Wednesday morning and there is more now to attend to than Mrs. E. More to do in a day than wait for her next risky visit. Mrs. Eberline at any rate is away just now, off with her black plastic trash bags, off to the empty bottles and cans and general discards she gathers.
Which actually, I should say, I’m assuming. For all I know, Mrs. Eberline at this moment is somewhere downtown on a corner declaiming my uncharitable heart. I do not know for a fact what Mrs. E is up to because I am not now around to catch her. I am instead myself away, at work at the sanatorium.
Where this morning things are seriously amiss. Joe Trout, for one, appears under a spell and has lost the elusive Trout Route. Sally Ann has herself misplaced Mr. Bones and wanders mute and desperate without him. Then in staff meeting just as the chandelier dimmed, “Look!” Celeste cried, gaping up. “They’ve returned!” After which, when we hurried back to our suites, we all found crumpled notes on our chairs, illegible and, more importantly, bloodied.
“It’s all that Emmaline’s fault,” Celeste says. “Really the girl knows no limits.” She is positively ruining the sanatorium for the rest of us.
Celeste, as usual, dramatizes. All of the above can be explained. But before any further detail, first a few points about context—that is, the sanatorium.
Which, to begin with, is no longer a sanatorium. We just say sanatorium here because that is what it once was, the Elmwood Sanatorium for Sunny Rest and Cure, a fashionable resort for the tubercular. A grand four-story stone building with cross-wings and turrets on one hundred acres of undulating plain. Once an elegant estate of sprawling bent-grass lawns, regal elms, bright meadows of columbine in spring. We had our own farm then, a post office as well, and a station where Silver Streak Pullmans rolled to a stop and stylish pale riders detrained.
But as I said, that is no longer the case. Years ago the sanatorium ceased being a sanatorium when the well-heeled ceased being tubercular. Streptomycin appeared, and soon the main hall here was locked up and abandoned. For years more it stood empty, its lovely green lawns turned fallow. After which, through a series of bank repossessions, the sanatorium was turned over to the state, who renamed it the Elmwood State Institution and moved in all state sorts of things. The medical facility for the nearby state prison, the state lab that tests rodents for rabies, a large wing for the state’s crippled children, a whole floor where the state alcoholics detox. And in the basement a state cafeteria too, above a malodorous state steam tunnel.
Then it occurred to the state that the university in our town, being a state sort of university, could also use sanatorium quarters. So we now have a faculty sabbatical lounge. And a wing for university-funded small business, incubator to emerging state jobs. Which is why I, Celeste, and the others are here, or rather, that is, the Project, university-funded and emerging as we all are.
The Project, very like the sanatorium, is not the real name for where we work. To be exact, we work for Steinem Associates, Unified, a publisher of children’s early readers. But our director, Dr. H. S. Steinem, prefers that we just say the Project. It makes us sound more academic, he believes, not so pushy and profit-minded.
What we do here is make up stories. Fanciful, structured adventure yarns that teach early readers to read. Tales of thrill-seeking sweet rolls on the loose from their box, whooping field mice in hot pursuit, a large grinning calico at their heels, all bent on a spirited progression throughout of hard consonants and long and short vowels.
It is a project Dr. Steinem, School of Education, proposed over a decade ago. That children must learn to read “oh” sounds before “oo,” single vowels before pairs, and so forth. That children learn best through imagination, through goal-oriented flights of fancy. And that fancy can be organized into bound basal readers, in turn grouped into grade-level series.
“Basal readers,” Steinem said to anyone who listened. And reiterated in grant proposals. He, Henry Steinem, had seen the future of learning, and the future was basal readers. “Get them early,” said Steinem. “Get them basal, and by god, you have got yourself readers.”
We consider ourselves lucky at the Project. Although Dr. Steinem’s ideas were not new, his proposals were surprisingly well funded. So two years ago, the Project was officially birthed, and I and the series editors were hired. Following which, with the help of our university and state, we all moved here to Elmwood S.I., fourth floor, in a wing of once-private suites.
There are advantages to working in sanatorium suites: the windows are large, we have a fine view. Our offices are all roomy and sunlit, with lovely high carved plaster ceilings. We each have a set of French doors looking out with our own wrought-iron balcony. And each office as well has a full attached bath with a porcelain tub and brass handrail. I have filled my tub with a terrarium of small palms, but Celeste brings bath oils for hers and soaks in lemon verbena on lunch hours.
We have no complaints at our sanatorium, we are happy for all we’ve been given. That is, we all say, with the possible exception of Earnest. Earnest is our new part-time Tuesday night janitor, recently come out of retirement. He is old and claims to have worked at the sanatorium years ago when it was in its tubercular heyday. Earnest is no longer right in the head. Moreover, he is a big talker, droning on about the old days here. He rambles and says things hard to believe, and if you must work late on a Tuesday, Earnest will most certainly find you. Then he will put down his pail and stand in your light and insist on telling you his stories, about all the long bloody nights that he’s seen, how each patient here suffered and died.
On this floor in particular, he’ll say. Screamers’ wing, that’s what they called it. They moved the incurables here, ones whose fever had taken their minds.
“Screamers’ wing. You got that?” Earnest says. “Why do you think you’re way off on fourth floor?”
That is the kind of thing Earnest says. “Oh the stories,” he’ll say. “The stories. Things happened here you could not guess.”
That balcony there for instance, he will say, when he has come up with his mop to surprise you. “That balcony,” he’ll say, “that’s where the girl in the nightgown jumped.” Then he’ll leave it at that, and go back to his pail.
It’s disconcerting at best, and ever since he arrived, we all try not to listen to Earnest. We just unlock our French doors in the mornings, let in the sun and fresh air. Then we sit down at our desks, pick up our pens, and begin our important days. We have our work after all, our deadlines.
We are busy, engaged people at the Project. Series editors mostly, our offices arranged down one side of the hall, precisely ordered by grade level. Sally Ann for first grade, Lola for second, Frances, in the big suite, for third. Next my suite and next door the verbena-drenched Celeste, editor of the gifted and talented. Then working freelance from home are two illustrators and a nice man named Cliff, editor of reader satisfaction. Only Steinem and Marcie are not editors here, Steinem as he is the director of course, and Marcie as she’s his assistant. Actually, what Marcie is is administrative assistant and sometimes acting receptionist, there is no pretending she’s anyone’s editor.
As for me, I’m the assistant editor of design, a name Dr. Steinem gave me. I am not sure why he calls me all that, in fact what I do here is paste-up. It is not much of a job; generally I just ink lines in tables, wax galleys and burnish them down. At my age I should be doing more. But it is a job I can do, the hours are right, almost never do I have to work weekends. And so for the most part, I’ve been happy to stay.
That is, until lately. Since Ben Adams, in fact, disappeared. Ever since Ben so abruptly took off, I cannot seem to keep my mind on my work.
He has rented a farmhouse outside of town. It is not the same house, but it is big and square and white like the other. So for a while he will live in this farmhouse, and it will be like it was before. He will make it like it was before.
This house, a neighbor has told him, once was a Mennonite church, then for a while a school. It is plain and wood-sided with a cupola on top where sometimes he sits late at night. On the north side, two wood swings hang by chains from a tree. And outside the front door, an American flag flies from a twenty-foot pole.
The house sits on a big rolling farmyard. The grass there is thick and deep green, and white lilacs line a long gravel drive that leads up to the house from the road. He has started a garden to the south of the house. And in the back in a stand of tall pines he keeps a pair of gray geese.
Beyond the yard are his landlord’s wide fields, acres of soybeans, seed corn, a barn, and a pen for some black-spotted pigs. The landlord has moved to a house in town, he is almost never around. He only stops by the farm early mornings and leaves again always by dawn.
So for most of his days he, the renter, has this yard and the fields to himself. It is quiet the way it once was. There is time here to think, to remember.
Now, about this matter of paste-up, something I’d like to get out of the way. Why I hold on to this job as I do, how I came to it in the first place. It is not unlike how I came upon Mott Street, in fact the two are related. The story of which is sometimes tricky to tell, not that I’m often asked to. But when I am, and I have to say something, I say well here is a story about someone I know, a person a little like me. Let me tell you about her instead.
The tale begins a few years ago when this person I know, a young woman, first arrived in the Midwest and this town. She came, as many here do, to study at the university. At the age of twenty-one, she applied as a graduate student of art, specifically painting and drawing, and was accepted on scholarship and waivers. Admissions took a shine to the portfolio she turned in, granting her out-of-state tuition. In return, they said, they expected her work to be worthy, to show talent and most especially vision. They expected a life of beauty and truth. A life spent in pursuit of, well, art.
At first the young woman believed what they said and set out boldly to paint. She believed it a calling, a duty, she believed that eventually art saved. But here is the catch to the story. In fact her life at the school was confounding. Others there did not feel as she did, they had come to do art for other reasons. They had come first of all to be noticed, to attract. They had come for careers, for degrees. And they looked at her oddly when she spoke of art for what she believed was art’s sake. Wise up, they all told her. Art can get you somewhere. You have only to name your price. After which, and some thought, the woman in fact did grow wiser. She knew then to never again talk of art, and certainly never to bring up vision. That is, to be clear, visions.
To explain: For years off and on, at that point maybe always, this woman had been having visions. Or, more precisely, visionettes. Better yet, she decided, dioramas—infrequent brief flickers of startling scenes, three-dimensional, full color, stock-still. As though at some ominous surprise celebration, the hall dark, filled with invisible guests, some trickster among them lights a flare. And suddenly there they all stand, frozen in light, heads back and mouths open mid cry, before everything goes to black again.
They were dioramas all right. Twisted glass boxes of moments in time. In their silent, still way they stood out. A man with great feathered wings at his back, his forehead against a stone wall. A woman in pink diaphanous tulle, wild boars where her legs should be. Bloated bodies in rivers. Eyeless white heads. Severed hearts wet and still beating. Alarming scenes, pained and askew.
The young woman, this artist, had no idea where they came from. Were they guideposts, warnings, predictions? Or just wayward nerve axons firing, signifying nothing at all? She had not a clue, she knew only she must somehow lay hold of them. So she drew and she painted each, one by one, recasting as best she knew how.
And although they turned out abstract and off course, nowhere close to what she had seen, soon her paintings attracted attention. It was the light, people said. Or no, the shadows—something, well, something strange. How did she do it, they wondered. But the woman did not disclose. She did not admit to the visions she saw, there was really no way to explain them. And soon they made her a School of Art star.
It was not what the woman intended. It was not why she’d come to art school. But there were missteps, miscalculations. When you are young you cannot always know. And sooner or later, despite herself, she bought into the others’ misguided praise and began hanging with fellow art stars.
They invited her to the Hogshead, the artists’ dive bar in this town. She joined them most nights at their table, learned to drink beer and play pool. Learned all the names of the others who drank there, learned to say things that amused.
And then over time at the Hogshead, the woman got to know a few faculty too. They had heard of her work, its vogue disaffection, its dark pitch-perfect aberrance. It behooved them to know the town comers. So they asked her to seminars and coffees off campus, to dinners at their homes as well, small casually pretentious affairs. They wanted to know this rising star better. They wanted to talk painting with her, they wanted to talk music, film, books. Then they wanted to talk of food, of wine, then of their crystal wine goblets, the correct shapely stem of each imported glass that cost more than two monthly phone bills. Oh they longed to stay up talking till dawn.
At first, despite how these evenings seemed to her, the artist wanted to believe them a boon. She had hope that in one way or another they would eventually lead somewhere new. So whenever she was invited to party or dine, always she gratefully accepted. And always she thought then this might be the night, that at last the evening would rise. That sensing it, people would gather around. That someone would say something essential, there would be some small act of wonder. Or that, short of these things, her inevitable silence partway into dessert would not dampen anyone’s spirit.
But the nights never worked out any better, while the invitations accrued. And in time, the artist began to fear she would not be able to keep pace. She didn’t know there would not always be more. She didn’t know she was only just this year’s art star. She knew only that she wanted both art and life. It seemed to her that couldn’t be wrong. And not realizing then that indeed it could, that the life she was choosing was all wrong, she continued to paint and to party, and let others continue to marvel. Such élan vital, those in her circle would say. Such eerie fecundity.
Until when, halfway into her second year of school, she felt a shift, then a shudder. And without knowing just why or even how, she watched the light in her visions start to dim. The drop-off continued, the decline grew steep, she tried to rekindle, illumine. But at last all that flickered were just some old stills, returned to loop for a while.
So she tried then to paint without them, without any vision at all. She painted and then she painted. But she found that the mysterious light in her art, like her visions, had disappeared. There was nothing beyond the fine colored surface, the strong technique she had learned. And after a few more last attempts, she knew it had to be true. All her art now amounted only to sketches, disjointed series of things, incomplete, weak, of no interest.
At which point she understood her School of Art work was through. She was not, it turned out, an artist after all and no longer had reason for painting. In fact had no business painting or for that matter acting the genial star. It was time the young woman stopped trying.
Which was also when I myself just stopped trying and settled onto Mott.
The point here being this: It is a strange thing all right to come to one’s end. That is, to come to the end before it is over. To meet one’s destiny early in life. To find at the age of twenty-eight, it has all come down to Mott, that Mott Street was one’s fate all along.
Of course, viewed in a certain light, there is, you might think, a kind of bravery in this, in living your life already knowing your precise lot in it. Living it through, all the while sensing how poorly it will actually turn out. A bravery, yes, you would like to think. Or possibly let others think. But here is the truth as I’ve found it: There is also a deep, profound comfort. A divine confirmation life is just what it is and indeed you’re not all that you thought. That so it will go, day after day, with no surprise or for that matter striving.
Because so it has been for me for five years, a settled, lengthy life lull. A plateau in effect, a high arid place with horizons wherever one looks. Not the new sort of horizons optimists wake up to, oh look a new horizon. Rather the comfortable same old horizons, boundaries on every side. From a plateau they are easy to see.
Although here is the thing I have found out as well. They are deceptive, these plateau’s hard edges. They can make you believe, if you’re not careful, your flatland is all that there is. And that if you just simply stay where you are you can calmly go on forever.
Which is why it was such a surprise when it happened. Ben’s disappearance, I mean.
He bought the geese, a goose and a gander, from a neighbor. He does not intend to eat them. He wants them for company, and also because there is the stand of pines by the back door. Under the trees it is cool and feels always a little like rain. It is a place he thought geese would like. So he built a big pen out under the pines and put the two geese inside it.
And now every day, he climbs over the fence and into the pen along with them. It is an idea he had. For an hour each late afternoon he squats low to the ground, holds out a hand, and talks quietly to his geese. Tells them about how it is these days. How he is getting to know his students, how he likes the studio where they paint. Likes the house and farm as well. Likes it in general here.
These are the things he says under the pines to his geese. You have to do this with geese, he believes. And if you go every day and sit in their pen and talk calmly to them, after a while they get used to you. They trust you and like you and then you can take down the pen. They won’t fly away.
Geese will stay loyal for life, he’d heard, once they get the chance to know you.
Ben’s disappearance? Well now, there is the real matter at hand. Enough of paste-up, plateaus. Enough of the editors all back in their suites, finishing their morning’s hard work. Enough, for that matter, of work at all and also of the sanatorium. Time here instead for Ben Adams.
I sit at my light table twirling my ink pen, considering. Ben Adams, I think. Ben and his curious vanishing. They are topics I keep returning to. Although, to be clear, I should add that Ben is not in fact my first boyfriend, or the first one that I’ve lost. When I was a graduate School of Art star, I had an excess of them, many just passing through. I’ve grown accustomed to boyfriends’ habits. Still, the sudden, silent way Ben Adams took off has me, I must say, thrown. Despite that it’s now been over three months, still I am figuring it out. Wondering, that is. Worrying too. Or sometimes, well mostly, just remembering.
The fact is, I suppose, it was easy for Ben just to slip out of sight. With the exception of Mrs. Eberline, who was onto us I would guess from the start, no one in town much knew about Ben or that he and I were a couple. It was a tacit decision we came to, for reasons that will become clear. A kind of silent oath, in fact, to tell no one about each other. And so Ben Adams and I just kept to ourselves. We were what you could call secret lovers, although it’s important to note we ourselves never saw it that way. Nor did we agree on what it was then we were, which was an issue between us, admittedly. Still, definitions apart, we were happy.
He is, as I’ve said, a good man, Ben Adams, though even before vanishing, elusive. A surprising man, not always the same. Strong but loose-limbed in a comfortable sort of way, generous but iron-willed. Now curious, now subdued, now here, now away. Young and old all at one time.
In years, the fact is Ben is older. Well, older than I by sixteen years. It does give him a natural advantage, this extra time he has had in the world. It’s allowed him to do some figuring out. How politics works, for example, why it is that people care. How life itself works, or some of it, how it has an odd way of turning on you, that it is usually neither all nor only. Ben will say things like that sometimes. And while I do not understand always just what he means, I know I have something to learn from him.
But then there is yet another Ben. The one that without any warning can turn inexplicably sad. Which may not be actual unhappiness at all, perhaps more just something like age. Or reflection. Or some natural list toward longing. But whatever the cause, the fact remains, Ben Adams is a man who yearns. The issue here being that a man who yearns, compared with someone more jolly, more festive and generally chipper—a wistful man is an obligation, one you cannot easily walk out on.
Which is an interesting point now, I think, considering Ben is the one who’s walked out.
I put down my pen and give this some thought. Unless of course, I think, he has not. Walked out, I mean. By choice. I take a deep breath, sit straighter. And I remember again Mrs. E’s vision of Ben and against my will, start to wonder. What if Mrs. Eberline had it right? That there’s been some sort of foul play. Is that why Ben hasn’t called?
So I sit at my light table and I consider this too. That Ben is somehow in trouble. It’s a reach, I know, but still. And after more thought, here is what finally occurs to me. Whether or not Ben really is missing—that is, now with the possibility raised—the fact remains that he is no longer here. So then, shouldn’t someone try to find out where he’s gone? Ask: Ben, are you all right? Check in as she might not have before.
And well, yes, shouldn’t that someone be me?
For a moment I feel very clear. And I know for once I could be on the right track. It would seem that way, anyway, wouldn’t it? I need to find Ben. Mrs. E says she’s seen him in trouble. How could I now not check up on him?
It is a good thought, all right, I think. Albeit one that doesn’t last long. Because I remember then of course about Mrs. E, that she and her visions are crazy, to believe them would be crazy as well. And I pick up my pen and start twirling again, momentarily back to the beginning.
Until, despite my remarkably good intention just now, a new thought begins to form. In fact two thoughts come at once. And I know then it’s no longer my better self thinking, because what occurs to me is this: Maybe it does not in fact matter so much if Mrs. Eberline is mad or her vision of Ben is true. Maybe something else is at play. Maybe looked at now in a different light, what Mrs. E saw is an opportunity. My opportunity. An excuse to see Ben again.
I consider this new possibility. And although I know it is not my finest hour, I feel something inside me leap. Yes, of course, I should be the one now to go and find Ben. To make sure that he isn’t in danger, to rescue him on the off chance he is.
And giving up then on pure altruism, I opt straight for brazen self-interest. Yes, I think, yes. A rescue here is in order. I will go save Ben, and once I know he’s all right—since it would be rude just to turn and leave—I’ll stay for a while, have a talk. Explain what I’ve been thinking since winter. Ben will say whatever he’s been thinking too. We’ll concede our disagreement from before. We’ll see where we both had it wrong and both feel the better for it. And with luck then, there you will have it, our chance at a second chance.
What do you know, a rescue could just work out for us. Maybe it’s not too late. Maybe we’ll end up all right. Isn’t that how rescue goes?
And well, I think, this changes everything, doesn’t it? All previous bets now are off.
Although a clarification here, before anyone goes any further or gets the wrong impression. By second chance I do not actually mean the kind that the lovesick, well mostly the discarded, dwell on. I do not mean I am hoping to get back together with Ben. I don’t know if I’d want to return to all that. There were problems with Ben, as I’ve said, and the fact is I just do not know about him. I have never really known about Ben.
Which is a funny thing about boyfriends, I’ve noticed. They too often don’t know about you and jump to unwarranted conclusions. That for instance it was love, a mate you were after, when you really just needed someone to talk to.
No, I think by second chance, I mean I just want to know things with Ben and me are all right. That Ben is all right. There’s been no real harm done here.
Again he climbs into the pen. There is more he wants to say.
Hoping for grain, the geese move in.
He takes a seat. So it’s like this, he tells them. After all these years, he’s come back. Here, where he had once been a student. Back to this town, the university. Back to where it began, where all of it once was possible. The painting, the light, that miraculous light, the fevered and urgent days. He has come back for them, yes, those days.
The geese stand nearby, watching.
Right, he tells them, smiles. That’s right—and for the nights too. He’s come back for those nights at the Hogshead. The cold beer, the pool, the old green shade. And the others like him at the bar, reeking of linseed, high.
All of them friends, he tells the geese. We were all of us friends then, good friends. Artists as well, graduate-student artists and friends. Michael, who built things, boxes within boxes, working from outside in. Jean, who filled canvas with tangled red roots and signed them “jean, jean the beet queen.” Charley, who etched tortuous faces in stone, then backed over the plates with his truck. Artists, yes artists. They were all of them artists then.
The geese drop their heads, peck the ground.
And some of them lovers, that too, he says. Ones he cannot now name, though he still sometimes thinks of the nights with them, their fine long-limbed bodies, the musk of their skin. Maybe he’s come back for them.
The geese look up.
Or Ellen. Or maybe for Ellen.
Turning their heads, the geese study him.
Right, he says. Right. Truth is, maybe he’s come back just for Ellen. For where they first met, for the house they first shared that winter.
The geese stand waiting.
He shakes his head, smiles. He has no more to tell. “You would have liked Ellen,” he says.
He stands. Turns to leave. Turns back.
Truth is—
And shrugging, turning again for the fence—Truth is he has just come back, that’s all. He had nowhere else to go.
But first, before rescue, a little more still about Ben and me. It’s important before rushing to save, I believe, to understand just what is at stake. In this case, for instance, Ben and me. That is to say our coupling.
Which I should explain was indeed a strange thing and also against several odds. You could say it was unlikely our even meeting at all, given Ben’s ways and mine. That is, ever since finding my house here on Mott, I’ve been inclined just to sit home alone a lot, while Ben himself is in town just this one year, staying mostly out in the country. We could have easily lived within miles of each other never knowing the other was there. Which is exactly what would have happened, I believe, if it weren’t for my best gay friend, Ford.
So actually, rethinking it more, first a moment now about Ford, Ford and me. Then on to Ben and me.
When I first knew Ford at the university here, Ford was not his whole name. He was in fact known as Robert Bob Ford, named after both of his grandfathers. But just Ford is how he signed all his work, and once he began selling his paintings we all began calling him the same.
I have known Ford for over six years. We were in graduate school together, the same entering class, School of Art. For a while we were both of us School of Art stars.
But here was the difference between Ford and me. Ford is a player and he believed in the school, he believed in hard work, in ambition. He believed in success, in talent. He believed, specifically, he’d been chosen and took his star station to heart. I, as I’ve said, took a different route. I just painted and painted and painted. Until the day that I didn’t. And haven’t, in fact, since.
Ford thinks it a shame I gave up on art. It is not something we can discuss. Although after moving to Mott Street, I did once give it a try. Ford had come for a visit, he wanted to know why it was I’d quit school, and I decided to level with him. The truth is, I told Ford, the art that once made us School of Art stars is just an odd knack, that’s all. A trick we both happen to know how to do. The surprise is that others don’t know the trick too.
Ford rolled his eyes, said Margaret, I do not buy this. And we have ended up differently, he and I. Ford now teaches full-time at the school, he regularly exhibits and sells. And I—well, I work at the Project in paste-up.
Still, regardless of paths, Ford and I have stayed close. He is my oldest friend in this town. We are comfortable with each other, we have history. Ford is nothing if not loyal, he likes to say. He has my best interests at heart. Which in turn gives him license, he also believes, to point out all that is wrong with me.
There is reason, Ford thinks, for concern—apart, that is, from my want of dedication and generally deficient spirit. Lately, Ford says, my poor social skills in particular have begun to worry him. He believes that since leaving both school and art, I have developed attachment issues. I have simply, personally detached. And here Ford points to the fact that, though single, I have bought a story-and-a-half stone house and settled into it most evenings alone.
“You are becoming an old maid, Margaret,” Ford told me last year on another one of his visits. “Just look at you, there in your sweatpants.” It was after I’d just bought a color TV, and actually, it was not the TV at issue. Ford approved of this purchase, he did in fact seem to encourage it. He took me out shopping, explained chromacolor, demonstrated remote control. But then, once I plugged in the set at home, and began watching it single-mindedly, Ford, like a shot, turned on me. Well, it’s all over now, Margaret. You’ll only be leaving your house now for milk. Grocery shopping will become your one social event. Then you’ll be back with your color TV, night after cold winter night, your feet on some raggedy hassock.
“It is what all you spinsters come to, Margaret. Sooner or later. You’ll see.”
In my defense, I must say that this is my first television. Or the first TV that I’ve owned. I was, to be honest, for a time once in possession of Ford’s old black-and-white, a loan during a brief charitable period. But I was not at that point a true television fan. Ford’s set tuned to only one station, local and educational, so I just watched old movies mostly, ones starring William Holden when possible. I’m not sure that even counts as TV.
But now I am the owner of a new color set, seventeen inches on the diagonal. And I began viewing, indiscriminately most nights—M*A*S*H, of course, Monty Python, The Brady Bunch, Fat Albert, Maude. It seemed inordinately to bother poor Ford. Although there were other things too that concerned him, he said, take my electric blanket, for instance.
I should explain that Ford only knows of my blanket because I once mistakenly mentioned it to him. How I had turned the heat down to fifty-five and purchased an electric blanket.
Ford was beside himself once again. “An electric blanket, Margaret? An EB?”
I did not at first understand. “Yes, so?” I said, and tried not to sound defensive.
Ford explained. “It’s another of the signs here, Margaret. Spinsters sleep with electric blankets. Old maids. Don’t you see? It’s all those empty beds they crawl into. My god, Margaret, next you’ll be telling me you’re taking up flannel.”
I gave him my best steely stare. “No, Ford,” I said. “I will not be telling you this.” Which I said because I had just then decided not to talk to Ford at all.
But yes, the truth is sometime in November two years ago, I indeed started sleeping in flannel. It grows cold here in winters, and when I began waking with sore throats, swollen glands, well yes, I turned to flannel nightgowns. Lanz. White eyelet ruffles at neck, wrist, and hem.
It is no particular sign, Ford, I said, when once again we were speaking. There are, I’m quite sure, married women in this town, sated single women as well, who don flannel for bed winter nights. What one wears to one’s bed is no sign of sleeping alone.
Although it is true those long nights I did sleep alone. That in fact I was growing lonely.
Which brings me, if loosely, back to Ben. How it was that I met Ben Adams.
It is Ford who talks me into the gallery opening where I first meet Ben this fall. He tells me I really do need to get out more, and as luck would have it, some graduate art students are throwing a little gala in town, an opening for their group graduate art show. It will do me good, Ford says, to get out and see some new people. “Look,” he says, “you can be my date.” Which means his boyfriend of the evening has just fallen through and Ford himself is in need of a date.
“All right, Ford,” I say. I am, as I’ve said, his oldest friend. I cannot let him go to a gala alone.
So then, Ford picks me up at eight and we are off to the gallery opening. The gallery, it turns out, is not really a gallery. It’s a storefront, abandoned in the wake of this town’s recent scourge, the country’s thrall with urban renewal. We are not happy here with urban renewal. The wide arc of its great iron wrecking ball wiped from the face of our town a good number of fine old buildings, and in their place left us temporary structures. That is the government’s term for them, temporary commercial structures. They are actually just low-slung tin trailers, in which local merchants make do while we wait for a grand new multi-tier mall to throw us into its grim urban shadow. We thought it could not get worse. But then in place of our lovely old downtown alleys, with all the intrigue and refuse and back entrance they allowed, we were given a bricked-over promenade, where now the homeless camp out, and lost tourists convene, and teenagers roam free range.
No, we are not fans of urban renewal, mere thought of it knocks us off topic and leaves us speechless or sputtering. I have only mentioned it here to explain why we have empty storefronts, still awaiting their own demolition, right in the middle of town. And why Ford’s graduate art students are now holding an opening in one of them.
It is an oddly cheery place for an opening, this store, considering that it’s condemned. From far down the block, we see bright-colored lights shining hopefully from its plate-glass window. And as we draw near, we hear music and people laughing. It sounds like a very big turnout.
At the door we stop, look in through the glass at the backs of them, men and women, standing fashionably, artfully dressed in drapey dark clothes, plastic cups of beer in their hands. A young crowd, I can tell, younger than I. Well of course. Ford’s graduate students, undergraduates too, maybe a few junior faculty. Budding artists all of them as well. I can only imagine how little we’ll have in common.
“After you,” Ford says, opening the door and bending in a gallant low bow. I blink at the spotlights behind him, and take a quick look around. Not for the art, which, as I’d guessed, is large, predictable, and cartoonish, also hung from the walls by fish wire. Not for some face I might recognize since, with the exception of Ford, I know no one in town still in art, no one in school, no one, that is, who would think to come to a graduate student art opening. And not even for the refreshments that I know must be near. The keg of beer from the corner grocery downtown, Blue Jim’s, whose owners rarely check IDs. Or the long folding table set to one side, filled with homemade hors d’oeuvres on paper plates.
No, one foot in the room, what I am looking for now is the possibility of a side door, with luck by the restroom down a long hall. And beyond that, the hope of a remaining back alley. It is never too early at large parties, I have learned, to plan one’s nearest escape route.
“Ford!” a young man calls from center room right. “Ford! Oh look, Ford is here!” he calls, now to the room in general. Heads turn our direction, Ford grins and waves, his arm held high. He is known here, of course. Ford is a perpetual attender of galas, aspiring tenured faculty as he is. Not to mention real working artist among this sea of grad student poseurs. He has tonight, I have only just noticed, dressed himself well for the part, retaining his workday paint-spattered boots and artfully oil-smudged jeans. Only his shirt is clean, although it is old, a blue chambray with frayed sleeves rolled. Working-artist, painter-in-oils, too-passionate-to-change-just-for-this is written all over him. It must be consoling to the others to see one so clearly defined.
Dropping his arm, remembering me again, Ford turns and asks would I like a drink? He can go find me a beer. “Why yes,” I tell him. “Yes, Ford, a beer.” And I know then I won’t see him for the rest of the night, or for as long as I plan to stay. It will work out well for us both.
So I turn to look for that side door, there must be one somewhere, all these old buildings have a second way out. I ease past tight circles of students, I am heading for the back wall. But the room is crowded and after I have squeezed by the first of the young artists and a second group of mere hangers-on, judging by their styleless black sweaters, I find there is no clear path forward.
I stand facing the backs of several young men, heads turned in toward each other the better to hear, telling rank stories from life-drawing class and periodically loudly guffawing. I wonder how I can make myself heard.
“Excuse me,” I say. “Sorry, coming through.” I tap at the nearest shoulder. And turning, mistaking me no doubt for his date, someone he must have only just met and has clearly already forgotten, the man hands me a cup of beer.
“Here,” he says, “I got this for you,” and turns back to his fellow storytellers.
The cup is cold in my hand, the beer fresh and still foaming, and I realize just how thirsty this party has made me. I spot a small folding chair to the side, next to an empty wall, and think better of abandoning ship. At least not so soon or directly. First refreshments, I think. Refreshments before escape, to be sociable.
I sit down and take a drink of my beer. While it’s indeed one of Blue Jim’s, it is also tastier than I’d remembered, and for a while I just sit and look at my cup, happy to have found a seat.
But then, gradually, it begins to dawn on me. The floor, what’s with this floor? Looking down as I am, I notice that something is off at my feet. With so many people crowded into the store, I could not in fact earlier see much of it. But now, with this space opened up here around me, I see that each of the floor’s large checkerboard tiles has been painted with some sort of symbol. Black paint on white, white paint on black. Angular, sticklike symbols. The floor vibrates with their bold strokes. And I see then the reason there’s no art on this wall is that it has moved instead to my feet. The tiles of this floor are the point here, a kind of graduate student installation, an art stealth attack from below.
I study the primitive markings. One vertical line, two branches rising off it, a skeleton grasping at the sky. A capital A with a circle above it, a mountain balancing the sun. A small frail cross made out of sticks, dazed and skewed to one side. A capital P drawn in three straight lines. A thunderbolt. An M. A backwards R. Now foreground, now background, now black white, white black. All pulsing the store’s linoleum. It is a dizzying dance below. Patterns emerge, a sequence, repetitions, and I find I cannot stop staring.
“Runes,” he says.
She sits, head down. “Runes,” he says again. “What you’re looking at, they’re runes. Or somebody’s idea of them.”
He surprises himself. He has spoken to no one tonight. He knows no one here. He does not know what made him go to her and speak. It was not like him. But so much now is not like him.
He has been watching her since she entered. A tall woman. People notice tall women, but that isn’t it. Something, maybe the way she is smiling, but not smiling. Attractive, in her way, and smiling. Standing next to the tall man, also smiling, then laughing and waving to the others. People know the man, he is happy to be here. But the woman is not. She smiles again and doesn’t, looks past the man. She is not really here.
Attractive woman, yes. He would say that. Unusual, wild sort of hair, rust color, gold. The room’s spotlights catch in it, gleam. A tall woman, leaning now toward the man, her head to one side to hear him. He likes that she doesn’t look at him, keeps her eyes on the room. Nice eyes, dark, open. Frank. And that smile. He thinks he sees something there. As though maybe. Maybe.
It quickens his heart. Something like hope. You know, he wants to say to her. Don’t you?
He watches the man leave her side, watches as she stands for a moment, then starts working across the room. He likes how she moves. Gracefully dipping, easing around the others. Stopping near one side. There, she’s found a chair. She sits. No longer the smile.
Out of habit he takes the small notebook from his coat, begins to sketch. She stares at the floor and does not move. He studies her profile. Strong definition, good bones. And she’s a bit older, he sees that now too, a little older than the others in this room.
She does not belong here. She sits alone. It makes him want to go to her.
Runes?
I keep my head down, look at the floor. I do not know this man now standing here. I do not know where he has come from. But I know this. He has been watching me, I have felt it. He has been watching for some time now.
It is in most women, I think, this signal that a man is staring. It’s an alertness, a cellular response, chromosomes pointing like a pack of trained hounds at some treed and hyperventilating quarry. Some kind of mating sixth sense. Women do not need to see the man staring to know. Although I can indeed see this new one before me, that is, the hems of his pants. I can see where they meet the tops of his shoes. And I can see he is not wearing socks.
I am interested all right, but I do not yet lift my head, I do not stare this new man in the eye. The fact is, it just now feels nice to be watched. It is not often lately I am ogled, and for the moment I am enjoying it.
“Runes,” he says again. “Ancient alphabet. Norse, Anglo-Saxon. Inscriptions mostly. Charms. Curses, maybe.”
I study the floor more closely. Lines vibrating on linoleum. That’s what I see.
“Supposed to bring back the dead,” he offers. “If you do it just right. Find just the right runes.”
I look up. And I am surprised. He is older, not like the others here, like Ford’s student friends. Older but not old, a big man with unruly gray hair cut short to his head. A handsome man, strong. Now backing up, unsure.
“Bring back the dead?” I say. “Some alphabet.”
He smiles. He looks at me, just looks. I do not miss the kind smile, the good green eyes.
“Bring back the dead?” she says.
She looks wary. He has frightened her. He has offered too much, too soon.
Doesn’t matter, he says to her, shrugging. And then he wants to say more. He has questions. He wants them to talk.
But the room is too crowded, too loud. He can’t think. “Look,” he says. “Want to leave?”
She studies him. What does he mean?
The words came out wrong. All his words are coming out wrong. A moment more and it will be over. One of them will say well, enjoy the show and then she will stand, find the tall man she came in with, disappear.
All he knows is he wants it not to be over.
“Want a beer?” he asks, forgetting she already holds one. “There’s the Hogshead. We could go have a beer.”
It is all he can think of, the Hogshead. He thinks it’s still here. Dark, knotty-pine. She might like it.
She frowns. “No, not the Hogshead.”
She says it quickly. Sets her jaw, looks back at the floor. Again he has said something wrong. He shouldn’t have asked. Why did he ask?
She sits, she is quiet. It is over.
“Sure OK,” he says. He tries not to make it sound like retreat.
She looks up. “Coffee,” she says. “How about coffee?”
But now “Margaret? Margaret?” I hear. And I realize it’s editor Celeste, demanding and dire, at my door. Celeste now with something important. More immediate than daydreams of Ben.
Blinking, head down, I do not right away answer. Instead I reach for the flat before me, eye there the middle column, lift and adjust it a pica to the right, as though I need just to finish this one last thing before I can be interrupted. Another nudge to the column back left. Then at last looking up, “Oh, Celeste,” I say, surprised. “It’s you.” And smiling, as though happy to see her, albeit a little dazed, engrossed in my work as I have been, “Come in, come in,” I tell her.
“I’m here about Joe,” Celeste says.
Again I look surprised. And this time I actually am. Celeste does not often stop by about work. Certainly not about Joe or his eponymous and gifted series. And I wonder then if she’s concerned about him or his trouble with the Trout Route. If she knows he’s been acting strangely. One could venture even a bit fishy. Which, put that way and also to be fair, would not normally be an issue.
That is to say, Joe Trout is just that, a trout. Of the rainbow variety, Oncorhynchus mykiss, native to the American Northwest. He spends his days swimming small freshwater streams and is an uncommonly handsome fish fellow, silvery and spotted and magnificently finned with a soft pink tinge to his belly.
A creation of Celeste’s, Joe heads up our gifted and talented texts. His series are the Project’s most prodigious, also—due to Celeste—its most florid. Each week she turns out a new installment or two; it’s hard keeping up with her layouts.
Celeste calls her series the Joe Trout Adventures in Science and, in a stroke of basal innovation, along with a string of the usual phonemes she has introduced actual content. Joe’s stories aren’t just tales of vowel phonic patterns; he also takes on natural science.
We at the Project are agog. We’d no idea Celeste had it in her. Celeste is a dreamer, a devotee of New Age, of meditation, levitation, crop circles. A follower of Ram Dass, Tim Leary. An attender of Esalen and Findhorn. Who knew she knew scientific method?
And here a professional confession of sorts. Although I am hired just to paste up Joe’s flats, to wax and lay out and rub down, for months now I’ve also been reading his text, word by every overwrought word. In this spring alone, I’ve seen him through numerous exploits in science—cell fission, migration, an entire Krebs Cycle—as well as diphthongs, sibilants, and hard g’s.
But it is not Joe’s subjects per se that engage me. My interest comes down to just this: Joe Trout. Despite Celeste’s own inauthenticity, Joe is good, even heroic company, well worth my morning reads. Joe’s heart is pure. He is hardworking, courageous, a good sport, and a tireless champion of nature. Moreover, or at least normally, he’s a seeker of beauty and truth along with, at times, paired vowels. Master of strategic “ou,” “ee,” and “ea,” he cleaves his streams on a quest—coming in, going out, turning about, seeking the unseekable Trout Route.
But just this morning, as I sat at my light table finishing Joe’s latest boards, a particularly hazy lesson on weather, I could see things were slipping with Joe. He was not his old driven self. His stroke had turned flaccid, his smile bemused, and his paired vowels had dropped off considerably, softened to “moon” and “croon.” Most alarming, as I have mentioned, Joe somehow had lost the Trout Route. Or given up seeking it entirely. Instead, his direction was decidedly leisurely, it was this morning a desultory float.
Then, as I burnished the lesson’s last galley, a short unit on storms, and a large dark cloud passed over, a strange thing happened indeed. Joe rolled dorsal, took a breath, and floating in this position, started to move his lips. It was a kind of fishy low hum, you could tell, which he seemed to want to keep to himself. But as thunder and lightning began moving in, Joe’s hum escaped his control. Growing continually now louder and bolder, it began to look something like song. Until, as the sky grew darker and the downpour let loose, Joe Trout appeared to as well. With his head thrown back and mouth open wide, he began belting out musical numbers. Show tunes, specifically. “Singin’ in the Rain.” Also “Come Rain or Come Shine.” It was as if he’d completely forgotten himself, not to mention his station.
It is not at all like Joe Trout. And I wonder again if Celeste sees it too. If she realizes this wrong turn Joe is taking.
“Margaret,” Celeste says, “about Joe.”
I return to my board. I keep working. It is not my place to turn in Joe. Celeste is the series editor here. Still something, I know, must be said. So reaching again for my burnisher, “Yes, Celeste,” I say. “I’ve been meaning to speak with you too.”
Drifting past me, Celeste fails to acknowledge. She heads for my desk where I have stacked a few boards and takes a long, close look. “The thing is,” she says, “I would like to know what you think of Joe Trout. I’m afraid he is getting away from me.”
“You are?” I say. I turn toward her. Once again I’m surprised. Normally Celeste keeps Joe close to her peasant-stitched vest. She is not one to solicit comments. But here is my chance. I have to speak up. Who else here will level with her?
I take a breath. “Celeste,” I begin.
“Hmm,” Celeste says, not listening. She fingers a board, tilts her head, considers a line drawing of Joe.
She studies the art, then suddenly blanches. “Oh Margaret!” she says, gasping. “Look here! Just look what she has done now.”
Celeste stabs a long finger at Joe’s large trout head, mouth open in his new list toward song. “It’s Emmaline again.” She is sure of it.
I stare as though I do not know what she means.
Celeste holds up the board. “See what she’s done to his lips, Margaret?” she says. “She’s redrawn his lips, the lips are all wrong.”
I get up from my table, take a look. And I am going to bring up another point then, that in the flat that she holds Joe is singing. That’s the reason his mouth looks like it does. He is opening it wide in song. Although, I will add, as tactfully as I can, the text is not all that clear why. I’m pretty sure trout aren’t known for their voices.
But I look at Celeste and realize she has somehow not caught all this, at least not the part about singing. Which does of course raise the question of just who is writing this series.
Celeste taps at the board again. “Just look, will you, Margaret,” she says. “Joe’s mouth reaches all the way back to his eyes. It’s frightening, really, I tell you. What will the children make of it?”
She sighs. “Whatever will we do with our Emmaline?” Apparently now the issue with this flat is all our Emmaline’s fault. Although I still think Celeste is missing the point here.
She stares at the board a moment more. Then, “Say, Margaret,” she says, and she brightens.
She looks up to see I am watching her. “Do you think, Margaret,” she says, “you could fix him? Maybe re-ink his lines just a little?” She points to the mouth. “It just wouldn’t be right to send Joe away to the printer like this.” She leans forward, lowers her voice. “And let little Emmaline win.”
She smiles sweetly. She does not wait for an answer, she only stands up straight and gives me a pat. “Thank you ever so, Margaret,” she says. “It is so fortunate to have paste-up in-house.” Then with a wave and a swish of her gauzy full skirt, she turns, headed early, no doubt, for her tub.
I wait until I hear her office door close, then take out my Rapidograph and blade. I scratch at the clay coat of the paper and put Joe’s lips back where they belong.
Still, this little patch does not change the drift Joe has taken. Joe Trout is floundering, it’s clear. He has abandoned his phonics, his science—indeed his quest for the crucial Trout Route. As signs go, none of this bodes any good.
He stands in his landlord’s plowed furrows. Breathes in, smells the earth. Knows it’s good. Good he’s come back, good he is here.
He picks up a small stone, throws it far. Watches it arc, fall to ground. And knows now he longs to start over. To put his thoughts straight again. Find what was lost, the hunger once felt, the sureness he’d felt as well. Wake before light, feel hope. Know again what the next step will be. Know it will turn out right.
He looks to the end of the landlord’s wide field and thinks yes, maybe here he’ll begin.
With Celeste out the door and Joe’s mouth back in place, I check the clock. There is still time before lunch for a little more of Ben. I would like now to get back to Ben. About how we first met and the happy parts. About where that first coffee of ours led.
But before I can take that particular bent, I hear a crash from Celeste’s suite next door. And from my table see her run into the hall, waving a galley overhead.
“Look here, oh my god, come look here,” she shrieks. And at that the other editors appear at their doors. “Just look at what’s happened now.” Then gathering all of us to her, “See there,” she says. “There in the next to last line.” She holds up the end of the galley. “A typo!”
At which point we all start to relax. We know about Celeste and her typos. She can be prickly about transpositions.
But “No!” Celeste’s voice rises higher. “There was no typo when I came in today. I checked that galley just this morning. But now at noon—look there,” she says, giving the galley a slap. “You see what has happened, don’t you? Whoever, whatever it was changed that ‘r’ in the last line to ‘d.’”
Celeste stops, breathes in, collects herself. Then lowering her voice and offering an instructional shiver, “The word is supposed to be ‘room,’” she says. “At the end of the story, Joe Trout is supposed to go off to his room.”
Celeste holds the galley back up for us. She takes a second look herself. Then shrieking again, “But now that ‘r’ has turned into a ‘d’!”
The editors recoil. But Celeste just goes on shrieking. “It’s Emmaline, again. Don’t you see?”
And then she stops, takes another long breath, and adds, “Or maybe one of the others.”
Which is to say, we are haunted here at the Project. Some days Celeste cannot get it out of her mind. Really, we think, she should have adjusted by now, she has known of the hauntings since we all first moved in. Still, “Shh,” she’ll whisper and sit up very straight, interrupting whoever is speaking. “Footsteps in the hall—Who’s there?” Or then suddenly pointing to a window and turning shockingly pale, “Good god,” she will cry. “That face just now at the glass. We’re four stories up. My god!”
Nor does she leave it at that. Frequently, to remind us all of the seriousness of our situation, she’ll point to other signs. The mysterious cold spots in the hallways and suites. The rushes of wind over desktops, the sometimes sulphurous smell to the air. Or the strange noises at dusk, the loud gargling, then the unexplained banging, the moaning.
The series editors pay attention to Celeste. She is someone who knows about ghosts, they believe, a true student of the afterlife. If Celeste saw a face at the window—well, most likely there really was one. Celeste’s just more attuned than the rest. More here/now, as she would say.
It’s unsettling indeed, this ghost or possible ghosts that Celeste insists upon sighting. Still she thrills, I have noticed, to the thought of them. The editors thrill just a little, too. They never know what new mayhem awaits, even when it’s not footsteps or floating faces at glass. Not all sightings are so dramatic. Some days they amount to mere office pranks. “Look, Joe’s mouth moved!” That sort of thing. Editorial outtakes, that’s all.
But Celeste bears none of it lightly. The typo just now, for instance. “You know,” Celeste whispers before we disband, not leaving us to our own conclusions, “ancient Greeks said the dead know the future. They can tell you your fate.”
And then nodding again at the typo of doom and clamping her hand to her cheek, “My god, think what those ghosts are saying.”
The editors listen to Celeste wide-eyed. But I myself am of another mind. Celeste needs to rethink things, I think. It is only ghost stories, not ghosts, here at play. Celeste’s signs are just things she believes that ghosts do. My guess is Celeste’s typo was in fact always there. She’s just looking for an excuse to have missed it.
And besides, I say to the editors, it’s old news, this haunting of Elmwood. All sanatoriums are haunted, there is some sort of rule. And if we were more of a profitable mind here, we’d be charging for midnight flashlight tours.
The fact is, people like to be frightened, I say. It just makes life a little bigger. We here, for instance, like to think we have ghosts, as without them we’d just be text editors. Without ghosts there’d be only the ordinary.
Still there is one ghost, this ghost Celeste calls Emmaline, who is starting to try all of our patience. In the last few months, she seems to keep coming up on our floor, these past days more than ever. Or so Celeste believes. I, however, have my doubts. “But Celeste,” I tell her, “it cannot all just be Emmaline.”
Celeste says well yes, it can. It is Emmaline who’s at fault here, yes of course. And she says then Earnest, the janitor, has seen her. “You don’t have to believe me, just ask Earnest.”
I nod. I say I’ll look into it, as though maybe I just might. But what Celeste doesn’t know is I’ve already heard all about our young Emmaline. Earnest filled me in several weeks ago now, soon after he’d come back from retirement. It was on a night I got caught in overtime—something I don’t make a practice of—but we were behind on our annual report. Steinem had dragged with the executive letter, so I had to stay late doing paste-up in hope of making our deadline by dawn.
I was in fact just burnishing the last of the letter and beginning to size Steinem’s photo when a shadow moved over my light table.
“Earnest?” I say. “Is that you, Earnest?”
“The girl in the nightie who jumped,” he says. “She was one of the screamers here.”
I look up. “Thought you would want to know,” he says.
And I realize then I am caught. So I put down my burnisher and “Jumped?” I say. “She jumped?”
Earnest leans on his mop. “Jumped. Yes,” he says. Then halting in places as though to recall, he continues. “Young girl, very pale. I remember her now. Small, quiet, kept to herself. You wouldn’t take her for a screamer. But one day she came back from the treatment wing wrapped up in a bloody sheet, and it was never the same with her after.”
Earnest sighs loudly. “Jumped,” he says. Then he walks to my balcony to show me.
He points to the ground below. “Right there,” he says. “There, where they’ve paved over for parking. She landed right there with her neck twisted around and they took her away in a basket.”
Earnest turns from the balcony, he looks old. I nod and return to my paste-up. The night is late, and I think Earnest has finished his story.
“But there’s something else you should know,” he says. And I can hear him shambling his way back to my table. He leans in then over my shoulder and his voice drops to a raspy whisper. What he has to tell me, he says, is something for only my ears. He never knows when it might be close and it is better it doesn’t hear.
“‘It,’ Earnest?” I say, still burnishing.
“The ghost. That girl in the nightgown. She’s still here, you know.”
I lift my head and find Earnest has taken a step back. He stands now, staring, waiting.
“There are no such things as ghosts, Earnest,” I say. Which I feel obliged to point out, although something about Earnest lurking there in the dark makes me less confident of the fact than by day. “You are now just making things up.”
“Believe what you like,” Earnest tells me, shrugs, and continues. “Me, I seen her. Little thing, drifty, long silvery hair. She stays mostly just on the fourth floor, there by that balcony where she jumped. I tell you I don’t much like mopping up here alone.”
And then he pulls up a chair, sits down, and tells me more of the story.
The night that it happened, he says, they had made up her bed on the balcony. Back then, they thought air was the answer, fresh air, so everyone, even screamers, slept out of doors. In winter with furs on their beds and their feet stuffed in boxes of straw.
Earnest continues. The nurse attending that night said the girl just wasn’t right. Her fever was back, she didn’t know where she was. She lay restless and writhing for hours. Then well past midnight, without any warning, she got up out of her bed like she was sleepwalking. The night nurse stood too, but before she could stop her, the girl was up on the balcony ledge, holding her arms out wide.
Just like an angel, the nurse later said, dressed as the girl was in her nightclothes. And then just like an angel, the girl lifted up to her toes and smiling, tipped out into the night. The nurse couldn’t reach her in time. The girl fell face first all those four floors and landed with a sickening sound.
I wince here a little. I do not like to think of that sound. But I believe this time Earnest is finished, so “It is a sad story, all right,” I tell him. And I start to go back to my board.
Earnest holds up his hand to stop me. “But it wasn’t the way the nurse told it. The girl wasn’t sleepwalking that night.”
And here Earnest gives me a look. “Something else made her jump. Something out in the night was calling her.”
He stands.
“That little one in the nightie, you watch out for her,” he says. “She’ll be calling to you now too.”
Earnest nods once toward the balcony. Then he picks up his mop and is gone.