His nerves shrieked.
Pre-med is a stiff course, especially when you work your way through. Oh hell. Hash night again. The foul air of the Salt Lake City boarding house struck him in the face like a greasy pillow. Drug you with heat downstairs, slug you with frost upstairs. Too weary even to comb his hair, he washed his hands, inspected a cold sore on his lip, and wondered momentarily if that date a couple of weeks ago could have had syphilis. Oh well. Back down again to the familiar atmosphere of onions, clattering dishes, and shrill female voices.
Suddenly life stuck in his throat. Pushing away his plate in acute distaste, he jerked to his feet, then stood swaying. The others stopped eating to stare. Nobody ever had too much to eat at Mrs. B—’s. Of course, he had always been a finicky kid. Covertly they appraised him, this quiet youth with the pale, sensitive face, the myopic gray eyes enlarged by the thick lenses of his glasses. A queer dope, always mooning. They shrugged and snatched at the potatoes.
Stumbling into the hall, struggling into his overcoat, the boy fled from the sight of their insensitive appetites. Yes. The cold, snowy air was better. Hailing a lurching streetcar, he dived into its familiar odor of perfume and sweat, hot steam and machine oil and shuddered afresh. Judas Priest! Was he on the verge of dementia praecox? Come now, a movie is indicated, a change.
The streetcar clanged around the corner, heading up Main. Shifting neons on his left, the whiff of dance music—Covey’s Coconut Grove. That’s what he needed. Lights. Relaxation. Women. He got out at the next stop and turned back down the block.
Inside, he tried to drown his malaise in the kaleidoscope of the vast dance hall. Leaning against a wall, he absently inspected the couples whirling past him, other couples ducking to the sidelines for a drink from a surreptitious flask. Noise pounded at him; the squeal of the orchestra scraped along his nerves like tiny knife blades. Color, light, gaiety. But somehow now he felt worse than ever.
It was then that he saw her. She was standing quite alone a short distance to his left like a calm little island in the midst of hectic seas. She paid not the slightest heed to people brushing past her. Black hair to her shoulders, she was lovely in her long white gown. He couldn’t understand the indifference of the other stags. Perhaps it was that she seemed so remote. And yet when he presented himself before her, she nodded pleasantly enough.
He had never known such exquisite pleasure. Abruptly the orchestra played celestial music. She seemed less to dance than to float, and marvelously, all weariness, all tension drained out of his body. He felt vital, buoyant as air. He smiled down at the shining crown of her head. But somehow, he could not find the words to toss against the barrier of her reserve.
Applause spattered. Surprised, he found that the music had stopped. Back at the sidelines he stammered like a sweating schoolboy, “Thank you.” Beneath her calm regard, the simple words sounded effusive.
The girl’s direct glance had a strange depthless quality. It was like staring into a bottomless well until the mesmeric impulsion of the dark waters pulled you under, blotted out time and space and memory. There was something irresistible about that soft brown scrutiny, something almost frightening. They were eyes that measured you against some standard he could not guess, measured and found you wanting. They were eyes that sapped a man’s will.
Unable to move, he stared at her like a person in a trance. But she was not disturbed. She did not fidget. Self-contained as a statue, she studied him. Now, in a moment she seemed to make up her mind. Swiftly she smiled for the second time. The effect was so exhilarating that tears started to his eyes.
Afterward, in the sleepless night, he tried to recall how many dances they had had together. He could not separate them. In memory, the evening was like a roll of movie film, a continuous, unwinding of experience. They did not speak much. He remembered that her husky voice was calm, matching the rest of her. The very sound of it flooded his being with unspeakable joy; her lightest word seemed fraught with mystic significance.
“I am too much alone,” she said once, and the word alone tolled inside his head like a great bell. He choked on an uprush of speech to tell her she need never be alone again.
“I need you,” she whispered, and the simple sentence was beatitude.
She told him her name and where she lived. When he asked to take her home, she merely nodded. She had no coat, but she did not seem to think that unusual. Since it was snowing outside, he put his overcoat around her and called a cab. She lived somewhere up in the avenues. Unconscious of the wet kiss of snowflakes, he held both her hands in his and tried to memorize the white triangle of her face, the dark pools of her eyes. Unsmiling, she stared back at him through the dim curtain of snow. An inner trembling seized him. In a moment she would turn and ring the bell and go through that door out of his life.
He snatched desperately at words. “I’ll see you tomorrow—tomorrow after school?”
“Yes.”
The sound was as elusive as one of the flakes. Then an unbelievable thing happened. She reached up and kissed him. A sense of golden lights exploded in his mind, a nebulous fragrance, an acute awareness of her body against his, warm and vibrant—and in the space of a heartbeat she was gone. As if she had never been, he was alone again, all about him only the dark and the cold and the snow.
Uncontrollable paroxysms gripped his body. Not until the next day did he realize he had been shaking with chill. The girl had taken his overcoat with her. He had no idea how long he stood there in the icy night. At last some instinct deeper than awareness turned his steps around, drove his numbed feet home through the white, unearthly streets.
By morning his fog had rifted sufficiently for him to comprehend fleetingly that there was a fog. Now that he could view the whole thing in retrospect, the passionless finger of reason prodded at some obscure corner of his mind. He brushed it impatiently aside. Words on a page, test tubes in a laboratory—nothing mattered but the magic of last night. It trembled along his nerves like something imagined but never quite true. He pushed away the cold focus of reality. All that really existed for him that day lived in the filaments of memory quivering at the back of his consciousness.
Scalpel in hand, poised over his laboratory cadaver, he saw not the livid, anonymous face but the girl’s gardenia flesh, not the dead body but the girl’s living slenderness in classic white, a being beyond dissection into cells and gristle and bone. In the obsessive, extra-cortical area where he lived, no smell of formaldehyde penetrated. Instead he seemed to move in some dim, drugged way to the airs of remembered springtime.
It was not quite four o’clock when he stood once more before that mute door up on the avenues. Even in broad daylight with the snow banked prosaically on each side of the walk and school kids shouting in the street below, there was something occult about that door. The trembling seized him again as he pressed the button. He waited for a tense eon. The door opened, and the blood rushed to his face. A little girl stood there. Of course. Her sister. He choked on the name.
“M-Mary?”
The child’s eyes grew wide with what he could not help but recognize as growing panic. Screaming, she slammed the door in his face, and he heard her feet pounding down a hall.
Stupidly, he stared at the door. It appeared to stare back like a blind, malignant eye. Little shocks of terror ran around his brain like plague-infected mice. Oh, God, he thought. Oh, God, I’m a sick man. But stubbornly he took a deep breath, grasped firm hold of the whirling cosmos, and rang the bell once more. Now he waited even a longer time. The palms of his hands grew wet with suspense, and he was sure he could feel ice locking the valves of his heart.
Sudden steps again. Authoritative steps. That dreadful inner trembling, the door opening slowly, almost reluctantly. For some reason, he knew better than to expect the girl herself. Angrily he shook the mists from his eyes. The figure standing there slowly resolved itself into a kind-faced middle-aged woman regarding him with polite inquiry. He could never make himself heard above the beating of his heart. It took all his courage to force the word between his stiffened lips. As soon as it was spoken, the enchanted name seemed to take on a life of its own, seemed to echo down the dark corridors of all the mindless ages. Since Cambrian slime, he had played this part. Whatever the end, there would be no place now until he had seen it through to the last drop of his blood.
The woman standing there did not cry out as had the child. She did not move. But he could feel her instinctive recoil. Mary. The word lived on like a wail in the frosty air. He watched the woman’s calm gaze deepen with some infinite sadness. Her lips moved as if the words she would speak were too painful to utter.
“You were one of her friends?”
In his agonized uncertainty and bewilderment, he did not notice her use of the past tense.
“No. That is, yes. Surely, she must have told you. I brought her home from the dance last night. She said I might call. Why, she’s—she’s got my overcoat!”
Damn it, he thought. You don’t have to look like that. I won’t give her leprosy!
The woman, still motionless, blanched, took on the claminess of shock. He watched her pupils dilate as if she saw in place of him some monstrous horror. In spite of him, he glanced over his shoulder. I’m going nuts, he thought.
The woman set her trembling lips, made a gesture of dismissal. “I am afraid you are mistaken, sir,” she said coldly. “And now, if you don’t mind—I am not well . . .”
“But listen!” His voice rose with desperation. “You’ve got to listen to me! . . . Look,” he enunciated carefully as if he were trying to make an idiot understand, “let’s just take one thing at a time. This is where she lives, isn’t it?”
“This is where she used to live.”
“What do you mean, ‘used to’? She can’t have gone so very far since midnight, can she?”
The woman’s haunted eyes studied him for a moment. She seemed to grow taller with the dignity of despair accepted and conquered.
“Mary, my daughter,” she said, standing very straight and looking him right in the eye, “Mary, my daughter, is dead. She died two months ago.”
He stared at her incredulously. He almost laughed aloud at her naivete. That’s one alibi I never heard before, he thought. “Look, madam,” he said patiently, “I’m no prize, but I can’t be that bad. You might just let me say hello to her, and then I’ll go. Besides, she’s got my overcoat.”
With sudden decision, the woman opened the door and motioned for the boy to enter. Still seething with resentment, he waited in the center of the warm living room. A fire smoldered on the hearth, and the little girl was playing with some paper dolls in front of it. She scowled up at him with childish animosity. Abruptly the woman went to the piano near the far windows and brought him a photograph.
“This is Mary.” Her voice was deep with tenderness. “You see, you’re wrong. This couldn’t be the girl you danced with.”
But he sensed a curious tenseness in the woman’s attitude.
“It is, too!” he shouted. “What is all this? What’s it all about?”
Then the woman, too, broke, covered her face with her hands.
“Look here—” he said desperately.
Swiftly the woman raised her head, fought for control. “Young man,” she said, “let’s not prolong this. It’s painful for us both. As I told you, my daughter Mary has been dead two months.”
Shock, horror, and disbelief warred in his face. He protested weakly, but the words seemed to have no meaning, like words in a nightmare. “But I tell you, I brought her home! That very dress in the picture—that’s the one she had on.”
“It’s the one she was buried in.”
He raised his voice as if he would wipe out her words with sound. “But I must see her! I tell you, I love her!” He was on the verge of hysteria himself.
The mother’s sad eyes grew tolerant, even benevolent. She lifted her hands in resignation, as one would humor a babbling lunatic. “I think you’re sick, young man,” she said kindly. “I think you’ve been studying too much. But come, perhaps this is, after all, the best thing to do. It’s certainly the quickest cure. Wait in front. I’ll bring my car around.”
She did not speak as they drove through the bleak, wintry streets. He, himself, was too chilled with some premonitory dread to make a sound. Mount Olivet Cemetery—he had known it. Convulsively shaking in every limb, he followed her through the gates.
She was stopping. She had stopped. She was bending over a snowy mound as slender and immaculate as—as—. She was brushing away the snow to read the inscription on a headstone.
“Mary,” she was murmuring brokenly, “aged nineteen. Daughter of—”
Her voice seemed to go by him like the gray wind, cold and cruel. He was consumed in the throes of terror such as the ancients had known, bodiless, unescapable. He was drowning, suffocating in it. His brain reeled, the universe clashed about him, and fiendish laughter exploded in his ears. All he could see was that his overcoat, his own overcoat, lay across the grave.
He was sick a long time. It seemed to him that all the forces of good and evil fought for possession of him during that sickness; his soul was a tug-of-war between heaven and hell. During his periods of coherence, he pled afresh with the people about his bed to listen, to believe he was telling the truth. If he could just get somebody to believe in him, just once, then the experience would be shared and might conceivably be understood. And he would be free. But after a long time, full consciousness returned and, with it, a bitter acceptance. They thought he was crazy. They tagged him with words like psycho-neurotic and hallucinatory. Sometimes in sheer despair he would try to convince himself it had been a hallucination.
But at such moments, just for an instant, would come the sound of her voice, the remembered fragrance of her hair—and every cell in his body would ache with renewed longing. But the longing only accelerated his thoughts. They surged round and round in his mind with the persistence and futility of a metronome. The years stretched so mercilessly ahead. How could he master that most difficult chapter in life’s book—old age—alone? Still longing for a dead woman’s smile, a dead woman’s arms? Sometimes he had a sense of listening to something very far off. A voice telling him to wait—to wait. But the laughter always came, blotting out the voice—laughter mocking, pitiful.
“You are well now,” they said to him at last. “Go back to school, and get your teeth into your work, and you’ll be all right. But don’t overdo again!”
How he hated their canting solicitude. How he hated them all! The faces on the campus grinning at him like ferret faces, like animals. He averted his eyes, but he could feel them peering at him from behind doorways and bushes and trees as he hurried from class to class. Everything was menacing and full of evil. When occasionally a teacher or one of the boys who had been his friends spoke to him, looked at him with eyes full of pity, he would jerk away in violent loathing. Some instinct still told him they only meant to help him, but it was like fingering an old sore.
His worst trouble was that he could make no real contact with people. He was in a phlegm-gray world of his own—shrunken, hard, and slimy, like a gallstone—and they could not get to him. His world kept spinning faster and faster. He tried to tell them, This is me. Get me out before it’s too late. See, it’s just a membrane between your world and mine. Get me out. But he could never make them hear. And so at night he never dared to close his eyes for fear his world would crash and he would be alone in chaos, helpless before all the evil little ghosts that waited in outer space . . .
Those first weeks at school when his torment became more frightful than flesh could bear, he formed the habit of walking at night behind the university across the snowy wastelands that stretched to the hill where the school emblem stood in whitewashed relief. Out there the world was enormous, amorphous. It swallowed his own. The frosty mountains ringing him round, floated like a mirage. Beneath the unearthly mystery pouring from the heavens, he would know an instant of calm, like that in the center of a hurricane. Out there were heroic stars and vast conceptions. They could laugh, the fools, but out there he knew there were powers beyond that last periphery of awareness, powers at once terrible and glorious. Out there you can almost pluck a star, almost squeeze it and watch the celestial juice run out. Analyze that juice, distill it in a retort, put it under a microscope, extract its secret and you would know the Ultimate Mystery. You would understand about Mary.
It was on such a night that he suddenly knew what to do. So simple! Why on earth hadn’t he thought of it long ago! Even the preparations were simple—a few letters to write, some debts to pay, an apology he’d owed to a guy for months and had just never had the guts to make. The stuff to concoct in the laboratory—something deadly yet simple and uneventful. Something to give him dreamless sleep, thank God. An interlude of sleep and then . . . Mary.
When the night came, he seemed imbued with a supernatural energy that sent him leaping across all the frozen ruts of the white fields, galloping crazily up the side of the hill. He wanted to be as close to the stars as possible. The air was pure and icy, and he sucked in great gulps as he ran. With everything settled at last, he knew relief inexpressibly sweet. The moment had come. Sweat ran down his body, and he relaxed against the slope a second, gasping for breath. He could see star shadows on the snow, and the moonlit air was blue and brilliant and almost fluid. Shadows were so much more real than realities. If he waited—but then he thought the night turned and sighed, knowing all the half-human meaning of earth and grass and trees, the long pitiful history of human weaknesses. Yes, this was the best way.
He had already written the note to a cynical world. He had even folded it in oiled paper against the damp. He felt in his pocket now, to make sure it was there. Like Christ who affirmed his faith with the cross, he would affirm his faith in Mary with his life.
Now as I am about to die, he had written, I do solemnly swear that I was of rational mind, that she existed, and that I held her in my arms—
And now all was ready. Now was the time.
For just a second the cogs of his will slipped. For just a second, he knew the brainless terror of a brute, frightened at it knows not what. In a transport of fear, he bit his fingers, glanced wildly about like a trapped animal. Then deliberately he calmed himself, gave a long, hushed gasp and a shudder as though he had thrown off some spell. After all, what was life? A whiff of hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, a pinch of carbon, sulphur, phosphorus. Life was just a handful of organic salts at the end, except for the pith, the star juice. Why wait to get at it? He already heard the glorious trumpets, sensed the endless joy untinged with regret or the muck of too-long living.
Unhurriedly he snatched up a handful of snow and downed the pills, grimacing because the bitter taste came off on his tongue. He scooped out a hollow and lay down, his hand on his cheek, his overcoat shrouding him tightly. An evanescent sensation of discomfort, of chill, of the hard crust of the snow biting the flesh of his face—and then nothing at all but utter calm, this vast peace whereby he attained communion with the unreachable gods.
“I need you,” Mary had said.
This is marriage, he thought drowsily. This is the sacrament of marriage.
“—took his own life while of unsound mind,” the Salt Lake papers said. Up on the avenues, the mother of Mary took flowers to two graves instead of one. A plague of speculation shuddered along all the desert roadways, from hamlet to hamlet, from mouth to mouth. A contagion of millennial awe found expressions in the pulpits all over Zion. Faces and faces stared and questioned and stared again—but found no answers. And that was all.
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Maurine Whipple (1903 – 1992) first heard this classic ghost story from a man she met in a movie theater. She included a shorter version in This Is the Place: Utah (1945), writing this version for The Unpromised Land, a projected volume of essays and short stories about Utah designed for tourists, which never came to pass. This is the story’s first publication. It will soon reappear in A Craving For Beauty: The Lost Works of Maurine Whipple edited by Veda Hale, Andrew Hall, and Lynne Larson (forthcoming from BCC Press).
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