He pauses, leaning on his putter like an old soldier. In the distance, the ceaseless rush of traffic on the BQE.
“Can I ask you a personal question, Mr. Conti?”
“Go ahead, Father,” I say.
“After all those years of Catholic school, do you believe in God?” He seems to stop breathing as he waits for my answer. A dull light flickers in his eyes.
He has caught me by surprise. It is hard to lie about this one. I don’t know what to say.
“Sometimes,” I manage at last.
The priest wants more. I shake my head. In fact, until recently, like everyone else, I maintained a cynical skepticism regarding spiritual matters. I didn’t believe in anything I couldn’t see. The ghost in my apartment has started to change all that. It’s still hard to extrapolate the existence of the deity from the presence of a single phantom, but one ghost, I suppose, could presage a whole unseen universe of ghosts, demons, saints, and miracles. The idea is frightening to me. I prefer the faceless charged particles of science, the big bang, the gaseous clouds of electrons and protons, the primeval soups of amino acids and so forth.
At last Father Rose puts a hand on my sleeve. “I think I understand your hesitation,” he says gently. “God is too big an idea for most of us. How can you pray to a being that you can’t imagine who is everywhere and nowhere? Even Christ in His faultlessness can be daunting. But think of the intercession of the saints! A saint is a human being who sinned, had problems, and overcame them to become one of God’s people. What Brooklyn needs now is a saint. A saint who will hear our prayers and put in a good word for us with God.”
I nod and try to look sincere, but I’m not exactly sure what he’s getting at. Brooklyn needs a saint. I need the stipend mentioned in the advertisement in the Catholic Historian. I’ve been out of work for five months now, am flat broke, and rely on the odd day or two of temporary office work through an agency in Manhattan—filing, answering the phone, typing the occasional piece of correspondence into the word processor. Humiliating for a man of my dignity, a man who has completed all the course work necessary for a Ph.D. Though I have come to believe that dignity and a Ph.D. are liabilities in the world.
A moment later Father Rose rises with a sigh and brushes off the skirt of his cassock. He has an appointment to hear the confessions of two older members of the congregation. Everyone who comes to confession now is sixty if a day, he tells me. The young, it seems, no longer believe in sin.
We walk together to the heavy wrought-iron gate at the foot of the churchyard. He pushes back an iron bar as thick as my wrist and swings the gate open onto Jay Street. A bus goes chugging by, and we are overwhelmed with diesel fumes. He shakes my hand.
“You’ve got my phone number,” I say, coughing.
I step through and am halfway down the sidewalk when he calls me back.
3
TONIGHT THE ghost is an atmospheric disturbance, a storm on the horizon. The hand of the ghost is everywhere apparent as I walk around, a visitor in my own rooms: Clothes are pulled off hangers in the closet; coins atop my dresser are arranged in an oddly familiar crescent-shaped pattern; the furniture has been moved at right angles to the wall. The refrigerator door is hanging ajar, milk spoiled, cheese gone green at the edges.
I change into khaki shorts and T-shirt quickly and check the answering machine. I do not intend to stay long. These days I do little more than sleep and bathe here. The ghost brings a sick clamminess to the palms, knocks the gumption out of me. I need an antidote: One message from Antoinette would make all the difference, just the sound of her voice across the miles from New Orleans. Antoinette, I say out loud, Antoinette. It is a vain incantation. There are no messages on the machine. We are just friends now. She never calls.
In the last twenty minutes before dark I run out and take the F train into Manhattan and get drunk at the usual round of Lower East Side dives and then for a change stumble over to SoHo, where, at the wine bar of the SoHo Kitchen, I meet a blond businesswoman who believes in ghosts. She is an account executive at Carstairs and White and not too bad-looking if you squint your eyes. After a dozen or so glasses of a mildly piquant Pouilly-Fuissé, she is drunk enough to take me home with her, and I am drunk enough to go.
“It’s the ghost,” I explain. “I can’t possibly sleep in my apartment tonight.”
She nods as if she understands, and we get in a cab and go up to her condo in a high-rise building at Ninety-third and Third. It is a well-appointed apartment on the forty-second floor, with a view of the lights of the city out a picture window that takes up one whole wall of the living room. After a little informal nuzzling on the couch, we resort to some sloppy and forgettable sex and then adjourn to the bed for more of the same. I fall asleep at last around dawn, happy to be away from the creaking of the old tenement and the ghost for one night.
But then I dream I am back in Brooklyn, and invisible hands are carrying me up the stairs into the darkness of my apartment. I am carried into the kitchen and set back at the table and forced to look around, and there, before the window, is a shapeless cloud full of despair in the same way that a thunderhead is full of hard rain and heat lightning. Then I see something white moving in the cloud and a pair of hands emerge, the white hands of a woman with rings on each finger, and my heart is filled with dread.
I wake up in a sweat to find that it is just past eleven in the morning and I am alone in the account executive’s apartment. I get up, dress, and find a note and a business card set beneath a glass of orange juice and a cold buttered muffin on the glass table in the living room.
“Had fun last night,” the note says. “Call me. Didn’t want to wake you. Let yourself out.”
As instructed, I let myself out and travel down forty-two floors in the elevator. The streets up here are neat and blinding. I wander this unfamiliar landscape for a few hours, feeling terrible and hungover and reflecting that the ghost has followed me into a woman’s bed across the river and up ninety-three blocks through streets flooded with a blaze of brightness as dark and unforgiving as the tomb itself.
4
LOOKING BACK, I should have realized there was something wrong with the apartment from the beginning. My friend Chase Zingari found it for me five years ago, and she is an odd, tormented young woman who believes in ghosts, second sight, and demonic possession. She is half Romanian Gypsy and half blueblood WASP, with a bone deformity that has left her face a mess, something out of a cheap horror movie.
I had just moved to the city and was going through the hell of looking for an apartment to share out of the Voice when Chase heard about a rent-controlled two-bedroom in an obscure industrial neighborhood in Brooklyn called Molasses Hill. I still don’t know how she found out about the place—an acquaintance, a stranger in a bar—but we got the key from the main office of a mob-run garbage concern on the Lower East Side and went under the river on the F train to take a look.
I remember walking the empty streets in the first red light of dusk. After the clamor of Manhattan it seemed eerily quiet. Dark barges passed silently on the East River just a block down. Crickets chirped from weeds growing through the cobbles. The blood-colored sunset tinted shards of broken glass in the windows of abandoned warehouses. Along the three or four blocks of decrepit tenements across from the power plant, dying fig trees sagged against gravity, propped up with two-by-fours and wire stays. I saw a hummingbird dart off from the rotting fruit toward the light in the west. I was charmed. Fresh from Graduate Student Housing at Georgetown, I knew nothing of the violence and crime of South Brooklyn. And the rent was extremely low, almost a miracle in itself.
“So what’s the catch?” I said to Chase.
We had inspected the apartment and stood in the empty living room, boards creaking beneath our feet. The smokestacks of the power plant out the window looked like the fingers of a giant hand.
“Does there always have to be something wrong?” Chase said. “For once in your life, believe.” Then she did
a sort of dance with the dust through the four vacant rooms and came back to stand beside me. “It’s a fucking amazing bargain,” she said, out of breath. “Three seventy-five for two bedrooms, one big, one teensy, a reasonable living room, a separate kitchen and bathroom sporting a full-length tub. And look out here.…” We stepped over to the bedroom window. The last light caught the ridges and scars of her Phantom of the Opera face as we peered through the dirty pane. “A backyard!”
Sure enough, there was a weedy fenced-in lot out back, with an overgrown garden patch, a square of grass, a broken-down grape trellis, and a crumbling brick barbecue pit. Beyond the fence and the nearest row of tenements, eight or nine massive residential towers stood black against the darkening sky.
“What are those?” I said.
“Those are the Decateur Projects, I think,” Chase said, and danced off into the kitchen to light her cigarette at the gas burner.
“Wait, housing projects?” I followed her across the dirty linoleum to the stove. Moths flitted around the naked bulb dangling from the ceiling. “So how’s the neighborhood?”
She shrugged. “Sort of melancholy. It suits you.”
“I mean, how safe is it?”
“You’re in New York now. Welcome to uncertainty and dread.”
“What happened to the previous tenant?”
“He left.”
“Chase …”
“Come on!” She gestured with her cigarette toward the fireplace in the living room. “Look at the one single thing the man left behind!”
Above the mantel, pasted to a piece of cardboard, hung a magazine reproduction of an unfinished portrait of the emperor by J. L. David. “Your hero, Napoleon!” Chase almost shouted. “That is a sign you should take this apartment! Now! Who cares about the neighborhood? We could all die tomorrow. Shit, you’ve got to move in, I can’t explain it. I’m getting that prickly feeling up my legs. It’s the right place for you, it just is!”
“Don’t go intuitive on me,” I said, calmly as possible. “Looks a little scary around here. That F stop at Knox …”
“Fine,” Chase interrupted, “if you don’t take the place, I will.”
I moved in a week later.
Now I know that even in those first months, before Molesworth came up from Louisiana, I felt something in the apartment, a quiet expectation, the presence of an unseen something else.
But when Molesworth arrived, these vague inklings were drowned out by his vast human stink. Molesworth in himself was enough to obscure any apparitions, belonging as he does entirely to this world, mulchy stink of the Louisiana swamp still about him. He was much too solid for hauntings. His huge, rotund body sweated of earthly pleasures; the smell of his cigars curled out from beneath the door to his bedroom like his own sort of ectoplasm—even though I had expressly forbidden any cigar smoking in the apartment. His bottles of Dixie beer, empty except for that little bit of backwash, piled up in the kitchen at the rate of a case and a half a week. And those women with big hair and gaudy jewelry brought home most Saturday nights from one bar or the next; their giggling and the squeals and groans of lusty play could be heard through the thin pressboard of the wall as I tossed alone on the other side in my narrow bed.
I suppose the ghost couldn’t stand this noisy, squalid life. Perhaps it hid in the woodwork with the termites and the spiders or slept between the walls with the rats or disappeared into the fabric of the air.
Then, three months ago, Molesworth picked up and went back to Mamou, Louisiana, owing me one month’s rent and six hundred dollars in long-distance phone calls. Of course, I will never see the money. I woke up one morning to find his room empty and what sounded like a prepared statement read into the memo function of the answering machine.
“Dear Coonass,” came his thick backcountry drawl through the static of the tape, “circumstances beyond my control conspire to call me home to Louisiana. And if you ask old Molesworth’s opinion, it’s high time you yourself repair to other climes. Your life in New York has reached a dead end. You are drifting, Coonass, you have no agenda! Far be it from me to throw you a lifeline, but you might reconsider your old stomping grounds. I hope you will not take advantage of my departure to masturbate too much. This is Lyle Molesworth signing off.”
Molesworth had spent the two weeks just prior to his midnight exit from New York on the phone with a lawyer in Shreveport discussing wills and servitudes and liquor licenses. His grandfather Duploux died in January, and Molesworth inherited a bar on stilts in the middle of Bayou Dessaintes.
From all descriptions, it is a rough sort of place, which has been in his family for generations. There are no toilets, just holes in the floor opening directly into black water infested with alligator and cotton-mouth, though for some reason the bar is patronized by a diverse group of folks that include from time to time Johnny Cash and the governor himself, as well as the usual host of Cajun brawlers and roughnecks from the oil fields. Legend has it that a drunken Hank Williams vomited on the stage there in 1947, and they preserve what passes for the great man’s evacuated dinner—an indistinguishable lump gone green and black with age—in a mason jar on a shelf over the jukebox.
With Molesworth gone, the ghost started again where it had left off five years before. In the first few days there was nothing I could put my finger on, exactly. Just a renewed pressure in the wake of Molesworth’s departure. A soft scraping no louder than leaves falling from a dead tree or breath leaving the mouth of a child. After a week or so I began to hear a sighing in the moment before I entered a room to click on the lights at dusk, and once I caught an odd reflection in the green at the back of the mirror in the bathroom. But now it is already in the nineties every day, we are in for a hot, miserable summer, and the ghost has abandoned such subtleties. It is dropping stones from the ceiling, moving furniture. It has grown bolder with the rising mercury as if it thrives on the heat like a hothouse orchid. Now it blows through this apartment, a sour, vindictive wind.
What does the ghost want from me? Ghosts always want something. According to what I have read, they are the children of the spirit world, always tugging on the skirts of the living. They want comfort, they want attention, they want us to know how they died. And am I sure that it is a ghost? There are days when I have my doubts. Could it be an unusual sort of electrical phenomenon, a disturbance in the magnetic field of the apartment caused by the proximity of the power plant just across the street? The high-voltage transformers half a block up zap and fizz at regular intervals, throwing trails of blue static in the summer evenings.
Or perhaps the answer is more simple than all this. Perhaps I am going mad. It would be nice to go mad, absolutely insane, free of the mundanities and responsibilities of life, every day a holiday.
Unfortunately I am sane as a piece of toast.
5
THE CRYPT of the church smells like old bones and camphor. We advance through the vaulted dimness past mortuary plaques, wilting flowers, and a heap of broken wooden chairs to a small unfinished chapel set off by an iron grate. A bare bulb hangs from the ceiling here over a battered wooden table. This place is full of moldering U-Haul boxes. About thirty of them are stacked against the walls of rough stone. Another dozen are lumped together in the center of the room.
“These are the records I spoke of,” Father Rose says, pointing to the boxes with his putter. “They moved them over here when St. Catherine’s was razed to make room for that Korean shopping mall.”
I pull up the flap on one of the boxes. A dusty ledger, leather bound and edged in faded gilt, shows the date 1849; a letter written in the spidery handwriting of another era has fallen out of its envelope into a mess of other such letters. There are easily thousands of documents here, hundreds of thousands of manuscript pages in these boxes. Missalets, sermons, receipts, laundry lists, personal correspondence, accounts, you name it, all succumbing to the dampness and the years.
Father Rose pulls a rickety chair from the pile in the crypt, brings
it in, and offers it to me. He crouches down, putter over his shoulder, and his eyes go half closed. When he speaks, his voice has an odd singsong quality, as if he is repeating something memorized by rote.
“A young nun came to this parish in 1846 from New Orleans. She was known as Sister Januarius. We don’t know her given name. It was the rule of her order that the novitiates take the name of a male saint or martyr. In those troubled times it was much as it is now. Violence and poverty and ignorance. The neighborhood around the navy yard alone was home to a hundred-odd brothels and an equal number of grogshops and gambling dens. Because of the flood of unwashed Irish immigrants, anti-Catholic sentiment ran high. Murderous gangs of xenophobic hooligans called Know-Nothings roamed the streets at night, and no Catholic was safe. The parish priest was dragged off in the middle of mass, brutally beaten, and left naked and bloody in the middle of High Street, and the original wooden church was burned to the ground.
“Sister Januarius arrived two weeks after this incident. Because the situation was so bad, the bishop of New York asked that she return to her order, the Nursing Sisters of the Cross. She refused. She said that St. Benedict and St. Teresa of Avila came to her at night in the form of hummingbirds and told her to stay. It is certain that she was seized by an irresistible religious fervor. She knocked on every door in the parish; she personally closed a hundred brothels with her proselytizing; and she won converts and doubled the congregation of St. Basil’s in three months. In one year a new brick church stood on the spot of the old one. In five years she was able to oversee the construction of the dome and steeple and the transepts. Five years after that she obtained a dispensation from Pope Pius the Ninth to create the cathedral you see now, the first on Long Island.
“These are the actions of an able administrator, you might say, an energetic woman. But Sister Januarius possessed other, more mysterious abilities. The sick came to her door and were healed with a touch. The hungry were fed by the hundreds on days when the church’s larders were absolutely empty. After a lifetime of service to the parish, she died here at one hundred one years old in 1919, a peaceful death at vespers, and it was said by those present that angels hovered around her bedside just beyond the edge of seeing, ready to bear her soul to paradise.…”
Madeleine's Ghost Page 2
