The Séance Parlor: Liminal Space Between the Living and the Dead in Buckeye

What the Séance Parlor Literally Is

The séance parlor is the converted front room of the Jenkins home at 17 Taft Street in Bonhomie, Ohio. Originally a standard living space, it is transformed after Becky offers Cal a compromise: sessions will take place downstairs, near the front door, so strangers do not wander through the entire house. By the early 1950s, the room has taken a distinct character – warm burlap walls, exposed wood trim, dark green curtains, and a heavy hexagonal table bought at a yard sale for five dollars. A small shelf of ceramic owls stands on the mantel, and a Cleveland-made grandfather clock marks the time. This physical setting remains consistent throughout the novel, grounding the supernatural in a domestic, middle-class interior.

The parlor is a working space, not a stage. Becky welcomes grieving clients one-on-one, rarely using more than a single chair at the table. She does not charge a fee, though many try to insist. She burns sage, lights a candle, and sometimes places flowers in the room to focus her concentration. These modest props contrast sharply with the elaborate trappings of fraudulent mediums she condemns – the gauze ectoplasm, the cardboard cutouts, the double-jointed toes used to fake spirit rappings.

Where the Parlor Recurs and How Its Meaning Changes

The parlor appears in several key moments across the story:

Chapter Three (1945): Shortly after Skip’s birth, Cal and Becky argue about the advertisement she placed in local newspapers. Roman advises Cal to suggest using the parlor for sessions. The parlor emerges as a negotiated territory – a concession that allows Becky to continue her work while Cal retains the illusion of control over domestic boundaries.
Chapter Four (1945): Casey LaGrange, the self-styled “scholar attached to no university,” visits the parlor to observe a session. He admires the woodwork, the corbels, the grandfather clock, and the ceramic owls. For Cal, the parlor becomes a site of unease: the stranger’s presence and his flattery raise questions about Becky’s reputation and safety. For Becky, the parlor momentarily shifts from a private sanctuary to a stage for her talents.
Chapter Fourteen (early 1950s): The parlor has settled into routine. Becky’s description formalizes – “warm burlap-colored walls,” the hexagonal table, the six chairs. She now sees four or five clients a week. The parlor is no longer a point of marital conflict; it is simply her workspace. Yet the commercial threat lingers in LaGrange’s unanswered offer to “fill halls” in Washington or New York.

The parlor’s meaning evolves from a marital battlefield to a professional site to a symbol of the ongoing tension between genuine comfort and potential exploitation. It never loses its liminal character – it is neither fully sacred nor fully profane.

Character Connections

Becky Hanover Jenkins: The parlor is an extension of her identity. She speaks of the dead as “contacting” her not from Heaven or Hell, but from a place “like a pay phone in the desert.” The parlor houses her gift and her ethics. She refuses to accept payments or to perform for audiences larger than a few sincere participants. When a client asks if she can predict the war’s end, she declines, calling prediction “not one of her abilities.” The parlor enforces her strict personal code.
Cal Jenkins: Cal’s relationship to the parlor is one of watchful distance. He helps his wife make the space usable, but he never participates in a session. He worries that strangers will rob the house or endanger Skip. The parlor literalizes his emotional exclusion from part of Becky’s life. His comment that “the house was more hers than his” reveals the power imbalance that the parlor crystallizes.
Casey LaGrange: As a recurring observer, LaGrange transforms the parlor from a private haven into a potential commodity. He sends flattering letters, takes notes, and mentions “filling halls.” His presence embodies the temptation of commercializing grief. Becky senses “a frantic energy just below the surface” in him, and she notices his frayed cuffs – details that hint at his own desperation.
Clients (Mrs. Dodson, Mr. Gonzalez, the young widow from Port Clinton, and others): These characters enter the parlor seeking contact with war dead or estranged loved ones. Their grief gives the parlor its primary function. A man asks whether his son has “a body or a face floating over a wisp” – the parlor is where such desperate questions are met with honesty, not theatrical spectacle.
Roman Hanover: Though he never sits in the parlor, Roman advises Cal from the outside. His line “If this goes anywhere, it’s got to be in writing” shows that even a skeptical observer recognizes the parlor as a site where legal and financial stakes intersect.
The children who yell “Witch!” from the street: Their taunts mark the parlor’s public perception. The house itself becomes a target, with “Witch” soaped on the windows one Halloween. The parlor is not just a private room; it is a lens through which the community judges Becky.

Theme Connections

Mediumship and Grief: The parlor is the stage for Becky’s gift. She repeatedly chooses truth over comfort – telling a widow she has never been contacted by a spirit from Heaven or Hell, refusing to pretend she can see the dead clearly. The room becomes a space where grief is acknowledged, not exploited.
War Trauma and Survival Guilt: Nearly every client in the early years is a woman whose husband or son died in the war. Cal himself feels purposeless for being rejected from service; the parlor is where he confronts the chasm between his desire to help and his wife’s ability to help. The war’s absent bodies haunt the room.
Marital Estrangement and Hidden Identities: The parlor reveals the fault line in Cal and Becky’s marriage. He cannot believe in her work but cannot stop her from doing it. The room becomes a silent standoff. Later in the novel, Tom Salt’s discovery that Cal is his biological father – a secret kept for decades – has no direct link to the parlor, but the pattern of hidden identities resonates: the parlor, too, is a space where unsayable truths are brought to light.
Secrecy and Family Lies: While the parlor is ostensibly a place of revelation (contacting the dead), it is also a place where certain truths remain unspoken. Becky keeps her advertisement secret from Cal; Cal does not fully disclose his doubts. The parlor’s existence as a shared-but-unequal space mirrors the larger secrets that structure the novel.
Forgiveness and Reconciliation: The final chapter sees Becky, at age sixty, hearing Skip’s spirit deliver a message of love and forgiveness. Though the exact location is not specified as the parlor (it happens in the laundry room during a birthday trip), the novel’s arc suggests that the parlor’s work – opening communication between the living and the dead – eventually makes peace possible.

Four Study Questions with Answers

1. How does the physical description of the séance parlor reflect its liminal function?

The parlor sits between the street and the deeper private rooms of the house. Its exposed wood trim, burlap walls, and dark green curtains create a warm but muted atmosphere – neither fully domestic nor fully ceremonial. The hexagonal table, bought cheaply at a yard sale, is solid but unadorned. This modest aesthetic resists the temptation of showmanship. The room is a threshold: clients enter from the outside world of grief and uncertainty, pass through the parlor, and leave without ever seeing the family’s living quarters. It is a transition space where the living may brush against the dead, but nothing is permanently changed.

2. In what ways does the parlor become a point of contention between Cal and Becky, and what does this reveal about their marriage?

Cal first objects to the parlor because he dislikes “strangers coming in and out of the house” and fears for Skip’s safety. Becky counters that people “find solace in what I do.” The argument reveals that Cal does not believe in her ability – when pressed, he admits he thinks it is not real – yet he cannot forbid her from doing it. The parlor becomes a symbol of the unequal investment in their partnership: Becky has her work and her gift; Cal has a job he fell into and a war he was denied. Roman’s cynical advice – “tell her you’ve had a change of heart” – underscores that Cal is out of his depth in negotiating the terms of his wife’s vocation. The parlor ultimately forces them to coexist in mutual, quiet estrangement.

3. How does Becky’s refusal to charge fees complicate the theme of commercial exploitation?

Becky’s advertisement originally read “No Fee – Sincere Only Please.” She rejects payment even from grateful clients. Yet she is not immune to the language of the marketplace: she runs paid ads in the Gazette and the Blade, and she accepts media attention from The Séance Précis. The parlor remains a space where money is not exchanged, but reputation is built. Casey LaGrange’s letters – and his talk of “filling halls” in large cities – present the temptation to monetize her gift. Becky’s resistance to money protects her from the charlatanry she despises, but it also leaves her vulnerable to those who would profit from her name. The parlor survives as a noncommercial zone, but the threat of exploitation hovers at its edges.

4. What does the arrival of Casey LaGrange in the parlor suggest about the risks and rewards of publicizing spiritual gifts?

LaGrange’s arrival is double-edged. He brings affirmation – his letter calls Becky “one of the most skilled mediums of our time” and promises a place in his compendium. But he also brings scrutiny. He notices details (the Swiss clock, the ceramic owls) that reduce the parlor to a collection of atmospheric adjusters. His presence forces Becky to articulate her ethics to a stranger. When she criticizes the Davenport Brothers and the Fox Sisters as frauds, she is also defining her own practice. LaGrange’s shadow – the “frantic energy” Becky senses – hints that publication and travel might distort the very intimacy her parlor provides. The risk is that public exposure could turn the parlor from a place of genuine encounter into a stop on a tour of “psychic minds.” The reward is that her work might reach more grieving people – but at what cost to the quiet integrity of her Taft Street room?