Stanley Elkin - George Mills

In less than three months the spiritualists, though to use the term was to paint with too broad a brush, there being as much difference between a clairvoyant and clairaudient as there was between a holy roller and a bishop, wondered how they had ever gotten along without him. Bill J. Pierce, a Spirit Photographer who’d been photographing auras for over fifty years, said Mills had been sent to them.

He made enough to pay Wickland for their room and board. He made more in fact than he’d ever made in his life and was actually able to bank a part of his earnings. He forgot all about orange picking as soon as he returned to the hoarding at the entrance to the small square, studying the board, reading the rubrics he had at first only glanced at, assuming it to be the town’s directory of churches, knowing only now where he was, what the fine-sounding titles, the “Doctors” and “Reverends” and “Professors” with their long tail of high-toned initials, really meant.

It was not no-man’s-land but one of those places like Hollywood or Broadway, or Reno, say, or somewhere offshore, beyond what was still the twelve-mile limit, where gambling ships dropped anchor and the high rollers had to take into account not just ordinary house odds but the pitch and yaw of the salon, too. It was a district, as Covent Garden was a district, as the Reeperbahn was, given over to a singleminded commerce not with no real reason for it to be, but with no real reason for it to be there, or none that anyone understood, not even Pierce, the aura photographer of fifty years. It was evidently famous — Mills checked off the license plates; more were from out of state than from Florida — as something is famous only after you discover you have a need for it, as when you take up tennis or golf and find out that there are magazines that advertise not only racquets and clubs, but devices for restringing racquets, bulk catgut-like balls of twine, tees specially designed to stand straight in sandy earth. (Or if you need an abortionist, his father thought, and discover all the abortionists are within a two block area a quarter mile from the Milwaukee Zoo.)

So Cassadaga was famous. At least twenty pages of Hartmann’s Directory of Psychic Science and Spiritualism were given over to its closely printed ads. It was famous for its occult hardware, the arcane merchandise which Mills toted into the De Land post office — tiny heart-shaped planchettes and ouija boards like odd altars or artists’ palettes, pocket breath controllers, aura charts, the rich colors painted on linen and attached to rollers like window shades, Aurospecs, seance trumpets, gazing crystals, spirit restraints, prisms, joss sticks, tarot cards, exorcism salts, sheet music, lullabies for the infant dead, marches for soldiers fallen in battle, witch waltzes. There were dictionaries of magic words, Seals of Solomon, mock-ups of left- and right-handed palms, telekinetic dice, outdoor seance furniture, occult recipes, three-dimensional models of the human soul, wands and charms, bells, books, candles — all Sorcery’s fee faw fum, all Belief’s hocus pocus dominocus.

And this just a sideline, though he didn’t know that yet, though his son found out first and even tried to tell him about it, to warn the father not to be taken in when he sometimes boasted that for the first time in a thousand years the Millses had risen above their station and gotten into crime, escaping if only briefly and if only through the odd historical accident of the Depression, that old curse on all fallen men that they must labor by the sweat of their brow and the clench of their muscles locked as fists just to eke out a measly subsistence which had to be pledged daily, renewed daily, like prayer or exercise.

“What do you mean a thousand years?” George asked.

“A thousand years. It’s a figure of speech.”

“We’ve been poor a thousand years?”

“Did I say that? We’re with the crooks now, that’s all. This is the age of busted law, sonny boy. We’re on the side of the corrupt for once. Watch our smoke.”

“But we’re not. They’re not.”

“Not much.”

“They believe in it.”

“Tell it to the Marines. Ain’t I got bills of lading for all the spook house swag the Cassadaga College of Cardinals sends to suckers all over this God-fearing country? And that’s just in one pocket. Ain’t I got promissory notes from the COD, and postal and international money orders and stamps and even cash in the others? We should have tied in with the criminal element long ago. We missed the boat there, George. It’s the land of opportunity down here. A few years ago they were running rum, all the boozes, not fifty miles from where we’re standing. We missed the boat. We missed the boat they run it in on.”

Because his son was the only kid in town. Because he was more than just an errand boy. Because, if the truth be known, it was his dad who was the errand boy, who they paid, and well enough, too, but didn’t bother to impress. So he knew it was a sideline, little more than a service to their clients, a nuisance, like free delivery. As a cab driver might write down flat rates to distant cities or a hooker have in her wardrobe, along with her regulation lace panties and see-through bras and garter belts, the odd cat-o’-nine-tails and cruel boots or nun’s habit, holding them in readiness not because she was often asked to use this stuff but because they were part of the repertoire, even though she knew that all that was really expected of her was the ordinary push-pull of standardized lust.

This was the way with almost the entire army of Cassadaga spiritualists.

“Many of the faithful have no faith,” Professor G. D. Ashmore had told him. “They want the atmospherics of the visible and invisible planes of existence. They know that Death is a misnomer but can’t break their Halloween habits, their skull and crossbones prejudices.”

It was so. He was errand boy enough to know that much. He had often enough been sent off to borrow a pinch of ghost spice or jar of phantom powder as another child might be sent to neighbors for sugar or milk.

“The Spirit Kingdom is real as Canada,” L. R. F. Grunbine — initials preceded their names like train whistles — liked to remind him, “but association drives their wills. They want mortuary silts, floral arrangements, candles, incense, all the hearse perfumes and cemetery aromatics. They believe with their noses, love stuck in their olfactories like grime. They want soul thrills but shop like savages, the cheap built into their psyches like bad breath. They gypsy our science and Coney Island our cause. Superstition is the enemy of the occult, George.” And W. A. Oaten Ernest had the same complaint. M. R. R. Keller did. (Mills no longer referred to them as Dr., Professor, Reverend, or Madam, dropping their honorifics before his father ever did, though it was his dad who continued to think of them as crooks and charlatans, addressing them for all that as they listed themselves on what he now called the billboard.)

Only Wickland was still Reverend.

Of all the mystics, psychics, theosophists, astrologers, telepaths, palm readers, metapsychologists, diviners, fortune tellers, alchemists, necrophysicists, crystal gazers, and figure flingers in Cassadaga, only Wickland was Reverend. Nor did George believe any more in Wickland’s bona fides than he did in the spiritual and scientific ordainments of Cassadaga’s other metaphysicians. It was a simple matter of distancing.

The town’s only child — nephew and grandson to all — he was in on their secrets, the tricks of their trade. Lessoned as a novitiate, closely drilled as an apprentice, often permitted to help with their proofreading, the pamphlets and handbooks they were endlessly writing, the psychic newsletters they were always getting out, he was their confidant, too. He read their mail to them, petitions of the mortally ill — the divines of Cassadaga were a forum of last resort: requests for clues to stave off death, appeals from widows, widowers — he learned that couples in their fifties and sixties and seventies still made love, ardent as teenagers; he learned, if not of the sanctity of marriage, at least of its addictive power, that love was always the last habit broken — to contact their dead.