Concert of Ghosts Read online

  He tried to relax, drummed his fingers on his knees, stretched his legs, switched on the radio. The music, riddled by static, was a song out of the past, “Good-day, Sunshine.” He changed the station, found country-western, a loathsome little ditty about a man tired of crying over a woman called Ruby. He switched off the radio, thinking self-pity should never be set to music.

  “You’re antsy,” Alison said.

  Tennant looked at an enormous truck roaring in the opposite direction, blowing vast clouds of smoke from its stack. “I’m fine,” was all he said. Why had he begun to feel this bad?

  She reached out and placed her fingers in the palm of his hand. “You’re sweating.”

  “It’s hot in here.”

  “The windows are down, Harry.”

  “It’s still hot.” His heartbeat was going fast. His pulse went at speed. He’d felt this way a few times on cocaine, slippage yielding to panic and then to a sense of your own doom. Coronary hour, an explosion in the old chambers. The downhill rush of the locomotive going out of control.

  “Are you feeling sick?”

  He shook his head. Sick, hell no, he was in fine shape, A1, first class, blue ribbon—except for the bothersome volcanic eruptions that every so often spewed lava and scattered ash inside his head. Help me, Alison, he thought. Get me out of this bummer.

  “I’ll pull over if you like.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You don’t have to shout. I’m only twelve inches away.”

  “Was I shouting?”

  “Yeah. You were shouting.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay.” She looked at him quickly. “You want to talk? Or do I get some guff about a dizzy spell?”

  “I was thinking about something, that’s all.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “A room on Schrader Street in the Haight. That’s what I was trying to remember. It bugs me. I can’t place it exactly.”

  “Did you live there once?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you think you could find the place again?”

  Tennant shrugged. He couldn’t be sure. He looked at the road ahead. A house on Schrader. What was the big deal anyway? A room, a few details, hippies splashing color on walls. He shut his eyes. Squeeze the brain, the headbox, force something out, for God’s sake. Sweat ran over his eyelids.

  He saw Maggie Silver.

  Beneath the struts and planks of scaffolding, Maggie Silver raised her face in sunlight and smiled and waved her hand—and that was it, that was all, the image imploded and he opened his eyes. There was a confusion of leftover feelings he couldn’t define—warmth, anguish, sadness: They swarmed through him furiously. But it was sadness mainly, the kind that runs dark and deep. What had Maggie Silver meant to him anyway? Down which culvert of his history had she walked? How had she touched him? There had to be a connection, something that linked himself to Maggie Silver and the house on Schrader.

  “Harry,” the girl said. “You didn’t answer my question.”

  His throat was dry. The sensation of sadness wouldn’t lift. “Maybe I could find the place. Maybe. I’m not sure. I get these flashes and they’re not exactly precise.” He wondered if he should mention the image of Maggie Silver. He dismissed the prospect; it was too ill-defined, and somehow too private, to speak aloud. “It’s like messages from nowhere. Like a bombardment out of the sky. It’s hard to explain.”

  Alison drove in silence for a mile or so. Tennant had the feeling they were traveling nowhere; west had become an abstract concept. Iowa was a word in a surreal collage. He was lost. He yearned for certainty. Other men led lives of self-assurance and quiet dignity, sedately organized existences recorded in diaries and notebooks and correspondence, in mortgages and checking accounts; they had life insurance and health insurance and car insurance, protection up the ying-yang. They understood where they were going and how to get there. They had wives who smiled and kids who went to college to become dentists or veterinarians. They constructed worlds of substance. Tennant, whose life in the Haight had been a form of disdain for these men, experienced a tiny envy of them now. What would it be like to live in a world of order and serenity? It didn’t seem so dreadful to him after all. But how did you gain entrance, what dues did you have to pay?

  He stared at the highway. In the headlights of the car it resembled some awful black predatory mouth into which he and Alison were rushing.

  He must have slept again, because when he opened his eyes it was dawn and he was confused by his surroundings. The car was parked in the lot of a suburban shopping center, an expanse of empty concrete and unlit lamps. The place was clearly abandoned. The storefronts were empty. Some had old Going Out of Business sale signs in their windows. A commercial death had taken place here.

  “Welcome to Iowa,” Alison said. She looked and sounded bright, alert. He wondered about the sources of her stamina. Youth had everything except that which comes from experience: a tendency to weariness. “According to the address I’ve got, we’re about twenty miles from where Karen Obe lives. We’ve got two options. Either we go there immediately or we find a motel and rest for a while.”

  “It’s up to you.”

  “I’d like to see the woman first.”

  Tennant glanced around the parking lot. The place made him feel exposed, conspicuous. “Let’s go,” he said, thinking how bad he must look himself, if the bitter taste in his mouth was any indication. He thought of swinging the rearview mirror so that he might see his own reflection. The hell with it. He didn’t need to see Harry Tennant staring back. Some things couldn’t be faced on an empty stomach.

  Karen Obe’s house was difficult to locate. Alison had to ask directions in a roadside cafe in a small village that consisted of a post office and five or six frame houses. Beyond the village the road was a narrow blacktop, badly cracked, neglected. It ran between flat fields that stretched as far as Tennant could see. A few of these fields had recently been harvested, but most lay barren, untilled dark earth and vigorous outgrowths of weeds. Here and there you could see FOR SALE signs and dilapidated farmhouses where porches listed and shingles had fallen from roofs, empty places that suggested more than mere abandonment of property; here, people had been uprooted and forced out of their lives, and now decay had taken the place of pride. The landscape was a bleak statement of its own. Tennant, seeing a rusted old tractor in a field, had a fleeting thought of his own woods, and his small white house, which would probably fall into ruin as certainly as these farmhouses.

  Depressing dawn; a pink sun illuminated the relics of a way of life as though it were a spotlight in a museum of ancient artifacts. What’s a farmer, Daddy? They’re extinct now, son.

  Alison drove a few more miles, then turned off the blacktop at a mailbox that had Karen Obe’s name on it. At the end of a rutted dirt road the house came into view, a white-brick affair with an iron porch. Blinds were drawn on the lower windows. A pale blue Volvo with Iowa plates was parked to one side. A black dog, a hybrid of Labrador and hound, appeared on the porch, guarding the terrain with canine suspicion. The creature shuddered, barked a couple of times, then was silent; a certain sullen quality was evident in the animal’s eyes.

  The front door opened just as Alison parked, and a middle-aged woman in a long green dressing gown came out, her arms folded. Tennant thought her rather fleshy face was kind. Her hair was remarkable, a glorious red disarray that spilled around her shoulders. Uncombed, it had a vibrancy that couldn’t have come from any bottle of conditioner. She tossed the hair away from her face as she stared at the car.

  He and Alison got out of the Buick. The dog barked a few more times, then stepped back to stand at Karen Obe’s side.

  “Mrs. Obe?” Alison said. “We talked on the phone four or five weeks ago. Alison Seagrove?”

  The woman smiled. “Sure. The journalist. I remember. You were interested in Sammy’s work.” She glanced at Tennant.

  “This is Harry
,” Alison said. “He’s helping me with my story. I hope we’re not disturbing you.”

  “Hell, no, I’m an early bird. I just brewed some coffee if you want to come inside.”

  They followed Karen Obe into the house, which was furnished in a sparse way: a few items of scrubbed pine, a couple of Japanese prints. No photographs, Tennant noticed. None of Obe’s work. She talked rapidly as she led them to the kitchen. I don’t see many people out here, if it wasn’t for the dog and the parrot I wouldn’t have company, how do you take your coffee, I’ve got fresh cream if you like.

  They sat together at a plain white table. In the window hung a large birdcage from which an oily green conure peered out morosely. The bird hopped suddenly from one spar to another, and a few feathers drifted in the air.

  Tennant sipped his coffee. He was happy to let Alison ask the questions, to play the situation however she liked. She could be subtle if that was needed, forceful if she had to be. He admired her tenacity, even envied it. I need some of her stuff, he thought. I need an infusion of her kind of fortitude.

  “It’s such a pleasure somebody remembers Sammy’s work, Miss Seagrove. Call me prejudiced, but I happen to think he was one of the best photographers of his time.” Karen Obe had the air of a curator of a neglected museum taking delight in unexpected visitors.

  Alison smiled in agreement with the woman. “This is the shot that intrigues us.” She produced the clipping from her jeans. Straight to the point, Tennant thought. No waste of time.

  Karen Obe took the picture and looked at it. “I could never forget this one. It’s his most famous shot. I don’t necessarily mean it’s his best, of course, but it brought him a lot of money. A funny thing …” She paused, sat back in her chair, gazed at the parrot. “He never liked it himself all that much. I don’t know why. He tended to dismiss it as an accident. But that’s fame, I guess. Accidental. Maybe he thought it overshadowed some of his other stuff. The thing that brings you fame is the thing you sometimes come to resent.”

  She got up and poured more coffee. “I always thought the photograph brought him more bad luck than good.”

  “Bad luck?” Alison asked.

  “There was the burglary, for starters.” Karen Obe ran a hand through her lustrous red hair; a few strands of silver glistened. “A week after the picture was first published, somebody broke into our place in LA and stole Sammy’s collection of negatives and prints. Devastating. Utterly devastating. A lifetime’s work.”

  “Did you ever find the culprit?”

  Karen Obe shook her head. “Never did. The thief stole some other stuff, but it was the collection that mattered most to us. Sammy took it very badly. He was never the same after that. About two weeks later, he began to believe somebody was following him. He was being watched. The phone was bugged.”

  She lit a cigarette, puffing on it twice before putting it out. “When it got to the stage where he imagined our water might be poisoned, I knew he badly needed professional help. I had a hell of a time convincing him, believe me. Sammy was always stubborn. Always went his own way. Anyway, he didn’t get along with the first psychiatrist, who he decided was part of a conspiracy against him, so I talked him into trying another. It seemed to go okay for a couple of days.” She got up from the table and fed a peanut to the conure. “So much for appearances. One morning I found him in his darkroom crying. He’d smashed his cameras with a hammer. The lenses were lying around broken. People were out to get him. There was nothing he could do about it. He just sat there crying. A complete wreck of a man. He began to lock himself in his darkroom for days. No food. Nothing to drink. Sometimes I could hear him singing these strange little songs. Tragic.”

  “And no explanation.”

  “No real explanation. What do doctors know anyway? The human mind. They don’t know that about it, do they?” She lit another cigarette. The parrot squawked; a small bell rung in the cage. “They said he had symptoms of severe schizophrenia. What does that mean when you get down to it? All I know is this: I had a husband once and now I don’t have anybody.”

  Tennant set down his coffee cup. He had all kinds of sympathy for Sammy Obe. “Is that all you were told? Severe schizophrenia?”

  “Hell, no, they wrap it up in gobbledygook, don’t they? Who am I to understand the kind of language these guys use? I know Sammy never came back to me. He never came back.” She moved to the sink where she ran cold water over the backs of her hands, a reflex gesture, something to do while she struggled with an old grief that had clearly haunted her for years.

  “What’s the prognosis?” Alison asked.

  “More of the same. He lives in his own limbo. And that’s where he’ll die, I guess.”

  The silence in the kitchen was interrupted only by the parrot’s bell, which issued a thin metallic sound. Drying her hands, Karen Obe returned to the table where the photograph lay. She stared at it for a time but made no move to touch it, as if such an act might somehow transfer to her more bad luck. “What’s your interest in this particular photo?” she asked.

  “I’ve been trying to track down the participants,” Alison answered. “For one of those ‘Where Are They Now?’ features. You know the kind of thing.”

  “Any success?”

  “It’s proving difficult. Except for Harry.”

  Karen Obe looked at Tennant, then back at the photograph. “That’s you?”

  Tennant nodded.

  Karen Obe picked up the picture and squinted at it, as if she didn’t believe the young man in the shot could be the one now sitting in her kitchen. “That’s actually you?”

  “I’ve changed,” Tennant remarked.

  “We’ve all changed, honey,” the woman said. She put the photograph down and was silent for a time, walking between birdcage and table, nervously cracking the shells of peanuts and shoving them at the conure. She was clearly unsettled by Tennant’s presence; the past might have been an unwelcome intruder in her own house. She turned from the cage and faced Tennant. “What do you remember about the day Sammy took that picture?”

  “Very little,” Tennant said.

  “Nothing out of the ordinary, say?”

  Tennant shrugged. He wasn’t about to launch into an attempt to explain his situation. “Why do you ask?”

  “I was kinda hoping you might enlighten me about something. A little mystery I’ve been carrying around for years.”

  “A mystery?” Alison asked.

  “I don’t know if it’s such a big deal really.” Karen Obe was hesitant. She brushed the fibrous remains of shells from the palms of her hands. She looked at Tennant again. “But since you were there that day, I’ll show you anyway.”

  She walked out of the room. Tennant fidgeted with his coffee cup. Alison got up from the table and went to the window. She looked at Tennant expectantly. A little mystery, he thought. He wasn’t sure he liked the idea of further puzzlement; but Alison did.

  Karen Obe came back carrying a silk paisley scarf neatly folded. “Before I show you this, I should tell you Sammy kept it in a safe-deposit box at his bank. It was the only thing in the box, so he must have considered it valuable in some way. I can’t figure out why. But if it meant something to him, maybe it’ll mean something to you.”

  She unfolded the scarf on the table. “I keep it hidden because it’s the only thing of Sammy’s I’ve got left. You understand, I wouldn’t like somebody to steal it.”

  Concealed at the center of the scarf was a small white envelope, which she picked up very carefully and opened. With the tips of her fingers she took out a negative and held it up to the light. Tennant had one of those off-center moments, one of those imbalances, in which he knew he was going to see something significant. Karen Obe passed the negative to Alison, who studied it in silence for a while before she handed it to Tennant.

  It was a black-and-white shot depicting, in the curious ghostly way of negatives, the same group of five hippies, but they were in disarray; something had happened off camera to m
ake the group turn their heads and look to the side. Harry Tennant, on the edge of the group, is pointing at something, hand in the air rather rigidly, a finger extended. The other faces are following the direction of his hand.

  Pointing at what? What had taken place across the street that day in Chinatown? What had interrupted the organization of Obe’s composition?

  “It must have been taken at roughly the same time as the shot that made your husband famous,” Alison said.

  “Minutes before, minutes after, it’s hard to say,” Karen Obe remarked. “I’ve looked at it a hundred times and every time I wish one of the faces would speak. I wish one of them would just step out of the negative and tell me what they were all so busy looking at. It spooks me. And why did Sammy go to the trouble of renting a safe-deposit box for one negative?”

  Tennant thought: Minutes before, minutes after, it didn’t make any difference, he couldn’t bring it into focus anyway. His head had begun to ache; his eyelids hurt. He thought of Chinatown, as if it were a nebulous place that existed only in the eye of the beholder. Look away, it’s gone. All of it.

  “And you don’t remember, Harry?” Karen Obe asked.

  Tennant said, “It could have been almost anything. The streets were filled with all kinds of activity back then. You name it, you could see it in San Francisco. Freaks, mimes, unicyclists, jugglers, fire-eaters, magicians, streakers, Frisbee tossers, musicians. Like I say, it could have been anything.”

  He held up the negative again. Stark white faces, black background—untethered white balloons floating in a midnight air. You are standing on a sidewalk in Chinatown, Harry. You are with a group of people you must have known. You are having a photograph taken. Across the street something is happening.

  Across the street something is happening.

  He thought: A church on Grant and California streets. What was it called? St. Mary’s? It lurched toward him, like a framed picture whisked through the air by an earthquake. St. Mary’s. Why would he be pointing at a church? He was infused by a feeling of expectancy, another little gate opening in his head.