A Manhattan Ghost Story Read online

  She looked awful.

  “Jesus, Stacy—”

  “Can I come in, Abner?”

  I stepped out of the way, held my hand out toward the living room. “Sure. Of course,” I said. “Come in.”

  She came in. She was wearing what must have, at one time, been a very stylish, blue raincoat, a pair of white jeans, and a ruffled, white cotton blouse that—also at one time—must have fit her quite fetchingly, but hung limply on her now, because she was very wet, as if she’d been standing a long time in a rainstorm. And there were streaks of brownish grit on the coat and the jeans, even down the side of her face.

  “Give me your coat, Stacy.”

  She gave it to me. “I’d like to use the shower, if that’s all right.”

  “Of course it’s all right.” I nodded to my left. “The bathroom’s over there, just past the bedroom.”

  “Thanks, Abner.” She sounded hoarse. “I know where it is.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Yes.” And she went quickly down the short hallway to the bathroom.

  I made some coffee for both of us, dressed, and waited for her. She took a full half-hour in the bathroom and needed every minute of it. But when she reappeared, she didn’t look at all refreshed, only cleaner. She had one of Art’s shirts on over her underwear.

  She sat, legs crossed loosely, her cup of coffee in hand, in a black leather chair opposite the couch. “Could you do me a favor,” she began, “and get my clothes cleaned somewhere? The coat has to be dry-cleaned; the other stuff you can take to a laundromat. You don’t mind, do you?”

  I shook my head. “No, I don’t mind.” It was a lie. “What have you been doing, Stacy?”

  “Searching for Art.” She looked pained. She sipped her coffee, set the cup on the floor, and announced, “I found him.”

  “You found him?” I said. “He told me he was in Nice, Stacy. Where’d you find him, for Christ’s sake?”

  She relaxed; her head was resting on the back of the chair, and she sighed, then explained, her gaze on the ceiling, “On East 100th Street. He’s got an apartment there—he calls it an apartment.” She brought her head forward; she looked suddenly angry. “It’s a goddamned pigsty. He’s cleaned it up, of course. He wanted to paint, but they wouldn’t let him—Jesus Christ, Abner, he’s a goddamned mess! You know what he’s doing? You want to know what he’s doing? He’s hiding out. Jesus, hiding out! I asked him what good he was doing himself, living there like that, and you want to know what he told me? He told me that he’s free. Free, for Christ’s sake. Free! I asked him—free to do what? He said ‘free to scratch.’ That’s what he said exactly. ‘I’m free to scratch, if I want.’ ” She picked her coffee up, sipped it, grinned. “Which is when I told him he was full of shit!” Another sip of coffee. Her grin reappeared, but there was pain in it now. “Which is when he hit me.” She touched the left side of her chest, just below her breast. “Here.” She touched the back of her head. “And here. With his fists. He likes to hit people with his fists. Not just women. People in general. When we were married, he hit this supermarket check-out boy who was looking at me, just looking at me. People look at other people, right? Where’s the harm? He broke the boy’s cheekbone. That’s awfully hard to do, I’m told.”

  “I stood, went over to her, put my hand on her shoulder. “Do you want to see a doctor, Stacy?”

  She shook her head. “No. Not here anyway. I’ll see my doctor in Bangor. I’m okay.”

  “You’re going back to Bangor?”

  “Yes, tomorrow, I think. Maybe tonight. It depends on what kind of arrangements I can make.”

  “You’re sure you’re okay?”

  She nodded, sipped her coffee again. “Yes. I run fast. He can’t run.”

  “I know.”

  “So I ran from him. This is a dirty city, Abner. This is an awfully dirty city.”

  “Here and there,” I said.

  “They’ll catch up with him though.”

  “Who?” I asked. “Who’ll catch up with him?”

  She shrugged. “Whoever.” She smiled. “Someone.” She pushed herself to her feet. “Can I stay here tonight if I have to, Abner?”

  “Sure you can. But won’t you be a little … uncomfortable?”

  She started for the bedroom, looked back. “He won’t come here. This is where he killed her, Abner. He’s afraid to come here.”

  * * *

  I slept on the couch, she in the bed. And she left the following morning, early.

  I kissed her good-bye. I said to her, “I love you, Stacy,” and conjured up a tear or two. She said she was glad she’d come, after all, that she was finally able to admit to herself that Art was “a crud” and unworthy of her, so she could put a big, unhappy part of her past behind her, at last. And then a taxi took her to Grand Central.

  I was posturing all the while. I felt like a man on display. Do this; do that; be what she expects and needs you to be, Abner. I felt the way a visitor from another planet probably feels—stiff and uncomfortable. As if she were in one world and I had one foot in another. I was not at all sad to see her go. Because I do not believe that I felt anything for her. Only for Art. My best friend. Who, deep inside me, was fueling a smouldering anger.

  At the Hammet Mausoleum, Halloween, 1965

  I shook my head violently. “I’m not going to help you break into Joe Hammet’s casket. No way, no how, nowhere—”

  “Oh, your grannie’s knuckles,” Sam said. “I’ll do it myself, okay? Just give me the fuckin’ screwdriver and I’ll do it myself. You don’t even have to watch. You can go over there—” he nodded at a far corner of the mausoleum—”and you can hang onto your little cock so’s you don’t pee your pants. Christ, Abner, all I wanta do before we go is touch him. What’s he gonna care?”

  I stood, stuck my hands into my coat pockets—my right hand found the screwdriver, clutched it tightly—and said, “I’ll tell you what he’s gonna do, Sam. He’s gonna sit up and tear your throat out and feed it to the rats, that’s what.”

  “Ain’t no rats here.”

  “And then all the rest of ‘em—” my hand swept wide to take in the whole room and the six vaults in it—”will get up and munch on you awhile.”

  “Jus’ gimme the freakin’ screwdriver, Abner, so I can do this and we can get outa here.”

  I shook my head.

  “I mean it, Abner.”

  “No,” I said.

  “I’ll beat the livin’ shit outa ya, Abner.”

  “No, you won’t,” I said. “You’re my friend.”

  “Yeah, well, this ain’t got nothin’ to do with friendship, Abner. This has got to do with stayin’ alive.”

  “With stayin alive?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  He took a step toward me, held his hand out. “Just give me the screwdriver, Abner, ‘cuz if you don’t, I’ll take it away from you.”

  I considered it a moment, then gave him the screwdriver.

  “Thanks,” he said. He nodded at the plastic bag. “Get me another Mallo Cup, wouldja?”

  “Get your own Mallo Cup, Sam.”

  He grinned. “Sure,” he said, and got his own Mallo Cup.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I have been to places in the last couple of months that I don’t want to go back to, but I know that I will go back because I have learned this, too—that Madeline was right. It really is just a matter of seeing, not what, but how.

  I knew that I’d find Phyllis sooner or later, if I looked in the right places. I asked myself, Who makes a world, and love, and time, if there’s no way of keeping it. All of it? It was a good question.

  What a miraculous thing the mind is. It’s what computers are patterned after. And the mind can figure out most things (how to get someone to the moon, how to bring someone back from schizophrenia, how to take an old, tired heart out of someone’s chest and put a new one in), but it has trouble with other things. Like the things that Phyllis and Ma
deline and the boy in the house on East 80th Street introduced me to. The mind turns inward. The mind stiffens up and says that it would rather leave such things alone.

  Go to bed, it says. Get some new shoes, it says. Turn on the tube and watch Love Boat, it says.

  But the mind cannot fool itself for long. At last it has to admit that it has learned some very frightening things, some very confusing things, but that it is still ignorant, too, and needs to learn a lot more.

  Early the morning after Stacy left, the morning of the tenth, I watched daylight come. It is a nice view from Art’s living room window—not the view of the skyline, which is barely visible through the bathroom window, but a view of the flat-gray and flat-green painted townhouses across the street, a view from halfway up to the top of the townhouses, and then twenty degrees of sky above that. The sun does not rise behind these townhouses; they are to the north, and when the sun comes up on a still and cloudless morning, as this was, it casts beautifully delineated, very dark shadows across the house fronts, shadows from bits of the houses themselves—roof overhangs, window frames. There is even a pair of pollution-streaked gargoyles on a house just down the street, the far right house visible from Art’s couch, that cast marvelously grotesque, elongated shadows.

  I found myself smiling at them as daylight came because I knew that I could no longer be spooked very much by things that were intended to spook. Like gargoyles. I’d gone beyond that. I’d graduated, paid my dues; I had taken a quantum leap of the spirit.

  I was frightened, yes. But for the right reasons. I was frightened because I was in search of the woman I loved in a world that, only two weeks earlier, I hadn’t even realized existed.

  But, in those two weeks, I had gone walking in it, sightseeing in it, I had been a part of it. And I knew generally, what it was all about.

  That wasn’t true, of course. I merely told myself it was true because it was the only way I knew of holding on and of coping.

  The great fiction (it’s a small world): “Oh,” one American says to another, both vacationing somewhere in Europe, “you’re from Cincinnati. Maybe you know my cousin George.”

  I had peered through the little security peephole and I had seen faces that smiled and frowned and laughed and cried. And I had told myself that they had no secrets from me.

  How could they?

  The dead can’t have secrets from the living.

  As Serena Hitchcock had very succinctly put it, “Dead, Abner, is dead!”

  And, of course, I knew very well what dead was.

  Everyone knew what dead was.

  And that was the big lie that was going through my head there on Art’s black leather couch.

  With daylight coming.

  Dead, Abner, is dead!

  With daylight slanting gaily off the townhouses across the street, off the windows, off the ledges, off the gargoyles.

  Because the dead sing, and laugh, and sit up, and look around, and cry, and want.

  And they are confused. They are lonely. They hurt.

  And, at last, they come apart. And go off to someplace else.

  As Phyllis did. Just as Phyllis did.

  At Grand Central Station, the Evening of the 9th

  It is a miracle, I think—a testimony to someone’s unsung genius with audio technology—that announcements of departures and arrivals are heard by anyone at all at Grand Central. Outside New York, in bus depots and train stations that are barely large enough to sleep in, such announcements sound like recordings of hay bailers or cement mixers. But at Grand Central, it is usually clear that names of towns and cities and track numbers and times are being said.

  This is, of course, because departures and arrivals on a very grand scale are what Grand Central is all about. When several thousand people have someplace to go, they must be told how to get to where they’re going only once or twice. This way, they can make their exits and their entrances with a modicum of style.

  Jocelyn Horn always had style. She was the reason I went to Grand Central that night—to tell her that Stacy had already left for Bangor, so her—Jocelyn’s—trip had been unnecessary; sorry, good-bye.

  I had tried to phone her in Bangor earlier in the day, but was told, by her husband Paul, that she was already on the train and “probably halfway to New York by now, Abner.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “I would have come with her,” he said, “but there were prior commitments. I’m sure Stacy’s all right, don’t you think?”

  “Sure,” I said. “She’s all right.” Then I said good-bye and hung up. I never liked Stacy’s father very much. I always liked Jocelyn—regardless of her clearly ambivalent feelings toward me.

  I got a big, freshly baked pretzel at a stand called Hot Sam’s near the 42nd Street exit. I began wandering about and munching on it because I was several minutes early to meet Jocelyn, who was due to arrive at 6:15.

  I felt someone tugging softly at my jacket. “Hey,” I heard. It was a man’s voice. I turned my head and saw a young man, twenty or twenty-one, no older, wearing jeans and a brown leather jacket. He was smiling at me and nodding at the pretzel. “Hey,” he said again, “where’d you get that?”

  I pointed to my left. “Over there,” I told him. “Near the 42nd Street exit.”

  “Thanks,” he said, turned and walked quickly away, in the direction of Hot Sam’s.

  I checked the big clock on the south wall of Grand Central, between a pair of timetables for the local trains. It read 6:05. I heard a woman shouting: “He grabbed at my purse; he grabbed at my purse!”

  She was close by. I looked to my right, saw her near the Amtrak ticket booths, near the entrance to the waiting rooms, and Park Avenue. She was tall, in her thirties, gaunt, and was wearing a loose-fitting red dress. She was standing still and pointing stiffly at a stocky, well-dressed man who was walking quickly away from her with a look of great humiliation about him.

  “He grabbed for my purse!” the woman screamed.

  The man continued to walk away.

  A cop—also stocky, dark-haired, in his early forties—came down the ramp from the waiting rooms. He saw the woman, went over to her—with no particular air of urgency about him—said, “What’s the problem, miss?”

  She said again, still pointing at the well-dressed man, who was close to me now and shaking his head slowly, hugely embarrassed, “He grabbed for my purse; he grabbed for my purse.”

  The cop called to the man, “Hold on there, buddy.”

  The man stopped walking. The cop went over to him, took him firmly by the arm—which was clearly even more embarrassing to the man than the woman’s accusations—and said, “D’joo grab for the lady’s purse?”

  I felt someone tugging at my sleeve. I turned. It was the guy in the brown leather jacket. He said, “Ain’t no pretzels over there. Why’djoo lie?”

  I nodded again at the 42nd Street exit. “It’s called Hot Sam’s,” I said.

  “Nope,” the boy said.

  “I’m not lying to you,” I said.

  He nodded at what was left of my pretzel. “Can I have the rest of that?”

  From behind me, I heard: “He grabbed for her purse,” and “This guy grabbed for that lady’s purse.”

  I thrust the pretzel at the young man in the brown leather jacket. He took it happily, started chewing on it, walked away.

  I checked the clock again. It read 6:08.

  At the Amtrak ticket counters, several long lines had formed, apparently, I guessed, to try and get last-minute tickets on the 6:45 which stopped at points in upstate New York and terminated in Chicago.

  The woman in the loosely fitting red dress was at the middle of the line nearest to me. She took one step out from it every now and then to check its progress, then stepped back and stood quietly, hands clutching her purse. The line was moving very slowly.

  I watched as a younger woman, carrying a backpack and looking at a timetable went over to her, stood next to her a moment, hoping, apparently
, to be noticed. A man just in front of the woman in the red dress turned his head slightly, noticed the younger woman, gave her a quick and critical once-over, looked back. When, after a full minute, the woman in red didn’t acknowledge the younger woman, she cleared her throat and said, “Excuse me, please?”

  The woman in red turned her head, looked blankly at the younger woman. “Yes?” she said.

  The younger woman smiled. “I didn’t mean to disturb you,”—she held her timetable up—”I was just wondering if you could tell me …”

  “Get lost!” said the woman in red.

  The younger woman looked stunned.

  The man in front of her, who’d turned his head to give her a quick and critical once-over, looked at her again. “Yeah,” he growled, “get lost!”

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  The cop came over, put his hand on the younger woman’s shoulder. “You givin’ these people here a hard time, honey?”

  The woman in the red dress said, “Yeah, she is.”

  “No, I’m not,” said the younger woman.

  The man in front of the woman in the red dress turned his head again and said to the cop, “She’s asking questions, officer.”

  “Yeah?” said the cop. “What kind of questions?”

  The younger woman looked very confused now, and was clearly at a loss for words.

  “Why don’tcha just leave ‘em alone, okay?” the cop said.

  And that’s when I went to meet Jocelyn.

  Her first words to me were, “You look scared, Abner.”

  “Too much coffee,” I said, and extended my hand to take one of her two, big blue suitcases. She let me take it and I nodded toward the 42nd Street exit. “We can go out this way, Aunt Jocelyn.”

  “I’ve been here before, Abner.”

  “Yes, of course you have.” We started for the 42nd Street exit, which was all the way across Grand Central. Jocelyn was dressed well, in a blue pants suit and black shoes. She’s a nice-looking woman (she’ll be described as handsome one day, when her basic feminine attractiveness has begun to fade), and men—certain kinds of men, businessmen in their forties and fifties—turned around occasionally to look at her, which she appeared to enjoy. She said, as we walked, “Where’s Stacy, Abner?”