Madeleine's Ghost (4 page)

He nods, strides to one end of the small room, putter behind his back, and strides back again.

“As a young priest,” he says, “I remember coming across a letter in the archives at St. Catherine's that detailed a miracle performed by Sister Januarius. A child born blind was brought before her. Its eyes were turned inward, just a sliver of the cornea showing in the whites. In the presence of witnesses, Sister Januarius removed the child's eyes with her bare hands, replaced them correctly, and the child could see for the first time in its life. If this letter exists—and I remember it clearly—surely others exist as well. We need them as evidence for Rome. And there are probably newspaper accounts and perhaps other letters in private hands, but that's your business. Brooklyn is counting on you, Mr. Conti.”

After he leaves, I am alone in the crypt, and I sneeze again, three times in a row. The stone walls sweat and flake, old mortar drifting through the cracks like sand. It would take six researchers a year to go through this mess thoroughly, to read every page, to dig between the
lines. Father Rose believes in Divine Providence, in the intervention of the saints on behalf of a sinful humanity. I remain a skeptic.

I reach into the nearest box and extract a letter. Its thin, illegible sheets crumble in my hand.

M
OLASSES HILL
is abandoned to the heat and shadows of the afternoon. Old derricks rust quietly on the disused docks just ahead. The smokestacks of the power plant puff clouds of cottony white smoke into the blue sky. Sparkling in the sun, the East River looks fresh and innocent as a mountain stream.

My footsteps echo against the brick walls of the warehouses as I descend through the empty streets. The neighborhood seems innocent, appeased in this light. It is not. The Decateur Projects loom in the near distance like a malevolent deity about to demand the sacrifice of virgins. According to an article in
The New York Times Magazine
last month, those eight towers boast a higher casualty rate per capita than U.S. ground troops during the Vietnam War. There are sirens and gunshots in the near distance every night. Murder and muggings are commonplace around here. Bodies pop up at the rate of three or four a month.

Barely a week after I had moved in and unpacked my suitcases the cops found somebody's girlfriend hacked to pieces and stuffed in Hefty bags in the Dumpster around the corner. A couple of years later, smoking a cigar in his underwear on the stoop, Molesworth was knocked on the head by two gangsta youths with pantyhose pulled over their faces. They forced him upstairs at gunpoint, took the stereo, the microwave, and an unopened box of brown sugar-cinnamon Pop-Tarts. I've been lucky so far, cheated the statistics. My time will come. In any other city you would move. Not in New York, not at these prices, ghost or no ghost.

Last month, attempting to find a clue to the identity of the ghost, I spent half a week in the archives of the Brooklyn Library in Park Slope. I
learned nothing about the ghost but a little more about the neighborhood. It was called Molasses Hill for the barrels of molasses once rolled by the thousands down the slight, cobbled incline to the river, loaded onto sailing ships, and traded somewhere along the chain of commerce for slaves. In the late 1840s Irish immigrants displaced the original mercantile Dutch and Anglo-Saxons. The Italians came just before the turn of the century. St. Cecelia's of Livorno, a rather grand Italian church full of marble and statuary, once stood two blocks up at the intersection of Jade and Blount.

A few of the remaining structures date from around 1820 and are among the oldest left standing in South Brooklyn, but of little interest to the architectural historian. They are not graced with embellishments of any kind, no Federal-style fanlights, no rococo iron railings. Low, plain-fronted, ugly dwellings of local brick and clapboard, they were built by ships' carpenters from the navy yard as rooming houses for dockworkers and sailors. Inside, the low ceilings, irregular doorways, and dim passages feel claustrophobic, like the hold of a ship. My haunted apartment occupies the top floor of one of these, an ancient green and white three-story building two doors down Portsmouth from Jade, at number 624.

Sometime in the late sixties, the last Italian families gave way to the current population of seedy, down-at-heel bohemians who infest the neighborhood like cockroaches: failed artists, alcoholic writers, photographers whose darkroom equipment has been stolen from vans long since sold to pay the rent, musicians who have not seen the inside of a club in years. These days the neighborhood has become a sort of terminus. The last place you fall to when you're falling, when your nerve is gone—cheap rents and failed promise, the place to brood on the wreckage of life, the mistakes, the missed opportunities, the woman that got away.

The mob-run garbage concern that owns most of the local property in absentia knocked down St. Cecelia's a decade ago, fenced in the property, and turned it into a garbage dump. This accounts for the rotten miasma that festers over us on the hot, airless summer days. But Chase was right. The atmosphere out here suits my disposition, the low-rent brand of melancholia, the petty inertias that have possessed my life since
graduate school. Midway through life's journey, as the poet says, the true way was lost and I found myself in a dark and terrible wood …

Or just in Molasses Hill, Brooklyn, barely one stop out on the F from Manhattan. I'm not down for the count, I have only to finish my thesis.

Still, it's getting late.

T
HE MESSAGE
counter reads 5, but the number is blinking, which is a sign of something gone awry. I hit the play button to find that the ghost has invaded my answering machine.

The first message is a long silence with eerie knocking noises in the background; the second a roaring like the inside of a seashell which ends with a small, childlike whimper. I listen to these, hair prickling on the back of my neck. For a moment I am sure there is someone standing just behind me. I spin around to the same empty room, the same dust thick on every surface.

This is unbearable. Then I hear the steady tap of a typewriter from the apartment downstairs. Rust is home.

Jim Rust answers the door barefoot, wearing the thick denim work-shirt and jeans he wears all year round.

“Busy?” I say.

He shrugs, wipes his wire-rim glasses on his sleeve. “You look like hell. Better come on inside.”

I step into the tiny, neat apartment. Its walls are lined with books carefully alphabetized, floor to ceiling. The only item of decor is an Indian blanket pegged over the fireplace. “Lakota Sioux, at least a hundred years old,” he told me once. “Inherited it when my brother was killed by the U.S. government.” And that's all he told me.

Like other westerners I've met, Rust never says enough and has a habit of squinting toward the horizon when he's turning something over
in his mind, even if there's no horizon to be seen. He's got a wind-weathered, outdoor face set off by eyes the weary blue of cactus flowers. Born on a farm in Wyoming, he grew sugar beets, worked horses across one big empty state or another out West, worked the rodeo circuit in Mexico in the early seventies. Then, one day, he decided to write. He sold his pickup truck, his horse and trailer, bought a typewriter—an ancient Remington Rand noiseless, which is about as noiseless as a truck in third gear pulling up a grade—and moved to New York City.

Rust claims he loves this town, and I believe him. He loves it with the fierceness of someone raised in a place with too much sky. He bought a black leather jacket, a ten-year membership in MOMA; he joined a socialist writers' group and attends the ballet at Lincoln Center and Noh theater performances at the Japan Society. But despite all this culture, he is still a good ex-cowboy at heart, and he couldn't bring himself to part with his hat or his boots. The hat, a battered black affair with a flat brim and tarnished silver coins strung around the crown, hangs above his sleeping bag and bookcases in the bedroom. The boots of red and black leather and lizard skin, wrought with fancy gold stitchery and comfortably worn, slouch in the corner like an old friend. There is a patched hole about the size of a .45 slug shot through just above the ankle of one of them. They were specially made for Rust during his rodeo days by a famous Mexican bootmaker in Durango. About the bullet hole he'll say nothing specific.

“Get yourself a beer,” he says now, and gestures toward the battered Coleman ice chest in the far corner which he uses for perishables. He goes over to put away his work as I dig through the slush for a bottle of Vera Cruz.

“You?” I say.

“Why not? Guess I was about done,” he says even though I know he's just pulled his writing gear out of the closet. He writes standing up, the typewriter sitting on an upended old steamer trunk, two stacks of paper, one covered with typescript, one blank, carefully arranged on either wing.

We settle cross-legged on the floor with our beers like two Indians. Rust lives in this apartment like he's camping out on the chaparral. No
furniture, no stove, no refrigerator, no real possessions. Except for the books, everything he owns could fit on the back of a mule. Overhead the ceiling fan wobbles dangerously. We pop the bottles and drink, and the only sound in the apartment is the small slurp of beer.

“How's the novel coming?” I ask after a while. I set the beer down on the painted blue wood. It is a foolish question that I know Rust will not answer to any satisfaction.

“It's not exactly a novel,” he says.

“So what is it?”

“Couldn't say. Writing. A mess of writing.”

“So how's it coming?”

He pauses and squints toward the horizon.

“Fair.”

We drink some more, and out of politeness Rust asks me about my thesis.

“Can't concentrate,” I say. “The ghost. Try writing your thesis in the middle of a haunting. It's impossible. And the silence. It's so damn thick. Pregnant if I may say.”

“I've got a suggestion,” Rust says, leaning forward. “Put on the radio, and you won't hear the silence. You'll hear the radio.”

“Yeah, but the radio—”

“Classical station. A little Mozart. Vivaldi. One of those geezers. Works wonders, you'll be surprised.”

Rust believes in the ghost, though in other matters he is a skeptic and a rationalist. It was he who put a name to the presence in the first place: A few days after Molesworth's inglorious flight to Mamou, I asked Rust upstairs and shut him in the apartment while I waited on the landing, chewing on a cold piece of pepperoni pizza from his ice chest. He emerged ten minutes later, squinting at a horizon no one else could see.

“Well?” I said.

He nodded. “Something. Makes your ears pop.”

“What do you think it is?”

“A ghost.”

“Exactly.”

Now Rust rolls a cigarette from the suede pouch of tobacco and fixings he keeps in his breast pocket. He offers one; I shake my head. That tobacco of his, a cheap Mexican blend a friend sends from Chiapas, tastes like burnt seaweed.

“I was staying in a cabin once in Colorado,” he says, shaking out the match. “Place belonged to my uncle, my mama's brother. Don't remember what I was doing there, working, I guess, writing on another book. I stayed in this place four or five nights, up in the foothills above Tabernash. Cougar country, you could hear them big cats yowling at night from the pine bluff. And cold as hell, just about zero outside, too cold to snow, but I slept outside after the first night, wrapped in my bedroll and a half dozen buffalo skins. Was worse inside the cabin. Got this strange, thick feeling, just like the one you got upstairs. Couldn't sleep. Don't know how you sleep up there.”

“I don't,” I say. “Not well. Strange dreams. A lot of tossing and turning.”

“In any case, I find out that in this cabin supposedly some bastard killed a woman going back about thirty years. Cut her throat, gutted her, skinned her, hung her up to dry, and cured the meat. When they busted in on him, he was grinding her liver for sausages. Things like that, they linger in the air, you know?”

Rust has a way of hitting the nail on the head. The last mouthful of the Vera Cruz suddenly tastes like lead. What horrors were cooked up on my stove? I wonder. What terrible haunches stored in the refrigerator? And these morbid considerations lead to others. It strikes me suddenly that I don't take care of myself, that I am going to seed. That I am getting older, thirty-three in November, that I don't eat well, that I have no health insurance, that I have squandered my early promise, that there is no one in this city who loves me.

And just then, as if in dreadful affirmation, the power plant vents steam into the night sky. A rush of white rises beyond the window, and a great mechanical clanging rings out over Brooklyn like a scream.

F
RIDAY, DUSK.

I am in Manhattan to pick up a last check from my temp agency. Then, to escape the crush in the streets, I stop for a beer at the Crescent City Grill, a cheesy pseudo-Louisiana bar on East Broadway with an unaccountably reasonable happy hour. From 4:00 to 8:00
P.M
. on Fridays, bottles of Abita are $2.25. As far as I know, this is the only place above the Mason-Dixon Line that serves Abita, which is New Orleans's hometown brew.

Louisiana is very trendy just now in New York. There are any number of imitation Cajun saloons, faux-Creole cafés, expensive East Side restaurants that feature down-home southern cooking at ridiculous uptown prices. New Yorkers are like the French in their childish attraction to what passes for genuine Americana; to country music, cowboy boots, deep-fried gator nuggets, sippin' whiskey, and all such redneck nonsense. This is because New York is really its own small nation; insular and provincial in the sense that New Yorkers do not know or care what's going on outside the five boroughs. Thus Dallas or Baton Rouge are as foreign and exotic to someone from New York as they would be to someone from Paris or Berlin.