Eleanor, Alice, and the Roosevelt Ghosts

by Dianne K. Salerni

  “You can count on me.” Alice shoots a look at her aunt and uncle, telegraphing her sincerity.

  No ghost is going to dislodge her from her home. It will have to be the other way around.

  Dear Eleanor,

  I shall be investigating the haunting of Aunt Bye’s house with the ghoal (I did not misspell that, it is on purpose) of identifying the progenitor of the ghost, locating any of his (or her) belongings, and disposing of them. If we cannot encourage this ghost to fade quickly, Uncle Will is going to close up the house and move. I do not know where the new place will be, but it seems doubtful that it will be within walking distance of your grandmother’s house. You probably do not want them to move any more than I do, which is why I know you will help.

  I will inventory the contents of the attic, and you can search library records for clues about the previous inhabitants.

  Your cousin Alice

  P.S. Aunt Bye purchased the house in 1884 from a Mr. and Mrs. Andrew Morrow. We called upon Mrs. Morrow at their new residence last evening, and she says there were no deaths in the house in the thirty years she lived there. She does not remember the name of the person who sold the house to her husband, and sadly her husband does not remember his own name most days, let alone anyone else’s.

  P.P.S. The date on the cornerstone of the house is 1825, in case you have not noticed.

  7

  ALICE IN THE ATTIC

  AFTER dispatching Ida to hand-deliver her letter to Eleanor, Alice sets about her own task. Because the electric lighting in the house does not extend into the attic, she takes an oil lantern to light her way.

  The circular servants’ staircase continues past the second-floor landing and ends at an overhead door. Alice unjams the latch and shoves the heavy door upward. When it reaches the tipping point, it falls away from her and strikes the attic floor with a whomp, raising a cloud of dust. Chilled air seeps into the stairwell. Mounting the three final steps, she climbs into the upper story.

  The peaked ceiling slants sharply downward on both sides. Two small, grimy windows provide next to no illumination, but by the light of her lantern, Alice can see that the attic is full to bursting with decades’ worth of discarded items.

  A linen press. A dressmaker’s dummy. A tarnished mirror. There are stacked cardboard boxes, frames without pictures, and a tall curio cabinet. She spies a rocking chair with a broken runner, several bolts of moth-eaten fabric, and a stack of old magazines tied with string. There are trunks and a mismatched cluster of luggage. Alice will have to go through them all.

  She heaves a sigh. Maybe she gave the better task to Eleanor.

  Where in the world should I start?

  With Pepsin chewing gum, of course. Removing a package from her pocket, she unwraps two sticks—and then one more because this looks like a three-stick job.

  The trunks, she discovers, are full of clothes: men’s suits riddled with holes, yellowed petticoats, heaps of dry-rotted stockings, and old shoes. None of them appear to be the right size for a child.

  A metal box decorated with faded paint turns out to be a toy chest, which is more promising. Alice exhales in satisfaction—and her breath turns to fog in the chilly air. Uneasily, she glances around. The lantern casts shadows on the walls and the slanted ceiling, but she sees no movement and hears no sound except her own breathing. Nevertheless, Alice feels in the primitive depths of her brain that something is watching her. “Hello?” she whispers.

  Nothing.

  Her chewing gum has gone dry too soon. She spits out the wad, sticks it on the back of the tarnished mirror, and returns her attention to the toy chest. Inside she finds a drum, a fife, and a doll with a china face and movable eyelids. When Alice picks up the doll, it blinks at her. Tin soldiers, dominoes, and playing cards lie loose in the bottom of the box. Alice rummages through them until a creaking sound causes her to whip around.

  The broken rocker is rocking. It shouldn’t be able to rock on that splintered runner, but it is. Her lantern throws a skewed shadow of the impossibly rocking chair across the floor and onto the sloping ceiling above.

  Alice’s body trembles with a shiver not entirely caused by the cold. “Are these your toys?”

  No answer. The rocker stops.

  Blowing on her hands to warm them, Alice moves on to one of the cardboard boxes and lifts the lid. Inside are a number of smaller boxes, and curled on top of them is a huge black snake.

  Alice sets the box lid aside and considers the creature. She’s not terribly surprised to find a snake in the attic, but how did it get inside a closed box? How does it eat? It doesn’t look dead—although it does lie absolutely still. Then she understands.

  She looks at the rocking chair again. It’s motionless, as though waiting for her reaction. “If you’re trying to disturb me, you’ll have to do better than that. I’m not the kind of girl who screams at the sight of a snake.”

  When she turns back to the box, the snake is gone.

  Some are mischievous, Nellie Bly said of so-called Friendly ghosts. Some can be downright cantankerous. Alice feels a growing certainty that their unwanted visitor is a boy.

  The smaller boxes inside the large one are filled with letters addressed to the Morrows, the people Aunt Bye bought the house from. Nothing to do with the ghost’s progenitor, then.

  Alice pushes the box aside and stamps her feet. Her legs have gone stiff with cold, and her teeth are beginning to chatter. She hasn’t been in the attic long enough for the temperature to drop as much as it has. That thing is to blame, turning her into an icicle with its unnatural coldness.

  Does it know what I’m doing? Is that why it’s watching me?

  It made tea for the investigators. Opened the drapes for Nellie Bly. But Alice got a snake.

  It knows I want to make it fade. To eradicate it.

  Too bad, Alice decides. It already had its life. I’m not going to let it wreck mine.

  A second cardboard box is filled to the brim with papers that look like legal documents. The one on top appears to be some kind of loan from a bank. The next two say something about insurance. Hurriedly, she riffles through the papers without removing or reading them, looking for something more interesting.

  A whoosh of displaced air warns Alice barely a second before a pile of boxes behind her topples over, spilling the contents everywhere. Alice stares at the mess. Did she bump those boxes herself? Or did something else give them a push? Old photographs are pooled around her feet, and for a moment, she thinks that maybe the ghost is giving her what she needs to identify him.

  But she recognizes the young man in the first photograph she picks up. It’s her father, looking young and handsome and much thinner than he is today. The next one is her deceased uncle Elliott—Eleanor’s father—posing with his two sisters, her aunts Bye and Corinne. Alice shuffles through the other photographs, finding various groupings of her relations: her father and Uncle Elliott together in bathing costumes, and an especially nice portrait of her grandparents, Theodore and Martha Roosevelt. Sadly, Alice never met either of them.

  Or, more accurately, she never met her grandfather. It is possible that Grandmother Martha had an opportunity to see Alice, at least from the doorway of her room. She died of typhoid fever only a couple of days after Alice was born and never held her infant granddaughter for fear of infecting her.

  Your mother held you, though, Aunt Bye assured Alice when she told her this story. She only had a day with you before she passed, but you were never out of her arms.

  Alice looks through the photographs one more time but does not find any of her mother. She slips the entire stack into the pocket of her divided skirt. They shouldn’t be in this damp and dusty attic. Aunt Bye must have forgotten about them. Crouching on the floor, Alice starts putting the other spilled items back into the fallen boxes. Mostly they are old books and primers and what lo
oks like a school report for Aunt Corinne. There are a few letters in envelopes, and one sheet of paper by itself that almost gets buried beneath a stack of other things—except that Alice spots her name on the page and stops to look at it.

  It’s part of a letter, the last page of a letter to be precise, because it starts in the middle of a sentence and ends with Uncle Elliott’s signature.

  is hard to understand, I know. It isn’t that he doesn’t love her, because he does. You know that. But grief and love and anger—yes, anger at the unfairness of it all—make for a strange combination. If Teddy has to exile himself to the Dakotas, rustling cows until he comes to terms with their deaths, then so be it.

  And yes, dear Bye, I know rustlers are thieves and Teddy is herding steers, not cows, but I hope that my blatant disregard for the proper usage of terms has provoked at least a glimmer of a smile from you in this time of sorrow.

  Teddy will come home when he is ready. In the meantime, concentrate on giving all your love to that precious baby, and allow our brother the freedom to grieve and tend his own heart. No matter how much he loves Alice, he also blames her for the tragedy, and therein lies the problem.

  Fondly,

  Elliott

  Alice reads it twice, her fingers numb with cold and her body shivering. This letter is about her. She is the precious baby in Aunt Bye’s care. The tragedy, the time of sorrow—that refers to the deaths of her mother and her grandmother. She never knew that her father ran off to the Dakotas and simply abandoned his newborn daughter with his sister.

  He was angry. Grieving, which is understandable. But also angry.

  No matter how much he loves Alice, he also blames her for the tragedy, and therein lies the problem.

  Tears blur her vision, and, over the pounding of her pulse, a persistent creaking assaults her ears. She turns around, clutching Uncle Elliott’s letter against her chest.

  The creaking chair rocks faster now, still empty. But the shadow on the sloping ceiling has changed. In the shadow, the chair distinctly contains an occupant—the silhouette of a boy with knee-length pants, drooping socks, and shoes.

  Alice’s muscles lock as if frozen in a block of ice.

  The shadow boy’s face is in profile, but as Alice watches, that changes. The silhouette is absorbed into the featureless head as some unseen thing in the chair turns its face toward Alice. You came into this world, and two souls left it. The two women your father loved best. He must have wished you had never been born.

  Where do those words come from? They appear in her mind as if whispered to her. But she doesn’t hear them. She thinks them. Alice is telling herself what she has always known inside, and what her aunt and uncle knew too. She came into this attic searching for the ghost’s history, and instead she has found her own.

  If you’re trying to disturb me, you’ll have to do better than that, she challenged the ghost only a few minutes ago. I’m not the kind of girl who screams at the sight of a snake.

  It seems her challenge was accepted.

  Suddenly, the rocker stops moving. The shadow vanishes, and the temperature begins to rise, returning to the normal chill of an unheated attic in February. But Alice can’t stop shaking. Snatching up her lantern, she kicks boxes aside in her rush to get to the hole in the floor and down through it, pulling the heavy door closed behind her. There will be no more searching the attic today.

  Score one for the ghost; zero for Alice.

  8

  ELEANOR’S DISCOVERY

  MY first impulse after reading Alice’s letter is to rip it up and burn it on the kitchen stove.

  Why does Alice think she can submit orders to me as if I were her maid? As if she were a captain in the army, and I a lowly private. Yesterday, she dismissed me from her presence when she was tired of me, and now she’s summoning me back because she needs me to do something she doesn’t know how to do—or doesn’t want to do—herself.

  But, from what I overheard yesterday, Uncle Will does want to move out of that house, and Alice is correct about how that will affect me. Grandmother Hall has done all she can to separate me from my Roosevelt relatives, but even she can’t deny me visits with an aunt who lives three blocks away. If Aunt Bye and Uncle Will move, my visits with them might cease.

  I also feel a little thrill over Alice’s use of the word clues. This is a mystery, and I have never solved a mystery more complicated than where Grandmother left her reading spectacles. I am certain that Alice assigned me the library research because it’s the slow, plodding kind of work that she hates…but I love the library. It is better suited to me.

  Grandmother gives me permission without my having to beg or wheedle. The library is one of the few places she lets me go on my own. The head librarian, Mrs. Adams, greets me cheerily, and when I explain the purpose for my visit, she sets me up at a table in the reference section with pencils, paper, and a quick lesson on using the census registry.

  If Aunt Bye bought the house in 1884 and the Morrows lived there for thirty years before that, the previous owners would have sold the place in approximately 1854. The census is only taken every ten years, however, so I start with the ledger for 1850. A woman named Ella Drummond resided with her son at my aunt’s address, 132 East Twenty-First Street, in that year, and when I check the 1840 and 1830 ledgers, I see that the Drummond family occupied the house for decades and that many children lived there over that time. The census record doesn’t establish whether any of them died in childhood, but this is a promising start.

  I copy down the names of the Drummonds, their ages at the time of each census, and their relationships to one another. Finding out when they died will be the next step. I’ll ask Mrs. Adams where that information can be found, but I suspect she’ll point me to the local churches for their parish burial records.

  Even though I have what I came for, I dawdle putting the ledgers back on their shelves, thinking about the conversation I overheard between Aunt Bye and Uncle Will. At first I thought I understood what my uncle meant when he said that having Alice in the house would bring bad memories. His wife is expecting a baby, and she’s twenty years older than Alice’s mother was when she gave birth to Alice. That would worry anyone. But Uncle Will said more than that.

  And now this ghost…there are too many parallels for my peace of mind.

  Why does the presence of a ghost make “too many parallels” to that long-ago tragedy?

  My fingers travel across the bindings of the ledgers until I reach the 1880 census. Flipping to the Rs, I find Grandmother Roosevelt’s family and the address of her home, 6 West Fifty-Seventh Street. Then I switch to the most recent copy of the New York City Supernatural Registry, which lists every house in the city that’s ever been haunted (back to 1822, when the registry was founded) and when each ghost faded into oblivion, assuming it ever did.

  I am not entirely surprised to find 6 West Fifty-Seventh Street listed in the registry, although it’s a bit of a shock to see my suspicion spelled out in print. Does Alice know this? I can’t imagine her keeping it a secret if she did. I copy it down, then take my notes and go looking for Mrs. Adams.

  * * *

  Aunt Bye is out visiting a sick friend when I arrive at her house, and Uncle Will is at the navy yard in Brooklyn, so Maisie sends me upstairs to Alice. I expect her to be in the attic, but I find her in her bedroom.

  She whirls around when I knock on her half-open door, looking ready to jump out of her skin. “Eleanor, what are you doing here?”

  “I have the information you wanted from the library.” I look her up and down. Dust and cobwebs adhere to her skirt and blouse. Her nose is red, and her eyes are puffy. “I guess you searched the attic?”

  “Until it got too cold. I didn’t expect to see you so soon.” She scowls as if I’m the last person she wants to talk to. This is typical Alice. She sent a letter asking for my help, and
now she’s annoyed at me for providing that help.

  Aggravation flares inside me, and I march into her room, brandishing my library notes in her face. “In 1830, a Mr. Edgar Drummond lived in this house with his wife, three children, and a housemaid. Ten years later, the first Mrs. Drummond must have died because there’s a new wife listed in the census, and she had two children of her own plus a new baby with Mr. Drummond. The eldest Drummond son also had a wife and baby living here. There were ten people in the house that year—six of them under the age of sixteen. But by 1850, only the second Mrs. Drummond and her youngest son, David, were left. Maybe the others grew up and moved away—but one or more of them may have died. I think we have several candidates for the ghost’s progenitor.”

  At the beginning of my speech, Alice stands stiffly, arms crossed. But when I start talking about the children, her demeanor loosens. Dashing one hand across her eyes, she holds out her hand for the notes. While she reads the list of names and ages, I cast a surreptitious look at her face. Has she been crying? Alice?

  “We can eliminate the girls,” she says, pointing to Susannah Drummond and her stepsister, Mary Isabel Brown. “And the older boys. We’re looking for a boy between ten and thirteen, I’d say.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I saw him.”

  My mouth falls open. “The ghost?”

  “His shadow, anyway.”

  I take another look at Alice, head to toe. “Did it frighten you?”

  “No!” she exclaims indignantly, her cheeks burning red. “Of course not! But while it was there, the temperature dropped to arctic levels, and I had to come downstairs to warm up.”

  She’s lying. Something happened to Alice in the attic that left her shaken like a bottle of soda water about to fizz over. I can’t imagine what that could be—especially from a Friendly ghost who makes tea for visitors—but when Alice shuffles my notes to look at the last page, I worry about how she will react and grab the paper to stop her.