Lost

  “Very lovely. Right up your alley, I see. She comes prepared with quotes and sources.”

  He emptied his pint and belched in a quiet but very American way, a way she was, just now, not displeased to witness. “Here’s her best guess. Her specialty is hemp or linen or anything of leaf fiber; she doesn’t know as much about wool or how to authenticate its age or provenance. She says carbon dating of cloth, while rarely done, is possible. A lot of advances in microscopy made during that recent examination of the Shroud of Turin. Without a woven design or the application of paint it’s hard to be certain, but she guessed maybe six, maybe seven hundred years old. And no doubt deteriorating at an exponential rate, now that you’ve exposed it to light and air. Look, the fibers are dancing off the thing like dandruff.” And so they were.

  “I don’t believe it for a moment,” she said. “A six-hundred-year-old shroud? When is that? I can’t count backward after one drink.”

  “She thought sometime between 1300 and 1400. Possibly French or Flemish. She didn’t want to give it back to me, in fact.”

  “Did you show her the little mark in it, the little icon?”

  “I did. She made nothing of it. Spilled blood, perhaps. She didn’t see it as an identifying code of any sort.”

  “Dr. Annelise Berchstein.”

  “She’d be delighted to consider the matter further, but unless it comes to her under the auspices of a professional collection like a museum, she’s not able to spend much time at it gratis.”

  “Did you tell her where it was found?”

  “Not the part of town, no. But where it was stored, yes, hammered into a dark pocket against a flue. She ventured that the dryness, the airlessness, the protection from insects preserved it these past hundred years or so. But it’s much older than the house, of course, so where it came from originally must also have been a protected space.”

  She did not speak, she did not say what she knew, or guessed. They left the pub and walked to Waterstone’s. Irv led her directly to the shelf of the Self-Help/Spirituality section and found The Dark Side of the Zodiac, the Partridge and Sons paperback edition. Ophelia Marley, Ph.D. He knew right where it was. He’d been checking up on her. He pointed out the print number—33—and said, “You’ve been living off this for a while, I see.”

  She was meant to be flattered that he was noticing her success, but all she could say was, “Sales slowing down in a worrying fashion.”

  “What does it say about me?” He flipped the book open.

  “It’s all bunk,” she said crossly. “You’re out to shame me. Close it.”

  “This is bunk,” he said, “but you believe in ghosts. You believe there’s a seven-hundred-year-old ghost haunting Rudge House, which is only two hundred years old, by your reckoning.”

  “You and your Annelise have given a birth date to this cloth, not to anything else.”

  “Dr. Berchstein to you,” he replied. “This is England, after all. We respect the formalities here.” He brushed her hand lightly to show he was making a joke, that he was near enough to her, now, to be able to tease her about a rival for his affections, a certain Madame Professor Fraülein Doktor Annelise Berchstein.

  “He should be here with you,” he said, “not me.” But she didn’t answer.

  There was a streetlight outside the hotel window, and as they stood there, the light flickered and went out. The instant it flickered, as if light in the godforsaken Balkans moved much more slowly than the speed of light--it moved at the speed of snow--their eyes met as they both were pausing in the first gesture of undress. She had dropped her coat on the floor and was bending to undo the clasp of a boot. She looked up at him like a washerwoman or a bending Degas dancer, from an odd position, seeing him towering at an unfamiliar angle--he was not of the build to tower, particularly. And he had let his coat slide from his shoulders and halfway down his arms, but there it stuck. A lick of light on his nose, on the snowy damp of his matted-down hair, and on his upper lip. She was in the frumpiest position imaginable, and about to stand up, when before she could, before their eyes could adjust to the ambient light outside, patterned by falling snow, he dropped to his knees, his coat a sodden carpet on which they clutched and fell.

  Then the usual business, all willpower and honorable intention taken hostage by lips, fingers, tongues. He smelled of a lemony sort of turpentine, not the sort of male smell she was used to. He was leaner than he seemed when dressed--she had never seen him naked before--and the sheets were like frost. She clung and pulled away and returned, making bearable the clammy cold sheets. He entered her--was there no other word for it than that?--how like an Old Testament possession by unclean spirits, it sounded, to be entered--and then, the cost of it too. But the act erased the last grasp she had of thinking, and she surrendered to the prehuman realm without language.

  The truth: sayable or not, she fucked back as hard as she was fucked.

  “Are you trying to spook me or something?”

  “No—no.” She shook her head. “Sorry. There’s just . . .” Her voice trailed off.

  “I’ve never believed in ghosts, but if anyone ever looked haunted, it’s you.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you, some days,” she said, and she began to laugh, “being haunted would seem a mighty relief. I mean, what better to take your mind off your own troubles than to be faced fair and square by a being so very aggrieved that it decides to hang on in the afterlife? Might help you remember how to count your blessings, if you needed reminding on how to do it.”

  “Will you autograph this book if I buy it?”

  “Will you buy it if I promise it’s nothing but hokum?”

  “Only then. If I thought you actually believed it I’d be polite and scram as soon as I could.”

  They wandered out of the bookstore and, without a word of negotiation about it, began to look at menus posted outside restaurants. Settled on the Café des Artistes, and got a table hunched into the corner. “White or red?” she said, studying the menu, unwilling to let him be too avuncular about this evening.

  “Champagne doesn’t come in red.”

  “How can you study ghosts if you don’t believe in them?” she said after the first sip, which she had taken in a hurry so he wouldn’t propose a toast and turn this into a ceremony.

  “The only way to study them is if you don’t believe in them,” he said. “Otherwise, it’s not study, it’s—ancestor worship—or a particular kind of prurience, maybe.”

  “Go on.”

  “It’s not ghosts I study, really. I study what people believed about them. How, in age after age, the notion of the afterlife serves the living, helps them reclaim their own lives with some urgency. How the Church tolerated stories of ghostly apparitions and remonstrations of the dead, to further its work of salvation.”

  “Salvation. Hah. A likely concept.”

  “Well, the afterlife was all the poor had. Their real lives being nasty, brutish, and short, as Hobbes’s catchphrase goes. Our notion that life can improve for individuals within their own lifetimes is a fairly modern one. Avoiding being damned was about all that you could hope for. That, and a potato for supper.”

  “So where do ghosts come in?”

  “They’ve always been around. You understand I mean”—he clinked his glass against hers, deviously working in a toast—“the notion of ghosts, not ghosts themselves.”

  “An eternal concept.”

  “The ancestor worship of our cave-dweller forebears is related to a very peculiarly human function. Our ability to anticipate our own mortality by deducing from the deaths of our loved ones what death means. Ghosts, it seems to me, are evidence of human panic.”

  “They’re portrayed otherwise, though, aren’t they? To me a ghost doesn’t have anything to do with the grief of those it left behind,” said Winnie. “A ghost is evidence only of its own panic. A ghost is the foul sad excrement of a life. The code word is ‘unfinished business’—”

  “What human soul have you e
ver known to die at a proper time, having finished all its business? Fulfilled all its human potential, exchanged all its sorrow for joy? I’m going for the lamb, by the way.”

  “Risotto with pulled chicken and asparagus for me.”

  The waiter took their order. “Besides,” Irv continued, “if a ghost is a figment of a life, some bit that has unfinished business, then the world should be overpopulated by ghosts. There should be no air left for the present moment to breathe.”

  “Suppose it is true that all humans have the ability to cast ghosts when they die. In your period of expertise, what did the Church make of the fact that ghosts aren’t universal?”

  “You pick up on one of my favorite threads. It’s always seemed to me unfair—these rolls are warm and Parmesany, try one—that so often it seems to be the well-connected dead who get to be ghosts. In medieval times, this usually means saints. Those dead ones rich in virtue. Saints could be counted on to be recognized, thanks to some characteristic tic or totem. But increasingly scholars are seeing that the apparition of the dead to the living was often a hallmark of a fucked-up funeral transaction.”

  “Transaction?”

  “After all, a proper burial was the sorry best that the living could offer the dead as a passkey to the afterlife. This was true for the Vikings and for the Egyptians and the Romans too of course. But what happened when a son was lost at sea, or a suicide couldn’t be buried in hallowed ground? Ghost tales coalesce around these sorts who provided worry and dread to the living.”

  “Then what did the ghosts say to the living?”

  “They asked help of the living, so that the souls of the ghosts could be at better rest. But I think we can take the abundance of tales of this variety as being an inclination of the living to say to the dead: Leave us alone. We want to go on. Our small community is blemished by your stupid botched death. Because what, really, is the job of the dead? It’s not to hang around, but to disappear—to clear the air for the living. As Jean-Claude Schmitt said—oh, apologies for the references, I’m an unrepentant lecturer—the goal of Chris-tian memorial masses and the celebration of All Saints’ Day, et cetera, was to separate the dead from the living, to keep the dead in their place. Once the living had discharged their duties to their dead relatives and companions, they could go back to living a full life.”

  “And that’s it, then: the goal of a ghost—”

  “To find someone who has the authority to dismiss it into full death. Leaving the dismissee the permission to live a full life without guilt or undue grief.”

  “The quick and the dead.” She mused. “It is, I suppose, part of what Dickens was saying. But in A Christmas Carol, Scrooge could have no effect on the sufferings of his poor partner, Marley. He could only save himself.”

  “Theme and variation. Nonetheless, the effect of Scrooge’s being haunted was that he dismissed his own fears and became a hugely fun guy again, a regular party animal.”

  Scrooge in the painting, his haunted, Bergmanesque inward torment? Hardly a party animal. “He’s my forebear, more or less. If not actual, then literary, in a way.”

  “You said something of the sort once before. I’m aquiver with professional curiosity. Pass your glass.”

  The lamb smelled glorious, all garlic and rosemary. The light of the candle flickered on the silver and the bleached linen. The murmur of Japanese tourists at the next table, their high exotic voices, made Winnie begin to be glad for the champagne. “So you don’t think the house is haunted.”

  “Your house? The flat where you found the cloth? No, of course not,” he said. “I’m a crusty old pedant. And if I saw your trademark slashed cross appear in the condensation of this window here, before my very eyes, I’d begin to murmur about statistical models regarding coincidences.”

  “And what if I said I saw such a cross and you didn’t?”

  “I’d believe with all my might that you said you saw it.”

  “Would you believe that I did see it?”

  “I don’t know. Experience so far in my life suggests not. But I’m not a novelist, and maybe it’s given to novelists to see things that associate professors can’t.”

  “You are being tolerant of a high-strung person in some degree of middle-class distress,” she said. “And after I gave you a false identity too. You’re not after me in any way, are you?”

  “You mean sexually? I’m not young enough and brash enough to answer you directly in any case. But a man is still allowed to care about a woman, is that not so? And vice versa? Without either of us knowing if we are in a prelude to friendship or romance, or if we’re just having an interlude of camaraderie due to the accident of having met each other at a fortune-teller’s? That’s the definition of being not haunted, by the way: being able to live in the moment without having either to lust for the future or to dread it.”

  “It’s only fair to say,” she ventured, “that I’m not available, for many reasons, to engage in romance.”

  “Maybe eventually that’ll break my heart. So far, I think: Oh, well, what do you know? For that matter, what do I know? I’m enjoying the lamb. What exactly is a noisette, do you know?”

  “But you have said nothing about your status. I mean married or gay or what?”

  “Every unmarried man of a certain age is presumed to be gay these days. Lots of married men too for that matter. I wouldn’t so much mind the presumption of it if a gay man would ask me out on a date, but since I don’t register on their meters as of particular merit I just blunder my way through parties, hunting for the nearest kid or grandparent or household pet to befriend.” He speared three julienned carrots on his fork and held them up and waggled them at her. “I’m a widower, so if anyone has a reason to believe in ghosts, it’s me. And I don’t.”

  “Oh. Oh, dear. I am very sorry.”

  “It was long ago,” he said, “and not as long as all that, either.”

  “I was married too.” She was unsure of her reasons for saying this.

  “I see,” he said, but did not press for more information. Of course, she had already invented for his behalf a husband in Scottsdale. No wonder he didn’t seem surprised.

  She looked at him, as close as she could, trying not to list the observations for a writer’s apprehension of this moment:

  His head turned down as if reading auguries in the roasted fennel and garlic mashed potatoes.

  His hair neither sandy with youth nor silver with age, just hair, just fair hair.

  The blush in his rough-scraped cheeks probably due not so much to the Veuve Clicquot as to the discomfort of talking about himself.

  Probably she could do no more than have dinner with this man, tonight, but she could do that.

  “Irv,” she said, and she put her hand lightly on his.

  The jolt of the touch kicked them both back, taking them unawares, and he smiled and blinked and said, “There there, no need to fuss over me. I’m a big boy. So tell me a little more of your family ghost story. The grandpappy Rudge piece. What’s the oldest proof you have that your great-great-et cetera grandfather was the model for Ebenezer Scrooge? Don’t tell me”—he held up his fork—“it isn’t a journal or a letter he wrote, but the written record of someone else.”

  “Well, I hate for you to be right so soon. But you are. As far as we can trace the source of the family gossip about it, the oldest mention is made in a letter from Ozias Rudge’s son Edward to Edward’s niece Dorothea.”

  “What does Edward say? Do you remember?”

  “Oh, I don’t recall verbatim, but I’ve seen the pages in question many times. John probably has them in photocopy, or did. The originals are in Boston. Anyway, through several family recollections, we deduce that late in life, Ozias came to know the immortal work of Christmas joy by Dickens. Then he, old Ozias Rudge, recalled the occasion of his being haunted by a specter. O. R., as we affectionately call him, had terrified the neighborhood children of Hampstead with his ghost story, and O. R. assumed that the boy Dickens
must have been one of the Hampstead urchins to stand slack-jawed at the narration. Dickens, at age twelve, did live in Hampstead briefly, at just the time of the supposed hauntings.”

  “You know a lot about what happened, what, a hundred fifty years ago?”

  “I researched it all once when I thought I could make a book of it. Don’t interrupt. Dickens had an obsession with his childhood. He loved recalling its griefs and reliving its brief but intense plea-sures. You see that in how Ebenezer Scrooge is haunted at first. The Ghost of Christmas Past takes Scrooge to see himself as a boy. Do you remember? The lonely young Ebenezer was reading by a fire in a huge deserted house. To the window beyond the chair there came Ali Baba and, oh, Robinson Crusoe, I think, and creatures from fairy tales. The figures of the boy’s reading and imaginative life were still there embedded in the mind of crabby old Scrooge. You could hazard the guess that the same is true of all of us—especially Dickens. In his later life the imaginary figures of childhood still obtained, emotionally I mean. Including the memory, maybe, of an old man made miserable from sleepless nights of being haunted.”

  “Well, then the most scary ghosts of A Christmas Carol are really the figures of Scrooge himself. The past child Scrooge, the embittered current one, the future dead Scrooge. If you press me for a psychological reading about it, I’d say there’s your ticket. Folks are more haunted by themselves than anything else.”

  “Very slick. And who can argue with that, except, perhaps, a real ghost.” She was enjoying this. “But of course there’s no way of saying anything assured about the roots of A Christmas Carol.”

  “How much of O. R.’s recollection had to do with Christmas past, present, or to come?”

  “None at all, except that the hauntings, which happened on successive nights, occurred during the winter solstice. Rudge didn’t mention any Christmas overtones to it, but then, as we know, back then Christmas wasn’t celebrated with the hoopla and hysteria that it has come to be—thanks in part to Dickens himself.”