A WHISPER FROM THE GRASS

On the night of her husband’s death, Solitaire sat on a Chinese bench beneath an orange tree in her garden.  It was the 6th of April 2009, nearing midnight.  She breathed in the dizzying fragrance of the blossoms on the boughs, the climbing roses and jasmine.  She heard the night music of the Sonoran desert:  the reedy hoot of the horned owl, the yip of coyotes hunting with their pups in the moonlight, the giddy aria of a nightingale.  The air was heavy and still.  The pale leaves of the honey mesquite trembled, but no breeze stirred.  She felt that she was suffocating, her breath shallow, panting, heart fluttering, face wet with tears.  Her husband, Em, had been dead since two o’clock that morning and she wept in the knowledge that they would never again, together, hear the nightingale sing.  Never would they lie on the grass and watch for shooting stars.  Never would they navigate the constellations, steering from Sagittarius to Cepheus and on to Cassiopeia.   

She looks overhead.  A quilted cloud layer is creeping up the sky;  the eerie, flaming pink and orange undersides smolder like a bed of burning coals.  Black plumes trail across the moon, reducing it to an anemic wax-white eye dimly peering through its tattered veil.  A ghoulish Gothic-novel sky.  




                                                                               
 Is it a sign from the dead?  The obverse of the Underworld?  Ridiculous!  On the other side of the garden wall is a narrow dirt path choked with weeds -- mallows and grasses and wild sumac.  She hears a sound beyond the wall – a footfall? a whisper? a sigh? -- and jumping to her feet, peers into the shadows, but sees nothing.  Her skin crawls, the hair rises on the back of her neck.  She calls her two small dogs and not daring to look back, hurries inside. 

Once in the house, she goes to her dressing room and with her hand on the door knob, freezes.  She has a sudden premonition that Em is on the other side of that closed door.  Why would he be in her dressing room?  He was never there when he was alive, why now?  And what if he should appear to her?  What then?  In what horrifying rebarbative guise would his shade present itself? 

What age would he be?  Would he look as he looked at the hour of his death?  Or at the hour of their wedding?  Would he be healed in death?  What would he be wearing?  A hospital gown with embedded chest catheter and trailing tubes?  A pin-striped suit?  The evolution of ghostly apparel is in itself an interesting study. In Elizabethan times, male ghosts like Hamlet's father trod the boards in clanking suits of armor.  In ancient Egypt,  dog-headed guides led kings in winding sheets down to the Underworld.  Biblical shades wore shrouds. Jesus, we are told, left his shroud behind when He went missing from the tomb.  Victorian vampires sported opera capes and female wraiths reverted to gauzy gowns floating in dusky groves of yew and myrtle.   Nowadays, ghosts wear chinos and polo shirts, slow-dance with their winsome widows, and give them tips on their stock portfolios.  Others flop about in bed sheets like Caspar-the-Friendly Ghost.  


What would Em say?  Would he exhort her in sepulchral tones to “Remember me ...”?  Would he lure her to her death like Peter Quint?  Claw like Catherine Earnshawe at her bedroom window?  Would he stare at her  accusingly like poor bloodied Banquo?  Or would he merely ask her to take his blood pressure… fetch him a popsicle… a pill … a bed pan?

Solitaire has read somewhere that 80% of Americans believe in paranormal phenomena.  Also, specifically, that some 50% of widows say they have seen, heard or felt the immediate presence of a recently deceased loved-one.  Solitaire, herself, does not really believe in ghosts; on the other hand, she doesn't not believe in them.  In some obscure, occultish cul-de-sac of her consciousness she rather hopes that Em is nearby and watching her, that he knows how much she misses him and how bereft her life has instantly become without him.  She is prepared to accept that the Dead, or Undead, may be all around her, but she does not believe they have been in contact with her --- with one possible, olfactory, exception.  

Some years ago, she and Em lived in a 17th century farmhouse in Rhode Island. Occasionally, during the summer months, Solitaire, a vegetarian, smelled the unmistakable odors of roast beef and frying bacon rising from her kitchen. Admittedly intrigued, she eventually concluded that as the sun warmed the house, the old pine boards and horsehair insulation expanded, releasing the vapors of ancient sides of beef, joints of mutton, slabs of bacon.   The scent of perfume, however, a musky fragrance that was not hers and that wafted on occasion round the guest bedroom when there were no guests was less easily explained away.  


Perhaps, she thinks, the dead inhabit a parallel universe.  Perhaps Dark Energy is composed of dead souls.  

Solitaire cannot sleep.  Em’s side of the bed is smooth, the pillows undented, as they have been ever since he entered the hospital nearly two months earlier.  She and the dogs huddle together on her side of the king-size bed.  They never cross that invisible fence; the dogs seem to understand this.

It is generally believed that cats and dogs can sense the presence of the dead.  She thinks there might be something in this, to the extent that if anyone can commune with the other world, it is more likely to be canines or felines than humans, whose noisy need to communicate has all but nullified their ability to commune.  She looks at her two shih-tzus for a sign:  are their ears pricked, their eyes dilated, their whiskers quivering, their hackles raised?   No.  They are splayed on the coverlet like carelessly dropped dust mops and one of them is actually on his back, legs in the air and snoring.  She turns on the white noise machine, and lies in the dark listening to a combination of Hawaiian Surf and Snoring Shih-tzu, then gives up the ghost, as it were, and decides to take an ambien, hoping she will not find herself an hour later devouring the contents of her fridge or cruising around the desert in her convertible.

She goes into Em’s bathroom for a glass of water and as she turns to leave, comes face to face with the his dressing gown hanging on the door.  It is a blue cotton dressing gown from the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok.  She recalls with heart-wrenching clarity the enchantment of their visits there.  Seized with a spasm of grief, she leans into the door, enfolds the robe in her embrace, and hugs it close. 

Barefoot, wrapped in Em's robe, she wanders out onto the terrace.  The sky has cleared, the full moon shines, the nightingale still sings..  She remembers other nights, other nightingales… a shabby hotel overlooking a garden in Paris…A pre-dawn walk in London, along the canal in Little Venice… Yet another night, another nightingale, beneath a flowering quince in Salamanca. 


 "... Not for the towering dead with their nightingales and psalms, but for the lovers..."

 These are the true ghosts, the ghosts of memory.  Ghosts of the past.  The ghosts within us. Ibsen  had it right.  We are the ghosts.

"I almost think we are all of us Ghosts…

There must be Ghosts all the country over, as thick as the sand of the sea."