Some Other Town (16 page)

We all give Celeste a blank stare.

Celeste returns to the topic at hand. What then to do with our ghost Emmaline.

“I just think we need to find out what she wants. What really she's after. What loose end is keeping her here.”

Lola lets out a laugh. “Celeste, honey,” she says. “I don't know our Emmaline is all that much into reasons. Seems to me she just does what she wants. Could be we're wasting our time tryin' to understand her.”

Celeste gives Lola a quick angry glance. She turns to Frances and me, addresses our table, speaks slowly. “If we are going to get Emmaline ever to leave, we'll all need to help show her the door.”

I look over at Lola. She herself has gone back to her lunch. She launches now into her salad.

Celeste perseveres. “What I mean is we have to give Emmaline a way out. Finish her story for her.”

Now Frances looks down at her plate. Considers the roast beef that remains there.

Offended, Celeste picks up her napkin. Her voice edging up, she addresses us all. “Well, Earnest at least agrees with me.”

Earnest, we see, is becoming Celeste's fallback position.

She folds her napkin in two, places it carefully on the table. “Earnest understands about ghosts,” she says. “He knows there's a reason they're here.”

Celeste stands then. Checks her watch. Well really, she must get back. She left out a flat of Joe Trout she'd just proofed and now she'll have to go check it again. It's been a whole lunch hour. Who can guess what Emmaline's been up to?

The fact is, I happen to know Earnest's take on why ghosts are here. Just what it is they are after. He explained it that night I worked late, the night he told me about Emmaline. And despite what Celeste believes to be true, his view is different from hers.

“She's only half right about ghosts,” he says. Or only right about half. They're not all here trying to make up for their lives, for the messes they left behind. They're dead and they know it. Most are happy enough to move on and leave what they started undone. They don't mind letting the living clean up.

“And the living don't mind?” I say.

“Well that's just it,” Earnest says. “That's the other half of the ghosts, I mean. For some ghosts, it's the living that keep them around. It's the living that want something, not the dead.”

“Want what?” I ask Earnest. What could the living want from a ghost? Most people I know are afraid of them.

Earnest gives this some thought. “Mostly they just want time to forgive,” he says, “or sometimes to be forgiven. There is a lot of that sort of thing.” And then he says how with Emmaline, for instance, there was her family of five, all of them needing to forgive her, all of them cursed when she jumped from the balcony that night.

“Cursed?” I say. And I realize I have stepped into one of Earnest's little well-laid traps. There is still more about Emmaline he's been saving. Because then, “Cursed,” he says. “Yes indeed.” And he tells me the rest of the story.

People thought it was some kind of curse, he says. Because after that girl did herself in, after they buried what was left of her, her family, the mother, father, a sister, brother, they all fell sick just like the girl, all took to bed pasty and wheezing. And then coughing up blood, and then later still raving, one by one they all of them died.

“Not likely they ever forgave her,” Earnest says. “That little Emmaline will be here forever.”

Earnest stops, he is thinking. “But there are others here at night. Not the bad ones who need forgiving. I mean the ones who are here out of love. The living won't let them leave out of love. Or the dead are themselves unwilling. Either way, the dead or the living, they can't seem to let each other go. So the spirit one stays, watching out, watching over, until one or the other of them figures it's time. They're going to have to go it alone.”

Earnest lets out a long sigh. “Sad situation,” he tells me. “Can't be easy for any of them here.”

But now lunch is over and I am back at my light table, once again trying to work. Or trying at least to look like I'm working. It is as I've mentioned increasingly difficult to pretend, I have not got a thing done in the past hour. So it is a welcome diversion when the phone on my desk starts to buzz. It is Marcie putting me through to a call, with luck something non–work related.

Marcie monitors all our calls here, it is part of her acting-receptionist job. She answers our lines, then buzzes our desks to tell us we have a call. It is a great waste of manpower of course but Steinem prefers to do it this way. He does not want us accessible, he says. We have our ivory turret to defend.

I pick up the receiver. “Margaret,” Marcie says on the line, not buzzing me through at all. “Margaret, have you forgot about tea? It's three-thirty, Margaret. Time for tea.”

I look at my watch. I have been daydreaming longer than I thought. And so, “Tea, Marcie. Right,” I say. “Meet you out in the solarium.”

It is something we sometimes do, Marcie and I, we take afternoon tea in the solarium. I am happy enough for our breaks. I learn things from Marcie, I do in some ways even like her. Although it is true I also do not always trust her.

And Marcie for her part seems to want to take breaks with me. As receptionist and administrative assistant to Steinem, she is lonely for company, she says. She must sit by herself at a desk all day out in the fourth-floor foyer. And all day long, she says, she has no one to talk to and just elevator doors for a view. She is grateful for the solarium, she says.

Marcie is not really supposed to be the receptionist here. She was hired strictly as Steinem's assistant. We had a real receptionist at the time, and don't you worry, Steinem told Marcie. We'll have more than enough work for both of you. Which is true. Dr. Steinem, given to lapses as he invariably is, requires a great deal of assisting, and with that work alone Marcie would have her hands full. But only four days into Marcie's new job, the first Monday of her second week, our receptionist just didn't show up. Instead she dialed in to say she had tired of all of the phone calls, of all the answering required in a day—just when to expect our catalog, for instance, and when our new readers would ship. So ever since, Marcie has been taking our calls, in addition to filing and typing.

We are all wondering when Steinem will hire someone new. When he asked Marcie to fill in as receptionist part-time, he said it would be only for a little while, only until he could get the ad for a replacement into the paper. But it has been four weeks now since the old receptionist took off, and Marcie says she just can't keep filling in. She cannot get her own work done, reaching for the phone every time that it rings. Marcie says she has talked to
Steinem about it, that then he promises to call an agency tomorrow. He has told her this four times in a row. “It is odd,” she says. “Don't you think?”

I say well yes, although maybe Steinem really is trying to hire, he just isn't having any luck. Then I tell her come to think of it we do go through a lot of receptionists here. And I add I am not certain why. We are nice to them, it is not that the Project mistreats them. Still, it could be Steinem's needs are just too great, our phone calls just too many. Maybe that's why our receptionists don't stay long. Maybe we're just asking too much of them.

Marcie believes she is meant for something far better than acting receptionist. Better even than administrative assistant. She is here by mistake, she tells me. “Marcie,” I say, “we are all here by mistake.” But she says no, really, she had another job offer. Well almost. She was one of three they were considering, she'd had a second interview. “I was going to be an office manager,” Marcie says. “For the university's School of Pharmacy.” They publish a lot of research, those pharmacists, they have a quarterly journal. She would have had her name on their masthead.

As I have said, Marcie and I are assistants here. We both could be doing more. But as Marcie points out, entry-level positions are hard to find in this town. There are too many old students who stay put here, they all try for the same open jobs, and many have advanced, if useless, degrees. She supposes, she says, she should be happy to have any work at all.

I tell Marcie well, I am happy. Compared to the other work I have had since leaving the School of Art—grinder of raw meat at a hamburger hut, potter of plants at a nursery—my position as the Project's assistant editor of design is really something of a marvel.
Although of course, I am lying here. I am too old to be someone's assistant.

Marcie, however, is not. This is her first job out of college, she has time to become something else. I am blunt with her on this point. She has nothing, I tell her, to complain about.

Still, Marcie and I are friends of sorts. And so today we take our tea in the solarium. It is where all of us take our breaks when we can, this great vaulted tunnel of lead-paned glass. It is now just the passage to the crippled children's wing, but when the sanatorium was truly a sanatorium, this was known only as the solarium. Consumptives sat here in sunlight for hours; we now recline in their same wood deck chairs. It is beautiful out here and airy and my favorite place on this floor, on good days all thick wavy glass and warm sun.

Today is one of those days. And surprisingly we are the only ones here. So I decide to give Marcie some idea of the view. “Oh look,” I say. I stand and walk to the glass. From our solarium, you can see all the sanatorium's meadows, all our phlox, our blue-eyed Marys, and of course our sturdy old oaks. Staring out, I gesture Marcie to come closer. I intend to show her each one.

But just now my eye goes not to our meadows, fine as they are this spring, but beyond, to the farmer's rich fields to the north. We none of us know this farmer, his land is too distant for sanatorium strolls. But through the solarium glass up here on fourth floor, the rolling contour of his land is clear. It is this that catches my eye—the dazzling green of young corn now sprawling the farmer's black earth in concentric lopsided whorls. Stunning geometry from where Marcie and I stand.

And I know then I cannot point out anything new. Because my
mind has gone back to Ben, these fields remind me of Ben. How the corn is up in his fields now as well, tender and verdant and hopeful.

Oh, how good it would be to see Ben again.

How good to see Ben again? Did I just say that? Oh I really must go now and find him. Ask “Ben, what is wrong?” Are you all right? Do you think we could both be all right again?

Soon enough, I think. Right after work, I will go right after work. But just now I need more to focus, as there is not much time left for my plan. What I need to do is not reminisce but understand about Ben and me, specifically how it went wrong. It is important to think through that part, what led to this winter's discord and Ben's subsequent, hasty retreat. So that when I find Ben, I will know what exactly to look out for. I will know how to keep him safe, how to keep him closer to home. I won't make the same bad choices.

So then, a little more still about Ben and me. About that night we went to the movies, that is, when it all began to unravel.

As I've mentioned, normally Ben and I did not go out together in public. We kept it to his house or mine. And it is how we would have continued, we would have stayed home drinking our coffee and tea or sitting around in the grass. But then, more or less by accident, I invited Ben out to a movie. It was a lapse in judgment on my part. We would probably not have had the problems we've
had, specifically Ben's disappearance, if we had not gone to that movie.

This is what I am getting to.

One day late last fall I read in the paper that the Bijou was showing
Picnic
, starring, as luck would have it, my most favorite actor, William Holden. He is a specialty of mine, I have an unreasonable crush on him. I study his every move on screen, his lanky long stride and secret half smile, the lazy assured look to his eyes. I try to see all of his movies.

And so when I read about the Bijou showing
Picnic
, circa 1955, in which William Holden starred but with sizable reservation, a movie I had not had the chance yet to see, I dialed up Ben Adams immediately. “Oh we must go, we must go,” I said into the phone, urgent and going on shrill. “Tonight, Ben, it's showing just tonight.”

“Margaret,” Ben said, “take it easy.” But when I pointed out again it was just this one night, well OK, he agreed. We'd meet there.

But now, in the dark, it is a mistake, this movie, from almost the beginning I know. It is no wonder William Holden had his doubts. William Holden is older than my father by one year, born in April 1918. Which means at the time they were shooting
Picnic
he was almost thirty-eight years old, playing Hal, a carefree young drifter, opposite Kim Novak's nineteen-year-old Madge. There's no denying William Holden feels out of place and I am reminded of
Sunset Boulevard
, another of his starring films. And I think oh now he knows how Gloria Swanson felt, with her white powdery face, sharing close-ups with the tanned, flip Joe Gillis.

Still, in
Picnic
William Holden gives it a shot. As the movie
begins, he is riding a freight train into town. He jumps off, then gives the train a good kick. This is a clue, we all know. William Holden will put up a good fight in this film, or that's what the director Joshua Logan believes.

But it makes me nervous. Even now in the beginning, I am concerned. William Holden just isn't acting right, he isn't his usual self, we in the audience can see it. And then when he asks old Mrs. Potts if she has any yard work for hire and shuffles his boots at her door, we're all sure this isn't the William Holden we know. He looks foolish and embarrassed to be playing a young drifter when it's obvious he is pushing forty. But someone, Joshua Logan again we suspect, has told him to take off his shirt and shoot baskets in front of Kim Novak, flash a boyish grin now and then, and swagger when he can work it in. William Holden is overplaying it we think, trying too hard, and so are Kim Novak and Susan Strasberg and old Mrs. Potts for that matter. I am worried now how the rest of this movie will go.