When did I find out I was a medium? I'll tell you when I found out I wasn't one — which is how you find out you can't do most things, at the precise moment you want it most.
Before we go any further: I am not a bad person. I've done bad things, but so has every person sitting in a pew on Sunday morning. The difference is their bad things led nowhere. Mine led to a penthouse on Fifth Avenue and a waiting list three months long. Make of that what you will.
I was an orphan. Lying wasn't a character flaw, it was a survival strategy. The same way some children learn to play piano or speak French, I learned to say whatever kept my head on my shoulders and food on the table. I was very good at it. I saw no reason to stop.
My mother was a chorus girl. In the '30s, that was the polite word for prostitute. She slept during the days and worked at nights, which meant I raised myself, which is either a tragedy or a character-building exercise depending on who's telling the story. I've always preferred to be the one telling the story.
That's probably where this all started.
My mother was a chorus girl. In the '30s, that was the polite word for prostitute. She slept during the days and worked at nights, which meant I raised myself. By nine I was stealing electricity from the hallway outlet. By thirteen I was checking the pockets of drunks who'd passed out on the stoop. I wasn't cruel about it. I only took what they wouldn't miss.
My memories of her are fragmented and drowsy, but I remember she was a beautiful woman: silky skin, naturally red hair, blue eyes. She'd have looked like Poison Ivy if her face didn't carry such an innocent depression to it. Despite that beauty, we were poor as mice — a four-hundred square foot kitchenette in Chinatown, no heat most winters, a broken windowsill that whistled when the wind picked up. And yet I slept in a large canopy bed with pink chiffon curtains. She told me she got it from a store sale. I suspect she slept with the owner for it. I don't blame her. I'd have done the same.
I developed an unsympathetic attitude toward life early, the way some children develop allergies: quietly, completely, and without anyone noticing until it was too late to treat. But I had one weakness: my mother’s knots.
Our schedules never overlapped — she came home when I was already asleep. So she'd devised a system. Every night she’d tied that knot. It was the only promise she ever kept. I'd wake before dawn and reach for it — tucking my small fingers between the chiffon folds, feeling a warmth that would slip away by afternoon. It wasn't much. But it was mine.
Until the morning I woke to a straight curtain.
My mother didn't come that night, nor the night after. For those two December nights I didn't touch the sheets. Instead I wrapped myself in the canopy curtains, the pink chiffon pulled tight around my body — so that when she came home, and she would come home, she always came home, I'd feel her fingers working the knot. I'd feel her there, even in my sleep.
She never came.
I spent the next four years at Angel Guardian Home, a home for girls who would never dream of get adopted. When I think of that time, all that comes to mind is lukewarm porridge, the frown lines on the nuns' faces, and curtainless beds where I still searched for knots each morning. Reaching for something that wasn't there. Hands remember what the mind tries to forget.
By the time I left Angel Guardian in 1958 I had blossomed into what they called a full-figured gal: my mother's heart-shaped face, except my nose was a little straighter, and an ass that made even the most god-fearing of nuns stop and stare. I went straight to Broadway. I'd been practicing in the orphanage choir for years. I had a decent voice and better legs. What else did a girl need?
My first audition was a chorus part in Much Ado About Nothing. I practiced for weeks. Learned every word, every step, every breath. I pressed my only good dress the night before and didn't sleep a wink. Onstage, someone asked if I had any connection to the theater. I said my mother had been a chorus girl — worked all over the city at nights. The whole room laughed. I laughed too, because I didn't yet know why.
After the callback, the director asked to see my breasts. That's when I learned what kind of Chorus Girl my mother was.
His hands were cold, that’s what I remember.
Two days later I had my part.
I walked out of the Winter Garden onto Broadway and the city hit me all at once — the smell of exhaust and roasted nuts, cabs laying on their horns, women in good coats walking fast like they had somewhere important to be. I had news. Good news. And good news needs an audience or it curdles, and I was desperate to share this news with the only person who’d care enough to celebrate. I could see exactly how it would go — I'd burst through the door and my mother’d be there, sleepy-eyed at our old wooden kitchen table, and she'd laugh and say she always knew I had it in me. Like she'd done something that mattered. Even if it was just birthing someone who someday might.
The feeling that rose in my chest was one I hadn't felt since the last morning I found a knot in my curtain. Warm and sudden and dangerously close to hope.
It lasted three blocks.
Here's the thing about growing up poor: you learn not to want things. You get very good at it. So when you finally do, really do, the disappointment doesn't arrive quietly. It grabs you by the chin and forces you to look at every single thing you'll never have.
My mother was dead and the dead don't clap. They don't cry. They don't say I told you so, baby. They just stay dead.
That night I made two decisions: I would get myself a canopy bed, and I would find a medium.
Three months later, with my first paycheck, I had a canopy bed made — pink chiffon curtains, the same shade as the one I'd lost.
Six months after that I found the medium.
Her name was Soraya. She had jade eyes, tan skin, and a fake freckle on the right corner of her mouth that smudged when she drank tea. I arrived at her apartment on Fulton Street, and walked up to a room that stank of cat litter drowned in jasmine incense, where she sat in silence and started her séance. She clutched her temples. She moaned about the spirits. When she finally spoke, she told me my mother was at peace — described the car crash in detail, the screeching tires, how mine was the last name on her lips.
My mother had died of syphilis. Found alone in a motor court off the highway, rotting from the inside out while I waited for her to come back home. I found out when her death certificate arrived in the mail.
That night I wrapped myself in my canopy bed the way I had the night my mother disappeared — pink chiffon pressed against my face, crying with the particular humiliation of someone outwitted by their own longing. I was twenty years old and incandescent with rage. Not at Soraya. At myself. I swore, with everything a twenty-year-old orphan has to swear with, that I would never again let want override judgment. Sentimentality, I decided, was a racket I could not afford.
My years on Broadway were both austere and intoxicating — sometimes within the same evening. The Winter Garden dressing rooms were sardine tins of ambition and Chanel No. 5, Marlboros passing between us with the solemnity of a sacrament, cold cream jars circulating like parish wine. We were all, in our way, rehearsing for lives we hadn't yet been cast in. Here and there a columnist from the Mirror or the Journal-American would materialize backstage, and if your bone structure merited it, you'd find yourself at El Morocco or the Stork Club by midnight.
It was during one of those nights out that I met a doctor named Johnny — handsome in that absentminded way intelligent men sometimes are, gold-dust hair, olive eyes. He treated cancer patients. After my third grasshopper I asked him how he told people they were dying.
"You tell them the facts, and you're as direct as possible. I've come to learn that people appreciate honesty more than comfort. They need something solid to stand on, even if it's terrible news." He took a sip of his whiskey. "It's the uncertainty that kills them before the disease does."
I had one more grasshopper with Johnny at Gleason's and left.
The next evening at the theater, I stood in the wings watching the audience. They'd paid good money to see us sell them a performance of happiness, stories with tidy endings that bore no resemblance to their actual lives. And it struck me: Soraya and I were in the same business. We both sold fantasies to people who needed them. The only difference was she charged more and worked alone.
But Johnny sold something else entirely. He sold the truth. And people paid him handsomely for it, because the truth—even when it's terrible—is something you can actually use.
But what if you gave people something else? Not the lie they wanted, but the truth they could use? Not fog, but floor. Not hope, but closure.
I became a medium. The honest kind. Which is to say, a different kind of liar.
My first client was a waitress from Queens named Dorothy. She wanted to know if her fiancé, missing in Korea, was coming home. I looked at her across my rickety kitchen table, took her hands in mine, and told her he'd died at war. I can't tell you whether it was true. But three years later Dorothy was happily married and pregnant so I saw that as a win. What I'd learned from Soraya's failure: people can't let go of hope, but they can let go of love.
Word spread the way it does among women with nowhere else to turn. Secretaries. Seamstresses. Widows from the Bronx who took three buses to see me.I charged five dollars a session, held their hands across my kitchen table, and handed them the gift of a certainty that had never occurred.
Did I feel bad about lying? I don't know, I think that once you've done something long enough it stops feeling good or bad, it just becomes normal. What I will tell you is this: every single person who walked out of that room left lighter than they'd arrived. Not happy — lighter. Slowly, session by session, I learned the thing that would make my career: people can't let go of hope. But they can let go of love.
I took on fewer Broadway shows as my practice grew. My fees were simple: you paid what you could afford, and no one skipped the line. In a business of immorality, that was my one moral compass. I followed it religiously.
Before I left Broadway entirely, I got married. I should say that differently. Before I left Broadway entirely, I acquired a husband.
His name was Paul Ashford. Handsome in the architectural sense — good bones, impressive facade, structurally unsound. He came from one of those old money families where the name still opened doors but the bank account couldn't pay for dinner once you walked through them. He wore his grandfather's watch, his father's cufflinks, and the expression of a man perpetually on the verge of a comeback. I found it charming for approximately eighteen months.
I never told him I was a medium. There are things a man like Paul simply cannot metabolize about his wife — the truth being chief among them.
Over the years, Paul brought my practice to a whole different level, unknowingly introducing me to my wealthiest clients. At a dinner party in his mother's apartment on Park Avenue, one of her friends — a Mrs. Vandenberg — mentioned she’d spent the last week in because her poodle had passed away after eighteen loyal years. I thought it was a joke. But every red-lipped, bejeweled woman at that table creased her porcelain forehead in sympathy. Amongst this cathedral of earnest absurdity, while the conversation drifted between summers on the French Riviera and the season's most anticipated gallery openings, I was quietly building a business plan.
She told her friends. Her friends told theirs. Within a year I had a waiting list of Park Avenue widows, all of them veiled, all of them grieving, all of them paying handsomely for the privilege of hearing the worst.
My life with Paul was happy enough — which is to say, decorative. We hosted dinner parties where I smiled and said nothing of substance, attended the opera where he fell asleep in the second act, and lived in an apartment on the Upper East Side we couldn't quite afford, though he'd never have admitted it at gunpoint.
He couldn't have children and blamed it on me, which I let him do. I found out the truth after I had an affair with his business partner and got an abortion I've never once regretted. People speak of motherhood as though it's a calling, a biological destiny, a woman's crowning purpose. I’ve come to realize that self-awareness is an underrated form of generosity. And some people are so aware of their selfishness that the most selfless thing they can do is not to have children.
My practice flourished. My marriage did not. The day after I turned forty, I found him in bed with a woman who looked like me fifteen years prior. Younger, obviously. Prettier— maybe. She had the kind of wide-eyed admiration I'd stopped faking around year three, which told me she had approximately two more years before she'd be replaced by someone who looked like her fifteen years prior. I stood in the doorway for a moment, and then I laughed. Not bitterly. Genuinely. Paul always did like an audience.
I cried, briefly, in the bathroom. Then I packed my things.
I took my clothes, my jewelry, and the canopy bed. I left him the fish forks. I've always believed in leaving a man just enough to feel like he won.
I rented a brownstone in the Village and hung a brass sign by the door: "Appointments Only." No more Madame Fontaine. No more veils. No more borrowed accents. Just me. Three years later I was making more in a month than Paul made in a year. I sent him a Christmas card every December. He never wrote back, which I took as a compliment.
I built an empire out of bad news. I told a shipping magnate's widow her husband had died thinking of his mistress. She left me her Cartier watch in her will. I told a Broadway producer his mother had never forgiven him for missing her funeral. He sent me a case of Château Margaux every Christmas until he died. I told a sitting governor's wife that her son, dead from an overdose, had blamed her in his final moments. She doubled my fee and came back the following week. They always came back.
I was profiled in The New Yorker in 1987. "The No-Nonsense Medium," they called me. No candles. No theatrics. No spirits crowding my mind. Just the truth, delivered like a doctor's diagnosis. The writer asked if I really spoke to the dead. I told her the dead were easy. It was the living who exhausted me. She printed that. I framed it.
It was glorious, and luxurious, and everything I'd stolen electricity and picked pockets and pressed pink chiffon against my face in the dark to one day have.
Until now.
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Here's the thing about dying: you leave behind every wall you ever built. All that armor, all that cleverness, all those years of convincing yourself you didn't need anyone—none of it comes with you.
I take one last breath in the canopy bed I've had since I was nineteen, the pink chiffon exactly the same shade as my childhood, and then—
I'm standing beside the bed. My body is still there, small and gray beneath the sheets, hands folded, face finally peaceful. It looks so small in that big bed. Smaller than I ever let myself feel when I was inside it.
I know I have to leave this room but first —
I reach for the curtain. My hand passes through once, twice. On the third try, the silk catches. I tie a knot. Carefully. The way my mother used to. The way I spent seventy years searching for.
There. Proof I was here.
And then I see her. Not a door, not a tunnel. Just her. Standing by the window, bathed in that early light, as if she'd been there all along. Red hair, blue eyes, that innocent depression on her face. My mother. She's smiling. She's been waiting.
I spent my whole life believing that hope was a trap. That wanting things only led to disappointment. That the kindest thing you could do for someone was to tell them the worst so they could stop waiting.
But here she is. Waiting.
I take her hand. Warm. Solid. Real.
I want to say something clever. Something wry and detached, the way I've said everything for seventy years. But when I open my mouth, what comes out is: "I missed you."
Bio:
Ella Torres is a Brazilian writer and translator and a graduate of Barnard College, where she earned a degree in English and Creative Writing. She is currently pursuing an MFA in fiction at The New School. Her work has appeared in Broadripple, Litbop, and other publications.
