Madeleine's Ghost (20 page)

T
HE CLOCK
ticks heavily in my room. Across Portsmouth the power plant grumbles in the yellow night. Bolts of blue static zap between the transformers. Out the bathroom window Manhattan seems rimmed in fire, burning against the sky, cables of the bridges strung glittering like blown glass over the dark river.

The apartment is like an oven tonight. Sleep is impossible. Yesterday the temperature reached 102 Fahrenheit in Times Square. The weatherman on the radio says we're in the middle of one of the worst heat waves the East Coast has seen in over a hundred years. In Philadelphia fifteen people have already died from heat-related illnesses. In New York they're not saying.

These conditions seem to please the ghost. The other night there were two new noises: a flapping sound and a very distinct cough. The flapping sound could have been the curtains in Molesworth's old room,
but the cough? Also, when I stumbled to the bathroom in the dark, my hand came to rest for a second against what felt like a ladder-back chair in the middle of the living room. It only occurred to me the next morning that I have no such chair. I was half asleep, so I am not entirely sure of this incident.

But I can't discount it either.

O
NE HUNDRED
and one in the shade, and I am sitting on a bench in the sun across from the Cost-Less shoe store, eating a bag of peanuts, sweating profusely and watching the crowds. This stretch of the Fulton Street Mall in downtown Brooklyn looks like pictures of Nairobi or Timbuktu I have seen in the pages of
National Geographic.
The same dark throngs and run-down buildings and women carrying bundles on their heads. Afrocentric ware is spread across blankets on the sidewalk. On the nearest one I see vials of liquid incense, wooden zebra statuettes, and hardcover books about Malcolm X, Tina Turner, and the blackness of the Pharaohs of Egypt.

At last I spy Chase exit the subway at Clark Street, two blocks down. She waves at me and pauses to look in the window of Cost-Less.

“They really do cost less,” she says when I reach her side. “Look at those.” She indicates a pair of black clumpy platforms with large chrome buckles, passable imitations of expensive models sold for hundreds of dollars at fashionable boutiques in Manhattan. “Twenty-nine ninety-five. Seems like a bargain. What do you think?”

“Yes,” I say. “But you get what you pay for.” This statement would have made my mother proud.

We stand there for a minute longer, staring at the shoes. Chase is wearing a short summer dress and Birkenstock sandals today and a pair of big Italian sunglasses that have the effect of making her look like a bug in a cartoon, but she is in a rare good mood.

“O.K.” She flashes me a crooked smile. “Ready for the Spirit World?”

We walk around the corner to Madame Ada's Gypsy Tearoom on Livingston. The place is one flight up, over a Korean deli that features a salad and hot lunch buffet. A plastic-lettered sign in the deli window gives today's specials as Beef Lo Mein, Bratwurst and Sauerkraut, Chicken Lasagna. The greasy smell of these disparate offerings haunts us until we step into Madame Ada's parlor. This place has a powerful smell all its own, the reek of cats and cloying perfume and incontinent bowels and baby powder, an old woman's smell.

I settle on the sofa in the hallway in a cloud of dust and wait as Chase goes through the curtain into the back to fetch her great-aunt. After a moment I hear the sound of arguing, and it seems it will take a while, so I go on into the tearoom, which is done up in what can only be described as Gypsy kitsch: The walls are covered with brocade fabric and framed 3-D pictures of the Last Supper and the Statue of Liberty. A yellow parrot blinks somnolently from a pagoda-shaped cage. A black lacquer celestial globe rests idly on its axis, ringed with fanciful personifications of the constellations. There is actually a crystal ball on a Turkish table, surrounded by low, carpet-covered Turkish couches. A poorly executed plaster statue of the Muse Calliope flexes her breasts in one corner. Of greater interest is the bookcase overflowing with ancient wide-backed tomes on various extraphysical topics, a few of them familiar to me from the research paper on automatic writing done in my abandoned year of graduate work at Loyola.

With a twinge of nostalgia I make out a copy of Flournoy's
Des Indes à la planète Mars
, the volume in which Antoinette once left love notes in another life. There is also Charles Linton's
The Healing of the Nations
, J. Murray Spear's
Messages from the Spirit Land
, and rare copies of Joseph Glanville's
The Vanity of Dogmatizing
and
Sadducismus Triumphatus
, containing Glanville's account of the séance that roused the infamous knocking drummer of Tedworth in 1661. I am surprised to find both are original seventeenth-century editions, worth a small fortune. As I
examine them, the curtains part and Chase wheels her great-aunt into the tearoom.

Stuffed into her wheelchair, Madame Ada is quite a sight. She has the jowls of Winston Churchill, a head the size of a basketball and is of an indeterminate age between 60 and 90. A big person to begin with, but bloated by years of overeating and no exercise, she must weigh more than Molesworth. The woman is not a cripple—Chase has told me this—just someone who does not like to walk. For a horrible second I imagine her inner organs, her heart encased in fat like a canned ham. With some effort Chase pushes her great-aunt up to the table.

“Auntie, this is Ned,” she calls out, and then collapses into a doilied armchair across the room.

The old woman in the wheelchair looks me up and down with eyes black and hard as marbles. “Young man, put the books back where you got them, very carefully, and sit down,” she says. Her voice booms from somewhere out of all that flesh.

I replace Glanville on the shelf and sit carefully on the Turkish couch, so low I am staring up at Madame Ada's knees. She is wearing the heavily embroidered skirt and shawl of her tribe. A circlet of Greek coins is stuck to her forehead with sweat. She stares at me for the next few minutes in silence, fixing her black eyes with a concentration that sends a chill down my spine. I start to speak, but Madame Ada puts a finger to her lips, and there is nothing but her eyes and an odd catlike humming from her barrel throat. Then, suddenly, she claps her hands. It is a loud, meaty, popping sound, and I almost jump off the sofa.

“Do you know how long you were out?” she says.

“What do you mean?” I say.

“It's been ten minutes,” Chase says from across the room. “Auntie had you in a trance for ten minutes. You sat on that couch stiff as a board with your mouth hanging open.”

“Hush, girl!” Madame Ada says. “You didn't feel it?” she says to me.

I shake my head, confused, and Madame Ada shrugs and turns to Chase.

“There is nothing I can do for your friend,” she says. “The knots are tied too tightly around him.”

“Wait a minute,” I say. “You haven't done anything. You haven't even heard about the ghost yet.”

“We don't use the word
ghost
here,” she says sharply. “The word
ghost
is offensive to the spirits of the departed. We use the word
spirit
, or
presence
or
apparition
, or, if you must,
shade
or
phantasm
, but never
ghost.
Also, the words
phantom
and
entity
are discouraged.”

I frown and say nothing.

“Why can't you help him, Auntie?” Chase says from her chair.

“Listen, how about we just forget the whole thing?” I stand up to go, annoyed.

“Sit!” Madame Ada brings her black eyes to bear like cannon.

I sit.

“I don't need to hear about the spirit from you because I can see the spirit. Right there.” She points to my head with a knobby finger made crooked by arthritis.

“Where?” I say.

“There, in your aura.”

“You mean, right now?”

“Yes. She's with you always. Not just where you live but wherever you go. And she has been with you for some years. Waiting.”

“She?” I begin to sweat. “Did Chase tell you about the, uh … spirit?”

The old woman shakes her head. “Chase told me that you were sharing your apartment with a restless presence, and that you found this arrangement uncomfortable. Nothing more.”

Chase sits forward in her chair across the room. Now I see that her eyes are like her great-aunt's, only dimmer, much less powerful.

“So you are aware the spirit is that of a woman?” Madame Ada says. “You have seen her. Am I correct?”

“Maybe,” I say.

“And let me tell you something else. Your people, they often see the dead. This mark is upon you. A certain melancholy tone in the outer edge
of your penumbra. A sadness that enables you to grope a little way into the gloom. Am I correct?”

“My mother,” I mumble. “She was a little weird. She had these migraines; she would see colors, hear things …”

“And?”

“Once, when I was a kid, she said our cat, Miss Kitty, came scratching on the kitchen door to be fed. She fed the cat, and out it went again. Thing is, I saw Miss Kitty run over by a car two weeks before that.”

“Of course. Your mother. And you have denied your own spirit sight time and again, am I right?”

“I don't know,” I say, my voice the barest croak.

“So you felt something when you moved into the apartment?”

“Not really.” I look down. I can barely meet the old woman's eyes. “A whisper, maybe.”

“A whisper!” She shakes her massive head in disgust. “If you had cultivated your gift, you wouldn't have moved into the apartment in the first place. You would have felt the presence there and found somewhere else to live.”

“Chase found the place,” I say. “She said it suited me—” Madame Ada gives an impatient wave. “And maybe it does. Maybe your own destiny is tied up with the restlessness of this female spirit.”

“Who is she?”

Madame Ada wheels her chair over to me, takes hold of one knee in a painful grasp, and closes her eyes. I feel a slight tingling sensation emanating from her fingers. Her lower lip begins to tremble and sweat, and when her voice comes out, it is an octave closer to the ground.

“I see a white dress. A woman in a white dress,” she says. “Not from here. From far away, a warmer place. Proud and arrogant. Ruled by terrible passions. Revenge. She paid dearly for what she did. She is still paying. She needs your help to find rest. Her cousin …” Then she lets go, her eyes fluttering open. “There, that's all I can tell you.”

“Please, how can I get rid of her?” I say, desperate. “Are you telling me that it's not the apartment, it's me? What if I move to Alaska? Will the ghost follow me there?”

“Even to the ends of the earth,” Madame Ada says, with grim satisfaction. “In your dreams.”

“But why?” I'm almost shouting now.

“This spirit has been waiting for you for a long time. Now she won't let go till she get's what she wants. You are at the center of a complicated web of circumstance. Many choices in your life have led you to the spirit, and the spirit to you. You have chosen each other from out of the billion souls.”

I feel sick. The smell of the place is overpowering. It all seems so unreal, so ridiculous, but my heart knows what Madame Ada says is true.

“I've got to get rid of it,” I say weakly at last. “Please.”

The old woman shakes her huge head. “The spirit must be coaxed far enough into the light for you to see her clearly. Only then will she answer your questions, tell you who she is, what she wants from you. You need a séance. I am too old for such things. You need a good medium. I might be able to give you a referral.”

The yellow parrot shifts its weight on the perch and screeches, the first sound it has made in an hour.

Before I can ask another question, Chase stands behind the wheelchair and puts her hands on the old woman's massive shoulders.

“I'll do it,” she says.

Madame Ada twists backward, the coins on her forehead jingling.

“You will not,” she says, and appears to leave no room for argument, but Chase is adamant.

“You told me once that I had a talent with the dead, Auntie,” she says. “You told me they would speak to me if I tried. I've never really tried. Look in my face now. I'm halfway there already.”

The old woman studies her great-niece for a quiet moment, then takes her hand. After a while she lets it go, and her shoulders droop sadly. “Yes, I see,” Madame Ada mutters, and the bird shrieks again in its cage in agreement.

“All right, Ned,” Chase says to me. “You can take off. Auntie and I need to talk some shop.”

I am at a loss for words. Chase is making a sacrifice I do not understand. “Are you sure about this, Chase?” I say to her.

She smiles.

“Madame Ada, is this dangerous?”

The old woman shrugs. When I reach the door, she calls me back.

“You're forgetting something, young man,” she says.

I look at her blankly.

“My fee. I am a psychic consultant. My services are not free. You owe me two hundred fifty dollars.” And she holds out one fat paw.

“It's less than most lawyers charge,” Chase says. “Think of it that way.”

I have no choice. I walk out into the equatorial heat of the afternoon and wait in line for the money machine at the Chemical Bank on Flatbush. It is rush hour; cars inch by, radiators boiling over, bound for scattered unimaginable neighborhoods on the ocean side of Long Island. The acrid stench of antifreeze and burned brake lining fills my lungs. On the way back I squint up into the haze through my sunglasses till my eyes hurt. The light in the sky is so hot it makes me stupid.