Spirit Read online

  She smiled at him but she felt more like crying. That any man’s life should come to this; after years of fun and dancing and publishing books and talking and going to parties. Alone now, or all but alone, in a vast dilapidated house without any family at all, incapable of movement or speech. The tears slid down her cheeks and there was nothing she could do to stop them. Her father watched them and said nothing.

  ‘I’ve been working real hard,’ Elizabeth told him. ‘They’ve given me this really complicated book to edit. Reds Under The Bed, by Carl Scheckner III. It’s all about the Communist threat, and it’s full of references and footnotes and indexes and everything and I have to check them all. I have a senior editor called Margo Rossi and she’s such a Tartar! If I’m one minute late back from lunch she practically flays me alive.’

  Her fingertip circled the back of her father’s hand.

  ‘I want to tell you something, though, father. I couldn’t have done any of this without your help and without your support. You taught me so much. I know how much you hurt after Peggy died and mommy got sick; but you were always there, weren’t you? And you always told me that you loved me.’

  Her father made a thick rattling sound somewhere in his throat, as if he were trying to speak. His eyes opened and closed, opened and closed, but there was no pattern to it, no secret semaphore, nothing but helplessness, Elizabeth sobbed, ‘Don’t give up, father. Please don’t give up. I’ll do everything I can to help you get better.’

  She sat and watched him for nearly ten minutes; and he lay there and watched her back. She tried to tell him about work, and what her friends had been doing, and the weekend she had gone upstate to Mohonk Lake. But his inability even to show her that he recognized her was more than she could bear, and she choked up, and had to sit with him in anguished silence.

  She was thinking of leaving him when his eyes rolled slowly to the right, as if he had seen something in the far corner of the bedroom. She thought at first that what he was doing was completely involuntary, but then his eyes rolled back to her, and repeated the movement to the right.

  She turned around, and let out a ‘hah!’ of total shock. In the corner, only feet away from her, was the little girl in white. She was standing in the sunlight, and she seemed to be quite real, although Elizabeth couldn’t understand how she had managed to enter the bedroom and walk across to the opposite corner without being seen and without being heard. Her face was as white and as smooth as polished marble. Her eyes were impenetrably dark. She wore the same simple dress that she had worn before, although she seemed to have put on more petticoats. Her hands were clasped in front of her, and Elizabeth noticed that her nails were bitten down. Somehow this made her seem all the more frightening. Whoever saw a ghost with bitten-down nails?

  ‘Who are you?’ asked Elizabeth, standing up and taking a cautious step backwards.

  ‘I came to see papa,’ the girl replied. She spoke without opening her mouth, and her voice was extraordinary, with a metallic, distant quality to it, like somebody sliding a brass ring along a brass curtain-pole.

  ‘Are you Peggy?’ asked Elizabeth. She was so frightened that she could scarcely speak properly.

  ‘I came to see papa. I’ve left my boots behind. I’ve left my gloves behind.’

  ‘Are you really Peggy?’

  The girl gave Elizabeth an unfocused smile. ‘Don’t be so worried, Lizzie. You don’t have anything to fear. Nobody will ever hurt you, ever.’

  ‘You’ve been following me. You’ve been watching me.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then why haven’t you ever talked to me before? I wanted so much to talk to you.’

  ‘Better to stay silent, unless you have something to say. I didn’t want to upset you.’

  ‘I saw you in Macy’s. I saw you in Central Park. I’ve seen you everywhere! You came here before, didn’t you? You froze the swimming-pool.’

  ‘The winter froze the swimming-pool.’

  ‘But it was summer, and you almost drowned us, mommy and me.’

  ‘You didn’t drown, though. She didn’t want me to take you.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Elizabeth demanded. She was close to hysteria. ‘I don’t understand what you’re talking about.’

  ‘– want me to take you,’ the Peggy-girl repeated, her voice more distorted.

  She slid towards the bed. As she passed the cheval-mirror, the surface misted over. She stood and looked down at Elizabeth’s father and her face was filled with curiosity and regret.

  Elizabeth said, ‘Don’t touch him.’

  The Peggy-girl smiled without looking at her. ‘He’ll be cold soon enough.’

  ‘He’s not going to die,’ Elizabeth retorted. ‘He’s going to live, and he’s going to get better.’

  The Peggy-girl slowly shook her head. ‘Even he doesn’t believe that.’

  ‘How do you know? He can’t even speak.’

  ‘He has something in him that can say what he wants. We all do; although many of us don’t know it, and many of those who do know it prefer to stay silent.’

  ‘You’re not making any sense.’

  The Peggy-girl stared at her. Of course I’m making sense. Why do you think some people rest in eternal peace while others never do?’

  She turned back to Elizabeth’s father. She reached her hand out to his forehead, but Elizabeth snapped. ‘No! Don’t touch him!’

  Elizabeth bustled around the end of the bed and tried to seize Peggy-girl’s wrists. But instead of grasping them, her hands plunged into them, like plunging into freezing slush. She could feel them, but she couldn’t get any kind of grip. She pulled her hands back in shock.

  ‘Just let him alone!’ she demanded, breathy and scared. ‘I don’t care who you are or what you are, just let him alone!’

  The Peggy-girl stepped to one side, and this time Elizabeth snatched at her sleeve. But the Peggy-girl seemed to have scarcely any weight, or substance. Instead of resisting, or trying to pull herself away, she completely collapsed. Her head dropped into her collar; and then her whole dress folded up, billowy and insubstantial, and before she knew it Elizabeth was struggling with nothing more than an empty bag of collapsing cotton. She clung to it, tried to stop it from collapsing any further, but it rolled up into something the size of a handkerchief; and then Elizabeth found that she was holding in her hand nothing but a snow-white rose, made of frost. It melted in front of her eyes, until the only evidence that it had ever been there was a faint chilly feeling in her fingers.

  Elizabeth turned to her father in astonishment. He was watching her, but of course he couldn’t speak. She looked wildly around the room, trying to see if she had been deceived by some elaborate trick. But the room hadn’t changed; the sun still shone; and there was no place at all where the Peggy-girl could have concealed herself.

  Shaking, Elizabeth sat down on the edge of the bed and took hold of both of her father’s hands. Her heart was still beating at high speed, and she badly needed a drink. But she looked him intently in the eyes, and said, ‘You saw her, didn’t you? She was really here? A little white girl in a little white dress.’

  Her father moved his eyes from side to side.

  ‘Is that a yes?’ asked Elizabeth. ‘If that’s a yes, moving your eyes from side to side, then do it again.’

  There was a very long pause, and then her father did it again.

  ‘You saw her, didn’t you? The little white girl in the little white dress?’

  Yes.

  ‘That was the same little girl that mommy saw, when she ran out into the rain. She turned the bushes all icy, even though it was summer.’

  Yes.

  ‘That was the same little girl that froze the swimming-pool, the night that mommy and I almost drowned. I saw her quite clearly. We both saw her. Mommy was never mentally sick. I wasn’t making up stories. We really, really saw her, just like we did just now. I’ve seen her again and again. I’ve seen her in New York. I’ve seen her everyplace tha
t you can think of. Laura’s seen her too.’

  Elizabeth was crying as she spoke. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, and then she said, ‘Nobody believed us. Nobody believed either of us.’

  Elizabeth’s father remained impassive, his face still fixed in a vapid sneer.

  Elizabeth said, ‘Do you believe that was Peggy? I know she doesn’t look like Peggy, but do you believe that she is?’

  Yes.

  ‘Have you ever seen her before?’

  Another long pause. Then, Yes.

  ‘You’ve seen her before? How many times?’

  No response.

  ‘Twice? Three times? More than three times?’

  Yes.

  ‘More than ten times?’

  No response.

  ‘And how long ago did you see her? Before mommy went to the clinic?’

  No response.

  ‘Before mommy had her operation?’

  No response.

  Thank God for that, thought Elizabeth. At least he hadn’t let mommy undergo a leucotomy knowing all the time that she had been telling the truth – that she had seen a little girl who was Peggy’s soul or Peggy’s spirit or whatever part of Peggy still persisted in the waking world.

  ‘Where did you see her?’ asked Elizabeth. ‘Here in the house?’

  Yes.

  ‘Anywhere else?’

  Yes.

  ‘Further than Sherman?’

  Yes.

  ‘How far?’ asked Elizabeth, and now a small dreadful thought was beginning to occur to her. ‘As far as New York?’

  Another pause. Then, Yes.

  Elizabeth and her father stared into each other’s eyes. She could see now that he had so much that he wanted to tell her, so much that he wanted to explain and discuss. There were so many questions that she wanted to ask him, too – questions that were far too complicated for a Yes or a No. Like – why did he think Peggy should still be here? Why did she look like another girl altogether? Why was she so cold? What was she made of? Ice, or flesh, or cotton, or smoke, or nothing at all? Were they imagining that she was here? Was she happy or was she sad? Was she trapped somehow between the living world and whatever lay beyond?

  ‘Are you frightened of her?’ Elizabeth wanted to know.

  No response. But then a very quick Yes.

  ‘You are frightened of her? Or not?’

  Again, the same reply.

  ‘You’re frightened?’

  Yes.

  ‘But not of her? Of something else?’

  Yes.

  ‘What is it that you’re frightened of? Is it a person?’

  No response. Then Yes.

  ‘It isn’t a person but it is a person? I don’t understand.’

  Elizabeth’s father lay back staring at the ceiling. She had the impression that he was making an enormous effort to do something, or to say something. His hands began to quiver, and his throat swelled up, and he started to utter a thick, low, growling sound.

  ‘Father – don’t,’ Elizabeth begged him. ‘You don’t have to strain yourself, please. I’m going to stay for at least a week – we can spend a whole lot more time talking about it.’

  But her father growled louder and louder, an upsetting doglike grrrrrrrrr which grew louder and louder.

  ‘Grrrrdd,’ he managed to say at last. ‘Grrrdduh.’

  Elizabeth shook her head in dismay. ‘Father, please, I don’t understand.’

  ‘Grrrrdduh!’

  He let out a thick, phlegmy whine, and then he relaxed. He kept flickering his eyes from side to side as if to say Yes, Yes, Yes. By uttering ‘Grrrdduh’ he had somehow managed to tell her what was frightening him.

  ‘Grrrdduh?’ asked Elizabeth.

  Yes, Yes, Yes.

  He kept on flickering his eyes from side to side until they were interrupted by a quick, flurrying knock at the door. It was a plump blonde woman in a nurse’s white uniform. ‘Hallo, Miss Buchanan,’ she said, smiling. ‘My name’s Edna Faulk. I’m here to take care of your father.’

  Edna went across to the bed and leaned over Elizabeth’s father, still smiling. ‘Good afternoon, Mr Buchanan! How would we like to have a little wash before lunch?’

  Elizabeth looked into her father’s eyes one more time. There was no expression in them at all. He had totally lost the ability to show her how he felt. She wished that she could understand what he was trying to tell her, but she knew that it would need hours or even days of careful questioning. What wasn’t a person and yet was a person? What was ‘Grrrdduh?’

  ‘You won’t mind leaving us for a while now, will you, Miss Buchanan?’ said Edna Faulk. ‘If you’d care to come upstairs and share some lunch with your father, well, you’re very welcome, but I must warn you that we’re rather messy, aren’t we, Mr Buchanan? We’re very messy pups at mealtimes, believe me!’

  ‘I’ll come back later,’ said Elizabeth. She couldn’t bear the idea of watching her father being fed. ‘I have some people to meet.’

  She kissed her father on the forehead. He looked up at her but she couldn’t tell if he were angry or contented, happy or miserable. As she left the sunlit room, she turned around one more time, and she found herself wishing that he hadn’t survived. At least, if he had died, he would have found Peggy in heaven, rather than here.

  Ten

  She walked along Oak Street and saw how much Sherman had changed. Most noticeably, the large post oak had been cut down, leaving nothing but a wide flat-topped stump. There were still seats around it, but without the green cavernlike shade that its overhanging branches used to offer, the street looked bald and ordinary, a Litchfield street like any other.

  The Stillwell Hardware Store had gone, to be replaced by Zee-Zee Appliances, with a window full of Frigidaires. Mr Pedersen had died of throat cancer three years ago, and the Sherman Grocery had given way to Waldo’s Supermarket. The creekbed where Elizabeth’s mommy had pursued the Peggy-girl in the summer rain had been all covered over with hardcore and asphalt now, to make a fifty-car parking-lot. Baxter’s Realty was still here, and so was Endicott’s soda-fountain, although Old Man Hauser was in a home now, deaf and blind and incontinent, and the drugstore was run by a young, lugubrious pharmacist called Gary with a flat-topped crewcut and red bow tie and heavy black-rimmed spectacles.

  The war had changed Sherman first, and most dramatically, because it had taken away its self-absorption and its innocence. In previous generations, the town’s children would have stayed, for the most part, and carried on the town’s traditions. But Dan Marshall the school swimming star had been hit by a mortar bomb on the beach of Peleliu Island only six minutes after the US 1st Marines landed there in September 1944. His death was famous because the war artist Tom Lea had painted his head flying through the air. Dan’s girlfriend Judy McGuinness, the Prom Queen, had joined the Navy as a Wave and had married her boss, Rear-Admiral Wilbur Fetterman, and then divorced him, and now she lived in Charleston, South Carolina, with a Kaiser-Frazer concessionaire called Hewey Something-or-other.

  Molly Albee was married and living in Providence, Rhode Island, with three gingery babies and a husband who repaired boats. Altogether three of Elizabeth’s friends had died in the war; others had disappeared; but even those who had returned had brought back with them the outside world, with its cool and its be-bop and its cynicism, and its hugeness, too; and once Sherman knew that it was just a minuscule part of something huge, it was no longer Sherman, the warm-hearted centre of everybody’s world, but just another place.

  Television had changed it next. Those between-wars family evenings by the Zenith radio were gone for ever, those evenings when shared imaginations would conjure up Amos’n’Andy, Burns and Allen, and One Man’s Family. Now everybody watched Milton Berle and Hopalong Cassidy and the kids all sang ‘It’s Howdy Doody time, it’s Howdy Doody time, Bob Smith and Howdy too, say Howdy-Doo to you’. Not only that, but they could see automobiles and floor-wax and which twin had the Toni, they could see what
was happening in New York, and Washington, and even London, England, and the loss of innocence was complete.

  Elizabeth walked along Putnam Street with its Queen Anne houses and this, at least, hadn’t changed. She reached Lenny’s house and walked up to the porch. As she knocked on the heavy doorknocker she had the most extraordinary sense that the last eight years hadn’t passed at all, and that she was back where she had been in 1943, knocking, on the Millers’ door to tell Lenny goodbye.

  Mrs Miller answered the door. She was whiter-haired, but still comfortable and well-rounded, and she must have been cooking, too, because the house was fragrant with the smell of meatloaf.

  ‘Lizzie Buchanan, well I never! Don’t you look the picture! Come along in!’

  Lenny and Mr Miller were sitting in the living-room, next to a crackling log fire, drinking coffee and reading the papers. Up above their heads the canaries still twittered and chirruped in their cages.

  Mr Miller was even thinner than Elizabeth remembered him. Stomach trouble, that’s what Mrs Patrick had told her. But he took off his spectacles and stood up and embraced her like a long-lost daughter, and Lenny stood up too, all proud to have her call on them.

  ‘You want a cup of coffee?’ asked Lenny.

  ‘Actually, no. But I could use a cigarette.’

  ‘Mom doesn’t like me to smoke in the house.’

  ‘All right, then, let’s smoke in the garden.’

  They strolled down to the end of the garden, through the orchard. The long grass was thick with fallen apples. Elizabeth leaned against one of the trees and blew out smoke and said, ‘Sherman’s changed, hasn’t it? I didn’t really notice until today.’

  ‘Everywhere’s the same. It’s not just the places, though. It’s the people.’

  ‘Do you think we’re all so different?’

  Lenny shrugged. ‘That day you came to say goodbye, that seems like a whole world away. I was a rookie, still wet behind the ears, and you were just a schoolkid.’