LITMIR.BIZ

       CHAPTER 2

       Mr. Cayce, I Am Dying

      It was nighttime and raining when we arrived in Virginia, after traveling two long days in a train crowded with service personnel of many ranks. To get into Norfolk, the country’s great naval port jammed with wartime shipping, where we could take a commuter train to nearby Virginia Beach on the exposed coast, our string of railroad cars had to be ferried across the large, unbridged port river that bordered the city. As we glided through the dark, our train appeared to be riding on the water. It seemed that we were leaving behind what was substantial and safe, breaking from the mainland of our lives, either for great discovery or great disappointment.

      As a cab at Virginia Beach took us from the train station to a waterfront inn, we were stunned by the overwhelming darkness. Peering at the rainy streets, we could dimly see the outlines of a few closed shops and unlit buildings two or three stories high along the ocean. The scene was eerie, because a complete wartime blackout was enforced so that light from the shore would not silhouette great ships coming to the nearby entrance of Chesapeake Bay and the Norfolk port. The cabdriver told us that local people had watched more than one ship sunk by German submarines lined up right off this coast, after which bodies and debris had washed onto the sandy beach for days. To prevent further catastrophes, every window in the resort community was heavily curtained at night. There were no streetlights or store lights at all. Autos drove with headlights painted to allow only slits of beams for navigating. The feeling for us Midwesterners was that we had stepped straight into war. Directly ahead of us, across the surging ocean, was open combat. If there were to be an enemy invasion, we were told, this port and this very beach would be prime targets for streams of troops debarking in the artillery-lit night.

      Despite the light rain, we walked in the dark down to the meeting of sand and surf, after checking into our room. The old mysterious ocean, source of all life forms on the planet, was moving rhythmically, rolling its waves against the continent which was our home. Sober questions kept our comments terse as we walked, sorting out thoughts and feelings. What was signaled to us by the endless moving waters? Were we staring at an emblem of the great expanse of the Spirit, flowing with helpful resources which Cayce had found how to tap? Or was this impersonal ocean with its cruel storms and great sea creatures a symbol of forces indifferent to humans, carrying submarines ready to smash out life? Help or threat, life or death, the sea reminded us of all we did not know about Cayce’s efforts.

      Standing on the margin of the land where it met the dark salt water, we felt sudden empathy for the many who turned to Cayce as a last medical resort, an outrageous possibility just on the edge of sanity. Most people approached him, by mail or phone, in grave illness or injury. They brought their pain-battered bodies before him for much more than a colorful reading in an exotic trance. He was often their last chance, after they had trudged down medical corridors to the brink of death, as near as we were to the ocean’s drop-off from the beach. They sought his aid stripped of their defenses, like patients unashamed in plain hospital gowns. The cases reported in the biography and told to us by friends were mostly people writing to him at his seacoast town, at the far edge of reality, “Mr. Cayce, can you help me?”

      Near the appointed hour we turned from the ocean and walked to the Cayce home, just blocks from our inn. In the dark, softened only by glimmers from passing cars, we found it across the street from the low and modest Star of the Sea Catholic Church. What we could make out was an ample frame home with an enclosed side porch and shingled exterior. An attached annex had to be the office area for what a small sign identified as the association with the long name. The Cayces were waiting for us, together with Cayce’s secretary for twenty years, Gladys Davis. They welcomed us cordially into their longish living room with a fireplace at one end. The furnishings around us were pleasant but not pretentious: a couch, a plain carpet, overstuffed chairs, a waist-high console radio, wooden floor lamps with large shades, and end tables joined by a magazine rack for Collier’s and the Saturday Evening Post. These could have come from the home of almost any of our middle-class relatives—schoolteachers, a librarian, a real estate agent, a game warden, a produce distributor. As we settled down to talk in this unremarkable setting, I tried to assess the people we had traveled so far to see. These were to be our guides to a region of the mind and spirit which most of our friends and relatives thought did not even exist.

      Cayce was tall, in the six-foot range, with a body that combined firmness with rounded contours. His figure was spare but not thin, and his shoulders slightly sloped. He seemed to move economically, as was fitting for a man in his mid-sixties, yet he carried himself with dignity and confidence. He was cordial, but he had a touch of reserve associated with Southern graces, familiar from a part of my boyhood spent in Kentucky. It was appropriate from this background for him to be addressed by all but his family—even by his secretary—as Mr. Cayce, just as he called her Miss Gladys. His large and full mouth smiled easily and commanded his face, with its slightly receding yet well-defined chin and his hairline yielding space to age. His gaze was level and steady behind his rimless glasses, and his hair combed flat gave him a composed and thoughtful appearance. I noticed how large his ears were and recalled that such ears were a mark of spirituality in Buddhist

Скачать книгу