Wallflower at the Orgy (18 page)

One such witness is William Sloane, an eminent editor who probably did more to bring parapsychology into respectable publishing houses than any other man. Sloane was the first man in the book trade to publish the work of Dr. J. B. Rhine, the grand old man of telepathy and director of the Duke University Institute for Parapsychology; he bought the first book written on Edgar Cayce (
There Is a River
by Thomas Sugrue), commissioned the second (
Many Mansions
by Gina Cerminara), and paid the first advance to a Denver amateur hypnotist named Morey Bernstein for the story of his experience regressing a Denver housewife back to a previous life as an Irish homebody named Bridey Murphy. Sloane, himself something of a sensitive, once called five cards in a row correctly off the top of a shuffled deck in order to convince his salesmen there was something to telepathy.

In 1940 Thomas Sugrue, a writer who felt he owed his life to a Cayce reading, sent the manuscript of
There Is a River
to Sloane, then at Holt, Rinehart and Winston. “I read it,” said Sloane, at present director of the Rutgers University Press. “Now there isn’t any way to test a manuscript like this. So I did the only thing I could do. A member of my family, one of my children, had been in great and continuing pain. We’d been to all the doctors and dentists in the area and all the tests were negative and the pain was still there. I wrote,
told him my child was in pain and would be at a certain place at such-and-such a time, and enclosed a check for twenty-five dollars. He wrote back that there was an infection in the jaw behind a particular tooth. So I took the child to the dentist and told him to pull the tooth. The dentist refused—he said his professional ethics prevented him from pulling sound teeth. Finally, I told him he would have to pull it. One tooth more or less didn’t matter, I said—I couldn’t live with the child in such pain. So he pulled the tooth and the infection was there and the pain went away. I was a little shook. I’m the kind of man who believes in X rays. About this time, a member of my staff who thought I was nuts to get involved with this took even more precautions in writing to Cayce than I did, and he sent her back facts about her own body only she could have known. So I published Sugrue’s book.”

There Is a River
is probably the best of the Cayce books. Unlike Stearn’s book, it has the virtue of the chronological order. But almost every book on Cayce is limited by the prophet’s awkward expression and by the nonmedical readings he gave. Edgar Cayce’s adventures into reincarnation—known as his “life readings”—are so foolish as to make his medical record very nearly suspect. One may be very partial to modest stories about Alabama housewives who lie down on couches and regress to become Scottish minstrels, but it is hard to cope with Cayce’s panoramic regressions. In his life readings, almost everyone he ever read for turned out to have existed in previous lives with everyone else he ever read for—on the same Crusades, in the same wilderness, together in Jerusalem, together on the lost continent of Atlantis. Cayce, his wife, and his secretary had been together, marching through Georgia, Cairo, and Rome, in at
least ten different incarnations. Cayce’s son, Hugh Lynn, once came to his father for a life reading after breaking off an unhappy engagement, only to be given the reassuring information that he was well rid of the girl since he’d been married to her in three previous lifetimes and she’d been rotten to him in all three of them. This suggests that Edgar Cayce may at times have been a better father than a seer.

The Search for Bridey Murphy
, published in 1956, was written by Morey Bernstein under the influence of Cayce’s life readings. Bernstein had not only read
There Is a River
and
Many Mansions
but also did some research on his book at the ARE.
Bridey Murphy
—which Doubleday bought from William Sloane, who felt the evidence in the manuscript did not stand up—sold 150,000 copies in six weeks; then a
Life
magazine story offering a nonspiritual explanation for Bridey’s “reincarnation” stopped its sale dead. (It is a charming book, recently reissued in paperback by Lancer Books with an extra chapter debunking the
Life
story.) Lee Barker at Doubleday thinks the exposé probably was the cause for postponing, for a few years at least, the surge in parapsychological literature. Not until Ruth Montgomery’s book on Jeane Dixon, nine years later, did the field have another big best seller.

There does seem to be something to parapsychology. (This, along with its appeal to people unwilling to look within themselves for the source of their difficulties, probably accounts for the popularity of these books.) The work done at Duke University has shown that telepathy and clairvoyance can be scientifically documented. How they work and what they mean are still unclear; like the Rosetta stone before
Champollion, they remain a tantalizing puzzle promising a great deal, perhaps a great deal more than they ultimately deliver. As for reincarnation, there is little evidence that it exists—a fact that does not alter one whit its attractions for any man who has made a mess of his current life on earth.

This much
is
clear: most of humanity muddles through without relying on parapsychology. We use the telephone, not telepathy. In fact, some publishers—a quiet few—have begun to wonder whether there is not some danger in exposing readers to the view of events that parapsychology represents. It may be that these books—particularly the sketchy, overstated, hastily put-together items that dominate the field—make it difficult for the susceptible to deal with their lives. As publisher William Sloane put it, “When a man is drowning, it may be better for him to try to swim than to thrash around waiting for divine intervention.”

May 1969

Here we are. In Springs, the artists’ colony of East Hampton, Long Island, only two and a half hours from New York on the Long Island Expressway—if you happen to be driving at
three in the morning and no other cars are on the highway. Came out yesterday, in a rented station wagon, with one mother’s helper (Scarsdale High School, uses Clearasil) and the kids (who demanded twelve gas-station stops and threw fried clams all over the Howard Johnson’s in Riverhead). All in all, the trip took five and one-half hours. Not that I have any right to complain about the distance: it was
my
idea that we rent a house here. In the Hamptons. A clutch of charming little towns at the Eastern tip of Long Island, with giant old beach houses, glossy white beaches, fresh-caught lobsters, acres of potato fields, and a summer population consisting of just Everyone. Westhampton, containing just Everyone in advertising. Quogue, containing just Everyone on Wall Street. Southampton, containing just Everyone in society. East Hampton, containing just Everyone in the arts. As for Springs, it’s on the Bay, and is, I must confess, a woodsy and not entirely chic appendage to East Hampton. No town of its own to speak of, but Main Street, East Hampton is ten minutes away—two long blocks of one-story white shops straight out of Olde New England, and no bathing suits and bare feet allowed. Keeps the real-estate prices up and the riffraff out.

In Springs, the mosquitoes bloom earlier, the sun heats hotter, and the wood ticks are saucier than in East Hampton proper. But it’s what we could afford—thirty-five hundred dollars for the short season (July 1–Labor Day), and, as the rental agent said back on that snowy day in February when we signed the lease, the house is across the street from the cemetery where Jackson Pollock is buried, just down the block from critic Harold Rosenberg, and right next door to Willem de Kooning. I can see the headlines now: “
EXPRESSIONIST PAINTER SUCCUMBS TO
MANHATTAN HOUSEWIFE
: ‘It Must Have Been My Bill Blass Bathing Suit That Got Him,’ Says Temptress.”

Frank is commuting Thursday nights for long weekends. It’s not ideal, but what can you do? It’s either this or sweating it out in the city. Adam and Amanda will be brown and healthy. The mother’s helper’s skin will clear up. I will grow dill and tomatoes and do all the things I’ve been meaning to do since Wellesley: search my soul, read Jane Austen, and stalk the wild asparagus. Ellie Trillin will also be out here (her house is two doors from a cottage rented by Sherman Rogin, the Jewish novelist who shot his first wife in the ankle), and we’ve vowed to take exercise classes at Kounovsky’s in Westhampton. Frank promises he’ll take two weeks off in July and spend them out here. “
VACATIONING GOTHAM LAWYER SLASHES NUDE PAINTING OF WIFE BY FAMOUS ARTIST
.” All in all, it shouldn’t be too bad. A little separation is good for any couple, right? And everybody does it. Year after year. People wouldn’t keep doing it over and over again if it was bad, would they? Or would they?

Before I left, I bumped into Jill Corman. A skinny bohemian one class ahead of me who kept a bottle of May wine under the bathtub. I told her I was doing the Beach Wife thing for the summer. “You must be crazy,” she said, “Leaving your husband alone in the city with all those secretaries.” Told her there was no other way. Said the summer air in New York wasn’t fit to breathe. Mumbled something about the possibility of rioting in the streets this summer. “But what about all those predatory females in town?” she said. “What about all those single painters and/or writers at the beach?” said I. I thought I handled her very nicely. But I keep wondering. What if she is right?

July Fourth weekend glorious. Four days of perfect weather. Everyone says it won’t last. Everyone refers in Ominous Tones to the summer of 1967, when it rained all of August and even the tomatoes hated it. I refuse to listen to them. Frank left this morning on the 6:13 for New York and said he would be back Friday. “I thought you said you’d be out Thursday,” I said. “I’ll try,” he said. The house has bats. I’m going into town to see a man about an extermination. Then, off to the East Hampton Coast Guard Beach, where (according to yesterday’s
New York Times Book Review
) the literati hang out. Saul Bellow. Sherman Rogin. Barney Rosset, publisher of Grove Press. Norman Mailer, here to make a film. “
ANGRY YOUNG NOVELIST TO STAR WELLESLEY GRAD (’58) IN CINEMA VÉRITÉ FILM
.”

My first whole week: Monday recovered from weekend. Tuesday spent in East Hampton laundromat. Wednesday gardened. Thursday cleaned house. Friday prepared for arrival of husband and houseguests. Washed hair. Cleaned nails. Shaved legs. Oiled body. Ate celery for lunch. Spent $75 at supermarket and $50 at liquor store. Took children to station to meet The Daddy Train. Mine wore flannel pajamas. Everyone else’s wore Pucci pajamas.

Frank arrived. Complained about Long Island Rail Road. Said air conditioning in parlor car didn’t work. Griped about
life in town: he eats TV dinners at night and is growing a mold in a dirty coffee cup. Houseguests arrived in time for dinner and polished off twelve ears of corn, two loaves French bread, and one grilled striped bass prepared according to Craig Claiborne’s recipe in last week’s
Times
. After dinner, houseguests sighed and said they always sleep better in the country and they always eat more in the country. Translation: they are going to sleep all day and eat all of my food. The weekend: I rushed from supermarket to stove to sink to beach to supermarket to stove to sink. Seven meals and four bottles of rum later, houseguests departed, promising to send present which will not begin to reward me for the time, effort, and money I spent on them. Today it is Monday, and I am recovering from the weekend. Like that. Meanwhile, I have polished off twelve Agatha Christies and three Rex Stouts. I’m saving Jane Austen for the long nights of August.

Life here is not quite what I expected. For one thing, Willem de Kooning does not live next door. His ex-wife lives next door. And Harold Rosenberg rented his house down the block to a certified public accountant and is off in Crete for the summer. As for Jackson Pollock, he is definitely buried across the street, though I haven’t been able to find his grave.

The East Hampton Coast Guard Beach is beautiful—clean, white rolling dunes that seem to stretch for miles into
the blue sea, quiet and private, houses as big as hotels fronting on it, all of them covered with climbing roses. On Sundays there’s a show-biz strip (where I overheard Lauren Bacall tell Adolph Green she uses Noskote to keep her nose from burning), a clutch of psychiatrists (who all play cribbage), and there’s even a homosexual belt. But you would hardly know there was anything literary about it. I did spot Sherman Rogin walking his dog down the beach yesterday. He is adorable—great soulful brown eyes and curly black hair that looks like clusters of black grapes. I think he winked at me.