The Ghost Notebooks

by Ben Dolnick

  “Sarah, dear,” I said, “I’ve never been able to resist a woman in a bonnet.” I lifted Hannah up like a mermaid (this was a back-endangering maneuver, to be attempted only on special occasions) and tossed her onto the bed—and this was how we discovered that Edmund and Sarah’s mattress was actually just two garbage bags full of styrofoam peanuts.

  “You two have already brightened this place way up,” Donna said one day. “So much cheerier than Jim moping around. People are going to be coming back here in droves.”

  Donna had straight gray hair to the middle of her back, thick glasses, an almost lipless mouth; her T-shirts all said things like “You’re Dang Right I Love History” and “Don’t Blame Me I Voted For the Other Guy.” She was an amateur potter, and she referred regularly to a hippie past. “Me and a girlfriend went to Paris once, almost got tossed in a French jail with these two real ‘artistic’ guys we were going around with, that woulda been fun.” “That was back when I could still smoke. Now if I took one puff it would be Sayonara, Donna, see you in a week.”

  “You guys have a picnic back by the river yet?” she said. “Oh, you gotta do that before it gets cold. Take a bottle of wine, walk down a ways, climb up on one of the big boulders. Hell, you can even go skinny-dipping, if nobody’s fishing.”

  One night we did—we canoed down to a swimming hole, and then we left our clothes on a rock and took turns leaping—and then we walked back to the museum in beach towels, barefoot, dripping, quietly amazed at our luck.

  “You’re looking at me weird,” Hannah said, smiling.

  “I’m feeling weird,” I said.

  Back in our room I cooked spaghetti while Hannah sat on the bed by the open window, drying her hair. “I’m glad we came here,” I said, but the words were just the clattering lid on a brimming pot of feeling. We’ve really started on our life together—that was closer to what I meant. Someday over geriatric cups of tea we’ll remember when we lived in a museum, we’ll interlock liver-spotted hands and say, “Remember how steep those stairs were? Remember the time we saw a fox by the picnic table? Remember the giant rusty front-door key?”

  Especially at night, the air in our room had a kind of root-cellar coolness. The racket of crickets and frogs and God knows what else swelled until it pressed right up against the house. We felt not just alone on the property but alone on earth.

  In bed we’d have conversations that were different from the ones we’d had in the city, more private, stranger. “Have I told you how much I showered when I was in middle school?” Hannah said one night. “Like three times a day. At least. I was obsessed with thinking I smelled. I think Megan must have been the one who freaked me out about it. She used to make this face when I sat near her. I was always sniffing myself, pretending I was just looking down at my shirt. My skin was all red, from scrubbing. My dad would yell at me. We had these green loofah things that were always coming unspooled.” We stayed up—midnight actually felt like the middle of the night in Hibernia—telling each other stories that weren’t even really stories, just crumb trails of memory that we’d follow and follow until—

  “Remember how we used to—” she said, swinging a leg over me in the astonishingly complete dark.

  “Like this?” I said, grabbing her, and she laughed and yelped, louder than she would have let herself in the city. We were (how many times does a person get to say this, without qualification?) happy.

  . . .

  The first time Hannah was woken up by voices was at the end of September. We’d been there for a month—it felt already like we’d been there for a year—and the museum had just had its Fall Harvest Festival. This was one of the museum’s biggest annual draws: kids digging up potatoes with dirty spades; apple cider in Dixie cups; churning butter with a crank. Hannah had convinced me to play guitar for it, so I’d sat on the stone wall in a period jacket, playing progressions I meant to sound vaguely autumnal, nodding at the families who stood and watched. The seasons were much more palpable in Hibernia than in the city—you could feel fall coming like a battle the whole town was getting ready to wage—but it was still warm enough most nights that we were eating dinner on the porch, sleeping with our windows cracked.

  That night we ate barbecued chicken with crispy slices of potato that were more blackened than I’d meant them to be (I’d become a maniac for grilling on the little Weber I’d found out in the garden shed). At some point in those weeks we’d started talking concretely about our wedding, and this had prompted, or coincided with, the flickering of our period of late-summer bliss. What did I think of this venue’s website? (Pictures of people drinking cocktails on an outdoor patio, a wedding tent set beside an apple orchard.) What were my feelings, generally, about rehearsal dinners? How important was it to me that all our friends be able to stay in one place?

  I answered these questions with a sort of willed attention, a half distraction, and Hannah could sense it; the jokiness drained slowly out of our conversations.

  It wasn’t that we were back to the bickering and bitterness of the spring—we were still glad to have moved, and glad to be with each other. But something chillier had crept in. The museum was slightly less novel than it had been—Hannah was dealing with her first budget, the water softener needed to be replaced—and there is, I think, a special gloom that comes with wedding planning. It may just be the realization that the traps you watched swallow up a thousand people before you are going to swallow you up too. You sit down meaning to compose a love song, and you end up scheduling a conference call with a tent rental company.

  “What if everybody camped?” Hannah said as we lay in bed that night.

  “We’d have to rent the equipment, plus, the old people…”

  “Yeah.”

  We finally fell asleep, and we’d been asleep for a couple of hours—long enough for there to be a cold spot of drool in the corner of my mouth—when Hannah bolted awake and asked if I heard people talking. The bedside clock said it was just past two in the morning. It was so dark in our room that I couldn’t see her face. I lay my hand between her shoulder blades and listened, waiting for the coherent parts of me to untangle themselves. Maybe she’d been having a dream that we were still talking about the wedding. Maybe I’d been having a dream that she’d said anything at all.

  “Listen,” she said.

  “I don’t hear anything.”

  “Listen,” she said again. “You don’t hear people whispering?”

  “Who would be whispering?”

  She sighed and said, in a tone more of exasperation than fear, “Can you go check?” So, with more grumbling than necessary, I swung myself out of bed and, trying not to bash my shin on the high first stair, made my way out into the museum. This was the first time I’d gone out into the museum in the middle of the night and I was surprised, walking barefoot through the kitchen exhibit and the living room, flicking on wall sconces as I went, to find myself not entirely at ease. The black windows. The rocking chair like a crouching animal. I understood, in a way I hadn’t quite before, why little kids sometimes refused to set foot inside, what a basic thing fear is.

  To be clear: I still didn’t hear any voices. But you never quite hear nothing when you’re in an old house in the middle of the night. The stairs to the second floor creaked as I made my way up. The windows rattled in their frames. One by one I looked in the rooms along the hallway: nothing in Edmund and Sarah’s bedroom, nothing in the kids’ bedroom, nothing in the study, nothing in the storage room.

  Maybe it was mice that Hannah had heard; maybe it was a raccoon in the attic. Or maybe, most likely, it was nothing. I went back down to our room—willing myself not to rush—and climbed back into bed. My skin against Hannah’s felt as cold as clay.

  “Well?”

  “There was nothing.”

  “We should get the alarm fixed,” she said.

  “I’ll deal with it tomorrow.”

  The next morning, with the sun light-sabering around the curtains into our room,
Hannah rolled over and said she was feeling sick. She was going to stay in bed, she said. Tell Donna to take over the museum. So maybe that’s what happened last night, I thought. She’d had an actual fever dream.

  Donna taught the class of third graders who came in at ten o’clock, and I helped. The kids sat clustered on the floor in the living room while Donna explained about Wright’s encyclopedias; I wove through the group passing out worksheets and pencils. One blister-lipped boy in a stained turtleneck said please could I take him to the bathroom, please, then held my hand with his grubby little palm the whole way. Next to him on the floor there was a blond girl with a face from a Renaissance painting, cross-legged, carefully writing the cursive loops of her name across the top of her worksheet. Lifelong fates determined at age seven.

  Even if Hannah hadn’t been sick, I might have been helping out like this. I was spending more and more time working around the museum—which is to say less and less time writing music. My first few weeks I’d been sticking to a schedule, going up each morning to the empty exhibit room on the second floor with my guitar and my digital recorder, filling my little Moleskine with scraps of lyrics and semi-legible notations. Fishing for melody bits, which I’d then furnish with chords and choruses, the whole usual cycle of pleasure and desperation and drudgery.

  I’d managed to finish a couple of songs this way, and I’d recorded them on my laptop, each one in just a few takes, only a couple of guitars per track. I’d gotten to where I could see how in a certain number of months I might have an album—it would start with ten or fifteen seconds of the sound of wind against the shutters—but then, just when I ought to have been feeling hopeful and energized, something had happened. I couldn’t quite explain it—it was a feeling like being in a plane on the tarmac, gaining speed and gaining speed and then, just at the point when the wheels are about to rise up from the pavement, that terrifying miracle, the plane slows back down and becomes just a vehicle again. Joy is hard to sustain outside of relationships too.

  Anyway, I didn’t tell Hannah any of this—I hardly told myself any of this. I just left my guitar on its stand and made myself more and more useful in the museum. There was never a shortage of things to do. Butch needed help replacing the deer fence around the garden plot. Donna needed help swapping out the signs in the kitchen exhibit. It’s alarming how little meaningful work a person can accomplish while appearing busy.

  I finished up with the class of third graders—they each got to take home a little satchel of herbs from the garden—and started cleaning up the bits of string they’d left in the grass. “Did you see when that short kid found a dead squirrel over by the bench?” Donna said. “I thought the teacher was going to pass out.”

  “I’ll tell Butch to move it,” I said.

  Hannah, when I went in to check on her, was still in bed, pale and damp-skinned but awake. Strands of hair were plastered to her forehead. Something about the way she sat—slightly propped up, looking at nothing in particular, her hair loose over her shoulders—made me think of an old dying person in a movie, a nightgown and a sleeping cap.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I think so.”

  “Do you want some ginger ale?”

  She shook her head. I lay the back of my hand against her forehead—only a gesture, since I never knew exactly how a forehead was supposed to feel—and told her I’d take care of the museum for the rest of the afternoon. Just before I left she said, “Wait. Will you hand me my notebook?” Her speckle-covered notebook was more and more like a sick person itself, worn and damp. She thanked me semi-audibly.

  Hannah was one of those people who, when they get sick, bring almost a spiritual aspect to it. Teeth chattering, voice feeble, curtains drawn—she suffered like someone going through a biblical ordeal. Once, when we were still in Queens, she’d gotten the flu and spent three days subsisting on crushed ice and Carr’s crackers, only opening her eyes long enough to let me tip NyQuil into her mouth.

  Out in the museum there was an unusual amount of hubbub. Donna and Butch were unfolding a table in the living room, and there were chairs stacked next to the window. I’d forgotten that this afternoon was the monthly meeting of the Wright Society; the last one had been just a couple of days after we moved in. The society—they called themselves “the Wrighters”—consisted of three men and a woman, all from Hibernia or one of the couple of towns nearby. They sat around in the living room for an afternoon each month and talked about one of Wright’s books, or about a period of his life.

  Hannah’s job was to provide them with a plate of Ritz crackers and apple slices, and to remind them about any upcoming evening programs; they’d loved Jim, Hannah’s predecessor, but they’d happily taken to her, too. They were, in the way of most people who gather in the middle of the afternoon to talk about books by long-dead people, slightly crazy. My plan was to sit with them for ten or fifteen minutes, just long enough to be polite, before pretending to remember work that needed attending to elsewhere.

  Today’s topic was the unproductive last couple of years of Wright’s life, what the Wrighters called “the Crisis.” This was apparently a pet obsession of theirs—that Edmund had, toward the end of his life, stopped writing not because he was sick, or because he’d run out of ideas, but because he’d encountered something in the course of his work on spiritualism that had broken him like an egg. This whole topic was, I gathered, for them something like the JFK assassination—a mystery irresistible precisely because of the impossibility of their ever definitively proving anything.

  “The problem,” the woman in the group explained to me, getting settled in her chair, “is that his spirit work was so spottily recorded, it’s hard to know what he was doing even before he went silent. And this was a man who wrote down every thought. This was a man who wrote down how many bites it took him to finish his chicken.”

  “They’d just as soon we talk about something else, of course,” said the wispy-bearded man who spoke in a not-quite-British accent. He made a face that managed to convey both disgust with the powers that be—Donna, I presumed—and resignation.

  The leader of the Wrighters—a collapsing barrel of a man named Barry—wiped his mouth and said, “I’d like to put forth the notion that what happened was that he had a vision of William’s death and he couldn’t bear it, because if you look at what he was working on just before the April second letter—”

  “But we don’t know what he was working on,” said the man who looked like a dissolute Viking, “because we haven’t disproven the fact that Sarah buried him with an entire notebook, or multiple notebooks, and that’s why to me this whole—”

  “Oh, for God’s sake. You and your burying. We also haven’t disproven the fact that—”

  The woman in the group, leisurely eating a grape, said, “Can we just take a second to say how sad it is, though? Can we? Here’s this guy who’d written his way through so many problems, so many years, and all of a sudden he’s just silent.”

  “But that’s exactly my point! Maybe he wasn’t silent.”

  They went on like this for an hour, bickering, laughing, pulling out and consulting their falling-apart copies of Wright’s books, refilling each other’s cups of seltzer. I stayed sitting with them for much longer than I’d meant to. They were retired schoolteachers and quilters and amateur genealogists, the sorts of people you see in library bathrooms—the Viking’s pants, I noticed, were halfway unzipped—and they were as happy as if they’d been sitting around the table with Charlie Rose.

  When they finally finished for the day, they all filed out of the house, calling, “See you in October!” and “I’m going to send you that article!”

  Barry stopped by the door and turned toward me with an expression like he was considering asking me on a date. He had skin tags on his eyelids, and teeth like worn pebbles. “You and Hannah aren’t letting Donna get to you with all her True Wright Legacy stuff, are you? That’s what we were worried about, when Jim left. That she’d get some
body in here who just toed the company line, acted embarrassed about all the rest of it.”

  I could hear Donna gathering her stuff up in the exhibit room, getting ready to come downstairs.

  “Nope,” I said, with no actual notion of what he was talking about, “you’ll never hear a bad word about Wright from us. We’re big fans.”

  This seemed to do the trick. “Good, good, good,” he said, tucking his books back into his backpack. “Tell Hannah to feel better. And see you next month.”

  Watching him walk out, I marveled, for the thousandth time since we’d been there, at the difference in people. This one walks around all day worrying about a song he’s working on. This one can’t stop thinking about whether she got her bulbs planted in time. This one cares only about the reputation of a stranger who died a hundred years before he was born.

  “They clear out already?” Donna said. “You mind if I open a window in here?”

  While I was folding the table and putting the chairs away, Butch came in carrying a big styrofoam cup and a plastic spoon.

  “I was over at Peck’s getting ant traps, and I bought Hannah some chicken soup.”

  “You didn’t have to do that,” I started to say, but Butch had that capacity that some people do to make any expression of gratitude, however mild, seem overwrought; he was the sort of shy person who would save your life in battle and then insist it must have been someone else.

  Hannah ate the soup in bed, slowly, wincing at each sip. I perched next to her.

  “I just didn’t sleep at all last night,” she said. The curtains were still drawn in our room, and the bed had the slight warm dampness of having had someone in it all day. Her notebook was on one side of her and a copy of Wright’s selected letters was on the other.

  Tending to Hannah always brought out the parent in me. Each time she moved to put down the spoon I made her take another bite. Finally she insisted she was done—she drew in her lips and twisted her head away; being sick brought out the kid in her—and so I slurped the rest.