Ghost Town

by Patrick Mcgrath

  It was not all. The room was very warm, for a coal fire was burning and the windows had been kept closed all day; the curtains were drawn. Charlotte silently took the housemaid’s place at the bedside, while Hester and Sarah stood at the foot of the bed, murmuring with sympathy as Charlotte dabbed at their brother’s damp forehead.

  All at once Hester uttered a scream and her hands flew to her face. Charlotte stood up and moved rapidly backwards, knocking over the chair. Sarah clutched Hester’s arm and all three stared at the bed. Julius had sat up, but as far as the sisters were concerned—and they remained unshakeable on this till the end of their days—it was not him. They could never speak rationally about what it was they saw in Julius’ bed that day—there was a creature, they said, and there was a smell, too, a strong smell, which they associated with raw meat and stables, and something else which they could not identify, something quite horrid—and they shrank back against the bedroom door where they clung together, open-mouthed. Apparently their brother, or whatever it was he had turned into, then began chanting at them, blasphemy and obscenity!

  —Julius! screamed Charlotte.

  The sound of his own name seems to have penetrated the boy’s inflamed brain, for the fit—if that is what it was—passed off as suddenly as it came. He fell back on his pillows in a dead faint, and when Charlotte cautiously approached the bed he was fast asleep. Hester pulled back the curtains and flung open the window, and then sank sobbing onto a chair. Julius remained asleep for several hours more. The doctor was again summoned, and having briefly examined the unconscious boy announced that the fever had broken just as he had predicted it would. The doctor dismissed all talk of a “creature,” but the sisters nonetheless insisted that what they had seen in the bed was not their brother.

  An account of all this was given to Noah when he arrived back at Waverley Place in the late afternoon. He was, we may imagine, greatly disturbed, though he too gave no credence to his daughters’ conviction that something else had been in Julius’ bed. He looked in on the boy and found him still sleeping. He then retired to his library, instructing Quentin that he would not go down for dinner, but that when a certain gentleman called at the house later in the evening he was to be shown straight up.

  It was after nine when a large man turned on to their block from Sixth Avenue, came striding along the street in the last of the twilight and then up the steps to the door. Quentin at once admitted him.

  —I have come to see Noah van Horn, he boomed.

  Hester and Sarah had the parlor door slightly ajar, and listened as Quentin murmured to the stranger to please come this way. They peeped out to see the broad back ascending the stairs behind the butler, and then the library door opening at the top, and then they heard their father’s voice. The library door closed and Quentin descended the stairs. The sisters stood in the hall with eager faces and silently asked—who? But the butler only lifted his hands, he did not know either.

  That certain gentleman was of course Jerome Brook Franklin. It is my belief that Noah’s intention was to give him a good cigar and tell him, man to man, that Annie Kelly was no good for his boy and had been paid to go away. I see Noah with a glass of brandy, his slippered feet crossed on the head of the grizzly, his eyes on the ceiling as he then speaks of the tour of Europe he intends to make when his son is a little older. He perhaps hints that a tutor will be required for Julius, a man of sound artistic judgment and a knowledge of European art both ancient and modern—and here he casts a keen glance at his guest, knowing, I suppose, that it has always been in the nature of artists to seek patronage, and having found it to cling to it for dear life, for patronage means dear life to a man who wishes only to paint pictures all day—and in this way he hopes to acquire Jerome Brook Franklin, just as he was accustomed to acquire shipments of cotton or parcels of land or any other commodity to which he took a fancy. And why? Because if questions were to be raised about Annie Kelly’s disappearance, he had to have the painter in the fold.

  The door to the library was on a landing one flight up from the hall. An hour later, as Noah emerged with the painter and prepared to descend—I assume a mutually satisfactory agreement had been reached—a bedroom door opened on the floor above. The wall lamps were giving out only a low, flickering flame as the two men paused murmuring at the top of the stairs.

  All at once something was flying down upon them and neither man had time properly to understand what was happening. Then my grandfather was tumbling down the stairs, and Noah was shouting, and Quentin ran up from the basement as Hester and Sarah spilled out of their parlor and screamed to see their brother, or the thing he had become, rather—the thing in the bed—stabbing at a portly man in a loud suit as they struggled violently on the hall floor. Quentin managed to pull him off and hold him back as Jerome Brook Franklin crawled away on his hands and knees with blood and jelly streaming from his face. Held tight in the embrace of the butler, Julius, his face distorted, unrecognizable—bestial!—sobbed and panted, and then began to chant, clutching aloft the instrument of his enemy’s enucleation; I believe it was a palette knife. With it he had taken out my grandfather’s eye.

  I need not weary you with what occurred in the immediate aftermath. The doctor was called yet again, for the third time in two days. Charlotte arrived soon after, with Rinder, who took control of the situation. He had to; for the first time in his life Noah was unable to act. He aged ten years that night at least, in fact I believe Noah van Horn that night began to die. As for my grandfather, his wound was treated by the best surgeons in the city but they could not save the sight of the eye.

  I will hurry the thing forward now. Rinder knew what to do about Julius, he did what wealthy New York families have always done when insanity erupts and scandalous behavior ensues which has at all costs to be kept out of the press: he sent him to a private asylum, selecting, for reasons of his own, a place in the Hudson Valley a few miles north of Poughkeepsie. There Julius was put under the care of an alienist named McNiven, and when the gates closed behind him they closed upon the one member of the family who could be linked directly to Annie Kelly. For the girl’s disappearance was already beginning to attract the attention of the newspapers.

  The story was kept alive for a number of weeks, but it could not compete with the developing crisis in the national arena. On February 25, 1860, a few months after Julius was sent away, an obscure, ill-dressed politician from Springfield, Illinois stepped off a ferry at Cortlandt Street. Two days later he gave a speech at the Cooper Union which helped to propel him into the White House, and the United States into civil war. It was a war which Julius would miss in its entirety.

  For twenty years Julius remained in the asylum upstate. He received regular visits from his sisters but only one from his father. It occurred a year before Noah’s death. I believe he wanted to tell Julius the truth about Annie Kelly’s disappearance before it was too late.

  They sat on a bench at the back of the main buildings and looked toward the setting sun over forested mountains cleft by deep-shadowed valleys. Julius was in his mid-twenties now. It was the era of what was called the moral treatment of insanity, this being an approach which stressed the exercise of constant kindness in a carefully selected location where not only the character of the carers but also the buildings themselves tended to regulate and make tranquil the lunatic mind, and lead it gently back to reason. Routine and occupation were considered essential, and activities such as basket-weaving and hymn-writing were encouraged, though in Julius’ case landscape painting in oils was the chosen therapeutic occupation. But to quote the bard, you may as well forbid the sea to obey the moon as shake “the fabric of his folly, whose foundation/ Is piled upon his faith.”

  It soon became apparent to his father that Julius had invested his faith in a bizarre crime perpetrated by my grandfather. Julius believed Jerome Brook Franklin had built a secret room beneath the floorboards of his studio where Annie Kelly was being held against her will, forced to live on flour
cakes and water in which he cleaned his paintbrushes and copiously urinated. When his students left for the day he would lift a trapdoor beneath the platform and descend to the narrow room where Annie lay in chains, and there he ravished her body for hours and nobody heard her screams but he, Julius, who alone was sensitive to the vibrating telegraphic currents in the atmosphere generated by the suffering of the girl trapped beneath those distant floorboards.

  All this Julius poured out to his father as the two sat watching the sun go down behind the mountains. Noah did not attempt to interrupt him. On being shown into the reception hall of the asylum earlier that afternoon he had at once recognized the changes wrought by madness in his son. Julius was no longer a boy, but despite the new firmness and definition of the bone structure, the faint-etched life-lines and hint of golden stubble on his cheek, nor was he a man. He seemed, rather, a husk of a man, an empty man, in large part because what he gabbled made no sense. He constantly wrung his hands, and his eyes darted about the room as though in search of some elusive flying insect. When the alienist suggested that they might like to walk in the grounds, Noah understood that Julius would be calmer out of doors. The story he then heard about Annie Kelly’s captivity contained a wealth of grotesque detail, much of it concerning bodily functions and their smells. He heard it to the end, then quietly told Julius that none of it was true.

  Julius appeared not to hear him. He stared out at the mountains murmuring to himself as his father quietly explained his decision to pay Annie Kelly to go away, never to see Julius again, and his entrusting the job to Rinder. He then said, slowly and gravely, that Rinder had instead had the girl murdered. He paused, while Julius continued to stare at the mountains, his lips moving but otherwise showing no reaction to what his father had said. Noah began speaking once more. For what Rinder had done, he said, he felt the most abject remorse. It could make no difference now, he said, but he wished to tell Julius the truth. Perhaps, he said, he was merely trying to ease his own conscience—Julius was entitled to think it—but he wanted him to know that there would be no easing of his conscience, not ever. Guilt and remorse had leached all joy from his life, ever since the day he discovered what Rinder had done. Noah said all this, and still Julius stared at the blackening mountains until an attendant approached and quietly told Noah that his son must come in now. Julius was led away and Noah walked out to the front gates of the asylum, where in the dusk a carriage awaited him.

  It is surely an image of some pathos: poor Noah van Horn, once the master of a great commercial empire, now a broken old man, his face haggard, his heart shattered by what had befallen his son. I see him pausing there with one foot on the step of the carriage and turning for the last time to gaze upon the steep walls and towers of the asylum etched black against the evening sky, and nothing for miles around but those impenetrable mountains. He never spoke to Julius again, and a year later he was dead.

  What did Julius find when they let him out in the summer of 1879? He was brought home from Grand Central Station in a hansom cab accompanied by an attendant, a stout, silent young Negro in a tightly buttoned coat and a peaked cap. The house on Waverley Place to which he returned was not as he remembered it. Only one member of the family lived there now, his sister Hester. Charlotte resided uptown in the mansion Rinder had built on Fifth Avenue, a place of such grandeur that it was considered the finest house in the city until a few months later it was eclipsed by an even grander pile boasting a more spacious ballroom and several tons more marble in the façade. Sarah, youngest of the sisters, had meanwhile nursed Jerome Brook Franklin while he recovered from the loss of his eye. Love had duly blossomed between patient and nurse, and the two were married in July, 1860.

  Many of Brook Franklin’s painter friends attended the wedding, men with whom he had once tramped the wilderness in search of the American Sublime. They made a curious match with the families of men from Noah’s world of business and politics, who had not perhaps encountered such figures before. The two camps eyed each other warily but not without interest. The getters of money glimpsed exoticism here, and for the exotic they had a keen appetite; the artists smelt commissions. And just as well, at least for the bridegroom, for what was not said that day, not openly, was that Jerome Brook Franklin’s days of wilderness painting were over. A man with one eye is no good on the side of a mountain. He is fine however in a well-appointed drawing room, and as my grandfather in top hat and eye patch walked down the aisle with my grandmother, he had in his pocket three commissions for portraits of eminent New Yorkers in the van Horn circle. They moved into a large house on West Twenty-Third Street, where the second floor was converted into a studio.

  Jerome Brook Franklin applied himself conscientiously to the work of portraiture, and in time he prospered, earning an income greater by far than what he could have expected from landscape painting. But he had lost the work which had once answered every deep yearning of his painter’s soul, I mean the depiction of the great natural vistas of the American wilderness. In his later years a bitter, impotent rage began to eat away at his spirit. He drank to console himself, and eventually the drink got the better of him. By the end he had lost everything.

  When my mother spoke of Julius’ return to New York, I remember how she would fall silent and gaze into the fireplace. I know she was thinking of the times when as a girl she visited the house on Waverley Place and met her Uncle Julius there. The house is gone now, as is my mother, but I have photographs and so I am able to bring to life at least in my own mind what it might have been like, the day Julius came home. He was a little stooped, still tall and thin, his hair now flecked with silver but as unruly as ever. He wore a double-breasted jacket with broad lapels, a wide cravat with a pin in it and a narrow collar at least ten years out of date. Across his vest hung a silver fob. He wore wool trousers with a narrow pinstripe and laced boots. All this is in the photograph. He carried a bamboo cane, and someone had put a flower in his buttonhole.

  Also apparent in the photograph is a faint reminder of what he had lost. The long, mild face with the watery pale-blue eyes and delicate claw of nose—a fine narrow ridge of bone under skin as taut as parchment, I have that nose myself!—carries the unmistakable mark of his vanished youth. He had of course been spared the many horrors which others had endured in his absence, I mean not only the war but the draft riots of July, 1863 when for days New York was under the control of a howling mob and all the family trembled for their lives. He missed it all.

  This, then, the man innocent of history who came back to his sister Hester in the summer of 1879 and tentatively mounted the steps of his childhood home. The windows of the upper floors were shuttered, all but those of his old bedroom. No attempt had been made to render the façade fashionable with granite pillars or other such additions, and with its flaking columns the house now seemed dowdy and forlorn, haunted almost. When the front door opened and Hester appeared from the gloom within, Quentin hovered somewhere behind her, and behind him, in deep shadow at the back of the hall, the one housemaid who remained, Mary, who as a girl had sat at Julius’ bedside in the first hours of his nervous breakdown. Hester stood quietly beaming, her hands clasped before her, as her brother ascended the steps and kissed her unlined forehead.

  —Dear sister, he murmured.

  —Come in, Julius, she said, and wiped her cheek.

  But before he crossed the threshold Julius turned and regarded the street, cocking his head to the sounds of wheels rattling over cobblestones and the rumble of the avenue beyond, where elevated trains now clattered uptown, spewing cinders and hot coals on the sidewalk below. With a troubled expression clouding his features he lifted a hand and with one finger tapped at the air as though he were attempting to summon the word which might express an idea only dimly formulated in his mind. But no, it escaped him, and he turned indoors.

  By all accounts he was grateful to discover that the house was unchanged since he had left it. Few of the rooms were used now, Hester living very quietly,
eating in the kitchen with the servants and using the parlor only when one of her sisters paid her a call. Is it possible that Julius heard in the empty rooms the laughter of his childhood, when his sisters were all at home and his father still alive? He went into the library and sat silent for many minutes in his father’s armchair.

  Hester had prepared his old room for him. This was wise, for with evidence of change in the city streets all around him, when he retired upstairs he could at least feel himself in familiar surroundings. In the evening the lamps were lit and I imagine they dined early as had been the custom when they were young, though whether they still dressed for dinner I do not know. Perhaps since the death of Noah the old formalities had been abandoned, but somehow I suspect that for this one night, the occasion of her brother’s homecoming, Hester might have felt compelled to exhume an evening gown and discovered that despite the odor of mothballs and a light coating of dust, the garment still fit her slight frame. She had then brought out her jewelry boxes, and rediscovered rings and necklaces and other such pieces whose luster, unlike the gown’s, had not dimmed in the years of their neglect. And so, before a cloudy mirror, Julius’ sister made herself presentable for his homecoming dinner.

  I see them next in the parlor preparing to go through to the dining room. Julius is elegant in formal evening clothes, the tailcoat and high collar, and a diamond pin in his tie. Hester, bedecked with old jewels and less than comfortable, sits nervously smiling as her brother wanders about the parlor, attempting but failing to discover a conversational tone to suit the occasion. She is relieved when Quentin announces that dinner is served.

  A little later, as the soup was removed and the duck carried in, she murmured a word to Quentin regarding one of the cats, and Julius came to life.

  —There are cats in the house? he said.

  Had he not seen them earlier? Hester glanced at the butler. The odor of camphor drifted from her person.