Ghost Town

by Patrick Mcgrath

  —There are, brother Julius.

  —How many?

  —Nine.

  Julius was sitting straight up in his chair now and his eyes were bright.

  —This is very good! he said.

  —Julius, said Hester, and her tone was grave.

  —Hester!

  —There is something we must discuss. The others.

  Julius’ mood at once changed. The mild elation disappeared. His face became occluded. He said nothing.

  —They wish to see you.

  Still he said nothing.

  —What am I to tell them, Julius?

  —Who wishes it?

  —Rinder wishes it. He is much changed, brother! And Charlotte, of course.

  Julius pondered this. His fingers played upon the tablecloth, restlessly pleating the fabric. He watched his struggling sister from under lowered brows.

  —Sarah too, said Hester. And Mr. Brook Franklin.

  This name she spoke with evident apprehension. Julius did not respond.

  —Very well, sister, he said at last, lifting his head and smiling at her. There was light in his eyes once more, although Hester was unsure what it signified. But her relief was great.

  I believe Julius began to explore the city the next day. The Negro attendant, before leaving the house the previous afternoon, had advised Hester that in the early days, at least, her brother should always be accompanied by a member of the household when he went out. But Hester did not object when he announced his intention after breakfast of going for a walk. He asked her had she any suggestions what direction he might take.

  —Fifth Avenue, she replied at once.

  —Fifth Avenue, said Julius.

  —Yes, said Hester, and then you can tell me what it is like.

  It was decided that they should dine with Rinder and Charlotte early the following week, and I have no doubt that Hester anticipated the event with no little apprehension. Julius however seemed unconcerned. This worried Hester all the more, for she understood as well as her sisters did what was involved. Julius had not yet spoken to any of them about the events of twenty years before, and had given no clue as to how he thought of them now. He was about to dine with the man whom he had once believed to be responsible for the murder of Annie Kelly, and whose eye he had gouged out in a savage attack. Also present would be the man his father had told him was the true author of Annie Kelly’s death.

  Charlotte was now a stout, colorful woman and very much a character in New York society. Her opinions remained radical—she had embraced socialism—and she compounded her eccentricity with ostentatious jewelry and cosmetics, often appearing in public in flowing capes and scarves, a cigarette holder permanently in her gaily beringed fingers, loud and fearless as only the very wealthy can be. She had visited Julius in Waverley Place and gently questioned him about the coming dinner, which she had initiated in the belief that her brother must be brought back into the family as quickly as possible. She had been relieved to find him apparently sane. She had witnessed distressing scenes in the Catskills asylum over the years, and at times had thought that he would never be well enough to come home. But her fears now seemed unfounded. She considered he had made a full recovery, and wished to do all she could for him. Charlotte was deeply uneasy about her own part in poor Julius’ breakdown, for it had become clear to all of them during the years he was away that not one of the dozens of pictures he had painted of the mountains had any artistic merit whatsoever. So she had been quite wrong about his genius. He did not possess it.

  Hester and Julius took a cab to the Rinder house on the appointed night, and if Julius was impressed by what his brother-in-law had built on the profits of the business founded by his father, he did not say so. They were greeted at the door by an English butler a half-century younger than Quentin and shown into a richly appointed drawing room where their hostess awaited them, also Sarah and her husband—my grandfather—wearing a glossy black eye patch. There was satin and gold on the walls, an immense chandelier, little couches and marble tables, and many fine pictures. Julius paused in the doorway and stared at Jerome Brook Franklin, who stood with his back to the fire. There was a moment of charged silence—a moment to which the three sisters were acutely sensitive—and then my grandfather, more portly than ever, handsome in his dinner jacket and gleaming shirtfront, his neatly trimmed beard peppered now with silver and gray, advanced across the room with his hand outstretched.

  —Julius, he said.

  The three women, very still, gazed at Julius. Much hung on his response to his brother-in-law’s advance. He seemed frozen, uncertain—a hint of panic appeared in his face—and then he stepped forward and extended his own hand. The two men clasped hands, and my grandfather seized Julius’ arm just below the elbow and gripped it tight as the handclasp lingered several seconds and each man gazed into the other’s face. Ironic, I suppose, that Julius should have returned from twenty years among the very mountains which my grandfather had been denied for the best years of his working life; but nobody alluded to it that night. The prolonged handshake came to an end and the sisters fell upon the pair with cries of joy. Jerome Brook Franklin retired to his place by the fire, while Julius sank into an armchair and demurely crossed his legs.

  It was only when they were going through to the dining room that Rinder appeared. Charlotte was watching Julius closely. They had not yet sat down. A door at the far end of the room opened, and Julius’ eyes fixed upon it in a manner, Charlotte said later, which reminded her of a beast of prey when it catches sight of some small animal in its territory. It was not an expression she liked, for she had only once seen it in his face before, and that was the occasion of the breakdown which ushered in his madness. Then it changed. Through the door, backwards, came a servant pulling a wheelchair. The wheelchair was turned into the room and Julius saw what had become of Max Rinder in the years he had been away.

  In the wheelchair lolled a shrunken man who had clearly only a few months left to live. It was difficult to recognize in this broken creature the coiled and potent figure which once had been Rinder. The bestial malice Charlotte saw in her brother’s face some moments before was now replaced by a frank astonishment. She could not know it, but in Julius’ mind this wasted, dying man had for many years been a monster, and about him he had entertained lurid fantasies of revenge.

  I see them then at table. I know that room well, I was often in it as a child, before they tore the house down to make way for a department store. It was one of those rooms so high, so large, a table seating forty in the middle of the polished hardwood floor, that a human being became insignificant within it, rendered miniature against the sheer scale of Rinder’s wealth; dwarfed by his money. They gathered around the head of the vast table and Rinder now was most tiny of all, a minuscule fragment of a man perishing within his own delusions of opulence. To his right sat my grandmother, and beside her the true possessor of delusions, or so he had been, I mean Julius; Hester sat opposite Sarah, with Jerome Brook Franklin between her and Charlotte. I believe there was a seventh person in the room, that being Rinder in the years of his supremacy after the death of Noah van Horn. He was there in oils, a huge portrait painted by my grandfather ten years before. The room truly belonged to the man in the painting and not the withered leaf, the homunculus he had become.

  A strange family group, comic even, in a morbid sort of a way, in a room dominated by a phantom, if we think of a human spirit preserved in oils as a phantom. At the head of the table a syphilitic robber-baron flanked by a one-eyed painter and a man just out of an insane asylum, this damaged trio supported by the sisters, who flung each other electric glances of wordless understanding and gave the faltering masculine energies in the room some ballast of civilized structure. Glasses were filled and emptied. Courses came and went. Julius and my grandfather ate well. Rinder was fed by his servant, and took only a few mouthfuls, which he washed down with claret. He had something important to say to Julius, this became clear, and he made
no attempt to contribute to the light drift of conversation initiated and propelled by Charlotte. As he masticated and swallowed his eyes burned on Julius, and when Julius returned his brooding stare Rinder merely nodded, as though to say: Soon you will know.

  Came the moment when the sisters rose to retire and Jerome Brook Franklin selected a cigar, but Rinder lifted his claw of a hand and in his hoarse, thin voice told the women not to go, for he had something to say. A glance again flickered between the sisters. Charlotte had no inkling of what was to come, this was clear, Rinder had told her nothing. When he had their undivided attention the sick man lifted his glass, in which a few drops of wine remained.

  —Julius has returned to us, he whispered—for his voice could barely rise above a whisper, though in fact it fluted as it spoke, more hiss than whisper.

  —To Julius, he then sibilated, and the others joined the toast. Julius seemed eager now to speak, but even as he cleared his throat and rose to his feet Rinder lifted a hand and begged him to desist until he had finished. He was desperately weak but the old steel was still there, and Julius sank down again. Rinder’s uplifted hand began to tremble and he laid it flat on the tablecloth and stared at it. The room was now utterly silent in expectation of what he would say.

  —A misconception exists which I have fostered.

  More glances flitting about the table like little birds in a conservatory, all atwitter with questions.

  —It concerns Annie Kelly.

  An intake of breath now, and all eyes upon Julius. He sat frozen, blackly glaring at Rinder. Rinder wheezed. It was not easy for him to talk, and he was accustomed to signaling his needs with gestures. He gestured for water, for the claret had spilled down his chin.

  —She was not murdered.

  —What? cried Charlotte.

  Julius continued to glare at the man as Rinder’s hand once more came up and Charlotte fell silent.

  —I gave your father to understand that she was. But she was not.

  Jerome Brook Franklin absently turned his unlit cigar between his lips, his frowning concentration fierce upon the shriveled Rinder.

  —No? said Julius.

  Rinder held Julius’ eye and shook his head.

  —Noah could say nothing. He felt responsible.

  Light began to dawn in the minds of several of those at the table. A candle spluttered in the chandelier overhead. In the street, a horse uttered a whinny and a cabman’s voice cried out. A servant entered the room and was waved away. Annie Kelly was not murdered, but Rinder told Noah she was. Noah withdrew from active oversight of the House of van Horn soon after, and Rinder’s reign began. Jerome Brook Franklin was nodding now. He put a flame to his cigar and produced a cloud of smoke.

  Then Julius was on his feet. He had one question only.

  —Where is she?

  A shrug from the bony shoulders of the dying man.

  —But she did not die.

  —No.

  Julius sat down again. He stared at Hester with his mouth open. Hester asked him if he was all right. Did he wish to leave now? For some seconds Julius said nothing, then he closed his mouth and shook his head, as though awakening from sleep.

  —Alive then, he murmured.

  Rinder nodded.

  —She did not suffer?

  —No.

  At which a sort of radiance seemed to well up from somewhere deep inside Julius, his soul most likely, and it irradiated his face until in the candlelight was seen the golden glow his sisters remembered from his youth. The years fell away, and so did the last of the madness.

  —Alive, he said again.

  It was not at once apparent to the women how profoundly this news would affect their brother. They left Charlotte’s house soon after. Rinder had been wheeled away, and whether he was gratified at the effect he had produced, whether he was morally uplifted at having emptied his freighted conscience of its secret, I do not know. If any of those present had turned at that moment from Julius to Rinder, their observations have not come down to me. What I do know is that they all clustered about Julius on the side-walk, and in the warmth of the evening the sisters murmured their concern, Brook Franklin standing back and gazing at his brother-in-law with sober solicitude. Then Charlotte retired to her front porch and the others stepped into their carriages and clopped away down Fifth Avenue. Julius leaned back into the upholstery, and to Hester’s quick glance, and the unspoken question it contained, answered that he was tired, only tired, then took her hand in his and lifting his eyes to his sister’s troubled face, kissed her fingers softly. He then set her hand on the seat between them and turned to watch the grand houses go by.

  I believe that in the days following Julius did attempt to discover what had become of Annie Kelly. Rinder had little enough to tell him beyond that she had been paid a handsome sum, first to leave New York and then to allow some weeks to pass before writing to her mother. I imagine that to cause such distress to her mother would have been a supreme test of the girl’s resolve, her decision, I mean, to give up Julius so as to secure them a better life. If, that is, her mother actually was distressed; she was after all an actress, and I suppose it possible that she was in on the plan from the start. When Julius returned to Nassau Street, not only did he not find Mrs. Kelly, nor anyone who remembered her, he did not find her boarding-house. It had been torn down to make way for newspaper offices.

  He was oddly undismayed by this. He must have realized that mother and daughter had most likely established themselves in another town far distant from New York. But it was also possible they had returned to the city after some years, perhaps having failed to find a life that gave them what they had known in Manhattan. For that reason he continued to hope that he would meet her in the streets of the city, and so he continued to search for her.

  This, then, the character Julius assumed as he took up the life in New York which had been so violently interrupted twenty years before. The gentle simplicity of his monomania—for so it must be seen, his rigid habit of daily perambulation, his wandering the streets in hope of a glimpse of Annie Kelly—somehow reminded his sisters of the unclouded innocence of his younger self. But he was no longer young, and with his slow gait and unworldly air he seemed to have drifted into old age having known nothing of a middle period of manhood, those years being lost in the obscurity of the Catskills asylum. I met him several times in the last years of the century, when I was taken by my mother to the old house on Waverley Place where he continued to live with Aunt Hester.

  I remember him once telling me of a memorable walk he took soon after his return to the city. He wanted to see the seaport again, he said, and I was struck by his tone as he told me this, for he spoke of it as though he were striking into wild and dangerous country. He implied that he had to rouse every ounce of courage and fortitude he possessed to undertake such an expedition. He had walked east and south, he said—and his voice was low, his eyes bright as he said it—and I was at once caught up in the adventure of it all, eager to know what perils he had met and how he had surmounted them.

  The further he went, he said, the worse became the character of the streets, and he was beginning to feel distinctly afraid. The block he was on was a poor one, the tenements badly run down, windows broken and patched with newspaper, and between the buildings criss-crossed washing lines with scraps of clothing hanging from them. The people he saw, shabby, watchful men idling in doorways, grimy children and sallow, harried women, all regarded him with suspicion and hostility. Julius tipped his hat to them and passed on. He turned a corner—the day was cloudy, he said, and threatening rain—and suddenly before him, filling the sky, and rising from somewhere by the East River near the tip of the island, a monumental block of stone towering high over the rooftops, and within it two soaring arches.

  He was so astonished he could not move for several minutes. So massive was the thing, dwarfing the buildings between himself and it, and dwarfing too the masts of the shipping in the river, that he could not conceive
what it was. And then in the fading light he made out cables swinging down toward the river, which were then lost to sight behind the buildings, and realized it was a bridge.

  I remember I cried out with pleasure.

  —The Brooklyn Bridge!

  Uncle Julius appeared astonished at my cleverness. How could I have known? I don’t remember what I said but I have no doubt he was telling me the truth, I mean that he had really gone for a walk and come upon the bridge without any prior knowledge of its existence. I am sure Hester did not speak to him about the Brooklyn Bridge, she may not have been aware of it either.

  I liked Uncle Julius, and I remember as a child I was eager to learn from my mother what it was he had done, to be sent to an insane asylum. At first she was evasive. She would not be drawn. She would tell me that an asylum was not a prison and that Julius was not a criminal. But she never said it with much conviction, and with the astuteness of a child I guessed that this was the story the family liked to tell itself, that he was not bad, he was sick.

  —But he did something, didn’t he, mama?—this would be my response, and I would worry at it, the question of what Uncle Julius had done, until my mother grew impatient and told me please to talk about something else, and if I couldn’t do that then please to be quiet. Of course I did find out in the end, through sheer persistence. Nothing is more tantalizing to a child than to come into a room and have the grown-ups fall silent and then change the subject. Nothing whets a child’s appetite more powerfully than the knowledge of the existence of a secret.

  It became in time all I could talk about, and I suppose my mother knew she had to tell me something if only to put an end to my questions. She would sit in the gloom of our little apartment on a winter afternoon, a cat in her lap, and gaze out through dingy lace curtains onto the street, West Twenty-Third, as it happens, where she lived the last years of her life in a state of shabby gentility contemplating the glory that was once the House of van Horn. See what we have come to, Alice, she would murmur—I was just a child, and had known no other home than that apartment, but I certainly understood what nostalgia was. And unhappiness too, for often she wept. This would be around 1910, I suppose, some forty years ago. She told me that when Julius was a very young man, no more than a boy, he had informed his father that he wished to marry a certain girl, and asked for his blessing, but his father had refused. Not only did he refuse, she said, but poor Julius was prevented from ever seeing the girl again!