Ghosts: Recent Hauntings

by Richard Bowes

  “You mean they did what you expected them to do,” Bill said.

  “Decency is an uncommon literary virtue,” said Traynor’s companion.

  “Thank you, yes,” Tony said.

  “But not a very interesting one, really,” Bill said. “Which probably explains why it isn’t all that common.”

  “I think you are correct, Mr. Messinger, to imply that decency is more valuable in the realm of personal relations. And for the record, I do feel your work since then has undergone a general improvement. Perhaps Mr. Flax’s limitations do not permit him to appreciate your progress.” She paused. There was a dangerous smile on her face. “Of course you can hardly be said to have improved to the extent claimed in your latest round of interviews.”

  In the moment of silence that followed, Max Baccarat looked from one of his new allies to the other and found them in a state too reflective for commentary. He cleared his throat. “Might we have the honor of an introduction, Madame? Chippie seems to have forgotten his manners.”

  “My name is of no importance,” she said, only barely favoring him with the flicker of a glance. “And Mr. Traynor has a thorough knowledge of my feelings on the matter.”

  “There’s two sides to every story,” Chippie said. “It may not be grammar, but it’s the truth.”

  “Oh, there are many more than that,” said his companion, smiling again.

  “Darling, would you help me return to my room?”

  Chippie extended an arm, and the Englishwoman floated to her feet, cradled his root-like fist against the side of her chest, nodded to the gaping men, and gracefully conducted her charge from the room.

  “So who the fuck was that?” said Max Baccarat.

  2

  Certain rituals structured the night-time hours on Floor 21. At 8:30 p.m., blood pressure was taken and evening medications administered by Tess Corrigan, an Irish softie with a saggy gut, an alcoholic, angina-ridden husband, and an understandable tolerance for misbehavior. Tess herself sometimes appeared to be mildly intoxicated. Class resentment caused her to treat Max a touch brusquely, but Tony’s trench coat amused her to wheezy laughter. After Bill Messinger had signed two books for her niece, a devoted fan, Tess had allowed him to do anything he cared to, including taking illicit journeys downstairs to the gift shop. “Oh, Mr. Messinger,” she had said, “a fella with your gifts, the books you could write about this place.” Three hours after Tess’s departure, a big, heavily-dreadlocked nurse with an islands accent surged into the patients’ rooms to awaken them for the purpose of distributing tranquilizers and knockout pills. Because she resembled a greatly inflated, ever-simmering Whoopi Goldberg, Max, Tony, and Bill referred to this terrifying and implacable figure as “Molly.” (Molly’s real name, printed on the ID card attached to a sash used as a waistband, was permanently concealed behind beaded swags and little hanging pouches.) At six in the morning, Molly swept in again, wielding the blood-pressure mechanism like an angry deity maintaining a good grip on a sinner. At the end of her shift, she came wrapped in a strong, dark scent, suggestive of forest fires in underground crypts. The three literary gentlemen found this aroma disturbingly erotic.

  On the morning after the appearance within the Salon of Charles Chipp Traynor and his disconcerting muse, Molly raked Bill with a look of pity and scorn as she trussed his upper arm and strangled it by pumping a rubber bulb. Her crypt-fire odor seemed particularly smoky.

  “What?” he asked.

  Molly shook her massive head. “Toddle, toddle, toddle, you must believe you’re the new postman in this beautiful neighborhood of ours.”

  Terror seized his gut. “I don’t think I know what you’re talking about.”

  Molly chuckled and gave the bulb a final squeeze, causing his arm to go numb from bicep to his fingertips. “Of course not. But you do know that we have no limitations on visiting hours up here in our paradise, don’t you?”

  “Um,” he said.

  “Then let me tell you something you do not know, Mr. Postman. Miz LaValley in 21R-12 passed away last night. I do not imagine you ever took it upon yourself to pay the poor woman a social call. And that, Mr. Postman, means that you, Mr. Baccarat, Mr. Flax, and our new addition, Mr. Traynor, are now the only patients on Floor 21.”

  “Ah,” he said.

  As soon as she left his room, he showered and dressed in the previous day’s clothing, eager to get out into the corridor and check on the conditions in 21R-14, Chippie Traynor’s room, for it was what he had seen there in the hours between Tess Corrigan’s florid departure and Molly Goldberg’s first drive-by shooting that had led to his becoming the floor’s postman.

  It had been just before nine in the evening, and something had urged him to take a final turn around the floor before surrendering himself to the hateful “gown” and turning off his lights. His route took him past the command center, where the Night Visitor, scowling over a desk too small for her, made grim notations on a chart, and down the corridor toward the window looking out toward the Hudson River and the great harbor. Along the way he passed 21R-14, where muffled noises had caused him to look in. From the corridor, he could see the bottom third of the plagiarist’s bed, on which the sheets and blanket appeared to be writhing, or at least shifting about in a conspicuous manner. Messinger noticed a pair of black, lace-up women’s shoes on the floor near the bottom of the bed. An untidy heap of clothing lay beside the in-turned shoes. For a few seconds ripe with shock and envy, he had listened to the soft noises coming from the room. Then he whirled around and rushed toward his allies’ chambers.

  “Who is that dame?” Max Baccarat had asked, essentially repeating the question he had asked earlier that day. “What is she? That miserable Traynor, God damn him to hell, may he have a heart attack and die. A woman like that, who cares how old she is?”

  Tony Flax had groaned in disbelief and said, “I swear, that woman is either the ghost of Virginia Woolf or her direct descendant. All my life, I had the hots for Virginia Woolf, and now she turns up with that ugly crook, Chippie Traynor? Get out of here, Bill, I have to strategize.”

  3

  At 4:15, the three conspirators pretended not to notice the plagiarist’s furtive, animal-like entrance to the Salon. Max Baccarat’s silvery hair, cleansed, stroked, clipped, buffed, and shaped during an emergency session with a hair therapist named Mr. Keith, seemed to glow with a virile inner light as he settled into the comfortable part of the sofa and organized his decaf cup and plate of chocolates and little cakes as if preparing soldiers for battle. Tony Flax’s rubber chins shone a twice-shaved red, and his glasses sparkled. Beneath the hem of the trench coat, which appeared to have been ironed, colorful argyle socks descended from just below his lumpy knees to what seemed to be a pair of nifty two-tone shoes. Beneath the jacket of his pin-striped suit, Bill Messinger sported a brand-new, high-collared black silk T-shirt delivered by courier that morning from 65th and Madison. Thus attired, the longer-term residents of Floor 21 seemed lost as much in self-admiration as in the political discussion under way when at last they allowed themselves to acknowledge Chippie’s presence. Max’s eye skipped over Traynor and wandered toward the door.

  “Will your lady friend be joining us?” he asked. “I thought she made some really very valid points yesterday, and I’d enjoy hearing what she has to say about our situation in Iraq. My two friends here are simple-minded liberals, you can never get anything sensible out of them.”

  “You wouldn’t like what she’d have to say about Iraq,” Traynor said. “And neither would they.”

  “Know her well, do you?” Tony asked.

  “You could say that.” Traynor’s gown slipped as he bent over the table to pump coffee into his cup from the dispenser, and the three other men hastily turned their glances elsewhere.

  “Tie that up, Chippie, would you?” Bill asked. “It’s like a view of the Euganean Hills.”

  “Then look somewhere else. I’m getting some coffee, and then I have to pick out a couple
of these yum-yums.”

  “You’re alone today, then?” Tony asked.

  “Looks like it.”

  “By the way,” Bill said, “you were entirely right to point out that nothing is really as simple as it seems. There are more than two sides to every issue. I mean, wasn’t that the point of what we were saying about Iraq?”

  “To you, maybe,” Max said. “You’d accept two sides as long as they were both printed in The Nation.”

  “Anyhow,” Bill said, “please tell your friend that the next time she cares to visit this hospital, we’ll try to remember what she said about decency.”

  “What makes you think she’s going to come here again?”

  “She seemed very fond of you,” Tony said.

  “The lady mentioned your limitations.” Chippie finished assembling his assortment of treats and at last refastened his gaping robe. “I’m surprised you have any interest in seeing her again.”

  Tony’s cheeks turned a deeper red. “All of us have limitations, I’m sure. In fact, I was just remembering . . . ”

  “Oh?’ Chippie lifted his snout and peered through his little lenses. “Were you? What, specifically?”

  “Nothing,” said Tony. “I shouldn’t have said anything. Sorry.”

  “Did any of you know Mrs. LaValley, the lady in 21R-12?” Bill asked. “She died last night. Apart from us, she was the only other person on the floor.”

  “I knew Edie LaValley,” Chippie said. “In fact, my friend and I dropped in and had a nice little chat with her just before dinner-time last night. I’m glad I had a chance to say goodbye to the old girl.”

  “Edie LaValley?” Max said. “Hold on. I seem to remember . . .”

  “Wait, I do, too,” Bill said. “Only . . . ”

  “I know, she was that girl who worked for Nick Wheadle over at Viking, thirty years ago, back when Wheadle was everybody’s golden boy,” Tony said. “Stupendous girl. She got married to him and was Edith Wheadle for a while, but after the divorce she went back to her old name. We went out for a couple of months in 1983, ’84. What happened to her after that?”

  “She spent six years doing research for me,” Traynor said. “She wasn’t my only researcher, because I generally had three of them on the payroll, not to mention a couple of graduate students. Edie was very good at the job, though. Extremely conscientious.”

  “And knockout, drop-dead gorgeous,” Tony said. “At least before she fell into Nick Wheadle’s clutches.”

  “I didn’t know you used so many researchers,” Max said. “Could that be how you wound up quoting all those . . . ?”

  “Deliberately misquoting, I suppose you mean,” Chippie said. “But the answer is no.” A fat, sugar-coated square of sponge cake disappeared beneath his nose.

  “But Edie Wheadle,” Max said in a reflective voice. “By God, I think I . . . ”

  “Think nothing of it,” Traynor said. “That’s what she did.”

  “Edie must have looked very different toward the end,” said Tony. He sounded almost hopeful. “Twenty years, illness, all of that.”

  “My friend and I thought she looked much the same.” Chippie’s mild, creaturely face swung toward Tony Flax. “Weren’t you about to tell us something?”

  Tony flushed again. “No, not really.”

  “Perhaps an old memory resurfaced. That often happens on a night when someone in the vicinity dies—the death seems to awaken something.”

  “Edie’s death certainly seemed to have awakened you,” Bill said. “Didn’t you ever hear of closing your door?”

  “The nurses waltz right in anyhow, and there are no locks,” Traynor said. “Better to be frank about matters, especially on Floor 21. It looks as though Max has something on his mind.”

  “Yes,” Max said. “If Tony doesn’t feel like talking, I will. Last night, an old memory of mine resurfaced, as Chippie puts it, and I’d like to get it off my chest, if that’s the appropriate term.”

  “Good man,” Traynor said. “Have another of those delicious little yummies and tell us all about it.”

  “This happened back when I was a little boy,” Max said, wiping his lips with a crisp linen handkerchief.

  Bill Messinger and Tony Flax seemed to go very still.

  “I was raised in Pennsylvania, up in the Susquehanna Valley area. It’s strange country, a little wilder and more backward than you’d expect, a little hillbillyish, especially once you get back in the Endless Mountains. My folks had a little store that sold everything under the sun, it seemed to me, and we lived in the building next door, close to the edge of town. Our town was called Manship, not that you can find it on any map. We had a one-room schoolhouse, an Episcopalian church and a Unitarian church, a feed and grain store, a place called The Lunch Counter, a tract house, and a tavern called the Rusty Dusty, where, I’m sad to say, my father spent far too much of his time.

  “When he came home loaded, as happened just about every other night, he was in a foul mood. It was mainly guilt, d’you see, because my mother had been slaving away in the store for hours, plus making dinner, and she was in a rage, which only made him feel worse. All he really wanted to do was to beat himself up, but I was an easy target, so he beat me up instead. Nowadays, we’d call it child abuse, but back then, in a place like Manship, it was just normal parenting, at least for a drunk. I wish I could tell you fellows that everything turned out well, and that my father sobered up, and we reconciled, and I forgave him, but none of that happened. Instead, he got meaner and meaner, and we got poorer and poorer. I learned to hate the old bastard, and I still hated him when a traveling junk wagon ran over him, right there in front of the Rusty Dusty, when I was eleven years old. 1935, the height of the Great Depression. He was lying passed out in the street, and the junkman never saw him.

  “Now, I was determined to get out of that god-forsaken little town, and out of the Susquehanna Valley and the Endless Mountains, and obviously I did, because here I am today, with an excellent place in the world, if I might pat myself on the back a little bit. What I did was, I managed to keep the store going even while I went to the high school in the next town, and then I got a scholarship to U. Penn., where I waited on tables and tended bar and sent money back to my mother. Two days after I graduated, she died of a heart attack. That was her reward.

  “I bought a bus ticket to New York. Even though I was never a great reader, I liked the idea of getting into the book business. Everything that happened after that you could read about in old copies of Publisher’s Weekly. Maybe one day I’ll write a book about it all.

  “If I do, I’ll never put in what I’m about to tell you now. It slipped my mind completely—the whole thing. You’ll realize how bizarre that is after I’m done. I forgot all about it! Until about three this morning, that is, when I woke up too scared to breathe, my heart going bump bump, and the sweat pouring out of me. Every little bit of this business just came back to me, I mean everything, ever god-damned little tiny detail . . . ”

  He looked at Bill and Tony. “What? You two guys look like you should be back in the ER.”

  “Every detail?” Tony said. “It’s . . . ”

  “You woke up then, too?” Bill asked him.

  “Are you two knotheads going to let me talk, or do you intend to keep interrupting?”

  “I just wanted to ask this one thing, but I changed my mind,” Tony said. “Sorry, Max. I shouldn’t have said anything. It was a crazy idea. Sorry.”

  “Was your dad an alcoholic, too?” Bill asked Tony Flax.

  Tony squeezed up his face, said, “Aaaah,” and waggled one hand in the air. “I don’t like the word ‘alcoholic.’ ”

  “Yeah,” Bill said. “All right.”

  “I guess the answer is, you’re going to keep interrupting.”

  “No, please, Max, go on,” Bill said.

  Max frowned at both of them, then gave a dubious glance to Chippie Traynor, who stuffed another tiny cream cake into his maw and smiled around it.
>
  “Fine. I don’t know why I want to tell you about this anyhow. It’s not like I actually understand it, as you’ll see, and it’s kind of ugly and kind of scary—I guess what amazes me is that I just remembered it all, or that I managed to put it out of my mind for nearly seventy years, one or the other. But you know? It’s like, it’s real even if it never happened, or even if I dreamed the whole thing.”

  “This story wouldn’t happen to involve a house, would it?” Tony asked.

  “Most goddamned stories involve houses,” Max said. “Even a lousy book critic ought to know that.”

  “Tony knows that,” Chippie said. “See his ridiculous coat? That’s a house. Isn’t it, Tony?”

  “You know what this is,” Tony said. “It’s a trench coat, a real one. Only from World War II, not World War I. It used to belong to my father. He was a hero in the war.”

  “As I was about to say,” Max said, looking around and continuing only when the other three were paying attention, “when I woke up in the middle of the night I could remember the feel of the old blanket on my bed, the feel of pebbles and earth on my bare feet when I ran to the outhouse, I could remember the way my mother’s scrambled eggs tasted. The whole anxious thing I had going on inside me while my mother was making breakfast.

  “I was going to go off by myself in the woods. That was all right with my mother. At least it got rid of me for the day. But she didn’t know that I had decided to steal one of the guns in the case at the back of the store.

  “And you know what? She didn’t pay any attention to the guns. About half of them belonged to people who swapped them for food because guns were all they had left to barter with. My mother hated the whole idea. And my father was in a fog until he could get to the tavern. After that he couldn’t think straight enough to remember how many guns were supposed to be back in that case. Anyhow, for the past few days, I’d had my eye on an over-under shotgun that used to belong to a farmer called Hakewell, and while my mother wasn’t watching I nipped in back and took it out of the case. Then I stuffed my pockets with shells, ten of them. There was something going on way back in the woods, and while I wanted to keep my eye on it, I wanted to be able to protect myself, too, in case anything got out of hand.”