I’d wanted to visit the Spiritualists by the Sea—it hadn’t been Del’s idea. I’d been reading my great-grandfather’s manuals, and I wanted some proof of what was happening in the camp. While my grandfather was alive I didn’t dare go against his wishes, but when he died I believed I would find him at the camp, and he would forgive me for defying him. That summer, I turned twelve. I was too old for Del’s games of pretend, too young to care about the boys Leanne and Sarah entertained around the pool. My father had kept the ranch house in the suburbs and had moved in with his new wife by then. We saw him occasionally, staying in our old bedrooms during weekend visits. But the place had never felt like our house—not like my grandparents’ had—and that summer my father and his wife had purchased a cottage on the Cape, and we were allotted a week with him there at the cottage, and then our visit with him was done.
My mother had continued her volunteer work at the church, and took shifts at the Prison Store, where they sold inmates’ handcrafted tables and chairs, chess boards and jewelry boxes. Del and I always joked about messages in the merchandise—a hidden panel at the base of a wooden candlestick into which had been secreted a manifesto, admitting or denying the inmate craftsman’s crime. The store was in a town plaza—between a bookstore and the one movie theater. Beyond this I wasn’t sure how our mother kept herself busy.
My grandmother was occupied with her bridge club and her garden club. Often, neither of them was home and we were left unsupervised. We spent a lot of time in the house—reading our grandparents’ old books, listening to French language tapes we found in the attic, and using the French around our mother to annoy her. The beach communities filled with summer people, and we spent our time on bikes, or walking the lanes to the beach club with our group of friends. Taking a detour into the woods wasn’t much of a stretch, and Del and I stole down the gravel road through the woods one morning just as the Spiritualists’ organ hit its first notes. We brought a backpack with sandwiches and pretended we were simply out for a hike. The woods were cool, just beginning to fill with bugs, and the sun blinked through the leaves as we walked. Neither of us spoke, solemn with the weight of our disobedience.
Occasionally, a car would come by, and we’d will ourselves invisible and step to the side, allowing it to pass—dusty Connecticut plates, some from New York or Massachusetts. The path through the woods inclined and we emerged at the top of a hill where the trees thinned to a meadow. Ahead the cottages began, brightly painted like gypsy wagons—peaked, wood-framed structures with gingerbread trim—miniature versions, I noted, of our grandparents’ house, connected by narrow lanes. We saw towels and swimsuits on clotheslines, and floats and inner tubes stuffed under cottage porches. One of the lanes ended at a bulkhead, where a path led through rangy swamp rose bushes down to a rocky beach. Del and I paused at the head of the path, partly hidden behind the roses. The Spiritualists had dotted the sand with umbrellas, and children played in the Sound. Someone opened a cooler and pulled the flip top of a can of soda or beer. Del and I surveyed the scene, surprised. This was like any of the other beach communities we’d been to.
The organ sound led us into a grove where the temple stood—a white clapboard building with tall windows and double wooden doors propped open to allow in the sea breeze. Inside, folding chairs made an expanding half-circle, and people had begun to file in and take their seats. That day, according to the placard at the front of the room, Reverend Earline Morrissey, a medium from New London, was scheduled to hold a spirit communication circle. We were told by a lanky man, who bent at the waist so we could smell the moth ball odor of his dress shirt, that children weren’t allowed. Del, sensing my disappointment, waited until the doors had closed, then tugged me into the viburnum shrubs beneath the open windows where we could hear the event commence.
Reverend Earline said she was getting a message for someone named “Jean,” and a woman, supposedly Jean herself, gasped, and Earline and Jean had a conversation—a back-and-forth about who the message was from (her grandmother’s childhood friend) and what she wanted to say (she was the one who stole the silver sugar tongs). The hour went on in this way, with Earline calling out messages, and people claiming them—“Why, that’s my uncle Gem” or “Oh! Mother! That’s Susan Merriman, my mother.” The messages were specific enough that they felt very real to me—the red bike with the basket, the boat named Lucky Again, a child’s hatred of rhubarb, a man’s quirky addiction to warm buttermilk. It didn’t seem possible that Earline would make these things up. But there were also moments when she called out messages and no one claimed them, when she’d struggle with a message that the audience member couldn’t understand.
“My mother never enjoyed going to the movies,” a woman said, sourly. “She was agoraphobic. I think you have the wrong person.”