Ghosts of the Missing

by Kathleen Donohoe

  If only the future were like a tricky knot that unwound itself upon approach. Surely to see what was coming was a gift, even if it was hints, small reassurances or quick warnings.

  But what was it to see the past? To touch memories not your own? Emily, on the day she met James, walking her dog in Central Park. James bending to pet the mutt, exchanging pleased smiles. My father as a boy of nine, in bed at night biting his pillow to keep from crying out with the pain as blood pooled in his joints. My mother turning away the day he explained that what he had—hemophilia—could be managed but never cured. In every case, you already know how the story ends.

  6

  Elspeth & Bevin

  On October 27, 1911, the girls of Culleton gathered at dusk wearing wild-animal masks and homemade wings. They wove through the village’s narrow streets. They sang:

  There was a lady from the mountain

  Who she is I do not know

  All she wants is gold and silver

  All she needs is a nice young man.

  The girls, who were neither children nor grown, had a different custom that never appeared in the stories of Quicken Day that were printed yearly in Culleton’s newspaper and those of surrounding towns, a perennial local-interest story. Even the women who once had participated themselves didn’t give it much thought, until the year of the incident that would give it a name and notoriety.

  The autumn evening had a timbre as sharp as glass, an instrument itself that carried the notes of the song for miles. The girls stopped at the rectory, which stood on the corner where Wick and Vine Streets crossed. The younger of the two priests who lived there appeared in the window of the upper parlor to listen, a cumbersome silhouette drawn against the closed curtain. The older priest remained in his bedroom on the far side of the house. Once, he’d had ambition, great hope for his career in the church, but at nearly sixty years old, he would never rise higher than monsignor. Gifted priests were not wasted on small parishes two hours from New York City. He had committed some sin, that much was clear, and the parish guessed it had to do with arrogance, not passion.

  The older priest’s disinterest protected the girls. Had he known the actual purpose of the march, he would have forbidden it and the girls’ mothers would have made them obey, though they would have been sorry to.

  As for the younger priest, there were many things he pretended not to see, and this had earned him the trust of his parishioners. Pausing to sing at the rectory, he knew, was deceit disguised as respect.

  Most of the girls did indeed end the evening in front of the rectory, as they’d been instructed by their parents to be home before full dark. But nine girls between the ages of thirteen and fifteen followed the road out of town, walking more than a mile before they saw the windows of Moye House. They passed by the main gate and then followed the Chapel Road into the woods. The leaves crackled beneath their feet. The moon was halved in a field of stars. They passed the hibernating Rosary Chapel, not stopping until they reached the mountain ash. In October, its ripe berries gleamed red.

  The oldest girl laid an ivy wreath beneath the tree in memory of Helen Dunleavy, the Irishwoman who had seen the dead and healed the living. Each girl walked around the tree once and then stopped, closed her eyes and asked a question. After each of the girls had taken a turn, they took bells from their pockets. The bells, small, sweet-toned, were topped by a circle exactly the right size to pull a ribbon through, and each of the girls had done so. They tied the bells to the branches of the tree.

  In nine days, the questions they asked would be answered in a dream. They all knew women—mothers and aunts and grandmothers—who swore they’d seen the house that they would one day live in, the names of their future husbands, the faces of their children.

  On November 5, they would return and collect the bells, putting them safely away.

  Ritual done, the girls turned and left, chatting and laughing, the pretense of solemnity over. Many carried their masks tucked beneath their arms.

  Elspeth lingered to let them pull ahead so that she could enjoy a quiet walk out of the woods. She had never bothered with the bells before, and she had gone only out of curiosity. Bevin walked in the opposite direction, over to the tree. She reached up and shook a low-hanging branch, and Elspeth turned.

  The others had ignored both of them all evening, as they did in school, except perhaps to briefly wonder why they had even come. Though Bevin had not considered it, Elspeth realized that here in the woods, on this night at least, they should have been revered. They were both Helen’s great-granddaughters.

  Though distant cousins, Elspeth and Bevin had barely ever spoken. Elspeth was fourteen, younger by a year than her classmates because she had been pushed ahead a grade at her mother’s insistence. The nuns who taught at the school agreed only because it meant they would be rid of Elspeth sooner. She wasn’t strident in class, but consistently correct.

  Bevin, though, was frequently reprimanded for gazing out the window.

  “I would say she was lost in her own thoughts,” one of the nuns once said of Bevin, “but I doubt she has any.”

  Bevin, how are the clouds today? her grandfather Edward sometimes teased.

  Bevin had never gone into the woods on this night before either, warned away by her mother, who said it was courting trouble. She had not asked permission to go on this night but had simply followed the others, deciding it would be worth the punishment. Her question: if I have sons, will they die like my brother?

  Bevin plucked a berry off the tree. She turned to Elspeth, holding the berry between her thumb and forefinger.

  “My grandmother used to say there’s nothing as red as a quicken berry.”

  Blood, Elspeth thought, but she only shrugged.

  “I wouldn’t eat that if I were you,” Elspeth said.

  “Granny used to make a tea out of them,” Bevin said. “She was Lucy.”

  She gave the name, aware, of course, that Elspeth’s grandmother was Clara, Lucy’s twin sister.

  But Elspeth ignored the reminder of who they were to each other.

  “They’re not poisonous if they’re cooked. But raw, I think they are.”

  Bevin’s hand fluttered and the berry reappeared in her palm. “I wasn’t going to eat it anyway.” She put the berry in her coat pocket. “Witches are afraid of quicken trees.”

  Elspeth was about to say there was no such thing as witches in 1911, but she suspected Bevin wanted to argue in favor of this, so she started walking instead. Bevin followed.

  The others had to be well out of the woods already. Bevin began to sing softly. Her voice had a throatiness to it that was absent when she spoke. She was often asked to sing at funerals and weddings.

  A bell began to ring, a bell with a far more resonant tone than the little bells left on the tree. Both girls stopped walking.

  “What is that?” Elspeth asked.

  “The chapel?” Bevin said uncertainly.

  Elspeth shook her head. The chapel bell rang only on Christmas morning. The doors were kept locked, and though it was possible someone had broken in and climbed up to the bell gable, this ringing was much too faint.

  Then they heard a voice calling, woman or girl, they couldn’t tell. Neither could they make out what she was saying.

  “That’s Mabel Gerity,” Elspeth said.

  Mabel was a patient tormentor. Hanging back after the others had gone so she could creep up behind them and scare them was the sort of thing she would do.

  Then the wind changed direction, and it turned from brisk to biting cold. Snow began to fall. Elspeth saw the flakes alight on Bevin’s dark hair, and she felt them on her own forehead and cheeks. Mabel could not have made the season change.

  “Someone’s coming,” Bevin said.

  “Yes,” Elspeth whispered.

  Bevin turned to the left and Elspeth to the right. Their shoulders touched.

  They heard, then, dozens of footsteps. Both Elspeth and Bevin later said that they waited fo
r a line of people to appear, moving steadily through the woods. But the two girls saw nothing but the trees, unmoving. That the sound was disconnected from its source, Bevin would say, was more frightening than if a corps of ghosts had appeared. The bell never stopped ringing.

  The footsteps vanished as abruptly as they had begun. The snowflakes turned back to falling leaves. Bevin moved first. She turned left, then right, then all the way around until she was facing Elspeth.

  “Who were they?” Bevin whispered.

  She expected Elspeth to snap at her, but Elspeth simply said, “I don’t know.”

  And with this, Bevin knew it had been real.

  Elspeth, for her part, would admit that her instinctive response to Bevin’s question was indeed aggravation. How was she supposed to know? But she was exhausted, as if they’d both been running for miles.

  Though the temperature was now back to autumn, Elspeth was shivering.

  They put their masks back on. Bevin and Elspeth, fox and hare, about to be forever linked in Culleton’s history.

  Together they walked out of the woods, their shoulders touching. They passed Moye House, the gold from its windows the only light in either direction.

  Only when they reached town did they remove the masks. There, in front of the rectory, they stared at each other briefly before turning away and heading toward their homes.

  Alone, Bevin might not have been believed. It was Elspeth’s reluctant corroboration that gave the tale its weight. Elspeth would have kept it to herself, a secret to revisit, to ponder, but Bevin took to the attention.

  The story spread, and many believed it, because the two who told it were descended from a woman who had herself seen ghosts. Others declared what the girls had inherited was a penchant for lying. A short article about the incident appeared in the newspaper, its tone amused and gently mocking.

  Other girls began to claim that, even if they hadn’t seen or heard anything themselves, they’d sensed something strange in the woods. They had been scared too, and they’d hurried home, nearly running by the end.

  They didn’t, Elspeth said scornfully.

  You don’t know that, Bevin answered.

  On November 5, Elspeth and Bevin went together to collect the bells from the quicken tree. For almost an hour, they waited for the others at the end of Chapel Road.

  Elspeth suddenly began to walk, and Bevin followed. They reached the tree and silently began to untie the bells from the branches.

  “There’s no way of knowing who these belong to, is there?” Elspeth asked.

  Bevin shook her head. They both put the bells they took down in their pockets.

  Elspeth soon refused to speak of that night at all, but Bevin brought the ghost seekers into the woods to show them the place where the two of them had been standing.

  The older priest, angry at the attention brought to the parish, forbade the procession the next year. Several girls went anyway, slipping out of their houses while their parents slept and creeping into the woods with Bevin leading the way. There were no bells, no singing and no Elspeth with her frown and credibility. The woods remained silent.

  7

  Adair

  2010

  I dreamed in stories.

  When I was in the hospital fighting summer pneumonia, the fever pulled me into the one about our family.

  Culleton had known for a century that my family was cursed. Boys die. Girls live. At least this was how they put it before the disease was called by its proper name: hemophilia. From the Greek: haima = blood + philia = to love. Though “to love,” in this context, is interpreted as “tendency to.” The blood doesn’t clot properly. Tendency to bleed. Women are carriers. Their sons get the disease but their daughters don’t.

  Helen Dunleavy brought the broken gene over from Ireland.

  Of Helen’s daughters, Clara was either not a carrier or very lucky, because the disease did not appear in her family, but Lucy was, and it devastated her family with the loss of her two sons.

  The diagnosis had been missed then, and whether it should not have been is an open question. One boy died in a fall that had not seemed serious. The child might have looked fine while hemorrhaging internally. Even if the symptoms had somehow come together for the local doctor, nothing could have been done to save him. The other boy died as an infant, hardly unusual for the time. Yet infants with hemophilia can die of birth trauma that is not typically fatal.

  Lucy’s daughter also lost a son, leaving her with one daughter, Bevin, who would have one girl herself, and then no more children. And so a generation passed without the disease appearing. Lucy–Anna–Bevin–Cecilia, carriers all.

  When my grandparents Darragh and Cecilia married, they were aware of the old superstition but did not comprehend its danger, until their two-year-old son was diagnosed with hemophilia. Five years later, they decided to have another child. They needed a girl. A daughter’s blood would clot.

  Both their sons, Cathal and Michan, grew up learning how to manage their illness. Their parents’ devastation was tempered by the knowledge that their sons would not face the dire prognoses of earlier eras. Factor VIII was a blood product manufactured as a powdered concentrate that caused blood to clot. Instead of whole-blood transfusions to treat bad bleeds and lives tied to the emergency room, hemophiliacs could self-treat at home.

  Cecilia had prayed and prayed and donated what money she could to Saint Thomas Garnet, patron saint of blood disorders, and he had answered her. Hemophilia was not cured, but it was far less likely to be fatal. Hepatitis C, which both boys had contracted from their treatments, as had most hemophiliacs, she and Darragh chose not to think about. The threat was not immediate, and without blood transfusions, surely one of her sons’ bleeds would have killed them. Future liver damage was the tradeoff, the thing to worry about if and when the time came.

  The summer after Cathal graduated from college, Jorie Pearse asked him if he would teach a drawing class at Moye House. It could be held outside on the grounds in good weather, and on rainy days in the old carriage house, which she’d been meaning to clean out anyway.

  When Cathal told her he’d never taught before, Jorie told him that making a living as an artist was going to be difficult unless he found a rich old woman to support him, and she was not available, considering that she had her hands full with Moye House. He would probably have to turn to teaching at some point. Might as well start with students who would not be demanding, as they’d be mostly widows, looking for an afternoon of company.

  The class, advertised in Culleton, sold out so quickly that Cathal agreed to teach another. Several students in both classes were his own age, or close. When Cathal teased Jorie about getting it wrong, she told him crisply that it would have been a different story—the one she told of a post-fifty student body—if she hadn’t published his picture with the course description.

  One of the women in the class was nineteen. Her name was Lissa—just Lissa, not short for anything—and she was a photographer. She wanted to learn to draw, she told him, to sharpen her eye.

  They married in 1982, when he was twenty-three and she was twenty-one. Far too young, both sets of parents said, but neither of them cared. Their daughter was born the following year.

  If “gay cancer,” or GRID (gay-related immune deficiency), registered at all for Cathal, the newlywed, or Michan, the college student, it was no more than a puzzling story on the news. Soon it had a new acronym. Soon it was a disease that not only gay men got, but also drug users who shared needles. The human immunodeficiency virus destroyed the immune system. Picture a castle where the moat has evaporated, the knights have all gone and there is no one left to slay the dragon.

  The nation’s blood supply was full of HIV. Of course it was.

  I’ve tried to imagine not knowing this. I have, but it’s like the surprise ending of a movie that was in front of your eyes the whole time. If you watch the movie again, every clue is a shout. Of course hemophiliacs were going to get AIDS, e
xposed as they were to the blood of thousands through their medication.

  Three doctors told my mother, Lissa, that she was getting sick because of stress. She was run-down. She needed to relax. Being a mother and attending graduate school were too much for her. No one thought of AIDS because women didn’t get AIDS. Then a fourth doctor asked if she’d ever had a blood transfusion. No, she said; blood transfusions were her husband’s thing. She understood from the expression on the doctor’s face that the rumors they’d begun to hear from the hemophiliac community were not panic over isolated cases.

  I picture Darragh and Cecilia, my grandparents, lying beside each other in the dark at night, trying to both be alive and be alive knowing that their entire family was going to die.

  Not long after my father died, my mother retreated to her childhood home on Long Island with me. Cecilia had died in her sleep by then. Possibly broken-heart syndrome, my grandfather had said; it was a real phenomenon, thought to be caused by stress and grief. I’ve wondered if he believed it, or if he was trying to make one death make sense.

  The night of my father’s funeral, Michan got in his car and drove to the town of Culleton. On their childhood visits to Moye House, he and Cathal loved that Jorie Pearse let them have the run of the place, never treating them as invalids, never even flinching when they slid down the banister of the front staircase or played tag in the garden. She was not happy to catch them climbing over the railing of the loft that overlooked the library and making their tremulous way along its outside. If they fell—never mind a bad bleed, internal or external—death would come from a broken neck or cracked skull.

  Michan arrived out of the rain after midnight in a drenched black suit.

  One of the residents let him in and then called Jorie on the phone to come down. Even in this situation, I guessed, the thought of running up the stairs, it was unthinkable to breach the third floor where Jorie lived.

  Jorie asked the confused writers to please leave the parlor, where they’d been gathered around the fireplace. One of them had gotten a fire going. The glasses they’d been drinking from sat abandoned on the side table, and the firelight lit the bourbon, turning them into amber candles.