Ghost Town

by Patrick Mcgrath

  —But why?

  To a child who from an early age had had a pronounced streak of romanticism in her, this was of course a startling revelation. But as I might have predicted, my mother at this point became vague. Apparently the girl did not come from a good family.

  —So it drove him mad?

  My mother was sitting by the fire, knitting, and I have a distinct memory of the clack of the knitting needles all at once stopping, and then a long silence. She gazed out at the street once more, and in the gloom the old clock on the mantel ticked on in a silence only occasionally disturbed by the muffled thunder of the subway trains running uptown under Seventh Avenue. Then she sighed, shook her head, cast a friendly glance at me where I sat by the fire with my arms wrapped round my knees, and resumed the story.

  —Yes, she said at last, I suppose it did.

  The clacking resumed but it was less rapid now. This meant that my mother was thinking.

  —He went mad for love?

  —Oh, you are all the same!

  By then my mama was old beyond her years, exhausted by her unhappiness, which I now realize was as much about the disintegration of her marriage to my father as it was to the collapsed fortunes of the van Horn family. Often there would come a moment—late in the evening as I remember it, the month November, or perhaps February, for it would be raining hard outside—and she would stop in mid-sentence, up would come her head, up would come her finger, and together we would listen to the distant sound of the front door of the building banging shut.

  —Your father is home, she would whisper; and the dread upon her face came of her uncertainty as to whether or not he was sober.

  —That’s enough! she cried; and I was sent to bed.

  I had heard enough by then to elevate Uncle Julius to heroic status—to think of it, my own uncle being driven insane for love! But I did want the rest, and I think my mother wanted to give me the rest, though it caused her genuine distress to speak of events which to her were the first causes of the disaster which spelled the beginning of our end; I constantly feared that she would simply refuse. Just shake her head and tell me she could not go on, it was all too dreadful. So much darkness, she whispered—and not just for us! I was of course agog to know what form the darkness would take, but I knew my mama well enough not to display any impatience. She was reluctant to arouse the family history, but I believe now that the past, vale of tears though it was, so bleak and full of suffering, was still preferable to a present in which a cold, indifferent husband came home to her night after night and reminded her of just how low we had sunk. The house on Twenty-Third Street in which we had a small apartment on the third floor, hard to heat in the winter, stifling hot in the summer, and the icebox down the hall—once we had owned the whole building!

  My mother held her father responsible. She disapproved of him just as she disapproved of Aunt Charlotte, just as doubtless she would have disapproved of me had she lived to see what I became. Her tragedy, if the word is not too strong, was being born too late to enjoy the social ascent of the van Horns, but not too soon to witness our decline. Her nostalgia was touched with acid by reason of acute disappointment: fate had cheated her of her rightful status, and for this, as I say, she blamed my grandfather.

  The last detail of the story I had after a conversation with him. I have said that Jerome Brook Franklin was a gruff man, and he often exaggerated that trait in order to amuse me. When my mama took me to visit my grandmother I would slip away and dart up the stairs, then tiptoe along the corridor to his studio. Often the door was slightly ajar, and from the corridor I was aware of the powerful smell of the chemicals with which he cleaned his brushes. I would see him there before his easel in the long coat he wore when he was working, a loose brown garment such as might be worn by a janitor. Always the brown coat, always the cigar, and sometimes a model, a girl, naked or loosely draped, arranged upon a platform with a broken pillar and perhaps a clump of trailing ivy. At other times some grand dignified lady with a vast bosom and hair stacked high would sit imperiously before him, and on the easel I would see her painted head, and beyond it the head itself.

  My grandfather was aware of my presence even though I had made no sound at all. Without turning he would bark at me in a tone of mock annoyance.

  —What is it you want, nuisance child? You have come to distract me because the women don’t want you, is that it?

  But he would not turn, nor would his eyes move from their single track, the sitter and the canvas, back and forth, and the brush in his hand flickering here and there as the cigar smoke streamed from him as though he were an engine. I said nothing, merely hitched myself up onto a paint-spattered stool in the back of the studio and sat silently watching. He talked about me to his sitter.

  —My daughter’s child, he would say. She’s a van Horn like her mother. All mad. My brother-in-law, they had to send him away! Into my mountains!

  So it would go, and a large part of the pleasure I took from being there came of listening to my grandfather talk about the family, which he did in tones of faux horror, saying we were all mad. It was a good joke. After a while he would turn to change his brushes and see me perched on my stool, and pretend to be surprised.

  —Are you still here, you damn little monkey? Go on, get out, get away downstairs, I’ve had enough of you!

  Off I would go then and wander about the house until I heard my mama calling me. Then we would go home.

  But one day my grandfather adopted a different tone. He had no sitter in his studio that day and he seemed in good humor. There was a bottle of red wine on the floor by his easel and a glass of the stuff close to hand. He was putting a few last touches to the portrait of an eminent banker with a high bald head and a mean face. He even hummed as he worked.

  —Oh it’s you again, is it? Back you come like a case of the pox, no one will have you, will they? Sit down over there but don’t say a word.

  After some minutes I forgot that I was not to say a word.

  —Grandpapa?

  —What is it, worm?

  —What happened to your eye?

  At this he stopped working and turned to me.

  —My eye? he growled.

  He fingered his eye patch, watching me closely, and I thought he might take it off so I could see the empty socket beneath, if that was what lay beneath. But he did not. Instead he came close to me and I could smell the wine and the cigar smoke on his breath. All at once I was not sure what sort of game we were playing. I felt a little afraid. He put his face very close to mine, and the bristles of his beard touched my skin.

  —It was your Uncle Julius, he whispered.

  His breath made me feel ill. I thought I might be sick.

  —Uncle Julius, I whispered.

  —He attacked me, he whispered.

  —No.

  —Yes. I ruined his life, and he ruined mine. The girl belonged to me, you see, and it was too much for him!

  I remember his laughter as I ran along the corridor and down the stairs, how it boomed from his studio and swirled about me like a cloud of cigar smoke and only grew fainter when I came panting to a halt in the drawing room, where my mama and my grandmama were having tea.

  —What is the matter with you now? said my mama.

  I could not tell her. It was too dreadful. The secret was revealed. I held it close in my heart for many years and in time I understood that mine was not the only family in which violence and insanity had erupted in generations past, and plagued the lives of those to come. They are all dead now, and what survives of them are the phantoms, merely—the daguerreotypes, the photographs, the paintings. The portrait of Noah van Horn came down to me, and as I say, I spend too much time in front of it. It all began with him, of course; it was Noah who denied Julius his chance of love, and why? Because of a prejudice acquired as a function of fear. Love must never be denied, never!—as I have cause to know, and better than most. For the story of Julius, so painstakingly assembled by means of the fading memo
ries of those who knew him, and the ghosts now clustered on my walls and sideboards—do they not all clamor the same sad warning? That love denied will make us mad? I think so.

  Ground Zero

  Danny Silver was like a son to me, and as a childless woman who never married I do not say this lightly. He was also my patient. For seven years we had been meeting twice a week to talk through his problems, which were largely sexual in nature, and which originated in a suffocating maternal relationship which created conflicts that ran like fault lines deep in his psyche, becoming visible only when he tried to sustain intimacy with a woman. Dan was eager to enjoy a healthy relationship, but the damage had begun early, and it was structural, so progress was slow. I was not in New York when the terrorist attacks occurred, but Dan was, and the events of that day disturbed him profoundly. It became clear to me that our work would for some time be thrown off track by the repercussions of an assault which he was not alone in regarding as having been directed at himself, as in a way it was.

  He was a large, sad, untidy man, highly intelligent, and his face so creased and fissured that he seemed prematurely aged, as though burdened with the weight of all of human history. I believe this had been true of him even in childhood. He dressed carelessly and had an air of constant distraction, and he did not look healthy; he took no exercise, and ate badly. He was resigned to the prospect of spending several more years in therapy, recognizing that with two wrecked marriages behind him he could not afford to make another mistake. In conversation he was given to frowns, groans, and sighs, and during our sessions together he would watch me closely from darkly bagged eyes that teemed with complicated anxieties. It may have been the very tortuousness of his mind that propelled him into a career in the law, and I believe he was a very good lawyer. Civil rights was his area.

  He came to see me soon after my return to the city. We sat in my apartment on Riverside Drive one warm evening in late September. The sun was setting over the Jersey shore and the Hudson was a lovely silvery gray in the last of the light. So tranquil was the view from the window in my consulting room, with its wide western exposure, high above the river, one could almost forget the horror at the other end of the island. Dan sat down heavily, and with his elbows on his knees, and his head pushed forward, said he was a worried man. He feared for our civil liberties, he said. He feared that Congress was going to push through a bill letting federal agents lock up anyone they didn’t like the look of. He said these new powers would be exercised with no judicial oversight, and the people the feds locked up would have no access to legal representation.

  He rubbed his cropped skull as he voiced these troublesome thoughts, and then sat staring at the floor and shaking his head. I waited for what was really on his mind. Finally he looked up, and quietly told me that in the immediate wake of the attacks he had gotten into a situation with a woman.

  —Go on, I said.

  He met her the Saturday after the attacks. About forty, he said. On the small side. Black hair, good body—very intense woman, he said—little cleft chin that juts out—he jutted out his own chin, smiling slightly, absurd gesture in this big, blue-jowled man—sensitive, smart … Not a woman to inspire affection, he’d thought on first meeting her, too, oh—cool—for that, although at the time that had had no bearing on their relationship. He had found her through an escort agency which advertised in the back pages of New York magazine—

  Here he paused. I was aware Dan used prostitutes, nothing new there. In fact I encouraged it.

  —Go on, I said.

  He was not strong, he told me, nobody who lived in the city and had been there that morning was strong. He was finding it difficult to work. It brought back everything he had suffered after his mother’s death: the same disabling grief, the same leaching of joy and purpose from projects which had previously given meaning to his life. The same sudden debilitating waves of anger and wretchedness and despair. Dan lived in one of those big apartment buildings on the north side of West Twenty-Third, and it was there that he’d grown up. His mother had died in that apartment. Both his marriages had failed in that apartment. His bedroom had a balcony with a wrought iron rail and a view of downtown. He’d heard it on NPR that morning, that a plane had gone into the World Trade Center. He’d turned on the TV and listened to the first reports, standing on his balcony high over Twenty-Third Street and watching the north tower burn.

  Then he’d seen the other plane go in and with a lurch of stupefied incredulity realized that New York was under attack. He called his office and talked to his partner. Later he saw the south tower fall, and heard a roar like distant thunder as clouds of dense smoke billowed up from the tip of the island. For a moment, no more than that, the tower left a ghostly image of itself in the empty air. Dan remembered trying to resist the numbness he felt creeping over him by thinking of people who lived downtown, or worked there—people in his office, colleagues, friends … Later he watched a man he knew slightly, a man who worked for the city, come limping along the block, covered from head to foot in gray ash, and go into the apartment building on the opposite side of the street. He could see him in the lobby of the building opening his mailbox.

  After a while he turned off the TV and made his way over to Union Square. There were many who shared this impulse, he said, and they milled about together, disparate New Yorkers finding what primitive comfort they could in the face of the destruction unleashed upon their city. Establishing transient bonds with strangers so as to escape the horror of solitude in the face of so much death.

  Which was why, a few days later, he had called the escort service.

  The woman gave him a brief firm handshake and sat down. They quickly arranged the money side of it, then she went into the bedroom and got undressed. Apparently what followed was clinical rather than passionate, which did not surprise me. She was very businesslike, said Dan, very efficient. Good cold sex. When it was over, he said, they stayed in bed, talking, and it seems that what Dan called a “rapport” sprang up between them.

  —What kind of “rapport”?

  She relaxed. She was interested in him. Wanted to know what he did. Had he grown up in New York? That sort of thing. She made him laugh. Dan never laughed, a sardonic bark was the closest Dan ever got to laughter, and I assumed that was what he meant. I must have said something to that effect.

  —It wasn’t like that, he said.

  —Like what?

  He was frowning. He stared at the floor, sitting forward in the chair, trying to be clear about what he meant and what he felt. He had caught the tone of my voice, my dismissive response to this “rapport” he’d achieved with a woman he’d hired for an hour.

  —We connected.

  —Go on.

  But then it seems the mood changed. They were talking about the attacks—what else did anyone talk about?—and it became clear that she had been through something far worse than him. She was badly scared, he said. She wanted him to help her, or at least listen to her and not just write her off as a crazy person. She was an artist. She did escort work to cover the rent on her loft. She lived in a building seven blocks from the Trade Center, and from her rooftop she had watched the first plane go in. She’d heard it coming down the west side. It was very loud until just before it hit. Then everything went quiet, and she thought they’d turned off the engines. She said it went into the building as if it were going through tissue paper. The building swallowed it, she said. And through it all, through the impact, and the silence, and the shock, and the smoke, her only thought was of the guy who’d left her bed an hour earlier to go to work on the 104th floor.

  Dan fell silent here. He wanted me to grasp the significance of what he’d just told me. I hardly needed his portentous silence to engage with the woman’s experience; there were many such stories at the time and I’d heard worse.

  She called the guy on his cellphone—his name was Jay, she said—and he answered on the first ring. She was close to hysteria, but his voice was calm. She could hear ch
aos in the background, screams, and the smashing of glass, and he told her that it was getting pretty hot and smoky in there. He asked her what had happened to them and she told him, a plane had hit the building. He knew this already, it seems he just wanted it confirmed. They had to shout to make themselves heard, but even as he grasped the enormity of his predicament he remained steady and calm, in fact he was comforting her. He told her he loved her. He told her to be happy. Then he said he had to call his father to say goodbye, and the line went dead.

  From her rooftop she could see men and women clustered in open windows and out on the ledges of the high floors of the tower. She could see people falling. She said she stood there on her roof with her cellphone in her hand and stared at the burning tower, trying to make out which of those distant falling figures was her lover.

  All this she told Dan in flat neutral tones, sitting forward in the bed and staring out of the window such that she gave him her profile, and he lay on his side watching her: two strangers, he remembered thinking, each seeking succor in an hour of fearful desolation, and it counted for nothing that the pretext of their meeting was commercial sex.

  Still staring out of the window she began to speak again. She told Dan that later that day the cops had evacuated her from her building and she had gone to a hotel uptown. The day after, she was on the east side subway. She was thinking of her last conversation with the guy, with Jay, as the train pulled out of Grand Central. The people who’d just got off were pushing toward the turnstile, but one figure stood unmoving at the edge of the platform.