The Living And The Dead

Jenny Boylan:

THE house in which I grew up was haunted by a cloud of cold mist, a mysterious woman in white, and an entity we called “the conductor,” since he walked around wearing a mourning coat and carrying a baton in one hand.

For the most part, these spirits manifested themselves in what I suppose is the usual manner: as mysterious footsteps in the attic, as doors that opened and closed by themselves, and as clouds of sentient fog.

The house, in Devon, Pa., was creepy, to be certain. Still, it wasn’t exactly the Amityville Horror. As a teenager in the 1970s, I found my house’s ghosts mostly a social embarrassment. It was humiliating to have to explain to my friends spending the night in the Haunted Room: “Now don’t worry if you see a blob come out of that closet. Usually it will go away if you whistle Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. If that doesn’t work, try the Ninth.”
...
I went back to the Coffin House last year with someone whom I can only haplessly describe as a paranormal investigator. The woman, a cheerful, round Philadelphian named Shelly, was associated with an organization called Batty About Ghosts. When I asked her to check out the house, she’d said she’d be glad to. “Actually,” said Shelly, without a hint of sarcasm, “this is my dead season.”

Shelly came through the front door and stood there for a moment holding her hand over her heart. “Holy cow,” she said. “There’s a lot of activity here.”

We busted ghosts for an hour or two, with mixed results, until we arrived in my parents’ old room. My father had died in that room on Easter Sunday 1986, from malignant melanoma. The Ninth Symphony had been on the radio that morning. Two days before, on Good Friday, he’d told me that the conductor had come into his room. The conductor wanted my father to go away with him, and conduct his orchestra.

“But I couldn’t go,” my father said. “Because I did not know the music.”

Shelly raised a pair of copper divining rods, which immediately began to spin around wildly, like the blades of a helicopter. “Is there anybody there?” she asked, but I could already sense my father’s shy, gentle presence.

“It’s my father,” I told Shelly.

“Talk to him,” she said. “Talk to him just like you used to.”

This was more difficult than it sounded, since I’m transgendered, and had morphed, since my father’s death, from the entity known as James to the current one, known as Jennifer.

“Hi, Dad,” I said, and felt the tears coming to my eyes. I felt as if he’d never truly known me, that only now, as I approached age 50, was my father seeing me for the first time. What I wanted to say was, I’m sorry, Dad, if I’ve been a disappointment to you.

But then, incredibly, I felt his hand on the side of my face, and heard the sound of his voice. There, there, he said. That’s enough of that.
...
Last summer, late one night while I was visiting [my mother], I went into the Monkey Bathroom to get ready for bed. It had been a long day, and I was filled with the usual rush of melancholy and nostalgia that always accompanies a visit to my boyhood home.

And then, as I looked into the mirror, I saw Mrs. Freeze, just as in days of old, a middle-aged woman in a white nightgown. For a moment I felt my skin crawl, wondering what disaster was now imminent.

But then it occurred to me that I was seeing my own reflection. After all this time, I was only haunting myself.

I realized then the thing that the stranger might have been trying to tell me, for all these years. Don’t worry, Jenny. It’s only me.

Hauntingly beautiful, and it brings to mind one particular session in Jim's class back in the spring of '89.  We'd been assigned to read Joyce's The Dead, which I think is one of the most beautiful stories ever, particularly the end:

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamp-light. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Probably my favorite paragraph in literature.  But it's this passage that comes specifically to mind right now:

He was in such a fever of rage and desire that he did not hear her come from the window. She stood before him for an instant, looking at him strangely. Then, suddenly raising herself on tiptoe and resting her hands lightly on his shoulders, she kissed him.

‘You are a very generous person, Gabriel,’ she said.

Gabriel, trembling with delight at her sudden kiss and at the quaintness of her phrase, put his hands on her hair and began smoothing it back, scarcely touching it with his fingers. The washing had made it fine and brilliant. His heart was brimming over with happiness. Just when he was wishing for it she had come to him of her own accord. Perhaps her thoughts had been running with his. Perhaps she had felt the impetuous desire that was in him, and then, the yielding mood had come upon her. Now that she had fallen to him so easily, he wondered why he had been so diffident.

He stood, holding her head between his hands. Then, slipping one arm swiftly about her body and drawing her towards him, he said softly:

‘Gretta, dear, what are you thinking about?’

She did not answer nor yield wholly to his arm. He said again, softly:

‘Tell me what it is, Gretta. I think I know what is the matter. Do I know?’

She did not answer at once. Then she said in an outburst of tears:

‘O, I am thinking about that song, The Lass of Aughrim.’

She broke loose from him and ran to the bed and, throwing her arms across the bed-rail, hid her face. Gabriel stood stock-still for a moment in astonishment and then followed her. As he passed in the way of the cheval-glass he caught sight of himself in full length, his broad, well-filled shirt-front, the face whose expression always puzzled him when he saw it in a mirror, and his glimmering gilt-rimmed eye-glasses. He halted a few paces from her and said:

‘What about the song? Why does that make you cry?’

She raised her head from her arms and dried her eyes with the back of her hand like a child. A kinder note than he had intended went into his voice.

‘Why, Gretta?’ he asked.

‘I am thinking about a person long ago who used to sing that song.’
...
‘He is dead,’ she said at length. ‘He died when he was only seventeen. Isn’t it a terrible thing to die so young as that?’

‘What was he?’ asked Gabriel, still ironically.

‘He was in the gasworks,’ she said.

Gabriel felt humiliated by the failure of his irony and by the evocation of this figure from the dead, a boy in the gasworks. While he had been full of memories of their secret life together, full of tenderness and joy and desire, she had been comparing him in her mind with another. A shameful consciousness of his own person assailed him. He saw himself as a ludicrous figure, acting as a pennyboy for his aunts, a nervous, well-meaning sentimentalist, orating to vulgarians and idealizing his own clownish lusts, the pitiable fatuous fellow he had caught a glimpse of in the mirror. Instinctively he turned his back more to the light lest she might see the shame that burned upon his forehead.

He tried to keep up his tone of cold interrogation, but his voice when he spoke was humble and indifferent.

‘I suppose you were in love with this Michael Furey, Gretta,’ he said.

‘I was great with him at that time,’ she said.

Her voice was veiled and sad. Gabriel, feeling now how vain it would be to try to lead her whither he had purposed, caressed one of her hands...

When Jim was talking about this section in class, he did it with an amazing, quiet, almost frustrated passion.  I actually still get goosebumps thinking of it: Gabriel, burning with desire and then suddenly disappointed to find that Gretta is thinking of a previous, long-dead love, perhaps comparing the living and the dead in that completely unfair way that leaves the living person feeling inadequate and abandoned.  Those ghosts always seem so powerful and impossible to exorcise.

Now reading Jenny's piece in the Times, I might understand a little better the ghosts Jim was haunted by for so long.  My soul swoons slowly...

ntodd

October 31, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor
The Ghosts of Halloweens Past
By JENNIFER FINNEY BOYLAN

Belgrade Lakes, Me.

THE house in which I grew up was haunted by a cloud of cold mist, a mysterious woman in white, and an entity we called “the conductor,” since he walked around wearing a mourning coat and carrying a baton in one hand.

For the most part, these spirits manifested themselves in what I suppose is the usual manner: as mysterious footsteps in the attic, as doors that opened and closed by themselves, and as clouds of sentient fog.

The house, in Devon, Pa., was creepy, to be certain. Still, it wasn’t exactly the Amityville Horror. As a teenager in the 1970s, I found my house’s ghosts mostly a social embarrassment. It was humiliating to have to explain to my friends spending the night in the Haunted Room: “Now don’t worry if you see a blob come out of that closet. Usually it will go away if you whistle Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. If that doesn’t work, try the Ninth.”

Our house was known as the Coffin House, built by one Lemuel Coffin in the 19th century. It was a three-story Victorian eyesore that at one point had had a pointed tower on the front, although this had been removed in 1944. One of my neighbors explained that this was because someone had been killed up there.

“Who?” I asked. “Who got killed?”

“Nobody,” he said, and shrugged. “Just some kid.”

•

The most discouraging of our specters was the woman I called Mrs. Freeze. She appeared, occasionally, in the mirror of a third-floor lavatory. This was known as the Monkey Bathroom because the family who’d lived in the Coffin House before us, the Hunts, had kept a monkey in there.

The monkey’s name was Jesus.

One night, coming home late from a friend’s house, I looked into the mirror and saw her standing behind me. Mrs. Freeze was a middle-aged woman in a white nightgown. Her eyes were small red stars. Cold mist rose from her hair and shoulders.

I turned around, but of course there was no one there.

I probably saw her about a half-dozen times in high school, usually a day or two before some calamity befell the family — my father’s diagnosis of cancer; a sibling’s unfortunate wedding. Once she materialized on the night before an overflowing toilet on the second floor flooded the whole house as we slept. In the morning, there was a river rushing down the stairs; all the downstairs ceilings bent, and then collapsed, beneath the weight of water.

My parents went to considerable expense to renovate the house. The old wallpaper was steamed off and replaced, the floors sanded and stained, the walls repainted. By the time I went off to college, the whole place had begun to seem considerably less creepy, a process that coincided with our family’s migration from working to middle class.

As the years went by, I began to wonder, as I looked back on my adolescence, if I’d imagined the whole thing, if the house’s haunting was something I’d invented out of perversity, or boredom, or sheer loneliness.

•

I went back to the Coffin House last year with someone whom I can only haplessly describe as a paranormal investigator. The woman, a cheerful, round Philadelphian named Shelly, was associated with an organization called Batty About Ghosts. When I asked her to check out the house, she’d said she’d be glad to. “Actually,” said Shelly, without a hint of sarcasm, “this is my dead season.”

Shelly came through the front door and stood there for a moment holding her hand over her heart. “Holy cow,” she said. “There’s a lot of activity here.”

We busted ghosts for an hour or two, with mixed results, until we arrived in my parents’ old room. My father had died in that room on Easter Sunday 1986, from malignant melanoma. The Ninth Symphony had been on the radio that morning. Two days before, on Good Friday, he’d told me that the conductor had come into his room. The conductor wanted my father to go away with him, and conduct his orchestra.

“But I couldn’t go,” my father said. “Because I did not know the music.”

Shelly raised a pair of copper divining rods, which immediately began to spin around wildly, like the blades of a helicopter. “Is there anybody there?” she asked, but I could already sense my father’s shy, gentle presence.

“It’s my father,” I told Shelly.

“Talk to him,” she said. “Talk to him just like you used to.”

This was more difficult than it sounded, since I’m transgendered, and had morphed, since my father’s death, from the entity known as James to the current one, known as Jennifer.

“Hi, Dad,” I said, and felt the tears coming to my eyes. I felt as if he’d never truly known me, that only now, as I approached age 50, was my father seeing me for the first time. What I wanted to say was, I’m sorry, Dad, if I’ve been a disappointment to you.

But then, incredibly, I felt his hand on the side of my face, and heard the sound of his voice. There, there, he said. That’s enough of that.

•

A few months later I talked to the four Hunt children, all grown up now, who’d lived in the house before me. One of the boys, Al, who’s grown up to become a well-known journalist, said he’d never detected the presence of anything disembodied in the house. “That was totally off my radar, Jenny,” he said.

His siblings Bill and Babby hadn’t seen any ghosts either, although Babby did provide me with further information on the life of Jesus. Apparently the monkey that lived in the bathroom was allowed out one day a year, on his birthday.

I wanted to ask her, “What day was Jesus’ birthday?” But then I realized I already knew the answer.

Christmas.

As for the youngest Hunt sibling, St. George, he said he’d seen plenty of spirits on the third floor, near the Haunted Room. One time, one of them managed to convince him to jump out the window. He’d gotten one leg out the frame before his father arrived on the scene and asked him what he thought he was doing. St. George didn’t have an answer.

Would he spend a night in the house alone, now, I asked? Not for a million dollars, he said. Not for any price.

•

My mother still lives there, all these years later. She’s never seen anything untoward in the house; for her it’s a museum of bright moments, the place where she and her husband raised their children and lived good lives. She doesn’t believe in ghosts, either, which might be one reason she’s never seen them.

Last summer, late one night while I was visiting her, I went into the Monkey Bathroom to get ready for bed. It had been a long day, and I was filled with the usual rush of melancholy and nostalgia that always accompanies a visit to my boyhood home.

And then, as I looked into the mirror, I saw Mrs. Freeze, just as in days of old, a middle-aged woman in a white nightgown. For a moment I felt my skin crawl, wondering what disaster was now imminent.

But then it occurred to me that I was seeing my own reflection. After all this time, I was only haunting myself.

I realized then the thing that the stranger might have been trying to tell me, for all these years. Don’t worry, Jenny. It’s only me.

Jennifer Finney Boylan is a professor of English at Colby College and the author of the forthcoming memoir “I’m Looking Through You: Growing Up Haunted.”