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 traditions. 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
