Gloriana

a short story by Philip Gerard

There are rules about ghosts, as everybody knows.

For instance: ghosts are supposed to be tied to a certain place-- a graveyard, say. A ship. A hanging tree along a winding country lane. Especially and most often, a house. A ghost doesn’t go wandering all over the neighborhood, stopping here and loitering there, and yet that is exactly what this one did. But then she was a child, and children behave according to the music in their heads.

Another rule is this: in a ghost story, the main character is not supposed to go seeking out the ghost, enticing her to appear, to linger and carve her shape into the air, to move in and take up residence and generally disturb the metaphysical order of things.

Yet that’s what Margaret Warren did. She set out to attract the ghost with toys and candy, the way her neighbors set out hanging jars of red sugar water to attract hummingbirds.

And let us get this straight at the outset: Mrs. Warren's husband, Jack, was a good man but limited by the things he had endured, as such men are. They were passing forty, the two of them, alone in the kind of opulent new house neither had ever dreamed of affording, she more alone than he, since he was away on business so much. They married young, and she had given up a position as a retail buyer years ago to help Jack establish a small investment consulting firm for which she managed the books, from home, figuring the numbers, accounting for things. But the business had grown too successful, too many others working under Jack, and now he had an office suite in the city. Margaret no longer kept the books. Now she kept the house, supervised the gardener and the pool man, went on seasonal shopping binges in New York.

Imagine him home at the end of a long week of meetings and consultations, a commuter flight down from the city, with a highball in his hand, thinking about golf and leafing through his accumulated mail, saying how he must leave in the morning for the West Coast and don't worry he'll call right away and this year St. Maarten seems to be a good bet for December, let's not stay around for Christmas and have to visit the neighborhood round-robin house party and hear them talk about their kids away at Duke and Vassar and Princeton. Always their damned kids.

And Margaret saying with a kind of excitement, "Her name is Gloriana."

"How can you possibly know that?" he says and the mail is suddenly strewn on the maple sideboard. "Is it somewhere in the records or something?" She has had this strange hobby for weeks, ever since cocktails at the Rupert Markles when Betty Markle let it slip about the way their toys were littered over the lawn some Saturday mornings, though their own kids were away at camp that summer. Baseballs, frisbees, dolls. Once even a bicycle.

"She told me. Gloriana." Margaret listened to the name pass out of her own mouth like a hymn, a prayer, a vote for miracles. She was Catholic and prayed the Rosary every Friday since-- well, you cannot measure out the meter of eternity.

"So what are you telling me?" In his words echoed another conversation, two days ago, a therapist friend in the city to whom he confided Margaret’s ghostly obsession, who said over his third scotch and soda, "What are you, Jack, some kind of Freudian? You think all you have to do is reach down and yank the trauma out by the roots, like a bad tooth, like extracting the pit of a prune, and voila-- Mental Health? I'm here to tell you, there are more things in heaven and earth."

"I'm not telling you, Jack," Margaret says now. "I'm just saying. You listen, then you tell me."

But Jack is tired and doesn't know what he is listening for, not this late. They've been over and over this, and it makes him sad and he doesn't know what to do about it. And that makes him sadder and a little angry. He leaves the highball on the sideboard, untouched.

Another rule is that a ghost is supposed to remain behind in a sort of limbo with an attitude, assigned by the entity that assigns such things to right some personal wrong that has gone unrectified. Usually the act that caused it to die before its time. As everyone knows, ghosts are creatures of justice. They bring order back into the world.

An old miser, let’s say, is poisoned for his gold by a greedy nephew and buried in the basement, and he haunts the premises for three generations-- until the nephew's grandson learns the bitter truth and gives away his tainted inheritance to charity, and the haunting is lifted.

That's how it works: the ghost knows her mission.

But Gloriana was a happy ghost. In life she had been a housemaid, Negro or sharecropper white, a girl of nine or ten or twelve, depending on who told the story. When Betty Markle told it, after half a bottle of chablis, her eyes shone with nostalgia, a mild longing:

Gloriana, she said-- Gloriana only came out to play.

She did not do housework, not after death. Instead she swung on porch gliders, borrowed dolls and undressed them, re-arranged the furniture in Barbie's dream house, invited the stuffed animals to tea. She loved soccer balls, kickballs, tennis balls. And skates, the kind with rubber wheels the best. She loved party dresses and balloons, the colored lights that sprouted every Christmas, draped across hedges and candy-striped around lampposts, loved to unscrew the bulbs from the their sockets and walk around with them still glowing in her hands. And she loved sugary desserts drenched in meringue and chocolate icing. She would take them out of refrigerators and hide the empty plates outside under the chaise longue.

Betty Markle was a private tennis pro with a body supple and brown as a boy's baseball glove, and she gave lessons on a private court two doors down from the Warrens. She said, "The poor girl died in a fire. This was a century ago. More. Back when such things happened." Betty Markle waved a cigarette in the air, making wreaths of smoke, but she never put it to her lips. "They say she worked for a woman who didn't trust her not to run away. They say the girl was locked in the pantry when it happened, and the old house burned down around her."

Which house, where? Margaret wanted to know-- perhaps it had stood on the lot she and Jack now owned-- but no one knew for sure. That was back in the days when the old watermen and their families lived in shacks along the Turtle Haul, which was just a sandy lane then, not yet gentrified, the ruts shoveled in with oyster shells that crackled under the steel tires of their wagons, and led down to the water, where they kept broad, shallow-hulled boats for working their crab pots and dredging the oyster beds in the sound.

The turtle captains, aristocracy, kept their deepwater boats moored to stakes in the sound and brought their catch ashore at the landing only at high tide-- the great leatherbacks, live barnacle-studded boulders swaddled in seaweed. The captains lived in the three or four big frame houses with wraparound porches and separate kitchens at the back, because the cooking was all done on open stove fires. Gloriana worked for the wife of a turtle captain who was gone to sea for weeks at a time, trailing his lines in the Gulf Stream as he sailed slack against it, sailing in place.

Margaret first saw Gloriana standing by the back fence, absently flipping a yo-yo in one hand, looking beyond the fence to something Margaret couldn't see. Because of her tatty blue cotton shift and brown bare feet, Margaret recognized her at once. The girl had soft black hair that lifted in the slight breeze and was not contained by the white hairband. Margaret said softly, "Sweetheart, didn't it hurt?"

"It hurt bad, but then it was over."

"How can you be happy?" Margaret said.

The girl shrugged and never turned. "It don't hurt now."

"What are you doing here anyway?" Margaret found herself becoming agitated. She wanted some help with this, some sense, some signal of what was to come next.

"Gloriana just playing." There is a kind of singsong child's voice that mocks adult seriousness.

"But listen: what are you doing here?" Margaret insisted.

Gloriana didn't understand the question. "If you want me to, I'll go."

Margaret thought it was a kind of test. "No," she said quickly, "don't go. Stay."

"Gloriana can go. She can."

"No--"

But Gloriana was already gone. Margaret could hear the breeze of her passing rattle the stiff leaves of the live-oak. It was a gray day that got inside you and made you feel as if something, somewhere, were terribly wrong, so she deliberately made herself imagine desert skies, cactus, a blazing sun that was always directly overhead so that a person's shadow pooled at her feet like a discarded towel.

And then she went into the house alone and cried.

Because Margaret recognized the child's voice.

A ghost can learn voices. It is a commonplace that ghosts are frozen in time, that when they die they remain the same age they were in life, with the same appearance, thinned a little because of the way light is strained through the ghostly vapors, but otherwise unchanged. And yet nothing could be further from the truth. Ghosts are caught in the act of becoming. They have something to learn, or they wouldn't still be hanging around. And they must learn a way of telling what they know, and to do this they must fool, dissemble, trick, masquerade, and lie.

Because a ghost is a memory of truth, a dream walking, truer than facts.

So when Margaret cried, she was crying over something bigger than the ghost of a long-dead serving girl twirling her homemade yo-yo, glimpsed in the garden looking beyond a fence.

* * * * *

"Let me tell you a story," Betty Markle said that same night while the men were in the garage checking out her husband's new sports car and the Warrens were not invited. "Don't ask me how I know this, I just know it." She glanced at them all one by one to make sure they were listening. She herself was a bit exuberant from the wine, seeing the room as a wavy splurge of color and the women as her truest friends. "It happened in Mexico. It was in a little village with filthy whitewashed walls and dirty kids running the streets and a sun that beat your brains in."

It was an old story: a boy has wandered far from his life. He gets into trouble here, then there. He steals a car in the middle of the night and smacks it into a light pole and where did he get the beer anyhow? Somebody’s been stealing cash from Jack Warren’s top bureau drawer and if there’s one thing he can’t abide it’s a thief, especially one who lies about it. There’s the bad crowd, the sullen pale boys who drop out of high school and keep hanging around, smoking and wearing black leather and hard looks, and he runs with them and gets nabbed breaking and entering and there’s even a possible statutory rape charge, and Jack does his best work as a father and talks and pays and makes some promises and does not beat the hell out of his son, though someone else does late one night (always late at night), over some screwed-up deal involving drugs or money or both, and his mother fetches him home from the emergency room where his nose was repaired and his broken arm set in plaster, and he doesn’t say word one.

The gunshot through the living room window, right in the middle of the evening news, that was the last straw. This was before they lived on the Turtle Haul. "Your wild friends don’t belong in this place," Jack Warren said, and Margaret agreed, tearfully, but pleading another chance for her little boy.

But he’s not a little boy. He’s a heroin addict, the doc at the ER said this, and Jack says, "Your drugs don’t belong in my house. They go, or you."

So the boy goes. Twice he calls, from Texas, from California, incoherent, sobbing: send money. Each time Jack stands firm until the hours of Margaret’s ragged crying have worn him down and he decides from now on, wherever the damned boy is, whatever he wants, just give it to him. Just so he doesn’t come home. This is the boy who wanted to be a priest. When he was a little boy, this is. Not since-- but you can’t measure out time like that.

Then he calls again, middle of the night, the kid only came out at night. Mexico. Someplace deep down below the border, lost in Chihuahua between the iguanas and the mescaline whores. Same old story and Jack is reaching for his credit card to tell Western Union when Margaret says, "Tell him to come home."

"We don’t want him home," Jack says, holding his palm over the receiver, afraid of losing the tenuous connection. "He won’t come anyway."

"Tell him. No more. No more money. No more anything. Unless he comes home." That’s it. What was she thinking? I can’t tell you, Betty Markle admits. But it’s different being a mother, that’s all. Just different. The ache is different, the longing more dangerous, it makes you first softer and then harder.

Betty Markle’s version: there must have been other calls to break a mother’s heart, calls that Jack never knew about. To harden her heart toward her son. To let him slip away. But good luck trying to have it all make sense, Betty Markle says. Just another ghost story, and that’s all the logic there is.

The boy’s name was Robbie. That was the name on the luggage tag when they shipped his body home. Slashed his wrists in a hotel room, lay in blood and flies for two days before anybody found him. No note. Scrawled across the bathroom mirror in some girl’s lipstick: wish you were here.

Margaret spends her days looking for Gloriana, enticing her to appear. She has rummaged through the garage and found some of Robbie’s old toys, a wagon, a basketball, a tennis racquet. She has set up the Fourth of July barbecue croquet set permanently on the back lawn and left the mallets and balls in the rack near the back steps.

The neighbors notice and talk, and some of them resent the way she has lured their neighborhood ghost away from their backyards. Some of them are just embarrassed for her.

And Gloriana does appear, but always out of the corner of Margaret’s eye, never face-on, often invisibly in the night-- leaving evidence of scattered croquet balls and overturned wagons on the lawn. For Margaret, it is agonizing consolation. She wonders how long before Jack will leave her. She knows she is giving him no choice.

One night, many weeks later, she dreams. It is a vivid dream, as if she is watching a late movie with a fluttering picture. A bedraggled girl locked in a small room. Canned goods lining the shelves with labels printed by hand with a laundry marker. A barrel of flour. A sack of sugar. A candle. A match. The girl is smiling like sin and striking the match and lights the candle, and with the candle flame she lights the bundled straw broom, and the walls glow in the sudden flare of light. And the screen goes yellow and then white and the girl’s smile is gone, and then she is outside watching the big house burn a hole in the night. Like watching a photograph burn, curling brown at the edges.

When Margaret wakes, startled, the teasing voice is hanging in the air: "Gloriana did it." A live voice, out of the dream.

Gloriana burned the house down.

No one else was home.

The turtle captain was far at sea, never to return, for that very night a storm took his boat with all hands. His wife, who would not hear of her husband’s disaster for a week, was visiting a man who made nets. Her own children were already dead from yellow fever two years, and the night lonelies had gotten her. Gloriana turns the house into a ghost story, and the captain is left out forever and the children, too. The only other one to keep Gloriana company in the story is the woman who did not trust her not to run away. That’s how it is. A mother’s grief weighs on Gloriana.

And now Margaret Warren lies next to her husband and listens to every second of the night ratchet past.

There is no other way to get through it.

Time clicks along, second by second, the gears of the universe turning her slowly toward her new life, tooth by steel tooth, very slowly, so that it will take a long time, so much time there is no guarantee she will see it through to the new life on the other side. She cannot do this alone, and Jack is sunken in his own grief, the deep hard grief of a man who blames only himself for the evil of the world, who cannot understand how he could lose such control over events, over his only son, a husband who knows his wife wants him to leave her, a man who has never been to Mexico and does not plan to go.

It is an irreparably beautiful night, a night of shattered stars strewn across an India ink sky, when restive spirits walk the fields and the peaceful churchyard dead rise with the sickle moon and sigh among the tombstones, their smoky breath lifting toward the black splayed branches of the live-oaks, drifting in a silver band of lucent memory along the Turtle Haul, over the dewy lawn to the single carriage lamp beside the front door of Margaret Warren's house.

Where I am to work now and once more earn my keep.