A Manhattan Ghost Story (23 page)

I stood, stuck my hands into my coat pockets—my right hand found the screwdriver, clutched it tightly—and said, “I’ll tell you what he’s gonna do, Sam. He’s gonna sit up and tear your throat out and feed it to the rats, that’s what.”

“Ain’t no rats here.”

“And then all the rest of ‘em—” my hand swept wide to take in the whole room and the six vaults in it—”will get up and munch on you awhile.”

“Jus’ gimme the freakin’ screwdriver, Abner, so I can do this and we can get outa here.”

I shook my head.

“I mean it, Abner.”

“No,” I said.

“I’ll beat the livin’ shit outa ya, Abner.”

“No, you won’t,” I said. “You’re my friend.”

“Yeah, well, this ain’t got nothin’ to do with friendship, Abner. This has got to do with stayin’ alive.”

“With stayin alive?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s that mean?”

He took a step toward me, held his hand out. “Just give me the screwdriver, Abner, ‘cuz if you don’t, I’ll take it away from you.”

I considered it a moment, then gave him the screwdriver.

 “Thanks,” he said. He nodded at the plastic bag. “Get me another Mallo Cup, wouldja?”

“Get your own Mallo Cup, Sam.”

He grinned. “Sure,” he said, and got his own Mallo Cup.

CHAPTER FOUR

I have been to places in the last couple of months that I don’t want to go back to, but I know that I will go back because I have learned this, too—that Madeline was right. It really is just a matter of seeing, not what, but how.

I knew that I’d find Phyllis sooner or later, if I looked in the right places. I asked myself,
Who makes a world, and love, and time, if there’s no way of keeping it. All
of it? It was a good question.

What a miraculous thing the mind is. It’s what computers are patterned after. And the mind can figure out most things (how to get someone to the moon, how to bring someone back from schizophrenia, how to take an old, tired heart out of someone’s chest and put a new one in), but it has trouble with other things. Like the things that Phyllis and Madeline and the boy in the house on East 80th Street introduced me to. The mind turns inward. The mind stiffens up and says that it would rather leave such things alone.

Go to bed
, it says.
Get some new shoes
, it says.
Turn on the tube and watch Love Boat
, it says.

But the mind cannot fool itself for long. At last it has to admit that it has learned some very frightening things, some very confusing things, but that it is still ignorant, too, and needs to learn a lot more.

Early the morning after Stacy left, the morning of the tenth, I watched daylight come. It is a nice view from Art’s living room window—not the view of the skyline, which is barely visible through the bathroom window, but a view of the flat-gray and flat-green painted townhouses across the street, a view from halfway up to the top of the townhouses, and then twenty degrees of sky above that. The sun does not rise behind these townhouses; they are to the north, and when the sun comes up on a still and cloudless morning, as this was, it casts beautifully delineated, very dark shadows across the house fronts, shadows from bits of the houses themselves—roof overhangs, window frames. There is even a pair of pollution-streaked gargoyles on a house just down the street, the far right house visible from Art’s couch, that cast marvelously grotesque, elongated shadows.

I found myself smiling at them as daylight came because I knew that I could no longer be spooked very much by things that were intended to spook. Like gargoyles. I’d gone beyond that. I’d graduated, paid my dues; I had taken a quantum leap of the spirit.

I was frightened, yes. But for the right reasons. I was frightened because I was in search of the woman I loved in a world that, only two weeks earlier, I hadn’t even realized existed.

But, in those two weeks, I had gone walking in it, sightseeing in it, I had been a part of it. And I knew generally, what it was all about.

That wasn’t true, of course. I merely told myself it was true because it was the only way I knew of holding on and of coping.

The great fiction (it’s a small world): “Oh,” one American says to another, both vacationing somewhere in Europe, “you’re from Cincinnati. Maybe you know my cousin George.”

I had peered through the little security peephole and I had seen faces that smiled and frowned and laughed and cried. And I had told myself that they had no secrets from me.

How could they?

The dead can’t have secrets from the living.

As Serena Hitchcock had very succinctly put it, “Dead, Abner, is dead!”

And, of course, I knew very well what dead was.

Everyone knew what dead was.

And that was the big lie that was going through my head there on Art’s black leather couch.

With daylight coming.

Dead, Abner, is dead!

With daylight slanting gaily off the townhouses across the street, off the windows, off the ledges, off the gargoyles.

Because the dead
sing
, and
laugh
, and sit up, and look around, and cry, and want.

And they are confused. They are lonely. They hurt.

And, at last, they come apart. And go off to someplace else.

As Phyllis did. Just as Phyllis did.

At Grand Central Station, the Evening of the 9th

It is a miracle, I think—a testimony to someone’s unsung genius with audio technology—that announcements of departures and arrivals are heard by anyone at all at Grand Central. Outside New York, in bus depots and train stations that are barely large enough to sleep in, such announcements sound like recordings of hay bailers or cement mixers. But at Grand Central, it is usually clear that names of towns and cities and track numbers and times are being said.

This is, of course, because departures and arrivals on a very grand scale are what Grand Central is all about. When several thousand people have someplace to go, they must be told how to get to where they’re going only once or twice. This way, they can make their exits and their entrances with a modicum of style.

Jocelyn Horn always had style. She was the reason I went to Grand Central that night—to tell her that Stacy had already left for Bangor, so her—Jocelyn’s—trip had been unnecessary; sorry, good-bye.

I had tried to phone her in Bangor earlier in the day, but was told, by her husband Paul, that she was already on the train and “probably halfway to New York by now, Abner.”

“Oh,” I said.

“I would have come with her,” he said, “but there were prior commitments. I’m sure Stacy’s all right, don’t you think?”

“Sure,” I said. “She’s all right.” Then I said good-bye and hung up. I never liked Stacy’s father very much. I always liked Jocelyn—regardless of her clearly ambivalent feelings toward me.

I got a big, freshly baked pretzel at a stand called
Hot Sam’s
near the 42nd Street exit. I began wandering about and munching on it because I was several minutes early to meet Jocelyn, who was due to arrive at 6:15.

I felt someone tugging softly at my jacket. “Hey,” I heard. It was a man’s voice. I turned my head and saw a young man, twenty or twenty-one, no older, wearing jeans and a brown leather jacket. He was smiling at me and nodding at the pretzel. “Hey,” he said again, “where’d you get that?”

I pointed to my left. “Over there,” I told him. “Near the 42nd Street exit.”

“Thanks,” he said, turned and walked quickly away, in the direction of
Hot Sam’s
.

I checked the big clock on the south wall of Grand Central, between a pair of timetables for the local trains. It read 6:05. I heard a woman shouting: “He grabbed at my purse; he grabbed at my purse!”

She was close by. I looked to my right, saw her near the Amtrak ticket booths, near the entrance to the waiting rooms, and Park Avenue. She was tall, in her thirties, gaunt, and was wearing a loose-fitting red dress. She was standing still and pointing stiffly at a stocky, well-dressed man who was walking quickly away from her with a look of great humiliation about him.

“He grabbed for my purse!” the woman screamed.

The man continued to walk away.

A cop—also stocky, dark-haired, in his early forties—came down the ramp from the waiting rooms. He saw the woman, went over to her—with no particular air of urgency about him—said, “What’s the problem, miss?”

She said again, still pointing at the well-dressed man, who was close to me now and shaking his head slowly, hugely embarrassed, “He grabbed for my purse; he grabbed for my purse.”

The cop called to the man, “Hold on there, buddy.”

The man stopped walking. The cop went over to him, took him firmly by the arm—which was clearly even more embarrassing to the man than the woman’s accusations—and said, “D’joo grab for the lady’s purse?”

I felt someone tugging at my sleeve. I turned. It was the guy in the brown leather jacket. He said, “Ain’t no pretzels over there. Why’djoo lie?”

I nodded again at the 42nd Street exit. “It’s called Hot Sam’s,” I said.

“Nope,” the boy said.

 “I’m not lying to you,” I said.

He nodded at what was left of my pretzel. “Can I have the rest of that?”

From behind me, I heard: “He grabbed for her purse,” and “This guy grabbed for that lady’s purse.”

I thrust the pretzel at the young man in the brown leather jacket. He took it happily, started chewing on it, walked away.

I checked the clock again. It read 6:08.

At the Amtrak ticket counters, several long lines had formed, apparently, I guessed, to try and get last-minute tickets on the 6:45 which stopped at points in upstate New York and terminated in Chicago.

The woman in the loosely fitting red dress was at the middle of the line nearest to me. She took one step out from it every now and then to check its progress, then stepped back and stood quietly, hands clutching her purse. The line was moving very slowly.

I watched as a younger woman, carrying a backpack and looking at a timetable went over to her, stood next to her a moment, hoping, apparently, to be noticed. A man just in front of the woman in the red dress turned his head slightly, noticed the younger woman, gave her a quick and critical once-over, looked back. When, after a full minute, the woman in red didn’t acknowledge the younger woman, she cleared her throat and said, “Excuse me, please?”

The woman in red turned her head, looked blankly at the younger woman. “Yes?” she said.

The younger woman smiled. “I didn’t mean to disturb you,”—she held her timetable up—”I was just wondering if you could tell me …”

“Get lost!” said the woman in red.

The younger woman looked stunned.

The man in front of her, who’d turned his head to give her a quick and critical once-over, looked at her again. “Yeah,” he growled, “get lost!”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

The cop came over, put his hand on the younger woman’s shoulder. “You givin’ these people here a hard time, honey?”

The woman in the red dress said, “Yeah, she is.”

“No, I’m not,” said the younger woman.

The man in front of the woman in the red dress turned his head again and said to the cop, “She’s asking questions, officer.”

“Yeah?” said the cop. “What kind of questions?”

The younger woman looked very confused now, and was clearly at a loss for words.

“Why don’tcha just leave ‘em alone, okay?” the cop said.

And that’s when I went to meet Jocelyn.

Her first words to me were, “You look scared, Abner.”

“Too much coffee,” I said, and extended my hand to take one of her two, big blue suitcases. She let me take it and I nodded toward the 42nd Street exit. “We can go out this way, Aunt Jocelyn.”

“I’ve been here before, Abner.”

“Yes, of course you have.” We started for the 42nd Street exit, which was all the way across Grand Central. Jocelyn was dressed well, in a blue pants suit and black shoes. She’s a nice-looking woman (she’ll be described as handsome one day, when her basic feminine attractiveness has begun to fade), and men—certain kinds of men, businessmen in their forties and fifties—turned around occasionally to look at her, which she appeared to enjoy. She said, as we walked, “Where’s Stacy, Abner?”

“Stacy’s back in Bangor by now,” I answered.

She stopped walking. “You mean she’s not in New York anymore?”

I nodded. “She left this morning.”

A quivering little grin broke out on her lips. She held her free hand out to me and indicated the suitcase I was carrying. “Then I don’t know what the hell I’m doing here, do you, Abner? Give me that please.”

I gave her the suitcase. “Don’t you want to get something to eat anyway, Aunt Jocelyn?”

“No. I’ll eat here. Good-bye, Abner.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that. Good-bye.” And she turned and walked away from me.

CHAPTER FIVE

Phyllis was buried in a gritty, little cemetery in Brooklyn, between McDonald Avenue and Van Sicien Street. On one side of the cemetery, there was a small tailor’s shop which smelled of fresh ironing, and on the other side, a wholesale toy distributor. Dozens of cheap, pastel-colored stuffed animals, most of them faded by the sun, had been set up precariously in the toy distributor’s window, and they gave the whole area, including the cemetery, a tacky and impermanent look.

It was a Friday afternoon, two days after I had last seen Phyllis, that I went to where she was buried. I think there were fifty headstones, no more. Most of them were quite old, several dating from the late 1700s, and most of them were in bad repair.

Phyllis was pretty easy to find. She was toward the back of the cemetery, near a high, brick wall topped with spikes of black wrought iron.

She hadn’t been given a headstone. She’d been given a small, rectangular piece of greenish metal—like a miniature of the ones used for roadside plaques to commemorate battles or landmarks—which had been set flat into the ground not too long ago, because the earth around it looked as if it had been very recently turned.