A Manhattan Ghost Story (2 page)

“Yes,” I said at last, and I conjured up a strong tone of annoyance. “My mother is dead. She died three years ago.”

Barbara W. Barber turned her head to look at me. She had small, gray-green eyes, a round, puffy face, and her hair, what was left of it—because it was thinning badly—looked greasy and stiff. She coughed again, briefly and silently, then told me, “I’m a medium, Mr. Cray. I know”—another cough—”I know,” she repeated, “many, many things—more things, I believe, than I
should
know.” She drew closer to me; her voice became a conspiratorial whisper. “More things,” she said again, “than I
want
to know.”

 I remember that I believed her at once. I don’t know why. In retrospect, I imagine it was probably the gritty and earnest way she had about her. And I don’t think I believed
what
she was saying as much as I believed that
she
believed it.

She continued, her voice changing to a low, nervous gurgle, “And sometimes, Mr. Cray, it scares the hell out of me. Because I
see
, too. And I hear. And I feel.”

I felt suddenly as if I were in the grips of a religious fanatic. “Yes,” I said, “of course you do.”

And she said, ignoring me, “I like it, sometimes. I like it quite a lot, sometimes.” She was trying to speak sensually, and it wasn’t working—she sounded like a bullfrog. “Sometimes it feels very, very good, Mr. Cray. You really can’t imagine how good it feels.”

I glanced about for another seat. She noticed. “You don’t want to sit with me, Mr. Cray? Do I make you nervous?”

“No,” I lied.

“Of course I do.” Another cough, then another. Her hands went to the sides of her huge breasts and squeezed hard, as if she were trying to push out whatever was in her lungs. She cursed then, low and violently, and several people nearby glanced around at her, annoyed. I smiled at them, as if in apology. Mrs. Barber went on, “I make everyone nervous, Mr. Cray.”

I said nothing. I was still smiling apologetically.

 “I made my father nervous; I made my mother nervous; I made my husband so nervous he left me for someone else, for another
man
, for Christ’s sake!” And yet again, a series of low, nearly silent coughs erupted from her. Finally, she quieted; her hands went to her breasts again, and she caressed them—she was clearly enjoying herself.

“Jesus!” I whispered, and looked away.

“I make you nervous, too, don’t I, Mr. Cray? Good, I’m glad.”

I pretended not to hear her.

“Do you want to know something?” she asked.

I still pretended not to hear her. She repeated, “Do you want to know something?” She paused very briefly, then continued, “I see
everything
. Really, I do. I see
everything
. I don’t want to; it’s not
my
fault, but I do. I know, for instance, that your mother committed suicide.”

“Shut up,” I whispered.

“She wrote a little note that said: ‘This isn’t what I wanted, Frank. This isn’t what I wanted at all.’ And then she shot herself in the head. That was a very masculine thing for her to do—only men shoot themselves in the head, you know. Women slit their wrists.”

“Please shut up,” I said.

“I can’t
help
it, Mr. Cray. I see what I see, and what am I supposed to do with it? Am I supposed to let it fester inside me?”

I closed my eyes. I said nothing.

“Frank was your father, wasn’t he?” she asked.

Still I said nothing.

“And he’s dead, too, isn’t he?”

I opened my eyes, looked to my left, away from her.

She said, “
There’s
your mother, Mr. Cray.” I turned my head back; she was nodding at the aisle. “She’s there, Mr. Cray. Look at her; say hello.”

I looked. The aisle was empty. I looked straight ahead, focused on the NO SMOKING sign at the head of the car.

Barbara W. Barber continued, “Your mother is naked, Mr. Cray. But do you want to know
what
she is, precisely? She’s a face and a pair of breasts and a pubic V, that’s all. Because that’s what she always supposed, in life, that mothers
were
. And she so wanted to please. She always so wanted to please!”

“You obscene bitch!” I whispered.

She coughed again, this time very high in her throat.

“You fat, obscene, miserable bitch!” An old woman in the seat ahead of me craned her head around and stared hard. I turned my head slightly to face Barbara W. Barber. I must have closed my eyes for a moment, because, if I’d seen her coming, I would have backed away. I felt her lips on mine, and they were very warm and moist and enjoyable, so I didn’t back away. I responded, if only for a moment, until I realized what was happening, and a grunt of surprise and revulsion escaped from me, broke into our kiss, and forced us apart.

A small, pleased smile appeared on her lips. She said, “Give it time, Mr. Cray. Three months, four. It’s like a cancer.”

I touched my lips with my fingers, very lightly. I said, “I don’t understand.”

“
Share
it with me, Mr. Cray,” she said. “Please.
Share
it with me.” Then she turned her head, made a little hole in the frost on the window with her short, chubby fingers, and looked out at the Maine countryside. I got up and found another seat.

When we arrived at Grand Central, I glanced back and saw her stand, push her way out, and head for the 42nd Street exit, one bag in hand—it looked like a carpetbag—and a huge, gray wool coat thrown over her arm. She moved much faster than I thought a woman her size could move, and every few seconds she turned her head with great agitation this way and that, as if she were looking at something.

And, of course, she was.

CHAPTER THREE

My father and I were shaving together when he died. He liked it when we shaved together—it appealed to his sense of masculinity. I think that throughout my childhood, and into my early adolescence, he looked forward to the day when I’d start shaving, and we shaved together as often as possible up until his death. It was one of the few traditionally masculine things we shared. We did not hunt or fish or go bowling together. He belonged to the Bangor Rotary Club, but I was never invited.

It was a year or so after my mother’s suicide that he died. He was dressed in crisp, white boxer shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt, and he was looking forward to breakfast.

“I feel hungry this morning, Abner,” he said in the middle of shaving. He took a long, slow swipe with his razor at his night’s growth of beard, grinned a small, anticipatory grin, and repeated, “I feel very hungry this morning, Abner. How about you?—Do you feel hungry?”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “French toast sounds good.”

“Yes,” he said. “French toast.”

He was still grinning, but it was no longer a grin of anticipation; it was more a kind of nostalgic grin, as if he were remembering something pleasant—an almost sexual grin.

“Dad?” I said.

He stopped grinning, put the razor down on the back of the sink, studied himself a few moments in the mirror—he was a ruggedly handsome, dark-haired man, with deep-set, searching green eyes—and then he turned his head, looked at me, put his hand on my shoulder.

“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.