A Reunion Of Ghosts: A Novel

by Judith Claire Mitchell

  “Are you hungry?” he asked. “You’re staying for dinner, right?”

  During dinner—pizza, delivered to the door—we were persuaded to stay overnight. We would wear Sharon and Margo’s old nightgowns. In the morning we’d avail ourselves of their old underwear, socks, whatever we needed. We had to say yes, Danny told us. He had that gig in Hicksville in a few hours. If we didn’t stay with Violet, he didn’t know what he was going to do.

  More than once that day we’d whispered to one another the same jokey complaint: staying in the city and preparing for our suicides would have been more fun than being with Violet. “I want to go home this instant,” she repeated throughout the day. She was saying it now as her pizza grew cold and congealed. “I want to go home.” None of us—not even Violet—could say which home she had in mind. Danny tried to get her into the car, to head to the nursing home. She wouldn’t go. Danny tried to call the nursing home, say she would be spending the night here. She started the chanting: No, no, I don’t want to stay here. I want to go home. “Do you mean our home?” Lady asked and Violet pounded the table. “Just take me home,” she said, spitting each word.

  After a while you just had to make a decision for her. “All right,” Lady said. “We’ll stay with her tonight,” and Danny ran to her, hugged her.

  It was 7:00 p.m. when he began loading amps into the rusty old VW bus he used for his shows. Vee had already gone to sleep in Margo’s old bed, Margo’s old nightgown. “I don’t suppose one of you wants to come hear me?” Danny asked Lady and Delph.

  “Yes,” Lady said. “Delph wants to.”

  “No, I don’t,” Delph said.

  “Take Delph with you,” Lady said. “Contrary to popular belief, she’s a terrible nurse.”

  In Hicksville, Danny Smoke performed on a rough-hewn platform that passed for a stage, his act a frenetic three-hour set of folk songs and oldies, songs that seemed to have no relationship to one another except for the nostalgia they provoked. Seated on a high stool, leaning into a standing gooseneck mike, he played and sang without break, as sweat rivuleted down his face and the middle-aged audience, fat-bellied men and deliberately withered women, all of them dressed in Married to the Mob couture, danced and sang along.

  The name of the place was Freddie’s. It was a dive bar that called itself a pub. Long wooden tables and uncomfortable bench seats. Red and green Christmas lights from last winter swagged along the walls, dusty plastic plants hanging from a dropped ceiling. Delph hid at the corner of the bar, one of those fake plants directly over her head. She was the only person in the entire place who wasn’t dancing, the only customer who wasn’t swilling cheap beer from the bottle.

  She was pretty sure she was the only person in the place listening to the words of the songs Danny was singing. Danny sang a song about a broken heart. He sang a song about the Mississippi River. He sang a song about evading the law. It didn’t matter what he sang. He played every song with the same upbeat tempo, the very same beat. The dancers gyrated and they shouted along with him, a happy, drunken braying. They knew all the lyrics. They just didn’t seem to know what any of the lyrics meant. Danny sang a song about the YMCA, and the pop tune lost all its innuendo, became a song about actually taking a room at the Y. The middle-aged dancers threw their arms in the air, turned their bodies into hip-swiveling Ys, as perhaps they had done thirty years ago in their parents’ refinished basements when the song first came out. Or maybe as they did in discos. Although, Delph is certain, not in the same kind of discos where she and her friends were also dancing to this song, also throwing their arms up in the air.

  There had been elation and energy in those clubs, too, the gay bars in New York in the 1970s, but now, looking back, she had a clearer perspective; she knew—everyone knew—that the elation had been one click away from despair and disaster. Step outside the club, say good night, walk away from the line—even at three in the morning, there’d be a long line—and there was danger. Even for her, though not as much for her. As she walked, head down, to a street where there might be a cab, she’d feared muggers, rapists, but she’d never had to fear simply bumping into someone she knew. And yes, of course, she feared the plague, used to run her eyes and, when he’d let her, her fingers over Joshua’s body looking for lesions, touching them, wishing some sort of magic would emanate from her fingertips, erase them, cure him—but her fear had not been anything like Joshua’s fear. Delph knew the plague would not be the cause of her own death.

  Now in Freddie’s, it dawns on her that begging Joshua to stay with her, to sleep with her just once—maybe that had been her first attempt at suicide. If Joshua were going to die, she would die with him. Cause of death: love. She would die from what Joshua was dying from. She would be Romeo chugging the poison. Of course, Joshua hadn’t seen it the same way. He wouldn’t sleep with her when he was healthy; he certainly wasn’t going to sleep with her sick. Thinking back, she can almost understand why he’d preferred to spend his last months with his thickheaded, bigoted, withholding parents than with her and her tears and her mewling and pleading and clinging. The frosty air in that midwestern home of his must have been refreshing.

  Here, at Freddie’s, no one’s in danger. These are white, middle-class suburbanites. Maybe they’re in danger of heart disease. Maybe diabetes, or living the unexamined life. But plague? No, not plague. By having your life ruined by someone seeing you here? By fucking someone you love or like or who you just feel like fucking? Death by fucking? No, none of that for this crowd.

  Danny sang the last song of the night—“Goodnight Irene,” predictably enough—and the sticky dancers looped their arms around each other’s shoulders, held each other close, and swayed, shouting the chorus as if it were their college fight song rather than a bluesy lament. The bigger men, the drunkest women, swayed so aggressively that the row of singers, like a row of dominoes, nearly toppled to the ground.

  And then it was done. Danny stood, bowed, held his guitar aloft. The crowd cheered as if they’d witnessed a performance by Caruso, Pavarotti, a Beatles reunion with John showing up.

  Delph ordered a fresh drink as the crowd shambled out the door. The couples—and they were almost all couples—would drive home to their own split-levels, to their sleeping kids, sleeping babysitters. They would drive drunk, convinced that nothing bad would happen to any of them, not for many, many years, and, Delph suspected, for the most part they’d be proven correct.

  “That last song you sang,” Delph said to Danny, when he joined her at the bar,

  “‘Goodnight Irene.’” He sang the title.

  “Do you think they understand what it’s about?” she asked.

  “It’s about lost love,” Danny said.

  “It’s about a gambler who wants to kill himself. The last song of the night is about despair and suicide.”

  “Yeah, but no one cares what it’s about,” the guy behind the bar said. This was Freddie, the owner. He’d brought three shot glasses and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. “None of them want to kill themselves any more than any of them want to shimmy like their sister Kate.”

  Freddie was older than Danny and Delph, maybe in his fifties, maybe his sixties. His hair was silver and disheveled, standing up as if he’d just run his fingers through it. His face was shadowed in the dim light, his cheekbones prominent, his jaw aggressive and dimpled. Once, perhaps thirty years ago, he’d been handsome.

  He poured each of them a shot.

  “My cousin Delph,” Danny said. “From the city.”

  “Cousin? Too bad. I thought maybe you’d finally gotten over what’s-her-face.”

  “I am over what’s-her-face. It’s just, how am I supposed to meet anyone new when I spend my weekends in this dump? I need to move to New York City. No decent single people live on the Island.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “You’re divorced. You’ve got kids. You’re an alte cocker. It’s different for you.” Danny slapped the bar with his palms. “I’m going to ch
ange and load the van.”

  Delph had assumed Freddie would wander off, wash some glasses, pick up the wet bills left behind on the bartop. But he stayed by her. “I’m in the city plenty and it’s just as lonely there as anywhere else,” he said. “Am I right?”

  She nodded.

  “What the hell,” he said. “We’re all doomed no matter what songs we sing.”

  He seemed to want her to say something. “That’s depressing,” she said.

  “Alcohol’s a depressant,” said Freddie. “My business is giving depressed people something guaranteed to make them more depressed.” He reached under the bar, handed her a card. On one side the name of the bar, his own name, a phone number. On the other side, the number of a suicide hotline.

  “Wow,” Delph said.

  He turned the card to his own info. “Call me next time you’re in town,” he said.

  “I’m going back to the city tomorrow.”

  “Hold on to it, then, for next time.” When she took out her wallet to pay for her drinks, he scoffed. “When you’re in my place,” he said, “I take care of you.”

  For a moment she’d forgotten who she was, that there would not be a next time. She put the card in her wallet. She said, “Well, in that case, I guess I’ll have one for the road.”

  It was two in the morning when Danny and Delph drove off in the van. Delph could see the surface of the road through the holes in the floor by her feet.

  Danny tried to drive slowly to compensate for how drunk he was.

  “You drink like an Alter,” Delph said.

  “You guys are obsessed with the Alters,” said Danny. “I think I have more Smoke DNA than Alter DNA. I think I drink like a Smoke.”

  “It’s a weird name, Smoke.”

  “It’s the Ellis Island version of the German name Schmuck. I shit you not.” He grinned. “Think about it,” he said. “You came this close to being adopted by a bunch of Schmucks.”

  “God bless the bureaucrats at Ellis Island,” she said.

  The van moseyed along Old Country Road, a main thoroughfare, four lanes. Car dealers and burger joints. A gas station on every corner, and, look—it’s the Parkway Diner from that old Billy Joel song.

  Old Country Road. Once, she supposed, it was a single lane, all packed dirt and tufts of wayward grass. Long before Billy Joel began singing about Long Island, Walt Whitman’s father must have driven a cart filled with raw lumber along this road.

  “Did Freddie ask you out?” Danny said.

  “He did, I think. Why? Does he ask every woman out?”

  “No. Not at all. You must be his type.”

  “Poor Freddie,” she said. “Me as his type.”

  “Stop fishing,” Danny said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, come on. Men must ask you out all the time.”

  She was tempted to pull down the visor, peer at herself in the vanity mirror. She’d been completely at ease with Danny, fairly at ease with Freddie. Why? Was Julie Smoke more outgoing than Delph Alter? Was Julie Smoke prettier? Maybe Sharon and Margo had passed along some beauty tips to Julie that Lady and Vee never mentioned to Delph.

  She decided to nudge the subject away from herself. “Was your school life hell?” she asked. A shrimp named Schmuck, she thought. Jesus.

  He laughed. “No. Was yours?”

  “Of course. I was a very strange kid. I was withdrawn and gnomish.”

  “I wasn’t. I was on the small side, yeah, but I was a normal kid. I always had a gang of friends. I always had a girlfriend. I always had music.”

  He made and repaired stringed instruments. His studio was in the basement of his house. That was his real job, the one that supported him. Not that he was getting rich off it, either. But after dinner, before he and Delph headed out to the pub, he’d showed her a mandolin he was working on. “Mandolins and ukuleles,” he’d said. “They’re the big sellers these days. Old rich guys like them for some reason.”

  Now he said, “The trick for me was not letting the world tell me who I was. It’s how I got into my business. The world wanted me to buy a short man’s guitar. That meant a kid’s guitar. I was, fuck that. I wanted a badass guitar. I wanted a one hundred percent guitar, not a three-quarters guitar. So my dad commissioned a custom job. I hung out with the guy while he made it. Then I just kept hanging out there. He taught me the craft. I still have that guitar. I’ll show it to you when we get home. I still play it from time to time. It’s got tall frets to compensate for the reduced scale length. It’s got a narrow neck so I could reach around to do thumb cords, but it’s not neck-heavy because, the guy said, ‘Sometimes you’ll want to throw it around some, and you don’t want to leave broken peg heads all over the stage.’” He laughed. “I was fifteen. Already as tall as I was going to get. Or as short as I was going to stay. But a badass guitar adds a good six or seven inches to a kid in high school.”

  She didn’t know what to say to all the peg heads this and pedal boards that. She was fairly sure that if she’d walked through the halls of junior high school with a guitar, badass or otherwise, someone would have taken it from her and bashed it against a wall.

  “It must have been expensive,” she said. “A custom-made guitar.”

  “He did okay, my dad. He was a Wall Street guy. But a good Wall Street guy. I wish you could’ve known him.”

  He used to pick me up when I cried, she thought. She tried to imagine herself rocked in the arms of burly Jack Smoke, she, the size of a ukulele, a mandolin.

  They’d just left Hicksville, a sign said. She thought: Hicks’ Ville. As in, you won’t meet a single sophisticated person within our borders. Now they were still on Old Country Road, but in a town called Plainview. Plain View, as in, nothing to look at here.

  She, who almost always had a drink in her hand but who never got more than a mild buzz, was drunk now. Those last few shots of Jack had pushed her over. What if, she thought, but then she couldn’t remember what she wanted to think about. The phrase just repeated in her head. What if, what if, what if . . .

  Now they were in Huntington, almost home, and traveling down a different street, a narrow street, an actual old country road. The houses looked like nineteenth-century farmhouses. The trees were thick, both in the girth of their trunks and their proximity to one another.

  “Nice moon,” Danny said, and it was, low and smudged, as if someone had reached up and rubbed it with the pad of her thumb, the way a mother might rub a spot of her lipstick off her child’s cheek.

  “Are we going straight home?”

  “We don’t have to. We could do something. If you want to know the truth, I never go straight home after a gig.”

  “Let’s do whatever you usually do.”

  The dark road ended at a six-lane state highway, a retail strip called Walt Whitman Road. “It makes you want to cry, doesn’t it?” she said of the name. But Danny made a sharp turn right just before the highway, and they were on Old Walt Whitman Road instead, and this road was much better, more what you’d want a road named after a poet to look like.

  Danny parked by a broken-down house. The paint was peeling, the roof staved in near the disintegrated chimney. The railings by the front doorstep were rotted through.

  “Speaking of wanting to cry,” Danny said exuberantly, “here’s Old Walt’s birthplace.” He reached across her, popped open the glove box, removed a silver flask. “I love the quiet after all the noise of Freddie’s,” he said.

  Delph wasn’t sure how he could call this quiet. It seemed to her there was a racket out there: screeching owls and the babylike screams of what Danny promised her was only a fox, and, one road over, semis speeding past the malls and all-night diners. Still, she nodded; why not agree? She was equally agreeable about accepting the flask when he passed it to her. More bourbon. Danny reclined his seat all the way back, and she did that too. “And the stars,” Danny said. “I love the stars.” She looked up through the windshield. The grimy veil that falls over the
city sky at night didn’t extend to this part of the world. She located the Big Dipper. It was the only constellation she could identify under any circumstances, but here she couldn’t possibly miss it.

  “There aren’t any stars in the city,” she said.

  “There probably are.”

  “No,” she said. “They’ve left. Light flight.”

  “You see that big shrub by the front door?” Danny said. “That lilac? You know who pruned it back this year? And every year before that?”

  “Whitman’s ghost?”

  “Only if I’m Walt reincarnated. I’m out here every fall, three in the morning with my clippers. How can you not? I know that nobody gives a fuck about this place, but I don’t understand how you can let the goddamn lilac bush by Walt Whitman’s front door go to hell.”

  “By his dooryard,” she said to let him know she knew the poem, that she got it. “Do you read a lot of poetry?” she asked.

  “I don’t read any poetry. Who reads poetry? Although,” he said, “sometimes I write it. It’s just that Walt is the hometown hero. Whitman and the guy who played the Karate Kid. That’s pretty much it for the Huntington hall of fame.”

  “There’s you. Pub singer and mandolin maker.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I used to write my own songs. I had a band. We did some recordings, some touring. Now I go from dive to dive, and I sing shit like ‘YMCA.’ I tell myself there are worse ways to live one’s life than to make guitars by day and play music by night. I tell myself that anything that leads to more strumming and singing and dancing in this godforsaken world can’t be all bad. Then I wonder if putting ‘YMCA’ into the environment night after night doesn’t constitute some virulent form of air pollution.”

  “‘YMCA’ is a great song,” she said. “It’s catchy. Not exactly a crime against humanity.” She couldn’t help it. She had to sing a few lines. It was that kind of song. And maybe she was showing off a little, the way he had with the beer and the bottle cap.