The Link (9 page)

CAMERA PANS TO show Robert parking in the driveway of a cottage adjoining the small church. He approaches the board and looks at it, his expression bleak.

He looks toward the church. A service is taking place inside, Ruth’s VOICE faintly heard, the responding murmur of her congregation.

Robert has a momentary flashback to another church in Brooklyn, him five years old, sitting beside his mother and Aunt Grace.

Turning from the board, he walks toward Ruth’s cottage.

He is sitting on a wicker chair on the covered porch after the last of Ruth’s congregation has departed.

“Why didn’t you come in the church?” she asks.

His smile is his reply; does she really expect an answer to that?

Ruth pats him on the arm, her smile complacent. “You’ll come back to it,” she says.

He casts his eyes skyward as she moves to unlock the front door, his expression saying: it’s going to be a long day. He asks if Bart can come inside, he didn’t want to leave him home.

Of course, she says.

As he brings Bart in, Ruth asks what’s wrong with the dog.

Robert is briefly startled, then decides it is Bart’s obvious breathing that Ruth has noticed. He tells her and she says she’ll pray for him; if Robert wants, she’ll try to heal the Lab. Her “Spirit Doctors” have helped heal many animals. “They are most receptive.”

“It would be very nice if you prayed for him,” he says, not responding to the rest of it.

Ruth runs her hands along the length of Bart’s body about an inch above his fur. “I can see the problem in his aura,” she says casually. “Darkness in the lung area.”

Robert sighs.

“This may not work,” she tells him. If it is intended that the dog “pass on”, healing work would be “of limited efficacy.”

Robert frowns a little. “Come on, Ruth,” he says.

She smiles and shakes her head.

They talk over dinner—a small pot roast, a few over-boiled potatoes, some over-cooked frozen peas. She asks him how Ann is and he lies to her; “She’s doing fine.” To change the subject, he mentions their father’s Arizona project legacy.

At the mention of him, Ruth’s benign smile fades; it is clear that her attitude toward his memory is definitely unchristian. “That’s no surprise,” she says. “He never gave the family anything without strings attached.” Is Robert going to accept the legacy?

When he says he isn’t, she is unable to repress a look of pleasure. “It was typically selfish of him to assume that you would drop your entire career on his behalf,” she says.

This evokes a comment from her on how difficult it was for their mother to function as a Spiritualist married to a man of “gross material nature.” It is not inconceivable, she says, that seeing what their mother endured kept
her
from marriage.

“Not that I regret, for a moment, being wed to Spiritualism,” she adds firmly.

She apologizes, then, for being “mean” to their father’s memory. It is hardly fitting for someone in her position to behave that way. It’s simply that, being the oldest and a female, she saw, the most, how unhappy their mother had been made by her husband’s harsh belittling of her beliefs.

At any rate, it is not up to her to judge him; whatever judgement is due is already taking place “as they know”.

Robert does not reply.

“To seek old bones instead of new inspiration,” Ruth observes. “It seems to say it all about his inability to understand her.”

Robert hesitates, then mentions his dream. Does Ruth have any idea why it recurs so regularly?

Ruth looks uncomfortable. “Well,” she says, “the hallway is where she fell, of course; you remember that.”

He says he doesn’t.

It was too much of a shock for you, she says; you’ve repressed the memory. “Pray that the dream be taken from you.”

He persists and, reluctantly, she repeats what she has told him before—that he came back from a neighbor’s house when he was six and she wouldn’t let him in because their mother had fallen down the stairs and “passed” immediately into Spirit.

“Surely, you remember Aunt Grace coming to take you to her house,” she says.

He nods; that he remembers.

“You’re better off without the rest of it,” she tells him. “Seek instead the consciousness of God.”

This leads her to remind him that the Allrights are a “gifted” family. (John excluded since he has “rejected” it so totally.) “It’s in
you
though, Robert,” she says. “Your legacy from
God.”

He shakes his head. “You’re wrong,” he tells her.

“No, no, you forget,” she says with smiling negation.

Abruptly, she rises and gets an old 78 RPM record. “You remember this?” she asks. He shakes his head and she reminds him that, when he was three, this was his favorite record. Mother would put it in a pile of other records where he always found it by running his “little fingers” down the edge of the stack.

“Probably nicked,” he says.

She smiles. “Oh, no.”

Robert tries to talk her out of playing it but Ruth goes to her phonograph.

The record starts to play: a man blowing on a trumpet, a woman laughing at him, the man’s playing becoming increasingly spluttering until, as overwhelmed as the woman, he bursts into a seizure of wild laughter with her.

It should be very funny; the record is ludicrous, engaging. Robert has to smile at Bart’s reaction to it.

But memories flood over him; him sitting in the living room, a small boy, laughing with his mother. The living room of his dream. A distorted recollection. The laughter of his mother somehow frenetic and disturbing.

Abruptly, the record snaps on the turntable, pieces of it flung to the floor, making Robert twitch in shock.

“Oh, well,” says Ruth, unmoved. “It was very old.”

Robert arrives home, settles Bart in, then begins to pace the living room.

The visit to Ruth has unsettled him. He keeps flashing to moments in the past with his mother, his father, Ruth, John, Aunt Grace, a man we will come to see later, Uncle Jack. His nervousness increases as though something dark is closing in on him. He recalls Ruth saying, “It’s in
you
though, Robert. Your legacy from
God.”
And has to do something to occupy himself. Moving swiftly to his office, he switches on the processor and begins to work.

“In the latter part of the 19
^th
Century,” he dictates and the processor writes, “the emphasis on physical mediums like Home and Palladino began to diminish to be replaced by a study of what came to be known as mental mediums.”

CAMERA MOVES IN ON the processor screen. “Two of the greatest of this new variety of psychic were Mrs. Lenore Piper and Mrs. Gladys Leonard (called “the British Mrs. Piper”) whose spectacular careers were, in many ways, alike from childhood on.”

We see eight-year-old LENORE EVELINA SIMONDS playing by herself in a garden, busily engaged in pushing acorns through a hole in one of the garden chairs.

“Lenore Evelina Simonds had her first experience when she was eight, on a warm spring afternoon in the year 1867, the place New Hampshire.”

The young girl is shocked as, suddenly, she feels a sharp blow on her right ear accompanied by a prolonged sibilant sound which becomes the letter S. As she holds her ear, eyes wide with dread, she hears a woman’s voice saying, “Aunt Sara, not dead but with you still.”

The terrified girl runs, sobbing, to the house and tells her mother. “Something hit me on the ear and Aunt Sara said she wasn’t dead but ‘with you still’.”

Robert’s voice breaks in to say that, at the very moment of the little girl’s experience, her Aunt Sara had died unexpectedly.

We see another eight-year-old girl sitting in her nursery, smiling as she watches something o.s. “Gladys Osborne, born in 1882, showed equal evidence of being psychic at an early age. Unlike Lenore Simonds, however, her experience, at first, was pleasant.”

We see what the girl is looking at. Where the nursery wall should be there is, instead, a dazzling vista: valleys, slopes, trees, flowers of every shape and hue, the landscape extending for miles. Walking about on velvety grass are couples and groups attired in flowing robes, looking radiantly happy. INTERCUT BETWEEN the young girl in her nursery and what she sees.

“It is not reported whether Lenore Simonds had trouble with her mother over what she said but Gladys Osborne definitely did,” Robert narrates.

Young Gladys, clad in a dressing gown, sits with her father, sharing breakfast and seeing another view of the lovely vista where the dining room wall should be.

“Dada, isn’t that a specially beautiful place we’re seeing this morning?” she says.

Her father frowns. “What place?”

“That place,” she says, pointing at the dining room wall which is, to her father’s eyes, bare except for a couple of hanging guns.

“What are you talking about?” her father demands.

Gladys tries explaining and her father’s expression darkens.

We see, next, the entire family gathered around her in a state of annoyance and anxiety as the young girl, becoming frightened, tries to describe her vision. We hear Robert’s voice narrating.

“At first, they thought young Gladys was making it up. Then, when she persisted and described her vision so minutely, they became alarmed and Gladys was forbidden sternly to ever see or look for what she called her ‘happy valley’.”

CUT TO Lenore Simonds, now 22 years of age, seated in a circle of people, her father-in-law beside her, in a modest parlor.

“When Lenore Simonds was 22, she married William Piper of Boston and, at the urging of her father-in-law, because she was suffering from the effects of an accident some years previously, was persuaded to attend a healing session of Dr. J. R. Coche, a blind clairvoyant.”

The clairvoyant reaches Lenore and puts his hands on her head. Abruptly, she shivers as a chill floods through her and she sees, in front of her, a blaze of light in which strange faces hover.

Then a hand begins to pass to and fro before her face and she rises from her chair and walks to a table in the center of the room on which writing materials have been placed. Picking up a pencil, she begins to write rapidly on a piece of paper.

CUT TO several minutes later. She puts down the pencil, hands the written page to an elderly man in the circle, then returns to her seat.

Everyone stares at her, the elderly man reading the paper with mounting amazement. Lenore Piper blinks and looks around in surprise. “Is something wrong?” she asks.

“Young woman,” says the elderly man, “I have been a spiritualist for over thirty years but the message you have just given me is the most remarkable I have ever received.” His voice breaks as he finishes. “It gives me fresh courage to go on for I know now that my boy lives.”

Lenore Piper stares at him, incredulous.

CUT TO Gladys Osborne Leonard and TWO WOMEN descending a steep, narrow staircase, above them a chaos of backstage NOISES. As the sounds fade, Robert’s voice is heard.

“When Gladys Osborne was 24, she married Frederick Leonard, an actor. One winter, when she and her husband were engaged in London, Gladys shared a dressing room with two sisters interested in Spiritualism.”

The three women reach a deserted area below the stage, among various engines and machinery used for theatre purposes: heating, lighting, trap doors, etc. “Looking for a quiet place to hold a séance, they discovered it in a deserted spot below the stage.”

CUT TO the three women sitting in a corner of the huge area, their Windsor chairs around a small table, the only sound the soft thudding of the machinery.

“The first night they sat,” says Robert’s voice, “Feda came through.”

We see the table rocking, one of its legs tapping out letters of the alphabet. Gladys Leonard watches apprehensively as her two friends speak out and write the letters down.

Gradually, we hear the VOICE of Feda, a young woman, saying, “I have been watching over Gladys since she was born, waiting for her to develop her psychic powers so that I could put her in a trance and give messages through her.”

CUT TO Gladys Leonard, older, sitting, now in trance, speaking in a voice dissimilar to hers, saying, “Something big and terrible is going to happen to the world. Feda must help many people through you.”

“Six weeks after that message was given through Gladys Leonard, World War One began,” says Robert’s voice.

CUT TO Lenore Piper leaving her house and walking along the street. “No one,” says Robert’s voice, “not even Eusapia Palladino, ever subjected herself so patiently to investigation as did Mrs. Piper. The most elaborate of precautions arranged by such men as William James and Richard Hodgson were taken to guard against outside information influencing her mediumship.”

We see a man in a dark suit following Mrs. Piper at a distance. “Private detectives were assigned to follow her,” says Robert’s voice.

CUT TO sitters announcing themselves and being admitted to Mrs. Piper’s home. “Sitters showed up anonymously or used false names,” says Robert’s voice.

CUT TO Mrs. Piper sitting with a group of people. “She endured endless pain inflicted by investigators to make sure she wasn’t faking trance,” says Robert’s voice. “From needles—” Mrs. Piper jars from trance as WILLIAM JAMES plunges a needle into her right hand.