Authors: Noëlle Sickels
The Medium (12 page)
AUGUST 1940
It was Helen's sixteenth birthday, and Billy had given her his yearbook photo, signed “fondly,” and a nosegay of violets. He'd passed them over the fence, as they'd been passing items back and forth for years. But things were deliciously different now.
In May, they'd started walking to school together, a day here and there, when they chanced to leave their houses at the same time. By the middle of June, Billy was waiting on his porch for her every morning, and they often met to walk home together, too, dropping the pretense of happenstance.
After his graduation, Billy went to work at Benson's Hardware, but he and Helen spent every Saturday and some Sunday afternoons together, bicycling, swimming, fishing. They'd been out at night three times, to a movie, a band concert, and the roller rink. The summer jaunts had reinforced and broadened the mutual attachment nurtured by their school-day walks, and the gift of the photograph cinched it.
Helen had tucked the photo in a corner of her dresser mirror and was arranging the violets in a vase when her grandmother paused outside her open bedroom door.
“So, you have Billy Mackey's picture. Does such a thing mean what it did when I was young?”
“I don't know,” Helen said shyly.
“No?”
“Sorry, Nanny. I don't know what it used to mean to you, but I do know what it means to me.”
She gently pushed the photo more tightly into the mirror frame. “To us,” she added.
“To us?” Ursula repeated archly.
Helen didn't wince under her grandmother's inspecting gaze. The bravery of saying “us” had released her from shyness.
“It means I'm his girl,” she went on. “That I won't go out with anyone else. And he won't, either.”
“Ah, your first sweetheart.”
“First and last.”
The band concerts at Brinker's Green were a pleasant way to pass a summer evening, but Helen preferred the latter concerts of the season, played on the first three Saturdays of September. The weather was crisper, the crowd smaller, the music somehow brighter and more bracing. This year's final concert was scheduled for tonight. Helen would wear Billy's varsity letter sweater. It was too big for her, but that was part of its charm.
“Mama,” Helen said, walking into the kitchen, “I need snacks for tonight.”
“Look around,” Emilie replied, “There are chicken wings in the fridge, some squares of
Pfefferkuchen
in the cookie jar.” She was sitting at the table leafing through
Life
magazine.
Pfefferkuchen
in the cookie jar.” She was sitting at the table leafing through
Life
magazine.
Chicken wings are too greasy, Helen thought, rummaging in the meat drawer for cold cuts. But she'd definitely take some gingerbread. It was one of Nanny's specialties, and she knew Billy liked it.
“Dear, dear, look at this,” Emilie said.
Helen came to peer over her mother's shoulder. She was pointing to a photograph of a group of children crowded together in a deep, narrow ditch. They were all looking up, not at the photographer, but higher, beyond him. What you noticed first were their intent faces. Then the hands. One boy's hands
were clenched together, another was using his hands to shade his eyes, another had his fingers in his mouth. Two girls had their arms around younger kids, their hands curled tenderly around little shoulders. The headline over the picture read “Hitler Tries To Destroy London.”
were clenched together, another was using his hands to shade his eyes, another had his fingers in his mouth. Two girls had their arms around younger kids, their hands curled tenderly around little shoulders. The headline over the picture read “Hitler Tries To Destroy London.”
“It's a trench shelter in Kent,” Emilie explained. “They're watching Spitfires intercept bombers.”
The Germans had been dropping bombs on London for the past sixteen days, with no signs of stopping. Thousands had been killed. In
Movietone News,
Helen had seen people digging in rubble piles, sometimes with their bare hands, and rescue workers carrying stretchers, but this magazine photo gripped her more than any of the moving pictures had. The children were so average-looking, so clean and well-fed, their upturned faces trusting in spite of their obvious anxiety.
Movietone News,
Helen had seen people digging in rubble piles, sometimes with their bare hands, and rescue workers carrying stretchers, but this magazine photo gripped her more than any of the moving pictures had. The children were so average-looking, so clean and well-fed, their upturned faces trusting in spite of their obvious anxiety.
The children's faces seemed to acquire throbbing color. Helen knew suddenly, without reading the text, that they'd all survived that day in the trench, but she also knew that the little boy in the foreground would die later, when a bomb hit his church, and that the girl with her hair pulled back from her brow with a barrette would also die, during an air raid that would take out a whole block of houses.
Helen turned away. Everything had been so quiet for so long, two whole years. She'd been sure she was really done with such things. Why should it come back now, in her own kitchen, on a happy Saturday afternoon, just because of a photograph? She'd been seeing newsreels and hearing radio broadcasts about the war in Europe for a year with no such effect.
Though the United States remained neutral, Helen's American history teacher had colored a world map to show occupied countries and inserted little flags to mark embattled areas. In the spring, German armies had overrun Denmark, Norway, the Low Countries, and France. With Japan and Italy
as allies and Russia signed to a nonaggression pact, Hitler seemed unstoppable. Helen knew that people were suffering and dying every day and night overseas, yet neither the classroom map nor the teacher's daily review of current events had sparked any visions or intuitions. Helen hadn't even had to resist them. They just weren't there.
as allies and Russia signed to a nonaggression pact, Hitler seemed unstoppable. Helen knew that people were suffering and dying every day and night overseas, yet neither the classroom map nor the teacher's daily review of current events had sparked any visions or intuitions. Helen hadn't even had to resist them. They just weren't there.
“Honey, are you all right?”
Helen turned to find her mother standing beside her. Only then did she realize she'd been leaning against the edge of the counter and softly moaning.
“It's that picture,” she said. “I saw ⦠Well, I didn't actually see anything, but two of those kidsâI know they're going to die.”
“Oh, Helen.” Emilie put her arm around the girl's shoulders.
“I don't like finding out things like that, Mama. I don't know what to do with them.”
“Shall we ask Nanny about it?”
“No. I want to forget it.”
Helen could see her mother struggling to think of what to say. Abruptly, Emilie opened the breadbox.
“All right then,” she said. “I was saving these rolls for supper, but why don't you use them for sandwiches?”
She peered into the refrigerator. “I know I've got some sweet pickles ⦠Here they are. And, Helen, I believe there's a bit of lettuce still in the garden. Go pick it. It'll only be wasted if the weather turns.”
Helen stood staring at her mother's industry as if she were watching a circus act.
“Well, go on,” Emilie said.
Still Helen hesitated. Emilie moved close to her and spoke quietly.
“It's just these times,” she said. “All the terrible news, the wondering where it's leading. Anyone could have premonitions
or dreams. I'm sure people do who have never had such things before. Don't worry about what to do about it.”
or dreams. I'm sure people do who have never had such things before. Don't worry about what to do about it.”
Helen knew it was not as simple as that, and she knew Emilie knew it, too. But she decided she would take the route her mother was laying out. She would pretend she hadn't received any communication about the children in the photograph, at least not anything almost anyone might imagine, as her mother said, in times like these. She would make her bologna sandwiches and go to the band concert and hold Billy's hand while they listened to the music, and she'd stop with him in the shadows on the way home and kiss him and let him touch her breasts if he wanted to, which he had taken to wanting often lately. She could forget anything while that was happening. She could forget anything just by thinking about that happening.
In the months that followed, Helen was repeatedly reminded of the children in the trench. The
Life
photo had been made into a poster supporting America's providing armaments to the Allies. The enlarged photo, with the slogan “Help Englandâand it won't happen here,” was posted in store windows, in the lobby of the movie house, and at the bus terminal. Helen kept her eyes averted whenever she passed one of the posters, but she couldn't stop herself wondering if the two doomed children had died yet.
Life
photo had been made into a poster supporting America's providing armaments to the Allies. The enlarged photo, with the slogan “Help Englandâand it won't happen here,” was posted in store windows, in the lobby of the movie house, and at the bus terminal. Helen kept her eyes averted whenever she passed one of the posters, but she couldn't stop herself wondering if the two doomed children had died yet.
Billy had taken a job at Wright Aeronautical in Paterson, but he still worked Saturdays at Benson's. Mr. Mackey had come back from his trampings and gotten a job at the Wright plant, too. President Roosevelt said America should be “the arsenal for democracy,” and Helen supposed he was right, but she regretted that Billy's work schedule meant he had less time to spend with her. Sundays were often taken up by his family. Mr. Mackey had embarked on a number of overdue repairs on the
house, and he expected Billy and Lloyd to pitch in.
house, and he expected Billy and Lloyd to pitch in.
“Do you think he's changed?” Helen asked Billy some weeks after Mr. Mackey's return. She'd noticed a wrung out quality to the man that she didn't remember him having before. Even standing in the midst of his family or busily engaged in some task of carpentry or yard work, he had an air of solitariness and motionlessness.
It was a clear Saturday night in February, and Helen and Billy were trudging home from sledding on steep Maitland Avenue. Rosie and her brothers had been there with their ten-person toboggan, and the snow on the backs of Helen's and Billy's coats attested to numerous hilarious spills.
“I'm not sure,” Billy answered after some thought. “It's different with him now, but I don't know if it's him or me.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, he gives me my head most of the time. Lloyd, too. Which I think is 'cause we're not kids like we were when he left. But he kind of stands off from all of us, doesn't even shush Linda when she's making a racket. He hasn't looked at the model planes I made while he was gone, and when I told him about a great new fishing spot we could go next summer, he didn't say anything.”
“You sound disappointed.”
Billy stopped walking and kicked at a snowbank, gradually boring a dent in the packed snow.
“It's funny, Helen, but I still miss him. He's back home, and I still miss him.”
“I guess you can get an idea in your head of somebody when the person isn't around, and then, later, if they don't match that idea, it can be sort of sad.”
Billy left off kicking the snowbank and playfully pulled Helen to him.
“And what about my idea of you, huh?” he said, hugging her,
his voice teasing, but his regard serious.
his voice teasing, but his regard serious.
“What about it?” She laughed.
“If I wasn't around, would you change?”
“Where would you be?”
“Oh, I don't know. My uncleâyou know, the one who's a pilotâhe joined the RAF. Could be he's dog-fighting some Stuka or Messerschmitt right this minute.”
“But he's an American.”
“Eagle Squadron. It's all American pilots.”
Helen stared into Billy's eyes.
“What are you going to do?” she said fearfully.
“Oh, nothing,” he said, giving her a little shake. “Guess the Brits don't need any hardware store jockeys. I'm better use to them here making fighter plane engines.”
Helen rested her cheek against the scratchy wool of his coat shoulder.
“Better use to me, too.”
He put his fingers under her chin and lifted her face. Slowly, eyes open, they kissed, then kissed again. Arms about each other's waists, they resumed walking.
“I wouldn't change,” she said softly after half a block.
“I'm not asking for a promise, Helen.”
“And I'm not making one,” she said earnestly. “It's just the truth. I wouldn't change. No matter where you go.”
By June, the March of Time newsreels proclaimed, there were 10,000 American volunteers in the RAF. The war news continued to go up and down, hope and discouragement trading places almost daily. The Allies, originally successful against the Italians in North Africa and Greece, were later bested in both places by the Germans. England was still under brutal bombardmentâin Edward R. Murrow's broadcasts from
London you often heard the noise of bombs and the shouts of fire wardens in the backgroundâbut the English remained unbowed, and the RAF was regularly downing German aircraft and bombing the German homeland. The powerful and dangerous
Bismarck
had been sunk. On the other hand, the Nazis were marching into Russia with half a million horses, as well as thousands of planes and tanks and heavy guns. Sometimes, during newsreels, people in the audience cried, and sometimes they shouted angrily at the screen, especially when Hitler or Mussolini appeared.
London you often heard the noise of bombs and the shouts of fire wardens in the backgroundâbut the English remained unbowed, and the RAF was regularly downing German aircraft and bombing the German homeland. The powerful and dangerous
Bismarck
had been sunk. On the other hand, the Nazis were marching into Russia with half a million horses, as well as thousands of planes and tanks and heavy guns. Sometimes, during newsreels, people in the audience cried, and sometimes they shouted angrily at the screen, especially when Hitler or Mussolini appeared.
Amid the welter of bulletins and commentary, Helen found it difficult to weigh the ultimate import of events, or to discern in what direction the war was heading. Added to her confusion were the laments of her grandmother for all the German deaths, especially of civilians, and the careful positioning of her parents and other German-Americans in the neighborhood. Her father's singing society had cancelled its annual concert and indefinitely suspended meetings. The front garden of the Dohrmanns sported little American flags beside their hydrangea bushes. The Smiths, whose great-grandfather had been Schmidt, had dropped out of Ursula's seances, which they'd been used to attending every few months. The frequency of seances had been cut in any case, Ursula saying the spirit world was too much in turmoil to make visits from there as calming as in peacetime.
“Some do not even know yet they are dead,” she confided to Emilie in Helen's hearing one evening as the three sat in the living room, the older women mending and Helen reading. “They come to our circle confused, like drifting boats.”
“How can that be?” Helen asked in spite of herself.
Ursula considered her before answering, as if pondering whether someone who had disdained learning about spirit deserved explanation now.
“When death comes sudden or violent,” she finally replied,
“the person can be as if dreaming. He stands in a spinning fog, afraid to go forward, even though he may see light ahead.”
“the person can be as if dreaming. He stands in a spinning fog, afraid to go forward, even though he may see light ahead.”
“What happens to them?” Helen said.
“Some awaken slowly to understand this life is done. Sometimes a higher spirit leads them. In our home circle, we have called such spirits to help the lost ones. It is good work, but it is tiring, and I cannot ask Mrs. Durkin and Mr. Grauer and Miss Simmons to do it too often.”
Ursula paused, again seeming to consider whether to proceed.
“You, Helen, younger and with your natural gift, could help. Just in this, not more. I do not let customers in the home circle.”
Helen swallowed. She wanted to say that she couldn't do what her grandmother was asking because she believed it would open a dam already straining. And she feared that what would come through would be not a measured flow, but a wild torrent that would wash away the normal life she'd been carefully building. What justification would not sound small and selfish? What equality was there between her wishing to count on flat-footed, ordinary days, and ghosts needing to be taught that they were dead? How could she say she was in her own struggle to find a place? How could she admit out loud that she didn't want to risk losing the affection in Billy's eyes, the touch of his hands?
“Nanny,” Emilie said, stepping into the taut silence, “remember when you and the others helped my babies leave?”
Ursula shifted her gaze to her daughter. She seemed annoyed by Emilie's interruption, but the change of topic was too sensitive a one to dismiss.
“Ja,”
she said.
she said.
“You were too little to remember,” Emilie said to Helen, “but when my pregnancies failed, your brothers' spirits were confused and unhappy, like Nanny just described. The circle talked to them and told them not to be afraid. We imagined them floating up into the sky like beautiful soap bubbles. It was a great
comfort to me to know they had found their way.”
comfort to me to know they had found their way.”
It was only the second time Helen had ever heard her mother talk about her miscarriages. Helen recalled them happening largely because she'd been sent both times to stay a few nights at Mrs. Durkin's house so her mother could rest. Mrs. Durkin had told her that Emilie's babies had gone back to heaven because they weren't ready yet to come live on earth. Helen had wondered in what way tiny babies could be unready. She'd considered all that had to be done before she was ready to go anywhereâthe finding of shoes, the brushing of teeth and hair, the matching of outerwear to the weather. None of that applied to the case of her puzzlingly fickle brothers, but when she returned home, the subdued manner of the three grown-ups informed her that questions would not be welcomed.
Helen had waited, a usually trustworthy course, and soon enough they took up their normal ways of speaking and moving about the house, but she had never felt the time ripe to ask for more information on why the babies hadn't been ready, and eventually, she forgot about it. It was only last year, when a neighbor lost a baby, that Emilie had talked briefly with Helen about her own miscarriages and how slow the sadness had been to lift.
“Nanny helped me see that my babies were still part of my life and your father's, and life in general, no matter how briefly they'd existed here,” Emilie had said then. “You see, she'd lost babies, too.”
Though her grandmother had resumed her mending, Helen knew she was still waiting for her to respond to the suggestion that she join the seance circle. Ursula would let Emilie unwind her digression, but she wouldn't be thrown off by it.
“Ja,”
Ursula said, “babies need help. Sometimes, too, there are spirits who know they should let go, but who cannot because they love too much this world or someone in it, or something
they feel is left to do.”
Ursula said, “babies need help. Sometimes, too, there are spirits who know they should let go, but who cannot because they love too much this world or someone in it, or something
they feel is left to do.”
“Are you finding more of those since the war?” Emilie asked.
Ursula sighed.
“They worry, some of them, that their people here need them, or that if they go forward, ties to those people will break. Such spirits we must push a little, so they may see that we do not really lose each other.”
“Nanny,” Helen began carefully, “I know all this is important, but I'm just not sure that I could ⦠I don't want any more ⦔
“It's not fair to put Helen on the spot,” Emilie said to her mother.
Ursula looked from one to the other.
“
Zwei gegen einen
. I am outnumbered.”
Zwei gegen einen
. I am outnumbered.”
“Maybe I could help at the séances,” Emilie offered. “I haven't the gift, but I did take part for my babies, so I know how it's done.”
Ursula nodded concession, though it was clear she begrudged it.
“Your mama told me about the picture in
Life,”
she said to Helen. “Has it happened again since that?”
Life,”
she said to Helen. “Has it happened again since that?”
“No.”
“This I am surprised to hear.” She raised her eyebrows. “You have more strength than I supposed.”
“Well, I'm going to have a bath,” Emilie said, standing up and putting her sewing things into a lidded basket.
Emilie obviously believed everything was safely settled, but Helen didn't want to stay in the room alone with her grandmother, who suddenly felt like an adversary. Helen hadn't asked her mother to keep her experience with the photograph a secret. But Nanny hadn't said anything, so Helen had assumed she didn't know. It was distressing to realize the old woman had stayed deliberately silent all these months, as if she'd been waiting
for the best time to bring it up, a time at which it might serve her own aims.
for the best time to bring it up, a time at which it might serve her own aims.
“I have a report to finish,” Helen said as soon as her mother had exited. She closed her book and rose from her chair.
“So near the end of school?” Ursula said suspiciously.
“The last one of the year!” the girl answered with calculated gaiety.
She had just reached the doorway when Ursula muttered to herself. Her voice was low, but Helen caught the words distinctly.
“Ja,
I am outnumbered,” she said. “If you do not count the dead.”
I am outnumbered,” she said. “If you do not count the dead.”
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