The Ghost of Greenwich Village: A Novel by Lorna Graham Read Free Book Online

likened to a rhythm of energy, could be made to move in sequence with brainwaves. This made possible a kind of rudimentary communication with any person, as long as he or she stood within his four walls, presumably where his force was most concentrated. But it wasn’t always easy.
    “I tell you, most psyches are frenzied thickets. The young CPAs and stockbrokers who’ve lived here—they’re the worst. Their brains process tax returns and balance sheets in their sleep. I couldn’t even
begin
to scale their retaining walls of useless information.”
    With Eve, it hadn’t been exactly easy either, he’d said. Her mind was open and pliant but too full of other writers and artists. But though he’d been prepared to loathe her as much as his previous tenants, he had admitted that he’d come to enjoy her company. She might be young; she might be silly. She might havegone an entire college career without reading him. But her whimsical outlook and habit of anthropomorphizing everything around her reminded him of his early writing, her way of turning things upside down and inside out played to his ideas of deconstructing language, and her stream of consciousness (which was all he was privy to, for he could not mine her memories unless she called them up) was quite amusing. She’d helped him pass quite a few lonely nights since she’d arrived on the scene, and he found himself thankful. Not to mention that she was the instrument through which his legacy could finally be cemented.
    In their time together, Eve had found something to appreciate in Donald, too. Namely companionship. Despite coming from a large family, she was essentially a solitary person; her childhood home had rarely been a place of comfort. With three siblings, she might have been lost in the shuffle anyway, but she also had the misfortune of being born thoughtful in a house of bluster. Bill, Bryce, and Baines had dominated their Victorian with races and belches, toys stuffed down toilets, and pranks like slugs inside her school shoes. There was no real bullying, but neither was there much intervention on the part of their parents. They tended to treat the children rather like charges at a small summer camp: As long as everyone was up and dressed in the morning and had bathed and said their prayers before bed, all was well.
    This hands-off approach was born largely from their father, Gin, being a workaholic, and the fact that their mother’s life seemed to take place mostly in her head. Penelope wasn’t sad, exactly, more like withdrawn. While she wore the “lady of the house” mantle well, she always seemed to be somewhere else, as if watching an unseen movie. She performed the regal chores of a woman of leisure: tending orchids, restoring antiques, and rearranging furniture, all the while singing scraps of songs and uttering words from some long-ago, or perhaps imaginary, conversation.
    Mostly, though, you’d find her in her room, reading her New.York stories:
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
by Truman Capote,
Here Is New York
by E. B. White, Edith Wharton’s
Age of Innocence
, and, her favorites, the many books by Dawn Powell. Under the rose-print canopy of her bed, she whiled away the hours with books spread around her like friends at a ladies’ lunch. On weekends, Gin would usually have the boys out hunting or camping, while Eve was left with Penelope. When she was very young, Eve would sit on the floor next to her mother’s bed, acting out stories with her dolls. As she grew older, books became her companions, too, and she leaned against the bedpost absorbed in the tales of Enid Blyton or C. S. Lewis. Eventually, she worked her way up to Laura Ingalls Wilder and up onto the bed itself, where she lay reading, looking up every few pages at the curve of her mother’s slender back.
    Sometimes Eve felt a stab of pain that if ghosts existed, why couldn’t it be her mother who came to her? But she and Donald had settled into a mostly harmonious rapport. Like