library. There he found a book titled Cosmic Consciousness by Richard Maurice Bucke, who had had a similar experience after a poetry reading of Walt Whitman’s work. That book presented stories of similar visions and asserted that they occur to many people between the ages of thirty-five and forty-five. He read The Tibetan Book of the Dead with the foreword by Carl Jung. He began studying the works of mystics. Eventually, he came to live in Lily Dale.

  One day a couple of years ago, as he was driving toward Highway 60 on Dale Drive, he glanced toward the passenger seat. His friend had returned. Now the Homo erectus man was balled up and somersaulting at a furious speed. The apparition’s whirling stopped abruptly. He turned toward Bill and made a comic face.

  A few weeks later, the man moved to the backseat, where eventually two more guides joined him. Each has a distinct personality. The gray-haired man, whom Bill calls his Teacher and Healer, is fairly grim and rarely smiles. The second man, whom Bill considers his Protector, is brawnier and has some sense of humor. The third guide is a Native American woman who is his Comforter. “They are here to help me, to give me what I need so I won’t screw up and pass to spirit too soon and hold them back again,” he said. Whatever holds him back also holds them back, he said.

  “I’m their project, and helping me is how they’re going to get to the next level. They’re in kindergarten just like I am.”

  He told me his story during a party at Shelley’s house. We were sitting at the long table on her back porch.

  “Are they here now?” I asked.

  “Sure,” he said. “They’re always with me.”

  Where are they?

  “The Comforter is standing behind you, right there beyond your left shoulder, so I can see her face. The Teacher-Healer is over there”—he gestured to his right—“and the Protector is there by the door, so he can see who comes in, and so I can see him and be reassured.”

  With the spirits around, Bill no longer needs rage. He has the comfort denied him as a child. He has the wisdom and healing that rationality failed to give him. And he has protection against his fears. These three figures give Bill more stability than he experienced in his rational past. Is he a little nutty? Or is he someone who has brilliantly saved himself by accessing the deepest regions of—of what? His own consciousness? The collective unconscious? Has he simply tapped into what’s available in the universe if we have the will and the wit to call it forth?

  And were Billy and Lillian the same kind of guides for me? When Patricia presented them as my helpers, she nudged me into accepting comfort and ease that my rational mind said didn’t exist. Had she taught me to float by teasing me into the playful consideration that the impossible might be real, that heavy human bodies may actually bob along blithely on top of cosmic waves, and that everything a reporter needs might come to her if she simply proceeds with happy confidence?

  Thinking such thoughts made me feel as though I was dropping from a tall building. The angels would not bear me up. I knew they wouldn’t, and if I kept thinking such things I was in for a hard landing. I knew I was.

  17

  Here is the story Marian Boswell told about her return home to her perfect husband and their perfect life. She didn’t think much about the surgeon’s strange prediction. The idea that she might lose everything was too ridiculous, especially considering the great spiritual growth she was experiencing. She began meditating more than before. The colors that swirled before her when she shut her eyes became more vivid. They looped and circled like silk scarves being flipped about the room. She told me that Jack, who sometimes watched her while she sat, said he could see tendrils of her hair moving as if a breeze was lifting them.

  One morning, she awoke to the sound of a woman’s name. Jane. Marian knew a Jane, an acquaintance who was once an artist. Her body had been stiffened and stilled by a degenerative disease. She owned a studio in the small town where Marian and Jack lived.

  The voice Marian heard as she came out of sleep said, “Go see Jane.” Whether it was a voice in the air or a voice from her dreams, she never knew, but it woke her up, and Marian did as it directed.

  Jane drew Marian into art classes and into a group of women meeting to talk of spiritual things. They discussed mystics and visions, their own and those they’d read of. Marian began to increase her sensitivity to what she believed were forces outside normal consciousness. The reading and meditating and praying began to take eff
ect.

  She and Jack had always relished power. He taught her how to negotiate, to bull her way through life, to get what she wanted, no matter what it cost others. To have money, to buy things, to impress people had been their life, and they loved it. Together they had created a world in which they were the most beautiful, glittering objects around, and then she changed. She put all that behind her. She didn’t want to talk about winning anymore. She didn’t want to go to corporate parties where she could be admired and envied. She wanted to talk about goodness and balance and love. She began to think those things ruled the universe and that nothing else was important.

  The women in her group became more and more vital to her life. She began to see an expression on Jack’s face that she’d never seen before. “I’d say, ‘You’re angry,’ and he would say, ‘Oh, no. I’m never angry.’”

  At this point in Marian’s story, I began to feel a little sorry for Jack. His money-loving, power-gathering wife had changed into a meditating, voices-hearing, God-is-Love kind of woman. That would be a nasty shock to any man who had married corporate Barbie.

  He questioned her intently now about everything she did. He wanted to know everything people said to her. He was jealous and suspicious, but what of? When she tried to talk to him, he no longer listened as he once did. Now his face turned toward her, but his mind was elsewhere.

  Her first clue that it might be someplace she couldn’t go came on the day she was rummaging under the seat of his SUV. She found a Barry Manilow tape. They hated Barry Manilow. She would throw such a tape in the trash, and so would he. Wouldn’t he?

  Not long afterward, an even stranger clue came her way. They ordered a generator. On the day it was to come, Marian received a call from the distributor, who said he had sold the last generator and would have to order them another one.

  A few minutes later Jack called. “The generator is in, and I’ll pick it up.”

  “What?” she said. “Are you sure?”

  “I talked to the man,” he said. “It’s in.”

  “It can’t be…”

  But Jack interrupted her. “I talked to him.”

  For some reason, Marian stopped protesting. Her husband was lying. He’d never lied to her. Why would he lie now about such a silly thing?

  When Jack came home that evening, he didn’t have the generator.

  “It wasn’t in, was it?” she said

  “Sure it was. I just didn’t have time to get it,” he said.

  Tired of the game, Marian told him what she knew. “You didn’t talk to him at all, did you?” she said.

  Jack admitted then that he’d lied. When she asked him why, he said he was a perfectionist, he wanted to please her, and so he’d fudged a little, hoping the generator would be there.

  Knowing he would lie to her shook Marian, but how could she stay mad about something so silly? So she didn’t.

  Jack began to complain about her behavior, telling her that she didn’t treat his children well. Once when she walked into the bedroom, he was on the phone, and something in his voice made her think he was talking to a woman and not about business. He broke off the conversation.

  Jack was more and more removed from her and at the same time more demanding. Her perfect life was crumbling, but she didn’t know why.

  About this time, she heard about Greg Kehn, a Lily Dale medium who wintered not far from their house. She made an appointment.

  Greg is one of the most highly renowned of the Dale’s psychics. Plenty of people told me that police officers frequently call on him when they have trouble solving a case. In the summer, he has a waiting list of clients. A book about psychics describes him as being so good he can tell clients which spark plug is misfiring in their car engines. Car troubles are understandably a specialty. He trained as a mechanic. But Greg didn’t talk to Marian about cars.

  Before she had time to ask him questions or tell him what she came for, he said, “You feel like you’re living with a stranger, don’t you?”

  She did.

  One day, Marian went to the pharmacy to pick up some medicine. “Look under Boswell,” she said. The clerk handed her a package of three pill bottles.

  “This isn’t mine,” she said.

  “Oh, that’s right,” said the clerk, handing her another package. “Those are for your husband.”

  The first bag contained psychotropic drugs. The dosages called for were high, staggering to Marian, who’d never heard of anyone taking so much of these medicines. She took them home and, when she showed them to Jack, he confessed again. He was obsessive-compulsive and hadn’t wanted her to know. He said he was ashamed. She comforted him.

  Marian was horrified, but she had a little of the disorder herself. At least this was something she could understand. Now she had a reason for their problems. They could work on this together.

  Jack began to see a therapist. He joined a men’s therapy group. The group was reading a book about controlling rage. Every night Jack sat in his favorite chair, turned on the lamp, read his book, and made notes in a little pad he kept beside it. He was outlining the book, he said. He often talked about the progress he was making in his therapy and the things he was learning from the other men.

  Once, when he was away, she went to the table where Jack kept his book and the notepad. She flipped open the book. He had underlined three lines. She opened the pad. It was all doodles and lines from songs.

  One evening, he arrived home from a trip in an especially good mood. He kissed Marian and told her about his day. It felt like old times. Marian should have been happy, but something kept telling her, “Look in the briefcase.”

  He went to bed early that night, leaving his briefcase on the floor beside his chair. Marian was thinking about bed herself, but the voice kept saying, “Look in the briefcase.”

  To anyone else, that might have sounded like the snake in the garden, but to Marian, who had begun to listen more and more to what her mind told her, it sounded like an old friend trying to help her past her illusions. She heard the voice again, “Look in his briefcase.”

  So she did. Inside was a financial statement that she had never seen. It showed that they were tens of thousands of dollars in debt.

  Then the voice said, “Look in his computer.”

  It was sitting there, still in its carrying case. He took it with him every morning.

  “Look in his computer,” the voice said.

  And so she did.

  18

  I hadn’t known Shelley Takei a week before she invited me to stay in the lavender house on the hill where she lived. “I’ve got lots of room,” she said, taking me up the green-carpeted stairs, past the little angels that sit on the steps. “Pick which bedroom you want.”

  Shelley and her sister Danielle each selected three bedrooms on the second floor to decorate according to her own taste. Danielle’s bedrooms tend toward flowered wallpaper and color-coordinated bedding. Quite lovely and tasteful in an English sort of way. Shelley goes for a different ambience. Her rooms have themes: angel, goddess, and zodiac.

  “I want this to be a sacred space,” she said.

  This is clearly a house where men have no say about decor. It contained 672 angels by the last count, and more have been added. Stained-glass windows made by Shelley’s husband, Frank, cast a multicolored glow across the rooms. The living rooms feature gold lamps with cherubs cavorting around them, lampshades with long fringe, a crystal end table, and heavy-petaled artificial flowers languishing over drapery.

  In the peach-colored angel bedroom, where I slept, there are more than one hundred images of angels. They’re on a poster in the closet smoking cigarettes. They dance around the trash can, hold up the soap, tie back curtains, skip across the walls, and lounge on the dresser.

  The downstairs bathroom, sponge-painted a rich purple, has stained-glass windows and a lamp that features a winged fairy. The house’s upstairs bathroom is black and silver. Silver stars and moons dangle from the ceiling. Artificial
magnolias grace the walls. A huge plastic shell filled with pink, orange, and purple bath fizzies sits ready for anyone who wants to relax. The shower curtain is white with the black silhouette of Norman Bates dressed as Mother, knife raised, ready to stab into the unsuspecting body of Janet Leigh—or if she’s not available, whoever is.

  Downstairs in the basement is the psychomanteum. A psychomanteum is a setup that’s supposed to allow spirits to be seen in a mirror. Shelley’s psychomanteum is screened off from the rest of the basement by panels of fabric that hang to the floor. A mirror is tipped up slightly so that people who sit in the chair before it can’t see themselves but can see spirits if they materialize in the glass. The psychic explorer Raymond Moody, who said the psychomanteum had allowed a number of spirits to appear to him, suggested using a low-wattage light. Shelley has candles, which makes it even better. Shelley has never seen a spirit in the mirror, but at least one of her friends says she saw one. From the minute I saw the setup, I knew it represented opportunity.

  What if we could make someone appear? I asked Shelley. What if we got some mediums together and tried to get someone to show up, someone like, say, Gretchen and Sherry Lee’s brother, the late Chapman Clark? Shelley and Chapman had been great friends. On the wall leading to the basement, she had a picture of him mounted with the words, “See you, Chapman,” next to it. Shelley believed that Chapman really might have had the power to communicate telepathically, to disappear, and to astral travel. She said he’d once described a room in her sister’s hunting camp that he could not possibly have seen.

  She was game to try. So we invited Gretchen and Sherry Lee to come over and see whether they could summon their brother. They brought a favorite book from his childhood and a bottle of liquor he’d made. We all took a drink of the stuff, which was pretty bad, and went to the basement. Sherry Lee took the chair, and the rest of us sat on the floor. Candle wax and brandy scented the air, which pressed closely around us.