My Ghosts

by Mary Swan

  Robbie’s house is in the opposite direction, but this morning I followed the sound of hammer blows to the place where the new inn, huge and modern, is rising from the ashes of the Lakeview Hotel. The old Lakeview burned to the ground one January night, burned so fiercely that even if the lines hadn’t been frozen, people doubt that much could have been saved. A bitter smell lingered all winter, the blackened mess softened by falling snow. Everyone knows what happened and who was behind it; cheaper to rebuild than repair, especially with the insurance money. There was an investigation of sorts, but of course nothing could be proved.

  Maybe it wouldn’t have happened, if I’d done what Robbie and Edie thought I should and tried to fight the will. Or maybe I’d have burned up with it, maybe it was lucky that I didn’t have the heart. I know they were right about the principle, and there were others in town who made a point of saying the same, which was maybe kind of them. Whatever they’ve thought and said about me, it seems they count me as belonging, compared to some slicker from the city. Though I’m sure there would have been muttering too, if the hotel had come to me. That’s just how people are, and I’m sure not only here.

  This morning I found it hard to remember the old hotel, looking at the high, new walls, the workmen moving in and out of the spaces where doors and windows will be. I tried to picture the dove-grey paint, the shady wraparound veranda, but the sun was bright, daubs of colour everywhere. A splash of yellow on a ladder, the back of a man at a sawhorse, his blue shirt criss-crossed by bright red suspenders, and I thought of a double exposure in a photograph, that can happen by accident or design. A ghostly image that doesn’t belong, mixed up with the one that does, past and present together in a way, and hard to tell which is which. I thought of how it is with a child you’ve watched grow, or a person you haven’t seen for years, how you still know them, and they seem to trail all their ages with them.

  Once thoughts like that get going they roll like waves and can be just as impossible to stop. This morning, by the spot where the Lakeview once was, those thoughts led me to Angus, and I remembered a time when we sat together near those old beach steps, in the late summer dark. We were talking about similar things, I suppose, about changes and the way the edges of the town were spreading out, new houses where there’d been nothing but bush and open fields. Angus said lately he’d noticed that when he gave directions from the station, they were based on where things used to be. Turn right where the big maple was, go past the corner where MacArthur had his store, left before the old iron footbridge. He said maybe he had a ghost town in his head, an ideal one, and if he could put together all the places that came into his mind, from their different times, he could imagine himself walking down its streets, maybe we both could. Remembering that, how I missed him. I never had the right, but I always did.

  It was luck or chance that brought me to Inverhaven all those years ago, and the same that I walked through the door of the Lakeview Hotel when I did, with my story about hard times, a husband lost to a fever. I’m sure Maggie didn’t believe a word, but the sun and melting snow that day had her in a panic. A reminder that spring was near, that she’d fired the last two women for miles around who were willing to work for her and now had no one to help get the place ready for the coming season, to take care of the rooms, serve the meals. I said that if she had a bed I would start at first light, and I made myself useful enough in the coming weeks that when the pains came she sent for the midwife, and there was never any question but that Robbie and I would stay.

  Maggie was difficult, with her moods and her rages, but I’d known much worse, and once I understood that there was no point in trying to please her we went along all right. She said a crying baby would disturb the guests, so Robbie and I lived in the two-room cottage she owned nearby, and that suited me very well. Her husband, Reuben, was as sweet as she was sour, just tilting his head and smiling when she called him an old fool, and worse. That only made her wilder, which I came to see he knew very well. People said that deep down they were devoted, the complaining and name-calling just their way, but I think that says more about what people need to believe. It’s harder, after all, to accept that things can be exactly as they seem, that there’s nothing gentle beneath harsh words, beneath cruelty.

  Reuben, I learned, was a man of sudden enthusiasms, and he always plunged right in. Perhaps that’s what happened when he met Maggie, one October when his ship was storm-stayed, or perhaps it was as she often said, that he took advantage, that all he wanted was an easier life. Fool’s Folly is what she called the shed out back that was filled with things he’d moved on from. Curling rocks and bicycle wheels, a white-painted board covered with pinned butterflies, their proper names written crookedly beneath. In one corner there was a heavy wooden easel, a floppy kind of hat draped over the top, and stacks of paintings. Strange, wobbly portraits of Maggie, of the fat orange cat that slept in the doorway, and others with streaks and blobs of colour that were meant to be sunsets over the lake. They were dreadful, Maggie was right about that, like something a blind person might do. I used to think it would be hard to be like Reuben, with the desire to do so many things, but no knack at all. But perhaps he didn’t think like that, just set his failures aside and moved on to something new.

  The year before Robbie started school it was photography Reuben was keen on, and he bought a copy of Bayley’s book and read about plates and lenses, focal lengths and development processes, things I’d learned from watching Sam years before, and learned for myself by trying them out, without ever knowing there were rules all written down. Reuben made a list from the book and cleared out the Folly to use as a darkroom, and I told him I could help him with that. It surprised me, how quickly it came back, once I stopped trying to understand the long sentences he was reading out, and surrendered to the movements my body remembered. The gentle tipping of the bath and the mixing and pouring, and along with it the feeling of the moment when the image began to appear, the rhyme I used to say to myself, so I would know exactly when to pluck it out.

  Reuben had a passing idea, and it was a good one, that we would take photographs of the summer guests, and views of the lake and the town, and offer them for sale at the front desk. His pictures never turned out well, for all his strict measuring and timing, and he’d soon decided that photography wasn’t really for him either. By the end of the season he’d bought himself a new banjo, and grown the fingernails on his right hand long, strange crooning and plucking sounds slipping under the kitchen door, when all the guests were asleep. He gave me everything, his camera and chemicals, all the tools and the darkroom to use; I carried on and it filled a space I’d been too busy to know was there.

  What Reuben could do was cook, though he didn’t see that as anything special. He said he’d learned when he worked the lake boats. Being in his kitchen was like watching some kind of dance, a nudge here and a shake there, cracked eggs falling golden into a mound of flour. Sauces and pastries and stews, all made up out of his head. Robbie became his taster, sitting on top of the table, with a too-big apron wrapped around; More salt, may have been the first sentence he said. Even when rooms were empty, because of the weather or the season, people came from all over to the dining room, and once a lawyer from the city tried to persuade Reuben to come and be his chef, but Reuben said he was fine where he was. Said he knew he was right where he belonged.

  The other thing left over from those lake boats was the drinking, of course; he stayed sober at the hotel, but every so often he’d be gone for hours or days, coming back with rumpled clothes and his face still sloppy and loose. One of those times he stepped off the sidewalk and into the path of Hump Waller, who was driving too fast through town, showing off his new Ford. “Old fool,” was all Maggie said when they told her. But she gave him a good funeral and wake, with fiddling and special cakes brought in that everyone said weren’t a patch on his. Maybe that was the beginning; in the months and years that came after, Maggie seemed to lose herself in food, dreaming up d
ishes and menus, and prowling the kitchen in the middle of the night, leaving crumb-strewn plates for the new cook to find. She’d never been a small woman, but she became enormous, rarely moving from her chair behind the front desk.

  Things had already been changing, but they began to slide faster, and new places that opened with their arranged picnics and entertainments, their private baths, drew away more and more of the summer guests. The yearly lick of paint couldn’t hide the way the Lakeview was crumbling, and though the running of it now fell mostly to me I was getting not much more than my keep. “Don’t fret, it will all be yours when I go,” Maggie said, closing her mouth over a custard-filled spoon, her eyes shut and a look of pure bliss on her face. And though I didn’t wish her ill, not really, there were plans in my head when I lay down to sleep those nights, back in a room on the second floor, because we’d had to sell the cottage I’d come to think of as mine.

  When she did go, Maggie dropped to the floor with a crash that made the room keys rattle on their hooks. “Dead as a doornail,” the cook said, when he came running, but we sent for the doctor anyway. It took the three of us to roll her over; I closed her eyes and wiped the smear of jam from her cheek. When the undertaker’s men came they had to tie her to an old door and push and slide her out and down the top steps, to where the wagon was pulled up close, and she was laughing somewhere, I know, watching those strong men strain.

  I don’t think she’d be laughing at me, though, for all her temper and meanness; I don’t think she lied, or dangled owning the Lakeview as a way to take advantage. But I think that when it came to putting it on paper, she couldn’t do it. In the end I think she realized that family is family, even if it meant a great-nephew she’d never met. I would have understood that if she’d told me, and I wonder if she was planning to; she was grumpier than usual near the end and maybe that was why. The last photograph I took of her was on the veranda and it’s a good one, though I never would have shown her. Just her head, half turned, and all her chins rolling, her mouth open in a giant O as she shouts through the open door at the poor kitchen girl, who has just dropped a tray of clean cutlery with a terrible clatter and clang.

  I’ve walked the shore with Robbie and I’ve walked it more often by myself, and I don’t know if it takes something from me or gives, that changing water, that sky, but it leaves me soothed, and feeling able to meet anything that might come. This morning, though, I was restless and jagged-edged; I left the Lakeview behind and kept walking down one street and another, and I had the strangest feeling that I was passing pieces of myself, that they were all falling into step behind me, trailing along, and if I turned and opened my arms, we’d all stutter and shift together. Thinking about that I came close to bumping into a lamppost at the end of the main street, and I tried to remember to keep turning my head as I walked, the way the doctor had told me.

  It was Edie who first noticed the way I knocked the side of the doorway, walking through, kept banging my hip on table corners. She thought it was something more than not paying attention and brought me to Dr. Jarrow’s office, stayed in the room while he shone a light in my eyes, his own big and close. He made some kind of measurements and had me follow his moving finger, held up like someone saying Wait, saying No. I’d thought I might come away with some tablets or a pair of spectacles, but instead it was an appointment with a surgeon in the city and strange exercises to do in the meantime, three times a day sitting straight in a chair, my fingers making slow circles on my closed eyelids.

  I said I would go on my own to the surgeon, but Edie came with me; she can be a little bossy but I was glad of it in the end, the way she knew where to go, and guided me across streets filled with cars and trams and people in such a hurry. Edie was the first married woman in Inverhaven to bob her hair, to wear her skirts shorter, and she fit right in on those city streets, while I felt like someone who belonged to another time. She’d planned to be a doctor, before the war and all that came with it, and as we walked by the University she pointed out buildings where she’d taken her classes, the boarding house where she’d stayed, and the tailor shop on the corner that had once been a tea room where students gathered and argued and laughed. A map in her head, too, of parts of her life, and places where it might have veered in a different direction.

  The surgeon said I was lucky, that I’d lost quite a bit at the edges but the centre of my vision was still fairly good; he said some people have the opposite, and imagine how strange that would be. Trying to move through a world with a big smudge at the centre, wherever you look, guessing at what you’re seeing by the edges around it. He told me it comes with age, this glaucoma, something to do with pressures and fluids; he said that it runs in families and he asked about my mother, but of course I had no idea. She was young when I last saw her, though I don’t know how young. Whatever came after I’m sure she never sat on a stool in a white room, while a man with clean hands touched her face.

  I needed an operation, the surgeon said, but apparently it was quite a simple one, involving some cutting that would produce a scar. He said that although it might seem odd, making that deliberate scar somehow made things better. While he explained it to Edie I thought about that; it did seem odd, and I’ve never noticed that the scars I already have do anything like. Edie and the doctor talked about the details of the operation, how long it would take—not long—and the care I’d need after. “She lives with us,” Edie said, “so that won’t be a problem.” Then he took out his calendar and when I said, “What happens if I don’t have the operation?” they both looked startled, as if I’d vanished at the edge of their vision too. “You’ll go blind, is what,” the surgeon said, and he said it again when we left. Said it would only get worse, so I’d best make my mind up soon. And I said that I would, and we went back to the shouting streets.

  People say that if one sense goes, another becomes stronger to replace it, but I don’t think it’s just that; I’m certain the world is noisier than it ever has been. There must have been a time, long ago, when the new sound of a train whistle made people start and complain, but now everything makes a racket. Typewriters clatter from offices along the main street and telephone bells ring out, even from quieter ones. Motor cars sputter and cough and roar, and I’m sure voices are louder too, because of it. When I say things like that, Robbie says I sound like a grumpy old woman. He says progress is progress, that I can’t pick and choose, and reminds me how pleased I am with my new hand cameras; even if I still prefer plates I have to admit that rolled films are so much lighter to carry around, the tank so much easier for developing.

  Robbie had other plans before the war, two-handed plans to be an operator in the city or a train engineer. But people say he’s a very good teacher, and the boys in the Science Club he started are always stopping him on the street to talk about waves and antennas. He says what can be wrong with discoveries, and who cares about giving up a little silence, and I pretend to give him a swat. “You and your spaceships,” I say, remembering the books he read when he got too old for tucking in. Mechanical monsters and strange beings that lived on Mars and the moon, machines that moved like men and could almost think. “It will happen,” he used to say, as if it was something to be welcomed. So like his father, who wasn’t afraid of anything changing except, of course, his easy life.

  It never happened but I used to think about it sometimes, especially in summer when there were visitors in all the hotels, strolling and eating ice cream and splashing in the lake. Sam might have come to Inverhaven, with the wife I’d heard he’d married, and he and Robbie might have passed each other on the busy main street, or even in the doorway of the hotel, and Robbie had such a look of him that if that had happened they would have had to recognize each other. My son would have known me for a liar, even about his father’s name, and who knows what Sam might have done, face to face with a living boy, instead of the idea of one. Something it seemed he had thought of as another mess for me to take care of, the way I used to wash his soiled
shirts and sweep up the crumbs he scattered.

  Times I fretted about that, I reminded myself of how often I’ve heard people say that their photograph doesn’t look anything like them; perhaps it’s not so easy, after all, to recognize yourself, let alone in other people. The shutter falls and captures one exact moment instead of the one just before or after, and I suppose that a photograph traps a person, as surely as a body frozen in ice. Chance imprisons them, in a way, and someone who didn’t know them would think they always smiled just like that, wore their hair that way, had that mark, whatever it was, on their chin.

  Perhaps it’s something to do with that, the reason people were so drawn to moving pictures. In the beginning, I mean, before they were made-up stories. The idea that you were seeing something that was more real, a train chugging in or people leaving a factory, even though they were things you hadn’t given a thought to, all the times you’d seen them in life. I wasn’t curious enough to make the trip to the city, but I paid my ten cents and joined the queue when a cinematograph was set up here, during the celebrations for the new century. Real people doing real things but disappearing so quickly, their jerky movements carrying them away to one side or another. Glimpses, but no one to recognize, and when we came out, blinking, into the day, I knew what the little girl in front of me meant when she said, “Why wouldn’t it slow down?”

  With what we see now it’s funny to think how fascinated people were by those first shows. Robbie and Edie are mad for the movies, like most people here, and my grandsons, of course, who have never known a world without them. I do go sometimes, especially when there are real things to see, a trip through Japan, or Princess Mary’s wedding. But I don’t have much interest in the ones that are all pie-in-the-face, or the love stories with penniless girls and wealthy lords. Besides, the way Robbie explained it, it’s all a trick, and I don’t mean just the miniature castles and painted scenery, things Edie reads about in her magazines. Even with the fastest of shutters there are still gaps, still lost moments, and there’s a name for it, though I forget what it is. The way our minds fool our eyes and we don’t notice those gaps, the way we see what we expect or want to see. Like the audience that gasps at an illusionist floating in the air, like an old woman looking in a mirror. Like the people who complain about their photographs, forgetting or ignoring the fact that in that instant they did look exactly like that, and that instant is part of them too.