Ghost Story (5 page)

"I've just thought of something," Ricky said. "It's been a year now. Suppose he wants to sell the house? It's been sitting empty since Edward died."

"Faw.
You're inventing problems. We'll get him here faster if he wants to sell."

"How can you be sure things won't get worse? Can you be sure?" Sitting as he had at least once a month for more than twenty years in a coveted chair in the best room he knew, Ricky fervently wished that nothing would change—that they would be allowed to continue, and that they would simply tease out their anxieties in bad dreams and stories. Looking at them all in the lowered light as a cold wind battered the trees outside Sears's windows, he wished for nothing more than that: to continue. They were his friends, he was in a way as married to them as a moment ago he had considered he was to Sears, and he gradually became aware that he feared for them. They seemed so terribly vulnerable, sitting there and regarding him quizzically, as if each of the others imagined that nothing could be worse than a few bad dreams and a bi-weekly spook story. They believed in the efficacy of knowledge. But he saw a plane of darkness, cast by a lampshade, cross John Jaffrey's forehead and thought: John is dying already. There is a kind of knowledge they have never confronted, despite the stories they tell; and when that thought came into his well-groomed little head, it was as though whatever was implied in the knowledge he meant was out there somewhere, out in the first signs of winter, out there and gaining on them.

Sears said, "We've decided, Ricky. It's for the best. We can't just stew in our own juices. Now." He looked around the circle they made, metaphorically rubbing his hands, and said, "Now that's settled, who, as Lewis put it, is on the griddle tonight?"

Within Ricky Hawthorne the past suddenly shifted and delivered a moment so fresh and complete that he knew he had his story, although he'd had nothing planned and had thought he would have to pass; but eighteen hours from the year 1945 shone clearly in his mind, and he said, "Well, I guess it's me."

Ricky's own home was literally just around the corner, not a five-minute walk away; in the old days he and Sears had walked to their office in town every day. In warm weather they sometimes still did: "Mutt and Jeff," as Stella said. This was directed more at Sears than himself—Stella had never actually liked Sears. Of course she had never let this submerged dislike interfere with her attempts to dominate him a little. There was no question that Stella would be waiting up with hot chocolate: she'd have gone to sleep hours ago, leaving only a hall light burning upstairs. It was Stella's conviction that if he was going to indulge himself at his friends' houses and leave her behind, he could knock around in the dark when he got home, bumping his knees on the glass and chrome modern furniture she had made him buy.

Sears came back into the room with two drinks in his hands and a freshly fired-up cigar in his mouth. Ricky said, "Sears, you're probably the only person I know to whom I could admit that sometimes I wish I'd never got married."

"Don't waste your envy on me," Sears said. "I'm too old, too fat and too tired."

"You're none of those things," he answered, accepting the drink Sears gave him, "you just have the luxury of being able to pretend you are."

"Oh, but you pulled out the prize plum," Sears said. "The reason you wouldn't say what you've just said to anyone else is that they'd be stupefied. Stella is a famous beauty. And if you said it to her, she'd brain you." He sat back in the chair he'd occupied earlier, stretched his legs out and crossed them at the ankles. "She'd slap a box together, dump you in it, bury you in five seconds flat and then run off with an athletic forty-year-old smelling of salt water and bay rum. The reason you can tell me is that—" Sears paused, and Ricky feared that he'd say,
I sometimes wish you'd never married too.
"Is it that I am
hors de combat,
or is it
hors commerce?"

Listening to his partner's voice, holding his drink, Ricky thought of John Jaffrey and Lewis Benedikt speeding away to their houses, of his own redecorated house waiting, and was aware of how settled their lives were; of how much they had found a comfortable routine. "Well, which is it?" Sears asked, and he replied, "Oh, in your case
hors de combat,
I'm sure," and smiled, stingingly aware of their closeness. He remembered what he had said before,
all change is change for the worse,
and thought:
that's true, God help us.
Ricky suddenly saw all of them, his old friends and himself, as on a fragile invisible plane suspended high up in dark air.

"Does Stella know you have nightmares?" Sears asked.

"Well, I didn't know that you did," Ricky answered, as though it were a joke.

"I saw no reason to discuss it."

"And you've been having them for—?"

Sears leaned further into his chair. "You've had yours for—?"

"A year."

"And I. For a year. So have the other two, apparently."

"Lewis doesn't seem ruffled."

"Nothing ruffles Lewis. When the Creator made Lewis, he said, 'I am going to give you a handsome face, a good constitution and an equable temperament, but because this is an imperfect world, I'll hold back a little on brains.' He got rich because he liked Spanish fishing villages, not because he knew what was going to happen to them."

Ricky ignored this—it was all part of the way Sears liked to characterize Lewis. "They started after Edward's death?"

Sears nodded his massive head.

"What
do
you think happened to Edward?"

Sears shrugged. They had all asked the question too many times. "As you are surely aware, I know no more than you."

"Do you think we'll be any happier if we find out?"

"Goodness, what a question! I can't answer that one either, Ricky."

"Well, I don't. I think something terrible will happen to us. I think you'll bring down disaster on us if you invite that young Wanderley."

"Superstition," Sears grumbled. "Nonsense. I think something terrible has already happened to us, and this young Wanderley might be the man who can clear it up."

"Did you read his book?"

"The second one? I looked at it."

This was an admission that he had read it.

"What did you think?"

"A nice exercise in genre writing. More literary than most. A few nice phrases, a reasonably well-constructed plot."

"But about his insights ..."

"I think he won't immediately dismiss us as a bunch of old fools. That's the main thing."

"Oh, I wish he would," Ricky wailed. "I don't want anybody poking around in our lives. I want things just to keep on going."

"But it's possible that he will 'poke around,' as you say, and end by convincing us that we are just spooking ourselves. Then maybe Jaffrey will stop scourging himself for that blasted party. He only insisted on it because he wanted to meet that worthless little actress. That Moore girl."

"I think about that party a lot," Ricky said. "I've been trying to remember when I saw her that night."

"I saw her," said Sears. "She was talking to Stella."

"That's what everybody says. Everybody saw her talking to my wife. But where did she go afterward?"

"You're getting as bad as John. Let's wait for young Wanderley. We need a fresh eye."

"I think we'll be sorry," said Ricky, trying for one last time. "I think we'll be ruined. We'll be like some animal eating its own tail. We have to put it behind us."

"It's decided. Don't be melodramatic."

So that was that. Sears could not be swayed. Ricky asked him about another of the things on his mind. "On our evenings, do you always know what you're going to say in advance, when it's your turn?"

Sears's eyes met his, marvelously, cloudlessly blue. "Why?"

"Because I don't. Not most of the time. I just sit and wait, and then it comes to me, like tonight. Is it that way with you?"

"Often. Not that it proves anything."

"Is it like that for the others too?"

"I see no reason why it shouldn't be. Now, Ricky, I want to get some rest and you should go home. Stella must be waiting for you."

He couldn't tell if Sears were being ironic or not. He touched his bow tie. Bow ties were a part of his life, like the Chowder Society, that Stella barely tolerated. "Where do these stories come from?"

"From our memories," Sears said. "Or, if you prefer, from our doubtless Freudian unconsciouses. Come on. I want to be left alone. I have to wash all the glasses before I get to bed."

"May I ask you one more time—"

"What now?"

"—not to write to Edward's nephew." Ricky stood up, audacity making his heart speed.

"You can be persistent, can't you? Certainly you may ask, but by the time we get together again, he will already have my letter. I think it's for the best."

Ricky made a wry face, and Sears said, "Persistent without being aggressive." It was very much like something Stella would have said. Then Sears startled him by adding, "It's a nice quality, Ricky."

At the door Sears held his coat while he slipped his arms into the sleeves. "I thought John looked worse than ever tonight," Ricky said. Sears opened the front door onto dark night illuminated by the street lamp before the house. Orange light fell on the short dead lawn and narrow sidewalk, both littered with fallen leaves. Massive dark clouds moved across the black sky; it felt like winter. "John is dying," Sears said unemotionally, giving back to Ricky his own thought. "See you at Wheat Row. Give my regards to Stella."

Then the door closed behind him, a spruce little man already beginning to shiver in the cold night air.

"Of course. I told you I would."

"What did you say to him?"

"What was agreed. I also mentioned the house, and said that we hoped he would not decide to sell it without inspecting it first. All of Edward's things are still there, of course, including his tapes. If we haven't had the heart to go through them, perhaps he will."

They were standing apart from the other two, just inside the doorway to John Jaffrey's living rooms. John and Lewis were seated in Victorian chairs in a corner of the nearest room, talking to the doctor's housekeeper, Milly Sheehan, who sat on a stool before them, dangling a flowered tray which had held their drinks. Like Ricky's wife, Milly resented being excluded from the meetings of the Chowder Society, unlike Stella Hawthorne, she perpetually hovered at the edges, popping in with bowls of ice cubes and sandwiches and cups of coffee. She irritated Sears to almost exactly the same extent as a summer fly bumping against the window. In many ways Milly was preferable to Stella Hawthorne—less demanding, less driven. And she certainly took care of John: Sears approved of the women who helped his friends. For Sears, it was an open question whether or not Stella had taken care of Ricky.

Now Sears looked down at the person fate had put closer to him than anyone else in the world, and knew that Ricky was thinking that he had weasel-worded his way out of the last question. Ricky's sagacious little jowls were taut with impatience. "All right," he said. "I told him that we weren't satisfied with what we knew of his uncle's death. I did not mention Miss Galli."

"Well, thank God for that," Ricky said, and walked across the room to join the others. Milly stood up, but Ricky smiled and waved her back to the stool. A born gentleman, Ricky had always been charming to women. An armchair stood not four feet away, but he would not sit until Milly asked him to.

Sears took his eyes off Ricky and looked around at the familiar upstairs sitting room. John Jaffrey had turned the whole ground floor of his house into his office—waiting rooms, consulting rooms, a drug cabinet. The other two small rooms on the ground floor were Milly's apartment. John lived the rest of his life up here, where there had been only bedrooms in the old days. Sears had known the interior of John Jaffrey's home for at least sixty years: during his childhood, he had lived two houses down, on the other side of the street. That is, the building he had always thought of as "the family house" was there, to be returned to from boarding school, to be returned to from Cambridge. In those days, Jaffrey's house had been owned by a family named Frederickson, who had two children much younger than Sears. Mr. Frederickson had been a grain merchant, a crafty beer-swilling mountainous man with red hair and a redder face, sometimes mysteriously tinged blue; his wife had been the most desirable woman young Sears had ever seen. She was tall, with coiled long hair some color between brown and auburn, and had a kittenish exotic face and prominent breasts. It was with these that young Sears had been fascinated. Speaking to Viola Frederickson, he'd had to struggle to keep his eyes on her face.

In the summers, home from boarding school and between trips to the country, he was their babysitter. The Fredericksons could not afford a full-time nanny, though a girl from the Hollow lived in their house as cook and maid. Possibly it amused Frederickson to have Professor James's son babysit for his boys. Sears had his own amusements. He liked the boys and enjoyed their hero worship, which was so much like that of the younger boys at the Hill School; and once the boys were asleep, he enjoyed prowling through the house and seeing what he could find. He saw his first French letter in Abel Frederickson's dresser drawer. He had known he was doing wrong, entering the bedrooms where he now freely stood, but he could not keep himself from doing it. One night he had opened Viola Frederickson's desk and found a photograph of her—she looked impossibly inviting, exotic and warm, an icon of the other, unknowable half of the species. He looked at the way her breasts pushed out the fabric of her blouse, and his mind filled with sensations of their weight, their density. He was so hard that his penis felt like the trunk of a tree: it was the first time that his sexuality had hit him with such force. Groaning, clutching his trousers, he had turned away from the photograph and seen one of her blouses folded on top of the dresser. He could not help himself; he caressed it. He could see where the blouse would bulge, carrying her within it, her flesh seemed to be present beneath his hands, and he unbuttoned his trousers and took out his member. He placed it on the blouse, thinking with the part of his mind that could still think that
it
was making him do it;
it
was making him push its distended tip down where her breasts would cushion it. He groaned, bent double over the blouse, a convulsion went through him, and he exploded. His balls felt as if they'd been caught in a vise. Immediately after, shame struck him like a fist. He rolled the blouse up into his satchel of books and, going a roundabout way home, wrapped the once-flawless thing around a stone and tossed it into the river. Nobody had ever mentioned the stolen blouse to him, but it was the last time he'd been invited to babysit.

Through the windows behind Ricky Hawthorne's head, Sears could see a street lamp shining on the second floor of the house Eva Galli had bought when, on whatever whim or impulse, she had come to Milburn. Most of the time he could forget about Eva Galli and where she had lived: he supposed that he was conscious of it now—of her house shining at them through the window—because of some connection his mind made between her and the ridiculous scene he had just remembered.

Maybe I should have cleared out of Milburn when I could, he thought: the bedroom where Edward Wanderley had died exactly a year ago was just overhead. By unspoken common agreement, none of them had alluded to the coincidence of their meeting here again on the anniversary of their friend's death. A fraction of Ricky Hawthorne's sense of doom flickered in his mind, and then he thought:
you old fool, you still feel guilty about that blouse. Hah!