Ghost Story

Hollywood as an actress in silents. She did a small part in a romance called China Pearl. A Richard Barthelmess movie.'

Don took a piece of paper from his pocket and wrote down the name of the film.

'And she was obviously partly of Italian ancestry, but she told Stringer at one point that her maternal grandparents were English. Her father had been a man of considerable substance, one gathered, but she had been orphaned when just a child and was raised by relatives in California. That was all we knew about her. She said that she had come here for peace and seclusion.'

'The women tried to take her under their wing,' Sears said. 'She was a catch for them too, remember. A wealthy girl who had turned her back on Hollywood, sophisticated and refined-every woman of position in Milburn sent her an invitation. The little societies women here had in those days all wanted her. I think that what they wanted was to tame her.'

'To make her identifiable,' Ricky said. 'Yes. To tame her. Because with all her qualities, there was something else. Something fey. Lewis had a romantic imagination then, and he told me that Eva Galli was like an aristocrat, a princess or some such, who had turned her back on the court and gone off to the country to die.'

'Yes, she affected us too,' said Sears. 'Of course, for us she was out of reach. We idealized her. We saw her from time to time-'

'We paid court,' Ricky said.

'Absolutely. We paid court to her. She had politely refused all the ladies' invitations, but she had no objections to five gangling young men showing up on her doorstep on a Saturday or Sunday. Your uncle Edward was the first of us. He had more daring than we other four. By this time, everybody knew that Stringer Dedham had lost his head over her, so in a sense she was seen as under Stringer's patronage-as if she always had a ghostly duenna by her side. Edward slipped between the cracks of convention. He paid a call on her, she was dazzlingly charming to him, and soon we all got into the habit of calling on her. Stringer didn't seem to mind. He liked us, though he was in a different world.'

'The adult world,' Ricky said. 'As Eva was. Even though she could only have been two or three years older than us, she might have been twenty. Nothing could have been more proper than our visits. Of course some of the elderly women thought they were scandalous. Lewis's father thought so too. But we had just enough social leeway to get away with it. We paid our visits in a group, after Edward had broken the ground, about once every two weeks. We were far too jealous to allow any one of us to go alone. Our visits were extraordinary. It was like slipping out of time altogether. Nothing exceptional happened, even the conversation was ordinary, but for those few hours we spent with her, we were in the realm of magic. She swept us off our feet. And that she was known to be Stringer's fiancee made it safe.'

'People didn't grow up so fast in those days,' Sears said. 'All of this-young men in their early twenties mooning about a woman of twenty-five or -six as if she were an unattainable priestess-must seem risible to you. But it was the way we thought of her-beyond our reach. She was Stringer's, and we all thought that after they married we'd be as welcome at his house as at hers.'

The two older men fell silent for a moment. They looked into the fire on Edward Wanderley's hearth and drank whiskey. Don did not prod them to speak, knowing that a crucial turn in the story had come and that they would finish telling it when they were able.

'We were in a sort of sexless, pre-Freudian paradise,' Ricky finally said. 'In an enchantment. Sometimes we even danced with her, but even holding her, watching her move, we never thought about sex. Not consciously. Not to admit. Well, paradise died in October, 1929, shortly after the stock market and Stringer Dedham.'

'Paradise died,' Sears echoed, 'and we looked into the devil's face.' He turned his head toward the window.

13

Sears said, 'Look at the snow.'

The other two followed his gaze and saw white flakes blizzarding against the window. 'If his wife can find him, Omar Norris will have to be out plowing before morning.'

Ricky drank more of his whiskey. 'It was tropically hot,' he said, melting the present storm in the unseasonal October of nearly fifty years before. 'The threshing got done late that year. It seemed folks couldn't get down to work. People said money worries made Stringer absentminded. The Dedham girls said no, that wasn't it, he'd gone by Miss Galli's house that morning. He'd seen something.'

'Stringer put his arms in the thresher,' Sears said, 'and his sisters blamed Eva. He said things while he was dying, wrapped up in blankets on their table. But you couldn't make head or tail of what they thought they heard him say. 'Bury her,' that was one thing, and 'cut her up,' as though he'd seen what was going to happen to himself.'

'And,' said Ricky, 'one other thing. The Dedham girls said he screamed something else-but it was so mixed up with his other screams that they weren't sure about it. 'Bee-orchid.' 'Bee-orchid,' just that. He had been raving, obviously. Out of his head with shock and pain. Well, he died on that table, and got a good burial a few days later. Eva Galli didn't come to the funeral. Half the town was on Pleasant Hill, but not the dead man's fiancee. That fueled their tongues.'

'The old women, the women she had ignored,' Sears said. 'They laid into her. Said she'd ruined Stringer. Of course half of them had unmarried daughters and they'd had their eyes on Stringer long before Eva Galli showed up. They said he made some discovery-an abandoned husband or an illegitimate child, something like that. They made her out to be a real Jezebel.'

'We didn't know what to do,' Ricky said. 'We were afraid to visit her, after Stringer died. She might be grieving as much as a widow, you see, but she was unattached. It was our parents' place to console her, not ours. If we had called on her, the female malice would have gone into high gear. So we stewed-just stewed. Everybody assumed that she'd pack up and move back to New York. But we couldn't forget those afternoons.'

'If anything, they became more magical, more poignant,' Sears said. 'Now we knew what we had lost. An ideal-and a romantic friendship conducted in the light of an ideal.'

'Sears is right,' Ricky said. 'But in the end, we idealized her even more. She became an emblem of grief-of a fractured heart. All we wanted to do was to visit her. We sent her a note of condolence, and we would have gone through fire to see her. What we couldn't go through was the iron-bound social convention that set her apart. There weren't any cracks to slip through.'

'Instead she visited us,' Sears said. 'At the apartment your uncle lived in then. Edward was the only one who had his own place. We got together to talk and drink applejack. To talk about all the things we were going to do.'

'And to talk about her,' Ricky said. 'Do you know that Ernest Dowson poem: 'I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion'? Lewis found it and read it to us. That poem went through us like a knife. 'Thy pale lost lilies.' It certainly called for more applejack. 'Madder music and stronger wine.' What idiots we were. Anyhow, she turned up one night at Edward's apartment'

'And she was wild,' Sears said. 'She was frightening. She came in like a typhoon.'

'She said she was lonely,' Ricky said. 'Said she was sick of this damned town and all the hypocrites in it. She wanted to drink and she wanted to dance, and she didn't care who was shocked. Said this dead little town and all its dead little people could go to hell as far as she was concerned. And if we were men and not little boys, we'd damn the town too.'

'We were speechless,' Sears said. 'There was our unattainable goddess, cursing like a sailor and raging… acting like a whore. 'Madder music and stronger wine.' That's what we got, all right. Edward had a little gramophone and some records, and she made us crank it up and put on the loudest jazz he had. She was so vehement! It was crazy-we'd never seen any woman act that way, and for us she was, you know, sort of a cross between the Statue of Liberty and Mary Pickford. 'Dance with me, you little toad,' she said to John, and he was so frightened by her that he scarcely dared touch her. Her eyes were just blazing.'

'I think what she felt was hate,' Ricky said. 'For us, for the town, for Stringer. But it was hatred, and it was boiling. A cyclone of hate. She kissed Lewis while they were dancing, and he jumped back like she burned him. He dropped his arms, and she spun off to Edward and grabbed him and made him dance. Her face was terrible-rigid. Edward was always more worldly than the rest of us, but he too was shaken by Eva's