Ghost Story (43 page)

"Then why did you ask?"

Ricky sneezed violently, and Sears said, "It happened in 1929—October of 1929. That was a long time ago. When Ricky asked John about the worst thing he'd ever done, all that we could think about was your Uncle Edward—it was only a week after his death. Eva Galli was the last thing on our minds."

"Well, now we have truly crossed the Rubicon," said Ricky. "Up until you said the name, I still wasn't sure that we'd tell it. But now that we're here we'd better go on without stopping. Whatever Peter Barnes told you had better wait until we're done—if after that you still want to stay in the same room with us. And I suppose that somehow what happened to him must be related to the Eva Galli affair. Now; I've said it too."

"Ricky never wanted you to know about Eva Galli," said Sears. "Way back when I wrote to you, he thought it would be a mistake to rake it all up again. I guess we agreed with him. I certainly did."

"Thought it would muddy the waters," Ricky said through his cold. "Thought it couldn't possibly have anything to do with our problem. Spook stories. Nightmares. Premonitions. Just four old fools losing their marbles. Thought it was irrelevant. It was all so mixed up anyhow. Should have known better when that girl came looking for a job. And now with Lewis gone ..."

"You know something?" Sears said. "We never even gave Lewis John's cufflinks."

"Slipped our minds," Ricky said, and drank some of his Old Parr. He and Sears were already deep in the well of their story, concentrated on it so wholly that Don, seated near them, felt invisible.

"Well, what happened to Eva Galli?" he asked.

Sears and Ricky glanced at each other; then Ricky's eyes went to his glass and Sears's to the fire. "Surely that's obvious," Sears said. "We killed her."

"The two of you?" Don asked, thrown off balance It was not the answer he had expected.

"All of us," Ricky answered. "The Chowder Society. Your uncle, John Jaffrey, Lewis, and Sears and myself. In October, 1929. Three weeks after Black Monday, when the stock market collapsed. Even here in Milburn, you could see the beginnings of the panic. Lou Price's father, who was also a broker, shot himself in his office. And we killed a girl named Eva Galli. Not murder— not outright murder. We'd never have been convicted of anything—maybe not even of manslaughter. But there would have been a scandal."

"And we couldn't face that," Sears said. "Ricky and I had just started out as lawyers, working in his father's firm. John had qualified as a doctor only the year before. Lewis was the son of a clergyman. We were all in the same fix. We would have been ruined. Slowly, if not immediately."

"That was why we decided on what we tried to do," said Ricky.

"Yes," said Sears. "We did an obscene thing. If we'd been thirty-three instead of twenty-three, we would probably have gone to the police and taken our chances. But we were so young—Lewis wasn't even out of his teens. So we tried to conceal it. And then at the end—"

"At the end," Ricky said, "we were like characters in one of our stories. Or in your novel. I've been reliving the last ten minutes for two months now. I even hear our voices, the things we said when we put her in Warren Scales's car ..."

"Let's start at the beginning," Sears said.

"Let's start at the beginning. Yes."

"Which house on Montgomery Street?" Don asked. "The one Freddy Robinson lived in?"

"Why yes. The one across the street from John's house. Miss Mostyn's house. She bought that house, and set it up with new furniture and a piano and a gramophone. And she smoked cigarettes and drank cocktails, and she wore her hair short—a real John Held girl."

"Not entirely," Sears said. "She was no bubble-headed flapper. The time for those had passed, anyhow. And she was educated. She read quite widely. She could speak intelligently. Eva Galli was an enchanting woman. How would you describe the way she looked, Ricky?"

"Like a nineteen-twenties Claire Bloom," Ricky said immediately.

"Typical Ricky Hawthorne. Ask him to describe someone, and he names a movie star. I guess you can take it as an accurate description. Eva Galli had all this exciting modernity about her, what was modernity for Milburn at any rate, but there was also a refinement about her—an air of grace."

"That's true," said Ricky. "And a certain mysteriousness we found terribly attractive. Like your Anna Mobley. We knew nothing about her but what she hinted—she had lived in New York, she had apparently spent some time in Hollywood as an actress in silents. She did a small part in a romance called
China Pearl.
A Richard Barthelmess movie."

Don took a piece of paper from his pocket and wrote down the name of the film.

"And she was obviously partly of Italian ancestry, but she told Stringer at one point that her maternal grandparents were English. Her father had been a man of considerable substance, one gathered, but she had been orphaned when just a child and was raised by relatives in California. That was all we knew about her. She said that she had come here for peace and seclusion."

"The women tried to take her under their wing," Sears said. "She was a catch for them too, remember. A wealthy girl who had turned her back on Hollywood, sophisticated and refined—every woman of position in Milburn sent her an invitation. The little societies women here had in those days all wanted her. I think that what they wanted was to tame her."

"To make her identifiable," Ricky said. "Yes. To tame her. Because with all her qualities, there was something else. Something fey. Lewis had a romantic imagination then, and he told me that Eva Galli was like an aristocrat, a princess or some such, who had turned her back on the court and gone off to the country to die."

"Yes, she affected us too," said Sears. "Of course, for us she was out of reach. We idealized her. We saw her from time to time—"

"We paid court," Ricky said.

"Absolutely. We paid court to her. She had politely refused all the ladies' invitations, but she had no objections to five gangling young men showing up on her doorstep on a Saturday or Sunday. Your uncle Edward was the first of us. He had more daring than we other four. By this time, everybody knew that Stringer Dedham had lost his head over her, so in a sense she was seen as under Stringer's patronage—as if she always had a ghostly duenna by her side. Edward slipped between the cracks of convention. He paid a call on her, she was dazzlingly charming to him, and soon we all got into the habit of calling on her. Stringer didn't seem to mind. He liked us, though he was in a different world."

"The adult world," Ricky said. "As Eva was. Even though she could only have been two or three years older than us, she might have been twenty. Nothing could have been more proper than our visits. Of course some of the elderly women thought they were scandalous. Lewis's father thought so too. But we had just enough social leeway to get away with it. We paid our visits in a group, after Edward had broken the ground, about once every two weeks. We were far too jealous to allow any one of us to go alone. Our visits were extraordinary. It was like slipping out of time altogether. Nothing exceptional happened, even the conversation was ordinary, but for those few hours we spent with her, we were in the realm of magic. She swept us off our feet. And that she was known to be Stringer's fiancee made it safe."

"People didn't grow up so fast in those days," Sears said. "All of this—young men in their early twenties mooning about a woman of twenty-five or -six as if she were an unattainable priestess—must seem risible to you. But it was the way we thought of her—beyond our reach. She was Stringer's, and we all thought that after they married we'd be as welcome at his house as at hers."

The two older men fell silent for a moment. They looked into the fire on Edward Wanderley's hearth and drank whiskey. Don did not prod them to speak, knowing that a crucial turn in the story had come and that they would finish telling it when they were able.

"We were in a sort of sexless, pre-Freudian paradise," Ricky finally said. "In an enchantment. Sometimes we even danced with her, but even holding her, watching her move, we never thought about sex. Not consciously. Not to admit. Well, paradise died in October, 1929, shortly after the stock market and Stringer Dedham."

"Paradise died," Sears echoed, "and we looked into the devil's face." He turned his head toward the window.

The other two followed his gaze and saw white flakes blizzarding against the window. "If his wife can find him, Omar Norris will have to be out plowing before morning."

Ricky drank more of his whiskey. "It was
tropically
hot," he said, melting the present storm in the unseasonal October of nearly fifty years before. "The threshing got done late that year. It seemed folks couldn't get down to work. People said money worries made Stringer absentminded. The Dedham girls said no, that wasn't it, he'd gone by Miss Galli's house that morning. He'd seen something."

"Stringer put his arms in the thresher," Sears said, "and his sisters blamed Eva. He said things while he was dying, wrapped up in blankets on their table. But you couldn't make head or tail of what they thought they heard him say. 'Bury her,' that was one thing, and 'cut her up,' as though he'd seen what was going to happen to himself."

"And," said Ricky, "one other thing. The Dedham girls said he screamed something else—but it was so mixed up with his other screams that they weren't sure about it. 'Bee-orchid.' 'Bee-orchid,' just that. He had been raving, obviously. Out of his head with shock and pain. Well, he died on that table, and got a good burial a few days later. Eva Galli didn't come to the funeral. Half the town was on Pleasant Hill, but not the dead man's fiancee. That fueled their tongues."

"The old women, the women she had ignored," Sears said. "They laid into her. Said she'd ruined Stringer. Of course half of them had unmarried daughters and they'd had their eyes on Stringer long before Eva Galli showed up. They said he made some discovery—an abandoned husband or an illegitimate child, something like that. They made her out to be a real Jezebel."

"We didn't know what to do," Ricky said. "We were afraid to visit her, after Stringer died. She might be grieving as much as a widow, you see, but she was unattached. It was our parents' place to console her, not ours. If we had called on her, the female malice would have gone into high gear. So we stewed—just stewed. Everybody assumed that she'd pack up and move back to New York. But we couldn't forget those afternoons."

"If anything, they became more magical, more poignant," Sears said. "Now we knew what we had lost. An ideal—and a romantic friendship conducted in the light of an ideal."

"Sears is right," Ricky said. "But in the end, we idealized her even more. She became an emblem of grief—of a fractured heart. All we wanted to do was to visit her. We sent her a note of condolence, and we would have gone through fire to see her. What we couldn't go through was the iron-bound social convention that set her apart. There weren't any cracks to slip through."

"Instead she visited us," Sears said. "At the apartment your uncle lived in then. Edward was the only one who had his own place. We got together to talk and drink applejack. To talk about all the things we were going to do."

"And to talk about her," Ricky said. "Do you know that Ernest Dowson poem: 'I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion'? Lewis found it and read it to us. That poem went through us like a knife. 'Thy pale lost lilies.' It certainly called for more applejack. 'Madder music and stronger wine.' What idiots we were. Anyhow, she turned up one night at Edward's apartment"

"And she was
wild,"
Sears said. "She was frightening. She came in like a typhoon."

"She said she was lonely," Ricky said. "Said she was sick of this damned town and all the hypocrites in it. She wanted to drink and she wanted to dance, and she didn't care who was shocked. Said this dead little town and all its dead little people could go to hell as far as she was concerned. And if we were men and not little boys, we'd damn the town too."

"We were speechless," Sears said. "There was our unattainable goddess, cursing like a sailor and raging ... acting like a whore. 'Madder music and stronger wine.' That's what we got, all right. Edward had a little gramophone and some records, and she made us crank it up and put on the loudest jazz he had. She was so vehement! It was crazy—we'd never seen any woman act that way, and for us she was, you know, sort of a cross between the Statue of Liberty and Mary Pickford. 'Dance with me, you little toad,' she said to John, and he was so frightened by her that he scarcely dared touch her. Her eyes were just blazing."

"I think what she felt was
hate,"
Ricky said. "For us, for the town, for Stringer. But it was hatred, and it was boiling. A cyclone of hate. She kissed Lewis while they were dancing, and he jumped back like she burned him. He dropped his arms, and she spun off to Edward and grabbed him and made him dance. Her face was terrible—rigid. Edward was always more worldly than the rest of us, but he too was shaken by Eva's wildness— our paradise was crumbling all around us, and she kicked it into powder with every step. With every glance. She
did
seem like a devil; like something possessed. You know how when a woman gets angry, really angry, she can reach way back into herself and find rage enough to blow any man to pieces—how all that feeling comes out and hits you like a truck? It was like that. 'Aren't you little sissies going to drink?' she said. So we drank."

"It was unspeakable," Sears said. "She seemed twice our size. I think I knew what was coming. There was only one thing that
could
be coming. We were simply too immature to know how to handle it."

"I don't know if I saw it coming, but it came anyhow," Ricky said. "She tried to seduce Lewis."

"He was the worst possible choice," Sears said. "Lewis was only a boy. He may have kissed a gal before that night, but he certainly had done no more than that. We all loved Eva, but Lewis probably loved her most—he was the one who found that Dowson poem, remember. And because he loved her most, her performance that evening and her hatred stunned him."

"And she knew it," Ricky said. "She was delighted. It pleased her, that Lewis was so shocked he could scarcely utter a word. And when she pushed Edward away and went after Lewis, Lewis was frozen stiff with horror. As if he had seen his mother begin to act that way."

"His mother?" Sears asked. "Well, I suppose. At least it tells you the depth of his fantasy about her— our fantasy, to be honest. And he was dumbstruck. Eva snaked her arms around him and kissed him. It looked like she was eating half his face. Imagine that—those hate-filled kisses pouring over you, all that fury biting into your month. It must have been like kissing a razor. When she drew back her head, Lewis's face was smeared with lipstick. Normally it would have been a funny sight but it was somehow horrifying. As if he was smeared with blood."

"Edward went up to her and said, 'Cool down, Miss Galli,' or something of the sort. She whirled on him, and we felt that enormous pressure of hatred again. 'You want yours, do you, Edward?' she said. 'You can wait your turn. I want Lewis first. Because my little Lewis is so pretty."

"And then," Ricky said, "she turned to me. 'You'll get some too, Ricky. And you too, Sears. You all will. But I want Lewis first. I want to show him what that insufferable Stringer Dedham saw when he peeked through my windows.' And she started to take off her blouse."

" 'Please,
Miss Galli,' Edward said," Sears remembered, "but she told him to shut up and finished taking off her blouse. She wore no bra. Her breasts were in period. Small and tight, like little apples. She looked incredibly lascivious. 'Now, pretty little Lewis, why don't we see what you can do?' She began eating his face again."

Ricky said, "So we all thought we knew what Stringer had seen through her window. Eva Galli making love with another man. That, as much as her nakedness and what she was doing to Lewis, was a moral shock. We were hideously embarrassed. Finally Sears and I took a shoulder apiece and pulled her away from Lewis. Then she really swore. It was incredibly ugly. 'Can't you wait for it, you little so and sos and et ceteras and et ceteras?' She began unbuttoning her skirt while she swore at us. Edward was nearly in tears. 'Eva,' he said, 'please don't.' She dropped her skirt and stepped out of it. 'What's wrong, you pansy, afraid to see what I look like?"

"We were miles out of our depth," Sears continued. "She pulled off her slip. She went dancing up to your uncle. 'I think I'll take a bite out of you, little Edward,' she said and leaned toward him—toward his neck. And he slapped her."

"Hard," Ricky said. "And she slapped him back even harder. She put all her weight behind it. It sounded as loud as a gun going off. John and Sears and I practically fainted. We were helpless. We couldn't move."

"If we could have, we might have stopped Lewis," Sears said. "But we stood like tin soldiers and watched him. He took off like an airplane—he just flew across the room and tackled her. He was sobbing and slobbering and wailing—he had snapped. He gave her a real football tackle. They went down like a bombed building. And they made a noise as loud as Black Monday's crash. Eva never got up."

"Her head hit the edge of the fireplace," Ricky said. "Lewis crawled up on her back and kneeled over her and raised his fists, but even he saw the blood coming out of her mouth."

Both old men were panting.