Madeleine's Ghost (6 page)

Of course, the Manhattan Bridge has this effect: city glittering below, a small rush of optimism like a mirage at the summit.

M
ONDAY NIGHT
again, just after eleven, and the sky is black with storms and the smokestacks of the power plant across the street, and I am sitting in my living room in the orange Naugahyde easy chair trying to eat a bowl of Froot Loops for dinner, but I am paralyzed by fear. The lights in the apartment have dimmed in a sort of supernatural brownout, and the ghost is at work shifting the furniture.

I was watching the eleven o'clock news when the television went to static and the furniture started creaking like the hull of an old ship. Now the hair on my arms stands on end, fear dances with the electricity on my skin, my ears pop. It is like being in the middle of a decompression chamber in which the pressure is fluctuating rapidly. To my left the desk chair falls over as if in a strong wind. Then the refrigerator door opens by
itself with a small sucking sound. Ghoulish white light, illuminating ketchup, beer bottles, and day-old bagels, shines from within.

The poltergeist has moved furniture before, but I am not prepared for what happens next: The heavy bookcase across the room begins to bow and creak, books spilling across the floor. Suddenly it takes a short hop, then another, and all I can think of is animated dancing teacups in Walt Disney movies. Through a sickening sort of parody of human movement, the bookcase hops and splinters a good five feet in my direction, hesitates for a moment in a gesture that is somehow feminine, then falls face forward with a great crash. In the next second the lights flare up, and the pressure releases its grip from the back of my neck, and the television picture wobbles back into place with the news again, and everything is back to normal.

I sigh and take another mouthful of the Froot Loops, which have gone soggy in the bowl. Then it occurs to me that if the ghost can send bookcases full of history texts hopping across the room, it can just as easily send the same bookcases crashing down on my head. And with the finality of a key slipping into a lock, I realize that the ghost is growing stronger each day and that maybe it is trying to kill me.

A
T NOON
I find Father Rose practicing his swing in the churchyard. He is perched atop a low sepulcher, cleats of his golf shoes dug into the old sandstone slab, a nine iron in hand. The pouches of his cassock bulge with hollow practice balls. They make a whistling sound as he sends them arcing crisply through the air, a white blur in the hot wind till they bounce off their target, the black obelisk about twenty yards distant.

“Mr. Conti,” he says as I ascend the narrow stairs from the crypt, “please don't think me disrespectful of those who lie here.” He climbs down from the stone, pulls off golf gloves of Italian leather, and shakes my hand.

“The thought hadn't entered my mind, Father,” I say. He winks at me. We have acquired a certain conspiratorial air, as if together he and I will pull something over on the pope.

“It's just that I think the dead don't mind a little company every now and then.”

I blink in the strong light and sneeze. The sun is hard on my eyes after the dimness of the crypt. My allergies are going crazy. Each box of documents seems to have its own special species of mold spores. Some make my eyes water; some make me cough; some send me into paroxysms of sneezing. I sneeze again, and Father Rose blesses me and waves the nine iron in my face.

“You see this?”

“Yes,” I say.

“A nine iron, I'm practicing my chip shot today,” he says and assumes the lecturing, priestly tone he reserves for golf and God. “The chip shot is one of the least practiced shots, widely undervalued by good golfers simply because deep down, good golfers feel their game should consist only of the drive and the putt. You drive onto the green in one or two shots, you putt. Simple, right? Of course, even the best of us are not skilled enough to get the ball on the green in perfect drives every time. We land in the rough just shy of the green or, God forbid, in a trap. This is where the chip shot is our greatest ally. If the ball gone off course is like sin—you will allow me this clumsy metaphor—then the chip becomes a sort of necessary penance. And ignoring the chip shot is a great vanity, which is itself a mortal sin. Do you catch what I'm driving at?”

I say I do. Father Rose smiles, eyelids half closed, serene as a cardinal. Then he follows me back down into the crypt and installs himself in the broken chair for a status report. He is not a suspicious man, exactly, but he is careful and monitors my progress with the archives twice a week.

“So, how's it coming?” he says now.

I wade through the mess like a fisherman in hip boots. A fly buzzes around the bare bulb above as I hold a thick yellow sheet to the light.

“ ‘… and though our life in this new country is a hardship,' ” I read aloud, “ ‘and the depredations of the savages on nearby homesteads
have been reported with increasing frequency, still my husband and I believe this open landscape is most nourishing to the soul. Better here, with savages and hoot owls and beasts of prey for company, than back East among the denizens of the false and wicked cities we have left behind. On Sundays, in the absence of a Church and Mass, I walk with my children upon the prairie surrounded by the works of the Divine Hand.…' Beautiful sentiment, don't you think, Father?”

He frowns. “What is that?”

“A letter from a member of the parish who emigrated to a frontier settlement around 1846. Of some interest as a historical document, I'd say.”

“Written to whom?” The priest's eyes light up.

“Not sure,” I say. “The first and last pages are missing.”

“Ah.” He turns to the table and leafs absently through a stack of gas bills from the 1880s.

“As you can see there, the rectory was converted to gas illumination in 1876,” I say. “And wired for electricity rather late, in the teens of this century.”

“All this is very interesting,” Father Rose says, an impatient edge in his voice. “But not what we're looking for. I'm just starting to prepare the paperwork for the Congregation of Rites. I've got a letter in to the bishop. It's a very complex procedure. I need something concrete. Soon.”

“Sorry, no miracles, Father. But I have gone through a lot of paper already.” I gesture to the piles stacked neatly all around—“and I'm about to go through a lot more. And I've been to the Brooklyn Historical Society and to the archives of the archdiocese. It's almost as if history swallowed up our saint. I've even advertised in the historical journals. A call for letters, information, anything. Nothing yet.”

I can see he is disappointed. He rises, takes a tentative step toward the iron gate opening into the crypt. Out there in the sepulchral gloom an old woman kneels before a memorial tablet set into the wall. An electric votive candle flickers in the alcove beside a black-and-white portrait of a young man encased in an oval of clear celluloid. In the background, always, even through these thick walls, the sound of traffic.

“Father?”

He turns back.

“I wonder if I could consult you on another matter?”

We go upstairs to his bright and cheery office on the third floor of the rectory and, surrounded by golf trophies, I tell him about the ghost. I am nervous talking about it and suppress an urge to kneel and say the act of contrition, like a ten-year-old at his first confession, as if the ghost has been brought on by my own unforgiven sins. He leans back in his chair and presses his fingertips together.

“Do you think this is a malicious presence?” he says at last.

“Hard to say, Father. First the stones, now the furniture. And I always feel there's someone looking over my shoulder. It's really very oppressive.”

“Why do you tell me all this, Mr. Conti?”

“I thought you might have a suggestion as to how to get rid of it,” I say. “A relocation, so to speak.”

“You mean bell, book, and candle. Obscure Latin incantations.”

I shift uncomfortably in my chair.

“Ghosts are no longer the province of the church, I'm afraid. Only spirits.”

“There's a difference?”

“Of course. You've heard of Vatican Two?”

“Sure.”

“Vatican Two cleaned house on many archaic practices. Exorcism was one of them. I'm not saying they are no longer performed, ever. Just extremely rarely. And there is an unofficial policy disapproving of such activities. Currently it's up to the individual bishops whether or not to allow exorcisms to take place in their diocese. Bishop Allen frowns on them most definitely. These days the church believes in psychology and repressed memory. Our interests lie with Freud and therapy. Not ghosts and demons.”

“What about saints?”

He ignores this. “If I were to authorize an exorcism in my parish, and word reached the bishop,” he says, “I would be sent to a dude ranch in Arizona to recuperate with all those other wacko priests who can't keep their hands off the altar boys. And that's not the sort of company I care to be locked up with for ten or twelve months.”

Sculptural light gleams off the polished trophies in their cases. Arnold Palmer smiles down benevolently. Here it is hard to believe in the haunted stillness of the apartment at 3
A.M
., ghost frittering like a moth against the screen in the darkness.

Father Rose rises and takes his putter from the plaid golf bag in the corner.

“Anything else?”

I hesitate. “Advice? Helpful hints?”

He leans over and makes a pass at one of the practice balls strewn across the carpet. Then he straightens and fixes his sad brown eyes upon me.

“Yes. You live in a terrible neighborhood, in an apartment subject to unusual disturbances. My advice is very simple. Move.”

O
N THURSDAY
Rust and I take the train uptown to see a restored print of Nicholas Ray's
55 Days at Peking
on the big screen at the Gotham on Third Avenue.

The film is terrible, a misbegotten epic about the siege of the European community at Peking during the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, starring Charlton Heston, Ava Gardner, and David Niven. It is full of fifties-era hysteria, cardboard Chinamen, bad acting, and misapprehended historical facts, but I hardly notice.

I can't concentrate on the plot because I am still brooding over the priest's advice. I have been brooding over the priest's advice for two days now. I have checked and rechecked the classifieds in the
Voice.
The conclusion
is inescapable. This is New York. They rent hallway space for five hundred dollars a month. And until I can save first and last and security deposit—about two thousand dollars—I cannot afford to move.

After the movie we wait on the empty station platform for the Brooklyn-bound F at Fifty-third Street, two levels down. We wait for a long time, but there is no sign of the F, not even the barest glimmer along the tracks. The stink down here is awful and the heat is intense. Rats scurry back and forth across the track bed between garbage and pools of black water. From somewhere comes a slow dripping sound. I feel like an extra in a Sergio Leone western, caught in one of those huge CinemaScope close-ups of desperadoes waiting for someone to kill on the Santa Fe express.

Rust scuffs along the platform edge. Then he spins on the heels of his boots to face me. We are discussing my dilemma.

“Let me tell you a story,” he says.

I roll my eyes.

“Back about twenty-odd years I worked as a ranch hand at a hacienda in Mexico, Chiapas State. The owners were very rich. Old-time landowners. The deed signed by King Carlos of Spain hung in a big frame in the hall of the hacienda. Consuela, the daughter, had a spirit attached to her, a poltergeist, like you. When she was around, the thing would dump bowls of chili on people's heads, knock paintings off the walls, slam doors. Once tossed the cat into a tub of tequila punch at a dance they held in the ballroom. Would have been kind of funny except how the whole thing ended. One night, the girl vanished. She just wasn't in her room in the morning. A week we looked for her. They had us ranch hands combing the whole countryside. When it got dark, we took torches up into the hills. But that wasn't how we found her. We found her because of the birds.”

“Birds” I say, a lump in the pit of my stomach. “What birds?”

“All of a sudden, there were vultures congregating on the roof of the hacienda. No one noticed till there were a half dozen up there, big, evil black birds staring down at us. Finally, Luis put a ladder to the eaves and climbed up and there she was, poor kid, what was left of her. Eyes and all
the soft parts eaten out by the vultures. Clenched in her left hand was a bottle of rat poison from the kitchen. At the inquest they said that was how she died, her tongue was black with the stuff. They called it a suicide. But how she got onto the roof no one can say. There was no way up from the inside of the house. Not for a girl of thirteen. Some people say it was the ghost, the poltergeist, that took her up there somehow, that put the poison in her hand. I don't know. I do know that it's not healthy living with the damn things. Like living with a gas leak. Sooner or later there's going to be an explosion.”

I open my mouth to speak but am overcome with exhaustion. I don't want to think about it anymore.

Now a few more passengers wait along the platform. An impeccably dressed old man talks to himself a mile a minute; two black teenagers wrapped in leather parkas despite the heat slouch over a boom box blaring rap; a thin, sad-looking woman stares with intensity at the third rail. Rust looks up suddenly, and in that instant there is a hot wind from the tunnel followed by a great roar. At this sound about twenty Puerto Rican youths pound down from the local track above, and the platform is full. But the train pulls into the station to groans and swearing from the crowd. It is a work train, its flat sides painted in yellow and black stripes like a plague ship, its windows barred.