The Moonlight
Authors: Nicholas Guild
The Moonlight
By Nicholas Guild
Text copyright © 2012 Nicholas Guild
All Rights Reserved
This book is for Thia
April 1, 1990
George Patchmore sat in his wheelchair out on the back patio, enjoying the cool April sunshine, thinking about the chicken crêpes they had served for lunch. Lately his dentures had been bothering him and, in any case, the paralysis on the left side of his face made chewing awkward, so he was just as happy when the main course was something soft. The crêpes were perfect. He could cut them with his fork—he hated it when one of the waitresses had to cut his meat for him; it make him feel like a driveling infant—and he managed to get through the whole meal without getting any of the sauce on his shirt.
Meals, with all their opportunities for accidents, provided his day with its moments of high drama. Lunch particularly was a challenge since George never ate very much for dinner, because bedtime was early at his age and he was afraid of bad dreams. Besides, the really tricky stuff always seemed to show up at lunch. That was when visitors came, if they were coming, and the kitchen staff tried to make an impression. So you had to watch your step at lunch.
Except for his realtor, whom he saw about twice a year, George did not have visitors. His only son had stepped on a land mine during the Korean War, his ex-wife had been dead for nearly forty years—killed by the shock, he suspected. He had a kid sister, but he hadn’t heard from her more than half a dozen times since 1938, when she had gone off to California with that husband of hers, and nothing in the past ten years. She would be in her middle seventies, so probably she was dead. Her boy, whose name George couldn’t even remember, might be anywhere. So there were no visitors. It bothered him sometimes, on Christmas and Thanksgiving, when the dining room was nearly empty because everyone was having dinner with The Children, but the rest of the time he thought of it as something of an advantage. He had given up living for other people after his wife left him. His life was his own property.
But there was always the realtor. Jack Matheny came twice a year, in January and July, to show him the financial statements and to try to talk him into selling the Moonlight, which, apparently, could no longer be rented and which, for reasons that were most definitely none of Jack’s business, George would never let out of his possession.
But it was April, so he had nothing to fear from Jack Matheny on this particular afternoon. The time stretched before him as invitingly as an empty bed. In an hour to so, when he got tired of the sunshine, he would go up to his room and spread
The New York Times
out on the table to read—he would read everything, even the obituaries and the want ads. Then, at six thirty, he would have his dinner. Then he would go back to his room and watch whatever the
Times
recommended on television. Then he would go to bed.
He did not mind being old. He did not greatly mind his incapacity, to which he had grown accustomed after thirty-five years and which, after the stroke that had left one side of his body almost useless, had never, thank God, gotten any worse. At least it had removed him from the Moonlight, with its memories and its tormenting dreams, worse with every year. He had thought the place would drive him mad, that one night he would just go over the line and never come back, but instead of that, a blood vessel in his brain went pop and had put him in a wheelchair. It could have been worse—it had been worse.
And he had lived into extreme old age, otherwise intact. Half of his body was dead, but his mind had remained unimpaired. All he had to do was look around him to realize how lucky he was.
Most of the residents of the Windermere Nursing Home weren’t playing with a full deck. They forgot their room numbers and their names and how to use a spoon. Every so often one of the old ladies would come to dinner in her underwear. There were people here George had known since he was a young man, and a fair share of them didn’t even recognize their own children.
Look at Vito—“Fingers” Carboni,
capo regime
in the Galatina Family and as hard-nosed a crook as you’d hope never to meet. Way back when, he and Fingers had done a lot of business together, and the guy had always given him a bad case of the sweats. Now, if they happened to pass in the corridor, “Mr. Carboni” didn’t know him from Sophie Tucker.
George glanced around the patio with a certain contemptuous satisfaction. There on a lounger, all tricked out in an iridescent green cocktail dress, was Mrs. Patimkin, who kept mistaking her son Harry for his late father and had once been brought back to the nursing home by a couple of uniformed policemen who had found her wandering around in the traffic on Putnam Avenue.
And sitting on a bench over on the other side of the lawn was some old fart in a brown suit, looking like he was dead. He was too far away for George to know who he was without putting on his glasses, and what difference did it make? He had been there when George came outside, and he hadn’t moved a muscle in fifteen minutes. He might actually be dead and, as long as he showed up for meals, nobody would notice.
Just being in a wheelchair was not the worst fate that could afflict a man in his mid eighties.
And living at the Windermere Nursing Home was better than his old third-floor apartment at the Moonlight—the Moonlight, which he had bought with such high hopes in 1935, mainly to get out of the rackets and away from his partner because the guy was a maniac it wasn’t safe to be around. And in the end he hadn’t done either one.
The Moonlight, where he used to wear a tuxedo to show guests to their tables, where a five-piece band would play Artie Shaw arrangements until three in the morning, where everything and everybody was for sale if only you had the price in cash. And for a few years it had been so good there, right up until the War.
Then came Pearl Harbor and gas rationing, and suddenly a roadhouse wasn’t such a hot business prospect anymore. Even after V-J Day things were never the same. It was like the place was under a curse.
Hell, it
was
under a curse. And George didn’t have to ask himself why.
Well, it was a good thing he’d kept his friends, friends who were willing to pay top dollar for the odd little favor that the police never had to know anything about. He had made a lot of money, but he had had to go on living at the Moonlight, keeping his slightly shady little operation puffing along as a front, and the Moonlight had become his private purgatory.
For years there was nothing, until after the War, well after the war. And then, slowly, so that he hardly noticed when it began, the place started to fill him with an indefinable sense of dread. There was an atmosphere of too many wicked secrets kept too long, the stench of death and betrayal.
Little sounds—not the noises that you come to expect in an old house as it settles in for the night, but the sounds of movement, of another presence, when he knew he was alone inside its walls. Faint voices, muffled words, curses too indistinct to be understood.
Then came the nightmares, so real he hardly knew whether he was awake or asleep. Visions of such horror that he dreaded to close his eyes.
And at last it no longer waited on the night. He would find himself haunted and hounded even in broad day. It was unbearable.
And then, finally, he had had his stroke—what a relief to wake up in the hospital, in a clean white bed, with the sunshine streaming in through the window, and be told, “Mr. Patchmore, I’m afraid you may never be able to go home. . .”
Not that he could ever really rid himself of the Moonlight. He didn’t dare to sell it, to let someone tear the place down. . . It just wasn’t possible.
For years afterward he wondered if perhaps he hadn’t had some sort of nervous breakdown—if the stroke, along with the nightmares and all the rest of it, hadn’t been just one more symptom, another proof that he was going off his chump. But it was now thirty-five years later and he seemed, at least to himself, remarkably sane. In all that time, the handful of bad dreams he had suffered through had all been the fault of undercooked roast beef and a weakness for rich desserts.
And, to set beside that, there was the gaudy history of the Moonlight during those thirty-five years, a history that had left the place at last unrentable and empty, the haunted house of local legend.
No, he hadn’t been going off the deep end. There was something evil out there, something that would never go away. An ancient wrong—a stain on a conscience that had always carried its sins lightly enough.
The old fart in his brown suit still hadn’t moved. George was beginning to wonder if maybe he really was dead, so he started fishing around in the pocket of his coat for his glasses.
He put them on, blinked a couple of times to give his eyes a chance to focus, and looked again.
The face he saw was almost gray. An old man’s face, thin and leathery, the lips slightly drawn back from the teeth so that he looked mummified, yet strangely familiar. The eyelids were closed over sockets that could have been hollow.
He was dead right enough. He looked like he had been dead for years.
His heart pounding in his chest and a buzzing sound in his head that was almost painful, George reached down with his good hand to the little control stick that ran his wheelchair. He wheeled around and, when he got to the door, about twenty-five feet behind him, he almost ran over Esther, the gigantic black charge nurse who ran the afternoon shift.
“Mistah Patchmore,” she said, in the lilting negro drawl that George suspected was actually some sort of elaborate hoax—after all, the woman had been born in Hartford and, so far as anybody knew, had never in her whole life been south of New York City—”you gotta watch that drag racin’ stuff. We got old people around this place, you know, and they don’t run too fast.”
“Take a look at that guy,” he answered, fighting for breath. He twisted the wheelchair violently around. “Just go—”
The bench on the other side of the lawn was empty. There was no one there.
“What
guy
, Mistah Patchmore?”
He wasn’t there. He really wasn’t there. George had just time enough to compose his face before he turned back to Esther with a weak, unconvincing smile.
“Nothing,” he said, badly slurring the word—his speech was, at the best of times, a labored business, and now it was almost impossible. His tongue felt too big for his mouth. “A mistake. Forget it.”
“You okay, Mistah Patchmore? You wanna go up to your room and lie down for a while?”
“I’m fine. I’ll go up a little later.”
She stood in front of him for a moment, with that look she used on the patients when she wanted them to know they’d been naughty, and then she just shook her head and went back inside.
George pulled his wheelchair into a patch of shade and tried to compose himself. An unfamiliar pain, as if the nerves were being twisted like rope, was coursing up his bad arm and into his chest. He felt weak and nauseated.
“Stop this,” he said under his breath. “Get hold of yourself. He was there and now he’s gone—big deal. So he wasn’t dead after all.”
“Except that he was.”
The voice came from behind him. Suddenly he felt himself moving forward in his chair. He could turn his head just enough to see a fist closed around the handle of his wheelchair and the sleeve of a brown suit coat. Someone was pushing him along out into the sunlight.
He knew that voice. He couldn’t place it right away, but he knew it from somewhere. Flat, slightly nasal and mocking—it was almost as familiar to him as his own.
Dammit. Dammit to hell. He cursed his decrepit, half-paralyzed body that would not let him twist around far enough around to see the man’s face.
“It’s been a long time, pal—you’re not lookin’ so good.”
George found himself panting for breath as the pain in his arm and chest started to creep up into his neck. He could feel his heartbeat behind his eardrums, and the sound in his head was growing louder. He felt as if he was going to give way at the seams, just pop open. It was agony.
The wheelchair came to a stop next to a lawn chair, not fifteen feet from Mrs. Patimkin’s lounger. Mrs. Patimkin looked up from whatever private reverie had been occupying what was left of her mind, smiled and nodded, adding a few indistinct monosyllables to her greeting. She looked only at George, not at the man behind him, of whose presence she seemed unaware.
“Goofy old broad,” the man said, in a voice loud enough for her to hear. “God, who wants to live to be that age?”
But Mrs. Patimkin seemed oblivious. She had a lace handkerchief spread out on her lap and she seemed occupied with smoothing away the creases with the tips of her fingers.
The man came around and sat down on the lawn chair. He was wearing a brown suit, like the man on the bench. It could have been the same suit, but not the same man—this was a young guy, in his middle thirties. He was thin, with a cunning, sharp-featured face, and his hair was oiled and combed straight back in a way that hadn’t been fashionable in decades. He was someone George Patchmore knew.
“Charlie?” George managed in a strangled voice that was almost drowned out for him by the buzz in his head. He was so frightened he felt as if he were about to throw up.
Mrs. Patimkin threw him a startled, reproachful glance.
“Yeah, Charlie,” the man said, smiling with a kind of contemptuous triumph. “I finally made it. Didn’t you always know I would?”