A Manhattan Ghost Story (26 page)

I said, “I’m sorry, no.”

She looked surprised. I think she was a lot like Kennedy Whelan—unaccustomed to resistance. She smiled stiffly. “And what precisely is it that I have not made clear to you, Mr. Cray?”

 “All of it’s clear, Madeline; all of it’s very clear. I just don’t believe it.”

That upset her. “And who, Mr. Cray, just who in the name of heaven are you to tell me that? I
know
these people, I’ve lived around them for a long, long time. For twenty years.” She stopped, took a tissue from a box of pink Scotties on a small, round table near her chair, dabbed at her mouth with it, put the used tissue on the table. “And,” she continued, “I have never seen them suffer the way you have made them suffer. You confuse them. Do you know that?”

“I don’t mean to,” I said lamely.

“The ignorant don’t
mean
any of the harm that they do.” She stopped and put her arm around Gerald, who was standing next to her. It was an affectionate and touching gesture, and he smiled slightly, as if in appreciation of it. “Tell me what you expected to find at the place Phyllis Pellaprat is buried, Mr. Cray.”

I thought a moment. I answered, “Nothing. Nothing at all.”

She smiled a flat, impatient smile. Gerald’s smile strengthened. “You cannot ask me to believe that you went there expecting to find nothing. You went there
because
that’s where her
body
is, isn’t that correct? And because that’s where her body is, then, naturally, she’d have to be there, too. It’s a reasonable assumption. Ignorant, but reasonable.”

“Please don’t patronize me,” I said.

“Oh, why ever not, Mr. Cray?” She was annoyed. “Why ever not? Do you think that you’re somehow above it. You’re not above it. You’re a meddler; you’re an intruder. And you are confusing them. All of them. Phyllis Pellaprat, too. They’re in transition. Do you know what that means? It means they’re
going
somewhere. Even Gerald here.” She squeezed him. “And Matthew Petersak, all of them are, in their own time,
going
somewhere. I don’t know where. I wish to God that I did. But I don’t.”

I stood abruptly.

“What are you doing, Mr. Cray? We’re not done here—we’re a long way from being done.”

“You’re wrong.” I started for the door, then stopped. “I think you’re as ignorant as I am, Madeline. I think that you fool yourself because you’ve been around them so long. But I think you’re just as ignorant as I am. And just as scared. I’m going to find Phyllis Pellaprat. I’m going to go and find her because I love her.”

Madeline sighed. “Yes, you probably do. And you’ll probably find her, too. But I doubt very much that you’ll like what you find. And I also doubt very much that you’ll be able to hold onto her.”

I went to the living room entranceway. She called after me, “Mr. Cray?”

“Yes?” I looked around at her.

She said, “The man at the cemetery—”

I cut in, “I think he found what he was looking for.”

She smiled. “Perhaps. I don’t know what they’re going to do with your friend; I have no idea. But it would be—” another smile, slightly perverse—”very entertaining to find out.”

And that’s when I left.

I went back to the little cemetery in Brooklyn the next morning; I stood above that ugly green plaque, and I tried hard to peer past it to what lay beneath.

And when at last I did, I saw flesh coming apart and falling away, a brain shriveling up, a yellowwhite skull grinning up through the earth at me.

And I thought,
This is Phyllis. This is my Phyllis. Why do I need more than this?

Because there is more
, I answered myself.
Because I can have more, and because I want more.

Inside that skull, which was like the inside of the earth itself, the brain was shriveling up, and the memories were drifting away from it like dreams: they come and they go; they come and they go.

They come apart, and they go together again.

I felt people around me. Millions and millions of people. And I felt sunlight on me. I heard voices raised in anger, and I sensed love and excitement and happiness.

And I remembered one voice especially.

The voice of the man behind the maple tree.

“We gonna take good
care
of you, Art,” it said. “We gonna take good care of you.”

At the Hammet Mausoleum, Halloween, 1965

I said to Sam Fearey, as he worked hard at trying to pry open Joe Hammet’s vault door, “It’s gonna knock you right over, Sam.”

 “Yeah,” he said. “What’s gonna knock me over?”

“The smell.”

He shoved the big screwdriver I’d brought along, and which he forced me to give him, under the bottom edge of the door and hit it with the palm of his hand. The screwdriver went forward a bare fraction of an inch. “I know all about that, Abner,” he said, and hit the screwdriver again.

“Yeah?” I said. “Tell me about it, then.”

He shrugged, hit the screwdriver again, pushed down on it. The vault door creaked slightly, but didn’t appear to give at all. “Well,” he said, “you know—it’s a
dead
smell.”

“You’re fulla shit.”

“No. It’s a
dead
smell, Abner. I’ve smelled it before.” He took the screwdriver out from beneath the vault door, nodded at the candle I was holding. “Hold that up a little higher, okay? I wanta check these hinges.” I held the candle up. He fingered the vault door’s hinges for a few moments, his tongue working on his lower lip as he did so. Finally, he announced, “Know what, Abner, I think these are capped screws here, and if I can get the caps off—” He shoved the screwdriver under one of the big, rounded metal caps on the door’s top hinge. The cap popped off and fell to the floor. “Good,” Sam said. Then, a moment later, “Shit!”

“What’s the matter, Sam?” I asked.

“It’s a fucking Phillips head.”

“The screw, you mean.”

He glanced at me, grimaced. “No, skillet-brains, I mean Joe Hammet’s head. Of course I mean the screw.”

“Oh.”

“So give me the Phillips head, damnit!”

“The Phillips head?”

“Abner, I’ll take it from you. I really will.”

I reluctantly gave him the Phillips head screwdriver I had in my jacket pocket. He took it, began working at the top hinge with it. I said, “You forgot about the formaldehyde smell, Sam.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Sure you did. You don’t smell anything else. Just the formaldehyde.”

“Big deal.” He smiled, held a screw up for me to see. “There’s the first one,” he said.

“Uh-huh,” I said.

CHAPTER NINE

I was smart enough to stay away from Art’s apartment. I went instead to Serena Hitchcock’s. She wasn’t home, so I went to a hotel called The Cadillac on East 11th Street, registered. And left immediately. I had stupidly registered under my real name.

I went to another hotel, The Belmore on East 36th Street. I tried to register under the name Jack McKetchum, who was my baseball coach at Walter Pierpont High, in Bangor. I couldn’t do it. The desk man wanted ID, and I had none for Jack McKetchum, so I made some weak excuse and left. That was when I began to feel desperate. My cash reserve was pretty low and I wasn’t sure I wanted to take a chance and go to my bank. I probably should have started feeling desperate long before, and maybe I had. Maybe needing to find shelter in Manhattan in February and having a lot of trouble doing it, reminded me that I’d been desperate for a few days. But I doubt it. I’m adaptable. We’re all adaptable.

I went to the building on East 95th Street, where Phyllis had taken me to meet her parents. The building was boarded up, so I found a rusty tire iron in the alley beside it, pried off the boards on the front door, and went in.

I had supposed that the building would be empty. It wasn’t. Some people had found their way in; I could hear them as I stood at the front of the long hallway. Some men. Some women. A lot of guttural noises and slurred talking.

It was dark there, except for late afternoon light filtering through open spaces between the slabs of plywood on the windows.

When my eyes had adjusted to the dim light, I went up the metal stairway at the back of the building.

I got to the second floor. I heard the same low, gutteral noises that I’d heard on the first floor, but they were louder now. I went to the third floor, the fourth. I found silence there.

I went to the fifth floor, to Apartment 506, pushed the door open, and went in.

It was cold in the apartment. I could hear small animals running about in the walls, and the vague smell of urine was in the air. In the front room, the ancient, overstuffed, red couch stood in the center of the floor and the rose-colored rocker against the wall, where it had been when Lorraine Pellaprat was using it.

In the bedroom was a black iron bed with a mattress, box spring, and pillow, and in the kitchen an old Kelvinator refrigerator kept company with a Burawell stove. Neither of the appliances worked.

I went back into the living room. “Hello?” I called. Nothing. “Hello. Mr. Pellaprat?” Still nothing.

Exhaustion caught up with me then. I sat on the red, overstuffed couch, felt my eyes close, forced them open, stood, sat again. I whispered, “Hello, is anyone here? Mrs. Pellaprat? Mr. Pellaprat?”

I woke after dark. I itched badly, especially inside my elbows, around my groin, in my hair, under my chin. I guessed that the red couch had some kind of lice living in it, but when I searched myself I found nothing, and after a while the itch went away.

It was very cold in the apartment now, and dark, though not pitch dark. Two windows at the back of the living room faced downtown Manhattan, which was casting a very soft, bluish-yellow light into the room, enough to see by. I could make out the rocking chair and the doorway to the bedroom. The door was open. From several stories below, I thought, I could hear the faint noises of people having a drunken good time. I wondered briefly why they chose to live only on floors one through three, why they hadn’t gone higher, and I guessed that it was probably warmer on the lower floors, and safer, too, in the event of a fire. These were reasonable ideas, and I think that I believed them. But I was wrong.

I did not like the noises of people having a drunken good time below, and I did not like the bluish-yellow glow in the room, the darkened doorway, the birdprint wallpaper. I was getting very nervous. I was getting spooked.

I told myself that I was hungry. I remembered passing a diner on Fifth Avenue near East 92nd Street and I thought that I could go there, eat, and come back within an hour. I’d call Serena Hitchcock while I was out, and perhaps, I thought—feeling cocky—I’d even give Detective Whelan a call, too, just to assess my situation.

I got up from the couch and stretched, to try and chase my fear away. It didn’t work. I heard again the sounds of little animals running about in the walls. And something else. A small, gurgling noise, close to a cooing noise. I thought it was a pigeon.

I started to itch again. I attributed it to nervousness, to fear, to desperation, because I was feeling all of those things at the same time. Who wouldn’t, under the circumstances?

I scratched. My chin, my groin, the inside of my elbows, and as I scratched, the soft, gurgling noises grew louder and I guessed that they were coming from the bedroom. I took a couple of cautious steps toward the bedroom, still scratching.

When I was halfway there, across the front room, the light changed. It grew brighter, as if several low-wattage bulbs had been turned on. I took a quick glance around and saw that it was true. Two bulbs in a grimy ceiling fixture were burning. They had changed the soft, bluish-yellow glow to a gritty orange.

A low, confused grunt came out of me. I saw a woman appear in the bedroom doorway. She was carrying a baby.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know.”

She smiled. She was a very pleasant-looking woman in her late twenties, dark-haired, with large, friendly brown eyes. Her simple, off-white house dress was opened to allow her baby to nurse, and the baby was cooing delightedly as it suckled.

She turned then, glanced around at me, smiled again, and went back into the bedroom.

I went to the doorway, looked in. She was in a far corner of the room, seated on a low wooden stool, with her left side against the wall, her feet and knees together, her arms crossed. She did not have her baby. She had the unmistakable patina of sadness about her.

I thought,
This is the woman in the garden. Good Christ, she’s doomed to play out the loss of her child again, and again, and again.

But I was wrong.

I have learned this, too: I have learned that we are not
doomed
to anything. I have learned that we move, and that we change.

Again I said to the woman, “I’m sorry. I didn’t know,” and I stepped back into the living room. I do not like watching the grief of anyone. She came to the doorway. She had her baby again. She was nursing it; she was smiling; her baby was cooing delightedly, a nipple in its mouth. That mouth was its only feature. It had a face like a skin of tapioca pudding, and tiny, pink hands that kneaded at its mother’s breast, as a kitten does.

I backed away, toward the front door, ten feet across the room. “I am so sorry,” I said. The woman’s very pleasant smile grew a little broader, even more pleasant, and I realized that she was telling me I had no reason to be sorry, that she had a kind of happiness, after all. But I said again, “I’m so sorry,” because I
was
sorry, because I supposed that I had interrupted something eternal and inviolate.

I still itched abominably, but I tried to ignore it as I backed toward the front door. I reached behind myself and touched the doorknob, grabbed it, turned it, pulled the door open. I watched the woman go back into her room. Then I stepped out, into the hallway, and closed the door softly behind me.

To my left, down the hallway toward the stairs, a drunken, middle-aged man with an unruly mop of grayish-brown hair was lurching toward me, snorting and cursing and belching all at the same time. He hit the far wall, glanced off it, like a lopsided cue ball, kept coming at me.