Ghost Town (14 page)

—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!

—But why?

To a child who from an early age had had a pronounced streak of romanticism in her, this was of course a startling revelation. But as I might have predicted, my mother at this point became vague. Apparently the girl did not come from a good family.

—So it drove him mad?

My mother was sitting by the fire, knitting, and I have a distinct memory of the clack of the knitting needles all at once stopping, and then a long silence. She gazed out at the street once more, and in the gloom the old clock on the mantel ticked on in a silence only occasionally disturbed by the muffled thunder of the subway trains running uptown under Seventh Avenue. Then she sighed, shook her head, cast a friendly glance at me where I sat by the fire with my arms wrapped round my knees, and resumed the story.

—Yes, she said at last, I suppose it did.

The clacking resumed but it was less rapid now. This meant that my mother was thinking.

—He went mad for love?

—Oh, you are all the same!

By then my mama was old beyond her years, exhausted by her unhappiness, which I now
realize was as much about the disintegration of her marriage to my father as it was to the collapsed fortunes of the van Horn family. Often there would come a moment—late in the evening as I remember it, the month November, or perhaps February, for it would be raining hard outside—and she would stop in mid-sentence, up would come her head, up would come her finger, and together we would listen to the distant sound of the front door of the building banging shut.

—Your father is home, she would whisper; and the dread upon her face came of her uncertainty as to whether or not he was sober.

—That’s enough! she cried; and I was sent to bed.

I had heard enough by then to elevate Uncle Julius to heroic status—to think of it, my own uncle being driven insane for
love
! But I did want the rest, and I think my mother wanted to give me the rest, though it caused her genuine distress to speak of events which to her were the first causes of the disaster which spelled the beginning of our end; I constantly feared that she would simply refuse. Just shake her head and tell me she could not go on, it was all too dreadful. So much darkness, she whispered—and not just for us! I
was of course agog to know what form the darkness would take, but I knew my mama well enough not to display any impatience. She was reluctant to arouse the family history, but I believe now that the past, vale of tears though it was, so bleak and full of suffering, was still preferable to a present in which a cold, indifferent husband came home to her night after night and reminded her of just how low we had sunk. The house on Twenty-Third Street in which we had a small apartment on the third floor, hard to heat in the winter, stifling hot in the summer, and the icebox down the hall—once we had owned the whole building!

My mother held her father responsible. She disapproved of him just as she disapproved of Aunt Charlotte, just as doubtless she would have disapproved of me had she lived to see what I became. Her tragedy, if the word is not too strong, was being born too late to enjoy the social ascent of the van Horns, but not too soon to witness our decline. Her nostalgia was touched with acid by reason of acute disappointment: fate had cheated her of her rightful status, and for this, as I say, she blamed my grandfather.

The last detail of the story I had after a conversation with him. I have said that Jerome Brook Franklin was a gruff man, and he often exaggerated that trait in order to amuse me. When my mama took me to visit my grandmother I would slip away and dart up the stairs, then tiptoe along the corridor to his studio. Often the door was slightly ajar, and from the corridor I was aware of the powerful smell of the chemicals with which he cleaned his brushes. I would see him there before his easel in the long coat he wore when he was working, a loose brown garment such as might be worn by a janitor. Always the brown coat, always the cigar, and sometimes a model, a girl, naked or loosely draped, arranged upon a platform with a broken pillar and perhaps a clump of trailing ivy. At other times some grand dignified lady with a vast bosom and hair stacked high would sit imperiously before him, and on the easel I would see her painted head, and beyond it the head itself.

My grandfather was aware of my presence even though I had made no sound at all. Without turning he would bark at me in a tone of mock annoyance.

—What is it you want, nuisance child? You
have come to distract me because the women don’t want you, is that it?

But he would not turn, nor would his eyes move from their single track, the sitter and the canvas, back and forth, and the brush in his hand flickering here and there as the cigar smoke streamed from him as though he were an engine. I said nothing, merely hitched myself up onto a paint-spattered stool in the back of the studio and sat silently watching. He talked about me to his sitter.

—My daughter’s child, he would say. She’s a van Horn like her mother. All mad. My brother-in-law, they had to send him away! Into
my
mountains!

So it would go, and a large part of the pleasure I took from being there came of listening to my grandfather talk about the family, which he did in tones of
faux
horror, saying we were all mad. It was a good joke. After a while he would turn to change his brushes and see me perched on my stool, and pretend to be surprised.

—Are you still here, you damn little monkey? Go on, get out, get away downstairs, I’ve had enough of you!

Off I would go then and wander about the
house until I heard my mama calling me. Then we would go home.