Ghost Story

one of my own books is happening around me.

The trouble is, I could almost start to imagine that. Those two suicides-David's and Dr. Jaffrey's-that's the problem, that simple coincidence. (And the Chowder Society shows no signs of recognizing that this coincidence is the main reason I am interested in their problem.) What am I involved in here? A ghost story? Or something worse, something not just a story? The three old men have only the sketchiest knowledge of the events of two years ago-and they can't possibly know that they've asked me to enter the strangest part of my life again, to roll myself back through the calendar to the worst, most destructive days: or to roll myself up again in the pages of a book which was my attempt to reconcile myself with them. But can there really be any connection, even if it is just the connection of one ghost story leading to another, as it did with the Chowder Society? And can there truly be any factual connection between The Nightwatcher and what happened to my brother?

II - Alma

Everything that has beauty has a body, and is a body;

everything that has being has being in the flesh:

and dreams are only drawn from the bodies that are.

'Bodiless God,'

-D. H. Lawrence

From the journals of Don Wanderley

1

There is only one way to answer that question. I have to spend a little time, over the next week or two, in writing out in some detail the facts as I remember them about myself and David and Alma Mobley. When I fictionalized them in the book I inevitably sensationalized them, and doing so falsified my own memories. If I were satisfied with that, I would never have considered writing the Dr. Rabbitfoot novel-he's no more than Alma in blackface, Alma with horns, tail and a soundtrack. Just as 'Rachel Varney' in The Nightwatcher was no more than Alma in fancy dress. Alma was far stranger than 'Rachel.' What I want to do now is not invent fictional situations and fictional peculiarities, but look at the peculiarities that existed. In The Nightwatcher everything was solved, everything came out even; in life nothing came out even and nothing was solved.

I met Alma not as 'Saul Malkin' met 'Rachel Varney,' in a Paris dining room, but in surroundings utterly banal. It was at Berkeley, where good notices for my first book had obtained me a year's teaching job. The post was a coup for a first-book writer, and I took it seriously. I taught one section of Creative Writing and two sections of an undergraduate course in American literature. It was the second of these that caused most of my work. I had to do so much reading of work which I didn't know well and so much theme-grading that I had little time to write. And if I had barely read Howells or Cooper, I had never looked at the criticism about them which the structure of the course demanded I know. I found myself falling into a routine of teaching my courses, taking the creative writing work home to read before I ate dinner at a bar or cafe, and then spending my evenings at the library going through bibliographies and hunting up copies of PMLA. Sometimes I was able to work on a story of my own when I got back to my apartment; more often, my eyes burned and my stomach was in an uproar from English Department coffee and my instincts for prose were deadened by scholarly waffle. From time to time I took out a girl in the department, an instructor with a mint-condition PhD from the University of Wisconsin. Her name was Helen Kayos, and our desks, along with twelve others, were next to one another in a communal office. She had read my first book, but it had not impressed her.

She was stern about literature, frightened of teaching, careless about her appearance, hopeless about men.

Her interests were in Scots contemporaries of Chaucer and linguistic analysis; at twenty-three, she already had something of the feather impracticality of the old scholar-spinster. 'My father changed his name from Kayinski, and I'm just a hard-headed Pole,' she said, but it was a classic self-deception; she was hard-headed about Scots Chaucerians and nothing else. Helen was a large girl with big glasses and loose hair which always seemed on its way from one style to another; it was hair with unfulfilled intentions. She had decided some time before that what she had to offer the university, the planet, men was her intelligence. It was the only thing about herself that she trusted. I asked her out for lunch the third time I saw her in the office. She was revising an article, and she nearly jumped out of her chair. I think I was the first man at Berkeley to ask her to lunch.

A few days later I met her in the office after my last class. She was sitting at her desk staring at her typewriter. Our lunch had been awkward: she had said, comparing the articles she was trying to write with my work, 'But I'm trying to describe reality!'

'I'm leaving,' I said. 'Why don't you come with me? We'll have a drink somewhere.'

'I can't, I hate bars and I have to work on this,' she said. 'Oh, look. You could walk me back to my place. Okay? It's up the hill. Is that okay for you?'

'That's where I live too.'

'I'm fed up with this anyhow. What are you reading?' I held up a book. 'Oh. Nathaniel Hawthorne. Your survey course.'

'Harvey Lieberman just told me that in three weeks I'm giving the main lecture on Hawthorne. I haven't read The House of the Seven Gables since high school.'

'Lieberman is a lazy so and so.'

I was inclined to agree: so far, three of his other assistants had also given lectures for him. 'I'll be all right,' I said, 'as long as I can figure out some angle to tie it all up, and get all the reading done.'

'At least you don't have tenure to worry about,' she said, gesturing toward her typewriter.

'No. Just eating.' This had the tone of our lunch.

'Sorry.' She bowed her head, suffering already, and I touched her shoulder and told her not to take herself so seriously.

As we were going down the stairs together, Helen carrying a huge worn briefcase straining with books and essays, me carrying only The House of the Seven Gables, a tall freckled blond girl slipped between us. The first impression I had of Alma Mobley was of a general paleness, a spiritual blurriness suggested by her long expressionless face and hanging straw-colored hair. Her round eyes were a very pale blue. I felt an odd mixture of attraction and revulsion; in the dim light of the staircase, she looked like an attractive girl who'd spent all her life in a cave-she appeared to be the same ghostly shade of white all over. 'Mr. Wanderley?' she asked.

When I nodded, she muttered her name, but I did not catch it.

'I'm a graduate student in English,' she said. 'I wondered if you'd mind if I came to your lecture on Hawthorne. I saw your name posted on Professor Lieberman's schedule in the departmental office.'

'No, please come,' I said. 'But it's just a survey class, you know. It'll probably be a waste of time for you.'

'Thank you,' she said and abruptly continued on up the stairs.

'How did she know who I was?' I whispered to Helen, concealing my pleasure in what I thought was my heretofore invisible celebrity. Helen tapped the book in my hand.

She lived only three blocks from my own apartment; hers was a random collection of rooms at the top of an old house, and she shared it with two other girls. The rooms seemed arbitrarily placed, and so did the things in them-the apartment looked as if no one had ever considered where bookcases and chairs and tables ought to go; where delivery men put them, they stayed. Here a lamp had been put next to a chair, there a table heaped with books shoved beneath a window, but everything else was so haphazard that you had to weave around the furniture