by Holly Nadler
“The first night after I parked the chair out in the sun-room, I went to sleep on that balmy July evening and woke up in February—it was that cold! Sure, the window was open, but I’d left it that way to catch a fresh nighttime breeze. I sat up in bed, and I saw a line of white mist waft through the room. It was like an indoor cloud. Eventually it moved through the door into the hallway, and it took the cold with it.
“I thought it was some freak of nature, but the next night the exact same thing happened again! On the third night, the freezing cloud again entered the room, but now a noise came with it! I don’t know how else to describe it except to say that it reminded me of a ceramic bowl, filled with silverware, being jostled on top of a tumbling clothes dryer.”
“Anything else?” I asked.
“No, but the cloud and the rattling noise have been going on for seven nights now! Seven nights!” she repeated with a shake of the head.
“Have you considered putting the chair back in the dining room?”
She wrinkled the nose in her ultra-tanned face. “The smell makes me queasy. I think I’ll see if the historical society will take it. They’ll know what to do about its … ah, problems … won’t they?”
I’ve tried asking discreetly whether anyone at the Martha’s Vineyard Historical Society, located on School Street in Edgartown, knows anything about a chair that would have been donated to their museum some twenty-five years ago. One historical society executive told me with a sigh, “We have a lot of stuff in storage—God knows what-all.” (I was also interested in a grand piano—the first ever shipped to the island, circa 1850. Apparently it was bequeathed to the museum upon the death of Desire Coffin Osborne, whose house stood on North Water Street. I wrote about the captain’s wife, the piano, and the ghost in Haunted Island.)
It’s been almost a century and a quarter since the City of Columbus broke up on Devil’s Bridge. Presumably, a number of Vineyard homes still house a treasure or two from the wreck. It’s also likely that some of the current owners have no idea about the provenance of their peculiar old bit of plunder. A red-plush upholstered parlor chair? (Dozens of them must have washed ashore.) A mahogany cabinet? An ornate gold-leaf frame from a mirror? If you possess such an article, and if your house goes a bit wonky on nights when a northeasterly wind is blowing and the surf is thundering against the western shore, it might be time to make your own tax-deductible donation to the Martha’s Vineyard Historical Society.
10 Portrait Of Steve
We were both oddballs in ways that folded us—like pancake mix and water—into the batter of kindred spirits. Steve Ellis first came into my bookstore in November 2005. He noticed that I stocked Nathaniel Hawthorne titles, and we were off and running in the first of many long conversations. Steve appropriated Hawthorne, having grown up in Haverhill, Massachusetts, close to the author’s old stomping grounds. I too had taken Nathaniel to my heart. As a nineteenth-century Vineyarder, the author had spent time in Edgartown, where he had an affair with a passionate young woman who bore him an out-of-wedlock daughter. He had wanted to marry the girl, but her parents rejected young Hawthorne. The baby died. Not too long ago researchers discovered, in the Edgartown cemetery, a small coffin with remains buried alongside Hawthorne’s long-ago sweetheart—tres romantique! Mother and daughter may have formed the template for the characters of Hester Prynne and daughter Pearl in The Scarlet Letter.
I won’t recount in detail any one conversation in which Steve and I indulged because I’d be obliged to set aside another full book to do it justice. But suffice it to say, we both loved to split hairs about areas of mutual interest that would have made most people squirm.
On a rainy afternoon, after I’d made a cup of hot chocolate for each of us and we had eased into opposite ends of the bookstore sofa, we might turn our noggins to a list of Henry VIII’s six wives or the first emperors of ancient Rome: “Of course it was Augustus, then Tiberius…” “Did Caligula come next, or was it Claudius?”
We both loved Rome, in fact, and had spent months at a time there. Steve, it turned out, had spent part of his Roman time living inside the Vatican. He was some sort of exclaustrated cleric. (He taught me that word. Exclaustrated means living outside a religious order but still affiliated with it; in other words, freedom without dishonor. This worked perfectly for me, an unofficial nun in the secular world—the kind who lives in her own apartment and can wear whatever she likes, within reason.)
Steve and I were the same age—we were both born in 1948—but he seemed like a much older person. He was tall and rotund, with a silver beard and an aristocratic bearing, and he wore tailored slacks with crisp creases, Englishy pullover sweaters, and scarves. He reminded me of an African-American Orson Wells, and, in truth, he was just slightly on the pompous side. A heart condition that he was disinclined to discuss caused him to walk with a cane. In fact, he hardly seemed to mind stepping into the shoes of an elderly man. He enjoyed the lunch and the company at the Oak Bluffs Council on Aging. After that he would buy a little something from the antiques store on Tuckernuck Avenue. The last part of this routine was invariably a visit to my bookstote.
Whenever he went missing for a week or two at a time, it seemed to relate to a stay with his father in Haverhill. His mother was somehow absent from the picture, and only when I read his obituary did I learn that he had once been married. He had no children but was fond of his nephews, and he’d inherited a lovely old house from an aunt in Vineyard Haven. (He’d shown me pictures of it only because a huge flock of wild turkeys once invaded his front yard, which sounds quaint until it happens to you.)
Steve once told me one of the eeriest true ghost stories I’ve ever heard. I’ll try to recreate his scholarly, vaguely old-fashioned style as I set it down for you.
I was set to attend a conference in an old monastery, high in the mountains, about an hour’s drive from Boulder, Colorado. There was no longer a religious community installed there, so they closed it up every winter, and opened it in the spring for meetings and retreats.
I took down the date of the event, but I got it wrong somehow, and booked my flight a day before anyone else did. I received word back that it was not a problem, that the day staff from the village had been getting the place organized. If I didn’t mind spending the first night alone in the monastery, I was welcome to come up early.
This would have been a perfect time for Steve to take a reflective pause. He was a riveting story-teller with a sonorous tenor voice. He reminded me of one of those nineteenth-century narrators who could recount a novella-length story until dawn, and no one at the dinner table would make a sound other than to pour a fresh glass of good port.
I was tired from the flight, and even wearier from the long, twisting drive through the mountains. Finally, I reached the wrought-iron gates which, thankfully, stood open. The sun was just sinking toward the surrounding mountain peaks, and that last bit of amber light beautifully illuminated the massive stone walls. The stone itself, even without the sunset, was a golden color. It had been brought in from some other mountain range because it was similar in hue to the ancient walls of Jerusalem. The whole place had a Knights Templar feel to it.
When I pulled up through the porte-cochere, two brass lanterns glowed on either side of the high wooden doors. A caretaker came out, showed me where to park, then opened the doors again and led me through the front hall the size of a school auditorium.
The place was awash in gloom. The caretaker had switched on only enough wall sconces for us to make our way up the grand staircase and through a maze of corridors. Finally he showed me into my room—very comfortable, with a four-poster bed, dark mahogany furniture, and some tattered but very noble old Persian carpets. I moved around the room switching on every lamp because, by then, the sun had dropped well below the mountains. No light whatsoever came through the recessed Gothic windows.
The caretaker said he was heading back to his cabin behind the main building. He asked if I remembered the route we’
d taken to get to my room, and then he described how to find the dining hall downstairs. “Most of the food supplies won’t be brought up until tomorrow, but there’s bread, butter, eggs, and a few cans of this and that in the pantry, if you want to help yourself.”
I’ll admit, immediately after the caretaker had gone, I toyed with the idea of locking myself in my room and not coming out until daylight. Up until that evening, I’d only had the haziest sense of the existence of ghosts, but, alone in that vast, silent place, I couldn’t help thinking that all the spirits from a hundred-mile vicinity—dead monks and cowboys and ancient Indians—were massing inside the thick walls for the night.
However, as often happens with me [and here he patted his Orson Wells tummy under the dark sweater], I was finally overcome with hunger pangs, and suddenly nothing else mattered.
Steve described how he’d padded down one corridor after the next, feeling for light switches, sometimes finding them, sometimes not. A couple of times he had to double back, and finally, when he thought he’d lost all sense of direction and would have to sleep in some unknown bedroom—without a single belonging, not even a toothbrush—he rounded a bend and found himself at the top of the grand staircase. From there he could follow the caretaker’s directions to the pantry off the dining hall.
In the big—and I have to say, freezing—dining hall, I turned on a couple of table lamps, but I couldn’t find a main switch for the chandelier or anything that could really light up the place. I dimly made out a space as big as a ballroom, with a terracotta tiled floor and a collection of rustic tables and old Windsor-backed chairs. Along one wall ran a long row of clerestory windows and on the other side was a tremendous hearth—cold and dark, of course.
Into this complete isolation and silence, certain sounds would intrude: a twig tapping a window, a pipe gurgling, a thump from something rolling off a bureau in a faraway room. All of it perfectly innocent, and yet momentarily terrifying as it punctuated the quiet, especially with my nerves wound so tight. Each time I let out a little gasp, then chuckled nervously as if—well, as if, were anyone watching me, I was signaling how absurd it was to feel so nervous.”
Finally Steve’s hunger propelled him across the dining hall and into the dark but comfortably utilitarian kitchen. He located a family-sized can of beef stew and, without having to open too many drawers, excavated a can opener. He sloshed the entire contents into a casserole dish, and while it heated in the microwave, Steve checked inside the big refrigerator. Six or seven bottles of white wine stood on the highest shelf.
I would have preferred red wine with the stew, but I didn’t want to waste more time searching for it—can you imagine venturing down into some dungeon of a wine cellar? No thank you! I examined each bottle in the fridge to find which one appeared to be the cheapest. I didn’t want to seem greedy by opening up a whole bottle of their best wine just for myself. I had every intention, however, of drinking half of it. I realized I’d need to imbibe some courage for the long trek back to my room.
Steve found a seat in the corner of the dining hall. He’d pulled four or five dingy-beige cloth napkins from a pile. One he’d used as a potholder to transport the hot casserole dish to the table. Another he spread out as a makeshift placemat, and a third he tied around his neck to keep his sweater clean for the weekend. After thirst and hunger were at least partially sated, he began to look around the room.
Now that’s odd, I told myself, when my glance roved over the platform below the hearth. I hadn’t noticed, when I first came through the room, that a covered statue stood at the far end, some slab of something, protected by a white drop cloth. But then the thing, whatever it was, started to move. In another moment, I realized that it was a figure of a seated monk, and it was slowly revolving toward me.
His robes were white, and I now wondered how they could have ever resembled the rough material of a drop cloth; they were made of some sheeny, soft satin, folds upon folds of cloth, just like those voluminous cloaks we see on saints in seventeenth-century paintings. Very little of his face showed beneath the cowl. What small glimpse of skin I saw-just a bit around his nose and bracketing his mouth-was so pale that I thought he might be an albino.
My questions piled on top of each other: “When did you get here? What order are you from? Why didn’t anyone tell me you’d be here too?” And then I realized he was going in and out of focus, with wavy lines, as if he existed on an old strip of celluloid in a movie. I had the impression that none of my questions registered with him, but somehow I registered. I could sense him taking me in, considering me as if the world and time itself depended on the conclusion he drew. And you know … even though I could hardly see his face, a melting kindness seemed to pour from his eyes. At last he said, in a voice that was no more than a whisper but perfectly distinct, even from a good fifty feet away, “We’ll meet once more.” Then he seemed to pull his robes tighter around him as if they were blankets, and he disappeared.
By April 2007, Steve Ellis and I had known one another for a little more than two years. We’d never made a plan or anything resembling a date. The affection between us was in no way romantic, although something about our long, involved conversations, and our instant intimacy, made me think we’d once shared a grand passion—though perhaps in an elevated, ecclesiastical kind of way—in earlier lives. Once in the beginning of our friendship, he dropped by the bookstore two days in a row and we had one of those odd epiphanies: I emerged from my office, my mind in a fog, and was taken aback to see him so soon again. In the next instant I could tell that he had read the alarm on my face and felt that he was intruding. He left hurriedly, and after that was careful to space his visits at least two weeks apart.
I felt no rush to alter our pattern, though when a month or two went by without my seeing Steve, I actually ached for him. That’s what happens when you’re deprived of your truly favorite conversationalist.
The last time I saw Steve, I lent him a CD of music by Hildegard of Bingen, fourteenth-century composer of angelic melodies, and he in return let me borrow an audiotape of his own favorite Gregorian chants. In the second week of May, it occurred to me I hadn’t seen Steven in nearly three weeks, and that meant that any moment he would be jaunting through the door. Holding his dapper cane off the floor, he would greet me with something like, “I thought of you the other night when I picked up a book about Eleanor of Aquitaine.”
Instead, flipping through the current newspaper, I saw Steve’s face on the obituary page. He’d died on May 8 and been discovered dead in bed. A memorial service had already been held for him in Haverhill.
Had the monk in the white robes returned for him?
It was the following November when Steve’s ghost began to gently haunt me. Sometimes I think the way to summon a departed spirit is to incorporate the image of that person in your daily rounds. Any discussion of saints, mystics, European history, and “fights historical, from Marathon to Waterloo, in order categorical” brought Steve to the forefront of my thoughts. Tuckernuck Antiques became one of my daily walking destinations. I sometimes purchased items there despite the fact that I’d spent the last few years getting rid of stuff as I moved to smaller and smaller domiciles, and I concluded that I must be under Steve’s influence.
And then his influence became more direct. I’d been using my digital camera almost nightly in an effort to pick up ghost anomalies. Nothing out of the ordinary had shown up for many nights running, until one chilly night my steps took me to the triangle of park alongside Tuckernuck Antiques. I realized I hadn’t yet taken any photos of this special place, so I held up the camera and said out loud, “Okay, Steve, this is your chance to send me a message.”
The camera died. The display flicked to black. I poked and prodded at the power switch and every other button on the little panel. Did the battery need a recharge? Apparently not, for when I got home the camera surged back on.
Next morning at first light, I scurried back to the antiques store, snapping perhap
s a dozen shots on my way over. And the camera went on working as I click-clkk-clicked the facade of Tuckernuck Antiques. On my seventh shot, I announced to Steve, “Last chance to send a message.” Immediately the camera’s screen faded to black. Once again I could not get it restarted.
Steve’s presence continued for a couple more weeks. Orbs the size of bubbles appeared in my photos of “his” places. Well into December the four clay pots outside my bookstore still bristled with red geraniums, yellow marigolds, purple pansies, and luxuriant trellises of rosemary. My planters were the only ones that still held live plants into December. Everyone else’s had croaked. If it wasn’t Steve’s spirit effecting this abracadabra, then some other helpful angel had been sent my way.
But the jewel in the crown of Steve’s November/December 2007 communication with me happened the night after the camera died outside the antiques store.
I was sitting upstairs in my apartment, and the night had grown quiet enough that I could hear music floating up from the bookstore. For three days straight I’d been playing—on repeat mode, no less—a CD of classical pieces, most of them far too famous and therefore overplayed, such as Beethoven’s Fur Elise and Debussy’s Clair de hum. But I enjoyed the easy listening, and I was still trying to flush the memory of all the seventies disco music my two young employees had played nonstop all through the summer.
Finally, I changed from “touristy classical,” to an all-Chopin disc. This too I’d played more times than was good for my mental health, but in its favor, there was only one selection I truly couldn’t stand, the too-peppy Valse Brillante, which I normally skipped completely.
So when I heard Chopin’s melodies tinkling up from the store, I kicked myself for forgetting to click off the CD player, even though it meant dragging out a stepladder, placing it under a high shelf, and climbing up to hit the stop button.
