Ghost Story

Ricky felt almost as though he should press a cold cloth to Jaffrey's forehead.

'Did you know that she just came out of nowhere? That she was the most promising student in her drama class, and the next week she got her part in Everybody Saw the Sun Shine?'

'No, John.'

'Just now I had a wonderful idea. It was about having her here in the house. I was standing here, listening to the kids' disco music from downstairs, and hearing bits and pieces of the George Shearing record from in there, and I thought-downstairs is the raw, animal life, kids jumping around to that beat, on this floor we've got the mental life, doctors and lawyers, all middle-class respectability, and upstairs is grace, talent, beauty-the spirit. You see? It's like evolution. She's the most ethereal thing you've ever seen. And she's only eighteen.'

Never in his life had Ricky heard John Jaffrey express such a fanciful concept. He was beginning to worry about the doctor's blood pressure. Then both men heard a door close up on the next landing, followed by Edward's deep voice saying something that had the sly intonation of a joke.

'I thought Stella said she was nineteen,' Ricky said.

'Shhh.'

A beautiful little girl was coming toward them down the stairs. Her dress was simple and green, her hair was a cloud. After a second Ricky saw that her eyes matched the dress. Moving with a kind of rhythmic idle precision, she gave them the tiniest of smiles- still it was brilliant-and went by, patting Dr. Jaffrey's chest with her fingertips as she passed them. Ricky watched her go, amused and touched. He had seen nothing like it since Louise Brooks in Pandora's Box.

Then he looked at Edward Wanderley and saw at once that John Jaffrey was right. Edward's feathers were shining. He had obviously been stirred up by the girl, and it was equally obvious that it was difficult for him to leave her alone long enough to greet his friends. All three men began to move into the crowded living room. 'Ricky, you look great,' Edward told him, putting an arm easily around Ricky's shoulders. Edward was half a foot taller, and when Edward began to propel him into the room, Ricky could smell an expensive cologne. 'Just great. But isn't it time you stopped wearing bow ties? The Arthur Schlesinger era is dead and gone.'

'That was the era right after mine,' Ricky said.

'No, listen, nobody's older than he feels. I stopped wearing neckties altogether. In ten years, eighty per cent of the men in this country will wear ties only to weddings and funerals. Barnes and Venuti over there will be wearing that getup to the bank.' He scanned the room. 'Where the hell did she go?' Ricky, in whom new ties evoked a desire to wear them even to bed, looked at Edward's unfettered neck as his friend surveyed the crowded room, saw that it was even more corded than John Jaffrey's, and decided not to change his habits. 'I've spent three weeks with that girl, and she's the most fantastic subject I ever had. Even if she makes the stuff up, and maybe she does, it'll be the best book I'll ever do. She's had a horrible life, horrible. It makes you weep just to hear it-I sit there and cry. I tell you, she's wasted in that piece of Broadway fluff, wasted. She'll be a great tragic actress. Once she's out of her teens.' Red-faced, Edward guffawed at his own preposterousness. Like John, he too was in flight. 'You two seem to have caught that girl like a virus,' Ricky said.

John giggled, and Edward said, 'The whole world will, Ricky. She's really got that gift.'

'Oh,' Ricky said, remembering something. 'Your nephew Donald seems to be having a great success with his new book. Congratulations.'

'It's nice to know I'm not the only talented bastard in the family. And it should help him get over his brother's death. That was an odd story, a very odd story-they both seem to have been engaged to the same woman. But we don't want to think about anything macabre tonight. We're going to have fun.'

John Jaffrey nodded in happy agreement.

4

'I saw your son downstairs, Walt,' Ricky said to Walter Barnes, the older of the two bankers. 'He told me his decision. I hope he makes it.'

'Yeah, Pete's decided on Cornell. I always hoped he'd at least apply to Yale-my old school. I still think he'd make it.' A heavy-set man with a stubborn face like his son's, Barnes was disinclined to accept Ricky's congratulations. 'The kid isn't even interested anymore. He says Cornell's good enough for him. 'Good enough.' His generation's even more conservative than mine. Cornell's the kind of rinky-dink place where they still have food fights. Nine or ten years ago, I used to be worried that Pete would grow up to be a radical with a beard and a bomb-now I'm afraid he'll settle for less than he could get.'

Ricky made vague noises of sympathy.

'How are your kids doing? They both still out on the West Coast?'

'Yes. Robert's teaching English in a high school. Jane's husband just got a vice-presidency.'

'Vice-president in charge of what?'

'Safety.'

'Oh, well.' They both sipped at their drinks, refraining from trying to invent comment on what a promotion to vice-president in charge of safety might mean in an insurance company. 'They planning to get back here for Christmas?'

'I don't think so. They both have pretty active lives.' In fact, neither of their children had written to Ricky and Stella for several months. They had been happy infants, sullen adolescents, and now, both of them nearly forty, were unsatisfied adults-in many ways, still adolescent. Robert's few letters were barely concealed pleas for money; Jane's were superficially bright, but Ricky read desperation in them. ('I'm really getting to like myself now': a statement which to Ricky meant its opposite. Its glibness made him wince.) Ricky's children, the former darlings of his heart, were now like distant planets. Their letters were painful; seeing them was worse. 'No,' he said, 'I don't think they'll be able to make it this time.'

'Jane's a pretty girl,' Walter Barnes said.

'Her mother's daughter.'

Ricky automatically began to look around the room to catch a glimpse of Stella, and saw Milly Sheehan introducing his wife to a tall man with stooping shoulders and thick lips. The academic nephew.

Barnes asked, 'Have you seen Edward's actress?'

'She's here somewhere. I saw her come down.'

'John Jaffrey seems very excited about her.'

'She is really sort of unnervingly pretty,' Ricky said, and laughed. 'Edward's been unnerved too.'

'Pete read in a magazine that she's only seventeen years old.'

'In that case, she's a public menace.'

When Ricky left Barnes to join his wife and Milly Sheehan, he caught sight of the little actress. She was dancing with Freddy Robinson to a Count Basie record, and she moved like a delicate bit of machine tooling, her eyes shining greenly; his arms about her, Freddy Robinson looked stupefied with happiness. Yes, the girl's eyes were shining, Ricky saw, but was it with pleasure or mockery? The girl turned her head, her eyes sent a current of emotion across the room to him, and Ricky saw in her the person his daughter Jane, now overweight and discontented, had always wanted to be. As he watched her dance with foolish Freddy Robinson, he understood that there before him was a person who would never have cause to utter the damning phrase that she was really getting to like herself: she was a little flag of self-possession.

'Hello, Milly,' he said. 'You're working hard.'

'Oh poof, when I'm too old to work I'll lay down and die. Did you have anything to eat?'

'Not yet. This must be your nephew.'

'Oh, please forgive me. You haven't met.' She touched the arm of the tall man beside her. 'This is the brainy one in my family, Harold Sims. He's a professor at the college and we've just been having a nice talk with your wife. Harold, this is Frederick Hawthorne, one of the doctor's closest friends.' Sims smiled down at him. 'Mr. Hawthorne's a charter member of the Chowder Society,' Milly concluded.

'I was just hearing about the Chowder Society,' Harold Sims said. His voice was very deep. 'It sounds interesting.'

'I'm afraid it's anything but.'