Lily Dale by Christine Wicker

from Pittsford, New York, told the Dunkirk newspaper that he cured her of blindness.
    Mae West, who depended on Jack for career guidance and who knows what else, once chased him all the way from California to Lily Dale. Mae’s bodyguards were gorgeous, remembered Betty Schultz, who saw them. Jack often entertained Mae’s friends at parties in Santa Monica while Mae sat to the side dressed in an elegant, floor-length gown. It was said that a five-carat diamond ring he wore was a gift from her. Jack died well before Mae did, but that didn’t end their story.
    In 1974, ten years after his death, Mae settled down to watch television in her Hollywood apartment one evening. While waiting for the television to warm up, she heard a deep voice. It was as though someone was trying to say something but couldn’t get the words out, Mae told an interviewer. She looked toward the other end of the couch and saw two feet in men’s shoes.
    Then trousers appeared, and, finally, Jack Kelly, clad in full-dress white tie, looking about thirty years old. He was completely solid, she told the interviewer.
    West yelled for her bodyguard, who was in the other room, and the apparition began to disappear. “He dissolved right before my eyes, down through the couch, and was gone,” Mae told a reporter. The bodyguard, shouting, “What happened?” ran into the room, but only Mae was on the couch.
    Â 
    I asked Hilda, why aren’t the mediums of today able to do what the old-timers did?
    â€œIt’s the money,” she said. “These mediums charge too much money, and that’s why they don’t have the power mediums once did.” Hilda can remember when mediums left a basket by the door for donations and didn’t name a fee. She can well remember when five dollars was considered plenty. Now mediums charge forty to seventy-five dollars for a half-hour of time.
    I asked Hilda whether anybody in Lily Dale was a born medium.
    â€œI don’t want to say anything against any of them,” she said. “They’re good people.”
    But was there one whom she could absolutely vouch for?
    â€œAnne Gehman,” she said. “She’s a born medium.”
    Then Hilda shook her head and looked worried. “I don’t know for sure, because Anne’s had several husbands, and you’d think that if she was a true medium she wouldn’t have so much trouble. She also said that Gerald Ford was going to win another term, and he didn’t.”
    But one of the husbands died. Anne couldn’t be held accountable for that, and, as for the wrong predictions, nobody’s right all the time. Even Hilda doesn’t expect that. Anne, who lived in Washington, D.C., and was married to a Georgetown University professor, spent part of her summers in a big pink and white cottage that faces the lake. She helped catch serial killer Ted Bundy and had some of the most powerful people in Washington as her clients, Hilda said.
    Before I left, the old lady gave me a piece of advice.
    â€œLearn everything you can while you’re on the earth plane,” she said, “and remember this: you take your bundle with you. Everything you learn here goes into the next world for you to use.”
    I’m convinced that we believe certain things about religion because they seem right. Some people call that a knowing. Some people call it resonance. Some people call it God talking. Whatever it is, that feeling is what really communicates to us, and we find ourselves thinking, That’s right. I believe that.
    When Hilda said we take our bundle with us, I thought, That’s right. I believe that. And her words shifted something in me. I quoted them many times to other people who never failed to nod and say, “Ummm,” as though I’d just imparted some great notion. I didn’t realize that Hilda’s words weren’t as magical to everyone as they were to me until I repeated them to