“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.”
11
ON 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.
The work train idles in the station inexplicably for the next fifteen minutes. Men in light blue transit uniforms mill about inside the single car. The caboose is a flatbed full of junk, mangled turnstiles, scrap iron. Finally another train pulls in on the upstairs track, and there is the tread of heavy boots on the stairs. Five transit workers, wearing sidearms and showing the brassy glint of extra cartridges from bandoliers, march quickly down onto the platform. They are escorting two nervous men in suits who carry small black suitcases. The doors open, the guards and men step into the yellow light, and in a moment the work train is gone, lurching off into the darkness of the tunnel.
I look over at Rust. He shrugs.
“New York,” he says. “You never know what’s going on. Not really. All we know is what they tell us. And they don’t tell us much.”
He is right. This city is one vast conspiracy, a riddle whose answer has been cleverly concealed from us. There is something we’re not getting, though there are certain clues: Steam rises from the streets; the pavement rumbles; the bedrock beneath our feet is shot through with tunnels and secret passages, arteries leading into the gloom beneath skyscrapers to a secret terminus where the city’s own heart is revealed beating and horrible, tended lovingly by transit workers like a queen by worker ants—the ventricles of its machine pump fueled by steam and blood and the dashed hopes of millions.
12
SUNDAY.
Chase is having a small dinner party in her loft just east of Carroll Gardens for Jillian. I almost refuse to attend, but Sundays are bad. Long, empty afternoons full of whispers and blank sunlight, followed by remorseless evenings, rearing up like a wall of ice.
It’s not the food—Chase is an excellent cook, conversant in several obscure Asian cuisines. It’s her friends, a motley collection of hipper-than-thou film professionals, acidheads, disaffected youths in jackboots, witches, Communists, performance artists. Rude bohemians with a passionate antipathy for table manners and the everyday kindnesses that are the grease of bourgeois life.
As dark spreads up from the river, I walk up Tide and catch the F train at Knox to Bergen Street. The neighborhood here is mostly Hispanic now, but there is still a block or two of Italians left, a row of Italian restaurants, and a few safe streets, supposedly patrolled by Mafia henchmen. Chase’s loft is at the corner of Smith and Baltic, in an old Episcopal church, St. John the Baptist. The church was converted to lofts ten years ago, when the last Episcopalian in Brooklyn fled or died.
The massive, studded doors on the Baltic Street side are equipped with an iron knocker of medieval proportions. Party lights shine through the Gothic stained glass window of Chase’s loft, and I hear the crash and hammer of an old Sob Sister tape played at top volume.
After a few minutes Jillian comes down to answer the door, a snifter of whiskey in hand. Her blond hair is bleached white tonight and slicked back, and she looks unhealthy and even thinner than she did at our last meeting. She is wearing a long-sleeve knit top that fits like a wet suit. Her ribs stick out like the ribs in a Dürer painting of Christ crucified.
“Shit. It’s the bastard,” she says. For a minute it seems she is not going to let me in.
“Jillian, great to see you again,” I say, shifting the bottle of cheap California Chablis and offering my hand.
“Whatever,” she says, and gives a dismissive wave and leaves me behind to shut and bolt the doors. I watch her bony butt wag up the stairs for a moment, and I am forced into a sad reflection upon its former luscious proportions. Another beautiful woman gone to the dogs on heroin and New York City. But this isn’t exactly fair. Jillian’s appalling new look is really the last stage of a general decline from ingenue through porn star to junkie that began many years ago. I blame everything on rock and roll.
At Brown in the early eighties, Chase and Jillian formed an all-girl thrash band called Sob Sister with an art student from the Rhode Island School of Design. Chase plunked the bass; Jillian picked up lead guitar and sang; the art student banged on things. In those days punk was the common language of the counterculture, and Jillian soon became known for her crude tattoos, dissonant shrieking, and disregard for common decency. During the performance of her infamous signature number, “Fuck Me Blind,” she would strip naked and masturbate onstage with the head of the microphone. The most obscene part was the wet, squelchy sounds that came though the old Vox amplifiers.
For three years Sob Sister played a series of notorious gigs around Providence and in Boston. They were arrested eight times and briefly signed to the alternative Dischord label out of Washington, D.C. When it was all over, Jillian’s voice—trained for opera by the finest coaches money could buy—was ruined beyond repair.
A long table composed of sawhorses and discarded doors is nicely laid out in the main loft space upstairs just beneath a Gothic icicle pointing down from the ceiling. I count twelve black octagonal plates, twelve sets of purposely mismatched silverware. An arrangement of black paper flowers floats in a stainless steel bedpan at the center. I pour some wine and walk down the row of seats, admiring the place settings. Each napkin is folded into a different sort of origami bird. Ashtrays stolen from a Japanese hotel in midtown are balanced on the doorknobs.
“Ever ask yourself what’s going on with doors in this city?” I call over to Chase. “People just throw them away. You see them everywhere, in Dumpsters, alleys, just lying along the sidewalk. Then you rent an apartment to find every door has been removed, and you’ve got to hang up sheets for privacy.”
Laboring over a huge wok full of vegetables behind the glass bricks of the kitchen area, Chase ignores me. She has made enough food to feed an army, but so far, besides Jillian and myself, there is only Byron Poydras. He is slumped on the leather couch against the far wall engrossed in a copy of Gnarl. Poydras is another bohemian friend of Chase’s who does nothing I can put my finger on exactly. I stride across the bare wood expanse to the couch.
“Tell me something, Poydras,” I say. “What do you do with your time?”
He looks up from the comic book, lazy as a cat. “Loiter, mostly,” he says.
“Okay. Where do you loiter?”
An obscure shrug must pass for an answer.
He is a long-limbed kid of about twenty-seven, of the lanky, Ichabod Crane southern type. A shock of blond hair hangs permanently in front of his face; the buttons of his cuffs are always undone. They dangle limp as wet rags from his wrists. This drives me crazy. I want to button them up, take a comb to his hair. Instead I slump beside him and read over his shoulder. Gnarl is an avant-garde comic book that portrays Benito Mussolini as a canny panda bear and Gabriele D’Annunzio and the rest of the blackshirts as malicious raccoons.
“Ned,” he says a few pages later, “don’t read over my shoulder. It makes me nervous.”
It’s hard to imagine Poydras nervous about anything, but I move off to replenish my wine. Unlike most of Chase’s friends, Poydras and I are on what passes for cordial terms in Bohemia. He hails from New Orleans and through an odd coincidence knew one of Antoinette’s sisters at LSU. Though straight, he is heavily involved in the drag show scene that seems to be a staple of East Village life. I find that many transplanted Louisianans participate in these perverse spectacles, which culminate in the Wigstock Festival in Tompkins Square Park in August—a daylong extravaganza of transvestism, female impersonation, and sexual confusion of the first water. Perhaps it is the heritage of Mardi Gras that leads Louisianans in New York to such excesses. After all, in Carnival krewes for well over a century now, men have dressed like women and women like men to the delight of the drunks and tourists along Esplanade and other thoroughfares of that distant city.
We wait an hour, and no one else has shown up. Chase is too busy making the last preparations to notice, but at ten-thirty everything is ready, and she looks around her nearly empty loft, and her crooked eyes brim with tears.
<
br /> “Not again,” she says, a reedy, unhappy sound in her voice. “All this goddamn food.”
“It’s your lousy friends, Chase,” I call out. “They don’t show up as a matter of style. It’s not cool to be where you say you’re going to be when you say you’re going to be there. There’s a whole new generation of beatniks out there who think keeping appointments is a sign of latent middle-class tendencies.”
“You are one uppity-fuck bastard.” Jillian waves her snifter of whiskey at me from the other side of the room. For the last hour she’s been pacing, jittery, swilling whiskey, and muttering to herself. Now her eyes are red and drunk, a nice contrast with the unhealthy green of her skin. She bounces over and jabs a finger in my face.
“What makes you think you’re above the stink?” she says. “Because I’ve got news for you, you fuck. You’ve got about as much agenda as the next hopeless bastard. You’re choking on it just like the rest of us!”
I am taken aback by this and don’t know what to say. For a moment all I can see are her eyes, red and accusing.
“Ha,” she says, and throws up her hands, sloshing whiskey across the wood floor.
But at that moment Chase steps in. “Come on, you two,” she says wearily. “Let’s eat.”
The meal tonight is Indonesian with a touch of Thai around the edges. We have a curried shrimp appetizer, lemon grass coconut soup, a cold broccoli and mussel salad, and twice cooked chicken Jakarta. A warm breeze blows on my neck from the stained glass windows tilted out at an angle to Baltic on their heavy pivots. The window closest to me portrays St. John the Baptist in his wild ass’s skin in the desert; the other, St. Andrew strapped to his cross, rotating over a slow flame of colored glass. From somewhere outside the mournful sound of a tuba is carried on the wind.
“Listen to that,” I say, gesturing over my shoulder with my fork.
“Listen to what?” Chase says.
Madeleine's Ghost Page 5