Ghost Town (13 page)

—Dear sister, he murmured.

—Come in, Julius, she said, and wiped her cheek.

But before he crossed the threshold Julius turned and regarded the street, cocking his head to the sounds of wheels rattling over cobblestones and the rumble of the avenue beyond, where elevated trains now clattered uptown,
spewing cinders and hot coals on the sidewalk below. With a troubled expression clouding his features he lifted a hand and with one finger tapped at the air as though he were attempting to summon the word which might express an idea only dimly formulated in his mind. But no, it escaped him, and he turned indoors.

By all accounts he was grateful to discover that the house was unchanged since he had left it. Few of the rooms were used now, Hester living very quietly, eating in the kitchen with the servants and using the parlor only when one of her sisters paid her a call. Is it possible that Julius heard in the empty rooms the laughter of his childhood, when his sisters were all at home and his father still alive? He went into the library and sat silent for many minutes in his father’s armchair.

Hester had prepared his old room for him. This was wise, for with evidence of change in the city streets all around him, when he retired upstairs he could at least feel himself in familiar surroundings. In the evening the lamps were lit and I imagine they dined early as had been the custom when they were young, though whether they still dressed for dinner I do not know. Perhaps since the death of Noah the old formalities
had been abandoned, but somehow I suspect that for this one night, the occasion of her brother’s homecoming, Hester might have felt compelled to exhume an evening gown and discovered that despite the odor of mothballs and a light coating of dust, the garment still fit her slight frame. She had then brought out her jewelry boxes, and rediscovered rings and necklaces and other such pieces whose luster, unlike the gown’s, had not dimmed in the years of their neglect. And so, before a cloudy mirror, Julius’ sister made herself presentable for his homecoming dinner.

I see them next in the parlor preparing to go through to the dining room. Julius is elegant in formal evening clothes, the tailcoat and high collar, and a diamond pin in his tie. Hester, bedecked with old jewels and less than comfortable, sits nervously smiling as her brother wanders about the parlor, attempting but failing to discover a conversational tone to suit the occasion. She is relieved when Quentin announces that dinner is served.

A little later, as the soup was removed and the duck carried in, she murmured a word to Quentin regarding one of the cats, and Julius came to life.

—There are cats in the house? he said.

Had he not seen them earlier? Hester glanced at the butler. The odor of camphor drifted from her person.

—There are, brother Julius.

—How many?

—Nine.

Julius was sitting straight up in his chair now and his eyes were bright.

—This is very good! he said.

—Julius, said Hester, and her tone was grave.

—Hester!

—There is something we must discuss. The others.

Julius’ mood at once changed. The mild elation disappeared. His face became occluded. He said nothing.

—They wish to see you.

Still he said nothing.

—What am I to tell them, Julius?

—Who wishes it?

—Rinder wishes it. He is much changed, brother! And Charlotte, of course.

Julius pondered this. His fingers played upon the tablecloth, restlessly pleating the fabric. He watched his struggling sister from under lowered brows.

—Sarah too, said Hester. And Mr. Brook Franklin.

This name she spoke with evident apprehension. Julius did not respond.

—Very well, sister, he said at last, lifting his head and smiling at her. There was light in his eyes once more, although Hester was unsure what it signified. But her relief was great.

I believe Julius began to explore the city the next day. The Negro attendant, before leaving the house the previous afternoon, had advised Hester that in the early days, at least, her brother should always be accompanied by a member of the household when he went out. But Hester did not object when he announced his intention after breakfast of going for a walk. He asked her had she any suggestions what direction he might take.

—Fifth Avenue, she replied at once.

—Fifth Avenue, said Julius.

—Yes, said Hester, and then you can tell me what it is like.

It was decided that they should dine with Rinder and Charlotte early the following week, and I have no doubt that Hester anticipated the event with no little apprehension. Julius however
seemed unconcerned. This worried Hester all the more, for she understood as well as her sisters did what was involved. Julius had not yet spoken to any of them about the events of twenty years before, and had given no clue as to how he thought of them now. He was about to dine with the man whom he had once believed to be responsible for the murder of Annie Kelly, and whose eye he had gouged out in a savage attack. Also present would be the man his father had told him was the true author of Annie Kelly’s death.

Charlotte was now a stout, colorful woman and very much a character in New York society. Her opinions remained radical—she had embraced socialism—and she compounded her eccentricity with ostentatious jewelry and cosmetics, often appearing in public in flowing capes and scarves, a cigarette holder permanently in her gaily beringed fingers, loud and fearless as only the very wealthy can be. She had visited Julius in Waverley Place and gently questioned him about the coming dinner, which she had initiated in the belief that her brother must be brought back into the family as quickly as possible. She had been relieved to find him apparently sane. She had witnessed distressing
scenes in the Catskills asylum over the years, and at times had thought that he would never be well enough to come home. But her fears now seemed unfounded. She considered he had made a full recovery, and wished to do all she could for him. Charlotte was deeply uneasy about her own part in poor Julius’ breakdown, for it had become clear to all of them during the years he was away that not one of the dozens of pictures he had painted of the mountains had any artistic merit whatsoever. So she had been quite wrong about his genius. He did not possess it.

Hester and Julius took a cab to the Rinder house on the appointed night, and if Julius was impressed by what his brother-in-law had built on the profits of the business founded by his father, he did not say so. They were greeted at the door by an English butler a half-century younger than Quentin and shown into a richly appointed drawing room where their hostess awaited them, also Sarah and her husband—my grandfather—wearing a glossy black eye patch. There was satin and gold on the walls, an immense chandelier, little couches and marble tables, and many fine pictures. Julius paused in the doorway and stared at Jerome Brook Franklin, who stood with his back to the fire. There
was a moment of charged silence—a moment to which the three sisters were acutely sensitive—and then my grandfather, more portly than ever, handsome in his dinner jacket and gleaming shirtfront, his neatly trimmed beard peppered now with silver and gray, advanced across the room with his hand outstretched.

—Julius, he said.

The three women, very still, gazed at Julius. Much hung on his response to his brother-in-law’s advance. He seemed frozen, uncertain—a hint of panic appeared in his face—and then he stepped forward and extended his own hand. The two men clasped hands, and my grandfather seized Julius’ arm just below the elbow and gripped it tight as the handclasp lingered several seconds and each man gazed into the other’s face. Ironic, I suppose, that Julius should have returned from twenty years among the very mountains which my grandfather had been denied for the best years of his working life; but nobody alluded to it that night. The prolonged handshake came to an end and the sisters fell upon the pair with cries of joy. Jerome Brook Franklin retired to his place by the fire, while Julius sank into an armchair and demurely crossed his legs.

It was only when they were going through to the dining room that Rinder appeared. Charlotte was watching Julius closely. They had not yet sat down. A door at the far end of the room opened, and Julius’ eyes fixed upon it in a manner, Charlotte said later, which reminded her of a beast of prey when it catches sight of some small animal in its territory. It was not an expression she liked, for she had only once seen it in his face before, and that was the occasion of the breakdown which ushered in his madness. Then it changed. Through the door, backwards, came a servant pulling a wheelchair. The wheelchair was turned into the room and Julius saw what had become of Max Rinder in the years he had been away.

In the wheelchair lolled a shrunken man who had clearly only a few months left to live. It was difficult to recognize in this broken creature the coiled and potent figure which once had been Rinder. The bestial malice Charlotte saw in her brother’s face some moments before was now replaced by a frank astonishment. She could not know it, but in Julius’ mind this wasted, dying man had for many years been a monster, and about him he had entertained lurid fantasies of revenge.

I see them then at table. I know that room
well, I was often in it as a child, before they tore the house down to make way for a department store. It was one of those rooms so high, so large, a table seating forty in the middle of the polished hardwood floor, that a human being became insignificant within it, rendered miniature against the sheer scale of Rinder’s wealth; dwarfed by his money. They gathered around the head of the vast table and Rinder now was most tiny of all, a minuscule fragment of a man perishing within his own delusions of opulence. To his right sat my grandmother, and beside her the true possessor of delusions, or so he had been, I mean Julius; Hester sat opposite Sarah, with Jerome Brook Franklin between her and Charlotte. I believe there was a seventh person in the room, that being Rinder in the years of his supremacy after the death of Noah van Horn. He was there in oils, a huge portrait painted by my grandfather ten years before. The room truly belonged to the man in the painting and not the withered leaf, the homunculus he had become.

A strange family group, comic even, in a morbid sort of a way, in a room dominated by a phantom, if we think of a human spirit preserved in oils as a phantom. At the head of the table a syphilitic robber-baron flanked by a
one-eyed painter and a man just out of an insane asylum, this damaged trio supported by the sisters, who flung each other electric glances of wordless understanding and gave the faltering masculine energies in the room some ballast of civilized structure. Glasses were filled and emptied. Courses came and went. Julius and my grandfather ate well. Rinder was fed by his servant, and took only a few mouthfuls, which he washed down with claret. He had something important to say to Julius, this became clear, and he made no attempt to contribute to the light drift of conversation initiated and propelled by Charlotte. As he masticated and swallowed his eyes burned on Julius, and when Julius returned his brooding stare Rinder merely nodded, as though to say: Soon you will know.

Came the moment when the sisters rose to retire and Jerome Brook Franklin selected a cigar, but Rinder lifted his claw of a hand and in his hoarse, thin voice told the women not to go, for he had something to say. A glance again flickered between the sisters. Charlotte had no inkling of what was to come, this was clear, Rinder had told her nothing. When he had their undivided attention the sick man lifted his glass, in which a few drops of wine remained.

—Julius has returned to us, he whispered—for his voice could barely rise above a whisper, though in fact it fluted as it spoke, more hiss than whisper.

—To Julius, he then sibilated, and the others joined the toast. Julius seemed eager now to speak, but even as he cleared his throat and rose to his feet Rinder lifted a hand and begged him to desist until he had finished. He was desperately weak but the old steel was still there, and Julius sank down again. Rinder’s uplifted hand began to tremble and he laid it flat on the tablecloth and stared at it. The room was now utterly silent in expectation of what he would say.

—A misconception exists which I have fostered.

More glances flitting about the table like little birds in a conservatory, all atwitter with questions.

—It concerns Annie Kelly.

An intake of breath now, and all eyes upon Julius. He sat frozen, blackly glaring at Rinder. Rinder wheezed. It was not easy for him to talk, and he was accustomed to signaling his needs with gestures. He gestured for water, for the claret had spilled down his chin.

—She was not murdered.

—What? cried Charlotte.

Julius continued to glare at the man as Rinder’s hand once more came up and Charlotte fell silent.

—I gave your father to understand that she was. But she was not.

Jerome Brook Franklin absently turned his unlit cigar between his lips, his frowning concentration fierce upon the shriveled Rinder.

—No? said Julius.

Rinder held Julius’ eye and shook his head.

—Noah could say nothing. He felt responsible.

Light began to dawn in the minds of several of those at the table. A candle spluttered in the chandelier overhead. In the street, a horse uttered a whinny and a cabman’s voice cried out. A servant entered the room and was waved away. Annie Kelly was not murdered, but Rinder told Noah she was. Noah withdrew from active oversight of the House of van Horn soon after, and Rinder’s reign began. Jerome Brook Franklin was nodding now. He put a flame to his cigar and produced a cloud of smoke.

Then Julius was on his feet. He had one question only.

—Where is she?

A shrug from the bony shoulders of the dying man.

—But she did not die.

—No.

Julius sat down again. He stared at Hester with his mouth open. Hester asked him if he was all right. Did he wish to leave now? For some seconds Julius said nothing, then he closed his mouth and shook his head, as though awakening from sleep.