A Manhattan Ghost Story (10 page)

* * *

At times it is imperative that we grab hold of something that seems real, something that has mass and weight, something that can cut, something mechanical, soulless, gauche, temporary.

We need such things when we feel certain that we are going to be caught up, suddenly—or already are caught up—in something exquisite, and eternal. Like death, or love. Or both.

And we need such things because they can help affirm for us that we are, ourselves, soulless, gauche, and temporary. Sure it’s a lie; I know that it’s a lie, but it’s how most of us make it from one day to the next.

I tried to get hold of Kennedy Whelan. I couldn’t. “He’s on an assignment,” I was told, so I asked whom I could talk to about a recent accidental death.

“What exactly did you want to know?” I was asked. It was a Detective Sergeant I was talking to—a woman named Spears. She was pleasant and efficient, and I got the idea right from the start that she wanted to pump me.

“I’d like some information about the victim, if that’s possible,” I told her.

“Yes, sir. I’m sure we can accommodate you on that. Could I ask what your interest is in this case, please?”

“Yes. She was a friend. A close friend.”

“Of course. And your name is?”

I hung up and left the apartment almost immediately.

I’m not quite sure why. Paranoia, I think. The phone rang as I was leaving. I let it ring. I convinced myself that it was Detective Sergeant Spears calling back—because wonderful, new, and secret methods of tracing telephone calls had been instituted—and that she had a few questions to ask me.

I took my Nikon F. with me. I’m rarely without it—it’s a kind of prop; it tells people what I am and what, approximately, they can expect from me. Everyone should be able to carry such identifying props.

I went out to East 79th Street and turned toward Central Park. It was a very cold night, probably down into the teens, and I found myself walking quickly to keep warm.

On Fifth Avenue I headed downtown. It was a route I had taken a week-and-a-half earlier, I remembered.

I saw the man in the ragged T-shirt, jeans, and sandals when I was still a good distance from him, several blocks at least, and I stopped immediately and whispered to myself, “My God, he’s
still
there!” I turned to a middle-aged woman walking toward me and nodded at the man. “He’s
still
there!” I said, and I smiled. I was trying to share something wonderful with her, something that could happen, I supposed, only in New York, and since she looked like a New Yorker, I thought she’d appreciate it. She ignored me. Her short, fat legs carried her quickly and purposefully past me, and I realized, as she passed, that she was talking to herself in a low, husky whisper.

I looked back at the man in the T-shirt, jeans, and sandals. He seemed to be in exactly the same position I’d last seen him—leaning against a doorway, head twitching every few seconds, hands in front and folded, I guessed, though I couldn’t be sure because I was seeing him from behind. I made my way toward him; the sidewalk was all but empty, except for him, the middle-aged woman, and four teen-aged girls trying to hail a taxi.

I stopped again, about a block from the man in the T-shirt and sandals. The block was not long, so I had a pretty good view of him now, and though I could not yet see his face, I was sure it was the same man I’d seen three weeks earlier. I didn’t believe for a moment that he had actually been leaning against the building all that time, head twitching. I believed that that particular spot was probably his
favorite
spot, Lord knew why, and that he came to it every now and again to watch the events of Fifth Avenue unfold.

I remembered, then, what was on the front of his T-shirt.
War is not healthy for children or other living things
. I remembered thinking how quaint that was, remembered that it gave me a little pang of nostalgia—
A middle-aged hippie who never quite got it together
, I decided about the man. And then I realized that he wasn’t middle-aged. He was in his early twenties, at most.

I made my way toward him. I passed him. After half a block, I looked back and nodded at him. He didn’t acknowledge me. He kept on twitching. And it came to me that when I passed him, I had heard him say, as he had the last time I’d seen him, “Ain’t we
all
doin’ a book?”

And I saw, also, that the four teen-aged girls—who were behind him a couple of yards, all of them tall and perilously thin—were still trying to hail a taxi. I saw one pass them by, and then another several seconds later. I called, “Do you need a hand?” and realized, as soon as I’d asked it, that they were doubtlessly just as good at hailing taxis as I, and that I probably sounded pretty strange to them.

They were in a tight cluster at the edge of the sidewalk, near the corner of Fifth Avenue and East 61st Street. As one, they turned toward me.

I called—loudly, so they’d hear me above the noise of traffic—”I thought you might need a hand.” I was trying for a note of apology. “I guess you don’t. Sorry.” And I started toward Central Park South. When I glanced back, moments later, they still were staring at me. I could see no sign of anger in their faces. They weren’t glaring. A cat sitting on a porch and watching a passerby has much the same look of quiet, studied indifference.

Then a cab pulled up to the curb, and a moment later the cabbie yelled, “Well, c’mon, for Christ’s sake, I ain’t got till doomsday, and there ain’t no one else gonna pick you up.” The four teen-age girls turned, very slowly and very stiffly, and got into the cab.

At the Hammet Mausoleum, Halloween, 1965

I said to Sam Fearey, “What do you mean you know you’re gonna die? Everybody knows they’re gonna die, Sam.”

He nodded, grinned; in the candlelight his face looked like a pumpkin. “Yeah, well I
know
I’m gonna die, Abner.”

“Why don’t we get outa here, Sam. This isn’t much fun. I’m cold, and my whole body’s about to go to sleep and what if we get caught—”

“What do you think, Abner? You think we oughta take a little peek at Joe Hammet? You think that would be in the nature of an educational experience, Abner?”

My mouth dropped open slightly; I could say nothing.

“It’s why we came up here, Abner.” Another of the candles went out. I figured, then, that there must have been a draft in the room.

I nodded at the candle. “D’joo do that, Sam?”

He grinned again, and his head bobbed, like an apple in a basin filled with water. “We got the means, Abner—to get a little peek at Joe Hammet. It wouldn’t take much; I’ve done it once or twice before.”

“Shit, you have.”

His head bobbed more furiously. “I have, Abner. Coupla years ago, me and another guy, a guy named Fred—you remember Fred; he got killed by a drunk, remember? Got thrown offa his bike?”

I nodded. “Yeah, I remember.”

“I was there when it happened, Abner. I saw it happen. Jees, he got thrown maybe fifty feet, maybe a hundred feet, and then he went
splat
, right into the pavement. I knew he’d bought the farm when I heard that splat. And anyway, Abner, it was me and him, me and Fred, and we broke into this funeral home across town and we had a peek at some woman who’d gotten shot by her husband—” He stopped in midsentence, put his hand up. “Quiet!” he said.

“What do you mean, ‘Quiet!’? You’re the one who’s talking—”

“Quiet, I said.” We both fell silent for several seconds. “I hear something again, Abner.”

“Me, too,” I whispered. And it was true. I could hear a very faint whispering sound. “I hear somebody
whispering
, Sam—”

“Yeah, so do I. Shit, Abner—I really do!”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

When I got back to the apartment, the phone was ringing. I let it ring quite a few times, gathered up courage from somewhere, and answered it.

It was my cousin, Stacy.

“Stacy?” I said. “Where are you? Are you in New York?”

“Yes, Abner. I’m at the Algonquin. Do you know where that is?”

“Yes, I know where it is. What are you doing in New York, Stacy?”

I heard her sigh.

“Stacy?” I coaxed. “Are you here because of Art? Does it have something to do with Art??

“Can you come over here, Abner? As soon as possible.”

 “Sure I can. I’ll be there”—I checked the clock on the stove—”at 8:30. Is that okay?”

“Yes. 8:30. I’ll see you then.” She hung up.

Let me tell you a little bit about Stacy Horn.

She’s a knockout—a genuine, old-fashioned, gee-what-a-body, I-wouldn’t-kick-her-out-of-bed kind of woman, the kind of woman that
women
turn around and stare at. I had known her all her life, of course—she was a year younger than I—and up until her sophomore year in high school, my junior year, we were really no friendlier than cousins ought to be. We saw each other often—at family gatherings, and when her parents came to visit my parents—and we started a casual and harmless flirtation when we were entering adolescence. I think I figured at the time that I was
practicing
how to flirt and that, since Stacy was my cousin, it wasn’t going to go anywhere, so no one was going to get hurt, and no one was going to care.

But then, at the middle of her sophomore year, something clicked. I was on my way to American History; she was on her way to Algebra. We passed in the hall. I winked at her; she winked at me—it was a game we’d been playing for a couple of years—and I realized that, at last, we both
meant
it, that the game had suddenly turned serious, that I wanted her and she wanted me, and that, if we could have, we would have jumped on each other right then and there. It scared the shit out of me. I stopped flirting with her; I stopped seeing her—when she and her family came to our house or my family and I went to hers, I only nodded at her, avoiding her eyes, and she nodded at me, avoiding mine, I think, and it wasn’t until nearly a year after that wonderful wink between classes that she and I tried to get together. She was, in fact, the first girl I was able to lay my hands on, not counting a girl named Jacqueline in sixth grade, whose tiny, soft boobs happened to brush up against the backs of my fingers on a science field trip—a happenstance for which I was soundly scolded. As for the first girl I almost made it with, those honors were to go to a girl named Luanne Stephens, late in my senior year at Pierpont High.

Another thing that stopped Stacy and I from getting together right away was the fact that she was very smart, smarter than I am by a long shot, which, I remembering the less-than-progressive early sixties—scared the shit out of me, too. How could I
fuck
her if she was smarter than I? It was a question that resolved itself very quickly: I couldn’t. When push came to shove, when wink came to nudge, and nudge to snuggle, at last, I went as soft as a ripe banana.

We were at her house, a big Victorian monstrosity that her parents had done up in shades of black and brown and gray and had filled with mouldering antiques. And we were on her bed—which was about the only piece of furniture in the house, I thought, that wouldn’t crumble beneath our combined weight—and we were both naked. Her parents had gone out somewhere, to a Grange Meeting, I think. They were Grangers; he was a Rotarian, as my father was, and an Elk and an Odd Fellow, and Jocelyn was a member of The PTA. I’ve always thought they were nice people, and I’ve never blamed them a bit for not being the kind of people who could have understood or appreciated what was going on in their buxom young daughter’s bedroom that night. Especially in the less-than-progressive early sixties. And I tell myself, even today, that that may have been the overriding reason why I went limp. Because I was convinced that Stacy’s parents were going to come home while Stacy and I were in the throes of passion, that they were going to come very quietly up the stairs, and that her father was going to beat the living crap out of me. I know today—being, of course, much older and much wiser than I was then—that I went limp because Stacy intimidated me. She intimidated me with that unbelievable body of hers, and she intimidated me because she was so much smarter than I—in an era when that sort of thing was cause for great concern—so I went limp.

“Gee, I’m sorry, Stacy,” I managed.

“That’s okay, Abner. You’ll make it up to me, I’m sure,”

And I did. When we were in college together, and I had learned to accept certain very basic facts of life—not the least of which was that women, after all, like to get it on just as much as men.

I was a sophomore at Brockport State College, in New York, when she got there. She enrolled as a philosophy major, with a minor in Latin and archeology, and a course load that I considered barbaric, but which she seemed to take in her stride. I hadn’t seen her since graduating from Walter Pierpont, and although we were cousins and had been pretty close friends—to say nothing of would-be lovers—we had fallen out of touch.

The first thing I noticed about her, that hot early September morning in 1968, was that she seemed to have mellowed a bit. In high school she had been all too aware of herself and her obvious attributes, and that had caused her, I think, to assume a hard outlook on life and on what lay before her—because, Christ, what if she loused up what she had? What if she didn’t make the best and most appropriate use of it?

She was at the back of a long registration line that had formed in front of one of the science buildings. She had her hands folded in front of her and was wearing a gray pleated skirt and simple white blouse. These were miniskirt years—nice years—and she looked fetching. I watched her a few moments; I had known, through my mother, that Stacy was going to enroll at Brockport State, but it was a surprise seeing her.

She was not quite five feet, nine inches tall and on the gracefully proportioned side of slender, with very long, very dark brown hair, large brown eyes, and a face that retained some of its baby fat, but with the unmistakable thrust of well-chiseled bone beneath. It was not a beauty-queen kind of face; there was too much character in it, and the hint of pain.