Madeleine's Ghost

by Robert Girardi

  “I don’t know,” I say. There is a funny feeling in my throat. “The Holocaust, I guess. Think of all those Jews. Six million, they say. Stolen from their lives and stuffed into ovens.”

  “My father was in the SS,” Inge says so softly at my elbow she is barely heard. “He belonged to a unit responsible for many war crimes. I found out quite by accident. I always thought he was such a good man.…”

  “Yes,” Chase says to me. “The Holocaust is terrible, sad, but it’s not your sad. You’ve got to be honest here, Ned. This whole thing is for you.”

  “All right,” I say, feeling foolish. “Antoinette Rivaudais, a girl I knew in New Orleans a long time ago. That’s sad. I still love her. I think about her every day. It’s like my life continued down there without me. Walking down the same streets at her side, up the stairs into her apartment in the Faubourg Marigny like a ghost. God, I miss her.”

  “Now,” Chase says, almost smugly. “Here’s something real sad: The doctor’s at St. Vincent’s told me ten days ago that my condition has worsened. I’m real sick. I was born with a degenerative bone disease called osteospyroplasia. Starts with your face and extends to other joints and finally reaches the spine, which fuses together stiff as a broom handle. In a few years, no matter what, after a whole lot of excruciating pain, I’ll be dead.”

  I am shocked into silence. Chase going to die? It seems impossible. Despite the depression and the medical problems, she seems too stubborn for that.

  “My God,” the Irishman says, “is it the whole truth?”

  “Yeah, because that’s a real bummer,” Mary says.

  “You’re kidding, right, Chase?” Jillian says, her eyes worried.

  “Please,” Chase says, “I don’t really want to talk about it.”

  “You can’t just pass over something like that,” Jillian says.

  “We’re here to do a séance,” Chase says. “Mostly because I want to find out what it’s like.”

  “What what’s like?” I say.

  “What it’s like to be dead,” Chase says. Then she goes around, lights the candles, and turns off the overhead, which is like the house-lights going down for the feature presentation, and the room is cast into flickering shadow.

  “Join hands,” she says. On one side I take Inge’s hand, which is warm and sticky; on the other, Rust’s, callused and hard as sun-dried mud.

  “There is a spirit here in this room,” Chase says, her voice high and strange. “A restless spirit. Now, all of you. Close your eyes and look into the darkness.”

  I look into the darkness and see the flickering of the candles against the back of my retina, then nothing at all, and there is a long period of silence, the only sound the grinding of the power plant across the street and the hush of nine people breathing. At last there is a strangled coughing sound, and I open my eyes to find everyone staring at Chase. I gasp. She definitely seems possessed by something. She rocks back and forth in a quick, jerky motion, her hands curled into claws on her knees. Her eyes are closed, but her eyeballs can be seen making rapid movements beneath lids that seem thin as paper. Her mouth convulses, trying to form words. Nothing emerges. We are transfixed, in the presence of an otherness. She begins to move faster, to shake like a rag doll in the hands of an angry child. From the kitchen now comes the faint rattle of pots, and in the living room the furniture begins to creak.

  “Wow,” Mary says.

  “Wow,” Todd says.

  “What’s happening?” Geoff says in a scared voice.

  “The spirit,” Inge says. “It has a hold of her.”

  I am used to these displays, but everyone else in the room is stiff and petrified.

  “We should stop this thing,” Jillian says, “before it gets too late, before Chase gets hurt.”

  “No,” Rust says. “Let the girl go through with it, let the ghost say what it’s got to say.”

  Suddenly the candles flare up brightly as if someone has turned up the gas, and the butcher paper on the planchette wags and rumples. One of the grease pencils flies from its brass keeper into Chase’s hand. Her lids flutter open to reveal a blank expanse of white, flutter closed, and she leans over the planchette and begins writing furiously. At first just a wide, jagged scribbling, page after page of it, then there are letters and words too quick to read, the pages turning a mile a minute.

  “Ask your questions, Ned,” Rust yells at me. “Now’s your chance!”

  For a moment I feel an enormous pressure on my temples and I can’t think. “Why are you here?” I shout finally. “What is your name? Why don’t you just leave? I’ve got news for you! You are dead, leave me alone! Leave!” This is all I have to say, but Chase keeps writing, and we can see that this work is becoming a terrible strain on her. She is covered with sweat now, and her breathing is labored. She is like a long-distance runner in the last mile of the marathon. Any minute it seems she will collapse. We watch her for a bit longer, unsure of what to do.

  “Someone’s got to stop this thing,” Jillian says. “It will kill her!” Chase’s eyes flutter open again, and we get another flash of white. Inge gives a little cry at this and faints, her plump hand slipping from mine. A moment later the paper on the planchette is used up, but Chase continues to scribble, a black greasy scrawl across the old wood.

  “Stop it!” Jillian screams. “Stop!”

  Rust and I look at each other, then he lunges forward. He catches Chase around the shoulders in a half nelson. I grab on to her arm, which is writing frantically in the air. I try to pry the grease pencil from her fingers. Her grip is strong, and it breaks off in my hand. Suddenly she jerks her head toward me, and with a face somehow not her own, she hisses out a few quick words that I can’t make out, that sound like French: “C’est vous!” is all I get.

  Startled, I drop her arm and rear back, and in that moment a strong, unseen wind gusts through the closed room, billowing the purple banners like sails. The candles blow out in one hot breath of wax and sulfur, and in the darkness that ensues there is panic and much screaming. From the living room I hear an unearthly pounding not made by any of us. Then the door is flung open, and as the others fall out, in the half-light I see Chase lying still and white as death in Rust’s arms.

  The séance is over.

  8

  NOT UNTIL three days later do I have the chance to enter Molesworth’s room and clean up. I take down the purple banners, fold them carefully, scrape up the candle wax, and gather the ghost-scribbled sheets of paper into a pile. I have examined them several times now. Covered with frenzied layers of scrawl, each sheet is heavy as a palimpsest and absolutely illegible. Sheet after sheet of weird whorls and loops, without so much as a word or a name or even a single letter. From a result’s standpoint, the séance was an utter failure. But I don’t have time to think about these things now. The last seventy-two hours have been awful. Chase has disappeared, and I fear the worst.

  After the séance she was revived with a whiff of Clorox, and taken by Jillian via car service to the loft in Carroll Gardens. I paid for the car service. It was the least I could do. On the way home, according to Jillian, Chase rambled incoherently about green lights and big blue houses and a lady in a white dress who was beautiful, and she said a few more words in French, a language that, to my knowledge, she did not have the use of. When they got up to the loft, Chase was fed a couple of Valium, put to bed, and then Jillian fell asleep on the couch. The next morning Chase was gone. Jillian found the futon in Chase’s bedroom an empty mess of rumpled sheets, the stained glass window angled open to the street, and the steel and chain fire escape ladder hanging down to the sidewalk.

  “Chase must have let that ladder down very slowly and very carefully,” Jillian said to me during the course of a calm, denunciatory phone call. “Otherwise she would have woken me with the rattle of the chain. I can’t imagine why she didn’t use the door, why she didn’t tell me where she was going or even leave a note.”

  I knew the answer to these ques
tions, but Jillian’s calm fury would not allow me a word. Perhaps rightly, she blames me for everything. Chase left the way she did because her aim was not just to leave. Instead she wanted to make her escape completely and utterly. She didn’t want a bit of fresh air, a change of scenery. She wanted a new life. All the years since birth she had been a prisoner whose sole design it was to break out of the prison of her flesh.

  At Jillian’s insistence, I went down to the Eighty-fourth Precinct at Gold and Tillary to file a missing persons report, but the desk sergeant, after hearing the circumstances, did not look too seriously on my request for immediate action.

  “You’re all a pack of loonies,” he said. “A séance! Come back in seven days, and if she still hasn’t shown up, we’ll talk. But if I had my way, I tell you, pal, I’d throw all youse kids in jail just for being weirdos.”

  The cop was probably a year or two younger than I, but there is something about the law enforcement mustache and the rattle of cuffs at the belt that gives a man an air of maturity beyond his years. I left the precinct house, tail between my legs, without uttering another word.

  After that I checked all of Chase’s usual haunts on my own. I went to the Arcadia and the Lobster and Club 219. I tried to contact her brother through Jamal, the bartender, at Le Hibou. I went over to Madame Ada’s tearoom on Livingston, but the place was closed. A hand-lettered sign on the door read Gone Fishing. I called a few friends of hers who live in Providence. They hadn’t seen her in years. Now there is nothing more to do but wait. I wait.

  At last the call comes on Tuesday as I am packing the purple banners and elaborate candleholders back into Chase’s suitcase. Jillian’s voice is strained and stiff on the other end of the line, and despite her inbred Anglo-Saxon reserve, I know immediately something is terribly wrong.

  “They found Chase,” she says slowly, “floating in the East River. She committed suicide. The cops talked to some homeless women who live under the Manhattan Bridge who saw her jump. Just thought you might like to know, you bastard.” Than she hangs up with a sharp click, and I am left with the dead buzzing of the line like the ring of conscience in my ear.

  An hour later I go down Pearl Street to the wide cobblestone triangle where the abutments of the Manhattan Bridge rise up like a dark fortress.

  “Hey!” I call into the rubble of construction equipment and wire spools jammed under the arch. “Hey, you, the lady from New Orleans. I want to talk to you! Hey!” Then I sit down on the curb, chin on my knees, and wait. Ten minutes later the black woman, emaciated, worn, and yellow-eyed, emerges from the perimeter of junk but stands warily a little ways off like a skittish animal.

  “What you want, mistah?” she says. “I already done talk to the police.”

  “I’m not the police,” I say. “I bought a shirt from you a few weeks back. I just want to ask a couple of questions.”

  “Oh, yeah, I remember. You from New Orleans too.” She comes a little closer and squats down on the cobblestones. Her knees bulge out from her narrow shins, like the knees of starving Biafran children in magazine ads.

  “The girl who jumped, she was a friend of mine. I’d like to know what happened,” I say.

  The woman nods solemnly. “All right,” she says after a beat. “I’ll tell you. It was about ten o’clock this past Sunday morning, and Bernice and I, we see this white girl coming down Jay Street over here. She moving in a funny way, like in a dream or something, and she wearing a bathrobe or a nightgown and she ain’t got no shoes on her feet. Looks like a white crackhead, Bernice says, but I’m not so sure. Then the white girl, she climbs the fence up yonder and gets onto the bridge like she’s going to walk over to the city. But the bridge is busted, been busted for years, anyone can see that. Check it out.” She points up to the disintegrating planks of the walkway overhead.

  I look up and nod.

  “So the white girl walks along till she comes to the place where the boards end, you know, and she stands there for a minute. Then she holds out her arms and just kind of leans forward. Man, she fell like a stone straight into the water, and she didn’t come up again.”

  I am quiet for a few minutes after this terrible account. Then I rise and offer the woman a ten-dollar bill, but she shakes her head.

  “I don’t want any money,” she says. “Sorry to hear about your friend is all.”

  “Thanks.”

  She pushes up off the cobbles and stands for a moment, knuckles jammed into the pockets of her dirty cutoffs. “It’s this damn city,” she says. “You know what’s best for you, you get on home to New Orleans, where you belong.”

  Then, as if on cue, we turn to Manhattan, moored across the river in the near distance like the dark hulk of a prison ship.

  9

  THE SERVICE for Chase is a quiet affair at a Gypsy funeral chapel in Manhattan on East Seventh, across from the Café Deanna. As usual, the incessant pounding of drums comes from Tompkins Square Park, one block over. The facade of the place, otherwise a normal tenement, is distinguished by two faded plaster urns painted to resemble pink marble, and a tiny storefront window decorated only with a dusty plaque that reads “Gragogian Bros. Embalmers. Romany Spoken Here.”

  Inside, at one end of a narrow wood-paneled room, a cheap urn filled with Chase’s ashes rests on a table draped in black. In death, as in life, Chase cannot rely on her friends. Now, at the final hour, out of all of them—for Chase was a woman who cultivated many friendships—there is only myself and Jillian. Jillian has gained a few more pounds and looks very good in a tight suit of black satin, a black veil hanging from a little hat over her eyes. She sits in the front pew between Madame Ada in her wheelchair and Ulazi, gangsterish as George Raft in a high-shouldered double-breasted suit. Seated behind them are a half dozen or so Gypsy relations, dark men in dandruff-flecked pinstripe suits from the seventies and rotund women draped in layers of black chenille.

  I arrive a few minutes late and slip into a pew at the back and, to my relief, am joined a minute later by Byron Poydras. He is half shaven, literally: One side of his face is smooth, the other stubbled, and there is the faint trace of purple eye shadow and mascara ringed around one eye. The nails of his left hand are painted with purple glitter nail polish. Metallic flecks flash in the dim light.

  “In a drag show last night,” Poydras whispers when he sees me eyeing his painted fingers. “There was, like, a gender role theme. We had to come as she-males or he-shes, a half man-half woman thing. Then we had to get onstage and try to fuck one half with the other half. It was wild.”

  I feel it best not to question the logistics of this perverse spectacle and lend an ear to the old priest mumbling over Chase’s ashes up front. But he is speaking in Romany, the indecipherable language of the Gypsies, and I can’t understand a word. When he is done, Ulazi stands, gives a thuggish tug on the front of his suit, takes a fiddle from a case beneath the table, and begins to play. It is an old Gypsy melody, that sounds like wagons rolling through the tall grass at dusk and the smoke of campfires and the faces of peasants seen for a moment in the half-light along the roadside; that sounds like all the sadness and beauty of life. Ulazi plays with a passion and feeling unsuspected in one so shallow, violin tucked tightly under his chin, eyes closed. He finishes with a flourish, wiping tears from his cheek with the back of his hand like a child.

  “Ozun tula bagran tu-da!” he says in a choked voice, and the statement is repeated in a murmur by the other Gypsies present. I recognize the phrase. A traditional Gypsy farewell, translated once for me by Chase, which means “Oh, when shall we cease our wanderings!” An admirable sentiment, which drives Ulazi to despair. He flings the fiddle to the floor with practiced melodrama and throws himself against the bulk of his great-aunt. She wraps her arms around him, and he weeps copiously there into her skirts as the priest says a few final words. Then the urn is lowered into a plywood box and handed to Jillian, who steps forward with as much dignity as Jackie accepting the flag from JFK’s coffin at Arlingto
n.

  Afterward the small party of mourners assembles in the foyer of the funeral chapel, which is decorated with yellowed black-and-white photographs of unknown men in suits, framed under glass with borders of black crepe paper. Everyone is going to Le Hibou for the funerary meal, a Gypsy tradition, where the departed is toasted with arak and toasted again till all participants are dead drunk. Ulazi and another Gypsy are trying to heft Madame Ada out of her wheelchair for the short walk down to the curb as I approach.

  “I am truly sorry,” I say to the large, old woman. “Chase was a good friend, and I will miss her sorely. If you don’t mind, I’d like to come along to Le Hibou.”

  Standing behind the wheelchair, Jillian jerks her head to me, eyes flashing. “Get away from here, you swine!” she hisses. “Haven’t you done enough damage already?”

  At this, Ulazi jumps forward with a cry and knocks me to the ground. I feel the hard tilework meet my assbone and the wind rush out of me.

  “You bastard!” He stands over me, waving his fist. “You bastard! I should kill you!” But this is all he can manage before he chokes up and throws himself once again against Madame Ada’s formidable bulk.

  “It’s a pity you didn’t show such concern for your stepsister when she was alive,” I say, and get up off the floor and dust my trousers with as much dignity as possible. The Gypsy relations stand watching stone-faced, their dark eyes moving from Madame Ada to me and back again. One nod from her, I get the feeling, and it’s a knife in the back.

  “Honestly, ma’am,” I say to the old woman, “I didn’t know it would end like this, I—”

  But she cuts me short. “My grandniece’s death was not your fault,” she says, her eyes hooded. “I saw that she was sick and would take her own life the day you two came into my parlor. There were dark flames all around her, and I knew it would not be long. That is not why we do not want you to join us at the meal in which we will remember her. We do not want you there because you are an unlucky person and Gypsies are superstitious and do not like to be around unlucky people. Your bad luck is written all over your face and in the palm of your hand.” She reaches up and grabs my hand, frowns into it for a moment, and thrusts it aside. “Yes,” she says. “Just as I expected. Only a miracle will help you to evade your fate.”