Ghostheart (2 page)

Annie O’Neill would often think such things and smile, alone with her thoughts.

The coffee was ready. She could smell it from the front. She went out back, washed a cup in the sink in the corner, and took a small carton of cream from the refrigerator, upended the last half-inch into a cup, and filled the cup with coffee. She stayed a while in the back room, and only when she heard the bell above the door did she venture once more into her world within worlds.

The man was elderly, perhaps sixty-five or seventy, and
beneath his arm he carried a brown paper-wrapped bundle tied with string. His topcoat, although heavy and once expensive, was worn in places. His hair was silver-grey, white over the temples, and when he saw her he smiled with such warmth and depth Annie couldn’t help but smile back.

‘I intrude?’ he asked politely.

Annie shook her head and stepped forward. ‘Not at all … how can I help you?’

‘I don’t wish to disturb you if you are busy,’ the old man said. ‘I could perhaps come back another time.’

‘Any time is as good as any other time,’ Annie said. ‘Are you after something specific?’

The old man shook his head. He smiled once more, and there was something about the way he smiled, something almost familiar, that put Annie at ease.

‘I’m just visiting,’ he said. He stood for a moment surveying the store, glanced once or twice at Annie, and then turned to look again across the racks and shelves that surrounded him.

‘You have an impressive collection here,’ he said.

‘Enough to keep me occupied,’ she replied.

‘And to serve the needs of those whose taste runs beyond the
New York Times
bestseller list.’

Annie smiled. ‘We do have some odd and unusual items here,’ she said. ‘Nothing too rare or intellectual, but some very good books indeed.’

‘I am sure you do,’ the man said.

‘Was there something you were hoping to find?’ she asked again, now somehow slightly uneasy.

The man shook his head. ‘I suppose you could say that,’ he replied.

Annie stepped forward. She had the unmistakable sense that she had missed something.

‘And what might that be?’ she asked.

‘It is a little difficult …’

Annie frowned.

The man shook his head as if he himself were questioning
what he was doing there. ‘In all honesty, I have come for no other reason than reminiscence.’

‘Reminiscence?’

‘Well … well, as I said it’s a little difficult after all these years, but the reason I came down here was because I knew your father –’

The old man stopped mid-flight as if he’d anticipated a reaction.

Annie was speechless, confused.

The man cleared his throat as if in apology for his own presence. ‘I knew him well enough to take books,’ he went on. ‘To read them, to pay him later.’

He paused again, and then he laughed gently. ‘Your father was a brilliant man with a brilliant mind … I miss him.’

‘Me too,’ Annie said, almost involuntarily, and was gripped by a sudden, quiet rush of emotion at the mention of her father. She paused a moment, gathering herself perhaps, and then walked a little further into the shop.

The old man set down his package on a stack of hardbacks and sighed. He looked up, up and around the shelves from one wall to the next and back again.

He stretched his arms wide, a fisherman telling tales.

‘This was his dream,’ he said. ‘He seemed to want nothing else but what he possessed here … except of course your mother.’

Annie shook her head. She was having difficulty absorbing everything that she was feeling. A sense of absence, of mystery, and a sudden reminder of a huge hole in her life which, even at this moment, she was trying desperately to fill with half-forgotten memories. Her father had been dead more than twenty years, her mother more than ten, and yet in some way her memories of her father were stronger, more vivid, more passionate. In that moment she could almost see him. Right now. Standing where the old man was standing with his worn-out expensive topcoat.

‘How did you know my father?’ Annie asked, the words
clawing their way up out of her throat. There was tension in her chest as if she were fighting back tears that had long since been spent.

The old man winked.

‘That, my dear, is a very long story …’

Annie O’Neill’s mother had listened to Sinatra. Always. The mere fact of hearing his voice so often as a child had enchanted Annie O’Neill long before she saw his films or read his biographies. And she couldn’t have cared less
who
the world believed he was. She didn’t care that Coppola called him Johnny Fontaine in
The Godfather
, or that he introduced a girl called Judith Exner to both Sam Giancana and John Kennedy, or that he underwent extensive investigations regarding his alleged involvement with the Mafia … man, he could
sing
. From the first bars of ‘Young At Heart’ or ‘I’ve Got The World On A String’, whether the orchestra was led by Harry James, Nelson Riddle or Tommy Dorsey, even if it was Take #9 or Take #12 with Frank’s irritated demands left intact on the master, it didn’t matter. A man could sing like that, didn’t matter if he’d been the one behind the grassy knoll smoking a cigarette and waiting for The Man to come to town. Hoboken, New Jersey, 12 December 1915, the world was given a gift from God, and God deigned to leave him here long enough to enchant a million hearts.

And it was to Frank that Annie O’Neill would go when she felt she was losing herself inside the anonymity of her own life. And it was within the timbre and pace of his voice that she would find some small solace; find refuge in the mere fact that this had been a love she had shared with her mother. Inside her third-floor Morningside Heights apartment – four rooms, each decorated with care and consideration, each color labored over, each item of furniture selected with a complete ambience in mind – she would sequester herself from reality and find her own reality that was so much more
real
.

It was from this same safe haven that she had ventured that
August Thursday morning, a walk she made each and every working day, and it was within those ten or fifteen minutes that she would habitually re-design her life into something more closely approximating her desires. For all the hundreds, perhaps thousands of people who passed her in the street, it was nevertheless a lonely walk, a methodical passage from one foot to the next with little of consequence in between. And in arriving she would see much the same people. There was Harry Carpenter, a retired engineer who’d once worked down at the Rose Center for Earth & Space: a man who talked endlessly of his Spiderman comic book collection, how he’d found a mint copy of
The Amazing Spider-Man
, March 1963,
#14
of July ’64 when The Green Goblin first appeared and, to cap it all, a
#39
from August ’66 when Norman Osborn’s real identity was revealed. Harry was perhaps a little lost, sixty-seven years old, his wife long since gone, and he trawled through the shelves and selected books that Annie knew he would never read. And then there was John Damianka, a lecturer from Barnard, a kindred spirit in some sense. John and Annie had been neighbors an eternity ago, and when she’d moved to Morningside John had kept right on visiting like it was something that would happen for the rest of their lives. Once upon a time, sitting on the stoop, they had talked of life’s inconsequentialities, but now he came to the store, and however well he might have seemed there was always something about him that reminded Annie of the quiet sense of desperation that accompanied all those who were lonely. He talked endlessly of the trials and tribulations of finding
a decent girl
these days.
I don’t need Kim Basinger
he would say,
I just want someone who understands me … where I’m at, where I’m coming from, where I’m going
. Annie held her tongue, resisted the temptation to tell him that it might be a little easier if he knew those things for himself, and she listened patiently.
Irony of it all
, he would say,
is that the only letters people like me receive are Dear John letters
. He would laugh at that, laugh each time he told her, and then he would add:
But you know, the only girl that ever dumped me by
mail called me J.D. And that was how it began. Dear J.D. So the only real Dear John letter I ever got wasn’t a Dear John letter at all
.

People like this. Lost people perhaps. Lost enough to find the little bookstore down a narrow sidestreet a short walk from Ellington and West 107th.

She welcomed them, all of them, because she was still idealistic enough to think that a book could change a life.

And thus her first thought when the old man in the expensive but tired-looking topcoat had mentioned her father was that he had come to reminisce, to select a book perhaps, to consume a few minutes of their lives shooting the breeze and skating the differences. And then her second thought, her third and fourth and fifth also, was that this man – whoever he was – might be the key to understanding something about her own past that had been forever a mystery. The urgency she felt could not have been explained any other way; he represented a line to the shore, and she grasped it with both hands and pulled with all she possessed.

‘You are busy?’ the old man asked her.

Annie held her arms out as if inviting him to survey the crowds that were even now jamming their way into the store. She smiled and shook her head. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m not busy.’

‘Then perhaps I can take a few minutes to show you something.’

He collected his package from the stack of hardbacks as he came towards her, and when he reached the counter he set it down and untied the string that bound it.

‘I have here,’ he said quietly, ‘something that may intrigue you.’

The brown paper unfolded like dry skin, like a fall leaf once again unwrapped from its own multi-hued chrysalis. Within the package was a sheaf of papers, and on top of the papers a blank manila envelope. The old man took the envelope, and from within it he drew a single sheet of paper. He handed it to Annie.

‘A letter,’ the man said.

Annie took it, felt the coarse and brittle texture of its surface. It felt like the page of an age-old volume, a first edition left somewhere to hold its words in breathless perpetuity. At the top of the page, faded now but still legible, was a scrawled heading.
From the Cicero Hotel
it read.

‘No longer standing,’ the old man said. ‘They tore it down in the sixties and built something strange and modern.’

There was something clipped and too articulate in his voice, something that made him difficult to place.

Annie looked up at him and nodded.

‘It’s a letter your father wrote,’ he went on. ‘He wrote it to your mother. See …’

The man extended his hand, then his index finger, and the index finger skated over the letter and rested above the words
Dear Heart
.

Annie frowned.

‘He always started his letters that way … it was a token of his affection, his love for her. Shame, but I believe the letters never actually reached her …’

The old man withdrew his finger.

Annie watched it go like a train leaving a station with someone special on board.

‘If there was one thing your father knew how to do,’ he whispered, almost as if for effect alone, ‘it was
how
to love someone.’

And then the old man nodded towards the letter, and the hand with the index finger made this small flourish, like someone introducing a minor act in vaudeville.

‘Proceed,’ he said, and smiled.

‘What’s your name?’ Annie asked.

The man frowned for a second, as if the question bore the least possible significance and relevance to the matter at hand.

‘My name?’

‘Your name?’ she repeated.

The man hesitated. ‘Forrester,’ he said. ‘My name is Robert Franklin Forrester, but people just call me Forrester. Robert is
too modern for a man my age, and Franklin is too presidential, don’t you think?’

He smiled, and then he bowed his head as if a third person had made a formal introduction.

Once again she felt a twinge as he smiled. Was there something too familiar in the way he looked at her?

She was possessed then, compelled to consider something that at once excited and terrified her. She found herself scrutinizing his face, looking for something that would serve to identify who he might be. She shuddered visibly and turned her eyes back to the letter.

Annie frowned; she felt her heart tighten up like the fist of a child. ‘Chance?’

Forrester smiled. ‘He called her Heart, she called him Chance … you know how love is.’

Annie smiled as if she understood. She did not question the feeling, but nevertheless the feeling came. She believed – all too unwillingly – that she did not know how love was.

‘He died soon after,’ Forrester said. ‘I believe, though I could never be sure, that even though she never received it, it was in fact his last letter to her.’

Annie held the page in her hands, hands that were even now beginning to tremble. Emotion welled in her chest, a small,
tight fist in her throat, and when she looked back at Forrester she saw him blurred at the edges. Blurred through her own tears.

‘My dear,’ he said, and withdrew a silk handkerchief from his pocket.

He handed it to her and she touched her lids gently.

‘I did not mean to upset you,’ he said. ‘Quite the opposite.’