Madeleine's Ghost

by Robert Girardi

  “But, honey,” the blonde says to him, “you know I can’t drink your nasty old liquor. I want a bourbon and water. Can’t you tell the boy to bring me a bourbon and water?”

  “You will drink what we drink, Cheryl,” Ulazi says in a hard voice. “You will not insult me in front of my sister. That is final.”

  “Oh, shit,” Cheryl says, but she puts her nose into the glass and wets her tongue like a cat. Her accent sounds like the hills of North Carolina. I take a good look at her. I would like to say that she is not attractive, but this is impossible. I’ve seen girls like her lounging away the summers on Myrtle Beach by the thousands, busting out of gold bikinis that are little more than scraps strung together with thread, their makeup melting in the sun, and despite myself, I wanted every one of them, at least for an hour. New York is full of Cheryls. Big-boned southern girls with a certain native beauty who leave Asheville or Winston-Salem for the lights of the city. The best of them after brief careers on the kick lines of off-Broadway shows end up as the wives of Italian construction subcontractors or police sergeants from the Bronx. The worst of them end up with men like Ulazi.

  I remember now the few things Chase told me about her stepbrother: He is an actor, a gigolo and a thug, something of a celebrity in the Gypsy community here. After a bit of modeling work in New York, he went out to Hollywood to make his fortune in the movies and does supporting roles as a heavy in the Mexican soap operas produced in Los Angeles. He is the son of the Spanish Gypsy whom their father married after divorcing Chase’s mother. Chase dotes on him; this is plain to see. A few years back she hid him out in Providence when he was wanted by the NYPD in connection with fraud and assault charges brought by a wealthy widow of Fifth Avenue. After sleeping with the unfortunate lady for six months at two thousand dollars a week, there was a falling-out, and Ulazi hit her and took some jewelry; we never got the full story. Eventually the charges were dropped.

  We drink a few more toasts of the arak. The stuff tastes like lighter fluid. Cheryl almost chokes getting it down and pounds her breastbone with her fist.

  “Damn,” she says. “Damn.”

  “How have you been, little brother?” Chase says. She has a tight hold on his arm to keep him from escaping. “I haven’t heard from you all year. Did you get my Christmas card? I sent you some expensive socks for your birthday; they were real cute. Did you get the expensive socks?”

  Ulazi nods, somberly, lifts his leg, and pulls up his trousers to show off the socks. This particular pair is embroidered with tiny shields bearing the fleur-de-lis of the arms of France.

  “I meant to call,” he says. “You know how it is.”

  Chase gives a girlish laugh that is shocking. I have never seen her like this. “You never call, you never write,” she says as if it is a good thing. “That’s just you.”

  The spectacle is a little painful, so I turn to the blonde.

  “You’re from North Carolina?” I say.

  She smiles, showing a mouthful of even white teeth. “Hey, that’s pretty good,” she says. “How did you guess?”

  I give out a mysterious smirk. “You and Ulazi here been going out for a long time?”

  “Around a year now,” she says. “Ully and I see each other every time he comes to New York, and that’s pretty often. About every other month.”

  “Oh!” Chase looks over at the blonde with a hurt expression, then looks back at her brother. “You mean, you’ve been coming to New York for a year and haven’t managed to see me?”

  At this Ulazi nods sharply to Cheryl, who gets up quickly, pulling Chase with her.

  “Let’s go to the little girls’ room, honey,” Cheryl says nervously. Chase is too confused to resist, and I am left at the table alone with the brooding Gypsy. There is a moment of silence. Then Ulazi turns his odd black eyes on me.

  “Are you hustling my sister?” he says.

  I give him a blank look.

  “You know what I mean. Is she paying you to fuck her?” He is serious.

  “No,” I say, aghast. “We’re just friends.”

  He stares at me, his eyes narrowed. “O.K., I believe you,” he says at last. “Given the way she looks, you’d have to be a real weirdo to fuck her, money or no money. You look a little cheap, but you don’t strike me as a weirdo.”

  “Hey, thanks,” I say.

  “But you never know. It takes all kinds. I ran into a guy in L.A. who will only screw amputees. He’s a good-looking guy, too. Strange, huh? Don’t get me wrong. Chase is a great kid. It’s just hard for me to hang out with her because of my career. You never know when you’ll run into someone from the fashion magazines or some producer, and it helps to be seen with a certain kind of woman. Someone more like Cheryl. Ugliness, just like bad luck, it rubs off, you know?”

  I think this despicable but consider it best not to tell him so.

  A minute or so later the girls return, and after another round of arak, Ulazi and Cheryl rise and take their leave.

  “Nice meeting y’all,” Cheryl says brightly.

  “Yeah, we’ve got to hang out with a couple of business acquaintances,” Ulazi says. “You know, business.” He flashes a false, perfect-toothed grin.

  “Will I see you soon?” Chase says, panic rising in her voice. “Come to dinner. Why don’t you come to dinner?”

  He shakes his head. “I’m really busy this time, Chase,” he says. “I’ll call you.”

  Then they disappear through a padded door to the private party rooms in the back.

  An hour later Chase and I walk up Doyers Street through Columbus Park, its concrete bandshell quiet at this hour, and up Baxter to a Vietnamese Pho place at Canal where the soup is cheap and good. But when we try the door, it is locked from the inside. The last couples sit finishing their spring rolls at the small tables, and the proprietor wags his finger at us through the glass.

  “We close,” he says.

  Chase turns away and takes out a cigarette. For a moment she stands on the sidewalk, blowing smoke up toward the banner of the Italian and American flags strung between Forlini’s and the sushi place across the street.

  “I can’t believe he’s been coming to New York all this time,” she says to the burnt-out sky over Manhattan. “And he’s never called me. Not once. I sent him money every month till he got established out in L.A., and these were in the days when I could barely make my rent. Then I wrote him letters, so many letters. You know, I don’t think he even bothered to read them. The bastard.”

  We walk up to Canal to catch a cab but stand lingering on the corner as the traffic shoots down to the bridge.

  “It’s the fucking banquet,” she says. “I’m denied a place at the banquet of life. All these years I thought I could fight my way in. I thought style or toughness would be enough. No. The banquet is open only to the beautiful. There’s a guy out front who checks your face.”

  “Don’t be hard on yourself because your stepbrother’s a jerk,” I say, but she has stopped listening. I flag her a cab and, as she bends toward the door, lean down and kiss her gently on the lips.

  4

  THE CLOCK ticks heavily in my room. Across Portsmouth the power plant grumbles in the yellow night. Bolts of blue static zap between the transformers. Out the bathroom window Manhattan seems rimmed in fire, burning against the sky, cables of the bridges strung glittering like blown glass over the dark river.

  The apartment is like an oven tonight. Sleep is impossible. Yesterday the temperature reached 102 Fahrenheit in Times Square. The weatherman on the radio says we’re in the middle of one of the worst heat waves the East Coast has seen in over a hundred years. In Philadelphia fifteen people have already died from heat-related illnesses. In New York they’re not saying.

  These conditions seem to please the ghost. The other night there were two new noises: a flapping sound and a very distinct cough. The flapping sound could have been the curtains in Molesworth’s old room, but the cough? Also, when I stumbled to the bathroom in the dark,
my hand came to rest for a second against what felt like a ladder-back chair in the middle of the living room. It only occurred to me the next morning that I have no such chair. I was half asleep, so I am not entirely sure of this incident.

  But I can’t discount it either.

  5

  ONE HUNDRED and one in the shade, and I am sitting on a bench in the sun across from the Cost-Less shoe store, eating a bag of peanuts, sweating profusely and watching the crowds. This stretch of the Fulton Street Mall in downtown Brooklyn looks like pictures of Nairobi or Timbuktu I have seen in the pages of National Geographic. The same dark throngs and run-down buildings and women carrying bundles on their heads. Afrocentric ware is spread across blankets on the sidewalk. On the nearest one I see vials of liquid incense, wooden zebra statuettes, and hardcover books about Malcolm X, Tina Turner, and the blackness of the Pharaohs of Egypt.

  At last I spy Chase exit the subway at Clark Street, two blocks down. She waves at me and pauses to look in the window of Cost-Less.

  “They really do cost less,” she says when I reach her side. “Look at those.” She indicates a pair of black clumpy platforms with large chrome buckles, passable imitations of expensive models sold for hundreds of dollars at fashionable boutiques in Manhattan. “Twenty-nine ninety-five. Seems like a bargain. What do you think?”

  “Yes,” I say. “But you get what you pay for.” This statement would have made my mother proud.

  We stand there for a minute longer, staring at the shoes. Chase is wearing a short summer dress and Birkenstock sandals today and a pair of big Italian sunglasses that have the effect of making her look like a bug in a cartoon, but she is in a rare good mood.

  “O.K.” She flashes me a crooked smile. “Ready for the Spirit World?”

  We walk around the corner to Madame Ada’s Gypsy Tearoom on Livingston. The place is one flight up, over a Korean deli that features a salad and hot lunch buffet. A plastic-lettered sign in the deli window gives today’s specials as Beef Lo Mein, Bratwurst and Sauerkraut, Chicken Lasagna. The greasy smell of these disparate offerings haunts us until we step into Madame Ada’s parlor. This place has a powerful smell all its own, the reek of cats and cloying perfume and incontinent bowels and baby powder, an old woman’s smell.

  I settle on the sofa in the hallway in a cloud of dust and wait as Chase goes through the curtain into the back to fetch her great-aunt. After a moment I hear the sound of arguing, and it seems it will take a while, so I go on into the tearoom, which is done up in what can only be described as Gypsy kitsch: The walls are covered with brocade fabric and framed 3-D pictures of the Last Supper and the Statue of Liberty. A yellow parrot blinks somnolently from a pagoda-shaped cage. A black lacquer celestial globe rests idly on its axis, ringed with fanciful personifications of the constellations. There is actually a crystal ball on a Turkish table, surrounded by low, carpet-covered Turkish couches. A poorly executed plaster statue of the Muse Calliope flexes her breasts in one corner. Of greater interest is the bookcase overflowing with ancient wide-backed tomes on various extraphysical topics, a few of them familiar to me from the research paper on automatic writing done in my abandoned year of graduate work at Loyola.

  With a twinge of nostalgia I make out a copy of Flournoy’s Des Indes à la planète Mars, the volume in which Antoinette once left love notes in another life. There is also Charles Linton’s The Healing of the Nations, J. Murray Spear’s Messages from the Spirit Land, and rare copies of Joseph Glanville’s The Vanity of Dogmatizing and Sadducismus Triumphatus, containing Glanville’s account of the séance that roused the infamous knocking drummer of Tedworth in 1661. I am surprised to find both are original seventeenth-century editions, worth a small fortune. As I examine them, the curtains part and Chase wheels her great-aunt into the tearoom.

  Stuffed into her wheelchair, Madame Ada is quite a sight. She has the jowls of Winston Churchill, a head the size of a basketball and is of an indeterminate age between 60 and 90. A big person to begin with, but bloated by years of overeating and no exercise, she must weigh more than Molesworth. The woman is not a cripple—Chase has told me this—just someone who does not like to walk. For a horrible second I imagine her inner organs, her heart encased in fat like a canned ham. With some effort Chase pushes her great-aunt up to the table.

  “Auntie, this is Ned,” she calls out, and then collapses into a doilied armchair across the room.

  The old woman in the wheelchair looks me up and down with eyes black and hard as marbles. “Young man, put the books back where you got them, very carefully, and sit down,” she says. Her voice booms from somewhere out of all that flesh.

  I replace Glanville on the shelf and sit carefully on the Turkish couch, so low I am staring up at Madame Ada’s knees. She is wearing the heavily embroidered skirt and shawl of her tribe. A circlet of Greek coins is stuck to her forehead with sweat. She stares at me for the next few minutes in silence, fixing her black eyes with a concentration that sends a chill down my spine. I start to speak, but Madame Ada puts a finger to her lips, and there is nothing but her eyes and an odd catlike humming from her barrel throat. Then, suddenly, she claps her hands. It is a loud, meaty, popping sound, and I almost jump off the sofa.

  “Do you know how long you were out?” she says.

  “What do you mean?” I say.

  “It’s been ten minutes,” Chase says from across the room. “Auntie had you in a trance for ten minutes. You sat on that couch stiff as a board with your mouth hanging open.”

  “Hush, girl!” Madame Ada says. “You didn’t feel it?” she says to me.

  I shake my head, confused, and Madame Ada shrugs and turns to Chase.

  “There is nothing I can do for your friend,” she says. “The knots are tied too tightly around him.”

  “Wait a minute,” I say. “You haven’t done anything. You haven’t even heard about the ghost yet.”

  “We don’t use the word ghost here,” she says sharply. “The word ghost is offensive to the spirits of the departed. We use the word spirit, or presence or apparition, or, if you must, shade or phantasm, but never ghost. Also, the words phantom and entity are discouraged.”

  I frown and say nothing.

  “Why can’t you help him, Auntie?” Chase says from her chair.

  “Listen, how about we just forget the whole thing?” I stand up to go, annoyed.

  “Sit!” Madame Ada brings her black eyes to bear like cannon.

  I sit.

  “I don’t need to hear about the spirit from you because I can see the spirit. Right there.” She points to my head with a knobby finger made crooked by arthritis.

  “Where?” I say.

  “There, in your aura.”

  “You mean, right now?”

  “Yes. She’s with you always. Not just where you live but wherever you go. And she has been with you for some years. Waiting.”

  “She?” I begin to sweat. “Did Chase tell you about the, uh … spirit?”

  The old woman shakes her head. “Chase told me that you were sharing your apartment with a restless presence, and that you found this arrangement uncomfortable. Nothing more.”

  Chase sits forward in her chair across the room. Now I see that her eyes are like her great-aunt’s, only dimmer, much less powerful.

  “So you are aware the spirit is that of a woman?” Madame Ada says. “You have seen her. Am I correct?”

  “Maybe,” I say.

  “And let me tell you something else. Your people, they often see the dead. This mark is upon you. A certain melancholy tone in the outer edge of your penumbra. A sadness that enables you to grope a little way into the gloom. Am I correct?”

  “My mother,” I mumble. “She was a little weird. She had these migraines; she would see colors, hear things …”

  “And?”

  “Once, when I was a kid, she said our cat, Miss Kitty, came scratching on the kitchen door to be fed. She fed the cat, and out it went again. Thing is, I saw Miss Kitty run over by
a car two weeks before that.”

  “Of course. Your mother. And you have denied your own spirit sight time and again, am I right?”

  “I don’t know,” I say, my voice the barest croak.

  “So you felt something when you moved into the apartment?”

  “Not really.” I look down. I can barely meet the old woman’s eyes. “A whisper, maybe.”

  “A whisper!” She shakes her massive head in disgust. “If you had cultivated your gift, you wouldn’t have moved into the apartment in the first place. You would have felt the presence there and found somewhere else to live.”

  “Chase found the place,” I say. “She said it suited me—” Madame Ada gives an impatient wave. “And maybe it does. Maybe your own destiny is tied up with the restlessness of this female spirit.”

  “Who is she?”

  Madame Ada wheels her chair over to me, takes hold of one knee in a painful grasp, and closes her eyes. I feel a slight tingling sensation emanating from her fingers. Her lower lip begins to tremble and sweat, and when her voice comes out, it is an octave closer to the ground.

  “I see a white dress. A woman in a white dress,” she says. “Not from here. From far away, a warmer place. Proud and arrogant. Ruled by terrible passions. Revenge. She paid dearly for what she did. She is still paying. She needs your help to find rest. Her cousin …” Then she lets go, her eyes fluttering open. “There, that’s all I can tell you.”

  “Please, how can I get rid of her?” I say, desperate. “Are you telling me that it’s not the apartment, it’s me? What if I move to Alaska? Will the ghost follow me there?”

  “Even to the ends of the earth,” Madame Ada says, with grim satisfaction. “In your dreams.”

  “But why?” I’m almost shouting now.

  “This spirit has been waiting for you for a long time. Now she won’t let go till she get’s what she wants. You are at the center of a complicated web of circumstance. Many choices in your life have led you to the spirit, and the spirit to you. You have chosen each other from out of the billion souls.”