Ghost Story

California. She wasn't herself, she says. She's afraid you have absolutely the wrong idea of her.'

'That's just what I do have,' I said. 'Everything about her is wrong. She's some kind of witch. She's destructive.'

'Hold on. I am going to marry this girl, Don. She's not the person you think she is. God, how we've talked about this. Obviously you and I have to talk about it a hell of a lot ourselves. In fact I was hoping you could hop a plane to New York this weekend so we could have a good long talk and really work through it. I'd be glad to pay your fare.'

'That's ridiculous. Ask her about Alan McKechnie. See what she tells you. Then I'll tell you the truth.'

'No, wait, buddy, we've already been through all that I know she gave you a garbled version of the McKechnie affair. Can't you imagine how shattered she was? Please come out here, Don. All three of us have to have a long session.'

'Not on your life,' I said. 'Alma's a kind of Circe.'

'Look, I'm at the office, but I'll call you later in the week, okay? We have to get things straight. I don't want my brother having bad feelings about my wife.'

Bad feelings? I felt horror.

That night David rang again. I asked him if he'd met Tasker yet. Or if he knew about Alma and the Xala Xalior Xlati.

'See, that's where you got the wrong idea. She just made all that stuff up, Don. She was a little unsteady out there on the Coast. Besides who can take all that stuff seriously anyhow? Nobody here in New York ever heard of the XXX. In California, people get all cranked up about trivia.'

And Mrs. de Peyser? She had told him that I was terribly possessive; Mrs. de Peyser was a tool to get time by herself.

'Let me ask you this, David,' I said. 'Sometimes, maybe only once, haven't you looked at her or touched her and just felt-something funny? Like that, no matter how strongly attracted you are to her, you're squeamish about touching her?'

'You've got to be kidding.'

David would not permit me to creep away from the whole issue of Alma Mobley, as I wanted to do. He would not let it go. He telephoned me from New York two or three times a week, increasingly disturbed by my refusal to see reason.

'Don, we have to talk this thing out I feel terrible about you.'

'Don't.'

'I mean, I just don't understand your attitude about this thing. I know you must feel terrible resentment. Jesus, if things had worked out the other way around and Alma had walked out of my life and decided to marry you, I'd be tied in knots. But unless you admit your resentment, we can never get to the point of doing something about it.'

'I don't resent anything, David.'

'Come off it, kid brother. We have to talk about it sometime. Alma and I both feel that way.'

One of my problems was that I didn't know to what extent David's assumptions were correct. It was true that I resented both David and Alma: but was it merely resentment that made me recoil from the thought of them marrying?

A month or so after that, many seesawing conversations later, David called to say that I was 'going to have a break from being hounded by your brother. I've got a little business in Amsterdam, so I'm flying there tomorrow for five days. Alma hasn't seen Amsterdam since she was a child, and she'll be coming with me. I'll send you a postcard. But do me a favor and really think about our situation, will you?'

'I'll do my best,' I said. 'But you care too much about what I think.'

'What you think is important to me.'

'All right,' I said. 'Be careful.'

Now what did I mean by that?

At times I thought that both David and myself had underestimated her calculation. Suppose, I thought, that Alma had engineered her meeting with David. Suppose that she had deliberately sought him out. When I thought about this, Gregory Benton and the stories of Tasker Martin seemed more sinister-as if they, like Alma, were stalking David.

Four days later I got a call from New York telling me that David was dead. It was one of David's partners, Bruce Putnam; the Dutch police had wired the office. 'Do you want to go out there, Mr. Wanderley?' Putnam asked. 'We'd like to leave it to you to take it from here. Just keep us informed, will you? Your brother was greatly liked and respected here. None of us can figure out what happened. It sounds like he fell out of a window.'

'Have you heard from his fiancee?'

'Oh, did he have a fiancee? Imagine that-he never let on. Was she with him?'

'Of course she was,' I said. 'She must have seen everything. She must know what happened. I'll get on the first plane going.'

There was a plane the next day to Schiphol Airport, and I took a cab to the police station which had cabled David's office. What I learned can be set down very barely: David had gone through a window and over a chest-high balcony. The hotel owner had heard a scream, but nothing more-no voices, no arguments. Alma was thought to have left him; when the police entered their room, none of her clothing was still in the closets.

I went to the hotel, looked at the high iron balcony, and turned away to the open wardrobe closet. Three of David's Brooks Brothers suits hung on the rail, two pairs of shoes beneath them. Counting what he must have been wearing at the time of his death, he had brought four suits and three pairs of shoes for a five-day visit. Poor David.

7

I arranged for the cremation and, two days later, stood in a cold crematorium while David's coffin slid along rails toward a fringed green curtain.

Two days after that I was back in Berkeley. My little apartment seemed cell-like and foreign. It was as though I had grown irretrievably apart from the person I had been in the days when I hunted down references to James Fenimore Cooper in PMLA. I began to sketch out The Nightwatcher, having only the most nebulous ideas for it, and to prepare for my classes again. One night I telephoned Helen Kayon's apartment, thinking that I would ask her out for a drink so that I could talk about Alma and my brother, and Meredith Polk told me that Helen had married Rex Leslie the week before. I found myself falling asleep at intervals all during the day and going to bed before ten at night; I drank too much but could not get drunk. If I survived the year, I thought, I would go to Mexico and lie in the sun and work on my book.

And escape my hallucinations. Once I had come awake near midnight and heard someone moving around in my kitchen; when I got out of bed and went in to check, I had seen my brother David standing near the stove, holding the coffeepot in one hand. 'You sleep too much, kid,' he said. 'Why not let me give you a cup?' And another time, teaching a Henry James novel to my section of the survey class, I had seen on one of the chairs not the red- haired girl I knew was there, but-again-David, his face covered in blood and his suit torn, nodding happily at how bright I could be about Portrait of a Lady.

But I had one more discovery to make before I could go to Mexico. One day I went to the library and instead of going to the stack of critical magazines, went to the reference library and found a copy of Who's Who for the year 1960. It was nearly an arbitrary year; but if Alma was twenty-five when I met her, then in 1960 she should have been nine or ten.

Robert Mobley was in the book. As nearly as I can remember it, this was his entry-I read it over and over and finally had it photocopied.

MOBLEY, ROBERT OSGOOD, painter and watercolorist. b. New Orleans, La, Feb 23. 1909; s. Felix Morton and Jessica (Osgood); A.B. Yale U. 1927; m. Alice Whitney Aug 27, 1936; children-Shelby Adam, Whitney Osgood. Shown at: Flagler Gallery, New York; Winson Galleries, New York; Galerie Flam, Paris; SchlegeL Zurich; Galeria Esperance, Rome. Recipient Golden Palette 1946; Southern Regional Painters Award 1952, 1955, 1958. Collected in: