The Ghost Notebooks

by Ben Dolnick

  …

  Spring 2011—New York—Age 30

  You are standing in spotted shade you are facing your husband he is almost your husband your friends your family are sitting in chairs on logs they are fanning themselves your grandmother tiny and ancient is perched in the first row the rabbi is going on too long he made a joke you can only tell because everyone is laughing so you laugh your almost-husband laughs squeezes your hands you look down your toenail polish is red your feet are white his shoes are black and then the rings spinning past knuckle-flesh onto bare fingers his palm is damp his eyes are brown with darker flecks you kiss like you’ve each been shipwrecked from somewhere music starts and even your grandmother is standing you are walking back down the aisle you just walked up you don’t know how many minutes it’s been someone hands you a piece of chicken on a wooden stick people with red faces hug you and ask you how you feel say how beautiful that was absolutely lovely absolutely perfect your dad is standing waiting to say something your mom is crying laughing trying to fix the contact in her left eye while your sister all in purple holds her scarf your husband says are you OK kissing you again each of you now holding narrow glasses of champagne you’re crying and you say to him of course I am I’m happy I’m supposed to be crying and he kisses you again because the photographer missed the last one you are almost certain this is why you’re crying you can’t think of a single thing that’s wrong you could almost swear it…

  3

  Welcome, welcome! How you guys doing? Hannah? Nick? Donna McCullough. Founding board member, education specialist, all-purpose pain in the you-know-what. We spoke on the phone. The board president, Mike, was supposed to be here, but he got hung up at work. You hit any traffic? Hit any deer? That’s a joke, this isn’t when you’ll hit deer, that’s more like October.

  “…Isn’t it good-looking? Remind me when we get inside and I’ll show you some pictures of how it was when we bought it. I swear you would have thought it was a completely different house. To give you an idea, this whole porch was red, like new-convertible red. So we scraped and scraped, and there was the dark green, still underneath. And it’s not like we got everything perfect. We tried to get close—they have historic color ‘experts’ who’ll come out and consult with you for about a million dollars—but with a job like this you basically have to accept that you’re only ever going to get a close approximation. It hasn’t been repainted since ninety-nine, anyway. That’s a grant you might think about applying for.

  “…So I’ve just got to say how glad I am that you guys are here together. I think that’s great. I know some people have probably been bitching to you about it, saying, Oh, what are we, a honeymoon destination?, but the way I see it: How’d it go, Jim living here on his own? You think that might have, I don’t know, made things a little harder for him?

  “…You’re not in museums, right? Remind me what you do?

  “…Oh, I think that’s great. My mother was too. Played piano in church every Sunday for thirty-seven years, First Methodist right over on Cold Spring.

  “…Now, you feel how cool the air is inside? That’s not AC, that’s because when they built houses like this they actually had to think about things like which way the windows were facing and how high the ceilings were and everything like that. We could use some more of that, instead of these places you drove past on your way in, where they’ve got ‘home theaters’ and indoor pools and you’re just thinking, Do you people even care that you live in one of the top ten beautiful settings in New York?

  “…That was the problem with the guy we interviewed last month, in my opinion. He didn’t seem to notice the word ‘historic’ in ‘historic house,’ so he thought it was going to be all queen beds and hot showers and just basically a hotel where you got paid to stay. Which is another reason I pushed for you guys, because I could tell from your application you got it, you weren’t going to go running the other way the first time a bat climbed in the window. Now just come on through here for a minute.

  “…So this is the caretaker’s apartment, which used to be a storage area. You can see it’s got basically everything you’ll need—bed, kitchen, a little bathroom, microwave, lamps, extra blankets and towels and things in here. There was still some of Jim’s stuff in the dresser, believe it or not. I guess nobody ever thought to clean it out. Coming from the city this probably seems big to you. Did I tell you I have a cousin in New York? Brooklyn. Coney Island Avenue. Been there for twenty-five years. I’m hoping to take the train down there this January, after my knee surgery. That’s why I’m slow going down the stairs.

  “…See, that was another thing people kept saying, Hey, she’s from the city, she’s never worked in a historic house before, wah wah wah, but the way I see it is, having somebody not from Hibernia is a good thing. God forbid we hire somebody who’s not all caught up in small-town crap from fifty years ago, or who knows a thing or two about marketing or big-time museum shows. Wouldn’t want to actually risk building Edmund Wright’s reputation a little bit, would we? Or gee, I don’t know, fulfilling our actual mission as an organization?

  “…Anyway, so this is your office here—not exactly state-of-the-art, but it does the job. And now we’re into the museum—this is the famous study. We don’t just let people wander in here, they have to be with an educator, mostly ’cause of the books. This was the kind of desk he would have had, with all these little drawers back here. He wouldn’t have actually written with a quill, but kids like it.

  “…Hmm? No. Most of the stuff in the house is what I call a ‘genuine antique.’ Same sort of thing the Wrights would have had, but not the actual stuff.

  “…Now, did they tell you that I’m actually related to Wright? Seriously? Yeah, well, I shouldn’t be surprised, I think it pisses ’em off, makes ’em feel like I’m trying to make some special claim to the crown, which I’m not. They tried to kick me off the board a couple of years ago too. Probably didn’t tell you that either.

  “Well, he was my great-great-grandmother’s brother, so my great-great-granduncle. Oh yeah. I’m not one of the kooks about him, come here and talk a lot of nonsense, because my grandmother actually met him. She used to have Indian fights with her sisters back out in those woods. For us it’s not just some story.

  “…Well, it’s a good question. When we first opened in ninety-two we had to focus mostly on the outdoorsy stuff, since people still had other associations with the house. We’d go do a walk in the woods, or we’d take people canoeing on the river. We still have a canoe out there if you want to use it, actually. It was like a camp. That was when I was director.

  “Then, you know, next generation comes along, lots of school groups, and of course they can’t do as much outdoor stuff, because insurance has gone nuts. So what do we do? We start doing more stuff in the house. Exhibits like the one we’ve got up now about nineteenth-century baking. But then you get these kids’ parents refusing to sign permission slips, and they won’t say why, but it’s obvious if you’ve lived here for half a minute. So, short version, the board decides to hire a new director, makes me a ‘special consultant.’ Gotta pay your respects to the almighty dollar sign.

  “…So let me just take you down to the basement for a minute, show you some of the mechanicals, before I turn the keys over and let you wander around a little. I’d show you around the woods—have you seen the family plot yet? Said howdy to old Edmund and Sarah?—except my knee is basically hanging together like this, so I shouldn’t even be walking around this much.

  “…Watch your heads. This is the furnace—you won’t be needing that for another month at least. This is the fuse box, which unless you go plugging in, I don’t know, one of those giant industrial blenders, you shouldn’t have any problems with. This is the water purifier, and this is the little booklet for it. These beams—this is all powderpost beetle damage, which I’ve been trying to get the board to care about for years. You might see a little moisture on the foundation in this corner here…

&n
bsp; “…Well, thank you. It’s called institutional knowledge, and I wish there were a little more of it, frankly.

  “…That’s the line out to septic. Oh, and we think that’s where there used to be a coal chute.

  “…All right, so I’ll get out of your hair in a minute. I can see I’m making you a little antsy, Nick. No, it’s okay. Hannah, you and me’ll be seeing lots of each other, since me and you and Butch are basically the whole show right now. You can always call me if I’m not in and you have a question, or you can even come by sometime. Me and my sister are four miles down eighty-two, then a right on Hobb’s Lane, then another right. Little brick house with the metal sunflowers out front.

  “…Well, you’re welcome. You’re very welcome. My only advice is, remember this place is actually where Edmund Wright lived, no matter what kind of cheapo furniture we have, no matter what people do or don’t know about him. He was an actual, brilliant guy, and this is where he slept and ate and excuse me but screwed his wife. So you’re actually pretty lucky, living here. Don’t let them trick you into thinking of it as just another creaky old house.”

  . . .

  Those first few weeks at Wright felt like being on a reality show. Take two city people, whose lives for the past six years have been all subway platforms and bodega aisles, and plunk them down on a farm where the main daily excitement is the UPS truck driving by. Watch them realize, at four p.m. on a Monday, that the only person they’ve seen all day other than each other is the muttering bald man who came in wondering if the museum would buy his old silverware.

  I realized, once we’d been there for a bit, that “upstate” is an absurdly inadequate term. I knew, from a handful of weekends and an excruciating number of trend stories, about the slice of upstate that was Brooklyn with a backyard—drinks in Mason jars, lights strung up between trees, cutely named cheeses. And I also knew about the pockets that were in a state of genuine collapse—casino disputes and pawn shops and bars where carbuncular men sat drinking at ten in the morning.

  But I hadn’t had the slightest idea about Hibernia’s brand of upstate, which wasn’t the least bit hip (the median age seemed to be fifty-plus) but also wasn’t particularly desperate. It was just, in a way I hadn’t quite known a town could be—there. Its main reason for being, its rallying cry, if it could have been bothered to have one, was: Just let us go about our business, please. There was a church where I’d never seen more than a few cars parked (“God Proved His Love When He Gave It Away”). A hardware store permanently advertising a special on mulch. Some not-especially-picturesque farms where cows stood in circles on muddy ground, chewing hay.

  It was less a town, in the farmers’ market and community theater sense, than a collection of houses that happened to be scattered along the same river. I don’t want to give the wrong impression—the people we met at Peck’s (a linoleum-floored general store where the employees, between customers, sat in white plastic chairs sighing at Fox News) were perfectly friendly, and there were undoubtedly all sorts of neighborly doings that we hadn’t been there long enough to know about: there was a town grange, and a Lions Club, and various other social organizations I only partially understood. But there was a basic flintiness, an unsmiling nod from a pickup truck kind of spirit, that until then I’d associated more with New Hampshire or Maine than New York. The most reliable evidence we had of our neighbors’ existence was the sound of distant gunshots.

  Our house, the museum, was on an easy-to-miss road called Culver Lane. It stood back a ways on a hill, on fifteen acres of what had once been farmland, now woods and grass paths and half-collapsed stone walls. Sometimes, when there wasn’t a school group, only one or two visitors came in an entire day; sometimes no one did. If you walked fifteen or so minutes from our back door, out across our property and then a couple of fields that belonged to a farmer who was never there—insects crackling all the time like stray voltage—you came to the Hibernia River.

  The house itself was smallish, wooden, slightly shabby—its paint, sooty white, was crackling and peeling in strips like birch bark. The roof had asphalt shingles with green lichen spots. There was a narrow porch with a blackened metal plaque mounted between the windows: “Edmund Wright Historic House Museum, Founded 1992, Hibernia, NY.” There was a smell as soon as you got through the front door—smoke-cured wood and dusty books and possibly the faintest hint of dead mice.

  You wouldn’t, if it weren’t for the plaque, necessarily know from the outside that it was a museum; you might just think this was an old farmhouse that school buses liked to park in front of occasionally. But inside there was a welcome desk with a stack of folded visitors’ guides and a mug full of tree-bark pencils you could buy for two dollars each. There was a cash box and, on a little wooden stand, a copy of The Selected Letters of Edmund Wright, with him looking warily out at you from the cover. There were faded and peeling wall panels with curlicued quotes (“Oh, what happy hours and torments, what odysseys unwritten and invisible, have taken place within this study’s sorry walls…”).

  We only learned about the house, what had happened there, from Butch, the museum’s maintenance man. Butch was one of those men, of whom there seemed to be a surplus in Hibernia, who take stoicism just to the edge of scarecrow-hood. He was in his fifties. He wore a Carhartt jacket and a plain blue baseball cap and he stood noticeably straight. Hannah asked him one day while they were fixing the gutters what Donna had meant, about small-town crap from fifty years ago; if not for that conversation I think we could have gone the entire year without anyone bothering to tell us.

  In 1958—decades after the Wrights were dead, decades before the county historical society bought the house and made it a museum—a man murdered his wife there. Possibly. They were George and Jan Kemp, the town doctor and his pretty wife, and Jan disappeared one winter and was never found. This was, apparently, the most scandalous thing ever to have happened in Hibernia. Butch’s older brother had gone to school with the youngest Kemp daughter, so he’d known the family slightly, and he’d stared along with everyone else whenever George appeared in town. “For all anybody knows, she got ticked and took a bus to Buffalo,” Butch said. “But the old folks still talk about it.”

  This, apparently, contributed to the museum’s aura in Hibernia, half proud historic site and half place for high schoolers to prove their boldness by going up and pounding on the door. Hannah and I weren’t particularly bothered by the story—to have lived in New York City for any length of time is to have accepted the idea that bizarre and horrible things have taken place in every room where you’ve ever set foot—but we were glad to know about it. Suddenly Donna’s way of scurrying past the house’s post-Wright history (“Oh, that’s all just red meat for the loons”) made sense.

  But no one else ever mentioned the Kemps explicitly to us—I don’t know if this was because not many people in town cared about the story anymore, or if it was wariness around newcomers. The closest people ever came was when the cashiers at Peck’s or the waiters at the pizza place on 82 would ask how we liked living in “the museum,” and there would be a mix of amusement and skepticism in their voices that meant they thought they knew something we didn’t. We’d make a point to answer cheerfully (“It’s like house-sitting for an insane uncle”; “It’s like Night at the Museum, only much smaller”), and they wouldn’t pursue it; they’d just smile and say, in a thinly encouraging voice, “Well, we’re glad you’re here.”

  But we actually did like living in the museum. There was a weird coziness to being there, at first, a playfulness, the way there would have been if we’d been camping or living on board a ship. The Kemps, the Wrights—they were jokes, myths, no more real to us than pterodactyls. We’d shout to each other laughing from another room to point out some new absurdity—a broken floorboard, a drawer stuffed with misprinted flyers. Neither of us had lived in a house since we were kids; apartments, it turns out, are very different things, psychologically. Houses—especially old and creaky houses—a
re individuals, somehow; their fronts are faces, their closets are pants pockets. We went, after hours, on exploratory missions to the basement (dirt floor, stone walls, bare hanging bulbs). We put on overcoats and metal glasses from the costume closet and leapt out at each other. We read each other entries from Edmund’s and Sarah’s diaries. It turns out that if your significant other becomes the caretaker of a historic house and you move with her, then whether you like it or not you become the caretaker of a historic house too.

  Our room, the caretaker’s apartment, was off the back of the house, down a few steps from the display kitchen with its potbellied stove and plastic potatoes. Our room didn’t look so different from a ground-floor apartment I’d lived in once—a double bed, a kitchenette, a much-faded area rug.

  “Does our room feel,” Hannah said, “a little bit like after a hoarder dies and they clean out his apartment?”

  “I think the vibe I get is more sad-lonely-man-sitting-in-his-underpants,” I said.

  This was another thing about living there: so much more suddenly depended on our conversation. We were (because the wireless was crappy, and because there was only one spot upstairs that got a cell signal) each other’s primary means of entertainment, a society of two. We would do impressions for each other, we would cook dinners that involved double-boiling and constant stirring.

  “Oh, Edmund,” Hannah said to me one night, in her Masterpiece Theatre accent. We were upstairs in the Wrights’ bedroom, looking through the closet for an extra lamp. “Won’t you make love to me right here on our four-poster bed?”

  (The Wrights’ bedroom, just to the right at the top of the stairs, was surprisingly spare, almost Shaker: a narrow bed, a wooden chair, a candle in a candle holder. I heard a woman that first week say to her husband, “Not a lot of fun you could have in here.”)