Lady Oracle

  Aunt Lou was ornamented from head to toe. Things dangled from her, her wrists jingled, South Sea odors wafted from her. As she bustled about, putting the final touches to the feast she'd prepared, she seemed to warm and expand, filling the room. Robert watched her as if she were a gorgeous sunset. I wondered if any man would ever look at me like that.

  "I don't know what your aunt sees in a dry old stick like me," he said, ostensibly to me but really to Aunt Lou.

  Aunt Lou bellowed. "Don't let him fool you," she said. "Underneath it he's a devil."

  After we'd finished the chocolate mousse, Aunt Lou said, "Joan, dear, we were wondering if you'd like to go to church with us."

  This was even more of a surprise. My mother went to church for social reasons; she'd subjected me to several years of Sunday school, with white gloves and round navy-blue felt hats held on by elastic bands and patent-leather Mary Janes. Aunt Lou had sympathized when I said it was boring. She herself had occasionally taken me to a small Anglican church, though only on Easter Sundays, for the hymns, she said, but that was as far as it went. Now, however, she applied one of her astonishing hats to the top of her head, powdered her nose, and took her white gloves matter-of-factly in hand.

  "It's not exactly a church," she said to me, "but Robert goes every Sunday."

  We went in Robert's car, which he parked on a pokey side street north of Queen. The semi-detached houses were old two-story red brick with front porches; the neighborhood looked squalid and sagging. Dirty snow fringed the lawns. One of the houses stood out from the others because it had bright red window curtains, illuminated from behind so that they glowed, and it was this house we entered.

  In the front hall there was a table with a large brass tray, a pile of paper slips and several pencils; beneath it, overshoes, rubbers and galoshes drained onto spread newspapers. Aunt Lou and Robert each wrote a number on one of the slips of paper, then placed the folded paper on the tray. "You write a number too, dear," Aunt Lou said. "Maybe you'll get a message."

  "A message?" I said. "Who from?"

  "Well, you never know," said Aunt Lou. "But you might as well try."

  I thought I would wait and see what happened. When we'd gone through a pair of purple velvet curtains, we were in the Chapel, as I later learned to call it. It had once been the living room of the house, but now it contained five or six rows of folding bridge-table chairs, each with a hymnbook on it. In what had once been the dining room there was a raised stage with a pulpit covered in red velvet, and a small electric organ. Only a third of the chairs were occupied; the room filled up a little more before the service began, but on my subsequent visits I never saw it completely full. Most of the regular members of the congregation were quite old, and many had chronic coughs. Aunt Lou and Robert were among the youngest.

  We settled into our front-row seats, Aunt Lou ruffling herself like a chicken, Robert sitting primly upright. Nothing happened for a while; from behind us came throat-clearings and shufflings. I opened the hymnbook, which was quite thin, not at all like the Anglican one. The Spiritualist Hymnbook, it was called; and, rubberstamped below the title, Property of Jordan Chapel. I read two of the hymns, at random. One was about a joyous boat ride across a river to the Other Side, where loved ones were awaiting. The other was about the blessed spirits of those who've gone before, watching o'er us for our safety till we reach the other shore. This thought made me uncomfortable. Being told in Sunday school that God was watching you every minute of every hour had been bad enough, but now I had to think about all these other people I didn't even know who were spying on me. "What kind of a church is this?" I whispered to Aunt Lou.

  "Shh, dear, they're starting," Aunt Lou said placidly, and sure enough the lights dimmed and a short woman in a brown rayon dress, with gold button earrings and a matching pin, crossed the stage and began to play the electric organ. A chorus of quavery voices rose around me, tiny and shrill as crickets.

  Halfway through the hymn, two people entered from the door that led to the kitchen, and stood behind the pulpit. One, as I came to know, was the Reverend Leda Sprott, the leader. She was a stately older woman with blue eyes, blue hair and a Roman nose, dressed in a long white satin gown, with an embroidered purple band, like a bookmark, around her neck. The other was a skinny gray man who was referred to as "Mr. Stewart, our visiting medium." I later wondered in what sense he was visiting, since he was always there.

  When the hymn had wavered to its close, Leda Sprott raised her hands above her head. "Let us meditate," she said, in a deep, resonant voice, and there was silence, broken only by the sound of uncertain footsteps, which went out through the purple curtains and then, very slowly, up the stairs. Leda Sprott began a short prayer, asking for the help of our loved ones who had gained the greater light for those of us still wandering in the mists on this side. Distantly, we heard a toilet flush, and the footsteps came back down.

  "We will now have an inspiring message from our visiting medium, Mr. Stewart," said the Reverend Leda, stepping aside.

  By the end of my time with the Spiritualists I'd practically memorized Mr. Stewart's message, since it was the same every week. He told us not to be downhearted, that there was hope; that when things seemed darkest, it was almost dawn. He quoted a few lines from "Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth," by Arthur Hugh Clough:

  And not by eastern windows only,

  When daylight comes, comes in the light;

  In front, the sun climbs slow, how slowly,

  But westward, look, the land is bright.

  And another line, from the same poem: "If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars." "Fears may indeed be liars, my friends; which reminds me of a little story I heard the other day, and which can be of help to us all at those moments when we are feeling down, when we're feeling nothing matters and what's the use of struggling on. There were once two caterpillars, walking side by side down a road. The pessimistic caterpillar said he'd heard that soon they would have to go into a dark narrow place, that they would stop moving and be silent. 'That will be the end of us,' he said. But the optimistic caterpillar said, 'That dark place is only a cocoon; we will rest there for a time, and after that we will emerge with beautiful wings; we will be butterflies, and fly up toward the sun.' Now, my friends, that road was the Road of Life, and it's up to each of us which we will choose to be, the pessimistic caterpillar, filled with gloom and looking forward only to death, or the optimistic caterpillar, who was filled with trust and hope and looked forward to the higher life."

  The congregation never seemed to mind that the message was always the same. In fact, they'd probably have felt cheated if it had varied.

  After the message the collection was taken up by the brown rayon woman, and after that came the serious business. This was what everyone had come for, really: their own personal messages. The brown rayon woman brought in the brass tray, and Leda Sprott took up the pieces of paper one by one. She would hold each piece unopened in her hand, close her eyes, and give the message. Then she would open the paper and read the number. The messages were largely about health: "There's an old white-haired lady with light coming out from around her head, and she is saying, 'Be careful going down stairs, especially on Thursday'; and she's saying the word sulphur. She's warning you; she sends you love and greetings." "There's a man wearing a kilt, and he has a set of bagpipes; he must be Scottish; he has red hair. He's giving you a lot of love, and he's saying, 'Cut down on the sweet foods, they're not good for you.' He's telling you - I can't quite catch the word. It's a mat of some kind. 'Be careful of mats,' that's what he's saying."

  After the pieces of paper were finished, Mr. Stewart took over and did free-form messages, pointing to members of the congregation and describing spirits which were standing behind their chairs. I found this much more disturbing than the numbers: Leda Sprott's messages seemed to come from inside her head, but Mr. Stewart did it with his eyes open, he could actually see dead people right there in the room. I slouched down in my chair
, hoping he wouldn't point at me.

  After this there were more hymns; then Leda Sprott reminded us about the Healing Hands session on Tuesday, the Automatic Writing on Wednesday, and the private sittings on Thursday, and that was all. There was some scuffling and crowding in the hall as several elderly men struggled with their galoshes. At the door people thanked her warmly; she knew most of them, and would ask, "Did you get what you wanted, Mrs. Hearst?" "How was that, Mrs. Dean?"

  "I'll throw that medicine away right now," they'd say, or, "It was my Uncle Herbert, that was just the kind of coat he used to wear."

  "Well, Robert," said Aunt Lou in the car. "I'm sorry she didn't come tonight."

  Robert was visibly disappointed. "Maybe she was busy," he said. "I don't know who that other woman was, the one in the evening dress."

  "A large woman," Aunt Lou said. "Hah. It sounded like me." She asked Robert up for a drink, but he said he was discouraged and should probably go home, so I went up instead and had a hot chocolate and some petit fours and a shrimp sandwich. Aunt Lou had a double Scotch.

  "It's his mother," she said. "That's the third week in a row she hasn't turned up. She was always a little thoughtless. Robert's wife couldn't stand her, she refuses to go to church with him at all. 'If you ever do get to talk to that old horror,' she told him, 'I don't want to be there.' I think that's a bit cruel, don't you?"

  "Aunt Lou," I said, "do you really believe all that stuff?"

  "Well, you never can tell, can you?" she said. "I've seen them give a lot of accurate messages. Some of them don't mean all that much, but some of them are quite helpful."

  "But it could just be mind reading," I said.

  "I don't know how it's done," said Aunt Lou, "but they all find it very comforting. I know Robert does, and he likes me to take an interest. I feel you have to keep an open mind."

  "It gives me the willies," I said.

  "I keep getting messages from that Scotsman," Aunt Lou said musingly. "The one with the red hair and bagpipes. I wonder what he meant about the mats. Maybe he meant mutts, and I'm going to be bitten by a dog."

  "Who is he?" I said.

  "I haven't the faintest idea," Aunt Lou said. "Nobody I know of ever played the bagpipes. He's certainly not a relation."

  "Oh," I said, relieved. "Have you told them that?"

  "I wouldn't dream of it," said Aunt Lou. "I wouldn't want to hurt their feelings."

  I fell into the habit of going regularly to the Jordan Chapel on Sunday nights. It was a way of seeing Aunt Lou which, by now, I preferred to the movies, as I was absolutely certain that nobody from Braeside High would ever see me there. I even spent a certain amount of time worrying about the Spiritualist doctrines: If The Other Side was so wonderful, why did the spirits devote most of their messages to warnings? Instead of telling their loved ones to avoid slippery stairs and unsafe cars and starchy foods, they should have been luring them over cliffs and bridges and into lakes, spurring them on to greater feats of intemperance and gluttony, in order to hasten their passage to the brighter shore. Some of the Spiritualists also believed in multiple incarnations, and some in Atlantis. Others were standard Christians. Leda Sprott didn't mind what you believed as long you also believed in her powers.

  I was willing to watch it all, with the same suspension of disbelief I granted to the movies, but I drew the line at putting a number on the tray. I didn't know any dead people and I had no wish to know any. One night, however, I did get a message, which was much more peculiar than anything I'd feared. It was during Leda Sprott's number session, and she was just about to process the last folded paper on the brass tray. As usual she'd closed her eyes, but then she opened them suddenly.

  "I have an urgent message," she said, "for someone without a number." She was looking straight at me. "There's a woman standing behind your chair. She's about thirty, with dark hair, wearing a navy-blue suit with a white collar and a pair of white gloves. She's telling you ... what? She's very unhappy about something I get the name Joan. I'm sorry, I can't hear...." Leda Sprott listened for a minute, then said, "She couldn't get through, there was too much static."

  "That's my mother!" I said to Aunt Lou in a piercing whisper. "She's not even dead yet!" I was frightened, but I was also outraged: my mother had broken the rules of the game. Either that, or Leda Sprott was a fraud. But how could she know what my mother looked like? And if she'd snooped around, she wouldn't have made the mistake of using a living person.

  "Later, dear," Aunt Lou said.

  After the service was over I confronted Leda Sprott. "That was my mother," I said.

  "I'm happy for you," said Leda. "I had the feeling she's been trying to contact you for some time. She must be very concerned about you."

  "But she's still alive!" I said. "She isn't dead at all!"

  The blue eyes wavered, but only for a moment. "Then it must've been her astral body," she said placidly. "That happens sometimes, but we don't encourage it; it confuses things, and the reception isn't always good."

  "Her astral body?" I'd never heard of such a thing. Leda Sprott explained that everyone had an astral body as well as a material one, and that your astral body could float around by itself, attached to you by something like a long rubber band. "She must've come in through the bathroom window," she said. "We always leave it open a little; the radiator overheats." You had to be very careful about your rubber band, she said; if it got broken, your astral body could get separated from the rest of you and then where would you be? "A vegetable, that's what," said Leda Sprott. "Like those cases you read about, in the hospital. We keep telling the doctors that in some cases brain operations do more harm than good. They should be leaving the window open a bit, so the astral body can get back in."

  I did not like this theory at all. I particularly didn't like the thought of my mother, in the form of some kind of spiritual jello, drifting around after me from place to place, wearing (apparently) her navy-blue suit from 1949. Nor did I want to hear that she was concerned about me: her concern always meant pain, and I refused to believe in it. "That's crazy," I said, in as rude a voice as possible.

  To my surprise, Leda Sprott laughed. "Oh, we're used to being told that" she said. "We can certainly live with that." Then, to my embarrassment, she took hold of my hand. "You have great gifts," she said, looking into my eyes. "Great powers. You should develop them. You should try the Automatic Writing, on Wednesdays. I can't tell whether you're a sender or a receiver ... a receiver, I think. I'd be glad to help you train; you could be better than any of us, but it would take hard work, and I must warn you, without supervision there's some danger. Not all the spirits are friendly, you know. Some of them are very unhappy. If they bother me too much, I rearrange the furniture. That confuses them, all right." She patted my hand, then let go of it. "Come back next week and we'll talk about it."

  I never went back. I'd been shaken by the apparition of my mother (who, when I returned that Sunday night, didn't look at all as if she'd been astral-traveling; she was the same as ever, and a little tight). Leda Sprott's opinion of my great powers was even more terrifying, especially since I had to admit I found the thought appealing. Nobody had ever told me I had great powers before. I had a brief, enticing vision of myself, clad in a white flowing robe with purple trim, looking stately and radiating spiritual energy. Leda Sprott was quite fat ... perhaps this was to be my future. But I wasn't sure I really wanted great powers. What if something went wrong? What if I failed, enormously and publicly? What if no messages would come? It was easier not to try. It would be horrible to disappoint any congregation, but especially the one at the Jordan Chapel. They were so trusting and gentle, with their coughs and reedy voices. I couldn't stand the responsibility.

  Several months later I confided in Aunt Lou. At the time, she'd seen I was upset and hadn't pressed for details. "Leda Sprott told me I had great powers," I said.

  "Did she, dear?" Aunt Lou said. "She told me the same thing. Maybe we both have them."

&n
bsp; "She said I should try the Automatic Writing."

  "Do you know," Aunt Lou said thoughtfully, "I did try it. You'll probably think I'm silly."

  "No," I said.

  "You see, I've always wanted to know whether my husband is still alive or not. I felt that if he wasn't, he might have the, well, the politeness to let me know."

  "What happened?" I asked.

  "Well," Aunt Lou said slowly, "it was quite strange. She gave me a ballpoint pen, just an ordinary ballpoint pen. I don't know what I was expecting, a goose quill or something. Then she lit a candle and put it in front of a mirror, and I was supposed to stare at the candle - not the real one, the reflection. I did this for a while and nothing happened, except that I could hear a sort of humming noise. I think I fell asleep or sort of dozed off or something, just for a minute. After that it was time to go."

  "Did you write anything?" I asked eagerly.

  "Not exactly," said Aunt Lou. "Just a sort of scribble, and a few letters."

  "Maybe he's still alive then," I said.

  "You never can tell," said Aunt Lou. "If he is dead, it would be just like him not to say anything. He always wanted to keep me in suspense. But Leda Sprott said it was a good beginning and I should go back. She says it takes them a while to get through."

  "So did you?"

  Aunt Lou frowned. "Robert wanted me to. But you know, I'm not sure it's a good idea. I looked at the paper afterwards, and it wasn't at all like my handwriting. Not at all. I didn't like that feeling of being, well, taken over. I felt I should leave it alone, and I would too if I were you, dear. You can't fly on one wing. That's what I think."

  Despite Aunt Lou's advice, I was strongly tempted to try some Automatic Writing myself, at home in my bedroom; and one evening when my parents were out, I did. I got one of the candles from the dining room downstairs, a red ballpoint pen, and my mother's Jot-a-Note from the telephone table. I lit the candle, turned out my bedroom light, and sat in front of the vanity-table mirror, staring at the small flame in the glass and waiting for something to happen. I was trying very hard to keep from moving my hand consciously: that would be cheating, and I wanted it to be real. Nothing happened, except that the candle flame seemed to get bigger.