Foggy Mountain Breakdown and Other Stories

AN AUTUMN MIGRATION

THE GHOST OF my father-in-law arrived today, smiling vaguely as he always does-or did, taking no notice of me. He acted for all the world as if I were the ghost instead of he. Not even a nod of greeting or a funny remark about the weather, which was about all the conversation we’d ever managed when he was alive. I’m not very good at conversing with people. Stephen says that I have no small talk. I listened a lot, though.

With my father-in-law, I became an audience of one to his endless supply of anecdotes, and I think he enjoyed having someone pay attention to him. He used to tell funny stories about his days in the Big One, by which he meant World War II, and he could always find a way to laugh at a rained-out ball game or a broken washing machine. This did not seem to endear him to his energetic wife and son, especially since his inability to hold a job made ball games and washing machines hard to come by, but his affability had made him a comforting in-law for the nervous and awkward bride that I had been. We were never really close, but we enjoyed each other’s company.

Later I sometimes shared Stephen’s exasperation with the smiling, tipsy ne’er-do-well who could never seem to hold on to a paycheck or a driver’s license, but in truth I would have forgiven him a great deal more than poverty and drunkenness for giving me a few moments of ease in those early days when I had felt on trial before Stephen and his exacting mother, for whom nothing was ever clean enough.

I didn’t hear the front door open and close-or perhaps it didn’t.

When he arrived, I was alone, of course, in that long emptiness of the suburban afternoon. I told myself that I was waiting for Stephen to come home, but I was careful not to ask myself why. Certainly I was not expecting any visitors that day-or any other day-and my father-in-law was as far from my thoughts as he had ever been in life.

I had been dusting the coffee table, a favorite pastime of mine, because you can make your hand do lazy arcs across a smooth wooden surface while thinking of absolutely nothing, and if you happen to be holding a damp polishing rag in your hand at the time, it counts as actual work. When I looked up from my shining circles, I saw my father-in-law clumping soundlessly up the stairs in his baggy brown suit and his old scuffed wingtips. He was probably wearing a worn silk tie loosened at his throat. He looked just as I remembered him: a portly old gentleman with sparse gray hair and a ruddy face. I even fancied that I caught the scent of Jack Daniel’s and stale tobacco as he sailed past. He was carrying the battered leather suitcase that used to sit in the hall closet at his house. I wondered where he was going, and why he needed luggage to get there.

He did not even glance around to see if anyone was watching him before he went upstairs. Perhaps he was looking for Stephen, but Stephen is never home at this hour of the day. For most of the year I scarcely see him in daylight. He works very hard, unlike his dad-or perhaps because of him-and he doesn’t talk to me much these days. He is impatient with my depression, although he always asks if I am taking my medicine, and he is careful to remind me of doctors’ appointments. But I know that secretly he thinks that I could snap out of it if I wanted to. An aerobics class or a new hairdo would do wonders for me, he suggests now and then, trying to sound casual about it. He thinks that depression is a luxury reserved for housewives whose husbands have adequate incomes.

Perhaps he is right. Perhaps those who are forced to go out and face the world with such a mental shroud about them throw themselves in front of trains or run their cars into trees rather than endure the tedium of another dark day. I have thought of such things myself, but it would take too much effort to leave the house.

I always promise to cheer up, as Stephen puts it, and that ends the discussion. Then when he leaves for the office, I crawl back into bed and sleep as long as I can. Sometimes I play endless games of solitaire on Stephen’s home computer, watching the electronic cards flash by, and scarcely caring if the suits fit together or not. I do not watch much television. Seeing those noisy strangers on the screen making such a fuss over a new car or a better detergent always makes me feel sadder and even more out of step with the world. I would rather sleep.

I am tired all the time. I manage to get the washing done every day or so, and by four o’clock I can usually muster enough energy to cook a pork chop or perhaps some spaghetti, so that Stephen won’t get annoyed with me, and ask me what it is I do all day. I push the emptiness around the polished surfaces of the coffee table with a polishing rag. It takes up most of my time. There is so much emptiness. I force myself to eat the dinner, so that he won’t lecture me about the importance of nutrition to emotional health. Stephen is an architect, but he thinks that being my husband entitles him to express medical opinions about the state of my mind and body. It is practically the only interest he takes in either anymore.

He is not so observant about the state of the house. He never looks under the beds, or notices how long the cleaning supplies last. With only the two of us, there isn’t much housekeeping to do. He has offered to hire a maid, but I cannot bear the thought of having someone around all the time. I do enough housework to get by and to stave off the dreaded cleaning woman, and he does not complain. I am so tired.

My father-in-law was still upstairs. At least, he hadn’t reappeared. I could not be bothered to go and look for him. I sat down in Stephen’s leather chair, running the polishing rag through my fingers like a silk scarf.

“Stephen isn’t home!” I called out, in case that made any difference to my visitor. Apparently it didn’t. Shouldn’t a ghost know who is home and who isn’t without having to make a room-to-room search? Surely-ten months dead-he was sober?

I wondered if I ought to call my mother-in-law in Wisconsin to tell her that he was here. He died last November. She’d be glad to know where he is. She had wanted to go to Florida for the coming winter, but she said she didn’t like to go and have a good time, with her poor husband alone in his urn. They had been married fifty years to the month when he passed away, and they had never been apart in all that time. He had always talked about taking her somewhere for their fiftieth anniversary, but by then he was too ill and too broke to manage. They spent their anniversary in his hospital room, drinking apple juice out of paper cups. Now his widow talks wistfully of Florida, and Stephen has offered to pay for the trip, but she says that she hates to travel alone after all those years of togetherness. Why shouldn’t she, though? He is.

I wonder why he has decided to call on us. It seems like a very unlikely choice on his part. I can imagine him haunting Wrigley Field, or a Dublin pub, or perhaps some tropical island in the South Pacific, or a Norwegian fishing village. We gave him a subscription to National Geographic every year for Christmas so that he could dream about all those far-off lands that he always claimed he wanted to visit, if his health would stand it. You’d think he would make good use of his afterlife to make up for lost time. But, no-after all those years of carefully paging through glorious photographs of exotic places, he turns up here, two states from home, uninvited. Surely if he could make it to Iowa, he could reach Peru. What does he want here? His pre-mortem communication with us consisted of a few cheery monologues on the extension phone when Stephen’s mother phoned for her monthly chat. Why the interest in us now? He cannot be haunting us out of malevolence. In life, he never seemed to mind about anything-no empty bottle or underachieving racehorse could darken his mood for long. Not the sort of person you’d expect to stay bound to the earth, when presumably he could be in some heavenly Hialeah, watching Secretariat race against Man o’ War and Whirlaway in the fifth-with a fifth. How could he pass up such a hereafter to haunt a brick colonial tract house in Woodland Hills, Iowa? He never came to visit us. Stephen said the old man wouldn’t be caught dead here. Apparently he was wrong about that.

He can’t be angry at us. We went to the funeral; we took a wreath to the crematorium. I even wrote the thank-you notes, so that Stephen’s mother could concentrate on her bereavement. Stephen packed his clothes in cardboard boxes, and took them to Goodwill, and he took the whiskey bottles in the top of the closet to the recycling place. We ordered the deluxe bronze urn to put his ashes in, and we even paid extra to have his name engraved on a little plaque on the front. And now here he is, swooping down on us like a migrating heron, dropping in for an unannounced rest stop on his way south-or wherever it is that he is going.

If I called my mother-in-law and asked her if the brown leather suitcase was there in her hall closet, I wonder what she would say. Perhaps it is a ghost, too. After all, it is leather.

In the end I sat in the recliner in the living room, and took a nap. We can resolve this when Stephen gets home, I thought. It is, after all, his father.

Stephen finally arrived home at eight tonight, moaning about the heat of Indian summer, and the tempers of his co-workers. With a feeling approaching clinical interest, I watched him go upstairs.

What will he say when he meets his father on the landing? Should I have warned him? I could have told him that a relative dropped in for an unexpected visit. He would scowl, of course, but then he might have said, “Who?” and I could have said, “Someone from your side of the family,” and thus we could have eased into the subject of his late father, and I could have broken the news to him gently. But I was too tired to plan conversational gambits, and Stephen’s attention span for discussions with me is many minutes shorter than such a talk would have required, so I merely smiled and gave him a little wave, as he pulled his tie away from his collar and hurried upstairs.

Then I waited-I’m not sure what for. A shout perhaps, or even a scream of terror or astonishment. Certainly I expected Stephen to reappear very quickly, and to descend the stairs much faster than he went up. But several minutes passed in silence, and when I crept close to the bannister, I could hear drawers opening and closing in the bedroom. Stephen changing his clothes, as he did first thing every evening. I made myself climb the stairs to see if the apparition was gone. If so, I won’t mention it to Stephen, I thought. He would only think that my seeing ghosts is another symptom of my disorder. Not seeing the ghost may be a symptom of his.

I stood in the doorway, smiling vaguely, as if I had come upstairs to ask him something, but had forgotten what. Stephen was sitting in the lounge chair beside the window, putting on his running shoes. He looked up at me, and when I didn’t say anything, he shrugged and went back to tying the laces. His father was sitting on the edge of the bed, watching this performance with interest.

“Stephen, look at the bed,” I said.

He frowned a little, and glanced at the bed, probably wondering what sort of response I was expecting. Was I propositioning him? Did I want new furniture? Was there a mouse on the pillow? He gave the question careful consideration. “The bed looks fine,” he said at last. “I’m glad you made the bed, dear. It makes the room look tidy. Thank you.”

Stephen was looking straight at his father. He could not miss him, and yet all he saw was a blue-flowered bedspread and four matching throw pillows.

My father-in-law looked at me and shrugged, as if to say that Stephen’s lack of perception was not his fault. He was certainly visible, plain as day, and if Stephen could not or would not detect his presence, there wasn’t much that either of us could do about it. I could have said, “Stephen, your dead father is sitting on the bed,” but that would have gotten us nowhere. In fact, saying that would have been worse than ignoring the matter, because Stephen would have insisted on analyzing my medication to see if I was taking anything that might cause delusions, and this would distract me from considering the real problem at hand: what is my father-in-law doing here-and what does he want me to do about it?

Upon reflection I was not surprised that Stephen failed to see this apparition. Stephen never saw rainbows when I pointed them out through the car windshield as he was driving. Finally I stopped pointing them out, and then one day I stopped seeing them, too. He is completely unable to tell whether people are happy or sad by looking at them. And he insists that he never has dreams, nightmares or otherwise. Of course he would not notice anything so unconventional as a ghost. It is beneath the threshold of his rationality. As he is not likely to take my word for it, I have abandoned the idea of telling him about his father’s visit. Some people do not qualify to be haunted.

We ate a hastily prepared meal of soup and salad. (In the excitement I had forgotten to cook dinner.) I asked Stephen a question about a project at work, and he answered so volubly that I knew he was talking to himself and had forgotten I was there. It was a very restful dinner. No awkward silences while one of us tried to think of something to say.

When we went upstairs afterward, my father-in-law was nowhere to be seen. I wandered from room to room, on the pretext of shutting windows and making sure that the lights were off. I peeked into closets and behind doors, but he was not in evidence. I did not think that this absence was permanent, however. I suspected that he was on some astral plane biding his time until Stephen had left the house again. Perhaps even ghosts find it awkward to communicate with Stephen.

I had thought about the problem all through dinner, which I barely touched, and I puzzled over it later in bed. While Stephen read Architectural Record, I scanned the room beyond the pool of light from the reading lamp to see if one of the shadows was grinning back at me, but no one was there. Later, when Stephen’s breathing evened out into the monotone of sleep, I lay awake wondering about the visit. He must be here for a reason, I thought. Since I am the only one who has noticed him, I suppose it is my problem.

He has been here for five days now. He does not speak to me. Perhaps he can’t. I see him here and there around the house, and sometimes we exchange looks or smiles, so I know he is aware of my presence, but he makes no sound. He does not seem distressed, as if he were anxious to communicate some urgent information to me about a lost bank account, or a cache of gold coins buried in the backyard. He does not seem to want any messages of love or regret taken to his wife or conveyed to Stephen. (I think if my father-in-law ever had any gold coins he would have cashed them in for Jack Daniel’s long ago. I have more money in my savings account from my grandmother’s legacy than he probably left to his family after a lifetime of desultory jobs. Messages for his loved ones? My father-in-law was a gentle and pleasant man, but I do not think his love for wife or son was the sort that would extend beyond the grave. They have certainly recovered from the loss of him, and I have no reason to suspect that the feeling is not mutual.) He is just… here.

I am no longer shy about his presence in the house. He is a courteous ghost. He never materializes in the bathroom, or sneaks up behind me when I am dusting. I find, though, that I am less inclined to sleep late, and I spend less time polishing the furniture. Even with uninvited guests there is the obligation to play hostess, I suppose. I tried turning the television on to the news channel, because I thought that he might be interested in what is going on in the world-an idle curiosity about familiar things, the way one might subscribe to a hometown newspaper after one has moved away-but he only glanced at the screen and drifted away again, so I gave it up. Perhaps the news is no longer interesting when nothing is a matter of life or death to the viewer. I didn’t find it very interesting myself, though. I wonder what that means.

Today when Stephen came home I had fixed beef Stroganoff, and he grudgingly said that I seemed to be snapping out of it. I wish I could say the same for him. He is as monotonous as ever. I find myself thinking that I have more to say to the ghost than I do to my husband.

I wonder where he keeps the piano. In the attic? The broom closet under the stairs? Sometimes when I am downstairs with the polishing cloth, I can hear sounds floating down the stairs, the tinkly lilt of a barroom piano: Scott Joplin tunes. I polish to the rhythm of a ragtime piano, and I wonder what he is trying to tell me. It has been a week now, and I find myself talking aloud to the ghost as I work. I still call him the ghost. He had a first name in life, of course, but I never used it. I called him Ummm, the way one does with in-laws. I still think of him as Ummm, and I make an occasional remark to him while I vacuum the dust bunnies under the bed and dust the tops of the bookshelves, because who knows where a ghost goes when he’s not in sight. It took a couple of days to get the house back into decent order, and then I began to wonder what else I could do. He was still there; he must be in need of something. Or perhaps he couldn’t think of anywhere else to go.

The next time I cleaned the living room, I considered turning to ESPN, on the off chance that a horse race might be broadcast. He always did love a good horse race. But I decided that I have to watch enough sports as it is during football season with Stephen around. I certainly wasn’t going to defer to the wishes of a dead man. Something else, then.

I switched to the Discovery Channel, and we watched a nice program about castles in the Alps. He seemed to enjoy the travel documentary much more than he had the news channel. He floated just behind the sofa and watched the screen intently. After a few minutes I put down my dust cloth and joined him, and we marveled at the splendors of Neunschwanstein and Linderhof for nearly a quarter of an hour, until at the end of a long commercial I looked over and found that I was alone. Over-decorated castles can fascinate one for just so long, I decided, but I had thoroughly enjoyed the tour, thinking how horrified Stephen would be by the glorification of nineteenth-century crimes against architecture. Still, his father had seemed to enjoy it. I felt I was on the right track.

After that I kept the television tuned to travel documentaries for as much of the day as I could. I noticed that my father-in-law’s ghost had no particular fascination with Europe, and only a fleeting interest in Africa and the Middle East. I was about to give up the project and try the Shopping Network when the programmers turned their attention to Polynesia. For the ghostly viewer, the Pacific Islands were another matter altogether.

A program on Hawaii brought him closer to the television than he had ventured before, and he actually sat through two commercials before fading away. A few days later, when Samoa was featured, he hovered just above the sofa cushions and gazed enraptured at the palm trees and outriggers with a smile that no longer looked vague. Easter Island was the clincher. Not only did he watch the program in its entirety, he even stayed through the credits, apparently reading the names of the crew and filmmakers as they rolled up the screen.

I had watched all these programs as well, and quite enjoyed the imaginary holidays they provided. Still, after hours of looking at the shining sands and turquoise sea of the South Pacific, my own living room looked dingy and worn. This did not inspire me to further cleaning efforts, however. My reaction was more along the lines of, “What’s the use?” No matter what I did to our sensible tweed sofa and the fashionable cherry colonial reproduction tables, it would still be dankest, brownest, latest autumn within these walls, and I was beginning to long for summer.

“It’s a pity that we are dead and stuck here,” I remarked aloud to the visitor. Something in his smile made me realize what I’d said. “I mean that you’re dead,” I amended.

On Monday, the daily documentary featured the irrigation system of the Netherlands, but neither my father-in-law nor I was ready to come back from the tropical paradises of the South Pacific. We sat there in gloomy silence for a few minutes, politely studying placid canals and bobbing fields of tulips, but neither of us could muster any enthusiasm for the subject. I clicked off the set just as he was beginning to fade out. “I’ll go to the library,” I said to the dimming apparition. “Perhaps I can borrow a video of the Pacific Islands-or at least a travel guide.”

Stephen occasionally sent me to the library to research something for him, but I had never actually checked anything out for my own use. I suppose Mrs. Nagata, the librarian, was a bit surprised to see me walk past Architecture and into the Travel section. Or perhaps she was surprised to see me in jeans with my hair in a ponytail. In my haste I had not bothered to change into the costume I thought of as Suburban Respectable. Half an hour later, I had managed to find two coffee-table books on the Pacific Islands, a video documentary about Tahiti, and the old Disney film of Treasure Island that I remembered from childhood. As an afterthought I picked up a guidebook to Polynesia as well.

When I entered the house again I could hear the strains of “Bali H’ai” being played on a honky-tonk piano. I wondered if that was a hint. Surely Bali H’ai would be featured in one of the books I had selected. Where was it, anyhow? And had my father-in-law been there before? I tried to remember his stories about World War II, but exotic islands did not play a part in any tale that I recalled. “He’s simply getting into the spirit of the thing,” I said. Realizing my pun I laughed out loud.

“What’s so funny?”

Stephen was home. I nearly dropped the books. He was lounging on the sofa watching the sports network. “The air conditioning was broken at the office, so I came home,” he told me without taking his eyes off the flickering screen. “I was surprised to find you gone. I thought you moped around here all day.”

“I went to the library,” I mumbled.

“Oh?” He raised his eyebrows in that maddening way of his. “Whatever for? I didn’t send you.”

I felt like a child caught playing hooky. “I just went,” I said.

I edged closer to the screen, careful not to block his view, and held out my armload of books and videos. “I just thought I’d do some reading.”

A commercial came on just then, and he turned his attention to me, or rather to the materials from the library. He flipped through the stack of books, inspected the videos, and set them down on the sofa beside him. “The South Pacific,” he said, sounding amused.

“Yes,” I said. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

“If you like heat and insects.”

“I thought we might go there some day.”

Stephen turned back to the television. “Paul Gauguin went to Tahiti. He was a painter.”

“Yes.”

“Went to Tahiti, got leprosy there, and died,” said Stephen, with evident satisfaction that Gauguin’s lapse of judgment had been so amply rewarded. Before I could reply, the commercial ended, and Stephen went back to the game, dismissing the subject of Polynesia from his thoughts entirely.

I left the room, unnoticed by Stephen, who was absorbed in the television and completely oblivious to my existence. Before I left, though, I took the pile of books, which he had discarded on the sofa beside him.

I was sitting on the bed, leafing through color pictures of beaches at sunset and lush island waterfalls, when my father-in-law materialized beside me and began peering at the pages with a look similar to Stephen’s television face. Once when I turned a page too quickly, he reached for the book, and then drew back, as if he suddenly remembered that he could no longer hold objects for himself.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” I sighed. “I wish I could see it for real.”

The ghost nodded sadly. He tried to touch the page, but his fingers became transparent and passed through the photo.

“Just go!” I said. “Do it! I’m tied here. Stephen refuses to go anywhere. I’m too depressed to go to the mall, much less to another country. But you! You’re not a prisoner. I wish I were a ghost. If I were, I certainly wouldn’t be haunting a tract house in Iowa. I’d do whatever I wanted. I’d be free! I’d go to Tahiti-or Easter Island-or wherever I wanted!”

The ghost shook his head, and immediately I felt sorry for my outburst. Apparently there were rules to the afterlife, and I had no idea what his limitations were. I shouldn’t have reproached him for things I don’t understand, I thought.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I just wish we weren’t trapped here.” My eyes filled with tears. One of them plopped onto the waterfall picture and slid down the rocks, as if to join the cascading image.

I looked up to see my father-in-law’s ghost smiling and shaking his head. He looked very much like Stephen for just that instant: his expression was the one Stephen always has when I’ve said something foolish. I thought over what I had said. I wish we weren’t trapped here.

Why was I trapped here?

I had grandmother’s legacy in the savings account. It had grown to nearly twelve thousand dollars, because in my depression I couldn’t be bothered to go out and actually buy anything. I had a suitcase, and enough summer clothes to see me through a few months in the tropics. And-most important-I had no emotional ties to keep me in Woodland Hills. I felt that I had already been haunting Stephen for the last few years of our married life. It was time I left. And when I went, his memory would never haunt me.

I opened the closet and reached for the canvas suitcase on the top shelf. As I was pulling it down, I heard a thump at the back of the closet, and I stood on tiptoe to see what had been knocked over. It was a large bronze vase. I had to stand on a chair to reach it. When I pulled it out of a tangle of coat hangers, I saw the brass plate on the front bearing a name and two dates. My father-in-law!

I left the suitcase on the floor, and ran downstairs. “Stephen!” I said. “Did you know that your father’s ashes are in the bedroom closet?”

“Shhh! They’re kicking the extra point.”

I waited an eternity for a commercial and asked again, keeping my voice casual.

“Dad? Sure. I took them after the funeral. I thought it would upset Mother too much to leave them on the mantel where she’d have to see them all the time. I figured I’d wait for the anniversary of his death-next month, isn’t it?-and then scatter him under the rose bushes out back. Bone meal. Great compost, huh?”

“Great,” I murmured.

As I fled back upstairs I heard him call out, “Thanks for reminding me!”

It took me twenty minutes to clean out the fireplace in the den, and another half hour to pack. Ten minutes to locate my passport and the passbook to my savings account. Five minutes to transfer the contents of the urn to a plastic cosmetics bag in my suitcase and replace them with the fireplace ashes. I didn’t think I’d need my coat, but I put it on anyway, as a gesture of finality. My father-in-law was wearing his.

We stood for a moment in the foyer, staring at the back of Stephen’s head, haloed in the light of the television. I picked up my suitcase, and flung open the door. “I’m going out!” I called.

“Yeah-okay,” said Stephen.

“I may be some time.”