“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Given our situation, I took care of my wife as best I could. As the years passed our lives became more and more restricted physically. It became increasingly difficult for Jane to walk in public. When we went food shopping, for example, she would sit in the car in the parking lot, perhaps reading, while I pushed the grocery cart up and down the aisles. We gradually gave up on vacations, in the usual sense of traveling. Strangely, the traveling aspect of the symptoms bothered us the least: we were too immersed in our daily lives with either full-time or part-time jobs (in the beginning), but always with writing, painting, the Seth material, ESP class, seeing friends, and so forth. Jane did conduct several quite successful long-distance experiments with the Gallaghers when they vacationed in the Caribbean Islands. We made dated notes and times of her impressions so she could check them when our friends returned. Interpreting the impressions was sometimes quite difficult. Jane did have direct hits listed, but for other impressions Peg and Bill couldn’t agree on the accuracy and/or timing of certain activities. And sometimes they said the impressions were just wrong.

For whatever reasons, she had resolved along the way to do her own thing in her own way—with two exceptions. She went to Andy Colucci, a dentist (and friend) who had his office around the corner from where we lived on West Water Street for routine cleaning (she had perfect teeth); and on rare occasions one or both of us visited Sam Levine, a doctor who had his office on the ground floor of his building next-door to 458. We’d see him for an inoculation, say, or treatment for a cold. Did Doctor Sam ever hear Seth’s booming voice in the summertime, when windows were open, or the uproarious racket made by the members of Jane’s ESP class on Tuesday nights? Yes he did, he told Jane, but he didn’t understand what was going on—only that there were many extra cars parked in the neighborhood on Tuesday nights. And Jane wasn’t about to explain: “Hi, Sam. Hey, I’m speaking in a trance state for this nonphysical entity called Seth—a guy I knew in Denmark three hundred years ago. I wonder if you can help me deal with some of my symptoms, as I call them. They might be connected with my psychic work…” Not a chance! Doctor Sam was a very kind but reserved Jewish doctor who helped many people on a daily basis. Yet I do think that even if he hadn’t accepted Jane’s mediumship per se, still he would have recognized it as being a portion of her psyche.

I pushed open the back fire door and the six of us clumped down the open stairs that Jane and I had used so many times. I worried about being an intruder into the domain of the people who lived in those dingy apartments now. Indeed, as we left the stairs two dogs in a back apartment set up a furious barking as they scratched at what I knew were kitchen windows. A friend of ours had lived in that apartment (and I still correspond with him). I was embarrassed: the dogs’ racket must have bothered everyone in the house. We saw no one, however, and the barking magically ceased as we moved around to the east side of 458 and surveyed it from a small paved parking lot. Once in that spot there had been flagstones and benches beneath an extended roof supported by four sets of wooden pillars. The tin-covered roof had born layers of old vines that had climbed up the pillars from our living-room windows on the second floor. Jane had liked to throw seed and bread crusts into the vines for the squirrels and birds to root out. The pigeons, cardinals, sparrows, blue jays and others had flown over from the Chemung River a quarter of a block away.

From the parking lot I pointed out to our guests the windows of Apartment 5 as they marched along the side of 458 on the second floor. Our landlord, Jimmy Spaziani, had told us that the entire apartment had been the master-bedroom complex of the wealthy merchant who had built the house for his family more than a century ago. The kitchen with its three tiny windows near the front of the house had been a closet; the three bay windows of the living room where Jane had held the sessions and her ESP class had been the main bedroom. Next comes the oversized bathroom with its stained glass window, tiled floor, and marble shower with eight nozzles. Jane and I had really enjoyed that shower! Then comes a smaller room that we had used as a bedroom, with one window in the back wall of the house. Finally, there’s the last room with its windows on three sides as it juts out on iron posts from the back of the house. Originally it had been a sun parlor. The room is open underneath. It had been my studio, and I’d had to insulate the floor.

Once our three cars were parked in or near 1730’s driveway, Debbie Serra helped me unload the overstuffed roadside mailbox and carry the pile to my SUV. As we milled about the side porch and garage area and began talking about 1730, Jim politely asked if he and the other three guests could see the inside of it. Laurel just as politely declined. The cozy house that Jane and I had loved so much looked dark and forlorn. The door and window shades were drawn. The house needed painting. The porch’s screen door was wired shut in a crude way that wouldn’t keep anyone out.