Apparition & Late Fictions: A Novella and Stories

by Thomas Lynch

  IT WAS the ad in the in-flight magazine for the Grand Hotel that guided Aisling Black to Mackinac—the tiny island in Lake Huron and the Straits of Mackinaw between Michigan’s upper and lower peninsulas. She’d been there with her father as a child and remembered her enchantment with the place, the enforced absence of automobiles, the busy docks and harbor, the horses and buggies and Victoriana, the easy opulence of the hotel, the dress code for dinner, the afternoon teas and string quartets. Timeless…read the banner over the photo of the hotel. There was a website and phone number. She could see herself doing nothing for a long time on the broad porch of the great hotel, watching the inland sea sparkling in the distance, restoring herself, renewing her stamina, readying for the school term that would begin in September. After she cleared customs in Detroit, she phoned the Grand, reserved a lake-view room until the end of the month, drew cash from an ATM in the terminal, got a seat on the five o’clock flight to Pellston Airport, a cab twelve miles north to Mackinaw City, where she was deposited along with her much-traveled bags at the Arnold Line Docks, and after the brief ferryboat ride across the Straits, she found herself on the island.

  “Professor Black?” said a young man in footman’s dress, top-hatted and gloved, and when she nodded, he took her bag, took her gently by the elbow, and led her to the shiny red-wine-colored coach with The Grand Hotel stenciled in gilt italics on the door. He looked like one of her undergrads, dressed for the prom or student musical—Great Expectations, she thought, Mr. Darby himself! He helped her into the coach, climbed up to take the reins, and brought her by turns up through the town to a wide thoroughfare which led uphill to the huge white clapboard edifice on the southwestern-facing bluff which was truly, now that she saw it aglow in the night, a grand hotel. The creak of the wooden coach, the strain of the draft horses up the hill past a stone church and wooden townhouses, the absence of anything automotive in the air—the racket of horns or emissions of motors—all of it conspired to slow her approach, after the furious day of taxis and airlines and ferries. It was, she knew, a kind of Disney, a theme park of sorts, a pretense of a place beyond the reach of real time. All the same, she could feel it almost metabolically—the pace of things slowing to the footfall of horses, of couples strolling the gaslit sidewalks or stretched out on the greensward listening to distant music—everything could wait, nothing was urgent, time could be taken, the moment held up for examination. She could feel herself getting sleepy. He took her immediately to her room, where a basket of fruits and cheeses and a bottle of wine had been left with a welcome note from the hotel’s manager. He turned the light on in the bathroom, drew the curtains shut, placed her bags in the closet, and gave her the key to the room and honor bar. He said she could call the front desk in the morning about her registration. She could tell he could tell she was very tired.

  “What time is it?” she asked him.

  “Going ten. Where have you come to us from, Professor?”

  “London, Detroit, well, Ann Arbor, by way of London today.”

  “A long journey. You’ll want a good night’s sleep.”

  “Yes, sleep’s the thing.” She proffered a twenty-dollar bill.

  “Oh no, Professor, I really couldn’t. There’s no tipping expected or permitted at the Grand. If there’s anything at all, anything, just call…Enjoy your stay.”

  He was out the door and she was left standing in the middle of a large corner room that looked out over the grounds of the hotel, the lakeshore and the Straits of Mackinaw, and in the distance, the lights of the Mackinaw Bridge, which connected the two peninsulas of her native state. She stripped and showered briefly, wrapped herself in the hotel robe, hugging herself in the plush terrycloth, savored a berry, left the wine untouched, then crawled under the down comforter, assembled the pillows according to custom, and considered the distance she’d come that day. Then Aisling Black fell into a sleep the details of which she would not remember. Whether she dreamed of her dead husband or baby, or new phantasms of love and desire, or random remnants from her travels; the pulsing in her temple, the usual insomnia, the cares of the day, all of it gave way to the blank oblivion of comfort and keen fatigue.

  She woke briefly before dawn and did not know if she was fully awake or only between deeper slumbers. She rolled from one shoulder to the other, sat up in bed, and with gathering consciousness wondered if she oughtn’t to make some notes toward an opening lecture for her senior seminar—a reading and writing course she taught to undergraduates in which she tried to get them to use the work of masters as predicates for their own creative efforts. The Sincerest Form was the title of a book one of her colleagues had written on the uses of imitation for young writers. She took it as the title of her course in the catalogue. Part of her lecture, indeed part of the paper she had recently delivered at the Yeats International Summer School, focused on the formulation, attributed to T. S. Eliot, that “all poets borrow, great poets steal.” As evidence of this dictum she had produced W. B. Yeats’s late nineteenth-century transcription of a late sixteenth-century sonnet by Pierre de Ronsard, “pour Hélène.”

  Quand vous serez bien vieille, au soir, à la chandelle,

  Assise auprès du feu, dévidant et filant,

  Direz, chantant mes vers, en vous émerveillant:

  Ronsard me célébrait du temps que j’étais belle.

  The poem, a cautionary tale to reticent lovers whose beauty will not outlive the lines of poems, is borrowed by Yeats to woo and warn his life’s great and unattainable love, Maud Gonne.

  When you are old and grey and full of sleep,

  And nodding by the fire, take down this book,

  And slowly read, and dream of the soft look

  Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep…

  Aisling made her case that poetic license was, in fact, license to steal, in service of the art itself, from all the poems that have come before. All art, she would further argue, communes with all of the art that went before it. “It’s what we do,” she’d say, quoting Auden, “to break bread with the dead.” And she called on her students to become priests and priestesses of the holy forms of language and literature. She would regale them with the romance between Yeats and Maud Gonne, how he had pursued her and she had refused him, his many proposals, but kept up their “intercourse” all of their lives. She would read them what he wrote in his journal on the day that he first saw her—the thirtieth of January, 1889: I was twenty-three years old when the troubling of my life began. And she would read them his breathless first description of her: I had never thought to see in a living woman so great beauty. It belonged to famous pictures, to poetry, to some legendary past.

  Aisling knew that her students were similarly vexed, being likewise in their early twenties, by the beauty and heartbreak they were finding in one another, and that their aptitudes for poetry and language might be, if she could attach them to their sharpening romantic and sexual appetites, forever fixed in their temperaments. Sex and death, she would always instruct them, are the only subjects worth thinking about. And then she would tell them she stole that from Yeats, who had written it in a letter to Olivia Shakespeare. Love and grief, she would further instruct them, share the one body. And she knew that they knew that this was true. She encouraged them to imitate the poems they most admired, to match them, as Yeats had with Ronsard, line for line, theme by theme, rhyme scheme by rhyme scheme, until they found themselves sounding more like themselves than like their dead or elder mentors. In fulfillment of which assignments she had received more of the ridiculous than the sublime—Let us go then, you and I, / Out for some brewskies and pizza pie—but still she had them thinking about poetry as something they could not only read, but do. What matter if most of them ended up as marketing assistants and investment bankers, sales reps and attorneys—hers was to move them as best she could to become readers and writers, if not for a living, at least as accessories to their lives.

  It was going toward daylight now and Aisling had pape
rs from her briefcase spread on the bed. She scolded herself for abandoning her resolve to find deeper rest and so she turned off the nightlight, closed her eyes, and lay flat beneath the coverlet, touching herself, trying to recall what it was to be touched.

  When she opened the curtains just before noon the light in her windows all but blinded her. She looked out eastward over the town and harbor to Round Island and Bois Blanc and the ferryboats plying the Straits from Mackinaw City and St. Ignace. The small abandoned lighthouse at the harbor’s mouth was one she had seen on postcards for years as an icon of Michigan’s Great Lakes. To the southwest was the five-mile bridge between Michigan’s peninsulas and beyond it the edge of Lake Michigan, its freshwater blue unlike any sea or ocean, sparkling in the mid-August light. She unlocked the bank of tall windows and opened them for the fresh blast of summer air and the rattle of horse-drawn traffic below. She looked around the large bedchamber with its nineteenth-century sofa and Queen Anne wingbacks and inlaid cherry writing table and straight-back chair. There were cushioned window seats along the side windows, a queen-size four-poster bed, and tiled bathroom with Jacuzzi and glass shower stall. There were richly framed prints of seaside tableaux—Daubigny’s The Beach at Villerville, Seurat’s pointillist masterpiece of La Grande Jatte, and one she recognized as September Morn, of a nude girl standing ankle deep in the water, though she couldn’t remember the artist’s name. A bit too vivid and pastel for her tastes, she thought, all signature Carleton Varney. Nigel would never have slept in such a room; she winced at the little needle of guilt that such excess should be wasted on herself alone. Still, the views were spectacular, the feather bed had given her the best night’s sleep she’d had in months, and the light, as she stood in it, was an ointment and balm to all that ailed her. She would make the best of her time here, whatever the cost was, it hardly mattered. She ordered breakfast and newspapers to the room, asked that the florist send up a centerpiece for the coffee table, set about putting away her things, and set up her laptop on the writing desk, determined to remain in the rented robe for most of the day. Much of the clothing she’d traveled to Europe with was all a little stale from the long journeys, overly wrinkled, too dull for the midsummer ambience of her new surroundings. She examined the catalogue of hotel services and on-site shops and found a serviceable outlet for women’s fashions in one of the first-floor boutiques. She’d pay a visit after her brunch. She studied her feet and scheduled a pedicure with the salon. She avoided the temptation to check her email or call her father or make known to her colleagues in Ann Arbor her whereabouts. She wanted to remain outside the loop and range of the known and ordinary world and to bask in the bright late-summer light, free of any obligation. She studied the local directory for newsagents, bookstores, points of interest. She resolved to rent a bike and see the island, named by the Ojibwas for its turtle shape and regarded as sacred to the spirit world. All in her own good time, she thought. But for now she promised to do nothing of substance beyond growing accustomed to the space she inhabited. She breakfasted, dressed casually in khaki slacks and a white blouse, wore sunglasses and a ball cap, as if going incognito, and made her way out to inspect her surroundings. By midafternoon she had registered with the front desk, looked in the dining room and café and terrace bar; she’d walked the length of the front porch—six hundred and sixty feet: longest porch in the world, the signage said—walked down to the pool and formal gardens, then back to the hotel for the spa and some shopping. She had, in the same time, acquired a new wardrobe, a new sense of wellness, and a new appetite for whatever she might find on the menus. She napped, and then surveyed the ensemble she’d bought in the hotel’s boutique. She’d splurged on a pair of strappy black patent leather cork-soled wedges to go with her pedicure. She found a simple black linen dress with a deep V neckline that gathered softly just below her knees that she thought would look perfect with the turquoise pashmina shawl she’d found in London. Near the checkout she found a pair of seed bead dangling earrings, also in turquoise, and a blue moiré water silk headband to match. For Aisling, each element of an ensemble was vested with meaning or metaphor or symbol so that wearing it, she became an accessory, somehow, to a larger narrative the denouement of which remained unknown. Seeing the new garments laid out on the bed filled her with curiosity about her place in it all. She dressed in quiet, consulting the bureau mirror after every element of her outfit was added.

  When she appeared in the lobby just after high tea, half an hour before dinner would be served, she looked rested and reborn. The hotel manager, a man in his thirties trying to look older than he was, standing sentinel in his blue suit and club tie and button-down shirt, hastened across the lobby to offer any assistance.

  “Good evening, Mrs….?”

  “Black,” she told him, “Aisling Black.”

  He shook her hand and smiled earnestly.

  “Is this your first visit to Grand Hotel?”

  “My first in years,” she said, “I used to come here with my father for conventions. I remember him meeting the governor here. And I was here the year they were making the movie.”

  “Yes, Jane Seymour and Christopher Reeve…how very sad…to think of him so damaged by falling from a horse…They made that movie in ’79.”

  “Somewhere in Time?” She had never seen it.

  “That’s it, Somewhere in Time, indeed.”

  “I remember them filming in this lobby.”

  “Well, you’re welcome back after all these years. What is it you do now?”

  “I write, I’m at the University of Michigan.”

  “Yes, yes! Professor Black. I saw that you’d arrived last night. Mark Twain was here, you know…lectured on the front porch, July of 1895. Perhaps we could impose upon you to give a reading?”

  “How very kind of you, but really, no, no, I’m here to be healed from all kinds of work.”

  “Of course, Professor, I understand.”

  “I’m Aisling, just Aisling, but thank you anyway.”

  “I’m Michael Musser, my family has owned the place for years. Please let me know if there’s anything, anything we can do to make your stay—”

  “Thank you, Michael, I will of course.”

  They had arrived at the entrance to the dining room.

  “Would you like a cocktail before dinner, Profess—Aisling? It’s early, what would you like?”

  “Maybe a scotch?”

  “And soda? Water?”

  “No, only scotch. Then a table, the fresh air…I’m famished suddenly.”

  “And will you be dining alone?”

  She nodded and smiled.

  He arranged with the maître d’ of the dining room to seat her at a window table so that she could have a view of the porch, the grounds, and the lake. He brought her a tumbler of single malt, asked if he could get her anything else, promised to be at her beck and call, then left her to enjoy her dinner.

  Aisling was used to dining alone. The time formerly spent conversing with Nigel between ordering and courses she now passed people-watching, assigning fictions to the assorted configurations at different tables. The elegant and amply mirrored dining room was a perfect venue for this, as people unaccustomed to dressing for dinner rose to the occasion of their surroundings. Most of the families with school-age children were back to their lives now, leaving the hotel and the island to seniors and young couples and what seemed like a convention of visiting engineers or architects. The whiskey warmed her. A black man in a white dinner jacket brought her a menu. She was happy to have something to hold and read as she watched the tables fill. The mirrored columns that ran the length of the long dining room allowed her to consider people at various angles without appearing to stare. A woman with a goiter and a fat husband, the pretty couple on their honeymoon, from Pinconning, she imagined, where his family had made a little fortune in cheese and hers farmed sugar beets. This was his first suit and she’d been a virgin. Or maybe not, Aisling thought; maybe he was home on leave from A
fghanistan and she was an escort from Traverse City, the long luxury weekend and the hooker paid for by a kindly uncle who couldn’t abide the thought of the bright-faced boy going back to the war before sleeping with a woman. Or maybe it was she who was home and he the escort and a rich lesbian aunt who paid. The possibilities were inexhaustible. She loved to bask in the liberties of fiction and thought she might like to write a novel. The four blue-haired women, maybe sisters or widows from the same Presbyterian church, here for a hospice conference or bridge tournament. The handsome brothers and their fashionable wives, men in their fifties, here to celebrate a mother’s birthday maybe? Anything was possible, or was not.

  It was in the mirror, at an angle, that Aisling first saw the young woman decanting water into glasses at a table slightly behind her and slightly left. Whether it was the grace with which she moved among them or the startling beauty of her face, unlike any Aisling had ever seen, or the poise and shapeliness of her figure, half hidden in a mannish dinner jacket, black trousers, white shirt and bow tie, it was hard to know; but Aisling heard herself catch her breath and her right hand moved to cover her mouth, which had opened to make the sound of vowels as she let the caught breath go. She was dressed to match the rest of the waitstaff except for the maître d’ and headwaiters, who were dressed in tails. Hers was an apparently junior or apprenticed position as she never served food or wine and only cleared tables after they’d been vacated by diners. Her skin was mocha-colored and her eyes still blacker and her bearing was regal though she was not tall. And while she could have been a native Detroiter or Tanzanian, Aisling guessed she was Jamaican. Crews from that island nation had been coming to Mackinac for years, spending April until late October working the Grand and then returning home for the winter season at the Wyndham Resort in Kingston. When she came to fill Aisling’s water goblet the older woman blushed and feigned composure whilst the younger, whose name badge read Bintalou, smiled shyly and backed away. Though Aisling tried to appear engaged with the menu, she was in fact following her every move around the room, using mirrors for the wider scrutiny they provided. Nothing on the menu, from the “Braised Pork and Vegetable Spring Roll in Ginger-Mushroom Soy Sauce” appetizer to the “Almond-Macadamia Crusted Trout” entrée could take her attention from the beauty. When the waiter asked Aisling what she had decided on, she ordered another scotch and told him to choose something for her; everything on the menu looked sumptuous and she’d trust his instincts. Bintalou was sixteen or seventeen, Aisling guessed, and near enough Aisling’s own size—just over five feet and a hundred pounds. Their eyes were near enough the same color, though the girl’s were deeper, darker, entirely benign. Her black hair was braided in tight cornrows and her bosom and her bottom were rounder, higher, more ample and sinewy than Aisling’s, and her body was bolder, more powerful. She had tiny wrists, long, delicate fingers, thin arms, perfect ankles. Her blackness was richer, more articulate, than Aisling’s whiteness. The newness of it, its purity and youth, its incarnate beauty were utterly compelling. Aisling could feel the heat of a blush rising just watching the girl move about the room among the clatter of dinnerware and conversations, the industry of the waitstaff, the piano music in the corner, the chandeliers and candlelight—everything was silent and incidental to the aura and cocoon of luminary beauty her vision moved in.