EULOGIES AND IMAGES
short story
by
Patrick Breheny
There were, north of Times Square in the theatre district of New York, at a time not too long past, some excellent second class hotels, clean and safe, with reasonable rates and at least the minimum of service. These were the habitats of our vagabonds and minstrels: jazz musicians, stage struck neophytes off busses from Terra Haute and Boise, con men setting up department store demonstrations of the gravity wedge pen (“Just turn the the tip down and ---voila!----the point comes out like magic. I only have a few left. Let me see the first five hands.” $7.95 for a silver painted pen with a heavy ball inside.)
At one of those hotels, a tough, squat four story bulldog, brownstone features holding gracefully against time and marauding winds form the Hudson, whose green canopy and thick maple stained doors still promised traces of elegance, Marie had a room reserved for whenever she chose to use it. The room was somewhat euphemistically designed 500, and was located on the turn landing of the stairs between the fourth floor and the door to the roof. I was an attic. Its architectural intent had been as a storage room, yet it was large enough, the ceiling high enough, to convert comfortably to a single once plumbing and heating had been installed, and if its sole window created ventilation problems in summer, it had the virtue also of providing an overhead view of West 46th Street with journalistic objectivity.
Ordinarily, the Arden did not furnish bell service, but Maries’s unheralded arrivals required that the desk clerk go up with her to remove dust covers from the furniture. While Marie did not pay to keep the room indefinitely reserved for her, it was not rented to other guests.
As was always the case when she checked into the Arden, Marie was drunk. The cab driver removed her luggage from the trunk and placed it on the wet sidewalk. After she paid him, they stood facing each other expectantly in the blue cast of light that seems to ascend from New York streets on rainy afternoons, at least on the covers of New yorker magazines or if one were intoxicated. Then, realizing he had no intention of carrying the suitcases, it occurred to her why he waited. “Oh yes” she said, reaching into her change purse and grasping a handful of coins, among them a number of pennies and nickels. She flung them like pebbles, and they rippled in a curbside puddle near their feet.
She carried one suitcase with both hands and slid the other across the sidewalk with her foot. At the door, setting down the suitcase she carried so she could grasp the door handle, she glanced back and saw that he was indeed bobbing for the larger coins. With the advantage of having seen him first, when their eyes met she was ready before he with the universal symbol of a finger for “I”. I am Marie, one, and up yours. Her head turned before he could return the gesture with a digital extension of his own ego, and interior sounds when she opened the door drowned out whatever he said.
The reception inside the small lobby of the Arden was warmer, as was the room itself, moderately heated, with a softly lit chandelier spreading gentle shadows from potted plants across the faded patterns of the oriental rug, spotless but threadbare from generations of walkers. Familiar with stage illusion, Marie knew the dim glow of light, while enhancing the effect of intimacy, also served to conceal the need for paint. Upon the walls hung canvasses of vague compositions, in subdued shades, selected more to assuage than attract, presences like waiters beyond the candlelight in a French restaurant, there only if you wanted them.
It was 4:00 PM, and Olsen the evening clerk was on duty. Because Marie always checked in after a full day of drinking, usually on the first night of a drunk, it was Olsen she met each time. He was a tall straight man with white hair and an exalted air of dignity. If he felt even a tinge of contempt for Marie, he did not express it. He would not even allow the humiliation of her teetering to the desk to sign in. Instead, as the door closed behind her, he was immediately, without having at all seemed to rush, beside her with a baggage cart that he loaded instantly, and then, hand under her arm while the other guided the cart, escorted her unobtrusively across the lobby to the elevator. So effectively was this done that any guest lounging in an armchair who might glance up would more likely conclude that the not unattractive woman with disheveled hair and rain streaked make-up was just temporarily ill rather than drunk.
They got off the elevator on the fourth floor and Olsen carried the suitcases the half flight to her room, as she stumbled after him along the banister. He would, after he had prepared the room, go downstairs alone and register her. He would also, at any hour during his shift when she called, provide her with a bottle and set-up.
If it was possible to overdose on alcohol, Marie would like to do it that night. She knew why 500 was no longer rented to other guests. There was a poltergeist in the room. On entering , some presence, that had nothing to do with a lack of provided heat, chilled to the bone. Later it knocked on the walls, and rattled objects on the bureau, sometimes overturning the ashtray or spilling the ice bucket. It never ever, however, disturbed a bottle or a drink. It seemed to know why Marie was there, and would not completely alienate its sole occasional visitor by disrupting her raison d’etre.
Marie was only vaguely curious about her spirit roommate. She had her own demons to deal with that alcohol could sometimes subdue. Usually, after one day in the room, she was unable to distinguish the paranormal from delirium. She had begun bringing a portable cassette tape recorder, that technological replacement to victrolas and vinyl records that was a bit bulky and heavy in a suitcase, but beat lugging a record player around. To her surprise, the first time she recorded and played back sober, she discovered there WAS another presence in the room, or at least a screeching that could not have come from her. The machine was objective, had recorded actual sounds, while ignoring the frenzy in her mind.
The Booth Theatre was only one blocks east and one block south. She had made her Broadway debut at the Booth fifteen years earlier, in a drama directed by Harvey Smith. She was 21 then, just up from college in New Orleans, doing theater in the Village, when Harvey saw her and assigned her a lead. More successes followed, other plays on Broadway, films, affluence, none of which were deterred by her marriage to Harvey during the run of the debut show. With the marriage, between the plays and films, there were children, three of them, a boy, a girl, a boy, in that order, and then there were conflicts. She had ambitions Harvey did not approve of, directing, at which she was also successful, and in which role he eventually came to see her as a competitor, and writing, beyond Harvey’s capability completely. Though the plays she wrote were not were not greatly received, she’d managed to see two of them produced off-Broadway.
Too “progressive” to concede jealousy, the clamp Harvey squeezed was in the form of a complaint that the children were not being given enough attention, and in truth they weren’t. Domestics were hired to care for them, and though Harvey spent less time with them than she did, the blame was placed on her.
Marie began going on periodic binges. In the beginning she was a spitfire, she made headlines, she threw glasses into bar mirrors, and clawed police faces. Once all that had served its purpose of penance and guilt---for Marie was, with all things considred, still N'Orleans French if a Catholic-in-remission--- by blunting her varied careers, Harvey succeeded in gaining custody of the children. Marie’s bouts then subsided from melodrama to sodden sullen purges.
Though she was on her way this rainy autumn afternoon, she was not yet far enough into her reverie for the horrors to begin. When the high pitched squealing started almost as son as Olsen left the room, she recognized it at once as the phantom she had heard on tape. She had with her the cassette recorder, which she took out and turned to RECORD. There were, in the same suitcases, two bottles of gin, one which she opened, then poured straight into a water glass. Though she could still afford good scotch or bourbon, and ice was readily available from room service, drinking cheap gin conjured for her a destructive rage, yet was not the impotent surrender of drinking, say, port wine. She was still cognizant of symbolism. A wino was a wino.
The ghost was persistent. Its wail continued incessantly while the recorder hummed, and Marie, otherwise ignoring its tantrum, drank the glass of gin and smoked four cigarettes in thirty minutes. Then the recorder clicked off and she poured more gin from the bottle .It was then that the thing did the intolerable. The glass turned over on the dresser, and the bottle launched into the air, splintering to crystal slivers of glass and showering liquid as it smashed against the door.
The telephone rang almost immediately. Marie’s stays at the Arden had begun long after her wilder drunks subsided, but Olsen knew her old reputation. While he handled her visits discreetly, and the hotel was tolerant of a saxophonist’s early evening practicing, or actors rehearsing an audition scene, the Arden would never permit rowdiness.
“Mrs Carvier?” She was still Carvier-Smith, but Olsen used the name she preferred. “Is something wrong up there?”
“Damn it! I didn’t do that. You know what it is.”
There were two full seconds of silence.
“I see. Nothing like this has happened before. Perhaps another room.”
“Let me try this a bit longer. Maybe I can see what it wants.”
Olsen was hesitant. “Yes, I suppose. But if it continues, I’ll have to move you. You understand. It only happens when someone’s in the room.”
“I know. But I prefer being away from the other guests, and you like it that way too. Let’s give it a chance.”
“Do you need anything?”
“Not right now, thank you.”
She didn’t at the moment. There was another bottle of gin in the suitcase. But she would not have that dashed against the door too, or she would have to leave the room.
How to appease it? She tried speaking.
“What to you want?”
Son of a bitch! It squealed at her. She flipped the cassette out of the recorder, turned it over, and reinserted it. When it was recording again, she repeated the question. The response, undecipherable as it was, sounded the same, was of the same duration.
She conducted an interview. The presence responded in varying lengths to the questions she asked. The water glass had not broken, and she set it upright. She took the other bottle from her luggage while she questioned. As she opened it, she made her first direct statement.
“Let me tell you something, old friend. You touch this one, and it’s the last time anybody ever talks to you again. Understand?”
An affirmative. She was sure of it. The reply was one syllable, the tone conciliatory. She poured the gin and took a large swallow. Paradoxically, she was becoming lucid.
She continued interrogating. At the end of thirty minutes, the recorder switched off, and the whining sound stopped too. She played the tape back, and realized, when she heard her own voice, that the batteries were dying. Her own voice was garbled, vowels elongated, the words seeming to come from someone impossibly sleepy, or more intoxicated than she now was. The recorder could be plugged in, but she didn’t have a chord. She had almost transferred it to OFF again when she heard the response to her first question
“Remember me,” it said. The enunciation was not clear, and there was an accent, but it was certainly intelligible. The ebbing batteries had slowed the playback speed so that the voice could be understood.
“My name is Harry Sloan. Remember me. Speak my name.”
While she listened, her own voice became distorted, his getting clearer, and his answers revealed that she had inadvertently conducted a good interview. He had been a lonely man in life as in death, a merchant seaman, English, and if he had left any offspring, they were in faraway ports and did not carry his name. He had died in that room on Christmas evening ten years ago, the beneficiary of a philanthropist who’d rescued him for the day from the Seaman’s Mission on South Street, treated him to a turkey dinner at an expensive restaurant, and culminated his charity by leaving him in the evening at the Arden. The old sailor exhibited a gruff sense of humor, attributing the probable cause of his massive coronary to “all that damned stuffing”. Or perhaps, he intimated, the shock of a square meal had just been too much for his system.
What was his problem now? He described dying, accompanied by a review of his life, at least by him, but there was a snag. Death is a mirror of life, and there must be a reflection from the living. Someone who knows you must speak your name: mourn you, curse you, eulogize you, pray for you. Harry had been homeless so long that he carried no papers. He’d been registered into the Arden in the name of his benefactor, who’d never come back to check on him. The benefactor had told the Arden front desk that Harry was from the South Street mission, and the police traced him that far. The seaman’s mission accepted him, when he stayed there with maybe a little money from a casual labor agency job, by their copy of his long expired international seaman’s card which indicated only a date of birth and that he came from Birmingham, England. No one knew which ship he last worked on. The police were not inclined to put much effort into the further tracking of an elderly foreign national indigent who’d died of natural causes. His embassy tried to locate relatives but couldn’t find any, and he was buried, truly unceremoniously, by Department of Corrections Riker’s Island Jail prisoners, in a communal grave on Hart Island, New York’s Potter’s Field, a solitary sad plot of land on western Long Island Sound, closest to the Bronx's City Island, a place frequently not shown on maps, nor much thought of by most New Yorkers, but officially designated as the uninhabited easternmost section of the Bronx., with a long sorry institutional history as the site of a Civil War POW camp, a lunatic asylum, a tubercular quarantine sanatarium, a reformatory, and for 150 years, delivered and interred every day by the hundreds, getting up toward a million, the burial place of New York’s unknown, forgotten, unclaimed or impoverished, among them a disturbing fifty percent children, infants, stillborns, fetuses from the city’s hospitals. The prisoners and Department of Corrections personnel are visitors only during daylight hours. Any other visitors are unwelcome and discouraged, no living soul is allowed on Hart past dusk, and without lights it bcomes a cold darkness, shrouded by the mist and winds off the water, as incidental city lights shimmer in warning to close-by craft, and dance like ethereal spirits along the banks.
Those who live alone die alone, and the passionless mention of Harry’s name on the lips of people who had not known him in life, nor care that he was dead, did not constitute a sufficient reflection of his life. His spirit had been in the hotel room for ten years. A guide would come, Harry believed, if he ever succeeded in communicating with the worldly. In fact, he said, as she made this tape, he thought that it was. He seemed to know that this time Marie would decipher his message. “Remember me,” he said, “I am Harry Sloan.” The tape was finished and there was not enough strength left in the batteries to click off the recorder. It just stopped humming.
Marie mentioned his name in an article published by a magazine that accepted it mostly for the oddity of circumstance and the marketability of the author’s notoriety, though it did not express endorsement. The account was at first scoffed and ridiculed. “Creative DTs ‘” one wag sneered in a tabloid. Another more serious critic accused her of using several tapes and recorders, with her voice on one tape, his on another, and all of it recorded on a third tape. In reference to a demonstration she did on television, one clever MC quipped later, “The only deceased presence in that room were the batteries.”
It was all on that last tape. The earlier recordings were made when the batteries functioned properly, and attempts to play back at slower speeds were largely unfruitful, though on one she could interpret enough to surmise that that Harry had been trying to say the same thing each time. She returned to the room several times sober, but it seemed Harry had gone on. The research she had done on his life and the publicity she gave him had been enough, so by helping him she had lost him.
Marie changed after the experience. The drinking ceased and her life became productive again. Whatever Harvey said, she’d always been a good mother, but found time to be a better one. She became an activist, challenging injustices and dangerous political policies. She was almost fearless because she had lost that old, primal boogie man scourge, the fear of death. She was still afraid of pain, but willing to confront it. So involved did she become in an attempt to influence courses of political decision, and so dedicated a following did she eventually attract, that she was assassinated at last by the forces of one government or another, each accusing others of the act.
She died without placating the one remaining fear. What will happen when there is no posterity? What will become of all of us when there are no living of our time to provide an image and memory? Where do reflections of sunlight in a brook go? How long will you laugh for if no one hears? You do know babies in orphanages don’t cry? They’ve learned no one is coming.
After Harry, Marie thought some of them might cry at night on desolate Hart Island, if only there were anybody there to hear.
(and again, always have to say it...copyright, all rights reserved, Patrick Breheny)