A Season Among Psychics Read online

  A SEASON

  AMONG

  PSYCHICS

  A SEASON

  AMONG

  PSYCHICS

  a novel by

  Elizabeth Greene

  INANNA PUBLICATIONS AND EDUCATION INC.

  TORONTO, CANADA

  Copyright © 2018 Elizabeth Greene

  Except for the use of short passages for review purposes, no part of this book may be reproduced, in part or in whole, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronically or mechanically, including photocopying, recording, or any information or storage retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Collective Agency (Access Copyright).

  We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada.

  Cover design: Val Fullard

  eBook: tikaebooks.com

  A Season Among Psychics is a work of fiction. All the characters, situations, and locations portrayed in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to persons living or dead, or actual locations, is purely coincidental.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Greene, Elizabeth, 1943–, author

  A season among psychics / Elizabeth Greene.

  (Inanna poetry & fiction series)

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-77133-501-0 (softcover).— SBN 978-1-77133-502-7 (epub).—

  ISBN 978-1-77133-503-4 (Kindle).— ISBN 978-1-771335-04-1 (pdf)

  I. Title. II. Series: Inanna poetry and fiction series

  PS8563.R41737S43 2018 C813’.54 C2018-901529-2

  C2018-901530-6

  Printed and bound in Canada

  Inanna Publications and Education Inc.

  210 Founders College, York University

  4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M3J 1P3

  Telephone: (416) 736-5356 Fax: (416) 736-5765

  Email: [email protected] Website: www.inanna.ca

  For the teachers

  ALSO BY ELIZABETH GREENE

  POETRY:

  Understories

  Moving

  The Iron Shoes

  EDITED AND CO-EDITED COLLECTIONS:

  The Window of Dreams: New Canadian Writing for Children

  On the Threshold: Writing Toward the Year 2000

  We Who Can Fly: Poems, Essays and Memories in Honour of Adele Wiseman

  Kingston Poets’ Gallery

  Common Magic: The Book of the New

  Beyond this, men think and feel certain things and see certain things not with the bodily vision.

  —Ezra Pound, letter to William

  Carlos Williams, 1908

  Nel mezzo di camin de nostra vita….

  —Dante, The Divine Comedy

  Just because there’s no word,

  no reason

  no proof

  doesn’t mean it isn’t

  true.

  1. PSYCHIC FAIR

  WHEN I WAS FIFTY and thought my life was over, I let my best friend, Claire, persuade me to attend a psychic fair. It was a bright blue January morning, forty below, the snow plowed into bobble-edged cliffs by the side of the road. Everything was frozen except for the plumes of exhaust from car engines, if they started. It was an insane time to go out. I could have made coffee and snuggled into the couch with a book—lavender shawl around my shoulders, black cats curled on the rug, fire burning in the fireplace. But Claire was my best friend, and I was ready by ten, dressed warmly, when she came for me in her sturdy aging Volvo, a leftover from her marriage.

  Claire was maniacally punctual, and we were much too early. There was a sagging red ribbon across the entrance to the room where the fair was to be held. We sat in the hall on a discouraged vinyl couch and tried to pretend we weren’t tired of waiting. We were sitting in the dark looking into a hall bright with light, promising forbidden knowledge.

  “Look,” whispered Claire, “there’s one of them now.”

  The woman looked like a middle-aged angel from the top of a prison Christmas tree—short, neat blonde hair, shading toward brass, with bangs that could have been cut from under a bowl, pristine white sweater over slim tan wool trousers, otherworldly light blue eyes. I introduced myself and Claire with a confidence that was mostly assumed. Psychics had always seemed glamorous to me. I thought of them as having the inner freedom of writers, artists, and magicians—a freedom I had always longed for.

  Luck is having what you want or being grateful for what you have. I was trying to be grateful, but I was twisted with discontent. Two years ago I’d been married to a colleague, had a tenured job, and a son—all things I’d wanted. But I’d found myself in a place where all the doors seemed shut. I thought of that Robert Frost poem “The Lovely Shall Be Choosers,” about all the joys that were actually confinements and pushed you down from the radiance of your younger self.

  I’d never been married before so I couldn’t tell when a marriage needed more work to get through rough spots, or if it was simply going bad. Henry and I had been very happy before we’d gotten married. We’d had summers in England, long afternoons on tennis courts, coffee and sherry late at night in our offices. Later, I was home with Davy a lot while Henry worked or played tennis or went hunting or went out to coffee. Most of the hall closet was taken up with Henry’s eighteen coats. I was exhausted and depressed. Henry had started throwing bills at me—big ones like the oil bill—furious that I hadn’t paid them yet. I remembered reading a new advice columnist saying, “My marriage was no bed of roses.” But whose marriage was? And who would want to sleep on a bed of roses with all those unexpected thorns? But after fifteen years, the thorns seemed more frequent, and the petals fewer and farther between.

  One February night I woke up, shaken, after a vision of Henry weeping crocodile tears over my grave. By June, I’d announced that I wanted to separate, and, by September, after a summer of bad fights, he was gone.

  Before that, even my job, which I’d always loved, went sour. Like my marriage, it went from bad to worse. I was suddenly teaching an array of courses in areas I’d never studied, and although I was lucky to teach, I was scrambling to get my classes together. Henry had taken up as much of my time as he had the coat closet, so I couldn’t really prepare. Mostly, I did it between two and four in the morning, when Davy was in bed and the house was quiet. When Henry did come to bed, I didn’t want to be bothered with him. That was my working time. But it felt hopeless, because heads of departments then didn’t count teaching as actual “work,” so it looked as if I wasn’t doing anything, even though new courses are a lot of work to organize and teach.

  Henry could have stood up for me, both when I was cut out of courses in areas I did know something about, and later, when the head of my department, the partner of Dottie Driver, a colleague who had vowed to destroy me (English departments can be like that) tried to fire me ostensibly for not publishing (though some of my male colleagues had published less). It occurred to me he might want to hire someone of his own choosing to replace me.

  Add to the mix one disturbed child who had started withdrawing when I put him in day care at age two and who, at three, became prone to angry, sometimes violent, outbursts, hitting other kids or me or his teachers. By the time he was five, he’d been assessed with autistic elements. He also had huge separation anxiety (another reason why I’d prepare for my courses between two and four in the morning).

&
nbsp; And finally, my writing. Since I’d started teaching at Royalton, most of my writing was looping back to me with rejection slips (like dead babies, Sylvia Plath said). To be fifty and mostly unpublished was even more depressing than my messed-up job or dealing with Davy’s autism. So, after a good beginning in my twenties, and writing in secrecy in my thirties, by my late-forties, I was beginning to feel that the road of my life had been smudged out. Nothing was working. Maybe a psychic leap of faith would carry me over the gap and land me on a new path.

  “I’m Rosetta Kempffer,” the blonde angel said with a slight lisp and a Germanic accent.

  “I’ve heard of you!” I was surprised. “You teach at Royalton!” She was a friend of a woman I didn’t like much and who I thought would be the last person in the world to hang around with psychics.

  “Taught,” said Rosetta. “I’m retired. Now I’m doing healing work, and I love it.”

  I was jealous. Imagine loving your work and knowing you were good at it!.

  “This is my first psychic fair,” Rosetta confided. “Please come see me!”

  Then she vanished abruptly into the bright room.

  “Well, that was something!” said Claire.

  “Yes,” I nodded. I was still thinking how unexpected it was that an academic could also be a psychic, and about what it might be like to be doing work that you loved, and doing it well, no doubt. Even to be able to say, That was when I was working on such and such, and have it done and then move onto something else, something new and more fulfilling, not teaching classes and having no idea whether they were effective or not, and then starting all over again in September. Sherlock Holmes said, For me there remains the cocaine bottle, but at least he had quickly, and brilliantly completed cases. Of course, he had Watson (or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) to help him. Maybe I needed a Watson.

  Claire put her hand gently on my arm, trying to get my attention. “I broke up with Sergei last night,” she said.

  “What, again?”

  “I’m pretty sure this time it’s final.”

  “He seems pretty doleful to me.”

  “He was sweet,” Claire said defensively, though she had slipped into past tense. “But I couldn’t see that we had any future.”

  I couldn’t understand how Claire, who was a blonde, blue-eyed snowflake beauty, managed to find all these sad-sack men and cast them as leads in her story. They always liked her immediately of course—she was so pretty, so clear, so attentive. The problems came later. Ultimately they didn’t measure up to her ex, Raymond, a nice-looking lawyer from a good family. I had met Claire when she was still married, chatelaine of a sprawling old house full of antiques on sloping waterfront land fifty miles outside of town. Claire did volunteer work, baked spectacular muffins, commuted to complete her university degree part-time, and was bringing up her kids. She was happy—happy enough—until she discovered that Raymond was having an affair. She was a good wife; he would have stayed married, as long as he could keep his mistress. Claire didn’t go for that, but she grieved; she still had dreams about Raymond, still mourned the loss of her marriage. Now a single mother looking for job, she was taking courses in education. Compared to Claire, I was hard-hearted; I had no regrets about ending my marriage, whatever else I might regret.

  “We went for coffee last night, and we had nothing to say to each other,” Claire lamented.

  “Do you think that’s because Sergei’s native language is Russian?” But then what had they been talking about for the past two months? Claire would have known the limits of Sergei’s English—he was a student in her English as a Second Language night class. Should they even have been dating? Even though they were both adults? And I had taught Claire ten years before—was it appropriate for me to befriend her? What about Brian, who I was still yearning for, and had been my teacher for two weeks at Banff? He had made sure nothing happened between us, but even though I hadn’t seen him for nearly two years, I could still hear his voice inside my head: you know you’re mine.

  Yes, but Brian, I’d like to talk to you in real life. I’d like to see you in real life. Am I just making all this up?

  I told people I’d fallen in love with someone who hadn’t fallen in love with me. There was no point saying: He has my heart, he’s under my skin his voice lives inside me. But Brian and I had spoken on the phone a few days before—for the first time in months—and I could feel his arms around me right now, could see him smiling.

  This guy doesn’t have enough money.

  Dry up, Brian, I thought now. Who asked you? Claire isn’t like that.

  Just wait—you’ll see I’m right.

  Go take a hike.

  I shouldn’t have said that—he was gone.

  Was I just talking to myself? Had we just connected? I wished I knew someone I could ask about telepathy—was it real? Once, when I’d tried to ask Brian about it, he’d just looked or sounded scared.

  I turned toward Claire, “How do you feel?”

  “Well, I miss him already, but I’m relieved too.”

  “But it was only last night.”

  “I know it’s over. Have you heard anything more from Brian?”

  “Not since we talked.” I’d told her about the phone call a few nights ago. Brian didn’t call often, and of course there had been nothing since. I didn’t want to tell her about his telepathic commentary on her love life.

  “I think things will happen very slowly with Brian, if at all.” Claire had said this before.

  “He’s too damaged.”

  “I couldn’t have said it better myself. Look, something’s going on!”

  A woman in a maroon uniform appeared at the entrance and uncovered a cash register. I could see movement inside the room. Finally, someone took down the barrier. The woman in maroon took our money, and we passed easily from darkness into light.

  Most of the tables were still empty. Maybe all the psychics had been up late at psychic parties or maybe some of them found it hard to negotiate the cold and snow, and didn’t have Volvos left over from their marriages to get them here. But the enormous table in the centre of the room was laden with hundreds of books shining like jewels with their bright covers. There were books on runes, on the Tarot, on the Kabbalah, on Tibetan wisdom, on Medieval mystics, on Celtic legends, on Egyptian mysteries, on feng shui, on shamanism, astrology, aromatherapy, crystals, herbs, and, of course, yoga. It was overwhelming. I felt like Dorothy in The Road to Oz; at the beginning there are so many roads in front of her that she can’t begin to choose which one to follow.

  I reached timidly for an astrology book and looked up my sign and then Davy’s, searching for the keys to who we both were. But it was confusing. According to my astrological sign, I was neat, orderly, reticent, talkative, explosive—well, people are contradictory—but I felt there must be something more, some mystery that wasn’t in these books.

  I riffled through a book on runes, but somehow having read The White Goddess made everything in it seem stale, even though I loved the idea of letters that whispered, letters that both singly and wound together could speak secrets. The secrets of our own alphabet long buried, like country underneath a highway. In runes, sigel/sun is s; beorc/birch tree is b; mann is m. The letters reflect the world they are rooted in—trees, cattle, the sky, water, the weather. Nyd—necessity. Words and letters make my mind spin, but right then I wanted to find something less rational. I knew that somewhere here was the perfect book, but I couldn’t navigate the jumble on the table to find it.

  Claire was on the other side of the table, and I joined her. “Did you find anything?”

  “I’m thinking about this one,” she held up a book on feng shui. The very idea made me shudder. Virgos are supposed to be orderly, but I was incorrigibly messy. Every time I invited someone over, I had a cleaning crisis. I admired that Claire’s house was always tidy, and I enjoyed being in it. The co
lours were dark and peaceful, and Claire shone in her living room like a golden-haired star.

  I also admired that Claire found it easy to have people over. Claire had friends.

  I mostly stopped having friends when I came to Royalton. I had a job, I had a lover, then a marriage, then a son—but I hadn’t made many friends since I’d started teaching. There’d been no time to nurture new friendships.

  “But your house is already lovely.”

  “I could make it more harmonious,” Claire said thoughtfully. “And you can arrange your house to encourage things to happen—I know of a woman who put pictures of lovers all over her bedroom, and it was great for her romantic life. And a friend of mine rearranged her kitchen to favour prosperity, and she got a good job. I think I’ll buy this book and see if it works. And look, I see people starting to line up for readings. Should we each go to someone and meet here after?”

  What would encourage Brian? I wondered. He’d probably never even see my house, and I’d probably never see his.

  Claire went off to make the book on feng shui hers, and I started to wander around the room, even more overwhelmed by the choice of psychics than by the choice of books. At forty dollars for a reading, they all seemed expensive.

  I found Rosetta Kempffer at the back of the room. “How about an African bone throw?” she suggested. “Three questions for fifteen dollars.”

  My imminent mortgage payment was always peering over my shoulder, but I could afford fifteen dollars.

  “Okay.” I sat down at her table and eyed the collection of tiny bones, stones, and feathers in front of her. It didn’t look very promising. There was also a large green binder in one corner of the table, and a pair of brass rods with white handles across the top. I decided to trust Rosetta. She gathered up the collection of bones, stones, and feathers.

  “What’s your first question?”

  I took a breath. “I want to know about my writing.” My voice cracked.I’d wanted to write since I was nine. Forty years later, I’d had a few things published in journals, but I hadn’t yet published a book. Why was I even asking?