A Manhattan Ghost Story (13 page)

I clutched the Nikon, hurried to Fifth Avenue, and caught a bus back to Art’s apartment.

The electricity went out at around 10:00 that night. I looked out the front windows, at East 79th Street, and realized—because the street lights were out, too, and there were no lights on in any of the houses I could see—that we were in the midst of another blackout, like the ones in November of 1965 and July, 1979. It was a wonderful photo opportunity, I thought—New Yorkers coping in a sudden crisis; New Yorkers making the most of an abominable situation; New Yorkers taking what they could before the electricity, and then sweet reason, returned.

I loaded the Nikon with some very fast film, a flash unit, and hurried from the apartment house.

Someone in a big, dark Mercedes pulled up at an angle on the sidewalk so that his headlights were on the front doors of a house just down the street. A woman, in her seventies, I guessed, and dressed in a white nightgown and a short, brown coat, was being carried from the house. She had her arms thrown around the man carrying her—who looked nearly as old as she, but who was tall and solidly built—and she looked terrified. I saw all this in the glare of the Mercedes’ headlights. When the couple moved into the darkness, I saw little, only the Mercedes’ door being pushed open by its driver and then, apparently, the woman being put into the back seat.

Just beyond, I saw several people standing on a set of front steps, one of them with a flashlight in hand, and I heard yelling from across the street, as if someone inconvenienced by the blackout was letting everyone within earshot know that he was angry about it.

I turned left, toward Central Park. Fifth Avenue would have more traffic, and hence more light for shooting, plus more action, I guessed, than Lexington Avenue.

I walked quickly. I nodded and smiled at a couple of people who had bravely come out to the sidewalk. One of them, a chunky, middle-aged man shivering in a pair of white pajamas and a black-and-white checkered robe, said, “Ain’t this the shits?” I said yes, it was the shits, but that I intended to make the most of it, and patted the Nikon. This seemed to unnerve him. “You some kinda pervert?” he asked.

At Fifth Avenue I turned left. It hadn’t been more than ten minutes since the blackout began, but already a traffic jam had started, and there was a cacophony of horns blaring and curses being shouted. The air was foul and nearly unbreathable from car exhausts; a thick, grayish-white fog was settling in—a temperature-inversion phenomenon, I guessed.

I stopped walking at East 65th Street, swung the Nikon up, took a few quick shots, started walking again. I heard from behind me, “Hey, mister, you want a puppy?”

I did not turn around at once. I let the question swim about in my head a few moments. If I’d been asked to draw up a list of questions I would expect
not
to hear on Fifth Avenue during a blackout, that one would have been high on the list.

I turned. A small boy was staring up at me. He was perhaps seven or eight years old and a little chunky—though that might have been an illusion, because his face seemed to have an excess of baby fat on it. He was dressed in a ragged, brown sweater and a pair of equally ragged, brown pants. At his feet, on the sidewalk, was a cardboard box, and in the box were six black, short-haired, long-eared, apparently mongrel puppies.

The boy said again, “Hey, mister, you want a puppy?” and the most heart-rendingly plaintive smile appeared on his face, flickered a moment, and went out. He had a wisp of a voice, barely audible below the noise of traffic and shouted curses.

I got down on my haunches, reached into the cardboard box, scratched a few ears and lifted one of the puppies out; it tried valiantly to stretch its neck out far enough so that it could lick my nose, and the sour sting of its breath hit me. I looked down at the boy again. “Where do you live? Do you live around here?”

He answered, in the same small voice, “I don’t. I don’t. You want a puppy. You can have one cheap. Two dollars.”

“Do you live over that way?” I pressed on, and nodded to my right, toward East 66th Street. “Would you like me to walk you to where you live? I’ll carry the box if you want.”

He didn’t answer me.

“It’s too cold for you to be out doing this, don’t you think?” I asked.

His smile flickered on again, then off. “I’m used to it,” he said. “You want a puppy. You can have one cheap. Two dollars.”

I took a deep breath, thought a moment, brought the puppy a little closer to me so it at last had a chance at my nose. I remember its tongue was warm and wet, and it took a real effort to keep from turning my head away from the sour smell of its breath. I said to the boy, “If I take one from you, will you let me walk you home?”

He answered, “Can’t. My mother’s there. My mother’s always there.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “Is she the one that sent you out here?”

He nodded.

 “To sell these puppies?” I went on. “She sent you out here to sell these puppies?”

He nodded again.

“And where does your mother live?” I asked.

“She don’t,” he answered. “You want a puppy? You can have one cheap. Two dollars.”

“Sure I do, but as I said, if I take one from you, you’re going to have to let me walk you home. Is that a deal?”

He nodded once. “Yeah. Sure. Which one you want? I got six here. I got two boys and four girls altogether. Which one you want?”

I nodded at the puppy I was holding. “This one will do just fine,” I said. “Does he have a name?”

“His name’s Mahoney,” the boy answered.

“Mahoney? That’s a nice name. Where’d he get a name like that?”

“From me,” the boy answered. “Mahoney’s my name, too.” He was beginning to sound less and less timid, and slightly more petulant than at first. “My name’s Mahoney,” he said again. “So my pup’s name’s Mahoney, too.”

I stood, Mahoney the puppy still in hand. “You want to show me where you live now?” I asked.

The boy answered, “My mom says it’s ‘unfinished business.’ She says it’s why I gotta come out here. I been out here a long time. You want a puppy? You can have one cheap. Two dollars.”

“Yes. This one will do fine, just fine; two dollars is a good price.”

“That’s Mahoney.”

 “Yes, you told me that.” I was growing impatient.

” ‘Unfinished business,’ that’s what my mom says.” He sounded much more petulant now—a little angry. “You want a puppy? You can have one cheap. Two dollars.”

I glanced around, hoping to see a passerby who might lend a hand. No one was on the sidewalk, just the boy and his box of puppies. On Fifth Avenue, the traffic was beginning to move very slowly, which didn’t have any effect at all on the blaring car horns and shouted curses. I looked back at the boy. I did not remember putting Mahoney the puppy back in the box, but he was there, with his five brothers and sisters, and the boy was staring up at me and giving me his heart-rendingly plaintive smile again. “Hey mister, you want a puppy?” he asked once more. “You can have one cheap. Two dollars.”

I did not answer.

I had begun to have an understanding of, and appreciation for, what exactly was happening to me, and of the world I was being allowed into.

So I backed away from the boy. I nodded, smiled. I said, “Maybe later,” and watched as he picked another of the puppies out of the box and held it out to me. “Hey, mister, you want a puppy? You can have one cheap.”

I turned then, and walked quickly away from him, back to the apartment.

BOOK TWO

CHAPTER ONE

Let’s forget the heartbreakingly cute kid with the box of puppies for a moment. Let’s forget the four painfully thin teen-age girls hailing a taxi, the man in the threadbare, gray, pinstriped suit, the young guy with the ragged T-shirt, the man in the unbuckled rubber boots. And let’s go back a few years.

It pertains. Hell, everything does. Which is something else that I’ve learned in these past six months. That everything pertains. Everything’s germane. What has gone before goes again. And again. And again. And what will be is. And ever shall be.

Let’s even forget Phyllis Pellaprat. Let’s set her aside anyway. Very gently.

And let’s stuff Art DeGraff into a box somewhere. Into a very small box. It’s where he belongs, after all. It’s where he very well may be at this moment.

And let’s go back to a time before I was screwing my cousin Stacy, to a time when my parents both were alive and avoiding each other around the house.

It was a big house. The kind you see quite a lot in Maine—white clapboard siding, black-shingled roof, wraparound porch. A very functional and livable house, good for sleeping in, and for eating Thanksgiving dinner in, and for waking up in on Christmas morning.

Quite a few people were laid out in that house. Several uncles, an aunt or two, a young cousin who fell through the ice on Miller’s Pond early one March morning. She was five. A nice little kid. And, Christ, there was a lot of crying the day that she was laid out.

The house had two living rooms. One was called a parlor, though it was architecturally identical to the other. It had a red brick fireplace in it, and oak floors. A small, dark-blue-and-white braided throw rug had been put at right angles to the big arched entrance way, and another parallel with the front of the fireplace and five feet out from it. The room was well furnished, with carefully chosen pieces from the late Victorian period. We never had a TV at home—my father wouldn’t allow it—but he did install a Zenith table radio in a corner bookcase in the parlor. The radio was used occasionally by my mother, who liked to listen to a Bangor top-40 AM station; it dismayed my father, who was of the opinion that the only real music was baroque, though, to his credit, he never said much about it.

The cousin who went through the ice was laid out in the center of the room in an open coffin. Her name was Rebecca. I remember going over and looking at her and thinking that it was too bad a little kid like that had to die. I was not quite thirteen at the time, and I remember that Rebecca’s parents had told her more than once not to go out on Miller’s Pond. And I remembered that Rebecca had protested that if she was old enough to do this and old enough to do that, how come she wasn’t old enough to go out on Miller’s Pond? To which her parents could answer only, “Because we said so.” I remember they were there, too, in the parlor, both weeping softly in straightbacked, wooden chairs set up close to the coffin.

Rebecca was buried the next day.

The day after that, I went to Miller’s Pond myself, out of sheer morbidness, I think. Twelve-year-olds seem to have a propensity for it, this particular twelve-year-old, especially.

Miller’s Pond was near a long-abandoned gravel pit just a mile or so from Lewis Street, where we lived. It was ten feet deep at the center, several hundred feet wide at its widest point, and it was sheltered on all sides by deciduous trees—maples, oaks, and tulip trees especially, which were very tall. These trees were bare then, because it was still only the first week in March, and there were wide, irregular patches of snow everywhere.

The pond itself was iced over, except randomly near the shore, where brackish water was visible, as it was at the center, where Rebecca had fallen in and where her would-be rescuers—a sixteen-year-old boy named Hymie Simms and his older brother, Timothy—had also fallen in. They had been able to swim to safety. Rebecca’s body was pulled out an hour later by a local volunteer fireman. She hadn’t drifted far; Miller’s Pond was stagnant, without currents.

No one was there the day after she was buried. It was a still, cool afternoon, the sunlight pushing through a high haze and diffusing into a pleasant, soft glow.

I saw a child, dressed in a green snowsuit, appear at the edge of the pond across from me, hesitate for a moment, and then step out onto the ice. I called to her: “Hey, you shouldn’t do that!” She looked up at me, across the pond, a distance of several hundred feet, appeared to smile, kept walking out onto the ice.

I cursed. It was the first time that I’d cursed, and it made me feel very adult. I called to the child again: “You shouldn’t go out there!” But she continued walking. She moved the way small children do, in quick, anxious steps. She was clearly enjoying herself, clearly enjoying the very act of being alive.

I cursed once more. I knew that I’d have to go out there and get her. “A little girl fell through the ice just the other day, you know,” I called. The girl in the green snowsuit looked up again and shouted back, “It’s okay. I can do it now.”

And that’s when I saw that the little girl was Rebecca.

At least I know now, twenty-one years later, that she was Rebecca. At the time, I told myself that the girl was only someone who looked strikingly like her, and I believed it.

So I stepped out onto the ice, to go after her. And fell through. “It’s
okay
!” I heard as I scrambled through three feet of ice water back to shore. “It’s
okay
!” she shouted with great, childish exasperation and annoyance, the way kids announce, one day, that they do not need help anymore tying their shoes or buttoning their jackets:

“It’s
okay
! I can do it now!”

But that was a fluke, a mistake, something that was never intended. For a few moments I became—like lots of other people, I believe—an unwilling trespasser into a world that, until then, had easily kept me out.

CHAPTER TWO

But no more. Now it had me, and I knew that it had me. I knew it when the little ragamuffin with the half-dozen puppies tried so hard to get his “unfinished business” done.

It is not what you might think—this world I trespassed briefly into at twelve, and nearly got trapped in at thirty-three. It is some of what you might think, certainly. But it is so much more.

Go, answer the door, peer through the little security peephole at whoever has come to call. You see a face, a smile perhaps, a pair of eyes. And they tell you—open the door. Or they tell you—do not open the door. But if you have shut yourself up on the wrong side of that peephole for too long, they tell you very little. They tell you only what is within arm’s reach, not what is above, or below, or to the sides, or behind that smiling face.