A Manhattan Ghost Story (27 page)

He was saying this:

“You—” snort, belch—”mis-er-able bastard, you mis-er-able bastard—” snort, belch—”that’s my
mo
ther’s room, you stay
out
of my
mo
ther’s—” snort, belch—”room, mis-er-able bastard, mis-er-able bastard—” And he fell at my feet, face-down, with one hand around my left ankle. He continued snorting a while, and belching, though in a muted way. Then he fell silent. I turned him over. It was an act of kindness. I thought if he vomited he would suffocate in it. I propped him up on his right side, and after a minute or two he started gurgling again. Little, cooing noises came from his throat. I noticed he had a cut on his nose, that one eye had been blackened recently.

His eyes fluttered open. “Whatchoo doin’ here?” he managed. “Whatchoo doin’ in my mother’s room?”

I sat him up, propped him against the wall near the door to Apartment 506. “I didn’t know,” I said.

He coughed. The smell of a half-digested whiskey and wine mix wafted over me. He said, “You got—you got a hundred rooms you can stay in here; why you … gotta stay in my mother’s room?”

“I didn’t know it was your mother’s room.”

He belched.

“And I didn’t mean to disturb her,” I said.

Another belch.

“I’m sorry if I disturbed her.”

He belched once again. A rolling triple belch. Then he passed out. I grabbed him under the arms, took him into Apartment 506, put him on the couch with his hands folded on his stomach and his head to the right, toward the center of the room. Another act of kindness.

He was her son.

And I had brought him to her.

I saw her appear in the bedroom doorway, the baby at her breast. I watched her take two hesitant steps into the room.

And I watched her smile fade when she saw what I had brought her.

And I knew at once that I had done something terribly wrong.

I shook my head. I said, yet again, “I’m sorry; I’m so sorry.” I don’t believe that she heard me. She let go of the faceless infant she was holding to her breast, and for the barest fraction of a second it clung by the mouth to her nipple. Then it thudded to the floor, soaked in, like water, as Phyllis had, at Art’s apartment. And was gone.

The woman did not take her eyes off the man I had put on the couch. She went to the platform rocker, sat in it, folded her arms at her belly, put her knees and her feet together.

That patina of grief was heavy around her now, as if the air itself had become discolored by it.

I watched her a long time. The man did not wake. She did not weep. I do not believe that she could weep. I don’t know. It’s possible that they are both still there—he on the couch, she in the platform rocker nearby, while small animals run about in the walls and drunks have a good time on the floors below.

I had done this: I had stolen her happiness from her, small as it was.

CHAPTER TEN

I took a bus to Madeline’s house on East 85th Street. I needed answers desperately, and I thought she could provide them.

Her house was dark, except for one light visible from the street, the lamp in her parlor, and when I knocked, I heard a distant, “Come in, Mr. Cray.”

I went in.

I stopped just inside the entrance to the parlor and saw her in her Morris chair. She had her back turned to me; she was facing a window.

“Madeline?” I said.

“Hello.” It was a soft and trembling whisper.

I came forward a few steps and saw her reflection in the window, on a background of darkness. She was seated with her feet flat on the floor and her knees apart slightly. Her hands were on the arms of the chair, and her head was back. She was dressed in something dark, something black, and though I couldn’t see her face clearly, I sensed that she’d been crying.

“I need to talk to you, Madeline.”

“Talk, then.”

I noticed, again as a reflection from the window, that she had something on her lap, and I stepped closer to see what it was. It was Gerald’s softball. She was caressing it with her left hand.

I began, “Madeline, I need your help—”

And she cut in, “I can’t help you.” I heard anger in her voice, and resignation.

I said again, with emphasis now, “I need your help.”

“I don’t even
want
to help you, Mr. Cray.” She looked down at Gerald’s softball. “Even if I could. And I can’t.”

“Madeline, I’m confused. I thought you—”

“Thought what? Thought I was some kind of guru, a spiritual Mr. Fixit?!”

“Sorry.”

“I’m just a lonely, middle-aged woman, and I don’t give a
damn
about you and your problems. That’s the way it is, Mr. Cray, and if you don’t like it, you can go piss up a rope.” There was a brief pause; I heard a grisly, little chuckle come from her, and then she continued, “But I’ll tell you this, Mr. Cray—I’ve figured one thing out sitting here, watching the daylight pass me by. I’ve figured one thing out. If you can’t lick ‘em, join ‘em.”

“My God, that’s no answer—”

 “Oh, blow it out your ass!” And I heard yet another grisly chuckle; I was seeing a side of her I had never expected to see. “
You
know what it’s all about; at least you
think
that you do. And I do, too. So tell me—why not? Why not? What
difference
does it make anyway?”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “If you can see them, and hear them, and touch them—”

“I’m not
one
of them, Mr. Cray. I
need
to be one of them, you understand, to be
with
them; it’s very simple, to be
with
Gerald, I need to be
one
of
them
. You can understand that, I’m sure. You’re not a moron. The same thing applies to to you and Phyllis Pellaprat—I’m sure you’ve figured that out by now.”

I said nothing. She went on, “Scares you, does it? Sure it scares you.”

“I haven’t thought about it—”

“Yeah, and the pope’s not Catholic.” Another chuckle. “Say that Phyllis was a fish, Mr. Cray. Say she lived in the Atlantic Ocean and you had this same, great overpowering need for her. Say that. Do you think you’d be content merely to put on your little swimming trunks and go frolic in the surf with her for a while? Of course not. You’d become a fish, if you could.”

“That’s absurd.”

“So? I have a right to be absurd. I’m grieving. I need to be absurd.”

“I’m going to find her, Madeline.”

“Of course you are, but as I told you before, you may not like what you find.”

I sighed. “Where’s your son?” I asked.

She looked around at me suddenly from the chair, and I saw that her face was red and puffy from weeping. But she was no longer weeping. She had a look of intense, stiff resignation about her; her eyes were wide. She whispered at me, her voice a tight, high hiss: “Gerald is
dead
, Mr. Cray, My son is
dead
!”

At the Hammet Mausoleum, Halloween, 1965

“It’ll knock you right over, Sam,” I said as he strained to free the screw from the hinge.

“So I’ll hold my nose.” He got the screw out, it was the second one of three in the top hinge. He put the screw in his pocket.

I shook my head. “You’re gonna puke your guts out, I know it.” He started working at the third screw. “I did.”

He looked oddly at me. “Yeah. When?”

“When my little cousin drowned. You remember. She was laid out in an open casket and when I went past her I got this little whiff of formaldehyde. I mean, if it was from a frog in a jar in biology or something, it would have been different. But it wasn’t. It was someone I knew.”

“So you puked your guts out?” He guffawed.

I shook my head. “No. Just a little. A little bile or whatever.”

He got the third screw out, started on the bottom hinge. “Well, I smelled it before, too,” he said as he worked at the hinge. “You remember, that woman that got shot by her husband. She smelled of it a little. Course we didn’t look long ‘cuz we heard someone comin’—”

“You’re lyin’, aren’t you, Sam?”

He popped the cover off the top screw on the bottom hinge. He said nothing.

“Aren’tcha?” I coaxed.

“Course not,” He said.

“You get a little whistle in your voice when you lie, Sam, did you know that?”

“That’s bullshit.” He twisted the screwdriver hard counterclockwise. “Damn it to hell!” he muttered.

“Want me to try it?” I asked.

“No. Shit, I can get it.”

“You woulda told me before if you’d really done something like that, Sam.”

“Okay, okay,” he said. He smiled. “Got it,” he said, and held up the first screw to the bottom hinge.

“Just tell me if you’re lying or not, Sam. What’s the big deal? So you lied.”

“So I lied.” He was clearly angry now. “So I fuckin’ lied. You never lied?”

I decided to change the subject. “How we gonna get it outa there, Sam?”

“What? The casket?”

“Sure. It’s heavier than shit, you know. I was a pallbearer once—”

“We’ll slide it out.”

I shrugged. “Maybe, maybe not.”

“Chickenshit!”

“Yeah, I am, Sam.”

 “You’ll grow up to be an insurance salesman or something.”

“No, Sam. A photographer.”

“Well, then, open your
eyes
.” He started on the second screw.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

I remember going to a seance when I was twenty-one or twenty-two and sure that I was pretty good at all those things that required a special kind of “sensitivity” (I wrote poetry, got it on with a succession of older women—who were supposed to enjoy young, sensitive men—did a lot of walking at night on dark, country roads, wept, longed for insanity; looking back on all of it now, I think that I must have been pretty much of a bore), and at this seance there were several very attractive teen-age girls, two middle-aged women—one a poet with three names, the other the wife of a well-known Bangor businessman—and my brother, Ike, who has since gone off to Yakima, Washington, where he works as a logger.

The poet with three names—names I cannot for the life of me remember, so we shall call her Pat—had set up the seance. She was in her early forties, a tad chunky, with short, black hair, moist lips, and an almost perfect nose. She spoke well, with the barest trace of a Boston accent. She must have cultivated it, because she told me that she’d been born and raised in Brooklyn. She was, I would much later come to realize, the quintessential “older woman,” at least for me—not quite “appealing,” but interesting, intelligent, sensitive, of course, and completely unattainable. Which is precisely why I’d accepted her invitation to the seance.

We seated ourselves at a big, round, wooden table. Introductions were made; I knew most of the people there, except for one of the teen-age girls, whose name was Loretta, and who, I was told, “writes poetry, too,” and was just then beginning to acquire the kind of earnest, intense sensitivity that I had acquired several years before and which had become my trademark.

At my request, the lights were dimmed, and candles brought in on three silver candle holders. We joined hands. Pat was to my right, and the sensitive teen-ager, Loretta, to my left. It was an arrangement I very much appreciated, and on which I planned to capitalize completely.

I said, “We must all be very, very quiet now,” exactly as if I knew what I was doing. I felt Loretta’s hand tighten. She was fifteen, maybe sixteen, no older, and pretty. Her hand was soft, very warm. Pat’s hand was stiff and cool.

I went on, “I feel the presence of several destructive spirits.” A pause. “We have no place here for you,” I continued. Loretta’s hand tightened further. Pat said, “Perhaps this isn’t something we should be fooling around with, Abner.” I smiled a small, secretive smile. She looked very concerned. I liked that. I was enjoying myself. What great entertainment the dead were.

Night on East 84th Street. 8:30. Someone who didn’t care much if I knew he was there was walking a couple of yards behind me.

I glanced back. He was shorter than I am by at least half a foot, and thin, and very nervous. And he was carrying a good-sized blade, which he was holding point-down. “I have a gun,” I said.

“Yeah? And I got
herpes
!” he said, chuckling.

I quickened my pace, glanced back again, very briefly; I saw that he had quickened his pace, too. “Gimme a break!” I said, and was surprised at how
annoyed
I sounded, as if he were no more than a Jehovah’s Witness trying to give me religion, or an Amway salesman, or someone passing out invitations to a massage parlor. “Because I really do not have the time to mess with you!” I went on.

He said nothing; I picked up my pace so I was moving at close to a run.

We were near the corner of East 85th Street and Third Avenue, and there were a few other people around—across East 85th Street, a hooker was strolling; near her were a couple of young white guys wearing baseball caps, jeans, and plaid jackets.

The man just behind me said, “You come to an alley, you just go in, okay?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

Half a block away there was a bar called Smitty’s. If I’d had a choice, I wouldn’t have gone anywhere near it, but I ran for it now, fully expecting that because I was quite a bit taller and probably a lot healthier than the man behind me, I’d quickly outdistance him.

I was right. I got to
Smitty’s
several seconds ahead of him and pushed my way through a crowd of six or seven people just outside the door, and then I was inside.

It was not what I would have hoped for.

“Get the fuck outa here!” one of the patrons said. He was a very large black man with a round, smooth face and big, expressive eyes: “You get the fuck outa here,
now
!” Several of the other patrons—a mix of male and female—chorused him.

I coughed. The air was gray with what I supposed was cigarette smoke, and it bothered me. I pleaded, “There’s a man following me. A man with a knife!”

The big man laughed. “He ain’t followin’ you no more, honky!”