“It’s a good idea, you know. We’d make a lot of money. There’s so much lust. The stitching of sex everywhere, common as knot, pandemic as signature. More lust and combination than the ingredients in recipes. Ask your parents. It’s a gimcrack idea.
“You know,” Kinsley said, “it’s a shame finally. It’s all real, you know. The supernatural plane is real as a breadboard. Astral projection is real. All of it is. I’m certain of my facts. (I get past the Rockies.) Last night I visited my dead. It’s just you can’t always reproduce it for them. It’s just you have to be alone. Isn’t that right, Mr. Ringlinger? Isn’t that right, sir? Am I lying to this boy?”
George held his breath. It seemed to him that just for a moment, and out of the corner of his eye, he saw the dark stain where greased, oiled heads had rested against the back of a wing chair glisten and flare.
“So,” Kinsley said, “what do you think?”
What he thought was that it wasn’t the first time. It seemed that someone he knew of was always talking to horses. Perhaps only what they said was different. Or maybe not. Maybe they said the same things finally, choosing language good as any to talk to horses in, trying to get through, past, like Ringlinger, like Kinsley, like all the others in Cassadaga, telling them in words even people would have trouble with what they wanted, who they were.
He had known the secrets of seances for almost a year, had attended, diligent as someone learning a card trick, as almost every spiritualist in Cassadaga had explained his particular techniques, unburdening, trusting him with their mysteries, dragging him into their conspiracies. It was not the way grownups normally behaved with children. Even his parents had said “when you’re older,” putting him off with their “not yets” and “not nows” (filling him in only on this: family history), but the Cassadagans had fixed on him as if he were some kid confidant, inundating him with some need they had to provide the plausible, satisfy logic, purge belief, lapse faith.
If he was taken in by some particularly striking effect, they could become almost shrill in their contempt.
“My God! Didn’t you even feel it?” Reverend Bone demanded.
“My left arm moved.”
“Not that! Didn’t you feel it when we shook hands and I planted the fishhook in your shirtsleeve?”
“You were talking about the spirits being angry. Something touched my sleeve. My arm flew up.”
“Christ, kiddo, it’s a good thing you’re too small and I had to throw you back. Otherwise I’d fry you for lunch. Something touched your sleeve! Yeah, right. My nickel fishhook and my ten-pound line! You were rigged as a puppet, Pinnoch! You were struck as a pompano.”
“There’s nothing there.”
“Jesus! You don’t know beans about good manners, do you? When people shake hands hello they usually shake hands good-by.”
“That’s when you took it out.”
Bone rolled his eyes and raised his hands in the air. “Curses, foiled again,” he said mildly.
It was always their mildness which was feigned. All they demanded of him was pure doubt, unrelenting skepticism. It was as if by exposing the five-cent fishhooks and ten-pound lines that were nearly always the simple solutions — they shunned the elaborate, were unreconciled to the complicated; if a seance couldn’t be conducted by a spiritualist and one assistant it was not a clean operation — to what were only tricks, hammering at him with explanation, clarification, cracked code and truth, they were free to contemplate mystery, the wonderful, all the elegant hush-hush of the riddle world.
They were childless of course, or their children were grown, gone, and that may have had something to do with their attitude toward him, but even George, grateful as he was for their attention, understood that at bottom their feelings were neutral, they did not care for him — not in that way. He was no surrogate.
“No,” Professor G. D. Ashmore told him, “you’re no surrogate. You’re it, the real thing. You know why we beat at you with our greenroom shoptalk and regale you with our wholesale-to-the-trade secrets?”
“Because you trust me?”
“Trust you? Why would we want to trust you? You’re a kid. What are you, eleven, eleven and a half? You’re a kid. You walk on the grass. You fish out of season. You’re a kid, you’re nasty to cats. You break a window you say it was an accident. You’re a kid, you play hooky, you mock the deformed. Why would anyone trust a kid?”
“Then why?”
“You’re going to be twelve soon. You’re going to have to make up your mind, George. You’re going to have to choose.”
“Choose what?”
“Leave me alone, don’t bother me. I don’t talk turkey with kids.”
This was before he’d seen his sister.
His instruction continued.
“In street clothes, I seem ordinary as a fourth for bridge. Pour yourself some lemonade, dear,” Madam Grace Treasury called from behind the dark, heavy curtain that served as a partition between her seance room and her parlor. “Pour some for me.
“I could be someone shopping, who does dishes, makes beds. In elevators, crowded buses, in all the rush hours, men, women too, find my bearing undistinguished, so like their own that we are almost interchangeable. They can scarcely see me, make me out. It is not prurience or avidity or passion which knocks men against women, which grinds their backs into our busts or makes them lean, close as ballroom dancers, along the cant of our thighs and hips. It is that reflexive indifference to flesh, feature, organ, skin, which sprawls mankind, which, beyond a certain age but implicit at any age, potbellies posture and un-sealegs gait. It is, I think, gravity which opens our mouths like the imbecile’s and mutualizes our bodies and sexes in those elevators and buses, permitting touch touch, skin skin, body body, the coalescing rhomboids and circles of our let-be geometrics like some backward parthenogenesis.
“I have no person, I mean. Few people do. Otherwise we should arrange ourselves, even in buses, even in rush hour, like chessmen on boards before play begins. Otherwise — were I beautiful, were I hideous — I should, even in the most crowded elevator, be given that same jagged fringe of elbow room and breathing space, like a nimbus of limelight, that is granted to drunks and royalty and people felled by their bodies collapsed in the street.”
She came into the room. She was dressed in a sort of robe, dense and massy as a habit, larger than he’d ever seen her, taller, her face, even her hands fuller.
George saw her strange make-up, her blue face powder, her black lipstick, her face blocked off in queer colors, like the hues of a wound or hidden organs suddenly visible. She seemed immense in her turban, her big seance dress.
“Thank you for pouring the lemonade, dear. My,” she said, taking a window seat in the bright parlor, “it’s just so hot. Sometimes I think it isn’t any special favor to us to have all this Florida sunshine. Oh, I know they envy us up North and it is a comfort in the winter, but, gracious, it does get hot, and we don’t get the cooling breezes that folks can at least hope for in other parts of the country. That’s one of the reasons I bought such a large Frigidaire. So I’d always have plenty of ice cubes for my lemonade. When it’s hot like this, I like it cold enough to hurt my teeth.