Madeleine's Ghost

by Robert Girardi

  “That priest fellow came down looking for you,” Rust says now. “Lucky for you. He said you hadn’t been to work in a week. I said, ‘Let’s break the door down.’ Otherwise we wouldn’t have found you upstairs till you started to bloat and stink.”

  The last lump of funnel cake sticks in my throat. The image of myself as a rotting corpse is not good for the digestion.

  “Sorry, buddy,” Rust says. “But are you sure this is O.K., you eating this shit? What do the people in the hospital say?”

  “To hell with the people in the hospital,” I say. “I’m fine. I’m only sticking around as a favor to Dr. Abrahamson. In fact, I’m still hungry.”

  We walk back up the boardwalk to Rockaway Boulevard, the main drag, a dilapidated street of bars and retirement hotels, divided by a burned grass median. It’s hard to imagine a time when Far Rockaway was new, when the restaurants served good food and the hotels, just built, were full of clean rooms and good cheer. Hard to imagine it as anything but what it is now—a last-chance greasy beach resort at the end of the line, the distant suburb where the suburbs end, blighted with working-class ennui and endless side streets of sand-blasted salt-box houses. There is nothing more melancholy than a low-class beach at the end of the season. The smell of three-month-old grease in the fryers and empty bottles of suntan lotion in the sand, the long shadows of the parking meters on the cracking blacktop, a lone broken thong sandal left stranded on the dirty median.

  Even Rust feels it. He shivers and rubs his hands together as I munch a chili dog, extra onion at the last stand left open on the boardwalk. Then I follow him up the street into an Irish bar, marked by a fritzing neon harp. Inside, it’s a cavernous room with pictures of long-dead boxers on the walls and a jukebox full of Irish sentimental favorites, including, as always, that damn song about the unicorn. Halfway down, through a swinging door, is the lobby of a residential hotel for old men. As Rust gets his Guinness from the bar, I take a look back there: dusty couches, a rubber tree, an old front desk of dark wood, a yellowed photograph of Myrna Loy on the wall. It could be the set of a 1940s era detective movie.

  When I join him at a table near the front, Rust is half done with his pint. It is the good stuff, shipped direct, nonpasteurized, from Ireland, and leaves telltale rings on the side of the glass with each sip.

  “You were a goddamned sight, Ned,” he says, wiping the froth off his mouth with the back of his hand. “When the priest and I busted in, we heard these weird panting noises coming from your bedroom. And there you were, sprawled half off the mattress—hot as a poker, buck naked, your dick sticking straight up into the air, and moaning and squirming around like you were getting the lay of your life.”

  I pick some lint off the sleeve of my sweater, embarrassed. “I had a fever of one hundred six; that’s what Dr. Abrahamson said,” I mumble.

  “So we dragged you into the bathroom and threw you into a tub of cold water and ice cubes. That’s probably what saved your ass.”

  “No,” I say. “That wasn’t it at all.”

  “O.K., so what was it?”

  “A miracle.”

  He puts the empty pint glass down on the table with a firm click and restrains himself from comment. Like the rest of them, he thinks I’m still sick, that the fever has affected my reason.

  “O.K., whatever you say.” He pushes up from the table and pulls on his jacket. “But right now we need to get you back to the hospital before the doc knows you’re gone.”

  Rust doesn’t believe in miracles. Nor does he believe in God, whom he sees as a big fat lie invented to help people sleep better at night. And while he accepts the existence of ghosts, he believes they are a natural phenomenon, a sort of photographic imprint of past traumatic events on the magnetic field, which will someday be quantified by science. I heard the story of his early disillusionment one night over too many beers at the Horseshoe. Some people get goofy, some violent; when drunk, Rust gets philosophic.

  “I was a kid,” he told me, “this is Carswell, Nevada, 1956. My oldest brother, Cyrus, was in the hospital with leukemia brought on by one of the nuclear tests they were always doing in the desert in those days. It was this rinky-dink hospital, primitive, you know. I got bored with watching the kid die, which didn’t happen fast like in the movies, and I wandered away while my parents were talking to the doctor. Well, I ended up down at the morgue just in time to see them dump a barrel full of fetuses into the trash. That was it for me. How could God sit still and watch them dump a barrel of fetuses into the trash? Was life worth about as much as a rotten old orange peel and some coffee grinds? The whole thing didn’t make sense. Then in a second I knew there was no God at all. Just an emptiness filled up by people’s fears.”

  I can’t argue with him now because I’m not prepared to examine the consequences of belief myself. Does this mean that I’ll have to start going to mass on Sundays and holy days, take communion and confession with the old ladies, stop using profanity as casual punctuation for my sentences, and make use of sex only for the purpose of procreation? And worst of all, will I have to drop my cynicism and cultivate a positive attitude? People live in darkness because they want to, the poet Dante tells us, because they love their sins. For so long the malaise has been my constant companion in life. Can it be that men and women are meant to be happy in the world? It seems unthinkable.

  4

  THESE CONSIDERATIONS are far too metaphysical for Dr. Abrahamson. He comes into my room twice a day to draw blood, ask a few questions, record a cool scientific observation on the pad clipped to his steel-backed medical clipboard. But this afternoon the doctor has his hands behind his back, his clipboard under his arm, and a pensive look on his face, as if he’s trying to get to the bottom of something big.

  “And how do we feel today?” he says.

  “We feel fine,” I say. “Just like yesterday and this morning.”

  “Oh, yes, I forgot …” His voice trails off.

  I have managed to get the aluminum-frame window open and sit on the bed in a breeze from the sea, reading a copy of Eugène Sue’s The Wandering Jew, checked out from the hospital library. It’s an unwieldy tome of some twenty-five hundred pages written by a man who for a time during the nineteenth century was the most popular writer in the world. Dr. Abrahamson leans against the windowsill now, blocking my light and air.

  “What are you reading?” he says absently.

  “The Wandering Jew,” I say.

  “Yes, that’s exactly how I’ve felt these last few days,” he says. “I’ve been wandering this hospital, chasing down your tests, trying to figure out what the hell happened.”

  “The book’s not what you think,” I say. “It’s a ridiculous nineteenth-century romance in which the lovers get separated and circle the world in opposite directions, only to catch one last glimpse of each other across the Bering Straits—” But he’s not listening.

  “I just can’t figure it out,” he says.

  “The nun,” I say, and put the book aside.

  He waves his hand. “A hallucination, a particularly vivid hallucination caused by the fever.”

  “And the machine and the tubes and the bracelets?”

  “One of the nurses must have thought you were dead and disconnected you. She’s just afraid to come forward.”

  “Come on, Doctor. That’s pretty negligent. Sounds like lawsuit material to me. Malpractice.”

  He winces at this comment.

  “Just kidding,” I say.

  “Another thing,” he continues. “We can’t quite pinpoint the strain of the virus, which depends on successive tests. Your blood was black with the stuff; now it’s—”

  “Perfect?”

  “—normal. You were down South recently, am I right?”

  “New Orleans.”

  “I’ll get in touch with public health officials down there. Maybe they can help out with identifying the strain. New Orleans is a port. It could have come from anywhere. A new strain, or mutated. Hepa
titis M, hepatitis Z!” He is excited at the prospect. “Did you drink any polluted water on your trip?”

  I shrug.

  “Eat any raw shellfish?”

  I feel a sinking in my stomach. “Shellfish?”

  “Yeah, you know. Oysters, clams, mussels, et cetera.”

  “Yes. An oyster bar.”

  For a moment he seems disappointed. “O.K., that could explain where you picked up the virus, but it’s how you got well that worries me.” Then he leaves the room abruptly, still pensive, hands behind his back.

  The next day I am released. Dr. Abrahamson walks me downstairs and out into the hospital parking lot, where Rust is waiting with his new-used pickup truck, bought from an artist friend who has just moved to Williamsburg from Austin, Texas. It’s a dented 1959 Ford F-100, dusty red and still wearing its Texas truck tags.

  Dr. Abrahamson is a good sport. I’ve stumped medical science, but he shakes my hand anyway.

  “Thanks for your patience, Mr. Conti,” he says, “and good luck.”

  When I am halfway to the truck, he calls me back for a moment. This is difficult for him. He looks up at the neon cross on the facade, looks out at the ocean, then looks back at me.

  “Ned,” he says, “I am a man educated in the scientific method, I went to Columbia, graduated top of the class in geriatric medicine, I’m a skeptic, a nonpracticing Reform Jew, and I do not believe in miracles. But humor me.”

  “O.K.”

  “This nun, did she wear a white and blue outfit and was her skin very, very white?”

  “Yes,” I say, surprised.

  “It’s just that a few of the older patients reported seeing her that same night. This woman on the sixth floor, Mrs. Castafiori, says a nun visited her room and helped her get out of bed. Only thing is, the woman’s ninety-three, on intravenous and hasn’t walked in six months because of a disintegrating hip joint. Now she’s walking up and down the terrace under her own steam, eating solid foods. Says she wants to live to see her great-grandson born, and her granddaughter isn’t even pregnant. What do you make of that?”

  “I don’t know,” I say, and shrug. It’s almost too ridiculous.

  “What is this nun, the Virgin Mary or something? Who was, I might add, a nice Jewish girl.”

  “No,” I say. “I’m not sure. A saint.”

  “Which one?”

  “She’s new,” I say. “An unknown.”

  “There are new saints?”

  “Yes. They’re coming up all the time.”

  Dr. Abrahamson and I shake hands again, and I climb into the truck. Rust nods, and we pull out of the parking lot and head back toward town, the beach sky bleached out and mysterious with haze behind.

  5

  LOOP up the Long Island Expressway, the sun setting red behind Manhattan’s daunting profile in the distance.

  Rust is silent for a while. Then he takes a pair of sunglasses out of a cubbyhole beneath the dash as if they’ve always been there. This gesture is like a whole conversation. The truck smells of gasoline and brake lining and old truck, is very loud, and vibrates as if it’s got a loose engine mount, but just now there isn’t any place I’d rather be. I settle happily into the cracked old vinyl as we rattle over the Kosciusko Bridge and Brooklyn lowers just ahead.

  “You know, I’ve been chewing over some of the things you said,” Rust says, breaking the loud silence.

  “Yeah?”

  “I don’t mean the crazy stuff about the nun. I mean what you’ve been saying about getting out, leaving New York.”

  I wait for him to continue, but I can already see it through the windshield of the truck, prairie storms blowing against green buttes in the spring, red-gold mesas, long, unbroken rows of fence posts, a big dome sky overhead, and the land rolling off to the horizon through air fresh and pure as the breath of a child.

  “Thing is, I got a letter from Wyoming the other day. My kid brother just got tossed into jail. They gave him twenty-five years. Supposedly he’s out in five with good behavior, but who knows?”

  “Jesus,” I say. “What happened?”

  “Bastard got himself a gutful of whiskey, went into Cheyenne, and shot an Indian in a bar.”

  “I’m sorry to hear it.”

  “Yeah, well, I tell you what. My younger brother—Mitch—is an asshole. He’s a hell raiser and one ornery drunk. And when he’s sober, he’s worse. Turns into a smooth-talking, oily son of a bitch. Been married six times now.”

  The story comes out in bits and pieces. It seems Rust and his brother had a falling-out years ago over the most beautiful girl in Wyoming, Ella Slater, who was elected Miss Wyoming in a contest in Cheyenne in 1967. There was a rivalry that ended in a drunken fight during which Mitch got a gun and shot Rust in the ankle. Rust lifts his foot off the gas for a beat to show me the patched hole in his boot. We slow; a white limousine behind us honks, swerving wildly into the next lane.

  “Got a metal pin in my ankle now,” he says. “Damn near blew my foot off. But Ella, she still went ahead and married the bastard. I was wearing these same boots at the time. Keep them around just to remind me. Been resoled a hundred times, and every time I put them on, I think about that woman. Mitch and her barely lasted out the year. He beat up on her or some such shit, and Ella wasn’t the kind of woman to take it. She went off to Texas and married an oilman. Thing about Mitch, he could always make the ladies laugh. Always telling a joke, pulling some stunt. I’m honest, you know, but I’m a glum son of a bitch. The ladies will take laughter over character any day.”

  “So you were in love?” I say. The sentiment appears to be universal.

  He shrugs. “I was young. She had this blond hair. Wore it in a thick rope down the middle of her back like an Indian girl. In any case I left Wyoming and I stayed away. Because in the end I would have killed the bastard. But now …”

  “You’re going back.”

  “We’ve still got fifty-seven hundred acres along the North Platte, west of Douglas, in Converse County. Barley and sugar beets. Belongs to both of us equally, but I left the whole damn spread to him when I took off. It’s going into receivership if I don’t go back and take care of things. Thought I might try my hand at farming again.”

  “How long has it been?”

  “Shit. Twenty-five years, more.”

  “Sounds risky.”

  “Life is risky, pardner. The day you’re born, they start figuring the odds.”

  “Might be right.”

  “Hell, like you said, how long can you hang out in the same damn bars on the East Side, listening to the same damn songs on the jukebox, watching the same damn cockroach crawl across the same damn table-top? This city gets dirtier and more dangerous, I get older, and soon I’m one of the lost souls. It’s no country for old men, Ned. Look around, and you’ll see them by the thousands. Lonely old men riding the subway, sitting on the stool at the end of the bar, nursing the same fifty-year-old beer, same delusions of grandeur running around their head. I’ve been here fifteen years now. Written four unpublished books. Always told myself that fame and fortune were just around the next corner. Shit. Time to give up. Time to go home.”

  “You’re lucky,” I say quietly. “You’ve got a home to go home to.”

  He grunts; then he is silent.

  6

  WE PULL down the ramp off the BQE as the last light fades. It’s just September, but the evening comes quickly, and the violet heat in the sky at dusk is gone, replaced by a mellower, permanent blue, and the city is like an oven cooling. In this part of the country, extremely hot summers are often followed by the deep freeze. Long winters of ice and snow, record colds. September gives New Yorkers time to meditate upon disasters to come.

  When we get to Portsmouth Street, I climb up the stairs slowly and open the door to the apartment and stand on the landing for a second, feeling the atmosphere. The place is a wreck, furniture knocked over, sleeping bag still spread out in the middle of the floor, vomit stains on the pink bathroo
m rug. And only now, home again in the quiet dust in the first gloom of evening, do I think about the ghost, Madeleine. Her story is vague now, like the details of a nightmare, but I don’t need the details to know the truth, which is in my bones. She died in this place the year Sister Januarius came to Brooklyn from New Orleans. She died here horribly and unavenged.

  Then, directly following this terrible intimation, I know what to do. I clean myself up as quickly as possible, go downstairs, borrow Rust’s truck and drive over to the cathedral on Jay Street. The windows of the rectory are dark. I park on Concord and go around to ring the bell and keep ringing until the housekeeper, whose name is Mrs. Schnadenlaube, pulls back the little glass window peephole and stares out with her usual suspicion.

  It appears that Father Rose is off on vacation playing golf until Sunday.

  “He’ll be back in time for mass,” the woman says. “If he’s not back, the bishop will have his head.” I get the feeling that Mrs. Schnadenlaube does not approve of Father Rose’s golfing, and I tell her so.

  “What the good father does with his spare time is up to him,” she says. “But I’ve known him to cut services short on holy days so he can watch a tournament on TV. Someday it’s going to catch up with the man.” She’s about to shut the peephole when I tell her I need to get into the crypt.

  “To finish my work,” I say. “I’ve been sick, you know, and the deadline for my research is September fifteenth.”

  Mrs. Schnadenlaube eyes me suspiciously through her thick glasses. At last she wrinkles up her nose. “You’re up to something,” she says.

  I put on my best smile. “Just my work,” I say.

  The crypt is dark and full of darker gradations of shadows. Out in the vault, the red glimmer of electric votive candles illuminated in honor of the dead by the quarters of the living. Mrs. Schnadenlaube unlocks the iron grate and steps in beside me. Three boxes of archives left unsorted sag in a row against the wall like the monkeys who see, hear, and speak no evil. The rest of the space is covered with piles of documents, labeled and arranged in chronological order.