by Amy Hempel
“The cold … is no mere matter of degrees Fahrenheit, but a drawing of warmth from the vital centers of the living.”
The Uninvited, made in 1944, stars Ray Milland and Ruth Hussey as the English brother and sister Roderick and Pamela Fitzgerald, who happen upon a stately empty house on a cliff in Cornwall when they are on vacation. The two are so won over by the place they decide to buy it and leave their London lives—he a composer and music critic, she a budding homemaker—for these “haunted shores.”
“That’s not because there are more ghosts here than in other places, mind you, it’s just that the people who live hereabouts are more …”
I am courting ghosts at a place where ghosts are studied as a subset of the paranormal. I participate in experiments at an institute in the South. Last week I was placed in a private room and given a photograph to hold. I was supposed to try to “send” the image to a woman in another room down the hall. The photograph I held was a likeness of Frankenstein, a still from the movie. For nearly half an hour I stared and directed the thought: Frankenstein, Frankenstein, at the woman down the hall. A researcher came to get us and took us downstairs to appear before the staff.
“Well?” the researcher prompted.
The woman from down the hall said, “I don’t know, I kept getting Frank, Frank—Frank Sinatra?”
And I screamed, “That’s a match!”—wanting so much the unexplainable in my life.
I had not been living in my house for months. I had accepted a job house-sitting, if you can call that a job, for a professor on sabbatical from a university in the South. He had hired a cleaning lady and a gardener, so all I had to do was occupy space and forward his mail. He would return for spring break, at which time I was to return to my house up North. Since it was winter up there, I returned for a night every three or four weeks; I had to check for burst pipes and whatever else could happen in my absence.
When I was back home, I read the local newspaper’s weekly police blotter. It featured the usual thefts—houses closed for the winter are routinely broken into—as well as a range of conceptual crimes. Someone had turned up the thermostat in a beach house in the dunes. This person took nothing, but turned the temperature to ninety degrees, which, by the time it was discovered, had badly warped the floors. In another house, the owners discovered that someone had emptied the kitchen cabinets. Nothing had been stolen, but every item in the cabinets had been lined up neatly on the counters.
One kind of damage presented itself on my first visit home: the house smelled of mice, and when I lay still on the couch, I heard them scrabbling in the cabinets and behind the walls. There was no point setting out traps—I would be leaving the next day and anything caught would decompose in the weeks until my next visit. I could hear mice in a drawer. I yanked it open and found droppings like fat, dark grains of rice surrounding a diamond-and-sapphire pin my mother-in-law had given me when I married her son. When the marriage ended, I thought of giving the pin back to my husband; his parents had since died, and the pin had been a gift to his mother from his father. I thought about it, but I did nothing about it, and now the timeworn jewelry was in this sorry setting when it should have been safe in a tiny velvet pouch.
All of us should be safe in a tiny velvet pouch.
Well, I left the thing loose in the drawer.
And of course a pipe did burst, but luckily one outside, positioned to irrigate a cutting garden long since abandoned, the garden my husband’s project, so I kept the water turned off except to flush a toilet when I would turn the relevant lever in the basement, go back upstairs and flush, then turn off the water again. Think of it as fancy camping, I told myself, and it was fine, this manner of thinking.
For instance, storm doors and windows had never been put up, so, like clocks not changed from Daylight Savings Time, wouldn’t the absence of these fixtures be just right in a few more months?
Lightbulbs, that was a different matter. They were often burned out, however much they had not been used. So I just as often had to stand on one foot to change them in the kitchen.
“Important decisions have to be made quickly,” says Pamela Fitzgerald.
“Anyway, how do you even know it’s for sale?” says brother Roderick.
“Life isn’t as cruel as that—it’s got to be,” says Pamela Fitzgerald.
Important decisions do have to be made quickly. Once the test stick is removed from its foil packet, once the “absorbent tip” is placed in the urine flow for at least five seconds, or dipped into a clean container of this person’s urine, also for no fewer than five seconds, the result will be indicated in three minutes.
A decision will be made quickly, and not at all quickly forgotten.
There is a “sealed splashguard” on the test stick. Still, it seems smarter to collect the urine and place the test stick in the container. So the first decision of the morning is whether to go in a tumbler or a measuring cup. In crystal or in cookware?
At the video store in the town in the South, I rent Topper and The Ghost and Mrs. Muir—romantic, playful, companionable ghosts—but they don’t compare with the ghost who sobs all night on the estate of Windward House where, from a cliff, young Mary Meredith falls (or is pushed?) to her death.
The night before taking the test the first time I had to take it, I watched The Uninvited on television, on the all-night oldies channel. I took it as a sign, its broadcast that night. The next morning, every minute of which I watched approach, I tested positive. It was a spring day in Southern California. It was 1970, and I was in college.
One week later, I signed a statement that would be sent to a committee of physicians. In it, I threatened to take my life if I were not allowed to terminate the pregnancy. A woman I barely knew had coached me to say this; she was the wife of a friend of a friend and had been moved to help a young thing she barely knew because she had been the young thing’s age and it had not been easy for her. Or so I seemed to have thought.
I was a girl again.
I stood in the student union, studying the bulletin board.
What could have been better proof of girlhood reacquired?
It is the little terrier, Bobby, who first gets Pamela and Rick into Windward House. Bobby sets off across the lawn after a squirrel and squeezes in after it when the squirrel slips through an open window. Bobby chases the squirrel up the chimney, but refuses to mount the stairs, where his owners will find, behind the locked door of the studio, an unexplained chill and a despair that engulfs all who enter.
My own house is situated across the street from a cemetery. The lawn of “the Boneyard,” as I call the place, is littered with dozens of chewed-out marrow bones. Neighbors would complain if the privet did not thrive and block the yard from view. The bones come frozen in packages of six; neighbor dogs get one apiece when they stop by to visit. They follow me across the lawn, back behind the backyard to where the growth has been too much to keep up with. The cold frame where seedlings made a dash for it is filled with weeds, and the rows of sunflowers and gladioli and irises are lost under grasses so long they bend and swirl into bedding for deer. The grasses have buried the rows of strawberries that my husband protected with net until the morning I went to pick some to serve with cream and found a box turtle caught in the webbing, dead. Like the “ghost nets” left behind by fishermen, seines that float loose to entangle porpoises and diving gulls.
That day I ripped off the net.
Let everything eat.
I did not call the police. Two years of working a hotline, and I did not report it.
We always offered to accompany victims to court.
We offered follow-up support until a woman called to say she was moving and could a few of us come over and help her pack.
Some of the group never said the word man. Instead they said “potential rapist.” There were men who wanted to donate money, but there was a faction among us who did not feel right accepting donations from future rapists.
Here is what I
would have had to say, if I had been a caller: “Hello? Hello? Oh, man, I did not call the police because I had invited the man in. My clothes? I took them off myself.”
The time I tried to keep it, I did not try for very long. Although one week did seem to me like a long time. I was sick enough to be in a hospital with an intravenous drip plugged into my wrist. There was an antiemetic I could ask for twice a day that made life tolerable for a little less than half an hour. Sometimes the body takes over to make a decision the mind can’t make. This was one of the doctors. She said sometimes a woman thinks she wants a child when what she really wants is the father of the child.
Stella Meredith was only three years old when her mother died at Windward House. Now twenty, she lives with her grandfather, the Commander (Donald Crisp), in town. Stella, played by Gail Russell, meets the Fitzgeralds when they come to inquire about buying the deserted house on the cliff. Stella is rude to them, tells them the house is not for sale. But her grandfather arrives as she is ushering them out, and, keen to provide for Stella after he is gone, sells the Fitzgeralds the house on the spot. The grandfather does not mention the disturbances the new owners will find. Stella, meanwhile, has caught Roderick Fitzgerald’s eye; later, he will readily accept her apology and invite Stella to dinner at her former home.
The act of taking the test made me feel sick. Before I could insert the test strip into the glass, I had to lie down and wait for the room to get steady. I wanted the hospital staple, Jell-O, cubed in a bowl on a tray. At home—a different story; was the problem sliced bananas or canned pears? The weight of diced peaches, the pits in the cherries? Waterlogged chunks of pineapple, fan-shaped mandarin oranges; they sank to the bottom or they rested on the surface—you had to know more about Jell-O than I did.
Mrs. Wynn used to make me Jell-O. She was a frequent baby-sitter, and, apart from my acquaintances in the movies, the only English person I knew. She was inventive, and once pasted the feet of paper dolls to either side of a Mexican jumping bean. She attached tissue skirts that covered the beans and then placed the dolls on a plate set on top of a chafing dish. In due course, the “fairies” had all been made to dance.
When I was sick, Mrs. Wynn performed a trick she called “the Passenger to Boulogne.” She brought to my bedroom an orange and a wineglass and a penknife and handkerchief. She prepared the orange by cutting into the rind the best ears, nose, and mouth her skill could devise. She then smoothed out the handkerchief and stretched it lightly over the mouth of the wineglass; she set the carved orange thereon. When she saw that she had my attention, she moved the handkerchief backward and forward over the top of the glass, imparting to the orange a rolling motion and what she described to her woozy audience as the agonies of a seasick passenger making the Channel crossing. The performance, she explained, was supposed to end by draping the handkerchief like a hood over the “head” and squeezing the orange into the glass. In deference to my condition, however, Mrs. Wynn demurred, saying some people found it disagreeably realistic.
I thought I remembered a Mrs. Wynn from The Uninvited, but the devoted housekeeper the Fitzgeralds bring over from London is named Lizzie Flynn, not Wynn. She hectors and pampers Pamela and Rick; she makes them tipsy pudding. A superstitious woman, Lizzie Flynn is not long for Windward House. Soon she is spending nights in a farmhouse down the road where, presumably, no ghost can be heard sobbing until dawn.
On the hotline one night, I got a call from a local rock star. The woman was calling between sets to say that the man who had attacked her the week before was sitting in the audience.
Had she reported that attack the week before? No, she said, she had had a few drinks that night. Did she want me to call the police? No, but could I meet her at the club after the show?
We always went out in pairs, so I called another counselor, a resourceful dyke named Carolee. The bouncer waved us in. We stood in the back and watched the end of the show. The rocker was athletic, backlit, barely clothed. Carolee and I worked our way to the greenroom as the rocker came off the stage. I tapped my chest, and she came over and hugged me hard. With her arm around me, she walked me to where I could see the audience from behind a curtain. She pointed to a man alone.
“There’s my rapist,” she said.
Then, as was not uncommon, she wanted to know if she had put us to any trouble. I reminded her that I was already on call, and Carolee said she preferred this to the fight she had been having with her girlfriend. Lesbian fights are the worst, Carolee said—nobody ever walks out and slams the door because they’re both women and want to talk about their feelings.
On the drive back home from the house-sitting job, I stopped off in West Virginia to meet my estranged husband. The large house sat on three hundred acres of horse and dairy farm amid gentle hills cut through by the Opequon Creek. His family staged fraught reunions every summer and lobbied for repairs needed to keep the place up. There were thirteen bedrooms and one bathroom, added in the 1920s. Each summer we all scraped and repainted the wraparound porch, taking breaks to chase off trespassers who pushed metal detectors across the grounds. My first time there, a charter bus wound up the drive on a hot afternoon. It advertised “The J.E.B. Stuart Singers,” who dismounted—a busload of folks in period costume. They serenaded us with Civil War ballads. My husband—then-husband—allowed as how the family was used to this.
Over the years, the affable and ineffectual caretaker would phone to report break-ins and thefts. The great house was vacant except for reunions, encouraging thieves to back their trucks up to the wide front doors. They stole every piece of furniture. They were so unhurried as to remove and leave behind cheap replacement shades for the valuable antique lamps. Some of the thieves took time for a beer, and left crushed cans in the grand entry hall. By the time the family voted funds for an alarm, there was nothing of value left to protect.
The place had its ghost, of course. It was said she haunted the third floor, a well-defined apparition wearing a long white sleeping gown. I was told that the only people who saw this ghost (“the White Lady”) were women who married into the family and of whom the White Lady approved. So one night I faked a rattled look and told my future husband that I had just seen a ghost when I went upstairs for more pillows. Years later, I asked this same man, now an ex-husband, if I could stay in his house to break up the long drive north and let some bad weather pass.
Was there a ghost who appeared to women leaving the family?
For extra class credit, we could volunteer for experiments at the parapsychology institute. These experiments took place on Saturday mornings. Downstairs, in the white clapboard house where the experiments were conducted, was a comfortable living room and library with worn, overstuffed chairs and dozens of psi journals. Across the hall was a dining room turned conference room with a rolling blackboard facing the large oval table. The research assistants were in their late twenties, conservatively dressed and courteous. My first time there, I was told to remain seated in the living room while an assistant went upstairs and turned on a computer. A photograph would appear on the screen. I was to concentrate on the image for a time, and draw it as best I could on the sheet of paper she gave me. All the assistant would say about the photograph was that there were no human beings in it.
I did as I was told.
I was about to begin sketching a cliff-dweller village along the lines of Mesa Verde when a more powerful image took its place. I roughed in the sides of a cliff, but instead of a village I drew a Niagara Falls—like waterfall.
Upstairs, the research assistant showed me the computer screen. It displayed a wide-angle view of the Vatican in Rome. We laughed it off, and she said it was only my first try. She said why didn’t we take a peek at what the next volunteer would try to draw. She pressed a button, and my waterfall appeared onscreen.
“See?” she said, pleased. “I’ve seen this happen before.”
She turned off the light in the room.
The grand chandeliers of Windward H
ouse supplement the light on the ceilings that is reflected off the water at the base of the cliffs.
Home on spring break, when I was already five days late, I went through closets and drawers to give my things away. Was this the beginning of the famed nesting instinct? Or its opposite? A friend had once opened a drawer in his kitchen and found four banana peels neatly folded by his pregnant wife. During the winter, mice carried cereal into the fingers of my gloves.
When I was six days late, I tried to fix the soaker hose ruined months before by a power mower. It fed a long stretch of privet. I found a length of replacement hose in the unlocked garage and battled it into place for more than an hour. When I turned on the water, I saw that the hose was a regular rubber hose without the tiny perforations of the soaker. I went inside the house and got a steak knife from the kitchen. I took it outdoors and stabbed the twenty-five feet of rubber repeatedly, making my own goddamn soaker hose.
Just when you begin to think you’ve dreamt it, it comes again.
This is Pamela Fitzgerald, talking to her brother about the ghost who sobs all night in Windward House.
Back in Los Angeles, when the woman I barely knew drove me to the hospital, we listened to somebody talking about old movies. But the movies being talked about, not one of them was as old as The Uninvited.
There was no blaming a poltergeist for the vase that flew off the mantel and shattered on the slate below. You had only to see that it was filled with top-heavy gerbera daisies to predict that the slightest stirring of the air, as from a person walking past, could cause the vase to topple over. As I sponged up the water and swept up the broken glass, I thought, What a relief, this loss.
The vase broke when I was seven days late. On the eighth day, I went to a lecture by a woman known as much for her compassion as for her clear soprano voice. She spoke of her work with the dying. She would bring her harp to their bedsides and sing.
“This is not ambient goodwill, not a bedside concert,” she said. “It is palliative, prescriptive music. The harp invites the listener into the present so that something new can happen. Ideally, the music will make time stop—it will help unbind the dying from qualities of time that we are bound to.”
