Madeleine's Ghost (23 page)

I am quiet for a few minutes after this terrible account. Then I rise and offer the woman a ten-dollar bill, but she shakes her head.

“I don't want any money,” she says. “Sorry to hear about your friend is all.”

“Thanks.”

She pushes up off the cobbles and stands for a moment, knuckles jammed into the pockets of her dirty cutoffs. “It's this damn city,” she says. “You know what's best for you, you get on home to New Orleans, where you belong.”

Then, as if on cue, we turn to Manhattan, moored across the river in the near distance like the dark hulk of a prison ship.

T
HE SERVICE
for Chase is a quiet affair at a Gypsy funeral chapel in Manhattan on East Seventh, across from the Café Deanna. As usual, the incessant pounding of drums comes from Tompkins Square Park, one block over. The facade of the place, otherwise a normal tenement, is distinguished by two faded plaster urns painted to resemble pink marble, and a tiny storefront window decorated only with a dusty plaque that reads “Gragogian Bros. Embalmers. Romany Spoken Here.”

Inside, at one end of a narrow wood-paneled room, a cheap urn filled with Chase's ashes rests on a table draped in black. In death, as in life, Chase cannot rely on her friends. Now, at the final hour, out of all of them—for Chase was a woman who cultivated many friendships—there
is only myself and Jillian. Jillian has gained a few more pounds and looks very good in a tight suit of black satin, a black veil hanging from a little hat over her eyes. She sits in the front pew between Madame Ada in her wheelchair and Ulazi, gangsterish as George Raft in a high-shouldered double-breasted suit. Seated behind them are a half dozen or so Gypsy relations, dark men in dandruff-flecked pinstripe suits from the seventies and rotund women draped in layers of black chenille.

I arrive a few minutes late and slip into a pew at the back and, to my relief, am joined a minute later by Byron Poydras. He is half shaven, literally: One side of his face is smooth, the other stubbled, and there is the faint trace of purple eye shadow and mascara ringed around one eye. The nails of his left hand are painted with purple glitter nail polish. Metallic flecks flash in the dim light.

“In a drag show last night,” Poydras whispers when he sees me eyeing his painted fingers. “There was, like, a gender role theme. We had to come as she-males or he-shes, a half man-half woman thing. Then we had to get onstage and try to fuck one half with the other half. It was wild.”

I feel it best not to question the logistics of this perverse spectacle and lend an ear to the old priest mumbling over Chase's ashes up front. But he is speaking in Romany, the indecipherable language of the Gypsies, and I can't understand a word. When he is done, Ulazi stands, gives a thuggish tug on the front of his suit, takes a fiddle from a case beneath the table, and begins to play. It is an old Gypsy melody, that sounds like wagons rolling through the tall grass at dusk and the smoke of campfires and the faces of peasants seen for a moment in the half-light along the roadside; that sounds like all the sadness and beauty of life. Ulazi plays with a passion and feeling unsuspected in one so shallow, violin tucked tightly under his chin, eyes closed. He finishes with a flourish, wiping tears from his cheek with the back of his hand like a child.

“Ozun tula bagran tu-da!”
he says in a choked voice, and the statement is repeated in a murmur by the other Gypsies present. I recognize the phrase. A traditional Gypsy farewell, translated once for me by Chase, which means “Oh, when shall we cease our wanderings!” An admirable
sentiment, which drives Ulazi to despair. He flings the fiddle to the floor with practiced melodrama and throws himself against the bulk of his great-aunt. She wraps her arms around him, and he weeps copiously there into her skirts as the priest says a few final words. Then the urn is lowered into a plywood box and handed to Jillian, who steps forward with as much dignity as Jackie accepting the flag from JFK's coffin at Arlington.

Afterward the small party of mourners assembles in the foyer of the funeral chapel, which is decorated with yellowed black-and-white photographs of unknown men in suits, framed under glass with borders of black crepe paper. Everyone is going to Le Hibou for the funerary meal, a Gypsy tradition, where the departed is toasted with arak and toasted again till all participants are dead drunk. Ulazi and another Gypsy are trying to heft Madame Ada out of her wheelchair for the short walk down to the curb as I approach.

“I am truly sorry,” I say to the large, old woman. “Chase was a good friend, and I will miss her sorely. If you don't mind, I'd like to come along to Le Hibou.”

Standing behind the wheelchair, Jillian jerks her head to me, eyes flashing. “Get away from here, you swine!” she hisses. “Haven't you done enough damage already?”

At this, Ulazi jumps forward with a cry and knocks me to the ground. I feel the hard tilework meet my assbone and the wind rush out of me.

“You bastard!” He stands over me, waving his fist. “You bastard! I should kill you!” But this is all he can manage before he chokes up and throws himself once again against Madame Ada's formidable bulk.

“It's a pity you didn't show such concern for your stepsister when she was alive,” I say, and get up off the floor and dust my trousers with as much dignity as possible. The Gypsy relations stand watching stone-faced, their dark eyes moving from Madame Ada to me and back again. One nod from her, I get the feeling, and it's a knife in the back.

“Honestly, ma'am,” I say to the old woman, “I didn't know it would end like this, I—”

But she cuts me short. “My grandniece's death was not your fault,”
she says, her eyes hooded. “I saw that she was sick and would take her own life the day you two came into my parlor. There were dark flames all around her, and I knew it would not be long. That is not why we do not want you to join us at the meal in which we will remember her. We do not want you there because you are an unlucky person and Gypsies are superstitious and do not like to be around unlucky people. Your bad luck is written all over your face and in the palm of your hand.” She reaches up and grabs my hand, frowns into it for a moment, and thrusts it aside. “Yes,” she says. “Just as I expected. Only a miracle will help you to evade your fate.”

At this, she turns away. The Gypsies wheel her over to the front door and help her down the stairs. A graffiti-scrawled van, fitted with a hydraulic lift, rumbles at the curb.

“Loser!” Jillian hisses as she passes with the rest.

The street door is shut in my face, and I am left alone in the quiet foyer, the eyes of the dead Gypsies in suits staring down at me from behind their panes of glass, quiet, accusatory, and still as memory itself.

I
AM DRAINED
of life; I am cold, shivering in the air-conditioning of the subway. The car is full of poor wretches who live without this amenity in New York. For them the subway is the only place they can come to get cool on hundred-degree days that blast this city like a blowtorch. They are easily recognized. Old men who live in back-alley tenements with a single window open on the airshaft where no wind stirs. Here on the F, they sit in their shorts and sandals, reading the paper, jolting sideways, loose as puppets when the train comes to a stop and when it starts up again. They are going nowhere. To Coney Island and back in the dull yellow glare.

When I exit the long tunnel at Knox in the grainy twilight, I know there is something wrong. I am being followed.

They are two black youths, about fifteen, dressed in full-blown gangsta style: Jeans ten sizes too big droop around skinny thighs to balloon over unlaced two-hundred-dollar sneaker-boots; matching gold dollar signs dangle from necklaces of thick gold rope; the plastic straps of X hats, worn backward, sweat into their foreheads. They've got that low-balanced street walk, the loping swagger of someone who has just been released from the joint. They're hooting and hollering back there; they don't care who hears them in this neighborhood. There's no one around, no place to run. They're looking for trouble, and I know the trouble is me.

I got a good look at them earlier on the platform at Broadway and Lafayette. With each stop, they made their way back through the cars, entering mine at Delancey. By East Broadway they came to sit across from me, and as the train gathered speed for the long run under the East River, they were making loud comments designed to instill fear into the average commuter. But I am not the average commuter, and I have a secret weapon for such moments.

I removed my weapon carefully from the back pocket of my khakis, made a great show of bending it out, smoothing the crinkled pages. Then I began to read. It is an old orange-and-black Penguin copy of Alan Moorehead's
The White Nile
, curved to the shape of my ass, and dogeared from much use, which I carry with me wherever I go in New York. This fading text gives me the courage I need to walk the streets of the city, to board subway and bus heedless of the dangers, to order an egg salad sandwich from the angry Ashanti behind the counter at the Kwanzaa Deli on Montague Street and ask, steel-eyed, for extra onion.

The book narrates the British exploration of Central Africa in the nineteenth century and is full of the brave and foolish exploits of men who overcame incredible odds, surmounted many dangers, and mostly returned to good old England to tell about it: There is Mungo Park, determined to find the source of the river Niger, who had himself deposited on the shores of an unknown continent wearing a top hat and carrying a valise; Burton and Speke, who discovered the source of the Nile;
Baker and Stanley and Livingstone, who traipsed across Africa wearing flannel suits; and the great General Gordon, who met his end at the hands of the Mahdi's dervishes at Khartoum in the Sudan.

Whenever I am feeling particularly outnumbered, I turn to the general's sad story. Surrounded by a fanatical enemy, he held out for months in the Citadel at Khartoum, praying for a relief column that came three days too late. Food gone, water low, no hope left, as out in the fragrant desert night a hundred thousand dark faces waited for the final assault. The Mahdi sent a message at the last minute under a flag of truce. Gordon would be allowed to leave with his personal possessions if he abandoned the city to the slaughter. Otherwise he would suffer the unspeakable fate of all unbelievers. Leave and Allah will spare you! The Mahdi made this generous offer in his capacity as the right hand of that inscrutable deity.

But Gordon did not hesitate. The offer was rejected without a second thought. “When God was passing out fear in the world,” Gordon told the messenger, “He came to Gordon and there was no fear left. Tell the Mahdi this! When God created Gordon, He created him without fear.” O brave General Gordon! How many of us will muster such composure at the end? For the tiniest breath of that courage now!

The two youths follow me down Knox, past the corrugated graffiti-scarred fence that conceals a big empty hole in the ground. They slouch about twenty paces behind, trading loud motha-fuckas back and forth. I start to sweat. In a second my shirt is stuck to my back. I hear the sound of a bottle smashed, and another bottle, but I do not turn around. It is like the surface tension that keeps water poured a little too high from overflowing the glass. Look at it wrong, and the stuff spills over the sides.

Shadows deepen along the warehouses now. From somewhere comes the plaintive cry of a car alarm. At this, they quicken the pace, unlaced sneaker-boots flopping like clown shoes against the glass-strewn pavement. Then the talk stops all at once. Their silence is worse. On the warehouse just ahead a rusty sign from the fifties announces the manufacture of men's and boys' hats. The sky is all blue shadow and beautiful,
with just a hint of moon. This is the moment that all New Yorkers dread, the moment they wait for all their lives. What will you do?

A moment later one of the youths is at my side, and an almost friendly arm crooks around my neck. I look up, my nose a half inch from his nose. His breath has the sweet reek of cheap malt liquor, and his eyes are wild. He smiles. We could be two old friends passing each other on the street.

“Hey!” I say.

“What you looking at?” the youth says, hostility in his voice.

“You, I guess,” I say, and duck out from under his arm and begin to run, but the other one is already crouched like a fullback between the Dumpsters of the Damascus Bakery and the head of Tide Street. I try to dodge around him; he leans into it and catches me up with his sneaker-booted foot, and I go sprawling across the cobbles. It is that simple. Before I can get up, I hear an unmistakable ratcheting sound.

“Freeze!” one says, and the other one comes around and pulls the wallet out of my back pocket. They find nothing, just a cash card, driver's license, and a few sentimental odds and ends: a bit of old ribbon from an ex-girlfriend's hair, a couple of hopeful fortune cookie fortunes, a four-leaf clover sealed in clear tape that my father plucked once from among more mundane clovers in the front yard of our suburban bungalow just outside of Washington, D.C.