The Ghost of Greenwich Village: A Novel

by Lorna Graham

  The bitterness and fizz of the drink were wonderful. “Donald?” Eve murmured his name but received no answer. He was “out” and there was no way of knowing when he was coming back. He wasn’t always able to control his status. He came and went, staying for minutes or hours, with little rhyme or reason, and this had made their initial introduction more than a little alarming. A couple of weeks after she’d moved in, she started hearing a faint voice in her head. It wasn’t her voice—that was for sure. It had a different cadence; it employed a different vocabulary. She had never in her life used words like “exfluncticate” or “slumgullion.”

  Usually the voice went away after a few moments and she half thought she’d imagined it. Then one day, as she sprinkled hot sauce on some enchiladas, a violent itch sprang up on the right side of her head. She dug her short red-polished nails into the skin and scratched hard, but the tickle was so deep she couldn’t get anywhere near it. She scraped and scraped. Nothing. It was intolerable. Then the words came, from the exact place from which the itch had sprung. She heard them, but strangely: from the inside out, instead of the outside in. They came on strong, then faded, like a radio station flirting with the tuner. EEEE-wshhhhhh. EEEE-wshhhhhh. Some static, then a man’s somewhat metallic speech: “Must protest the homogenization—” More static. “Subjectivity brought about by—” Then some words she couldn’t make out, and finally, “—MEDIA SATURATION AND POP PSYCHOLOGY!”

  “Ohhhhhh!” Eve screamed and jumped violently, shaking a plume of sauce high in the air. A drop landed in her left eye; the burning was excruciating. She felt her way to the bathroom, where she rinsed her eyes. In the bedroom, she sat down at her vanity table. She moved her eyes all the way around in their sockets, working them steadily into each corner, trying to look back into her head. But her eyes, perhaps flummoxed at being called upon to monitor the very brain that operated them, reported nothing more than blurry darkness.

  She must be insane. Schizophrenic. She broke out in a cold sweat.

  “Relax.” The voice was coming in clearly but gently now. “There’s nothing wrong with you.”

  “Who … what … are you?”

  “No need to yell. No need to speak, even. I can hear your thoughts and they’re much more interesting than your words. I’ve been listening to them for days now. Finally, I got you to hear mine. I’m just sorry it was one of my rants. Really, they’re quite rare.” The voice paused and there was an apologetic little chuckle. “Look, dear. I realize this is a bit of a shock. Why don’t you take a few deep breaths and I’ll introduce myself properly?” Feeling a bit silly, Eve closed her eyes and breathed deeply several times. After a few moments of silence, he began again. “Eventual Weldon,” he said with a flourish, “I am Donald Bellows.” He said it with the pride of a three-star chef pulling a metal dome off a signature dish. He paused, waiting for a response. “Ring a bell?”

  “Honestly, no. Should it?”

  With a sigh like a breeze inside her mind, he began his story. His words were like tiny toes, skipping from nerve cell to nerve cell in her brain, sometimes tickling, sometimes pinching slightly and making her squint. Donald explained that he was a writer who’d lived in the Village on and off from the fifties to the seventies. In Eve’s very rooms, he’d penned some of his most meaningful work. He drew a picture in her head of himself at his rolltop desk, which sat where her bar resided now, listening to the same London plane tree pulling its bony fingers across the window.

  As he spoke, something dawned on Eve. Her mother had lived in the Village in the sixties. Maybe she and Donald had known each other.

  “I don’t remember anyone by that name,” he said in answer to her unspoken question. “I’m sorry.”

  Donald’s description of his life as an artist went on for a good hour more, but it was rambling and far from complete. So, a few days later, overcome with uncertainty as to whether this was a real person or if she had dreamed the whole thing, Eve had gone to the Jefferson Market library. It wasn’t her first visit to the turreted red-brick building with its dramatic cupola that looked like a small castle on Sixth Avenue. Since she’d moved to New. York, she’d prowled its racks a number of times. The library boasted several shelves on local lore, and Eve devoured the books, hoping, even though she knew it was ridiculous, to find something about her mother.

  Penelope had died when Eve was just eight, and even though it wasn’t true, it often felt to Eve at that young age as though everyone had forgotten Penelope quite quickly, her clothes packed away almost instantly by a couple of her churlish cousins and her beautiful name rarely uttered in the house. But though Eve had lost her mother before she was old enough to really know her, there was one thing that she understood: Penelope had been truly happy only once in her life—long before Eve was born, during the two years that she’d lived in Greenwich Village. During that time, she’d known many writers, and Eve thought maybe, just maybe, one of them had put her in a story or memoir. Eve would be grateful for any scrap, any glimpse of her mother during those times. So far, though, she’d found nothing.

  But on this day, it was all about Donald. She made her way through the aisles, so much like those at the libraries she’d grown up with: airy, dignified, gracious in repose. At last she found a dusty volume entitled Mid-Century Writers East of the Hudson and West of Sixth Avenue, which contained one relevant passage.

  Donald Bellows of Perry Street, 1932–1976, is counted among the West Village writers, postwar, sub-Beat-generation division.

  Eve smiled. This explained some of Donald’s amusing hipster expressions, like “daddy-o” and “strictly dullsville.”

  Unlike many of his contemporaries, Bellows never became a household name. Flat feet kept him out of combat, but during the Korean War he was briefly tasked by the military with creating propagandist fiction to “sell” the conflict to war-weary, post-WW2 America. The bulk of his career is believed to be a reaction to that straitjacket assignment in that he declared he would never again write with restrictions. In the fifties, Bellows existed on the fringe of the Beat crowd. When the Beats went west (to San Francisco), he went east—to Europe. Though he enjoyed a minor, almost-cult-type success among a handful of members of the avant-garde while living, he was never taken to the breast of a large readership, and it’s not clear whether he inspired any acolytes who sought to push forward with his ideas. Bellows is, however, credited with attempting a potentially exciting, subversive form of fiction in which everyday objects become symbols, which play a part in seemingly simple narratives with deceptively nuanced meanings. They are also noted for containing little emotion and requiring a great deal of patience on the part of the reader. However, in his lifetime, this unique style remained more of a germ without developing into an established genre, and its value was never determined.

  The next time they spoke, Donald explained to Eve that his greatest regret was “disappearing” before completing a particular collection of short stories that he felt was sure to seal his reputation.

  “How—how did you … you know …?” she asked.

  “Brain hemorrhage. At least I think so. On a wonderful spring day, too. I’d just had eggs and toast at La Bonbonniere on Hudson—is it still there?—and I’d come home feeling the world was ripe with promise. I was ready to dive into some new stories, and maybe make some changes in my life.” He trailed off here but his tone suggested this was not a tangent to be pursued. “Anyway. I came home and went into the bedroom. I felt a splitting pain in my head and suddenly my teeth were in the floor. For a moment, I saw the world through a keyhole. Then someone covered the keyhole.”

  “Where are you buried?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why not?”

  “I hadn’t made any arrangements. And I didn’t have any family. At least none that I was speaking to.” He paused thoughtfully. “Maybe that’s why I’m here. My spirit, or energy or whatever it is, doesn’t know where to go.”

  After a few moments of respectfu
l silence, Eve raised the question that had just occurred to her. “You passed in 1976, you said?”

  “Yes,” said Donald. “Were we alive at the same time?”

  “Barely. I was born in ’74.”

  “I suppose if we’d met back then, we wouldn’t have had much to say to one another.”

  Eve smiled, grateful he’d lightened the mood.

  Donald continued with his tale. He was gone, but not gone. While incapable of a physical presence, in a small measure of consolation, and only after what he imagined were years of practice, he’d found that his current state, which was best likened to a rhythm of energy, could be made to move in sequence with brainwaves. This made possible a kind of rudimentary communication with any person, as long as he or she stood within his four walls, presumably where his force was most concentrated. But it wasn’t always easy.

  “I tell you, most psyches are frenzied thickets. The young CPAs and stockbrokers who’ve lived here—they’re the worst. Their brains process tax returns and balance sheets in their sleep. I couldn’t even begin to scale their retaining walls of useless information.”

  With Eve, it hadn’t been exactly easy either, he’d said. Her mind was open and pliant but too full of other writers and artists. But though he’d been prepared to loathe her as much as his previous tenants, he had admitted that he’d come to enjoy her company. She might be young; she might be silly. She might have gone an entire college career without reading him. But her whimsical outlook and habit of anthropomorphizing everything around her reminded him of his early writing, her way of turning things upside down and inside out played to his ideas of deconstructing language, and her stream of consciousness (which was all he was privy to, for he could not mine her memories unless she called them up) was quite amusing. She’d helped him pass quite a few lonely nights since she’d arrived on the scene, and he found himself thankful. Not to mention that she was the instrument through which his legacy could finally be cemented.

  In their time together, Eve had found something to appreciate in Donald, too. Namely companionship. Despite coming from a large family, she was essentially a solitary person; her childhood home had rarely been a place of comfort. With three siblings, she might have been lost in the shuffle anyway, but she also had the misfortune of being born thoughtful in a house of bluster. Bill, Bryce, and Baines had dominated their Victorian with races and belches, toys stuffed down toilets, and pranks like slugs inside her school shoes. There was no real bullying, but neither was there much intervention on the part of their parents. They tended to treat the children rather like charges at a small summer camp: As long as everyone was up and dressed in the morning and had bathed and said their prayers before bed, all was well.

  This hands-off approach was born largely from their father, Gin, being a workaholic, and the fact that their mother’s life seemed to take place mostly in her head. Penelope wasn’t sad, exactly, more like withdrawn. While she wore the “lady of the house” mantle well, she always seemed to be somewhere else, as if watching an unseen movie. She performed the regal chores of a woman of leisure: tending orchids, restoring antiques, and rearranging furniture, all the while singing scraps of songs and uttering words from some long-ago, or perhaps imaginary, conversation.

  Mostly, though, you’d find her in her room, reading her New. York stories: Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote, Here Is New York by E. B. White, Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence, and, her favorites, the many books by Dawn Powell. Under the rose-print canopy of her bed, she whiled away the hours with books spread around her like friends at a ladies’ lunch. On weekends, Gin would usually have the boys out hunting or camping, while Eve was left with Penelope. When she was very young, Eve would sit on the floor next to her mother’s bed, acting out stories with her dolls. As she grew older, books became her companions, too, and she leaned against the bedpost absorbed in the tales of Enid Blyton or C. S. Lewis. Eventually, she worked her way up to Laura Ingalls Wilder and up onto the bed itself, where she lay reading, looking up every few pages at the curve of her mother’s slender back.

  Sometimes Eve felt a stab of pain that if ghosts existed, why couldn’t it be her mother who came to her? But she and Donald had settled into a mostly harmonious rapport. Like many twosomes, they enjoyed a remarkable knack for maintaining equilibrium. When one despaired, say, over being dead, the other extolled the silver lining of not having to put up with telemarketers. And when the other grew angry about street noise, for instance, the first might gently remind about the pleasures afforded by being able to stroll a museum.

  They came up with a system of rituals and boundaries. Donald never eavesdropped on Eve’s telephone conversations; she picked up a tattered book of his early essays at the Strand. He stifled complaint when she pulled out the odd mystery; she agreed to take dictation of his unfinished works. They were something like an old married couple, without the fights over sex and money.

  There were, however, a couple of problems with their arrangement. Anything she wanted to keep private, Eve could think about only when she was out of the apartment. When she found herself unable to stop mulling something delicate while at home, she’d pick up a book or magazine and read it aloud, silencing her inner monologue. Living this way was a bit like keeping two overlarge pancakes separated on a grill, and it didn’t always work. The whole situation would have exhausted her utterly except that Donald spent so much time “away.” Perhaps he slept or perhaps he traveled, but either way he was “gone” much of the time.

  Another snag was that Eve could never invite anyone over. Not that she’d had occasion to yet. But her dearest wish was to have a gang of New York friends, like her mother had. And when she finally did, well, she could hardly host a cocktail party or dinner. If she explained about Donald, her guests would think she was crazy. If they actually “met” him, they’d call the police or an exorcist or something. As long as she lived in this apartment, Eve knew, she would be in some sense isolated from the city she had come so far to be part of. But until she had a good bit more money saved up, she wouldn’t be able to move out.

  “What is that?!” Donald yelled suddenly. Startled, Eve almost fell off her bar stool. Her drink swirled dangerously close to the edge of the glass.

  “What’s what?” she asked, her heart beating fast.

  “The thing you’ve brought into this apartment.”

  For a moment, Eve had no idea what he was talking about. Then she remembered. “You mean the puppy?” She looked around but the dog was hiding.

  “ ‘You mean the puppy?’ ” Donald repeated, his tone dripping with mockery. “I mean whatever thing it is that’s introduced another set of—albeit rudimentary—brainwaves to this space. They’ve completely thrown me off. I’ve had a killer time getting through.”

  “I’m sorry. I had no idea she’d present a problem.” Eve explained about the hockey boys and their untimely exit. “She needs a home. Please don’t be difficult about this.” Donald paused, and Eve thought her bid for sympathy had worked.

  “It’s not enough that I departed the world at a young age.…” He began what promised to be a classic tirade, which would inevitably include references to rejections from various literary magazines and non-wins of prizes. Several minutes later he concluded, “… but then I opened my home to you as well. And now this.”

  Eve wanted to remind him that it was a real estate broker who’d “opened his home,” and that without her, he’d never finish his stupid stories. But she was feeling generous after her successful afternoon, so she opted for conciliation. “No doubt about it, you’ve faced more than your share of injustices. So why don’t we do a little dictation now? About ‘The Handbag That Swallowed Midtown’ or whatever.”

  “I am not fooled. And I am not mollified. But luckily for you, I am eager to get back to my work.” Donald’s narcissism made him an easy mark for a gambit like this. “We’ll get back to the mutt later. But for now, let me prepare myself and we’ll begin.” Several moments of s
ilence followed, during which Eve found the notepad she’d been using for their work. She placed it on the bar and waited. Finally, he began. “The glove was thick and snappy, like a surgeon’s. It stretched and loomed, high above Gotham.…”

  As she scribbled, Eve wondered if the story was as odd as it appeared or whether she was taking it down wrong. The words on the page looked at each other as if even they knew they didn’t belong together. She was just about to interrupt when the puppy made a noise. The sound began in the back of her throat, a low, pained murmur. Eve stiffened.

  Donald, of course, was unaware of anything but his own brilliance. “… The glove’s fingers are bulbous, dangling ominously above the Chrysler Building.…”

  “Hang on a moment—”

  The dog’s mewling grew more pained and intense. Eve knelt down on the floor, trying to tune out Donald and soothe her.

  “I know, I know, you’re in a new place and it’s scary.…”

  “… The citizens of New York look up to the sky, wondering if the glove came from Bloomingdale’s.…”

  “Donald, please. Give me a moment.”

  Eve reached out to pet the dog but she leapt away, hitting her head on the coffee table. Her yelp filled the room. “Arauuu!”

  “Oh, sweetheart. Let me see what’s wrong—”

  “—The glove is expanding, as though someone is blowing into it. Now it covers Central Park, now the Upper West Side—”

  “Shhhh.”

  As Eve reached out again, the dog threw her neck back like a coyote under a full moon. There was a dramatic pause before she let out a heartbreaking yowl. Perhaps it was a delayed reaction to losing the only family she’d ever known, if four sloppy, thoughtless boys counted as family.