by S. T. Joshi
Justin flagged Palazzo down and introduced himself. Palazzo congratulated him on the show without acting especially impressed. He was clearly en route to more important conversations. Justin presented his case with all due tact, while ruminating that the sum in question wouldn’t have bought one of Palazzo’s shoes. Palazzo’s curt advice was to discuss petty cash with the gallery director.
“She referred me to you,” claimed Justin, a shade archly.
“I can’t do anything right now.” Oh? That much “petty cash,” and then some, was probably wadded up in Palazzo’s back pocket.
“Why don’t I drop by your office Monday morning? What time is convenient for you?” Justin swallowed a belch an instant before it was too late.
“You’ll have to call my secretary.” Palazzo rushed off before Justin could say anything else.
The gallery director had been across the room all along, but Justin didn’t want to make her evening any worse. She looked like hell. Curly brunette strands were stuck to her clammy brow, her eyes were bulging, and she was dividing frazzled attention between a cell phone and the micromanagement of slowpoke undergrads in catering uniforms. Dr. Palazzo, meanwhile, was hobnobbing with the impeccable few, as if nobody else were around. Justin downed one more plastic goblet of Chablis and slunk out and down the hill to Benefit Street.
He awoke in a sweat under a fleece comforter. Between the cushy down-filled mattress and the hiss of a radiator going full blast before Columbus Day, he felt decadent as much as overheated. He also felt he might have been a bit uncharitable toward last night’s attendees, and even Dr. Palazzo. He couldn’t, in fairness, object if the lives of others led them to perspectives different from his own.
According to bedside digital clock, it was earlier than he thought. He could still catch the tail-end of breakfast. He rolled out of bed and into the bedraggled, off-balance aftermath of more plastic goblets than he cared to tally. In the dining room downstairs, the other guests had come and gone, and the staff had yet to clear the self-serve table. Justin grabbed three cups of coffee to be sure they’d be there when he wanted them, along with croissants and orange juice. The second cup was lukewarm, but did the trick. His frilly surroundings became sunnier, and he gamely conceded that even if they were overly precious, they attracted the clientele without whom this address might devolve into one of his silver nitrates. Justin had been pleased to find the East Side pretty much as he’d left it, thus far at least, including Geoff’s Sandwiches, still in business across the street. Or did it use to be Joe’s?
Justin had wisely packed an okay digital camera, to make the best of imposed leisure. The B&B counted homecoming as a “special weekend” and obliged him to book three nights, which was just as well, in view of Monday morning business. At a whim, he headed south on gloriously unchanging Benefit Street, and at the first major intersection spotted a white cardboard rectangle taped below a “No Left Turn” sign. Big black letters proclaimed “Alumni Tent,” with an arrow pointing up the curve of Waterman Street. The phrase put Justin in mind of a circus, and despite the low odds of reality bearing him out, he opted to go see what was what.
The street skirted the drab, postwar School of Design campus and the List Building again and the venerable Main Green of the university, and at the corner of shopping-strip Thayer Street another white placard directed him one block farther, where an arrow sent him north. He winced at vinyl siding on historic walls in a neighborhood that should have known better, and then smiled. A circus tent indeed dominated the little urban meadow of Pembroke Field. Clusters of red, white, and brown balloons bobbed at the tent entrance and along the chain-link fence around the field.
The illusion of a Big Top dissolved as soon as Justin trudged amidst a gaggle of merry old graduates through the gate. Demographically, he was back at the gallery opening, only with a much stronger turnout here, and the addition of many babies in strollers. A guy in a cartoonish bear costume was posing for photos with happy couples. Justin was mildly amused at his inability to look upon the jaunty mascot without thinking “narc.” Name tags adhered to the majority of sweaters and jackets, and sociable babel emanated from a dining area where a pregame box brunch was underway. The “Alumni Pub” was doing a lively business, and Justin vetoed the passing thought of a beer to wash down breakfast.
These people were having fun, and more power to them, but black loneliness latched onto him and gnawed deeper, the longer he steeped himself in the festivities. He had a master’s degree from this school, and every right to be here, and had come at departmental behest, hadn’t he? But he wasn’t feeling particularly “honored,” and suspected that the Gallery Director’s invitation to him had somehow fueled bad politics between her and Palazzo. He also suspected that somebody sooner or later would notice him languishing in solitary discomfort and ask him to leave. He needed no outside confirmation that he didn’t belong. Out on the sidewalk, he breathed easier.
He retreated to Thayer Street, and his eyes widened in immediate dismay. Damn his vivid recollections! A dorm complex with red and green brick façade, like a dull-witted kid’s Lego project, had replaced a row of classic Victorian mansions, mansard roofs and gingerbread eaves and all. He continued down Thayer and wished he could stop himself. He remembered a second-hand bookshop notorious for buying stolen collections, and a locksmith whose illegal dupes of dorm keys abetted countless student flings, and a hole-in-the-wall deli where a grouchy octogenarian sold expired yogurt and treated the customer like a sissy for not eating it, gray fuzz and all. These and other upwellings of robust personality had no latter-day counterparts. Clothing and restaurant chains were in ascendancy, some chichi, some tacky, but all with deep pockets to absorb the likely sky-high rents. Something he didn’t recall was the excessive number of trust fund babies out making fashion statements. He had meager faith in the survival of a record store, a pizza joint, and a few other mom-and-pop operations beyond their next lease renewals. To discover a new generation of panhandlers in front of Store 24 was heartening, though he wasn’t about to waste any cash on them. A little scruffiness, a little waywardness remained of the Runyonesque street of his less uptight era. That was the kindest spin he could manage.
Thayer outside the commercial strip was even more appalling. His mental map contained a neighborhood with attractive houses, a popular breakfast place, a clothier who specialized in dated formalwear, and a corner grocer’s—Boar’s Head Market, wasn’t it? Progress, or science, or capitalism, if any distinction applied in this context, had rolled over all of it, and on its dust the university had installed gigantic barracks of lab facilities and gussied-up bunkers of congested dorms. Regrets about hanging his work anywhere on this overreaching campus were weighing more heavily on him. He was glad Lovecraft couldn’t see any of this pox of oppressive architecture. Or could he? What was a ghost, and what was the extent of its awareness, its powers of observation? Justin’s mind wandered aimlessly in and out of these meditations, while his feet led him back to the solace of Benefit Street. He was sure now only of what he had been sure of all along: he had not been on hallucinogens, that night in List.
He ordered lunch at Geoff’s, where sandwiches bore the names of local celebs, none of whom rang a bell. He took his Antoinette Downing a few blocks north, into the secluded old graveyard behind the stately Episcopal cathedral. Poe had courted Sarah Helen Whitman here, and Justin thought he’d read somewhere that Lovecraft had done likewise with his fiancée Sonia. He tried reviving the tradition one night while dating his first wife-to-be, till a humorless geezer cradling a yappy pug appeared at a window overlooking the churchyard and threatened to call the cops on them for “scaring everyone half to death.” Today Justin sat on a tabletop sarcophagus off to one remote side and ate in peace. For all he knew, the humorless geezer was buried somewhere in here.
At the B&B again, he slept all afternoon under the fleece comforter, without breaking a sweat. His eyes opened to the waning hour when the outlines of things softened, thou
gh he could still navigate by natural light. He retained no contents of any dreams, yet was firmly convinced he’d been dreaming. Or more precisely, he had the sensation of something external impinging on his sleeping self, which, according to received wisdom, had altered the course of those dreams he’d otherwise forgotten. Room service? Intruders? He gave the bedroom a wary once-over and switched on the bedside lamp. Neither his duffel nor the items on top of his bureau showed signs of disturbance. He was picking up none of the eerie vibes he imagined would accompany a haunting. If he couldn’t shake the feeling of having been watched, then he’d sensibly ascribe it to pigeons on the windowsill.
What he needed now was to get out and walk, preferably in the direction of supper. He had done nothing to work up an appetite, but hunger pangs and a nervous energy were prodding him toward the door. The East Side had depressed him enough for one day. Grabbing the camera, he headed west, confident of eating well on Federal Hill.
A Holiday Inn on the far side of downtown doubled as a gigantic, informal welcome sign to the Hill, luckily for Justin. Traversing the business district, he felt like a rat in a water-maze. His most substantial old landmarks were proving ephemeral. A puny three decades had obliterated railroad trestles, a Civil War monument, a huge department store, the bus station, and a sprawling annex of the state university. He peevishly navigated around the multiple sore thumbs of upstart high-rises and was never happier to be making steady headway toward a shamelessly box-like hotel. He hadn’t planned on going in, but there he was at the desk, asking an aloof clerk about the availability of rooms on Monday. Not a problem, allegedly. All the college types in town for girls’ hockey or whatever were checking out tomorrow. Justin said he might be back, and the clerk grunted and re-entrenched himself in a sudoku book.
Like a great X marking the spot, a four-membered arch now spanned the beginning of Atwells Avenue. By way of keystone it featured an outsize bronze pinecone, or maybe a pineapple. He rejoiced at recognizing the Old Canteen and Blue Grotto, evocative fixtures from yesteryear, and still prosperous. But on his budget, he was more delighted about the warm light from the windows at Angelo’s. Inside, the tin ceiling and white enamel tables and the menus nailed like eye charts to big square support posts conceivably looked the same as in 1971 or 1931. And at 5:30, he had his pick of the seats. A chipper waitress called him “sweetie” as she placed his order for sausage, peppers, and French fries, with a glass of the house red. No knots of fat or gristle were hiding in the sausage, the clear outer skin sloughed right off the peppers, and the fries had entered the kitchen as fresh potatoes. The burgundy wasn’t bad, either. Justin tapped the bottom of the glass to coax the last drops into his mouth, and pushed away from the table, contented, and thought, This is the good life for me. Should that be so hard? Plus, Justin had beaten the dinner crunch! He left a nice tip and continued up Atwells.
Bewilderment made his steps drag at times. What had happened to the solidly Italian enclave of yesteryear? Chinese and Caribbean takeouts, a nouveau hippie coffee house, an Indian eatery felt incongruous, as if plunked down by some cosmic joker. And where to go from here? The night was in its infancy. If he wasn’t mistaken, one of the Lovecraft sites mentioned in his thesis was a few blocks away. Maybe the Historical Society had bolted a commemorative plaque to its door by now.
Justin gradually sped up from minute to minute, till he identified the silhouette of a church across a tiny courtyard. He peered more closely and harrumphed. No, this wasn’t it. Too recent, and too wholesome for a horror yarn. And he had gone too far. He was well over the hilltop and halfway down to Olneyville, if memory served. This, unlike the locale in the story, wouldn’t be visible from Lovecraft’s address on College Hill.
He backtracked. How had he missed an entire church? He had a bad feeling about an open space at the corner of Sutton Street. The sidewalk widened into a modest plaza, with an ash-gray disk embedded at its center. He glossed its incised text by streetlight, and by the third line was too incensed to follow the rest. Since its founding in 1875, the Catholic church of St. John had been important to “many ethnic groups” and in local working-class history.
Then in 1994 it was demolished. Just like that. Persons unknown to him had designated the resultant vacant lot a park and relinquished it as a “gift to the city.”
Disgusted, Justin glared past the plaza and the remnant church steps toward a curb-bound circle of dirt with sparse patches of defeated-looking grass. On the outer perimeter was one park bench, paintless, with a number of broken slats. To its left, springing mushroom-like from the soil, was a pair of cement tables with inlaid checkerboards, flanked by three and four cement chairs, respectively. These furnishings wore a thick coat of rust-orange paint, which reinforced an appearance of being salvaged from a fast-food chain. So even in 1990s Providence, a repository of clear-cut neighborhood and literary value could come to this. What good would it do, though, to burst a blood vessel over other people’s disordered priorities?
A wire fence behind the bench denoted one edge of the property. Beyond were three tenements: beige, with flat roof; blue, with pitched roof; and green, with hipped roof. A powerful security light between the uppermost windows in the blue house cast a surprising level of brightness on the park grounds. From stark shadow in back of the checker tables, somebody was careering straight at him. Getting mugged would be the perfect finish for a day like today!
Justin was too stunned to utter a sound and grew faint at a face-to-face glimpse of his assailant, who suddenly U-turned away into the darkness. He stood motionless as the restive ghost of H. P. Lovecraft strode out of the shadows again and beckoned earnestly at arm’s-length perigee before withdrawing once more. On Lovecraft’s third approach, Justin’s professional reflexes nudged him into raising his camera, popping the lens cap, and shooting a rapidfire sequence. His hands were trembling, but at least the automatic flash didn’t scare off Lovecraft the way his voice had. In fact, the apparition paused longer and beckoned more demandingly. Maybe verbal communication would work this time. His hands became steadier as he continued to shoot. He gazed through the viewfinder upon Lovecraft’s forlorn expression and felt sorry for him, and was at a loss for words. Nonetheless, he wasn’t about to follow anyone’s ghost into blind obscurity. Lovecraft, a little sadder it seemed, turned on his heel and did not return a fourth time.
Justin lowered the camera and self-consciously checked hither and yon. No other pedestrians were around, and the occasional motorist had tooled by as if nothing unusual was going on. Moreover, the inner-city scene was getting to him now more than when a ghost was flitting through it, because the security light, which must have had some finicky sort of motion sensor, had gone out, to swamp everything beyond the church steps in uneasy mystery.
Justin was shaken, of course, and perplexed, but as he stooped to grope against the paving stones and miraculously find his discarded lens cap, he realized he was also famished as if he’d never had supper, and more antsy than ever, as if some long-awaited desire were near fulfillment. But what did he have in the offing that wouldn’t pale beside the sight of a spirit? He had no conscious inkling, and concluded he was too hungry and overwrought for his mind to be doing right by him.
The dinner crunch was just ending as he re-entered Angelo’s. His previous table was available, and the chipper waitress remarked that he must really like the food here. He chose the gnocchi because nothing else would be as filling, with sides of rabe and eggplant parm and a half-carafe of the red. The waitress beamed as if gluttony were admirable and called him “sugar.” If he looked like he’d seen a ghost, she didn’t make anything of it.
And what about the ghost? Justin was in the hapless middle of an emotional pileup, dazed, indignant, intrigued, anxious, excited. Still, his thoughts kept looping back to certain vagaries of what he’d witnessed. He attacked his food and pondered how the ectoplasmic Lovecraft had successfully crossed town but upon arrival was confined, with a single variation in gesture, to perfo
rming exactly the same motions as in the List Building. Ghosts might be prone to stereotypy, but that seemed too glib an answer.
Nor was Sutton Street where Justin would have staged a rendezvous if he were in Lovecraft’s position. True, the church of St. John had some importance as a story setting, but to Justin’s knowledge Lovecraft had only seen it from a few miles’ distance. Any number of places closer to home must have been more meaningful to him. Why not materialize at one of those? And why Justin? Twice? Whatever the unquiet spirit wanted, countless others had to be better qualified to help. Yet he’d never heard of Lovecraft haunting anyone else.
He regarded his three clean plates and empty decanter. Everything had been tasty, he’d swear to that, but he couldn’t remember consuming any of it. He’d eaten like one possessed. Fortunately, none of the other customers were staring as if he’d been boorish about it.
He got a cannoli to sweeten the return trek through downtown. The ricotta filling burst through cracks in the pastry casing, so his hands were a mess when it finally hit him that he could review all his occult images in-camera this very second, while walking down the street. Going digital was about to pay off already! He stopped himself an inch away from smearing expensive technology with sticky fingerprints. Back in the B&B, he fastidiously washed and dried his hands, but afterward scarcely had the energy to undress before toppling into bed, as if someone somewhere had thrown a lever and cut off his jitters of the last few hours. The pictures would wait.
The heat in his room next morning bordered on stifling, and an unpleasant hint of scorched mold laced the air, a byproduct of antique steam pipes, Justin reckoned. He also awoke with a heightened perception of being an outsider, of not belonging, an echo of what he’d felt at Pembroke Field yesterday, but he connected it now in some dreamtime logic with the excessive heat. Was the management trying to drive him off with too much of a good thing? He opened the window some and discovered that the radiator beneath it was cold. So was the one in the bathroom. Had the warmth wafted up through the floor? These old buildings usually had their anomalies. On the positive side, he was up in plenty of time for breakfast. How fortuitous, seeing as last night’s insistent hunger was homing in on him again. And the sooner he was out of the room, the better. Camera in hand, he noted that the corridor was downright chilly. Happily, he’d left the fungal scent behind.
