Lost (39 page)

“Then what did the ghosts say to the living?”

“They asked help of the living, so that the souls of the ghosts could be at better rest. But I think we can take the abundance of tales of this variety as being an inclination of the living to say to the dead:
Leave us alone
. We want to go on. Our small community is blemished by your stupid botched death. Because what, really, is the job of the dead? It's
not
to hang around, but to disappear—to clear the air for the living. As Jean-Claude Schmitt said—oh, apologies for the references, I'm an unrepentant lecturer—the goal of Chris-tian memorial masses and the celebration of All Saints' Day, et cetera, was to separate the dead from the living, to keep the dead in their place. Once the living had discharged their duties to their dead relatives and companions, they could go back to living a full life.”

“And that's it, then: the goal of a ghost—”

“To find someone who has the authority to dismiss it into full death. Leaving the dismissee the permission to live a full life without guilt or undue grief.”

“The quick and the dead.” She mused. “It is, I suppose, part of what Dickens was saying. But in
A Christmas Carol,
Scrooge could have no effect on the sufferings of his poor partner, Marley. He could only save himself.”

“Theme and variation. Nonetheless, the effect of Scrooge's being haunted was that he dismissed his own fears and became a hugely fun guy again, a regular party animal.”

Scrooge in the painting, his haunted, Bergmanesque inward torment? Hardly a party animal. “He's my forebear, more or less. If not actual, then literary, in a way.”

“You said something of the sort once before. I'm aquiver with professional curiosity. Pass your glass.”

The lamb smelled glorious, all garlic and rosemary. The light of the candle flickered on the silver and the bleached linen. The murmur of Japanese tourists at the next table, their high exotic voices,
made Winnie begin to be glad for the champagne. “So you don't think the house is haunted.”

“Your house? The flat where you found the cloth? No, of course not,” he said. “I'm a crusty old pedant. And if I saw your trademark slashed cross appear in the condensation of this window here, before my very eyes, I'd begin to murmur about statistical models regarding coincidences.”

“And what if I said I saw such a cross and you didn't?”

“I'd believe with all my might that you said you saw it.”

“Would you believe that I did see it?”

“I don't know. Experience so far in my life suggests not. But I'm not a novelist, and maybe it's given to novelists to see things that associate professors can't.”

“You are being tolerant of a high-strung person in some degree of middle-class distress,” she said. “And after I gave you a false identity too. You're not after me in any way, are you?”

“You mean sexually? I'm not young enough and brash enough to answer you directly in any case. But a man is still allowed to care about a woman, is that not so? And vice versa? Without either of us knowing if we are in a prelude to friendship or romance, or if we're just having an interlude of camaraderie due to the accident of having met each other at a fortune-teller's? That's the definition of being not haunted, by the way: being able to live in the moment without having either to lust for the future or to dread it.”

“It's only fair to say,” she ventured, “that I'm not available, for many reasons, to engage in romance.”

“Maybe eventually that'll break my heart. So far, I think: Oh, well, what do you know? For that matter, what do I know? I'm enjoying the lamb. What exactly is a noisette, do you know?”

“But you have said nothing about your status. I mean married or gay or what?”

“Every unmarried man of a certain age is presumed to be gay these days. Lots of married men too for that matter. I wouldn't so much mind the presumption of it if a gay man would ask me out on a date, but since I don't register on their meters as of particular merit I just blunder my way through parties, hunting for the nearest kid or grandparent or household pet to befriend.” He speared three julienned carrots on his fork and held them up and waggled them at her. “I'm a widower, so if anyone has a reason to believe in ghosts, it's me. And I don't.”

“Oh. Oh, dear. I am very sorry.”

“It was long ago,” he said, “and not as long as all that, either.”

“I was married too.” She was unsure of her reasons for saying this.

“I see,” he said, but did not press for more information. Of course, she had already invented for his behalf a husband in Scottsdale. No wonder he didn't seem surprised.

She looked at him, as close as she could, trying not to list the observations for a writer's apprehension of this moment:

His head turned down as if reading auguries in the roasted fennel and garlic mashed potatoes.

His hair neither sandy with youth nor silver with age, just hair, just fair hair.

The blush in his rough-scraped cheeks probably due not so much to the Veuve Clicquot as to the discomfort of talking about himself.

Probably she could do no more than have dinner with this man, tonight, but she could do that.

“Irv,” she said, and she put her hand lightly on his.

The jolt of the touch kicked them both back, taking them unawares, and he smiled and blinked and said, “There there, no need to fuss over me. I'm a big boy. So tell me a little more of your
family ghost story. The grandpappy Rudge piece. What's the oldest proof you have that your great-great-et cetera grandfather was the model for Ebenezer Scrooge? Don't tell me”—he held up his fork—“it isn't a journal or a letter he wrote, but the written record of someone else.”

“Well, I hate for you to be right so soon. But you are. As far as we can trace the source of the family gossip about it, the oldest mention is made in a letter from Ozias Rudge's son Edward to Edward's niece Dorothea.”

“What does Edward say? Do you remember?”

“Oh, I don't recall verbatim, but I've seen the pages in question many times. John probably has them in photocopy, or did. The originals are in Boston. Anyway, through several family recollections, we deduce that late in life, Ozias came to know the immortal work of Christmas joy by Dickens. Then he, old Ozias Rudge, recalled the occasion of his being haunted by a specter. O. R., as we affectionately call him, had terrified the neighborhood children of Hampstead with his ghost story, and O. R. assumed that the boy Dickens must have been one of the Hampstead urchins to stand slack-jawed at the narration. Dickens, at age twelve, did live in Hampstead briefly, at just the time of the supposed hauntings.”

“You know a lot about what happened, what, a hundred fifty years ago?”

“I researched it all once when I thought I could make a book of it. Don't interrupt. Dickens had an obsession with his childhood. He loved recalling its griefs and reliving its brief but intense plea-sures. You see that in how Ebenezer Scrooge is haunted at first. The Ghost of Christmas Past takes Scrooge to see himself as a boy. Do you remember? The lonely young Ebenezer was reading by a fire in a huge deserted house. To the window beyond the chair there came Ali Baba and, oh, Robinson Crusoe, I think, and creatures from
fairy tales. The figures of the boy's reading and imaginative life were still there embedded in the mind of crabby old Scrooge. You could hazard the guess that the same is true of all of us—especially Dickens. In his later life the imaginary figures of childhood still obtained, emotionally I mean. Including the memory, maybe, of an old man made miserable from sleepless nights of being haunted.”

“Well, then the most scary ghosts of
A Christmas Carol
are really the figures of Scrooge himself. The past child Scrooge, the embittered current one, the future dead Scrooge. If you press me for a psychological reading about it, I'd say there's your ticket. Folks are more haunted by themselves than anything else.”

“Very slick. And who can argue with that, except, perhaps, a real ghost.” She was enjoying this. “But of course there's no way of saying anything assured about the roots of
A Christmas Carol
.”

“How much of O. R.'s recollection had to do with Christmas past, present, or to come?”

“None at all, except that the hauntings, which happened on successive nights, occurred during the winter solstice. Rudge didn't mention any Christmas overtones to it, but then, as we know, back then Christmas wasn't celebrated with the hoopla and hysteria that it has come to be—thanks in part to Dickens himself.”

“So what were the hauntings about, then?”

All this scrutiny of a hoary old family legend, and the night darkening above London. Above London's cystic blur of electric lights, its frizz of cosmopolitan energy leaching ever deeper into the stratosphere, but the night darkened nonetheless, a gathering heaviness, year by year. “Why are you so intent to know?”

“Is my interest unseemly? Sorry. This is a busman's holiday for me. I derive some of my notions by examining the distance between the supernatural event and the telling of it. In the Middle Ages, we
see few firsthand accounts about the experience of being haunted. Far more often, a prelate transcribes a story of haunting as told to him. This lends a kind of journalistic objectivity to the narrative, broadens its credibility—after all, if it weren't true, the good cleric wouldn't have taken his holy time to record it for posterity. I find it charming, really, that you have no scrap of evidence of this story from Ozias Rudge's own hand. It quite follows the norm. And supports my humble thesis.”

“Glad to oblige. I guess. Anyway, Ozias Rudge was apparently vague about it. One of the other relatives, later a convert to the Clapham Sect, remembered it like this: Ozias Rudge—as verbatim as I can manage—Ozias Rudge was visited by a wraith whose language he could not understand, and for fear of his sanity he closed his ears against all entreaty and determined to live a blameless life for others, in the hope of certain pardon for his sins when it was his turn to cross. You see, there's nothing said about who the wraith was or what it wanted. If anything.”

“The dead ask a lot of favors.”

“The exceptional dead. As you point out.”

“As I point out. But most of the dead are mute. And most of the living know how to grieve without inventing phantasms or going psychotic.”

“I have no evidence that O. R. went psychotic. I only know this: after the supposed visitations by a ghost, he never went abroad again. He found someone else to marry, someone younger and more fertile than the old widow, and at the age of fifty he began to beget Edward and Harriet and Marianne and Jane.”

“I'd love to see Edward's letter sometime. Though of course in the written word the reality of the situation has no choice but to calcify and become less thrilling.”

“How well I know that.”

“Have you opened the letter from your cousin John? To see what excuse he gave for standing you up?”

She had been led there without seeing it coming. She flinched. “That's none of your business at all.”

“Oh, please, how you rush to take offense!” He threw up his hands good-naturedly. “I only point it out so that . . .”

“So that what?”

“Oh, well,” he said, “never mind, then. We're having a nice night.”

She decided to let it go. He was right. It was a nice night.

Champagne was replaced by wine, and wine by snifters of cognac, and by the time they yielded their table, there were no other diners hulking about the cold doorway. As Winnie and Irv steered their way lopsidedly up Hampstead High Street, Winnie wondered where, in ten minutes, she wanted to find herself. Irv was a solid mailbox of a man, a throwback. He wore a tie, for Christ's sake, and some sort of aftershave you could buy by the quart at CVS. He looked as if he'd be at home in a fifties homburg chatting with Edward R. Murrow. And John—though John not in the running of course—but John so opposite, so lightly penned in and at the same time so fierce, so defined. It was an exercise she didn't want to be engaging in. She gave up when, bumping into Irv and giggling, they met up with a crowd of people emerging from the doors of the Tube station and sallying across the street. One of them was Rasia McIntyre, who had been doing some partying of her own.

“Where are the kids?” said Winnie, forsaking hellos.

“Oh, you,” said Rasia, “out on the town, I see?” She smiled with a colluding earnestness at Irv.

“Where are the kids?” said Winnie.

“Don't panic; why the panic?” Irv put his hand on Winnie's
shoulder, neither an embrace nor a squeeze, but a gesture of caution. She shrugged him off.

Rasia was too giddy herself to take offense “They're at my mother's in Balham. I was at a girls' night out—a friend getting married. We knew there'd be wine, so I dropped the kiddos in front of the telly.”

Winnie sagged a bit. She could sense in Irv's bearing a certain misgiving rising through him. And well he might have misgivings. She was grateful, oddly, for bumping into Rasia. It put things back where they belonged. Winnie about to entertain notions of romance? It wasn't to be.

Rasia put both her hands out. “Hello, I'm Rasia McIntyre,” she said. “I remember you from crashing through the locked door. You rang me for Winnie's number.” Winnie thought: Go ahead, Rasia, take him if you want him; I was a fool, for an evening, to imagine I was deserving of a surprise. And Rasia was all charm, letting her brown shawl slip off her head to show her beautiful crimped black hair. Her eyes were made sensual by kohl or a Revlon approximation. A blue and gold sari enveloping her ample bosom slipped back along her
cioccolata
arms to reveal a stenciled pattern of dots, an organized rash. Irv Hausserman was a study in American composure, that little-known quality so often eclipsed by the spectacle of bumpkiny American forwardness. He even said “How do you do?” as if he were at a gentlemen's club.