When did I find out I
was a medium? I'll tell you when I found out I wasn't one — which is how you
find out you can't do most things, at the precise moment you want it most.
Before we go any
further: I am not a bad person. I've done bad things, but so has every person
sitting in a pew on Sunday morning. The difference is their bad things led
nowhere. Mine led to a penthouse on Fifth Avenue and a waiting list three
months long. Make of that what you will.
I was an orphan. Lying
wasn't a character flaw, it was a survival strategy. The same way some children
learn to play piano or speak French, I learned to say whatever kept my head on
my shoulders and food on the table. I was very good at it. I saw no reason to
stop.
My mother was a chorus
girl. In the '30s, that was the polite word for prostitute. She slept during
the days and worked at nights, which meant I raised myself, which is either a
tragedy or a character-building exercise depending on who's telling the story.
I've always preferred to be the one telling the story.
That's probably where
this all started.
My mother was a chorus
girl. In the '30s, that was the polite word for prostitute. She slept during
the days and worked at nights, which meant I raised myself. By nine I was
stealing electricity from the hallway outlet. By thirteen I was checking the
pockets of drunks who'd passed out on the stoop. I wasn't cruel about it. I
only took what they wouldn't miss.
My memories of her are
fragmented and drowsy, but I remember she was a beautiful woman: silky skin,
naturally red hair, blue eyes. She'd have looked like Poison Ivy if her face
didn't carry such an innocent depression to it. Despite that beauty, we were
poor as mice — a four-hundred square foot kitchenette in Chinatown, no heat
most winters, a broken windowsill that whistled when the wind picked up. And
yet I slept in a large canopy bed with pink chiffon curtains. She told me she
got it from a store sale. I suspect she slept with the owner for it. I don't
blame her. I'd have done the same.
I developed an
unsympathetic attitude toward life early, the way some children develop
allergies: quietly, completely, and without anyone noticing until it was too
late to treat. But I had one weakness: my mother’s knots.
Our schedules never
overlapped — she came home when I was already asleep. So she'd devised a
system. Every night she’d tied that knot. It was the only promise she ever
kept. I'd wake before dawn and reach for it — tucking my small fingers between
the chiffon folds, feeling a warmth that would slip away by afternoon. It
wasn't much. But it was mine.
Until the morning I
woke to a straight curtain.
My mother didn't come
that night, nor the night after. For those two December nights I didn't touch
the sheets. Instead I wrapped myself in the canopy curtains, the pink chiffon
pulled tight around my body — so that when she came home, and she would come
home, she always came home, I'd feel her fingers working the knot. I'd feel her
there, even in my sleep.
She never came.
I spent the next four
years at Angel Guardian Home, a home for girls who would never dream of get
adopted. When I think of that time, all that comes to mind is lukewarm
porridge, the frown lines on the nuns' faces, and curtainless beds where I
still searched for knots each morning. Reaching for something that wasn't
there. Hands remember what the mind tries to forget.
By the time I left Angel
Guardian in 1958 I had blossomed into what they called a full-figured gal:
my mother's heart-shaped face, except my nose was a little straighter, and an
ass that made even the most god-fearing of nuns stop and stare. I went straight
to Broadway. I'd been practicing in the orphanage choir for years. I had a
decent voice and better legs. What else did a girl need?
My first audition was
a chorus part in Much Ado About Nothing. I practiced for weeks. Learned
every word, every step, every breath. I pressed my only good dress the night
before and didn't sleep a wink. Onstage, someone asked if I had any connection
to the theater. I said my mother had been a chorus girl — worked all over the
city at nights. The whole room laughed. I laughed too, because I didn't yet
know why.
After the callback,
the director asked to see my breasts. That's when I learned what kind of Chorus
Girl my mother was.
His hands were cold,
that’s what I remember.
Two days later I had
my part.
I walked out of the
Winter Garden onto Broadway and the city hit me all at once — the smell of
exhaust and roasted nuts, cabs laying on their horns, women in good coats
walking fast like they had somewhere important to be. I had news. Good news.
And good news needs an audience or it curdles, and I was desperate to share
this news with the only person who’d care enough to celebrate. I could see
exactly how it would go — I'd burst through the door and my mother’d be there,
sleepy-eyed at our old wooden kitchen table, and she'd laugh and say she always
knew I had it in me. Like she'd done something that mattered. Even if it was
just birthing someone who someday might.
The feeling that rose
in my chest was one I hadn't felt since the last morning I found a knot in my
curtain. Warm and sudden and dangerously close to hope.
It lasted three
blocks.
Here's the thing about
growing up poor: you learn not to want things. You get very good at it. So when
you finally do, really do, the
disappointment doesn't arrive quietly. It grabs you by the chin and forces you
to look at every single thing you'll never have.
My mother was dead and
the dead don't clap. They don't cry. They don't say I told you so, baby.
They just stay dead.
That night I made two
decisions: I would get myself a canopy bed, and I would find a medium.
Three months later,
with my first paycheck, I had a canopy bed made — pink chiffon curtains, the
same shade as the one I'd lost.
Six months after that
I found the medium.
Her name was Soraya. She had jade
eyes, tan skin, and a fake freckle on the right corner of her mouth that
smudged when she drank tea. I arrived at her apartment on Fulton Street, and
walked up to a room that stank of cat litter drowned in jasmine incense, where
she sat in silence and started her séance. She
clutched her temples. She moaned about the spirits. When she finally spoke, she
told me my mother was at peace — described the car crash in detail, the
screeching tires, how mine was the last name on her lips.
My mother had died of
syphilis. Found alone in a motor court off the highway, rotting from the inside
out while I waited for her to come back home. I found out when her death
certificate arrived in the mail.
That night I wrapped
myself in my canopy bed the way I had the night my mother disappeared — pink
chiffon pressed against my face, crying with the particular humiliation of
someone outwitted by their own longing. I was twenty years old and incandescent
with rage. Not at Soraya. At myself. I swore, with everything a twenty-year-old
orphan has to swear with, that I would never again let want override judgment.
Sentimentality, I decided, was a racket I could not afford.
My years on Broadway
were both austere and intoxicating — sometimes within the same evening. The
Winter Garden dressing rooms were sardine tins of ambition and Chanel No. 5,
Marlboros passing between us with the solemnity of a sacrament, cold cream jars
circulating like parish wine. We were all, in our way, rehearsing for lives we
hadn't yet been cast in. Here and there a columnist from the Mirror or
the Journal-American would materialize backstage, and if your bone
structure merited it, you'd find yourself at El Morocco or the Stork
Club by midnight.
It was during one of
those nights out that I met a doctor named Johnny — handsome in that
absentminded way intelligent men sometimes are, gold-dust hair, olive eyes. He
treated cancer patients. After my third grasshopper I asked him how he told
people they were dying.
"You tell them the facts, and
you're as direct as possible. I've come to learn that people appreciate honesty
more than comfort. They need something solid to stand on, even if it's terrible
news." He took a sip of his whiskey. "It's the uncertainty that kills
them before the disease does."
I had one more grasshopper with
Johnny at Gleason's and left.
The next evening at the theater, I
stood in the wings watching the audience. They'd paid good money to see us sell
them a performance of happiness, stories with tidy endings that bore no
resemblance to their actual lives. And it struck
me: Soraya and I were in the same business. We both sold fantasies to people
who needed them. The only difference was she charged more and worked alone.
But Johnny sold something else
entirely. He sold the truth. And people paid him handsomely for it, because the
truth—even when it's terrible—is something you can actually use.
But what if you gave
people something else? Not the lie they wanted, but the truth they could use?
Not fog, but floor. Not hope, but closure.
I became a medium. The
honest kind. Which is to say, a different kind of liar.
My first client was a waitress from
Queens named Dorothy. She wanted to know if her fiancé, missing in Korea, was
coming home. I looked at her across my rickety kitchen table, took her hands in
mine, and told her he'd died at war. I can't tell you whether it was true. But
three years later Dorothy was happily married and pregnant so I saw that as a
win. What I'd learned from Soraya's failure: people can't let go of hope, but
they can let go of love.
Word spread the way it does among
women with nowhere else to turn. Secretaries. Seamstresses. Widows from the
Bronx who took three buses to see me.I charged five dollars a session, held
their hands across my kitchen table, and handed them the gift of a certainty
that had never occurred.
Did I feel bad about lying? I don't
know, I think that once you've done something long enough it stops feeling good
or bad, it just becomes normal. What I will tell you is this: every single person
who walked out of that room left lighter than they'd arrived. Not happy —
lighter. Slowly, session by session, I learned the thing that would make my
career: people can't let go of hope. But they can let go of love.
I took on fewer Broadway shows as my
practice grew. My fees were simple: you paid what you could afford, and no one
skipped the line. In a business of immorality, that was my one moral compass. I
followed it religiously.
Before I left Broadway entirely, I
got married. I should say that differently. Before I left Broadway entirely, I
acquired a husband.
His name was Paul Ashford. Handsome
in the architectural sense — good bones, impressive facade, structurally
unsound. He came from one of those old money families where the name still
opened doors but the bank account couldn't pay for dinner once you walked
through them. He wore his grandfather's watch, his father's cufflinks, and the
expression of a man perpetually on the verge of a comeback. I found it charming
for approximately eighteen months.
I never told him I was a medium.
There are things a man like Paul simply cannot metabolize about his wife — the
truth being chief among them.
Over the years, Paul brought my
practice to a whole different level, unknowingly introducing me to my wealthiest
clients. At a dinner party in his mother's apartment on Park Avenue, one of her
friends — a Mrs. Vandenberg — mentioned she’d spent the last week in because
her poodle had passed away after eighteen loyal years. I thought it was a joke.
But every red-lipped, bejeweled woman at that table creased her porcelain
forehead in sympathy. Amongst this cathedral of earnest absurdity, while the
conversation drifted between summers on the French Riviera and the season's
most anticipated gallery openings, I was quietly building a business plan.
She told her friends. Her friends
told theirs. Within a year I had a waiting list of Park Avenue widows, all of
them veiled, all of them grieving, all of them paying handsomely for the
privilege of hearing the worst.
My life with Paul was happy enough —
which is to say, decorative. We hosted dinner parties where I smiled and said
nothing of substance, attended the opera where he fell asleep in the second
act, and lived in an apartment on the Upper East Side we couldn't quite afford,
though he'd never have admitted it at gunpoint.
He couldn't have children and blamed
it on me, which I let him do. I found out the truth after I had an affair with
his business partner and got an abortion I've never once regretted. People
speak of motherhood as though it's a calling, a biological destiny, a woman's
crowning purpose. I’ve come to realize that self-awareness
is an underrated form of generosity. And some people are so aware of their
selfishness that the most selfless thing they can do is not to have children.
My practice flourished. My marriage
did not. The day after I turned forty, I found him in bed with a woman who
looked like me fifteen years prior. Younger, obviously. Prettier— maybe. She
had the kind of wide-eyed admiration I'd stopped faking around year three,
which told me she had approximately two more years before she'd be replaced by
someone who looked like her fifteen years prior. I stood in the doorway for a
moment, and then I laughed. Not bitterly. Genuinely. Paul always did like an
audience.
I cried, briefly, in the bathroom.
Then I packed my things.
I took my clothes, my jewelry, and
the canopy bed. I left him the fish forks. I've always believed in leaving a
man just enough to feel like he won.
I rented a brownstone in the Village
and hung a brass sign by the door: "Appointments Only." No more
Madame Fontaine. No more veils. No more borrowed accents. Just me. Three years
later I was making more in a month than Paul made in a year. I sent him a Christmas
card every December. He never wrote back, which I took as a compliment.
I built an empire out of bad news. I
told a shipping magnate's widow her husband had died thinking of his mistress.
She left me her Cartier watch in her will. I told a Broadway producer his
mother had never forgiven him for missing her funeral. He sent me a case of
Château Margaux every Christmas until he died. I told a sitting governor's wife
that her son, dead from an overdose, had blamed her in his final moments. She
doubled my fee and came back the following week. They always came back.
I was profiled in The New Yorker in
1987. "The No-Nonsense Medium," they called me. No candles. No
theatrics. No spirits crowding my mind. Just the truth, delivered like a
doctor's diagnosis. The writer asked if I really spoke to the dead. I told her
the dead were easy. It was the living who exhausted me. She printed that. I
framed it.
It was glorious, and luxurious, and
everything I'd stolen electricity and picked pockets and pressed pink chiffon
against my face in the dark to one day have.
Until now.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Here's the thing about dying: you leave behind
every wall you ever built. All that armor, all that cleverness, all those years
of convincing yourself you didn't need anyone—none of it comes with you.
I take one last breath in the canopy
bed I've had since I was nineteen, the pink chiffon exactly the same shade as
my childhood, and then—
I'm standing beside the bed. My body
is still there, small and gray beneath the sheets, hands folded, face finally
peaceful. It looks so small in that big bed. Smaller than I ever let myself
feel when I was inside it.
I know I have to leave this room but
first —
I reach for the curtain. My hand
passes through once, twice. On the third try, the silk catches. I tie a knot.
Carefully. The way my mother used to. The way I spent seventy years searching
for.
There. Proof I was here.
And then I see her. Not a door, not
a tunnel. Just her. Standing by the window, bathed in that early light, as if
she'd been there all along. Red hair, blue eyes, that innocent depression on
her face. My mother. She's smiling. She's been waiting.
I spent my whole life believing that
hope was a trap. That wanting things only led to disappointment. That the
kindest thing you could do for someone was to tell them the worst so they could
stop waiting.
But here she is. Waiting.
I take her hand. Warm. Solid. Real.
I want to say something clever.
Something wry and detached, the way I've said everything for seventy years. But
when I open my mouth, what comes out is: "I missed you."
Bio:
Ella Torres is a Brazilian writer
and translator and a graduate of Barnard College, where she earned a degree in
English and Creative Writing. She is currently pursuing an MFA in fiction at
The New School. Her work has appeared in Broadripple, Litbop, and other
publications.
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