A Manhattan Ghost Story Read online

  “Yes,” I said tentatively. “I’d like that.”

  “Some evening very soon.”

  “I’d like that very much.”

  “Tomorrow evening, Mr. Doubleday.”

  “Tomorrow? I don’t know; I’m not sure—”

  “Tomorrow evening at 8:30.” She stood. Her husband stood, although a little unsteadily because his chair nearly fell backwards to the floor; he caught it. Lorraine went on, “Phyllis will show you the way.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “We’re on East 95th Street, Mr. Doubleday. Phyllis will show you the way.”

  They rounded the table together and started for the door. Phyllis stood. I stood. Phyllis took my arm and led me to the door with them.

  “Tomorrow, then,” Lorraine Pellaprat said.

  “Yes,” I said, “tomorrow.”

  Thomas Pellaprat extended his hand; I took it. “Good to meet you, Mr Doubleday.”

  “And you, too, Mr. Pellaprat.”

  “Until tomorrow, then?”

  “Yes, tomorrow. I’m looking forward to it.”

  “Of course you are.”

  They left the apartment. Phyllis and I stood in the doorway together and watched as they walked to the elevator. We watched, smiling, as they waited. And,’ at last, when the elevator came, they waved, and we waved, and the aged man who had been working the elevator a week earlier—and whom I hadn’t seen since—stuck his head out. “Hello, sir,” he said to me. And I nodded at him and said, “Hello.”

  I am not going to try and make you believe that what follows is a love story. Because it’s so much more than that.

  When I hear the words love story, I think of Ali McGraw and Ryan O’Neal, Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, Woody Allen and Diane Keaton, Taylor and Burton, Streisand and Redford. I do not think of Abner W. Cray and Phyllis Pellaprat.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  At the Hammet Mausoleum, Halloween, 1965

  I asked Sam again, “Is that some kind of trick-candle or something, Sam?” because it went out a third time, and he relit it.

  “Could be,” he said. “But it ain’t.”

  “Then what keeps blowing it out, for crimey’s sake?” I shifted a little on the cold cement floor because my legs had started to go to sleep.

  “Spooks and demons,” Sam answered.

  “I don’t think I believe in demons, Sam. I don’t even know what a demon is. And maybe I believe in spooks, and maybe I don’t, but I sure don’t think they’d hang around here.”

  “Who’s to say?” he asked. “Not me and not you, that’s for certain.”

  We were both seated cross-legged on the floor.

  Sam lifted one cheek then, and a long, noisy fart came from him. He looked pleased.

  I waved at the air. “Jees, that stinks.”

  “We can light ‘em,” he said.

  “Shit,” I said.

  “Light the old demon farts.” He chuckled. “Light the demon’s breath!” He chuckled again, though lower in his throat, as if to himself. “Demon fire!” he whispered tightly.

  “I wanta leave,” I said.

  “I have demon fire in my shorts.”

  “You’re being real stupid, Sam.”

  He reached out, stroked the cat’s skull very slowly and lovingly. “You’re a nice cat, Flora,” he said several times as he stroked it. “You’re a nice cat, Flora.”

  “You’re giving me the creeps, goddamnit!” I said.

  “You’re supposed to have the creeps,” he said. “We’re sitting in here with a bunch of dead people, so you’re supposed to have the creeps.”

  “I wanta leave,” I said again.

  “Go ahead.”

  “I mean it,” I said.

  “No, you don’t. You don’t mean it.”

  And he was right. I didn’t mean it.

  In Manhattan, January 23, 1983

  It was a little past 7:00 when Phyllis and I left Art DeGraff’s apartment to catch a bus for her parents’ home on East 95th Street. She seemed very excited, and I realized that it was the first time we’d been out of the apartment together.

  She had dressed warmly—although it was an unseasonably mild evening—in a stylish, white, waistlength mink coat (“Fake,” she told me, “but don’t let on.”), a mid-calf-length green dress, and white, knee-high boots with stacked heels. She looked very sexy.

  “You look sexy as hell, Phyllis,” I told her. We were walking east on East 79th Street, arm in arm.

  “Thank you, Abner.” She seemed pleased. “Tonight is very special.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I think so, too.”

  “They didn’t like Art.”

  “Your parents, you mean?”

  She nodded. “They didn’t approve of him. Because he was white.”

  “I’m white, Phyllis.”

  “And because he had money.”

  “I have money, too. Not as much as Art does, it’s true—”

  “And because he liked to hit me.”

  “He hit you?”

  “With his fist. When he got angry.”

  “Christ, I had no idea, Phyllis.”

  “He got angry once because his team lost the Super Bowl. He threw me across the room, and then he hit me. Three times. Twice in the face. And then in the stomach. He had to take me to the hospital.”

  “My God, I never realized Art was like that, Phyllis. I mean, when he was married to Stacy—”

  She cut in, “I remember the hospital. It was on the Lower East Side. St. Ignatius. I remember it smelled bad. I remember it was noisy. And I remember I hurt.”

  I looked at her. She was staring straight ahead.

  “I remember I hurt,” she repeated. She was speaking in a dead, husky monotone. “I never hurt like that before. Not like that. And I knew that Art had done something bad to me. Something no one was ever going to be able to fix.”

  I grinned at her, though she wasn’t looking at me. I said, “Well, thankfully, Phyllis, they did—”

  “I heard them say that he’d broken my jaw and that he’d ruptured my spleen, too.” I noticed then that she was walking very stiffly, as if she were in pain; I asked her if she was all right, and she ignored me. “They said my spleen had to come out. ‘It’s got to come out,’ they said. So they took it out. And then I heard them say that I had lost a lot of blood, too much blood.” We were closing on the bus stop; there were a half-dozen people clustered at it, and one of them, a young black man smoking a cigarette and wearing a gray sports jacket and black scarf, who was hugging himself for warmth—which I thought was odd, because it wasn’t a cold evening—looked over, smiled, and nodded.

  Someone else at the bus stop said loudly, “There it is,” and pointed. I looked and saw our bus a block-and-a-half away. “We’d better hurry up, Phyllis,” I said, and walked faster. She kept pace with me. She said, “Too much blood. That’s what I heard them say: ‘Too much blood.’ And I remember looking down at myself and thinking, ‘Gee, that really is too much blood …” The young man in the gray sports jacket and black scarf tossed his cigarette down, smiled and nodded again. It was then that I realized he was nodding at Phyllis.

  “Phyllis?” I said. “Do you know that guy?”

  She wasn’t listening to me. She was still talking about St. Ignatius, and though she was keeping pace with me, she was still walking very stiffly and was still speaking in that awful, dead, husky monotone. “I saw them put the I-V bags up. I wanted to yell at them, ‘Hey, that’s not going to do any good.’ “

  I heard the bus behind us, closing fast; we were a good fifty feet from the bus stop. “We’d better run, Phyllis,” I said, and began jogging toward the stop. I soon realized that Phyllis had fallen behind. I looked back.

  She was trying to jog. She was trying very hard. But she was keeping her arms straight and stiff at her sides. And her knees were not bending correctly as she ran; they were bowing slightly outward, as if her thigh muscles had become very weak, and the only connec
tion between her thighs, knees, and calves was in the bones themselves. And she had her head heldhigh, too, so her chin was jutting forward, and a pathetic, tight-lipped, wide-eyed look of grim determination was on her face.

  I stopped jogging at once.

  She caught up with me. I put my arm out so it fell across her chest and so my hand was clutching her left shoulder. She stopped. “Phyllis …” I began.

  The bus pulled up to the bus stop. The small crowd of people started getting on.

  “You okay, Phyllis?”

  And she answered, her voice a long, shallow wheeze, “I don’t think I’m used to the exercise, Abner. Forgive me. Please forgive me. It’s the cold air—”

  “What’s to forgive, Phyllis?”

  She said nothing; she looked confused.

  “C’mon,” I said. “That bus isn’t going to wait forever.”

  Thomas and Lorraine Pellaprat lived in what appeared, at first glance, to be a long-abandoned apartment house not unlike several thousand others in Manhattan. It was a ten-story building, the color of dirty cream, with tall, narrow windows, and it was streaked brown here and there from air pollution. Several of the windows visible from the street had been covered by plywood, and a few others appeared to be broken.

  “This is where your parents live, Phyllis?” I said. I was confused; the Pellaprats had looked very much like they had money.

  She answered, “Apartment 506, Abner.”

  “We’ll probably have to walk up, right?”

  “Probably.”

  “I was going to bring them a bottle of wine, some rose—”

  “No,” she cut in. “They don’t drink. They used to, but not anymore.”

  “Not at all?”

  “Not a drop.”

  We were standing at the base of the wide, crumbling cement steps. I held my hand out toward them. “Shall we?” I said.

  And Phyllis said, her eyes on the middle of the building, apparently on her parents’ apartment, “This is a very special night, Abner. You have no idea how special. This has not been done before.” And she started quickly up the steps, her movements now very fluid and graceful.

  I followed.

  At the Hammet Mausoleum, Halloween, 1965

  Sam said to me, “We’re just having some fun, Abner. Don’t you think this is fun?”

  I shrugged. “I’m getting cold, Sam.”

  “It’s the demon’s breath on your bones.”

  “Shit, too!”

  “What are you—afraid we’re going to get caught?”

  I shrugged again. “Maybe.”

  ” ‘Cuz who’s gonna catch us, you know?” He nodded to his right, then his left. “You think these people here could care less? Shit, they’re probably happy for the company.”

  “Uh-huh.” Another shrug. “Maybe we should go, Sam. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea.”

  “We won’t touch ‘em, for Christ’s sake!”

  “Who said anything about touching ‘em, Sam? I didn’t. I’m not sick—” I changed my position again on the cement floor; my entire right leg was asleep. “Jees, Sam, if we stay here much longer my whole damn body’s gonna be asleep.”

  “Quiet!” he said, and his finger went to his mouth. “Shh!”

  “Gimme a break—”

  “Quiet! I hear something!”

  I put my hand on the floor, prepared to stand.

  “Sit down, Goddamnit!”

  I sat.

  “I really do, Abner.” A short pause. “I hear someone talking.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  I have learned this, too, in the past six months; I have learned that even the dead are ignorant.

  Phyllis and I had to walk up to Apartment 506. The elevator clearly was not working; its doors were stuck open, and the car itself was stalled several feet below floor level.

  “When was the last time you visited your parents, Phyllis?” I asked.

  We started for the stairway, to the right, across the lobby. The lobby was dark, but not pitch dark; there were several low-wattage, bare bulbs installed at regular intervals in dull beige, leaf-motif ceiling fixtures.

  Phyllis answered, “Not for a long while, Abner.”

  The building’s interior was clean—which I’d expected, despite its outward appearance, because the Pellaprats had appeared to be very clean people.

  “Have your mother and father been here long, Phyllis?” I asked.

  We started up the stairs. They too were lit by the same kind of low-wattage bulbs in the same kind of ceiling fixtures. She answered, “Yes, Abner, I believe that they have.”

  The stairs were made of metal, so her high-heeled boots made a lot of noise.

  “You don’t keep in touch with them, do you?” It was more a statement than a question.

  “We find it difficult to keep in touch, Abner. We always have. We have different … approaches to living, I think.”

  We got to the second-floor landing. I looked up, toward the third floor; there was no light. “Be careful, Phyllis,” I said.

  She did not answer. She was walking several feet ahead of me, to my right, and as we climbed toward the third floor, I found that the only way I could tell where she was, exactly, was by her white coat and her white boots and the sound her high heels made when they hit the metal stairs—a kind of rhythmic, echoing clop-clop noise.

  I heard her say: “They liked you, Abner. They didn’t like Art. Art was cruel. And Art had money.”

  She was speaking, again, in the same, low, husky monotone I’d heard her use when we were making our way to the bus stop. “Yes,” I said, “you told me about Art.” I quickened my pace on the stairs to catch up with her, but she stayed several feet ahead of me, though the timing of her heels on the metal steps didn’t change. “I still can’t believe it, Phyllis—”

  “I remember St. Ignatius, Abner. I remember I hurt, and I remember that I bled.”

  I took a chance, then, and mounted two stairs in one stride; “It must be awfully painful to remember,” I began, and found that she still was several feet ahead of me, her heels clop-clopping on the metal steps. “I’ve never had surgery myself, Phyllis.”

  “And I don’t blame him anymore, Abner. I did at first—in the first couple of days.”

  “That’s very generous.”

  “I remember thinking, Abner, how strange it was that there still were days.”

  “I’m sorry, Phyllis. I don’t understand that.”

  “Of course you do; of course you understand it, Abner.”

  We got to the third-floor landing. I stopped a moment, to rest, because the air here was stale and hard to breathe. “Want to hold on a moment, Phyllis, until I can catch my breath?” She kept walking. “Phyllis?” I called. I saw her white coat and white boots merge with the darkness. I still could hear the clop-clop of her heels on the metal steps, and I called to her again, “Phyllis, hold on, okay?” And I sensed something like desperation in my voice. I grinned, as if to chase it away. “Jesus, it’s pitch dark down here, Phyllis.” The clop-clop of her heels ended. She called back, “Abner? Are you there?”

  “Yes, right here, Phyllis. Hold on.” I started up the stairs, toward the fourth floor.

  “Abner, where are you? I can’t see you!” And now I could hear desperation in her voice.

  “It’s okay, Phyllis!” I called, and quickened my pace. “It’s okay; I’m coming!”

  “Abner, I can’t see you; where are you?” It was more than desperation that I heard in her voice now. It was something closer to panic.

  “I’m right down here, Phyllis. I’m coming up to you.”

  “Abner, please, Abner—”

  “Don’t worry, Phyllis; I’m coming!” I got to the fourth-floor landing. I stopped. “Phyllis?”

  “Abner, where are you?” She was pleading with me.

  “Here, Phyllis. Just below you.” I looked up the stairs, toward the fifth floor. I saw nothing. “Where are you, Phyllis?”

  Silence.
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  “Phyllis?” I started for the fifth floor. “Phyllis, are you up there?” I could see the suggestion of light above me. “Phyllis, please answer me.” I heard nothing.

  I became aware of a cold draft from above, apparently from the fifth floor. “Phyllis?” I called again. Still nothing. The light was brighter now. I could see that there was another leaf-motif ceiling fixture with a bare low-wattage bulb installed in it. I could see, also, the top edge of the fire door that opened onto the fifth-floor hallway.

  I called to Phyllis again. And again I heard nothing. I thought, This is a kind of game she’s playing. I didn’t believe it. I didn’t believe she was capable of such games.

  “Phyllis?” I called. I had reached the fifth-floor landing. “Phyllis?” I pulled the fire door open all the way and stepped into the hall.

  Apartment 506 was directly in front of me. I stepped across the hall and knocked softly on the door.

  Phyllis answered my knock at once. She was smiling playfully, and I could see Thomas and Lorraine Pellaprat behind her, in the apartment—he still in his dark blue suit and highly polished wingtips, and seated in a big, high-backed wooden chair near the far wall, and she in her nicely tailored herringbone-tweed pants suit, in a small, rose-colored upholstered rocker beside him. They had their hands folded on their laps, and they were smiling small, pleasant, friendly smiles. They nodded at me, first Thomas and then Lorraine. Then Phyllis said, “Come in, Abner, come in. Where have you been?”

  I stepped in. The apartment, what I could see of it—the living room, the dining area, and a small kitchen—was sparsely decorated. The wallpaper was a slightly shabby but very delicate blue-on-white bird print with a blue-striped border, and the only piece of furniture besides the chairs the Pellaprats were sitting in was an ancient, overstuffed red couch that was standing against the left wall, kitty-corner to the Pellaprats. There were no rugs on the hardwood floors, and when Phyllis moved across them, her heels made sharp, clicking noises, like a tap dancer’s—I got the idea that these people did a lot of dancing because there were numerous scuff marks on the floor.

  I had a pleasant evening. They gave me a wineglass half-filled with what tasted like coffee liqueur—which, because it was very bitter, I nursed until we left at 10:30—and we sat around the edges of the room and talked about light, inconsequential things. Mr. and Mrs. Pellaprat stopped calling me Abner Doubleday, though Phyllis had to remind them who I was exactly: “He’s my boyfriend; you remember. And he’s not at all like Art.” They nodded at this, and smiled oddly, as if they weren’t quite sure who Art was.