Ghost Story

Fenny Bate on his staircase-Ricky saw all this, but after he and Sears had left the car and were walking up the path to the door he said, 'About that girl this morning.'

'What about her?'

Ricky put his key in the slot. 'If you want to pretend that we need a secretary, fine, but…'

Stella opened the door from within, already talking. 'I'm so glad both of you are here. I was so afraid you'd go back to stuffy Wheat Row and pretend that nothing had happened. Pretend to work and keep me in the dark! Sears, please, come in out of the cold, we don't want to heat all outdoors. Come in!' They shuffled into the hall and moving like two tired carthorses, took off their coats. 'You both look just awful. There's no question of mistaken identity then, it was John?'

'It was John,' Ricky said. 'We can't really tell you any more, Stella. It looks like he jumped from the bridge.'

'Dear me,' Stella said, all her momentary brightness gone. 'The poor Chowder Society.'

'Amen,' Sears said.

After late lunch Stella said that she'd make up a tray for Milly. 'Maybe she'll want to nibble something.'

'Milly?' Ricky asked, startled.

'Milly Sheehan, need I remind you? I couldn't just let her rattle around in that big house of John's. I picked her up and drove her back here. She's absolutely wrecked, the poor darling, so I put her to bed. She woke up this morning and couldn't find John, and she fretted in that house for hours until horrible Walter Hardesty came by.'

'Fine,' Ricky said.

'Fine, he says. If you and Sears hadn't been so wrapped up in yourselves, you might have spared a thought for her.'

Attacked, Sears raised his head and blinked. 'Milly has no worries. She's been left John's house and a disproportionate amount of money.'

'Disproportionate, Sears? Why don't you take her tray up and tell her how grateful she should be. Do you think that would cheer her up? That John Jaffrey left her a few thousand dollars?'

'Scarcely a few thousand, Stella,' said Ricky. 'John willed almost everything he owned to Milly.'

'Well, that's as it should be,' Stella declared, and stamped off to the kitchen, leaving them both mystified.

Sears asked, 'You ever have any trouble deciphering what she's talking about?'

'Now and then,' Ricky answered. 'There used to be a code book, but I think she threw it out shortly after our wedding. Shall we call Lewis and tell him? We've put it off too long already.'

'Give me the phone,' Sears said.

Lewis Benedikt

5

Not hungry, Lewis made lunch for himself from habit: cottage cheese, Croghan baloney with horseradish and a thick chunk of Otto Gruebe's cheddar, made by old Otto himself in his little cheese factory a couple of miles outside Afton. Feeling a little upset by his experiences of the morning, Lewis enjoyed thinking of old Otto now. Otto Gruebe was an uncomplicated person, built a little like Sears James, but stooped from a lifetime of bending over vats; he had a rubbery clown's face and enormous shoulders and hands. Otto had made this comment on his wife's death: 'You hat a liddle trouble over there in Spain, yeah? They told me in town. It's such a pidy, Lewis.' After everyone else's tact, this had moved Lewis immeasurably. Otto with his curd-white complexion from spending ten hours a day in his factory, Otto with his pack of coon dogs- he'd never been spooked a day in his life. Chewing his way through lunch, Lewis thought he would drive up to see Otto someday soon; he'd take his gun and go out looking for coon with Otto and his dogs, if the snow held off. Otto's Germanic hardheadedness would do him good.

But it was snowing again now; the dogs would be barking in their kennels and old Otto would be skimming off whey, cursing the early winter.

A pity. Yes: a pity was what it was, and more than that: a mystery. Like Edward.

He stood up abruptly and dumped his dishes in the sink; then he looked at his watch and groaned. Eleven- thirty and lunch already over; the rest of the day loomed over him like an Alp. He did not even have an evening of bubbleheaded conversation with a girl to look forward to; nor, because he was trying to wind things down, could he anticipate an evening of deeper pleasure with Christina Barnes.

Lewis Benedikt had successfully managed what in a town the size of Milburn is generally considered an impossibility: from the first month of his return from Spain, he had constructed a secret life that stayed secret. He pursued college girls, young teachers at the high school, beauticians, the brittle girls who sold cosmetics at Young Brothers department store-any girl pretty enough to be ornamental. He used his good looks, his natural charm and humor and his money to establish himself in the town's mythology as a dependably comic character: the aging playboy, the Suave Old Bird. Boyish, wonderfully unselfconscious, Lewis took his girls to the best restaurants for forty miles around, ordered them the best food and wine, kept them in stitches. He took to bed, or was taken to bed by, perhaps a fifth of these girls-the ones who showed him by their laughter that they could never take him seriously. When a couple-a couple, say, like Walter and Christina Barnes-walked into The Old Mill near Kirkwood or Christo's between Belden and Harpursville, they might half expect to see Lewis's steel-gray head bending toward the amused face of a pretty girl a third his age. 'Look at that old rascal,' Walter Barnes might say, 'at it again.' His wife would smile, but it would be difficult to tell what the smile meant.

For Lewis used his comic reputation as a rake to camouflage the seriousness of his heart, and he used his public romances with girls to conceal his deeper, truer relationships with women. He spent evenings or nights with his girls; the women he loved he saw once or twice a week, in the afternoons while their husbands were at work. The first of these had been Stella Hawthorne, and in some ways the least satisfactory of his loves, she had set the pattern for the rest. Stella had been too offhand and witty, too casual with him. She was enjoying herself, and simple enjoyment was what the young high-school teachers and beauticians gave him. He wanted feeling. He wanted emotion-he needed it. Stella was the only Milburn wife who, tested, had evaded that need. She had given his playboy image back to him-consciously. He loved her briefly and wholly, but their needs were badly mismatched. Stella did not want Sturm und Drang; Lewis, at the center of his demanding heart, knew that he wanted to recapture the emotions Linda had given him. Frivolous Lewis was Lewis only skin deep. Sadly, he had to let Stella go: she had taken up none of his hints, his offered emotion had simply rolled off her. He knew that she thought he'd simply gone on to an empty series of affairs with girls.

But he had instead gone on, eight years ago, to Leota Mulligan, the wife of Clark Mulligan. And after Leota, to Sonny Venuti, then to Laura Bautz, the wife of the dentist Harlan Bautz, and finally, a year ago, to Christina Barnes. He had cherished each of these women. He loved in them their solidity, their attachments to their husbands, their hungers, their humor. He loved talking to them. They had understood him, and each of them had known exactly what he was offering: more a hidden pseudo-marriage than an affair.

When the emotion began to go stale and rehearsed, then it was over. Lewis still loved each of them; he still loved Christina Barnes, but-

The but was that the wall was before him. The wall was what Lewis called the moment when he began to think that his deep relationships were as trivial as his romances. Then it was time to draw in. Often, in times of withdrawal, he found that he was thinking of Stella Hawthorne.

Well, he certainly could not look forward to an evening with Stella Hawthorne. To fantasize about that would be to confirm his foolishness to himself.

What was more foolish than that ridiculous scene this morning? Lewis left the sink to look out the window toward the path into the woods, remembering how he had raced down it, panting, his heart leaping with terror-now there was real asininity. The fluffy snow fell, the familiar wood raised white arms, the return path trailed harmlessly, charmingly off at a screwball angle, going nowhere.