Ghost Story

by Peter Straub

  —“Bodiless God,” D. H. Lawrence

  From the Journals of Don Wanderley

  1

  There is only one way to answer that question. I have to spend a little time, over the next week or two, in writing out in some detail the facts as I remember them about myself and David and Alma Mobley. When I fictionalized them in the book I inevitably sensationalized them, and doing so falsified my own memories. If I were satisfied with that, I would never have considered writing the Dr. Rabbitfoot novel—he’s no more than Alma in blackface, Alma with horns, tail and a soundtrack. Just as “Rachel Varney” in The Nightwatcher was no more than Alma in fancy dress. Alma was far stranger than “Rachel.” What I want to do now is not invent fictional situations and fictional peculiarities, but look at the peculiarities that existed. In The Nightwatcher everything was solved, everything came out even; in life nothing came out even and nothing was solved.

  * * *

  I met Alma not as “Saul Malkin” met “Rachel Varney,” in a Paris dining room, but in surroundings utterly banal. It was at Berkeley, where good notices for my first book had obtained me a year’s teaching job. The post was a coup for a first-book writer, and I took it seriously. I taught one section of Creative Writing and two sections of an undergraduate course in American literature. It was the second of these that caused most of my work. I had to do so much reading of work which I didn’t know well and so much theme-grading that I had little time to write. And if I had barely read Howells or Cooper, I had never looked at the criticism about them which the structure of the course demanded I know. I found myself falling into a routine of teaching my courses, taking the creative writing work home to read before I ate dinner at a bar or café, and then spending my evenings at the library going through bibliographies and hunting up copies of PMLA. Sometimes I was able to work on a story of my own when I got back to my apartment; more often, my eyes burned and my stomach was in an uproar from English Department coffee and my instincts for prose were deadened by scholarly waffle. From time to time I took out a girl in the department, an instructor with a mint-condition PhD from the University of Wisconsin. Her name was Helen Kayon, and our desks, along with twelve others, were next to one another in a communal office. She had read my first book, but it had not impressed her.

  She was stern about literature, frightened of teaching, careless about her appearance, hopeless about men. Her interests were in Scots contemporaries of Chaucer and linguistic analysis; at twenty-three, she already had something of the feather impracticality of the old scholar-spinster. “My father changed his name from Kayinski, and I’m just a hard-headed Pole,” she said, but it was a classic self-deception; she was hard-headed about Scots Chaucerians and nothing else. Helen was a large girl with big glasses and loose hair which always seemed on its way from one style to another; it was hair with unfulfilled intentions. She had decided some time before that what she had to offer the university, the planet, men was her intelligence. It was the only thing about herself that she trusted. I asked her out for lunch the third time I saw her in the office. She was revising an article, and she nearly jumped out of her chair. I think I was the first man at Berkeley to ask her to lunch.

  A few days later I met her in the office after my last class. She was sitting at her desk staring at her typewriter. Our lunch had been awkward: she had said, comparing the articles she was trying to write with my work, “But I’m trying to describe reality!”

  “I’m leaving,” I said. “Why don’t you come with me? We’ll have a drink somewhere.”

  “I can’t, I hate bars and I have to work on this,” she said. “Oh, look. You could walk me back to my place. Okay? It’s up the hill. Is that okay for you?”

  “That’s where I live too.”

  “I’m fed up with this anyhow. What are you reading?” I held up a book. “Oh. Nathaniel Hawthorne. Your survey course.”

  “Harvey Lieberman just told me that in three weeks I’m giving the main lecture on Hawthorne. I haven’t read The House of the Seven Gables since high school.”

  “Lieberman is a lazy so and so.”

  I was inclined to agree: so far, three of his other assistants had also given lectures for him. “I’ll be all right,” I said, “as long as I can figure out some angle to tie it all up, and get all the reading done.”

  “At least you don’t have tenure to worry about,” she said, gesturing toward her typewriter.

  “No. Just eating.” This had the tone of our lunch.

  “Sorry.” She bowed her head, suffering already, and I touched her shoulder and told her not to take herself so seriously.

  As we were going down the stairs together, Helen carrying a huge worn briefcase straining with books and essays, me carrying only The House of the Seven Gables, a tall freckled blond girl slipped between us. The first impression I had of Alma Mobley was of a general paleness, a spiritual blurriness suggested by her long expressionless face and hanging straw-colored hair. Her round eyes were a very pale blue. I felt an odd mixture of attraction and revulsion; in the dim light of the staircase, she looked like an attractive girl who’d spent all her life in a cave—she appeared to be the same ghostly shade of white all over. “Mr. Wanderley?” she asked.

  When I nodded, she muttered her name, but I did not catch it.

  “I’m a graduate student in English,” she said. “I wondered if you’d mind if I came to your lecture on Hawthorne. I saw your name posted on Professor Lieberman’s schedule in the departmental office.”

  “No, please come,” I said. “But it’s just a survey class, you know. It’ll probably be a waste of time for you.”

  “Thank you,” she said and abruptly continued on up the stairs.

  “How did she know who I was?” I whispered to Helen, concealing my pleasure in what I thought was my heretofore invisible celebrity. Helen tapped the book in my hand.

  She lived only three blocks from my own apartment; hers was a random collection of rooms at the top of an old house, and she shared it with two other girls. The rooms seemed arbitrarily placed, and so did the things in them—the apartment looked as if no one had ever considered where bookcases and chairs and tables ought to go; where delivery men put them, they stayed. Here a lamp had been put next to a chair, there a table heaped with books shoved beneath a window, but everything else was so haphazard that you had to weave around the furniture to reach the hall.

  The roommates too seemed arbitrary. Helen had described them to me on the walk up the hill. One of them, Meredith Polk, was also from Wisconsin, a new instructor in the Botany Department. She and Helen had met while hunting for a place to live, found they had done graduate work at the same university and decided to live together. The third girl was a theater graduate student named Hilary Lehardie. Helen said, “Hilary never leaves her room and stays high all day, I think, and she plays rock music most of the night. I put in ear plugs. But Meredith is better. She’s very intense and a little bit odd, but I think we’re friends. She tries to protect me.”

  “Protect you from what?”

  “Vileness.”

  Both of the roommates were at home when I reached Helen’s apartment. As soon as I came in behind Helen, an overweight black-haired girl in blue jeans and a sweatshirt shot out of the door from the kitchen and glared at me through thick glasses. Meredith Polk. Helen introduced me as a writer in the English Department, and Meredith said “Dja do?” and zipped back into the kitchen. Loud music came from a side bedroom.

  The spectacled black-haired girl cannoned out of the kitchen again as soon as Helen had gone in to get me a drink. She wove through the furniture to a camp chair near a wall against which stood what looked like hundreds of cacti and plants in pots. She slotted a cigarette in her mouth and stared at me with an intent suspicion.

  “You’re not an academic? Not on the regular staff?” This from a first-year instructor, years from tenure.

  I sai
d, “I just have a year’s appointment. I’m a writer.”

  “Oh,” she said. More staring for a moment. Then: “So you’re the one who took her to lunch.”

  “Yes.”

  “Ah.”

  The music boomed through the wall. “Hilary,” she said, nodding in the direction of the music. “Our roommate.”

  “Doesn’t it bother you?”

  “I don’t hear it most of the time. Concentration. And it’s good for the plants.”

  Helen came out with a tumbler too full of whiskey, one ice cube floating at the top like a dead goldfish. She carried a cup of tea for herself.

  “’Scuse me,” Meredith said, and darted off in the direction of her room.

  “Oh, it’s nice to see a man in this awful place,” Helen said. For a moment all the worry and self-consciousness left her face, and I saw the real intelligence that lay beneath her academic cleverness. She looked vulnerable, but less so than I had thought.

  We went to bed a week later, at my apartment. She was not a virgin, and she was firm about not being in love. In fact she went about the entire matter of deciding to do it and then doing it with the brisk precision she brought to the Scots Chaucerians. “You’ll never fall in love with me,” she said, “and I don’t expect you to. That’s fine.”

  She spent two nights at my apartment, that time. We went to the library together in the evenings, vanishing into our separate carrels as if there were no emotion at all between us. The only actual sign I had that this was not so came one evening a week later when I found Meredith Polk outside my door when I came home. She was still wearing the jeans and sweatshirt. “You shit,” she hissed at me, and I quickly opened the door and got her inside.

  “You cold-hearted bastard,” she said. “You’re going to wreck her chances for tenure. And you’re breaking her heart. You treat her like a whore. She’s much too good for you. You don’t even have the same values. Helen’s committed to scholarship—it’s the most important thing in her life. I understand that, but I don’t think you do. I don’t think you’re committed to anything but your sex life.”

  “One thing at a time,” I said. “How can I possibly be wrecking her chances for tenure? Let’s just take that one first.”

  “This is her first semester here. They watch us, you know. How do you think it looks if a new instructor jumps in the sack with the first guy who comes along?”

  “This is Berkeley. I don’t think anyone notices or cares.”

  “You pig. You don’t notice or care, you don’t notice anything or care about anything, that’s the truth—do you love her?”

  “Get out,” I said. I was losing my temper. She looked like an angry frog, croaking at me, defining her territory.

  Helen herself arrived three hours later, looking pale and bruised. She would not discuss Meredith Polk’s astounding accusations, but she said she had talked to her the night before. “Meredith is very protective,” she said. “She must have been to you. I’m sorry, Don.” Then she began to cry. “No, don’t rub my back like that. Don’t. It’s just foolish. It’s only that I haven’t been able to work, the past few nights. I guess I’ve been unhappy whenever I haven’t been with you.” She looked up at me, stricken. “I shouldn’t have said that. But you don’t love me, do you? You couldn’t, could you?”

  “There’s no answer to that. Let me get you a cup of tea.”

  She was lying on the bed in my little apartment, curled up like a fetus. “I feel so guilty.”

  I came back with her tea. “I wish we could take a trip together,” she said. “I wish we could go to Scotland together. I’ve spent all these years reading about Scotland, and I’ve never been there.” Her eyes were brimming behind the big glasses. “Oh, I’m a horrible mess. I knew I should never have come out here. I was happy in Madison. I should never have come to California.”

  “You belong here more than I do.”

  “No,” she said, and rolled over to hide her face. “You can go anywhere and fit in. I’ve never been anything but a working-class drudge.”

  “What’s the last really good book you read?” I asked.

  She rolled back over to face me, curiosity defeating the misery and embarrassment on her face. Squinting, she considered it for a moment. “The Rhetoric of Irony by Wayne Booth. I just reread it.”

  “You belong at Berkeley,” I said.

  “I belong in a zoo.”

  It was an apology for everything, for Meredith Polk as much as for her own feelings, but I knew that if we went on I could only hurt her more. She was right: it was not possible that I could ever love her.

  Afterward I thought that my Berkeley life had settled into a pattern to which the rest of my life would adhere. It was, except for my work, essentially empty. But wasn’t it better to continue seeing Helen than to wound her by insisting on a break? In the workbound world I saw as mine, expedience was a synonym for kindness. When we parted between us was the understanding that we would not meet for a day or two, but that all would continue as before.

  But a week later the conventional period of my life came to an end; after it I saw Helen Kayon only twice.

  2

  I had found the hook for the Hawthorne lecture; it was in an essay by R. P. Blackmur: “When every possibility is taken away, then we have sinned.” The idea seemed to radiate throughout Hawthorne’s work, and I could connect the novels and stories by this black Christianity, by the impulse in them for nightmare—by what was almost their desire for nightmare. For to imagine a nightmare is to put it at one remove. And I found a statement by Hawthorne which helped to explain his method: “I have sometimes produced a singular and not unpleasing effect, so far as my own mind was concerned, by imagining a train of incidents in which the spiritual mechanism of the faery legend should be combined with the characters and manners of everyday life.” When I had the ideas which would structure the lecture, the details fell onto the pages of my notebook.

  This work and my writing students kept me fully occupied for the five days before the lecture. Helen and I met fleetingly, and I promised her that we would get away for a weekend when my immediate work was done. My brother David owned a “cottage” in Still Valley, outside Mendocino, and he’d told me to use it whenever I wanted to get away from Berkeley. This was typical of David’s thoughtfulness; but a kind of perversity had kept me from using the house. I did not want to have to be grateful to David. After the lecture I would take Helen to Still Valley and kill two scruples at once.

  On the morning of the lecture I reread D. H. Lawrence’s chapter about Hawthorne and saw these lines:

  And the first thing she does is seduce him.

  And the first thing he does is to be seduced.

  And the second thing they do is to hug their sin in secret, and gloat over it, and try to understand.

  Which is the myth of New England.

  That was what I had been looking for all along. I put down my cup of coffee and started to restructure my remarks. Lawrence’s insight extended my own, I could see all the books in a new way. I discarded paragraphs and wrote in new ones between the crossed-out lines . . . I forgot to call Helen, as I had promised to do.

  In the end I used my notes very sparingly. Once, straining for a metaphor, I leaned on the lectern and saw Helen and Meredith Polk seated together in one of the last rows, up at the top of the theater. Meredith Polk was frowning, suspicious as a Berkeley cop. When scientists hear the kinds of things that go on in literature classrooms, they often begin to look that way. Helen merely looked interested, and I was grateful that she had come.

  When it was over Professor Lieberman came up from his aisle seat to tell me that he had enjoyed my remarks very much, and would I consider taking his Stephen Crane lecture in two months’ time? He was due at a conference in Iowa that week, and since I had done such an “exemplary” job, especially considering that I was not an
academic . . . in short, he might find it possible to extend my appointment to a second year.

  I was stunned as much by the bribe as by his arrogance. Lieberman, still young, was a famous man, not so much a scholar in Helen’s sense as a “critic,” a generalizer a sub-Edmund Wilson; I did not respect his books, but I expected more of him. The students were filing up toward the exits, a solid mass of T-shirts and denim. Then I saw a face lifted expectantly toward me, a slim body clothed not in denim but in a white dress. Lieberman was suddenly an interference, an obstacle, and I agreed to give the Crane lecture to get rid of him. “Very good, Donald,” he said, and disappeared. As quickly as that: one moment the seersuckered young professor was before me, and the next I was looking into the face of the girl in the white dress. It was the graduate student who had stopped Helen and me on the stairs.

  She looked completely different: healthier, with a light golden layer of tan on her face and arms. The straight blond hair glowed. So did her pale eyes: in them I saw a kaleidoscope of shattered lights and colors. Her mouth was bracketed by two faint lines of irony. She was ravishing, one of the most beautiful girls I’d ever seen—no small statement, for Berkeley was so populated by beauties that you saw two new ones every time you looked up from your desk. But the girl before me had none of the gaucheness or assertive, testing vulgarity of the usual undergraduate knockout: she simply looked right, perfectly at home in herself. Helen Kayon didn’t have a chance.

  “That was good,” she said, and the faint lines beside her mouth twitched as if at a private joke. “I’m happy I came after all.” For the first time, I heard the Southern accent: that sunny drawl, that lilt.

  “So am I,” I said. “Thank you for the compliment.”

  “Do you want to relish it in private?”

  “Is that an invitation?” And then I saw that I was being too quick, too self-consciously flattered and one-dimensional.

  “A what? No, I’m not aware that it was.” Her mouth moved: what an idea.