by M Dressler
So sure you are of yourself, Mr. Pratt. Yet I’m in this room, plain as day, and you haven’t found me yet.
“Well, that sounds final.” Mrs. Fanoli shakes her head. “But still,” she says—and I see in her eyes the shadow of her end so close it crowds her—“I wonder what it takes to be strong enough to … not be that poor man you just put down by the ghost flower.”
Ellen says, “Sounds like something everybody would want to know, doesn’t it?”
“I can only tell you, Agnes, that there are ghosts who convince themselves they aren’t ghosts. There’s a kind—but it’s not very common—who convinces itself it isn’t dead. Who firmly believes, with every inch of its soul and being, that it hasn’t died, that it never died; who can conjure itself into believing it never passed away. Suicides who change their minds on the way down. People who die accidentally. In rare cases, they take on a phantom form that’s nearly complete. At the price, though, of not being able to do the things a normal ghost can do. Like disappear. They also don’t eat, or rest, or sleep. The eating, especially, tends to give them away. Would you like that, Agnes? To be able to walk around but not be able to do the things that give life its flavor?”
“I’d have to think about that,” she admits.
“It sounds impossible.” Ellen looks out the window.
Don’t listen to him. It’s all tricks. As if dying were something anybody could choose not to do. As if all a soul had to do, while its lungs were filling with water and its breath was being choked away, was pretend that it wasn’t happening.
“It’s rare.” Pratt sits, finally. “It’s unusual. The usual is what we’re dealing with in town. A ghost attaching itself to a place that has meaning to it, an empty space. Like a shack on a beach no one thought to tell me about.” He turns again toward Ellen. “A space belonging to a person or a family that did it some harm or wrong—or who simply ignored it. Maybe a family that should have done more for the ghost, while it was still living. Some ghosts hide in plain sight. They have a face. They—”
“Oh my word!” The old woman reaches out to touch Pratt’s shoulder. “Did you just say a ghost could attach itself to an entire family? Not just one person? But a family? That maybe did it some harm or just ignored it?”
“Yes?” Pratt looks up at her.
“Well then, you stay right there, young man. Because I think I may have been sending you down the wrong garden path.”
19
It was only a rumor but it was the kind of rumor that stayed with you for eighty-seven years, Agnes told them. Because there was a whisper of scandal around it. Whispers at old Mrs. Lambry’s funeral, when the whole village of Benito came out—her husband already unbending in his grave for ten years. The Depression was in full swing by then. Many of the millworkers had already left, trying to find some better place that needed their muscle. What remained of the village came to Eugenia Lambry’s funeral.
In the back pews, behind the family, in St. Clements Church, the murmurs went round and round and round:
Well maybe that old woman will have some peace at last …
Blood on their hands, on both of them, I say …
And more than just their own son’s … Unless it was all lies?
Then why did the girl disappear when the boy did …?
She might have gotten herself into trouble and skulked off to hide … probably in another town for good. How else could a poor girl keep a rich boy tied to her apron if she wasn’t letting him have what was underneath it?
And even old Mr. Folde said she ran away out of shame.
But they do say she was at the hotel the night before. Asking about the ship …
What was that schooner’s name …
The Lorna.
Well, the constable wouldn’t look into it. Too squeamish.
Because they stopped him, Eugenia and Augustus …
And what was her name … so long ago … nobody … Something with a flower in it, a lily? A rose? They do say that’s why the old woman put up her garden and the widow’s walk to let her see over the cove … so she could keep vigil …
Or make amends?
Or just keep an eye out for that slattern girl hoping to come back and cheat her way into the family again …
It can all come out, though, now …
Not that there’s anyone left to remember … Just a few of us old biddies, not long for the world ourselves.
That’s right, I think, and keep to the sunlight warming the Welcome Cottage’s windows. No one left to remember. No one living. But I’m still here, while all the rest of you lie moldering in your graves, and an old woman stammers on. And what can she do to me, what can she say, what can she give away, when she’ll be joining you soon enough …
“I was only six years old,” Agnes says excitedly, “but the whispers stayed with me, because they were things that had never been said out loud about the Lambrys, at least not that I’d heard, anyhow. Like it wasn’t safe to talk about certain things until Eugenia and Augustus were both stuffed under that monument.
“And I don’t know if any of this will help you, Mr. Pratt, but this whole time I’ve been walking around with you, thinking it should be Alice you’re hunting, these little whispers in my head were sitting and gathering cobwebs. I never heard of the Lambry House being haunted by anyone, but then again, I’ve never heard of a Lambry turning into a ghost, either. Why should any one of them, comfortable as they all were—and proud!—stoop to become something as lowly as a ghost? It wouldn’t suit them. And Alice kept so much to herself; why would she suddenly take to visiting the hotel and dropping in and out of mirrors? What I’m thinking, Mr. Pratt”—she reaches down to touch his shoulder—“is what if the old rumors were right, after all? And Mrs. Lambry knew of a girl, whoever she was, who had drowned along with her boy, and not gone off to some other village … And what if it isn’t Alice causing all this trouble, but someone else who’s been keeping a leash on the Lambrys all these years, one after another after another after another … only now there are no more Lambrys to haunt, so it’s out into the open, as it were?”
“But there is one Lambry left,” Pratt says, before I leave them all in my dust.
I fly toward the village.
Afraid now.
But I can’t be. I won’t.
Because nobody can find out the name of a nobody. Can they?
The name of an orphan girl, dead for a hundred years.
And if they can’t know my name, they can’t rouse me.
I reach the house, and how safe, oh, how good it feels to pass smoothly through the doors and glide up the staircase and visit the rooms and galleries and then go through the smaller door and out onto the circle of the widow’s walk, and pace around it, and see across the cove to the Botanical Garden, and how invisible, how small, how nothing those people are over there. At this distance, who are the nobodies? And how good it feels to go in and float down again along the carved banister and over the newel post, and go through the parlors, one by one, and visit each beloved room, until finally I stand in the shimmer of our beautiful Glass Room, with its perfect dome around me, its floating panes. Built on the very spot where Eugenia Lambry used to stand and look out at the waves and wonder if it was me brushing against her shoulder, making her hair stand on end and the skin on the back of her neck draw tight.
So long ago, that was. That first dawn. After my death. At first, I didn’t even know what I could do. No one explains it. There’s no help. No one says, Here you are, you’ve died, but you aren’t dead now, spilling and rolling and tangled like this, like a baby seal, bloody, washed up on the beach.
I don’t remember much from those first few moments. Afterward, I remember standing. Feeling the emptiness inside me. My heart no longer swinging in my chest. Stopped forever, like an ax on a stump. My mind full of questions. What do I do, then? So it seems I can walk. I can move. I can climb, high, higher, crawling up the cliff. Can I have some revenge? I can. I can make the ele
ctric light flicker when I find her alone in a room, when she sits and tries to write another letter to her children.
First to her children. Later to her grandchildren.
How slowly time moves, I thought in the beginning.
But still I was quick to catch at her sleeve when she tried to leave a room before I wanted her to. Or slam a door in her face when she was rude to a servant. What seemed to frighten her the most was when I fogged the mirrors as they both dressed for dinner and made it look as though the breath was coming from right behind them, over their shoulders, panting. But when Mr. and Mrs. Augustus Lambry turned, in their starched fronts, no one was there. And when they turned back and reached up to wipe the fog away, they’d see a mirrored arm that seemed to be their own—but stretching for their throats.
Are you sorry now? I asked Lambry after Lambry. Can your blood ever be done apologizing to mine? Will you ever be truly sorry enough? It’s four generations of Lambrys, now, who have quietly tried to make their amends to me. Too ashamed to share with the town, and the timid constables, what was happening in their own house. In some ways, I should be grateful. Because it’s thanks to their shame, their leaving me to do as I’ve wanted, year after year, that I’ve learned more and more about what I’m strong enough to do, and how much I can do—more than I ever imagined in the beginning. Yet I’ll never say to any soul living or dead that being dead is a good thing, or that suffering is a good teacher. Drowning is agony. Sadness is slavery. No one dying should ever see a back turned away from them; no one should ever be left alone, in the end.
And so I gave Manoel’s watch back to him, when he asked for it. And I’ve appeared, faithfully, to every soul who has died in this house, to tell them it would be over soon. And I shut the blinds to keep the sun from blinding poor Alice, and put the pillow over her face when she was afraid and nothing was left that could help her; for all we can ever do for one another is the best we know how.
And so must you, Emma Rose, I remind myself. You must do your best, now. Don’t lose your will. Don’t abandon it. There’s no one living now, after all, who still knows the name of the girl who sank forgotten all those years ago. Why, I might even feel sorry for anyone trying to find out who she was, with so little to go on, no more than rumors, a whisper, gossip over a grave. I might even feel sorry for Mrs. Fanoli, Pratt, and Ellen. Except I won’t.
Maybe it’s everyone else who should be sorry for everything, everywhere.
20
It was a dry, clear spring afternoon when Mrs. Folde asked me to come with her to the cemetery above the Point to visit her baby boy’s grave. I carried the basket for her with the pruning shears while she lifted the fattening twin of Infant Joseph up to her hip. We walked together, up the lane, across the high coast road that so many months before had brought me to my new home. We followed a smaller, narrower track to the raised meadow. From there the headstones of some of the Point’s keepers and their families rose with a nice view of the cluster of red-shingled buildings, and the lighthouse, and the shifting ocean.
I trimmed away the clover from the plot, while Mrs. Folde bowed her head on her baby’s head and said the prayer:
Oh God, you do not willingly grieve or afflict your children. Look with pity on the suffering of this family. Sustain us in our anguish and into the darkness of Grief, bring light.
“All right.” She straightened her sun hat and adjusted the baby at her breast. “I think we’ve done the best we can. It looks better now. The weeds grow so fast, don’t they? We should plant flowers. For next summer. Pansies. Children do like pansies.”
She stuffed her nose into the twin’s neck. “He smells like spring. There’s a ripeness to everything right now. A freshness. Maybe that’s a good omen.”
Maybe. Quint came at least twice a week now, and each time he was more anxious to take me away with him. But each time he still couldn’t say how he was going to do it with no money of his own.
“Emma, you’re not paying attention to me.”
“Sorry, Mrs. Folde.”
“I was just saying—the future is bright today. Guess why?”
“I can’t.”
“Because we’ve received a letter from the commission, that’s why! Good news at last. Mr. Edgars, the head keeper, won’t be returning to the Point. Mrs. Edgars’ consumption has gone to both lungs, so they’ll have to go away and retire from the damp. Which means—isn’t it something—Mr. Folde and Mr. McHenry will get promotions. The question is: who will be promoted to head lightkeeper?”
She frowned and set her chin down again on the baby’s scalp. “I’m prejudiced, but I know in my heart it should go to Mr. Folde. He’s the better manager. And we’ve got the larger family. And I think anyone would agree Mr. Folde’s common sense is superior to Mr. McHenry’s. Mr. Folde would never have let you take that nasty tumble on the tower, isn’t that right? And Mr. McHenry could stay on as first assistant, which seems to suit him and Mrs. McHenry very well, and there would be a new second assistant hired, so the men wouldn’t have to run all the shifts themselves, the way they’ve been doing, putting such strains on them. It’s overwork that’s been making Mr. Folde so quiet lately, I’m certain of it. No man can expect to keep himself fit running twelve hours a day, every day, six hours at a stretch, for month after month, when it’s only eight hours he was hired on for.”
I didn’t say anything to that. Not about Mr. Folde’s drooping whiskers, or his tired, blinking look, or the way he’d begun to stare at me for a long time, dazed, while I ironed his socks. I looked down and brushed the weed clippings from my skirt.
“Now this is important, Emma. Something you and I need to discuss in great detail. We’re going to have a visit from the commission to decide about the new head keeper. Ours is going to be the luncheon interview. So, you and I have to go over every little thing. We have to be sure everything is perfection. Especially since Dora McHenry is going to have the advantage of the dinner interview.” She fidgeted with the baby’s collar. “But it’s first impressions that really matter, thank goodness. And we get the commission first. So let’s have salmon, and cucumber sandwiches, and those tarts you make so well, and of course tea. I’ll hostess, and you’ll serve.”
“The tea?” I had to ask, because I knew I should never, ever handle the royal blue and gold Wedgewood china tea set. That was the Foldes’ pride and joy.
“Well, I don’t see why not. Just this once. I need to look like a head keeper’s wife, after all, and not an ordinary—Anyhow, I’m sure you’ll be very careful, Emma. All you’ll have to do is bring in the tray, and I’ll do the rest. And I’ll see to it Mr. Folde understands. That we need to show the commission we’re capable of entertaining fine guests at the Point, and … and so on.”
I’d been at the Point for eight months and seen no one finer than Quint arrive, but I didn’t say so. It would have been cruel.
“We’ll show them we’re an excellent, complete establishment. My management skills will impress them, and you’ll show them in what good order we are, and it will say something about us all.”
“When are they coming?”
“Next Tuesday. A week.”
My birthday. I’d been hoping to have part of that day all to myself so I could go and stand at the edge of the cliffs and make a plea to the spirits, to the far darrig, that I would be beginning my last year as a housekeeper, my very last. For it was—Quint said and I knew it—no primitive world we lived in now. Servants weren’t content to be servants anymore. We were all going and working at the wharves and warehouses, and into the factories, and making good money doing war-enterprise. Even Mrs. Strype, I’d heard, was having a hard time keeping help on. Because girls weren’t keeping to their places anymore. We were trying our luck at bigger things.
“It doesn’t give us much time to pull ourselves together,” Mrs. Folde said as we walked back down the hill. “We’ll have so much polishing and cleaning to do. I don’t know how I’ll manage it. I’m still not very str
ong. As I keep telling Mr. Folde.”
I told all the news to Quint when he arrived. How Mrs. Folde wanted so much to look like a grand lady she planned for me to wear a white cap like the ones the hotel and parlor maids wore. “And she said I should call her madam instead of ma’am,” I said, laughing.
“The commission is made up of people my family knows.” Quint pulled on his whiskers, distracted. “I don’t like the idea of you serving them at all.”
“Well, I serve here every day, and that’s the truth.”
“It’s always bothered me.”
“Has it? Or does it bother you more now because your family’s friends are coming?”
“Of course it does. I mean, always has.”
“Then what do you think I should do? Go work in the canneries? I ought to. There’s good money for people like me, down south.”
“No! I mean, no,” he said, with less of a bark. “I don’t want you to go away!”
“But you don’t want me to stay here, either,” I pointed out. “So what exactly do you expect me to do?”
“Can’t we go into your cottage to talk about it?” he said eagerly. “And sit like two grown up people in a room, instead of like tramps on a beach?”
“No. We can’t.” I didn’t think it would be a good idea. I remembered again Franny’s words: Like a buck out of the woods … you’d better watch out. And I knew what the gossips in the village were already saying about me.
“Emma, please. You don’t have to worry. Folde knows enough to respect my character and family. And he’s a decent man.”
“But it’s never the men who mind about girls being alone in a room with them. And it’s never the men who pay for it.”
“Do you mean Mrs. Folde might turn you out, if she knew?” He moved strangely, excitedly. “But maybe that’s exactly what we should have her do! Maybe we should give her a reason to fire you! Then you wouldn’t have to wait on my family’s friends—you couldn’t stay here at all. You’d be free.”
