Ghost Story

  “That’s it, isn’t it?” Peter asked. “It’s all over now. We did it all.”

  “Yes, Peter,” Ricky said. “It’s all over.”

  And for a moment the two men exchanged glances of agreement. Don stood up and walked as if idly to the window and saw only a slackening storm. He turned to the boy and embraced him.

  20

  “How do you feel?” Don asked.

  “He asks how I feel,” Ricky said, supported by pillows on his bed in the Binghamton hospital. “Pneumonia is no fun. It affects the system adversely. I advise you to refrain from getting it.”

  “I’ll try,” Don said. “You almost died. They just got the highway open in time for the ambulance to bring you up here. If you hadn’t pulled through, I’d have had to take your wife to France this spring.”

  “Don’t tell that to Stella. She’ll run in here and pull my tubes out.” He smiled wryly. “She’s so eager to get to France she’d even go with a pup like you.”

  “How long will you have to stay in here?”

  “Two more weeks. Apart from the way I feel, it’s not too bad. Stella has managed to terrify all the nurses, so they take excellent care of me. Thank you for the flowers, by the way.”

  “I missed you,” Don said. “Peter misses you too.”

  “Yes,” Ricky said simply.

  “It’s a funny thing about this whole affair. I feel closer to you and Peter—and Sears, I guess I have to say—than anyone since Alma Mobley.”

  “Well, you know my thoughts about that. I blurted them all out when that young doctor doped me to the gills. The Chowder Society is dead, long live the Chowder Society. Sears once said to me that he wished he wasn’t so old. I was a bit taken aback at the time, but I agree with him now. I wish I could see Peter Barnes grow up—I wish I could help him. You’ll have to do that for me. We owe him our lives, you know.”

  “I know. Whatever we don’t owe to your cold.”

  “I was completely befuddled, back in that room.”

  “So was I.”

  “Well, thank God for Peter. I’m glad you didn’t tell him.”

  “Agreed. He’s been through enough. But there is still a lynx to be shot.”

  Don nodded.

  “Because,” Ricky continued, “otherwise she’ll just come back again. And keep on coming back until all of us and most of our relatives are dead. I’ve supported my children for too long to want to see them go that way. And as much as I hate to say it, it looks like it’s your job.”

  “In every way,” Don said. “It was really you who destroyed both Gregory and Fenny. And Peter killed their boss. I have to take care of the remaining business.”

  “I don’t envy you the job. But I do have confidence in you. You have the knife?”

  “I picked it up off the floor.”

  “Good. I’d hate to think of it being lost. You know, back in that terrible room I think I saw the answer to one of the puzzles Sears and I and the others used to talk about. I think we saw the reason for your uncle’s heart attack.”

  “I think so too,” Don said. “Just for a second. I didn’t know that you saw it too.”

  “Poor Edward. He must have walked into John’s spare bedroom, expecting at the worst to find his actress in bed with Freddy Robinson. And instead she—what? Threw off the mask.”

  Ricky was now very tired, and Don stood up to go. He put a stack of paperback books and a bag of oranges on the table beside Ricky’s bed.

  “Don?” Even the old man’s voice was grainy with exhaustion.

  “Yes?”

  “Forget about pampering me. Just shoot me a lynx.”

  21

  Three weeks later, when Ricky was at last released from the hospital, the storms had wholly vanished, and Milburn, no longer under siege, convalesced and healed as surely as the old lawyer. Supplies reached the grocery stores and supermarkets: Rhoda Flagler saw Bitsy Underwood at the Bay Tree Market, turned red as a radish and rushed over to apologize for pulling out her hair. “Oh, those were terrible days,” Bitsy said. “I probably would have clobbered you if you’d got to that damned pumpkin first.”

  The schools reopened; businessmen and bankers went back to work, taking down their shutters and facing the mounds of paperwork that had accumulated on their desks; slowly, the joggers and walkers began to appear on Milburn’s streets again. Annie and Anni, Humphrey Stalladge’s two good-looking barmaids, grieved for Lewis Benedikt and married the men they were living with; they conceived within a week of one another. If they had boys, they’d name them Lewis.

  Some businesses never did open up again: a few men had gone bankrupt—you have to pay rent and property taxes on a shop, even if it is buried under a snowdrift. Others closed for more somber reasons. Leota Mulligan thought about running the Rialto by herself, but sold the site to a franchise chain and married Clark’s brother six months later: Larry was less a dreamer than Clark had been, but he was a dependable man and good company and he liked her cooking. Ricky Hawthorne quietly closed down the law office, but a young attorney in town persuaded him to sell him the firm’s name and goodwill. The new man took back Florence Quast and had new nameplates made for the door and the front of the building. Hawthorne, James was now Hawthorne, James and Whittacker. “Pity his name isn’t Poe,” Ricky said, but Stella didn’t think that was funny.

  During all this time, Don waited. When he saw Ricky and Stella, they talked about the travel brochures that now covered the enormous coffee table; when he saw Peter Barnes, they talked about Cornell, about the writers the boy was reading, about how his father was adjusting to life without Christina. Twice Don and Ricky drove to Pleasant Hill and placed flowers on all the graves which had come into being since John Jaffrey’s funeral. Buried together in a straight line were Lewis, Sears, Clark Mulligan, Freddy Robinson, Harlan Bautz, Penny Draeger, Jim Hardie—so many new graves, separate piles of earth, still lumpy. In time, when the earth had settled, they would have their headstones. Christina Barnes was buried farther off beneath another heap of raw earth, on half of the double plot Walter Barnes had bought. Elmer Scales’s family had been buried closer to the top of the hill, in the Scales family plot first purchased by Elmer’s grandfather: a weatherworn stone angel guarded over them. There too they put flowers.

  “No sign of a lynx yet,” Ricky said as they drove back to town.

  “No lynx,” Don answered. Both of them knew that when it came, it would not be a lynx; and that the waiting might take months, years.

  Don read, looked forward to his dinners with Ricky and Stella, watched entire sequences of movies on television (Clark Gable in a bush jacket turning into Dan Duryea in a gangster’s nipped-in suit turning into graceful, winning Fred Astaire in a Chowder Society tuxedo), found he could not write; waited. Often he woke himself up in the middle of the night, weeping. He too had to heal.

  * * *

  In mid-March on a black wintry day just like those he and the Chowder Society had endured, a mail truck delivered a heavy package from a film rental company in New York. It had taken them two months to find a copy of China Pearl.

  He threaded his uncle’s projector and set up the screen and discovered that his hands were trembling so badly that it would have taken him three tries to light a cigarette. Just the sequence of setting up Eva Galli’s only movie brought back the apparition of Gregory Bate in the Rialto, where all of them could have died. And he found that he feared that Eva Galli would have Alma Mobley’s face.

  He had attached the speakers in case someone had added a musical sound track: made in 1925, China Pearl was a silent film. When he switched the projector on and sat back to watch, holding a drink to help his nerves, he discovered that the print had been altered by the distribution company. It was not just China Pearl, it was number thirty-eight in a series called “Classics of the Silent Screen”; besides a soundtrack, a commentary had been
added. That meant, Don knew, that the film had been heavily edited.

  “One of the greatest stars of the silent era was Richard Barthelmess,” said the announcer’s colorless voice, and the screen showed the actor walking down a mock-up of a street in Singapore. He was surrounded by Hollywood Filipinos and Japanese dressed as Malays—they were supposed to be Chinese. The announcer went on to describe Barthelmess’s career, and then summarized a story about a will, a stolen pearl, a false accusation of murder: the first third of the film had been cut. Barthelmess was in Singapore looking for the true murderer, who had stolen “the famous Pearl of the Orient.” He was aided by Vilma Banky, who owned a bar “frequented by waterfront scum” but “as a Boston girl, has a heart the size of Cape Cod . . .”

  Don turned the speakers off. For ten minutes he watched the lipsticked little actor gaze soulfully at Vilma Banky, topple villainous “waterfront scum,” run about on boats: he hoped that if Eva Galli would appear in this butchered version, he would recognize her. Vilma Banky’s bar housed a number of women who draped themselves over the customers and languorously sipped tall drinks. Some of these prostitutes were plain, some of them were stunning: any of them, he supposed, could have been Eva Galli.

  But then a girl appeared framed in the doorway of the bar, studio fog boiling behind her, and pouted at the camera. Don looked at her sensual, large-eyed face, and felt his heart freeze. He hurriedly switched on the soundtrack.

  “. . . the notorious Singapore Sal,” crooned the announcer. “Will she get to our hero?” Of course she was not the notorious Singapore Sal, that was an invention of whoever had written the inane commentary; but he knew she was Eva Galli. She sauntered through the bar and approached Barthelmess; she stroked his cheek. When he brushed her hand away, she sat down on his lap and kicked one leg in the air. The actor dumped her on the floor. “So much for Singapore Sal,” gloated the announcer.

  Don yanked out the speaker leads, stopped the film and backed it up to Eva Galli’s entrance, and watched the sequence again.

  He had expected her to be beautiful, and she was not. Beneath the makeup, she was just a girl of ordinary good looks; she looked nothing like Alma Mobley. She had enjoyed the business of acting, he saw, playing the part of an ambitious girl playing a part had amused her—how she would have enjoyed stardom! As Ann-Veronica Moore, she had played at it again; even Alma Mobley had seemed fitted for the movies. She could have molded that passive beautiful face over a thousand characters. But in 1925, she had miscalculated, made a mistake: cameras exposed too much, and what you saw when you looked at Eva Galli on screen was a young woman who was not likable. Even Alma had not been likable; even Anna Mostyn, when truly seen—as at the Barnes’s party—seemed coldly perverse, driven by willpower. They could for a time evoke human love, but nothing in them could return it. What you finally saw was their hollowness. They could disguise it for a time, but never finally, and that was their greatest mistake; a mistake in being. Don thought he could recognize it anywhere now, in any nightwatcher pretending to be man or woman.

  22

  At the beginning of April Peter Barnes came to visit him. The boy, who had seemed to be recovering from their terrible winter, slumped into a chair and ran his hands over his face. “I’m sorry to interrupt you. If you’re busy I’ll go away again.”

  “You can always come to see me,” Don said. “You never have to think twice about it. I mean that, Peter. I’ll never be anything but happy to see you. That’s a guarantee.”

  “I was hoping you’d say something like that. Ricky’s leaving in a week or two, isn’t he?”

  “Yes. I’m driving them to the airport next Friday. They’re both very excited about their trip. But if you want to see Ricky now, all I have to do is call him up. He’ll come.”

  “No, please don’t,” the boy said. “It’s bad enough I’m bothering you . . .”

  “For God’s sake, Peter,” Don said. “What’s the matter?”

  “Well, it’s just that I’ve been having an awful time lately. That’s why I wanted to see you.”

  “I’m glad you did. What’s wrong?”

  “I keep seeing my mother,” Peter said. “I mean, I dream about her all the time. It’s like I’m back in Lewis’s house, and I’m seeing that Gregory Bate grab her again—and I keep dreaming about the way he looked on the floor of the Rialto. All those smashed-up pieces of him moving around. Refusing to die.” He was close to tears.

  “Have you talked to your father about it?”

  Peter nodded. “I tried. I wanted to tell him everything, but he won’t listen. Not really. He looks at me like I’m five years old and telling him some made-up nonsense. So I stopped before I really started.”

  “You can’t blame him, Peter. Nobody who hadn’t been with us could believe it. If he can listen to part of it and not tell you you’re crazy, maybe that’s enough. Part of him was listening. Maybe part of him believes it. You know, I think there’s another problem too. I think you’re afraid that if you give up the horror and fear, that you’ll also be giving up your mother. Your mother loved you. And now she’s dead, and she died in a terrible way, but she put her love into you for seventeen or eighteen years, and there’s a lot of it left. The only thing you can do is carry on with it.”

  Peter nodded.

  Don said, “I once knew a girl who spent all day in a library and said she had a friend who protected her from vileness. I don’t know how her life turned out, but I do know that nobody can protect anybody else from vileness. Or from pain. All you can do is not let it break you in half and keep on going until you get to the other side.”

  “I know that’s true,” Peter said, “but it just seems so hard to do.”

  “You’re doing it right now. Coming here and talking to me is part of getting to the other side. Going to Cornell will be another big part of it. You’ll have so much work to do that you won’t be able to brood about Milburn.”

  “Can I see you again? After I’m in college?”

  “You can come to see me anytime at all. And if I’m not in Milburn, I’ll write to let you know where I am.”

  “Good,” Peter said.

  23

  Ricky sent him postcards from France; Peter continued to visit, and gradually Don saw that the boy was beginning to let the Bate brothers and Anna Mostyn fade into the background of his experience. In warm weather, with a new girlfriend who was also going to Cornell, Peter was beginning to relax.

  But it was a false peace, and Don still waited. He never let Peter see his own tension, but it grew every week.

  He had watched new arrivals to Milburn, had managed to look at all the tourists who checked into the Archer Hotel, but none of them had given him the thrill of fear Eva Galli had projected across fifty years. Several nights after drinking too much, Don dialed Florence de Peyser’s telephone number and said, “This is Don Wanderley. Anna Mostyn is dead.” The first time, the person at the other end simply replaced the phone in its cradle; the second time, a female voice said, “Isn’t this Mr. Williams at the bank? I think your loan is about to be recalled, Mr. Williams.” The third time, an operator’s voice told him that the telephone had been switched to an unlisted number.

  The other half of his anxiety was that he was running out of money. His bank account had no more than two or three hundred dollars in it—now that he was drinking again, enough for only a couple of months. After that he would have to find a job in Milburn, and any sort of job would keep him from patrolling the streets and shops, searching for the being whose arrival Florence de Peyser had promised.

  He spent two or three hours every day, now that the weather was warm, sitting on a bench near the playground in Milburn’s only park. You have to remember their time scale, he told himself: you have to remember that Eva Galli gave herself fifty years to catch up with the Chowder Society. A child growing up unobtrusively in Milburn could give Peter Barnes and hi
mself fifteen or twenty years of apparent safety before beginning to play with them. And then it would be someone everybody knew; it would have a place in Milburn; it would not be as visible as a stranger. This time, the nightwatcher would be more careful. The only limit on its time would be that it would want to act before Ricky died of natural causes—so perhaps it had to be ready in ten years.

  How old would that make it now? Eight or nine. Ten, perhaps.

  If.

  24

  And that was how he found her. At first, he was doubtful, watching the girl who had appeared at the playground one afternoon. She was not beautiful, not even attractive—she was dark and intense, and her clothes never seemed to be clean. The other children avoided her, but children often did that; and her air of separation from them, swinging herself in lonely arcs or bouncing up and down on an otherwise empty teeter-totter, could have been a resilient child’s defense against rejection.

  But perhaps children were quicker at seeing real difference than adults.

  He knew he would have to make up his mind quickly: his account had shrunk to a hundred and twenty-five dollars. But if he took the girl away and he was wrong, what was he: a maniac?

  He started wearing the Bowie knife strapped to his side beneath his shirt when he went to the playground.

  Even if he was right and the girl Ricky’s “lynx,” she could stick to her role—if he took her away, she could damage him irreparably by not revealing anything and waiting for the police to find them. But the nightwatcher wanted them dead: if he was right, he did not think she would let the police and the legal system punish him for her. She liked gaudier conclusions than that.

  She seemed to take no notice of him, but the child began to appear in his dreams, sitting off to one side, observing him expressionlessly, and he imagined that even when she was sitting on a swing, seemingly absorbed, she peeked at him.

  Don had only one real clue that she was not the ordinary child she appeared to be, and he clung to it with a fanatic’s desperation. The first time he had seen her, he had gone cold.