At the slight touch of his fingertips, I bounded up with a smile, giving a great sigh of relief. “Thank you,” I said, and moved back to my place in front of the fireplace, smiling as if the pain were gone. It was not; if anything it was worse as all eyes followed me. Maybe I had overplayed. Would he guess immediately that I knew who he was? Or would he be so flattered by recognition of his healing powers that he would suspend all disbelief? The latter, to be sure. As I saw the soft, proud, satisfied smile light his face, I knew that all was well, and my headache actually did begin to lessen.
I reached out my hand for pencil and paper, and I did silent automatic writing for the rest of the sitting. I covered sheets and sheets with anything that came into my head, anything but a reference to “Mister Long.” Whenever I stopped, head sunken on my chest, Erika read aloud what I had written, none of which made much sense. Finally I stopped, and Erika announced that the sitting was at an end.
When we were alone in our rooms, Erika praised me for my restraint. “It’s important not to overplay, not to give him too much at first. And you don’t want to do anything like he’s seen before. Don’t use Theophola again. He clearly isn’t excited by women. I think you’d better….” Erika stopped herself, obeying Norman’s advice to let me improvise on my own. “…better think of something because he’ll be back soon.” She was right. The next morning there was a phone call asking if “Mr. Long” could come for a private sitting that night.
For this private sitting Erika asked the Robertsons to allow us to use the tea house which their Japanese gardener had built at the end of their huge garden. It was a tiny room, bare except for tatami mats on the floor. White shojiscreens let in dim light during the day, but there was only a candle to light the room after dark. It was September, a hot, fogless month. The tea house was cool and comfortable.
Erika sat in the corner as silent chaperone (how she hated sitting on the floor!) Doctor Willy and I sat in the middle of the room, only a few feet from her, crosslegged on black cushions I had brought from Haight Street, with a lighted candle on the floor between us. I took a few deep breaths, then let my head fall forward to indicate that I was in trance. A moment later I became Jeb and gave the performance of my life up to that point.
“My friend!” I said, in the deepest, blackest voice I could muster. “Oh, my old friend Victor, how I watched over you these years past, how I tried to come through, how I tried to lead you to this girl who, ignorant as she is, makes the only channel I’ve found. After a hundred years, to clasp your hand again!” At this point I grabbed his right hand in both of mine and gave it a squeeze that made him cry out in pain. “It’s Jeb, your comrade Jeb, but you don’t know me. You don’t even know you are Victor!” I gave out a thick, deep laugh which impressed even Erika as I let go his hand, then sprawled sideways on the floor in a free, masculine pose, the way a large man would take his ease.
Then I told Doctor Willy, in the voice of Jeb, that he had, in a previous life, been Victor Lawson, a distant relative of many famous families, including that of Thomas Jefferson. He had been born in 1798, the same year as Jeb, who had been given to him as slave and companion. But they had become more than master and slave, had become true friends, growing and learning together, Victor secretly teaching Jeb to read and write, the two of them prizing one another above all others. As they grew older, the family expected their close relationship to change to one appropriate to a slave society. When it did not, Victor’s family tried to separate them, but Victor resisted, becoming defiant. So they sent him away, up north to boarding school, where he met abolitionists and, secretly communicating with Jeb, made plans to help him escape, after which they planned to go to Canada where they would make their fortune together. The plot broadened to include other slaves who wanted to escape. They planned a mass uprising and escape, Victor secretly returning to help lead them out. They were betrayed, Jeb was killed, and the other rebel slaves sold south. Victor killed himself over his friend’s body, and his family covered up the story, saying that Victor had died of smallpox shortly after being sent north to school. All records of the uprising and deaths had been suppressed.
My invention owed much to Uncle Tom’S Cabin with traces of Huckleberry Finn and Frederick Douglass’s autobiography. Probably two elements of my story of Jeb and Victor appealed most to Doctor Willy. One was the extraordinary heroism and loyalty of Victor. The other element was the erotic flavor Willy might find in the relationship, which, of course, I left unspoken. So again I had given Doctor Willy flattery, this time with a pinch of romantic, boyish love, brotherly and otherwise. Tears were running down his pink cheeks when I suddenly slipped out of trance, folded my legs under me, and gave him a shy, puzzled look. He took my hand, told me his true name, and asked if he might return the next night.
I grew very fond of Doctor Willy as he returned night after night. I can still see his rosy face with his neat, white pointed goatee and sparse gray hair sticking up above his large, blue, often wet eyes. He was a very credulous man, very susceptible to flattery, very proud, and very self-pitying. But he was genuinely tolerant and open-minded, which is the better side of being credulous. He loved seeing himself in the role of fighter against injustice; hence I, in the role of Jeb, could endlessly elaborate on Victor’s story. He might even have been justified in believing that he had healing powers; there was something soothing in his gentle smile.
Doctor Willy told me many stories about his persecution by authorities, and of his resigning from the Society for Psychical Research, which he found increasingly intolerant of phenomena he believed genuine. Nevertheless, he was considering moving to England, the headquarters of the SPR, because interest in spiritualism was very high there.
It was Doctor Willy who first addressed me as Madame Psyche. Since I was just eighteen when he met me, the title was at first a little joke, an exaggerated bit of courtliness, but it was also a sincere expression of respect. To call an unmarried woman Madame was a recognition of maturity, accomplishment, independence. At one point Doctor Willy said, “You are married to something higher than a mere man.”
Night after night, Doctor Willy came to sittings, private or public, and when I refused money, brought gifts which Erika planned to sell as soon as he went back to Europe. At the public sittings he took notes which he said would help in writing the long chapter he intended devoting to me in his book. At our private sittings he laughed and cried with Jeb, who brought him messages from other spirits who confirmed Doctor Willy’s healing powers, tolerance, courage, and intelligence. But Doctor Willy also spent time, more and more time, just talking to me directly. At some sittings I did not even go into trance or try automatic writing. I just listened as Doctor Willy discoursed on the meaning of spiritualism.
“We are on the brink of a new era,” he would say, “and I may live long enough to see it. Surely you will. The long, cruel history of mankind’s crude beginnings is at an end. The old beliefs are being swept away. The churches, those fortresses of superstition, are crumbling. The annihilating drudgery of physical labor is being taken over by machines. The despotic rulers are being swept aside in great tidal waves of democracy. Oh, there is much to do yet, but the trend is unmistakable. We are on the brink of the new age.
“And who will lead us into the new age? You, my dear little Madame Psyche. You and I and all the others who are slowly coming to see the signs of the miracle which is being revealed through you. Yes, the spiritualist movement is the vanguard. For it is we of the spiritualist movement who are bringing together the two worlds, this, and the World Beyond. It is that connection which gives meaning to life, without which, all is chaos. We bring the new gospel, the faith based on evidence, proof that life does not arise and die in senseless repetition but goes on and upward forever. We connect the seen with the unseen. We show that everything is alive, that we have always lived and always shall live, that every atom of every person, animal, indeed of every stone, is precious.
“You are the prophet, the seer who makes the tiny chink of light in the wall between the two worlds. We have always had a few who saw into the unseen, but now, in this age, our numbers multiply.