Ghost Story

months later: Larry was less a dreamer than Clark had been, but he was a dependable man and good company and he liked her cooking. Ricky Hawthorne quietly closed down the law office, but a young attorney in town persuaded him to sell him the firm's name and goodwill. The new man took back Florence Quast and had new nameplates made for the door and the front of the building. Hawthorne, James was now Hawthorne, James and Whittacker. 'Pity his name isn't Poe,' Ricky said, but Stella didn't think that was funny.

During all this time, Don waited. When he saw Ricky and Stella, they talked about the travel brochures that now covered the enormous coffee table; when he saw Peter Barnes, they talked about Cornell, about the writers the boy was reading, about how his father was adjusting to life without Christina. Twice Don and Ricky drove to Pleasant Hill and placed flowers on all the graves which had come into being since John Jaffrey's funeral. Buried together in a straight line were Lewis, Sears, Clark Mulligan, Freddy Robinson, Harlan Bautz, Penny Draeger, Jim Hardie-so many new graves, separate piles of earth, still lumpy. In time, when the earth had settled, they would have their headstones. Christina Barnes was buried farther off beneath another heap of raw earth, on half of the double plot Walter Barnes had bought. Elmer Scales's family had been buried closer to the top of the hill, in the Scales family plot first purchased by Elmer's grandfather: a weatherworn stone angel guarded over them. There too they put flowers.

'No sign of a lynx yet,' Ricky said as they drove back to town.

'No lynx,' Don answered. Both of them knew that when it came, it would not be a lynx; and that the waiting might take months, years.

Don read, looked forward to his dinners with Ricky and Stella, watched entire sequences of movies on television (Clark Gable in a bush jacket turning into Dar Duryea in a gangster's nipped-in suit turning into graceful, winning Fred Astaire in a Chowder Society tuxedo), found he could not write; waited. Often he woke himself up in the middle of the night, weeping. He too had to heal.

In mid-March on a black wintry day just like those he and the Chowder Society had endured, a mail truck delivered a heavy package from a film rental company in New York. It had taken them two months to find a copy of China Pearl.

He threaded his uncle's projector and set up the screen and discovered that his hands were trembling so badly that it would have taken him three tries to light a cigarette. Just the sequence of setting up Eva Galli's only movie brought back the apparition of Gregory Bate in the Rialto, where all of them could have died. And he found that he feared that Eva Galli would have Alma Mobley's face.

He had attached the speakers in case someone had added a musical sound track: made in 1925, China Pearl was a silent film. When he switched the projector on and sat back to watch, holding a drink to help his nerves, he discovered that the print had been altered by the distribution company. It was not just China Pearl, it was number thirty-eight in a series called 'Classics of the Silent Screen'; besides a soundtrack, a commentary had been added. That meant, Don knew, that the film had been heavily edited.

'One of the greatest stars of the silent era was Richard Barthelmess,' said the announcer's colorless voice, and the screen showed the actor walking down a mock-up of a street in Singapore. He was surrounded by Hollywood Filipinos and Japanese dressed as Malays-they were supposed to be Chinese. The announcer went on to describe Barthelmess's career, and then summarized a story about a will, a stolen pearl, a false accusation of murder: the first third of the film had been cut. Barthelmess was in Singapore looking for the true murderer, who had stolen 'the famous Pearl of the Orient.' He was aided by Vilma Banky, who owned a bar 'frequented by waterfront scum' but 'as a Boston girl, has a heart the size of Cape Cod…'

Don turned the speakers off. For ten minutes he watched the lipsticked little actor gaze soulfully at Vilma Banky, topple villainous 'waterfront scum,' run about on boats: he hoped that if Eva Galli would appear in this butchered version, he would recognize her. Vilma Banky's bar housed a number of women who draped themselves over the customers and languorously sipped tall drinks. Some of these prostitutes were plain, some of them were stunning: any of them, he supposed, could have been Eva Galli.

But then a girl appeared framed in the doorway of the bar, studio fog boiling behind her, and pouted at the camera. Don looked at her sensual, large-eyed face, and felt his heart freeze. He hurriedly switched on the soundtrack.

'… the notorious Singapore Sal,' crooned the announcer. 'Will she get to our hero?' Of course she was not the notorious Singapore Sal, that was an invention of whoever had written the inane commentary; but he knew she was Eva Galli. She sauntered through the bar and approached Barthelmess; she stroked his cheek. When he brushed her hand away, she sat down on his lap and kicked one leg in the air. The actor dumped her on the floor. 'So much for Singapore Sal,' gloated the announcer.

Don yanked out the speaker leads, stopped the film and backed it up to Eva Galli's entrance, and watched the sequence again.

He had expected her to be beautiful, and she was not. Beneath the makeup, she was just a girl of ordinary good looks; she looked nothing like Alma Mobley. She had enjoyed the business of acting, he saw, playing the part of an ambitious girl playing a part had amused her-how she would have enjoyed stardom! As Ann-Veronica Moore, she had played at it again; even Alma Mobley had seemed fitted for the movies. She could have molded that passive beautiful face over a thousand characters. But in 1925, she had miscalculated, made a mistake: cameras exposed too much, and what you saw when you looked at Eva Galli on screen was a young woman who was not likable. Even Alma had not been likable; even Anna Mostyn, when truly seen-as at the Barnes's party-seemed coldly perverse, driven by willpower. They could for a time evoke human love, but nothing in them could return it. What you finally saw was their hollowness. They could disguise it for a time, but never finally, and that was their greatest mistake; a mistake in being. Don thought he could recognize it anywhere now, in any nightwatcher pretending to be man or woman.

22

At the beginning of April Peter Barnes came to visit him. The boy, who had seemed to be recovering from their terrible winter, slumped into a chair and ran his hands over his face. 'I'm sorry to interrupt you. If you're busy I'll go away again.'

'You can always come to see me,' Don said. 'You never have to think twice about it. I mean that, Peter. I'll never be anything but happy to see you. That's a guarantee.'

'I was hoping you'd say something like that. Ricky's leaving in a week or two, isn't he?'

'Yes. I'm driving them to the airport next Friday. They're both very excited about their trip. But if you want to see Ricky now, all I have to do is call him up. He'll come.'

'No, please don't,' the boy said. 'It's bad enough I'm bothering you…'

'For God's sake, Peter,' Don said. 'What's the matter?'

'Well, it's just that I've been having an awful time lately. That's why I wanted to see you.'

'I'm glad you did. What's wrong?'

'I keep seeing my mother,' Peter said. 'I mean, I dream about her all the time. It's like I'm back in Lewis's house, and I'm seeing that Gregory Bate grab her again-and I keep dreaming about the way he looked on the floor of the Rialto. All those smashed-up pieces of him moving around. Refusing to die.' He was close to tears.

'Have you talked to your father about it?'

Peter nodded. 'I tried. I wanted to tell him everything, but he won't listen. Not really. He looks at me like I'm five years old and telling him some made-up nonsense. So I stopped before I really started.'

'You can't blame him, Peter. Nobody who hadn't been with us could believe it. If he can listen to part of it and not tell you you're crazy, maybe that's enough. Part of him was listening. Maybe part of him believes it. You know, I think there's another problem too. I think you're afraid that if you give up the horror and fear, that you'll also be giving up your mother. Your mother loved you. And now she's dead, and she died in a terrible way, but she put her love into you for seventeen or eighteen years, and there's a lot of it left. The only thing you can do is carry on with it.'

Peter nodded.

Don said, 'I once knew a girl who spent all day in a library and said she had a friend who protected her from vileness. I don't know how her life turned out, but I do know that nobody can protect anybody else from vileness. Or from pain. All you can do is not let it break you in half and keep on going until you get to the other side.'

'I know that's true,' Peter said, 'but it just seems so hard to do.'