Seance On A Wet Afternoon was the title of a novel I read in the 1960’s, which was later made into a movie, starring Kim Stanley and Richard Attenborough. (It is interesting to note that in high school, I was interested in the occult, as were most of my friends - long before Harry Potter. I’m not saying that is a good thing, simply that it is a common curiosity for many young people.) This post really has nothing to do with seances however, except it is a very wet afternoon in Minneapolis this Sunday. In fact thunderstorms awakened me for prayer at 4am and I was off to 6:30am Mass at St. Agnes during the lull before the next round of storms came through.
When I returned home I bored myself sleepy with the Internet and took a 3 hour nap… troubled by dreams. I awoke to more storms and heavy rainfall, while my thoughts returned to the dreams, which must have occasioned my recalling the title of the book from the 1960’s. Strangely, our memories and dreams can be somewhat like a seance, conjuring specters from the past, experiences long forgotten, along with emotions one hasn’t felt in years.
To be honest, I can’t remember the details of the dreams, only the emotions; the feeling of being lost, unable to reach my destination, accompanied by a woeful sense of abandonment, feeling unoticed by passers by, friends and family - almost as if I were a ghost.
Upon waking I had the uncanny realization that my mother had been sexually abused as a child. Why, I don’t know. Of course I can’t prove it - her two surviving siblings would not tell me even if they knew. Yet I understood that is why she “knew” so much about that “kind of stuff” - and why she was so hurt and angry deep inside.
For instance, when it happened to me - she “knew”. I was in 5th grade and just returned home from the Sunday afternoon movies with a dollar a man had given me. I showed my mother the money, explaining that I had found it on the floor in the theater, and asked her if I might keep it.
“What happened to you?” She demanded angrily. “Who gave you that money?”
“No one did - I found it on the floor.” I explained, immediately understanding she must have known what had happened.
“Go ahead, keep it.” To my surprise she uncharacteristically dropped the matter and nothing was ever brought up again.
Sometimes, mostly late at night, her voice echoes in my head, not only from that experience but from other things she said to me about “stuff”, which suddenly makes sense to me today. It wasn’t just a mother’s intuition that informed her, something had happened to her as well - which must be how she knew “stuff”. Although she never dealt with her experiences except to medicate herself with alcohol, along with the occasional escapes, seeking consolation through transitory extramarital intimacies with other men, and so on.
I remembered how she once referred to a very young girl as a “little whore” - which was a startling thing to say about a 4 or 5 year old. (And may have been a revelation about how she perceived herself.) Yet later, when the girl grew up, she was indeed promiscuous for a time, in a manner which suggested she herself may have been abused as a young child. Without going into detail, I can’t help wonder if my mother sensed this girl would be abused or turn out the way she did. Scarier still, what if there had been some sort of curse attached to my mother’s words? No, I don’t believe in curses that just slip out like that. And can I really attribute such great insight to my mother’s neurosis?
Nevertheless, my mother was very perceptive about these things - I have other examples that I won’t go into here. I will never know for certain if she had been abused, but all the signs are there. Shortly before my father died, he told me that he and my mother were hurt very badly as kids, but he couldn’t talk about it. He just said, “My dad did things to me you wouldn’t believe.” He was right, I didn’t want to know about it either.
In the movie “Seance On a Wet Afternoon” the plot revolves around the kidnap of a child by the husband of a psychic. The psychic wishes to offer her skills in finding the child and thus gain fame as a medium. If I remember correctly, the child dies accidentally.
Sexual abuse of children is like that, though the purpose was not to kill, something inside the child dies - “accidently”. And despite the fact the child survives, the experiences often haunt the child for the rest of one’s life, reemerging unexpectedly in one’s consciousness, something akin to a seance on a wet afternoon, if you will.
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