Lost

  “John, she’s your neighbor, not mine.”

  “Understood. But you seem to have made yourself familiar with her while I’ve been away.”

  “I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean, John. It sounds more disapproving even than your usual. But to answer your question, as far as I know she’s alone in the world. Her husband died long ago.”

  “If she dies, someone will have to see to her affairs. I wonder if Camden Council takes care of such things?”

  “Completely beyond me. I took care of the cat, that was my job.”

  “What was that business with the cat, anyway?”

  “You didn’t ask her?”

  “She didn’t know anyone else was in the ambulance with her. She was too busy carrying on a conversation with herself to talk to me. But you must have an idea.”

  Winnie did have an idea, but it was old, and tired, and stupid, like most of her ideas these days. “I know what Wendy would have said. It was the ghost of Jack the Ripper that your workers uncorked from your pantry wall. It floated free-form through the house and dislodged the chimney pot that nearly took out old Jenkins. It found a footing in Chutney and began to stretch its claws—to stretch Chutney’s claws, I mean—and Chutney became a lethal house pet, murdering its companions. Then, who knows, Mrs. M passed her own sell-by date, and the idea of the dead cats sent her over the edge. How she caught Chutney and why she cooked him I don’t know, but in the best of times she wasn’t all there. Remember that phrase, whose is it, about a place: there isn’t any there there? Is it Gertrude Stein? Doesn’t matter. Of Mrs. M, there wasn’t much there there even in her better days.”

  “Wendy?” said John.

  “Wendy,” she said impatiently, “Wendy Pritzke.”

  “Oh oh oh oh,” he said. “Oh.”

  “But she would have been wrong, of course, because the ghost that came out wasn’t Jack the Ripper, it wasn’t a man. Unless Jack the Ripper was a woman, a possibility that’s never been disproven. According to Ritzi Ostertag—”

  “Ritzi Ostertag?”

  “The medium. The seer. I told you. Didn’t I? The fortune-teller. He said the cloth hanging behind your pantry wall was the shroud of a woman, and Irv Hausserman—”

  “Irv Hausserman. That’s right. You’ve been consulting a bevy of experts.”

  “Don’t be a bastard. I’m only answering the question you asked. Irv as I may have mentioned is a historian, and someone at the V and A said the shroud was much older than that. Possibly real solid Middle Ages.”

  “So,” said John. “To sum up. You come to town and I leave, and you handily avoid facing the facts of why I have done so—”

  “I have avoided no facts, John. I have been rather busy with affairs stemming from your absence as you can tell—”

  “And I see the note I left you is there on the desk”—he pointed at it—“unopened and unread. As I say, you avoid the reality and instead find a medieval ghost to exhume out of this very nonmedieval home. You are not writing just now, you say. But you are stalking through a plot constructed out of unverifiable bits and pieces and stupid—I will say it—stupid hypotheses by fringe characters posing as experts in parapsychology and medieval history? Why are you embellishing a sad and real story with nonsense out of some juvenile campfire ghost story? Is it to keep from acknowledging that the real story is done, Winnie? And that there’s no life on the other side of it for you—and frankly no relief for me either—until you acknowledge it? You’re madder than Mrs. Maddingly, and that takes some doing.”

  “John, I saw what I saw.”

  “You will see anything but what is in front of your face.” He picked up the envelope. “Read this in front of me. Now. Read it before I go. And I’m not coming back until you’re gone out of here.”

  “I’ll leave now. I’ll just finish packing and be gone in ten minutes—”

  “Read it.” He looked as if he would strangle her. She turned her head away from him, hating to see his face. But he would not move and she could not, so finally she gave a whimper and tore open the damned thing.

  “Read it aloud.”

  “I will not.”

  “You do or I’ll take it from you and read it to you myself. I want to know you have heard the words it says. Winnie. Please. For your sake. For mine. Please.”

  She shrugged, held it out to him but still didn’t turn to look at his face. He cursed her under his breath and opened the folded page.

  “Dated October thirtieth,” he said. “And before I start I should say I resent your shirking this responsibility. Classic, though. You despise certain kinds of privilege in others but you take every kind of liberty for yourself that suits you. The letter.

  “ ‘Dear Winnie. I’m not the writer you are so as you know I take pen to hand unwillingly. But I have had no luck in reaching you by phone and the post is unreliable at best. I have been trying to get your attention and you deftly sidestep everything with your gaze focused on some internal middle distance. In fairness I usually put it down to artistic temperament but enough is enough. So with reluctance I am writing you this note for you to find on your arrival in London. I am not going to be here while you are here. I am not able to stay in the same place with you. I have to go abroad for work, somewhat unexpectedly. I could postpone it but why. I think it better I should go. I assume you will use my flat overnight or even for several nights while you make adjustments to your plans. You’ll find workers on the premises by the way; that’s accidental, but since I think and hope it unlikely you’ll stay it’ll be a chance for some work to be done while I’m gone.’

  “New paragraph. ‘The thing Winnie is this: I can no longer waltz around the regret about what happened in Romania as if it hadn’t happened. I had thought a little time would put a helpful distance on things, would allow us to forgive and find a new footing for our long friendship. We can choose either to die of shame and sorrow or we can recover. I have no intention of dying but I fear you have no intention of recovering. And I am not the person I was before we went to Romania. I miss that fellow sometimes, that aging undergraduate, who into his early forties could still smile with a certain amount of foolish innocence. And I certainly miss you, in every way. (Every way but one, as you will have trouble hearing, but I need to say it so that you face it: I do not miss you as a lover.) But I have access to nothing of you, just a simulacrum, is that the word?—a gluey-eyed manikin. Not Winifred Rudge, my cousin and dear friend, but some sort of Winnie-the-Scrooge, stuck in your sorrows and unable to reform yourself the way your famous great-great-great-grandfather could and did.’

  “New paragraph. Last one. ‘So this is what I cannot say to you in person, because you will not listen, you leave the room, you get a sudden inspiration and dive into a notebook or flee to a library to do some research or have a sudden appetite for a nap. You must put Romania behind you. It is over. There is nothing you can do about it. You are not responsible and more to the point’ (this part, Winnie, I underlined for emphasis) ‘no more am I. I only hope that my writing this and my leaving you alone here until next time will finally register with you. I truly can’t imagine what else I can do to get your attention. Your loving friend. J.’ ”

  He handed her the envelope and the letter. “That’s it. Now did you hear it?”

  The notebook that was to have been the Wendy Pritzke story, these weeks later, was still full of empty white pages. Something in Winnie couldn’t make the simple gestures anymore: the shrug, the middle finger, the wink, the wince, the kiss, the genuflection. She was trying as hard as she could to unriddle herself, wasn’t she? What more could she do?

  “You’ve no right to intrude,” she said at last. “You gave up that right. And there is no longer such a thing as reform, not the way old Ozias Rudge managed it, nor Ebenezer Scrooge. Things don’t really get better in life. Do you remember the text? Dickens Hallmarked it up. In the book, Tiny Tim didn’t die. But in Victorian England, he would have died.”

  “I kno
w,” said John. “And I know people die. And people leave. And people change. But so must you.”

  “If you’re right, if I’m stalled, it’s not because of a weakness in the fabric of my soul. I don’t believe in the soul, anyway, and I hardly believe in character anymore. If I’m stuck in one place, it’s because some little wooden sphere in a precise place on my personal double-helix model of DNA doesn’t allow me to obey the instructional poem. Do you remember it?”

  “I don’t know what you’re on about.”

  She imagined wagging her finger at him as she recited:

  “When in danger, when in doubt,

  Run in circles, scream and shout.

  “But that’s not what I do, John. I don’t scream and shout. My personal inheritance of genetic code says: When in doubt, freeze.”

  “DNA as fate is just as much a cop-out as Freudianism. Or as astrology.”

  “Touché, my dear.”

  He wiped his eyes on the back of his palms. “If you could work over your own life as you so willingly work out your fictions.”

  “Do you think I have had my soul cauterized on purpose?”

  “You are too busy working on some fiction in your head that says you and I are to blame for what happened. We’re not. There’s no—no contingency—in it, it’s just accident and coincidence at work. That you refuse to move forward is to lend—”

  But she couldn’t listen to this anymore. She dropped the letter on the floor and stood looking at John with her hand open, flapping, exaggerating with cruelty the gesture of dismissal, and then she raked her hair behind her ears with two fingers. She picked up her leather catchall and her computer case and left the larger suitcase where it stood.

  “It’s your house,” she said, “handle your ghosts on your own.”

  “A deal.” Spoken to her back as she headed down the stairs. “If you grapple with yours.”

  She took a tiny airless room near the British Museum, and couldn’t sleep for the traffic noise. What a pig’s breakfast she was making of things—the ghosts of Christmas Past and Present and Yet to Come vying for attention with the ghost of Jack the Ripper, or Jacqueline the Ripstress, or some parlor maid behind a wall.

  She went to Ritzi Ostertag’s, but his place seemed closed for business, some bottles of unclaimed milk going sour at his door. She tacked a note to his door anyway, saying: RITZI: Please give my whereabouts to Irving Hausserman if he should request it, and below that she scrawled the hotel phone number and address.

  She made a call to Boston. She did not want to speak to anyone from her former life. She called Adrian Moscou instead. She got him. She told him where her key was hidden and what the security code was for the alarm system. (She didn’t tell him the alarm had malfunctioned recently, and hoped that if he was arrested and jailed for trespassing the other detainees would be pleasant to him.) She explained where the photocopied pages of Edward Rudge’s letters were kept, and asked for them to be sent by air express to London.

  “And what do I get out of it?” said Adrian.

  “If I get a story out of it,” she said, “I’ll dedicate it to you and your boyfriend.”

  “That’s thin beer. How about a dinner date, the three of us, when you get back?”

  “You have no business liking me, you don’t even know me. No one who knows me likes me anymore. Just save the receipt and I’ll reimburse you.”

  “You better. Forever Families is milking us dry. We’re going to be welfare dads.”

  She wandered around Whitechapel, trying to get back into the Jack the Ripper story that Wendy Pritzke was supposed to be writing. It was too far away. She felt like Ritzi Ostertag on a bad day, unable to get a reading on anything.

  He showed up a day or two later, with a bunch of treats from the food hall at Harrods. They lunched on a bench in Green Park, huddled under an umbrella that kept tipping over. “Smart of you to leave that note for me at Ostertag’s,” he said. “I kept calling your cousin but only got the answering machine.”

  “I suspect he’s steering clear of the place until the renovation is done.”

  “Or until he sees you’ve come in during the day and removed the rest of your luggage. How are you managing?”

  “I replenished the basic toiletries at Boots, and did some emergency clothes shopping at John Lewis. What are your plans?”

  “I’m not here much longer,” he said. “I’ve a return ticket for a week from Thursday. The semester’s coming to an end. There are department meetings I need to sit in on, to make sure I don’t get elected chair of the history department in my absence.”

  “Has it been valuable for you? The research? Sounds as if you’ve been more successful than I.”

  “I hate the new British Library, but I’m an antediluvian. Yes, it’s been okay. I’ve been concentrating on manuscripts about charivaris.”

  “Charivaris being what?”

  “Not sure of the etymology—I think it’s uncertain—but it refers to the raucous noise—the OED says ‘rough music’—made by banging pots and drums and household implements on the occasion of an unpopular marriage. The earliest literary reference is contained in a fourteenth-century manuscript, Le Roman de Fauvel, in which—”

  “You can spare me the bibliographic citations.”

  He looked hurt, but only for a moment. “I thought you had a lively curiosity about such things.”

  “I do, my dear,” she said, “but I have my own rough music in my head. Charivari is as good a term for what ails me as anything else. But go on; I was being rude.”

  “To prove that I can go on, I shall. Not for nothing have I been wearing out the seat of my pants at the British Library.” He flicked an olive pit into the shrubbery. “The charivari in Fauvel is gorgeously specific. I care less about the allegorical characters of Fauvel and his new bride, Vainglory, than I do about the charivari designed to disrupt their wedding night. It’s a kind of Feast of Fools carried out in the bedchamber. Youths dressed in clerical habits or old bits of sacking, youths dressed as girls, youths showing their bare bums, or masked as wild men of the forest. They tear the place up like a rock band in a hotel room, breaking windows and smashing doors and the like. They tease and they torment and jeer. They tickle the private parts of the wife, to distract her from her husband’s attentions; they scare poor Fauvel with a funeral procession. It’s just grand.” He sighed with gusto. “Even grander that it doesn’t work. Fauvel has his way with his wife despite the charivari. In Fauvel, see, marriage wins. Sex is more sexy than death.”

  She said, “We are all too fascinated with this stuff.”

  “And why shouldn’t we be?” he said. “Look, but I didn’t come to talk to you about my research. I came to see how you are.”

  She shook her head. “By now you should know that I never tell people how I am. I’m too good a liar.”

  “You’re too bad a liar, you mean. I can see for myself, plain as day. For one thing, the clothes you bought on Oxford Street are all black. But I have another bit of gossip as well. Have you been to see your so-called Mrs. M in the hospital?”

  “No. Surely you haven’t been?”

  “Are you kidding?” he said. “After you told me about it that night at dinner, I went out of a simple need for you to be impressed with my charity. But after the first time, I went again. And I’m going back this afternoon.” He patted the canvas satchel on the bench beside him. “With this.”

  “What? You’re bringing her a picnic hamper? Just because the hospital cuisine isn’t up to snuff?”

  “No. Underneath the food. A tape recorder.”

  “What for?”

  “Come,” he said. “You’ll see.”

  They made their way gingerly along the sidewalk, the paving stones plastered with wet leaves. Winnie said, “I can’t imagine why you’re doing this. Why you went to see her.”

  “Can’t you really?” He looked at her almost fondly. “Want to take a guess?”

  “Oh, that?” She felt horrible,
ancient, an exhumed mummy herself. The waistband on her panties was unraveling, and she had a charley horse in her left calf. Also a lump in her throat. “I told you I’m not free for a sentimental attachment.”

  “What a lovely old-fashioned way to put it. And anyway, that makes you all the more novel to be with. Just in case.”

  She felt cold and superior. “You’re following me about because I’m the only citizen of this modern world, at least of your acquaintance, to claim any truck with ghosts. You’re examining me like a specimen. Maybe you’ll have some flash of inspiration about how the medieval mind worked. Or are you intending to trot out a sidebar to some newspaper piece, or work me into the preface of your book, to give it commercial appeal? Hauntings in the Twenty-First Century?”

  “You know, you are occasionally paranoid to the point of being delusional yourself. Would you like me to find you a room here at the Royal Free Hospital, as long as we’re on the premises, so you can take a rest cure?

  “Not,” he added, holding open the door for her, “that your commercial instincts are off, at all. Mostly I do modest little essays in professional journals no one reads except professionals. Would that I had your grasp of what sold.”

  They rode a lift to the seventh floor: Health Services for Elderly People. Outside the elevator doors, Winnie paused and put her hand out to stay Irv, for a moment, as she readied herself to see Mrs. Maddingly. The throbbing of heat and ventilation systems, the hush of elevators rushing in their shafts, it all made a ringing in the air, as if the building had tinnitus.

  They passed through the doors in the Berry ward, one of four arms reaching out from the heart of the building. The linoleum floor was the color of white coffee; the air smelled, inevitably, of overboiled brussels sprouts. There was a quiet buzz of competence in the nurses’ station overlooking a central ward with multiple beds, all filled, none with anyone familiar.