Madeleine's Ghost (3 page)

I remember walking the empty streets in the first red light of dusk. After the clamor of Manhattan it seemed eerily quiet. Dark barges passed silently on the East River just a block down. Crickets chirped from weeds growing through the cobbles. The blood-colored sunset tinted shards of broken glass in the windows of abandoned warehouses. Along the three or four blocks of decrepit tenements across from the power plant, dying fig trees sagged against gravity, propped up with two-by-fours and wire stays. I saw a hummingbird dart off from the rotting fruit toward the light in the west. I was charmed. Fresh from Graduate Student Housing at
Georgetown, I knew nothing of the violence and crime of South Brooklyn. And the rent was extremely low, almost a miracle in itself.

“So what's the catch?” I said to Chase.

We had inspected the apartment and stood in the empty living room, boards creaking beneath our feet. The smokestacks of the power plant out the window looked like the fingers of a giant hand.

“Does there always have to be something wrong?” Chase said. “For once in your life, believe.” Then she did a sort of dance with the dust through the four vacant rooms and came back to stand beside me. “It's a fucking amazing bargain,” she said, out of breath. “Three seventy-five for two bedrooms, one big, one teensy, a reasonable living room, a separate kitchen and bathroom sporting a full-length tub. And look out here.…” We stepped over to the bedroom window. The last light caught the ridges and scars of her
Phantom of the Opera
face as we peered through the dirty pane. “A backyard!”

Sure enough, there was a weedy fenced-in lot out back, with an overgrown garden patch, a square of grass, a broken-down grape trellis, and a crumbling brick barbecue pit. Beyond the fence and the nearest row of tenements, eight or nine massive residential towers stood black against the darkening sky.

“What are those?” I said.

“Those are the Decateur Projects, I think,” Chase said, and danced off into the kitchen to light her cigarette at the gas burner.

“Wait, housing projects?” I followed her across the dirty linoleum to the stove. Moths flitted around the naked bulb dangling from the ceiling. “So how's the neighborhood?”

She shrugged. “Sort of melancholy. It suits you.”

“I mean, how safe is it?”

“You're in New York now. Welcome to uncertainty and dread.”

“What happened to the previous tenant?”

“He left.”

“Chase …”

“Come on!” She gestured with her cigarette toward the fireplace in the living room. “Look at the one single thing the man left behind!”

Above the mantel, pasted to a piece of cardboard, hung a magazine reproduction of an unfinished portrait of the emperor by J. L. David. “Your hero, Napoleon!” Chase almost shouted. “That is a sign you should take this apartment! Now! Who cares about the neighborhood? We could all die tomorrow. Shit, you've got to move in, I can't explain it. I'm getting that prickly feeling up my legs. It's the right place for you, it just is!”

“Don't go intuitive on me,” I said, calmly as possible. “Looks a little scary around here. That F stop at Knox …”

“Fine,” Chase interrupted, “if you don't take the place, I will.”

I moved in a week later.

Now I know that even in those first months, before Molesworth came up from Louisiana, I felt something in the apartment, a quiet expectation, the presence of an unseen something else.

But when Molesworth arrived, these vague inklings were drowned out by his vast human stink. Molesworth in himself was enough to obscure any apparitions, belonging as he does entirely to this world, mulchy stink of the Louisiana swamp still about him. He was much too solid for hauntings. His huge, rotund body sweated of earthly pleasures; the smell of his cigars curled out from beneath the door to his bedroom like his own sort of ectoplasm—even though I had expressly forbidden any cigar smoking in the apartment. His bottles of Dixie beer, empty except for that little bit of backwash, piled up in the kitchen at the rate of a case and a half a week. And those women with big hair and gaudy jewelry brought home most Saturday nights from one bar or the next; their giggling and the squeals and groans of lusty play could be heard through the thin pressboard of the wall as I tossed alone on the other side in my narrow bed.

I suppose the ghost couldn't stand this noisy, squalid life. Perhaps it hid in the woodwork with the termites and the spiders or slept between the walls with the rats or disappeared into the fabric of the air.

Then, three months ago, Molesworth picked up and went back to
Mamou, Louisiana, owing me one month's rent and six hundred dollars in long-distance phone calls. Of course, I will never see the money. I woke up one morning to find his room empty and what sounded like a prepared statement read into the memo function of the answering machine.

“Dear Coonass,” came his thick backcountry drawl through the static of the tape, “circumstances beyond my control conspire to call me home to Louisiana. And if you ask old Molesworth's opinion, it's high time you yourself repair to other climes. Your life in New York has reached a dead end. You are drifting, Coonass, you have no agenda! Far be it from me to throw you a lifeline, but you might reconsider your old stomping grounds. I hope you will not take advantage of my departure to masturbate too much. This is Lyle Molesworth signing off.”

Molesworth had spent the two weeks just prior to his midnight exit from New York on the phone with a lawyer in Shreveport discussing wills and servitudes and liquor licenses. His grandfather Duploux died in January, and Molesworth inherited a bar on stilts in the middle of Bayou Dessaintes.

From all descriptions, it is a rough sort of place, which has been in his family for generations. There are no toilets, just holes in the floor opening directly into black water infested with alligator and cotton-mouth, though for some reason the bar is patronized by a diverse group of folks that include from time to time Johnny Cash and the governor himself, as well as the usual host of Cajun brawlers and roughnecks from the oil fields. Legend has it that a drunken Hank Williams vomited on the stage there in 1947, and they preserve what passes for the great man's evacuated dinner—an indistinguishable lump gone green and black with age—in a mason jar on a shelf over the jukebox.

With Molesworth gone, the ghost started again where it had left off five years before. In the first few days there was nothing I could put my finger on, exactly. Just a renewed pressure in the wake of Molesworth's departure. A soft scraping no louder than leaves falling from a dead tree or breath leaving the mouth of a child. After a week or so I began to hear a sighing in the moment before I entered a room to click on the lights at dusk, and once I caught an odd reflection in the green at the back of the
mirror in the bathroom. But now it is already in the nineties every day, we are in for a hot, miserable summer, and the ghost has abandoned such subtleties. It is dropping stones from the ceiling, moving furniture. It has grown bolder with the rising mercury as if it thrives on the heat like a hothouse orchid. Now it blows through this apartment, a sour, vindictive wind.

What does the ghost want from me? Ghosts always want something. According to what I have read, they are the children of the spirit world, always tugging on the skirts of the living. They want comfort, they want attention, they want us to know how they died. And am I sure that it is a ghost? There are days when I have my doubts. Could it be an unusual sort of electrical phenomenon, a disturbance in the magnetic field of the apartment caused by the proximity of the power plant just across the street? The high-voltage transformers half a block up zap and fizz at regular intervals, throwing trails of blue static in the summer evenings.

Or perhaps the answer is more simple than all this. Perhaps I am going mad. It would be nice to go mad, absolutely insane, free of the mundanities and responsibilities of life, every day a holiday.

Unfortunately I am sane as a piece of toast.

T
HE CRYPT
of the church smells like old bones and camphor. We advance through the vaulted dimness past mortuary plaques, wilting flowers, and a heap of broken wooden chairs to a small unfinished chapel set off by an iron grate. A bare bulb hangs from the ceiling here over a battered wooden table. This place is full of moldering U-Haul boxes. About thirty of them are stacked against the walls of rough stone. Another dozen are lumped together in the center of the room.

“These are the records I spoke of,” Father Rose says, pointing to the
boxes with his putter. “They moved them over here when St. Catherine's was razed to make room for that Korean shopping mall.”

I pull up the flap on one of the boxes. A dusty ledger, leather bound and edged in faded gilt, shows the date 1849; a letter written in the spidery handwriting of another era has fallen out of its envelope into a mess of other such letters. There are easily thousands of documents here, hundreds of thousands of manuscript pages in these boxes. Missalets, sermons, receipts, laundry lists, personal correspondence, accounts, you name it, all succumbing to the dampness and the years.

Father Rose pulls a rickety chair from the pile in the crypt, brings it in, and offers it to me. He crouches down, putter over his shoulder, and his eyes go half closed. When he speaks, his voice has an odd singsong quality, as if he is repeating something memorized by rote.

“A young nun came to this parish in 1846 from New Orleans. She was known as Sister Januarius. We don't know her given name. It was the rule of her order that the novitiates take the name of a male saint or martyr. In those troubled times it was much as it is now. Violence and poverty and ignorance. The neighborhood around the navy yard alone was home to a hundred-odd brothels and an equal number of grogshops and gambling dens. Because of the flood of unwashed Irish immigrants, anti-Catholic sentiment ran high. Murderous gangs of xenophobic hooligans called Know-Nothings roamed the streets at night, and no Catholic was safe. The parish priest was dragged off in the middle of mass, brutally beaten, and left naked and bloody in the middle of High Street, and the original wooden church was burned to the ground.

“Sister Januarius arrived two weeks after this incident. Because the situation was so bad, the bishop of New York asked that she return to her order, the Nursing Sisters of the Cross. She refused. She said that St. Benedict and St. Teresa of Avila came to her at night in the form of hummingbirds and told her to stay. It is certain that she was seized by an irresistible religious fervor. She knocked on every door in the parish; she personally closed a hundred brothels with her proselytizing; and she won
converts and doubled the congregation of St. Basil's in three months. In one year a new brick church stood on the spot of the old one. In five years she was able to oversee the construction of the dome and steeple and the transepts. Five years after that she obtained a dispensation from Pope Pius the Ninth to create the cathedral you see now, the first on Long Island.

“These are the actions of an able administrator, you might say, an energetic woman. But Sister Januarius possessed other, more mysterious abilities. The sick came to her door and were healed with a touch. The hungry were fed by the hundreds on days when the church's larders were absolutely empty. After a lifetime of service to the parish, she died here at one hundred one years old in 1919, a peaceful death at vespers, and it was said by those present that angels hovered around her bedside just beyond the edge of seeing, ready to bear her soul to paradise.…”

At this, Father Rose straightens and swings the putter in my direction, his face lit by a sort of madness. A pinch of mortar crumbles from between the stone walls into a half open box of yellow papers.

“I'm not making all this up, Mr. Conti! A short monograph was written in the 1920s and privately published, containing the bare facts of her life and an account of a few of her many miracles. We had a copy in the library upstairs until recently. Somehow it has been misplaced, and I can't locate another one. But I'm hoping the rest of Sister Januarius's story might be buried in these papers here. I am particularly interested in contemporary accounts of miracles. It is my conviction that we have an unrecognized saint on our hands. One of the blessed, worthy of a cultus conveyed by the church. As I've said, Brooklyn needs a saint. Brooklyn is desperate, its jails are full; its people live without light. You are going to find us one, a saint who will intercede for us with the Almighty.”

“O.K.,” I say, trying to sound reasonable. “How do I go about finding you a saint?”

“It's a legal procedure. Ancient, time-honored. A suit of law is pleaded before the tribunal of the Congregation of Rites in Rome. This is a permanent commission of cardinals charged to investigate such matters,
but of course, the supreme judge in cases of sainthood is the pontiff himself.”

I don't think the pope more than a pious man in a funny hat, but I can't help it; the back of my neck prickles.

“The procedure is loaded with formalities and mysteries,” the priest says after a breath. “The defense, if you will, must provide three distinct proofs of sainthood. First, a reputation for sanctity must be established. Second, the heroic quality of the virtues exhibited by the prospective saint must be shown. And third, of course, evidence must be gathered to establish the working of miracles.”

I eye the thirty moldering boxes of paperwork, most of it more than a century old, illegible and dusty. Lately I've been developing allergies. Just the thought of this kind of work makes my nose itch. I pull my handkerchief out of my pocket in time to catch the sneeze.

“Bless you,” Father Rose says.

“Seems like kind of a long shot, to be honest, Father,” I say. “And there's no guarantees. History has a way of confounding our expectations.”