After Dachau (2 page)

Faced with this idea, Mr. and Mrs. Dorson knew they’d rather have been forced to choose between the insane asylum and the exorcist. It needs to be mentioned, I’m afraid, that the Prescotts were several rungs below the Dorsons on the Vettsburg social ladder. To expose their family difficulties to people of that class was completely unthinkable (though I suspect it was rather more unthinkable for Mrs. Dorson than for her husband).

Seeing that the Dorsons would have to be brought to the idea by stages, Dr. Jansen made this suggestion. Through his contacts in the medical community, he’d check out the Prescotts and make sure they weren’t the sort of people who would take advantage of this strange situation. Then if they passed this inspection, he himself would undertake to contact them.

“But what do you hope to gain from this?” Mr. Dorson asked.

“In a matter like this,” the doctor said, “we’re like people trapped in a cave. We can sit here and starve to death or we can set off to explore the only corridor that presents itself and hope for the best.”

The Dorsons reluctantly agreed.

But there was something else Dr. Jansen wanted first, and that was to satisfy himself that he wasn’t being gulled. He had a scientific turn of mind, and his first hypothesis in this case wasn’t going to be that something uncanny was going on. Though he didn’t say so to the Dorsons, his first hypothesis was going to be that Mary Anne was playing a mean practical joke on her parents, possibly with the collusion of one or more of the Prescotts or of someone who knew them.

During the fortnight that followed, the doctor spent two or three hours a day with either the girl or her mother. Mrs. Dorson insisted it was completely impossible to suppose that some outsider was coaching her daughter. Mary Anne wasn’t one of a passel running wild; she was an only child living virtually every minute under her mother’s gaze. She had two or three friends she visited occasionally, but these weren’t people who would have any connection with the Prescotts, though of course the doctor was free to check this for himself—and he did.

You could see in the telling that Dr. Jansen was really getting into his role as investigator. His tests and stratagems were ingenious, subtle, and persuasive. But unless these very ordinary middle-class families were all joined in a fiendish conspiracy (and to what point?), Mrs. Dorson was right: Mary Anne had not been coached. Nor had she pieced together her picture of the Prescotts from things she’d heard
or overheard at her friends’ homes. The Prescotts were unknown to them all.

The doctor’s next hypothesis was that the girl’s babblings about the Prescotts comprised the sort of generalities that fortune tellers make their reputations on. If pressed, she’d shy away from details. If pressed harder, she’d start inventing things and soon get tangled in discrepancies and contradictions. The hypothesis foundered immediately. Mary Anne was eager to supply details of the most minute kind and was unruffled by any challenge.

The doctor’s next and final hypothesis was that even if Mary Anne’s lies were internally consistent, they’d collapse when compared to actuality. Of necessity, this brought him face to face with the Prescotts themselves. He proceeded with the confidence of a Grand Inquisitor, presenting himself at their house unannounced, practically accusing them of perpetrating a confidence swindle on the Dorsons. They stared at him with such open-mouthed incomprehension that he couldn’t doubt what he’d already heard from others, that they were a family of thoroughly prosaic and innocuous working-class people. He apologized for having made this blustery beginning and went on to explain why he was there. When they finally understood what had been happening at the Dorson house, Dr. Jansen asked if they could imagine any ordinary way Mary Anne could have come into possession of detailed information about their lives and household arrangements. When they gave the expected answer, it was time to test the information itself.

He’d divided it into statements he could verify with his own eyes (descriptions of the house and family members) and statements only the Prescotts could verify (habits, history,
And so on). It would serve no purpose to recite the process here. The material Mary Anne had provided was a mass of hits and misses, but not a hodgepodge. By the time they were finished, the character of the data was unmistakable. It was remarkably accurate—
but ten years out of date
.

Connie and Francis were no longer living with their parents, for example. Connie was married and had a home of her own. Francis had joined the army and was now a career soldier. Many of the furnishings and decorations Mary Anne had described were gone, but they’d certainly been there ten years ago.

The significance of “ten years ago” was no mystery to the Prescotts. Ten years ago they’d lost their firstborn, Natalie, to leukemia.

Now eight-year-old Mary Anne was telling anyone who would listen: “I am Natalie.”

The rest of
the story is rather anticlimactic and more than a little chilling. When Mary Anne finally met the Prescotts, it was eerily like a reunion. Mrs. Prescott started weeping and couldn’t stop. Dr. Jensen finally had to administer a sedative and put her to bed. The Dorsons watched, frozen with horror and bewilderment, and when it was all over and they took their daughter home, they knew they’d lost her. It was an inevitable thing now. Two weeks later Mary Anne moved in with the people she considered her true parents, and that was the end of that.

News of the wonder couldn’t be suppressed. With the Prescott house at its center, Vettsburg became a place of pilgrimage for thousands who wanted to believe that Mary
Anne was living proof of life after death and reincarnation. It would be nice to be able to say that the girl was unaffected by all this hullabaloo and grew into an angelic young woman, but it seems she grew into a perfectly normal young woman (one who, according to most witnesses, was a bit more than normally inclined to be sulky, spoiled, and demanding). She married twice, divorced twice, and in later life distinguished herself in no way whatever. Any sanctification that had come with being reborn in another girl’s body (if that’s what happened) was distinctly short-lived.

THIS WAS
the version of the story that was put forward in the book I read at my friend’s home. Later I would read other versions that were neither so tidy nor so apparently conclusive. No matter—that was later.

The uncanny events of Vettsburg opened up a new dimension of sight for me. That’s the best way I can describe it. It’s as if I’d been living in a sort of flatland up till then, and this book directed my gaze up into a sky I’d never suspected was there. It was not in any sense a religious experience and confirmed no religious belief on my part, since I had none. In fact, I didn’t see religion as having anything to do with it and still don’t. If Natalie Prescott was in fact reincarnated as Mary Anne Dorson, then this was surely a wondrous event—but no more supernatural than a caterpillar
being reincarnated as a butterfly. If Natalie Prescott was in fact reincarnated as Mary Anne Dorson, then this was surely just a manifestation of a natural law whose workings are usually not manifest at all. If Natalie Prescott was in fact reincarnated as Mary Anne Dorson, then we’re
all
the reincarnation of someone else—and destined to be reincarnated as someone else as well.

I slipped the book back to the maid, and that was that. The vacation came to an end, and I went back to school. Life continued as before—for another seven years, when I graduated from college and told my family I was going to work for We Live Again, a threadbare but earnest little organization devoted to reincarnation research.

They wanted to know what I meant by “work.” I explained that the foundation had only two paid full-time employees, the founder, Reginald Fenshaw, and his wife, Marcia, who coordinated and compiled the fieldwork of dozens of enthusiasts working on a volunteer basis around the world. I would in effect become their first full-time field-worker, bringing to the task not only my time and energy but the financial resources to follow up on reports anywhere in the world.

My mother thought the idea amusing and original, as if it were all an invention. My father thought it would make “an interesting way to spend the summer.” In his cunning and tactful way, he was opening an avenue down which I could retreat when the project began to bore me (as he was sure it would, sooner or later). However, he had a request. Before taking up my labors on behalf of We Live Again, he asked me to talk to “Uncle Harry,” who was coming to dinner the following evening. Of course I said I would.

Harold Whitaker, Ph.D., was a longtime close friend of the family (and not really any sort of uncle). I’d known him since childhood, when every adult seemed elderly, though in fact he wasn’t very old even now, being perhaps in his late thirties. I seemed always to have known the man’s legend better than the man himself. He’d studied at that frightfully ancient institution, Heidelberg University, and had a dueling scar on the left side of his face to prove it. He possessed several obscure academic degrees but said he favored the Ph.D. over the others because it didn’t need to be explained.

For a decade after leaving school he’d been “something in the military” and wore his beautifully tailored suits as if they were uniforms. Everlastingly slim and fit, he always looked like he could rise from the dinner table and run a mile without getting winded or mussing the careful set of his fine blond hair. Now no longer in the military, he was “something in the government,” and I wasn’t in the least surprised to learn that recruitment was the object of our conversation.

When we were settled with our brandies in the library after dinner, he said, “I think this venture with the Reincarnation Institute sounds like fun, and I’m sure you’ll learn a lot.”

The family didn’t care for the name of the organization, and it was quite their usual practice to reshape reality to suit themselves. Thus We Live Again had almost immediately become the more dignified Reincarnation Institute.

“But,” Uncle Harry went on, “you mustn’t get them too accustomed to leaning on you. In a year or two you’re going to want to move on to something else.”

“Yes, that’s only good sense,” I agreed blandly.

“I want you to be aware that anytime you want it, there’s a place for you in my outfit.”

“Doing what?”

“Doing what I do.”

“And what’s that, if I may ask?”

He shrugged. “I assumed you’d know by now that I’m in Intelligence. Or guess it.”

I suppose I had guessed it, I told him, though I’m not sure I could have put the name
Intelligence
to it. “I know what you do is … mysterious, perhaps sinister.”

“Neither one, most of the time. The government—every government everywhere and in every age—depends on men like me. On large numbers of men like me, in fact. When a leader stands in front of an audience or answers a question from the press, he almost never speaks from his own knowledge about the issues and problems of the world. For the most part, he’s merely voicing
our
knowledge of those issues and problems. This is no exaggeration, I assure you.”

“I believe you, though in my innocence it never occurred to me until now that this might be the case. But why me? I’m no good at languages. I have no very useful specialties.”

He shook his head impatiently. “Linguists and specialists we buy in packets of ten. It’s the talented generalists who are difficult to find, people with classical educations, people who are intelligent, well-bred, well-connected, and, above all,
known
.”

“Known? My father is known. I hardly consider
myself
to be known.”

“You’re known to
me
, and that’s all that matters. I can vouch for you absolutely, which is something I can never do
for anyone who just walks in off the street looking for a job. He may have degrees spilling out of his pockets from the world’s leading universities and letters of introduction from dozens of national heroes, but to me he’s an unknown, and I wouldn’t even trust him to empty the wastebaskets.”

“I see. To be honest, I was expecting something like this but thought you’d just be doing it as a favor to Dad.”

“Not at all. In fact, it’s the other way around. I’m the one who asked for the favor, and your father granted it.”

I told him I was flattered (and I was) and that I’d certainly keep the offer in mind.

“What you propose to be doing for the Institute,” he went on, “could actually turn out to be excellent training for Intelligence work, I think.” He paused to ponder that for a moment. “I suppose you could say that, in a sense, what you propose to be doing is Intelligence work.”

I didn’t particularly care to know what he meant by that, so I thanked him and adjourned the meeting
sine die
.