Ghost Story (27 page)

"Have you heard from his fiancee?"

"Oh, did he have a fiancee? Imagine that—he never let on. Was she with him?"

"Of course she was," I said. "She must have seen everything. She must know what happened. I'll get on the first plane going."

There was a plane the next day to Schiphol Airport, and I took a cab to the police station which had cabled David's office. What I learned can be set down very barely: David had gone through a window and over a chest-high balcony. The hotel owner had heard a scream, but nothing more—no voices, no arguments. Alma was thought to have left him; when the police entered their room, none of her clothing was still in the closets.

I went to the hotel, looked at the high iron balcony, and turned away to the open wardrobe closet. Three of David's Brooks Brothers suits hung on the rail, two pairs of shoes beneath them. Counting what he must have been wearing at the time of his death, he had brought four suits and three pairs of shoes for a five-day visit. Poor David.

Two days after that I was back in Berkeley. My little apartment seemed cell-like and foreign. It was as though I had grown irretrievably apart from the person I had been in the days when I hunted down references to James Fenimore Cooper in
PMLA.
I began to sketch out
The Nightwatcher,
having only the most nebulous ideas for it, and to prepare for my classes again. One night I telephoned Helen Kayon's apartment, thinking that I would ask her out for a drink so that I could talk about Alma and my brother, and Meredith Polk told me that Helen had married Rex Leslie the week before. I found myself falling asleep at intervals all during the day and going to bed before ten at night; I drank too much but could not get drunk. If I survived the year, I thought, I would go to Mexico and lie in the sun and work on my book.

And escape my hallucinations. Once I had come awake near midnight and heard someone moving around in my kitchen; when I got out of bed and went in to check, I had seen my brother David standing near the stove, holding the coffeepot in one hand. "You sleep too much, kid," he said. "Why not let me give you a cup?" And another time, teaching a Henry James novel to my section of the survey class, I had seen on one of the chairs not the red-haired girl I knew was there, but—again—David, his face covered in blood and his suit torn, nodding happily at how bright I could be about
Portrait of a Lady.

But I had one more discovery to make before I could go to Mexico. One day I went to the library and instead of going to the stack of critical magazines, went to the reference library and found a copy of
Who's Who
for the year 1960. It was nearly an arbitrary year; but if Alma was twenty-five when I met her, then in 1960 she should have been nine or ten.

Robert Mobley was in the book. As nearly as I can remember it, this was his entry—I read it over and over and finally had it photocopied.

MOBLEY, ROBERT OSGOOD, painter and watercolorist. b. New Orleans, La, Feb 23. 1909; s. Felix Morton and Jessica (Osgood); A.B. Yale U. 1927; m. Alice Whitney Aug 27, 1936; children—Shelby Adam, Whitney Osgood. Shown at: Flagler Gallery, New York; Winson Galleries, New York; Galerie Flam, Paris; SchlegeL Zurich; Galeria Esperance, Rome. Recipient Golden Palette 1946; Southern Regional Painters Award 1952, 1955, 1958. Collected in: Adda May Lebow Museum, New Orleans; Louisiana Fine Arts Museum; Chicago Institute of the Arts; Santa Fe Fine Arts; Rochester Arts Center; many others. Served as Lt Cmdr. USNR, 1941-1945. Member Golden Palette Society; Southern Regional Arts League; American Water Color Society; American League of Artists; American Academy of Oil Painting. Clubs: Links Golf; Deepdale Golf; Meadowbrook; Century (New York); Lyford Cay (Nassau); Garrick (London). Author: I Came This Way. Homes: 38957 Canal Blvd New Orleans, La; 18 Church Row, London NW3 UK; "Dans Le Vigne," Route de la Belle Isnard, St Tropez 83 France.

This wealthy clubman and artist had two sons, but no daughter. Everything Alma had told me—and David, presumably—had been invention. She had a false name and no history: she might as well have been a ghost. Then I thought of "Rachel Varney," a brunette with dark eyes, the trappings of wealth and an obscure past, and I saw that David had been the missing element in the book I'd tried to write.

But I've come to one perhaps foolish conclusion. I'm no longer so ready to reject the notion that there might be some factual connection between
The Nightwatcher
and what happened to David and myself. I find myself in the same position as the Chowder Society, no longer sure of what to believe. If I am ever invited to tell a story to the Chowder Society, I'll tell them what I've written out here. This account of my history with Alma—not
The Nightwatcher
—is my Chowder Society story. So perhaps I have not wasted my time after all; I've given myself a base for the Dr. Rabbitfoot novel, and I'm prepared to change my mind on an important question—right now, maybe
the
important question. When I started this, the night after Dr. Jaffrey's funeral, I thought it would be destructive to imagine myself in the landscape and atmosphere of one of my own books. Yet—was I not in that landscape, back at Berkeley? My imagination may have been more literal than I thought.

I too have an unusual feeling which I'll record here at the risk of feeling idiotic whenever I see it in later years. This feeling is absolutely unfounded: more a hunch than a
feeling.
It's that if I start to look more closely into Milburn and do what the Chowder Society asks, I'll find what sent David over that railing in Amsterdam.

He ran back to his house and did not dare to come out again until he could see dawn, when at any rate it was again time for chores and he had to go out. His description of the figure he had seen inspired, among a very few of the most excitable souls of Milburn, the story of a creature from a flying saucer which Don had heard in the drugstore. Both Walt Hardesty and the County Farm Agent, who inspected the dead cows, had heard the story, but neither was gullible enough to accept it. Walt Hardesty, as we know, had his own ideas; he had what he considered good reason for assuming that a few more animals would be bled white and then that would be that. His experience with Sears James and Ricky Hawthorne made him keep his theory to himself and not share it with the County Farm Agent, who chose to overlook certain obvious facts and form the conclusion that somewhere in the area an oversize dog had turned killer. He filed a report to this effect and went back to the county seat, having completed his business. Elmer Scales, who had heard about Norbert Clyde's cows and was constitutionally half inclined to believe in flying saucers anyhow, sat up three nights in a row by his living-room window, holding a loaded twelve-gauge shotgun across his knees
(... come from Mars boy maybe you do but we'll see how you glow when you got a load of shot in you).
He could not possibly have foreseen or understood what he would be doing with that shotgun in two months' time. Walt Hardesty, who would have to clean up Elmer's mess, was content to take things easy until the next weirdo happening and think about how he could get the two old lawyers to open up to him—them and their friend Mr. Lewis Snob Benedikt. They knew something they weren't telling, and they knew something too about their other old buddy, Dr. John Dope Fiend Jaffrey. They just didn't take that
normal,
Hardesty told himself as he bedded down in the spare room behind his office. He put a bottle of County Fair on the floor beside his cot. No sir. Mr. Ricky Snob Hawthorne-With-Horns and Mr. Sears and Roebuck Snob James just didn't act normal at all.

But Don does not know, so he cannot put in his journal, that after Milly Sheehan leaves the Hawthorne house to return to the house on Montgomery Street where she lived with John Jaffrey, she remembers one morning that the doctor never did get around to putting up the storm windows and yanks on a coat and goes outside to see if she can do it herself and while she looks up despairingly at the windows (knowing that she'll never be able to lift the big storms that high), Dr. Jaffrey walks around the side of the house and smiles at her. He is wearing the suit Ricky Hawthorne picked out for his funeral but no shoes or socks, and at first the shock of seeing him outside barefoot is worse than the other shock. "Milly," he says, "tell them all to leave—tell them all to get out. I've seen the other side Milly, and it's
horrible."
His mouth moves, but the words sound like a badly dubbed film.
"Horrible.
Be sure to tell them now," he says, and Milly faints. She is out only a few seconds, and comes to whimpering, her hip aching from the fall, but even through her fear she can see no footprints in the snow beside her and knows that she was just seeing things—she'll never tell anyone. They put you away for things like that. "Too many of those darned stories, and a little too much of
Mr.
Sears James," she mutters to herself before picking herself up and limping back inside.

Don, sitting alone in room 17, of course does not know most of the things that happen in Milburn while he takes a three-week tour of his past. He barely sees the snow, which continues to fall heavily; Eleanor Hardie does not skimp on heating any more than she allows the lobby carpet to go unvacuumed, so he is warm, up in his room. But one night Milly Sheehan hears the wind shift to the north and west and getting out of bed to put on another blanket, sees stars between the rags of clouds. Back in bed, she lies listening to the wind blow more strongly—and then even more strongly than that, shaking the sash of the window, forcing itself in. The curtain billows, the shade rattles. When she wakes in the morning, she finds a drift of snow covering the sill.

Walter Barnes sat in his car at Len Shaw's Exxon station and thought about his wife while Len filled the tank. Christina had been moping around the house for months now, staring at the telephone and burning dinners and at last he had begun to think that she was having an affair. Disturbingly, he still carried in his mind a clear picture of a drunken Lewis Benedikt fondling Christina's knees at Jaffrey's tragic party: and of a drunken Christina letting him do it. It was true that she was still an attractive woman, and he had become an overweight small-town banker, not the financial power he had once envisaged: most of the men of their class in Milburn would have been happy to go to bed with Christina, but it had been fifteen years since a woman had looked at him in a challenging way. Misery settled over him. His son would be leaving home in a year, and then it would be just he and Christina, pretending that they were happy. Len coughed and said, "How's your friend Mrs. Hawthorne? Thought she looked a little peaked last time she was in here— thought maybe she had a touch of the flu." "No, she's fine," Walter Barnes replied, thinking that Len, like ninety per cent of the men in town, coveted Stella: as he did himself. What he ought to do, he thought, was run away with Stella Hawthorne; go someplace like Pago Pago and forget about being lonely and married in Milburn; not knowing that the loneliness which would in fact visit him would be worse than anything he could imagine; and Peter Barnes, the banker's son, sat in another car with Jim Hardie while they drove at twenty miles over the limit to a rundown tavern, listening to Jim, who was six-two and muscular and the kind of boy described forty years earlier as "born to hang," and who had set fire to the old Pugh barn because he'd heard the Dedham girls kept their horses in it, tell stories of his sexual relations with the new woman at the hotel, this Anna woman, stories which would never be true, not in the way Jim meant them; and Clark Mulligan sat in the projection booth of his theater, watching
Carrie
for the sixtieth time and worried about what all this snow would do to his business and if Leota would have something besides hamburger casserole for dinner and if anything exciting would ever happen to him again; and Lewis Benedikt paced the rooms in his enormous house tormented by an impossible thought: that the woman who had appeared before him on the highway and whom he had nearly killed was his dead wife. The set of the shoulders, the swing of the hair ... the more he thought back to those seconds, the more agonizingly quick and vague they were; and Stella Hawthorne lay on a motel bed with Milly Sheehan's nephew, Harold Sims, wondering if Harold would ever stop talking: "And then, Stel, some of the guys in my department are looking into myth survival among the Amerinds because they say the whole group dynamic thing is a dead letter, can you believe it? Hell, I only finished my thesis four years ago, and now the whole thing's out of style, Johnson and Leadbeater don't even
mention
Lionel Tiger anymore, they're getting into field work, and the other day, for Chrissake, a guy stopped me in the corridor and asked me if I've ever read any of the stuff on the Manitou—the
Manitou,
for Chrissake. Myth survival, for Chrissake."

"What's a Manitou?" she asked him, but didn't pay any attention to his answer—some story about an Indian who chased a deer for days up a mountain, but when he got to the top the deer turned on him and wasn't a deer anymore ...

and bundled-up Ricky Hawthorne, driving to Wheat Row one morning (he now had his snow tires) saw a man wearing a pea jacket and a blue watch cap beating a child on the north side of the square. He slowed, and just had time to see the boy's bare feet kicking in the snow. For a moment he was so shocked that he could not think what to do; but he stopped, pulling the car over to the curb, and got out. "That's enough," he shouted, "that's
quite
enough," but the man and the child both turned to stare at him with such peculiar force that he put down his arm and got back in the car;

and the next night, sipping chamomile tea, looked out of an upstairs window and nearly dropped the cup, seeing a forlorn face staring in at him—gone in an instant when he jerked to one side. In the next instant, he realized that it was his own face;

and Peter Barnes and Jim Hardie come out of a country bar, and Jim, who is only half as drunk as Peter, says
hey, shithead, I got a great idea,
and laughs most of the way back to Milburn;

and a dark-haired woman sits facing the window in a dark room in the Archer Hotel and watches the snow fall and smiles to herself;

and at six-thirty in the evening an insurance salesman named Freddy Robinson locks himself in his den and telephones a receptionist named Florence Quast and says, "No, I don't think I need to bother either of them, I think that new girl of theirs could answer my questions. Could you give me her name? And just where is she staying again?"

and the woman in the hotel sits and smiles, and several more animals, part of the fun, are butchered: two heifers in Elmer Scales's barn (Elmer having fallen asleep with the shotgun across his lap) and one of the Dedham girls' horses.