A Manhattan Ghost Story Read online

  “Dad?” I said. “What’s wrong?”

  His grin reappeared.

  “Dad?” I repeated. “Please—tell me what’s wrong.”

  His hand tightened on my shoulder, his grin became a quivering, lopsided smile.

  “Dad,” I said again, “what the hell is wrong?”

  “Well, Abner,” he answered, and his voice was slow and casual, “everything, of course.” And his quivering, lopsided smile froze on his face.

  I started to speak, to ask him what he meant, and I saw something pass across him, something like a fog, something, I swear, that took the light from his eyes, and I knew that at that moment, as he stood with his arm outstretched and his hand gripping my shoulder, he had died.

  We could have stood together like that, in the bathroom, for several minutes, I’m not sure. It probably wasn’t several minutes. It was probably a few seconds—logic says it could only have been a few seconds. But at last he collapsed, and I tugged him into the living room and laid him on the couch and made telephone calls to all the right people. I did not attempt mouth-to-mouth resuscitation or chest massage. I wiped the rest of the shaving cream from his face, folded his hands on his belly, straightened his legs, and told him I was sorry he was dead.

  Then I sat in his chair—a large and sturdy leather wing-backed chair—and waited for the right people to arrive. When they did, I heard some speculation between them that my father had died of a stroke or a heart-attack, and I said, stupidly, that maybe he thought it was time to die, which got merely an “Uh-huh” and a “Why don’t you relax, okay?” Then they took my father away.

  The funeral, a week later—at a big and venerable cemetery just outside Bangor—was a predictably dreary affair. My older brother Ike was there, full of sage advice and good fellowship. He said he was going to try and join the Peace Corps—”If they’ll have a ne’er-do-well like me, Abner.”

  “Sure they will,” I said.

  And my Aunt Jocelyn was there—my mother’s sister; she always liked my father—and her husband Paul, too, and several of my father’s fellow Rotarians.

  I lingered at the graveside when the service was finished. My brother wanted to linger with me, but I told him I’d rather be alone, which he accepted readily.

  I said nothing further to my father as I stood by his graveside. I started to. The words Bye, Dad came to me but never made it past the mental planning stages. What I was trying to do, I think, was to look past the coffin lid at what resided inside and try to relate that, somehow, to what my father had been. And I thought that what was in there, in that coffin, was still pretty whole, still recognizable as the creature who was my father, but that, soon enough, it would change—the skin would fall away, the hair recede, the lips part and decay to reveal the rictus grin.

  He was dead. I would never see him or speak to him again. All I had as my memory of him. And though that was profoundly sad, there was also something secure in it, something wonderfully secure, and comfortable.

  I read a statistic once that there are more people alive at this moment than have lived and died in all of history. If that’s true, then someday this world is going to be very, very crowded indeed.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I had a friend in Bangor who had a nice, dirty-blonde beard and a round, gentle face, and whenever he went into a laundry near his home, the proprietors—two aged Chinese men named Lu and Yang—smiled at him when he came through the doorway and shouted, “Hey, Jesus Christ, how are you doing?” My friend told me that story quite a lot, and I always enjoyed it; it tickled me.

  His name was Sam Fearey. He was two years older than I, chunky, with a splash of freckles across the bridge of his nose. He looked like one of the Campbell’s Soup kids grown up and a few pounds lighter.

  In 1966 he got drafted and was sent off to Vietnam. I received a half-dozen dreary, rambling letters from him about what a “shitty place” Vietnam was and about what a “shitty war” we were waging there, and in 1967 he was reported as missing in action. He was never found, and rumor has it to this day that he’s still alive in some tiny North Vietnamese village. I hope not. He deserves to go on to better things.

  We hung around together for several years before he was drafted, and we did something once that was pretty lousy—we broke into a mausoleum.

  What did we know? We just wanted to have a little fun.

  We talked about it for quite a while first. We discussed it calmly and rationally, and we came to the conclusion that no one would know the difference and no one would care—least of all, the people who had been put into the mausoleum.

  It was nearing Halloween, so we put it off until then—we had to do the thing up right, of course.

  We didn’t plan to do anything in the mausoleum. We didn’t plan to write on the walls or tip a casket over or leave perverse little notes everywhere, as had been done by other kids in Bangor, a couple of years earlier, at a different mausoleum. We weren’t sick, for God’s sake; we were just curious.

  It was Sam’s idea to bring the candles, and Sam’s idea to bring the cat’s skull and the Ouija Board. And his idea, too, to try a little “psychic communication.”

  Jesus, we were just planning to have a little fun on Halloween. Everyone had fun on Halloween. Some kids put bags full of dog shit on people’s porches; other kids left toilet paper everywhere (in retrospect, we certainly did have a toilet fixation), and those were really crummy things to do. Breaking into a mausoleum, lighting a few candles, and scaring yourself silly was stupid, sure—but who was it going to harm?

  The mausoleum we chose belonged to the Hammett family, who went back a long, long way in Bangor. They lived in a huge, stone house just outside the city limits, on several hundred wooded acres, and as a family they had been dying off with clock-like regularity for quite some time.

  The most recent addition to the Hammett mausoleum that October of 1965 was a pleasant old man named Joseph A. Hammett. He liked to fish in a public fishing pond west of Bangor, and he always had a kind word for everyone. He was put into the mausoleum toward the end of September, so Sam figured that by Halloween he’d be “nice and ripe,” which made me cringe, but also intrigued the hell out Of me.

  The mausoleum is in a private, fenced area of Bangor’s Memorial Park. There are several ways to get to it—either through the park itself (which, for a fifteen-year-old kid on a Halloween night, can be a very numbing experience) or from Route 23A, a four-lane highway several hundred yards north of the park. After considerable discussion—during which Sam called me a wimp at least a hundred times—we agreed that Route 23A would be the best route to take. The only real problem with it was the unavoidable climb up a steep and erosion-rutted hill, which, after a heavy rain, was treacherous, at best.

  As luck would have it, that Halloween night it was raining, and as the two of us stood at the bottom of the hill looking up—the roof and upper walls of the mausoleum were reflecting the headlights of cars on Route 23A—I said, “Jees, Sam, I don’t know about this.”

  He chuckled. It was his duty to chuckle at the scared kid; it was supposed to make the scared kid feel more secure. It didn’t. “What the hell could happen to us, Abner?” he said. “Tell me what could happen.”

  I pointed stiffly at the hill. “I could get hurt pretty bad up there, Sam, that’s what could happen.”

  “How? By sliding down a hill? C’mon, Abner!”

  We started up the hill a couple of minutes later.

  We made it to the top, of course, though with a great deal of effort, and only after we’d both gotten ourselves filthy as hell and burned on an unexpected growth of stinging nettle halfway to the top (plants that had been put there, Sam suggested, by the Hammets themselves as a way of keeping people away from their “dead relations”).

  But when we got to the top and stood in the rain fifty feet from the mausoleum, I had to admit that the climb was more than worth the effort and the pain.

  “Look at that, Abner,” Sam whispered in awe
. “Just like outa The Fall of the House of Usher or something, right?”

  “Right,” I agreed.

  “You seen that, haven’t ya?”

  “Seen what?” I asked.

  He wasn’t listening. He started for the mausoleum—the cat’s skull, the Ouija Board, and six new, white candles in a black plastic bag that he held tightly under his right arm. He also had a number of Mallo Cups in the bag. Sam was addicted to Mallo Cups. He ate no other candy. “Mallo Cups are the best, Abner,” he told me time and time again. He had, in fact, a constant, weak chocolate/marshmallow smell about him.

  I followed him to the mausoleum. I had a pair of pliers and two screwdrivers—a large Phillips head and a larger slotted screwdriver—in my coat pocket. Our strategy was to unscrew one of the windows and climb in; we felt certain that the door was going to be locked. But the windows—two of them; one high on the north wall, one high on the east wall—had been screwed in from the inside. And the door was indeed locked.

  “Jesus,” Sam breathed. He was leaning against the east wall, rain dripping into his eyes, the glare of car headlights on Route 23A hitting him every few seconds. I stood next to him and said “Jesus,” too.

  “Goddamnit!” he said.

  “Goddamnit!” I said.

  “We’ll have to break in, Abner.”

  I said nothing.

  “I didn’t come all the way up that fucking hill for nothing. We’re going to have to break in.”

  “How?” I whispered.

  “We’ll jimmy the padlock.”

  “How?” I whispered again.

  “With the screwdrivers,” he said.

  “They’re my father’s screwdrivers, Sam. What if they break?”

  “They won’t break.”

  “Yeah, I know—but what if they do?”

  “Wimp,” he said.

  We were working at the padlock seconds later. And, thanks to several decades worth of rust, we were inside the mausoleum within minutes.

  The first thing I said was, “I don’t want to be here, Sam.” It smelled bad; it smelled of damp wood.

  Sam chuckled again, but it was quick and unconvincing, and there was a slight tremor to it. “Sure you don’t, Abner,” he said.

  “Why are we here, Sam? There’s nothin’ here!” There were six vaults, three on the east wall, three on the west wall. Each vault had a heavy, dark metal door in front of it and a small metal plaque beneath with the name, birth date and date of death of the person within. We read each one—”Langley Hammet: October 12, 1873—October 15, 1951” … “Ariel Hammet: November 22, 1952—June 12, 1953.” (“Boy,” I said, “That’s sad.” “Happens,” Sam said.) “Garner John Hammet: June 1, 1918—September 12, 1947”—until we got to “Joseph William Hammet,” the last vault toward the rear of the mausoleum on the west wall. Sam stopped, knocked slightly on the vault door, and said, “Evening, Joe. All we wanta do is talk, okay?”

  Then he went to the center of the concrete floor, crossed his legs Indian-style, opened the plastic bag, took six candles out. “Got any matches, Abner?” he asked.

  “No,” I answered.

  He cursed under his breath.

  I said, “I thought you were supposed to bring the matches, Sam.”

  “I did. They’re all wet.”

  The headlights of cars on Route 23A filtered through the grimy window on the north wall and played dully on the ceiling of the mausoleum.

  “Fuck it!” Sam said.

  “Fuck what, Sam?”

  “Fuck the candles. We don’t need them.” He stuffed them back into the plastic bag, withdrew the skull of the cat, put it down in front of him, and said to it, “Hi, Flora.” It had once been his cat. He’d raised her from a kitten and called her Flora in honor of a girlfriend who’d moved from Bangor to Albany a year before and whom he missed terribly.

  I nodded at Flora’s skull. “That’s kinda sick, you know,” I said.

  Sam nodded. “Maybe a little. I’ll tell ya, it kind of made me sick cleaning her off—” He stopped suddenly, put his hand up. “Quiet!” he said.

  “What’s wrong, Sam—”

  “Quiet! I hear something.” He nodded to indicate the rear of the mausoleum. “I hear something, Abner,” he repeated. There was a small tremor in his voice. I strained to see his face in the darkness. I saw it. He was grinning ever so slightly. I was grinning, too.

  “What do you hear, Sam?”

  “A voice. Damn it, I hear a voice!” he whispered.

  “What kind of voice?” I whispered.

  “An old man’s voice.”

  “What’s it saying?”

  “I don’t know; I’m not sure.” He paused.

  “I don’t hear anything, Sam,” I said.

  “It’s saying something about cats, Abner.”

  “About cats?”

  “Uh-huh. It’s saying, ‘Get out of here, get out of here; I’m allergic to cats—they make me itch!’ ” And he broke into a fit of hysterical, infectious laughter that lasted at least five minutes.

  And when we had both stopped laughing, I discovered a book of matches deep in my jacket pocket, beneath a rip in the lining, and I handed them to Sam. He took the candles out, lit one, let the wax drip liberally on six evenly spaced spots around Flora’s skull, and set each candle in the wax. Then we got down to business.

  The dead were such fine entertainment, then.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  January 6

  I had an appointment in Manhattan with Serena Hitchcock, a senior editor for one of the city’s largest publishers. She wanted to talk to me about doing a coffee-table photo book dealing with New York’s parks and tourist attractions. The possibility of doing such a book was why I’d come to New York in the first place. I had done similar work before, for magazines like Yankee and Americana, though never a full-length book, and I enjoyed it. It paid well, and it didn’t demand too much creativity, which—I’m the first to admit—is not my strong suit. I’m very good with a camera; I have a fair idea of what the public will and will not like, and when I was working, I almost always delivered on schedule. But I think, after all, that I was to photography what fast-food restaurants are to eating—I was slick and quick, but I had about as much substance as a snowflake. I knew that no one would ever give me a one-man show or do an “Abner Cray Retrospective.” I knew that I would never set the world on fire. And that was okay, because I didn’t want to set the world on fire. I think that I wanted no more out of my life than to be reasonably comfortable and healthy, never to go hungry, and never to suffer too much pain, and to find pleasure where I could find it. That’s only what most people want, I think. So I wasn’t asking too much.

  I’d never met Serena Hitchcock. We’d talked on the phone quite a few times, though, about photography and New York and books, so I had a clear mental image of her. I saw her as tall, fortyish, and thin, with the kind of smart and calculating sexuality that, I was convinced, only tall, fortyish, and thin women can possess (another tacky sexist fantasy). But when I finally did meet her, she was none of those things. She was short, a little chubby (“pleasingly plump” used to be the phrase), had shoulder-length brown hair, gray eyes, and a pleasant but basically unappealing face, like a Tupperware lady. She was wearing a brown pants suit and had stuck a tiny red rose into her lapel. She’d come out to the lobby to meet me, and as she lead me back to her office, she walked briskly several feet ahead and nodded at some of the departments we passed through—”This is the art department, Abner.” … “These are the copy-editors’ desks, Abner.”—and I said “I see” or “Very interesting,” which she didn’t acknowledge. And when we got to her office, I saw that it was a only a cubicle that fronted West 44th Street, twenty stories below. There were some book covers on the walls, a utilitarian-looking, gray metal desk in the center of the room—snapshots of two chunky, flat-faced kids on it—and a much used, black-cloth-on-metal secretarial chair behind it. The office said very loudly that Serena Hitchcock was smal
l potatoes indeed.

  She went around to the back of her desk, sat in her secretarial chair, told me to sit down on a flimsy-looking, armless chair in back of me. I pulled the chair closer to the desk and sat in it.

  She said, “Crummy, huh?”

  I smiled. “I don’t understand.”

  “This office—” she nodded—”it’s pretty crummy, don’t you think?”

  “It’s small,” I said, and smiled again.

  “It’s temporary,” she said. “We’re renovating our old offices.”

  “Oh. Looks are deceiving.”

  “Sorry,” she said, and smiled confusedly.

  “Looks,” I repeated, “are deceiving.”

  Her smile altered slightly. “Yes,” she said, “they are.”

  I had a briefcase on my lap, with some samples of my work in it. I opened it, took out some color shots I’d taken in the Adirondack Mountains two summers before, handed them across the desk. She glanced at them, handed them back. “I’ve seen your work, Abner. That’s why you’re here.”

  “Oh,” I said, and put the photographs away, the briefcase on the floor.

  “We want a big book, Abner,” she said. She took the tiny red rose from her lapel, began fingering it as she talked, her gaze going to it occasionally. “We’re not going to be using a lot of text, a few lines per photograph—most people don’t read anyway—and I’d like you to do a good amount of black and white. I think you’re pretty good at black and white, Abner.”

  “Thanks.” I knew it was just something for her to say. I didn’t believe I was any better working in black and white than in color.

  She went on, “And I’d like something a little off-key, too.”

  It took me by surprise. “Off-key? I don’t understand.”

  She looked at the rose; I saw her smile and guessed that she was somehow amused. “No,” she said, and looked up at me. Her smile faded. “You probably don’t understand.” She pushed herself to her feet, went to the window that overlooked West 44th Street, and stood at it with her back to me. “I don’t even care if the people who buy this book notice it, Abner.” Her tone had become low and meditative. “This ‘off-key’ thing, I mean.” She turned her head briefly and grinned a quick, sad grin. She turned back, continued, “They don’t even have to notice. Maybe your angles could be slightly off, or the colors not quite right, and the people—we need lots of people in this book, Abner; it’s what Manhattan is all about—and the people,” she repeated, paused, glanced around again, “should be … just people—like you and me. Just people.” She turned back to the window. “Christ, I’m not making any sense at all, am I?”