Ghost Story

could finish off a pint of bourbon without being cornered by lawyers, the sheriff, his wife or someone telling him to get on the snowplow and start clearing the streets. He tilted more bourbon into his mouth, closed his eyes. When he opened them it was still there, lower in the water because the heavy coat had begun to weight the body down. 'Shit.' He capped the bottle, stood up and went back out into the wind to see if he could find someone who would know what to do.

II - Jaffrey's Party

Give place, you ladies, and begone!

Boast not yourselves at all!

For here at hand approacheth one

whose face will stain you all.

'A Praise of His Lady'

-Tottel's Miscellany, 1557

1

The following events occurred a year and a day earlier, in the evening of the last day of the golden age. None of them knew it was their golden age, nor that it was coming to an end: in fact they would have seen their lives, in the usual fashion of people with comfortable existences, a sufficiency of friends and the certainty of food on the table, as a process of gradual and even imperceptible improvement. Having survived the crises of youth and the middle years, they thought they had wisdom enough to meet the coming crises of age; having seen wars, adulteries, compromise and change, they thought they had seen most everything they would see -they'd make no larger claim.

Yet there were things they had not seen, and which they would see in time.

It is always true in personal, if not historical, terms that a golden age's defining characteristic is its dailiness, its offered succession of the small satisfactions of daily living. If none in the Chowder Society but Ricky Hawthorne truly appreciated this, in time they would all know it.

2

'I suppose we have to go.'

'What? You always like parties, Stella.'

'I have a funny feeling about this one.'

'Don't you want to meet that actress?'

'My interest in meeting little beauties of nineteen was always limited.'

'Edward seems to have become rather taken with her.'

'Oh, Edward.' Stella, seated before her mirror and brushing her hair, smiled at Ricky's reflection. 'I suppose it'll be worth going just to see Lewis Benedikt's reaction to Edward's find.' Then the smile changed key as the fine muscles beside her mouth moved, became more edged. 'At least it's something to be invited to a Chowder Society evening.'

'It's not, it's a party,' Ricky vainly pointed out.

'I've always thought that women should be allowed during those famous evenings of yours.'

'I know that,' Ricky said.

'And that's why I want to go.'

'It's not the Chowder Society. It's just a party.'

'Then who had John invited, besides you and Edward's little actress?'

'Everybody, I think,' Ricky answered truthfully. 'What's the feeling you said you had?'

Stella cocked her head, touched her lipstick with her little finger, looked into her summery eyes and said, 'Goose over my grave.'

3

Sitting beside Ricky as he drove her car the short distance to Montgomery Street, Stella, who had been unusually silent since they'd left the house, said, 'Well, if everybody really is going to be there, maybe there'll be a few new faces.'

As she had meant him to, Ricky felt a mocking blade of jealousy pierce him.

'It's extraordinary, isn't it?' Stella's voice was light, musical, confidential, as if she had intended nothing that was not superficial.

'What is?'

'That one of you is having a party. The only people we know who have parties are us, and we have about two a year. I can't get over it-John Jeffrey! I'm amazed Milly Sheehan let him get away with it.'

'The glamour of the theater world, I imagine,' Ricky said.

'Milly doesn't think anything is glamorous except John Jaffrey,' Stella replied, and laughed at the image of their friend she could find in every glance of his housekeeper. Stella, who in certain practical matters was wiser than any of the men about her, sometimes titillated herself with the notion that Dr. Jaffrey took some sort of dope; and she was convinced that Milly and her employer did not occupy separate beds.

Considering his own remark, Ricky had missed his wife's insight. 'The glamour of the theater world,' as remote and unlikely as any such thing seemed in Milburn, did seem to have gripped Jeffrey's imagination- he, whose greatest enthusiasm had been for a neatly hooked trout, had become increasingly obsessed with Edward Wanderley's young guest during the previous three weeks. Edward himself had been very secretive about the girl. She was new, she was very young, she was for the moment a 'star,' whatever that really meant, and such people provided Edward's livelihood: so it was not exceptional that Edward had persuaded her to be the latest subject of his ghosted autobiographies. The typical procedure was that Edward had his subjects talk into a tape recorder for as many weeks as their interest held; then, with a great deal of skill, he worked these memories into a book. The rest of the research was done through the mails and over the telephone with anybody who knew or had once known his subject-genealogical research too was a part of Edward's method. Edward was proud of his genealogies. The recording was done whenever possible at his house; his study walls were lined with tapes-tapes on which, it was understood, many juicy and unpublishable indiscretions were recorded. Ricky himself had only the most notional interest in the personalities and sex lives of actors, and so he thought did the rest of his friends. But when Everybody Saw the Sun Shine underwent a month's change of cast which Ann-Veronica Moore spent in Milburn, John Jaffrey had increasingly had one goal-to have this girl come to his house. An even greater mystery was that his hints and schemes had succeeded, and the girl had consented to attend a party in her honor.

'Good Lord,' Stella said, seeing the number of cars lined at the curb before Jaffrey's house.

'It's John's coming-out party,' Ricky said. 'He wants to show off his accomplishment.'

They parked down the block and slipped through cold air to the front door. Voices, music pulsed at