Edgar Cayce A Seer Out of Season. Harmon Hartzell Bro

His gestures were not expansive, but he put us at ease by the relaxed way he smoked frequent cigarettes and leaned back in his chair, as well as by taking the lead in conversation. He did not appear to study us unduly nor try to impress us. There was a prompt responsiveness in his dignified facial expressions, and he held the center of attention when he spoke. Within his low-key manner there seemed to be a high-strung man who did not miss much, with an abundance of natural bearing and charm, sufficient to reassure even suspicious inquirers if he chose. His speech was measured, not hurried, and clearly Southern. Only a few colloquialisms suggested limits to his formal education, by contrast with his ample working vocabulary.

      His wife, Gertrude, was petite and winsome, attractive even in her sixties. Her graceful features suggested refinement and natural beauty, as did her well-knit body and restrained but expressive movements. One lens of her glasses was frosted over, and I recalled that she had lost the vision of her right eye in a fall. But her face was so alert and focused, framed in her graying dark hair, that one promptly forgot the defect in the pleasure of her engaging smile and quick speech. She appeared to defer slightly to her husband, but not in lack of confidence—rather from what seemed a more self-contained and perhaps thoughtfully introverted temperament. Her teasing wit, which could be downright merry, and her judicious comments made her easy to talk with as we groped our way toward being natural with people doing something absurdly unconventional in such a conventional home. The care and fluency with which she expressed herself in a Southern accent, choosing her words and offering defined ideas, suggested an intellectual but also a person with feminine tact. She listened to others a bit more intently than her husband seemed to do. Cayce and his secretary occasionally called her Muddie, which I remembered was a family nickname that endured long after it had been invented by her infant second son as his way of saying Mother. The unusual name seemed to celebrate her individuality while still cherishing her evident nurturing qualities. Here was the proverbial able woman behind a gifted man.

      Gladys Davis was larger of build and taller than Gertrude Cayce, with a body not stocky yet solid, and appealingly full and curved. She wore her honey blonde hair braided around her head, and her movements and gestures were thoroughly feminine. She seemed to be in her mid-thirties, and I recalled that she was unmarried, having put aside wedded life for single-minded devotion to the Cayces and their work. But nothing about her suggested a future as an old maid, and I wondered briefly how the three animated persons before us had avoided problems over her wholesome charm. She smiled and laughed as though inclined by nature to want to put us at ease. Her speech touched with Southern dialect came in bursts, as she seemed to grope for the right expression, giving the impression of breaking an inner barrier of shyness with the energy piled up behind what she wanted to say. Although the Cayces addressed her as Miss Gladys, the title was clearly just her name, for they related to her as a family member, not as an employee. She in turn gave them the lead in conversation, but she responded to stories and sallies with original comments, not merely conventional remarks, which showed an independent and able mind that made her a peer in the family circle. Evidently she had the best memory of any of them, for they consulted her without hesitation to supply needed details in our exchanges.

       How Much Does He See?

      During most of the conversation the topics we addressed absorbed me. But now and then I noticed a second train of thought in the back of my mind. What was Cayce seeing in us? Did he judge us adequate for the roles he had planned? His biography had noted that he could see auras, or patterns of color around people’s heads and bodies, and could evaluate character and conflicts from them, as well as directly read minds. There was no hint that he might be using second sight to amplify or change his surface perceptions—no squints or faltering exchanges to suggest he was consulting an inward vision. Still, the thought of being inspected in the recesses of one’s psyche was uncomfortable.

      Would he pick up my systematic doubt, as part of my determination to use my academic training in objectivity? I would be showing an affable side to him, as I did in my teaching or weekend church work. But another side would be watching closely for clues that might show him misguided or self-deceived, or exaggerating his capacities. Would he notice my suspicion that he might be self-important, pushed by a sense of divine mission? Surely someone conducting an incredible activity in a skeptical world, and able to think the unthinkable in concepts of reincarnation, would have considerable self-assertion in his makeup. I owed it to him, and certainly to the larger university and church worlds, to expose any messianism I found. And of course, if he turned out to be greedy or flawed in character, commercializing his ability, I would have to expose that, too.

      Yet deeper than these concerns, which had to irritate him if he read my mind, was another layer in my thoughts: fears about my own adequacy. Would he pick up trends in my personality which I either did not recognize or preferred not to think about? He might see in my so-called aura a band of red for a strong temper. Or perhaps there were flashes of color for sexuality, not exactly erased by my recent marriage to a curvaceous blonde of Norwegian descent, whom I had courted with fervor for several years. He might even conclude that my activist resistance to arbitrary authority was colored by personal rebelliousness. Worse, he might find that my attempts to be objective about his capacities were partly intellectual arrogance, meant to balance off great uncertainty about my own spiritual maturity. I had not done much business with God outside of moments in choral music or in nature, though I had preached about him at some length. Cayce might find me tone-deaf to the inner notes of his work.

      As we talked on, I felt a bit less vulnerable. It occurred to me that Cayce’s reported intuition should often have shown him in others the kind of momentary hesitation and fear which shadowed my thoughts (as I later found they had June’s). He must by now know well that people with varying needs to prove themselves would approach him with masked doubts and even strategies to unveil his delusions or flaws. Part of his strange vocation would be having to live with currents of unpleasant suspicion. He would also have learned to reassure others who approached him that he would not suddenly expose whatever he saw in them that was unworthy. His calling, if authentic, was not enviable. He had to be lonely at some level. Perhaps those who got to know him dropped not only their doubts, but their secret ambitions to use him. If they did not, or could not, then here was a man who could safely wrap around himself only his household. That limitation would be costly to his sense of identity and worth, already upended by the peculiarity of his gift.

      The sense of his being stranded without peers or deep support outside the family would return often in the months ahead, when he seemed increasingly someone whose ability might have been welcomed in another time or culture, but a figure out of season in modern America. The implications were serious. If others who sought to duplicate his skills had also to stand awkwardly alone, even among well-meaning friends, who would try? What sort of person could meet the test of unending estrangement, created not only by doubt of unfamiliar capacities, but also by sudden fear of his or her penetrating accuracy?

       His Sense of Global Violence

      We made small talk about our trip on a train so crowded that soldiers and sailors stood in the aisles. Cayce spoke with such easy knowledge about Chicago and other cities on our route, as well as about porters and dining cars and berths, that it was soon clear he was a sophisticated traveler. Later I would learn, in part by journeying with him, how much he liked to take trips and how (as his family put it) he could pack a bag in five minutes. I would discover that he had been to most of the major urban centers of the country, often many times, as he responded to emergency pleas for aid and searched for how best to serve with his unusual gift. At the moment I could only note how the image of a well-traveled American collided with stereotypes of a helpless, unworldly ascetic which his Catholic biographer had faintly suggested in portraying him as the victim of a remarkable endowment.

      Soon we turned our exchanges to the war, commenting on the strangeness of the total blackout. Cayce spoke with quiet pride of his two sons in military service, Hugh Lynn and Edgar Evans, one overseas and the other headed there. Yet as he described their assignments, his face showed for a moment the sharp-edged loss he felt from their absence. It seemed likely that family ties might be more important to him than Southern mores already made them. Being a man with a