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Synopsis

Ned Conti is a young historian struggling to piece together the miraculous past of a Brooklyn nun for a tiny stipend, while, at night, he grapples with the paranormal phenomena that have recently seized his rent-controlled apartment: furniture set askew, strange light haunting the bedroom, rocks appearing mysteriously in midair to pummel the floor. His only refuge is the F train and its connection to long Manhattan nights in East Village bars that he visits with his forlorn and eccentric friends.

As the summer grows hotter and his apartment more threatening, a baffled but tolerant Ned sets out to uncover the secret behind the angry spirit and, in so doing, is drawn irretrievably into a world of desire and fate...where all around him lingers the dark dream of New Orleans, a place of magical disaster. Ten years before, he fled the Crescent City, never to return, when Antoinette, his true love, ended their brief but urgent affair. Now he's going back, returning to the past that has haunted him for a decade.

In that city of sleepless energy and seething passion, he will encounter the world that connects his own to the next: where a restless ghost yearns for the touch that will set her free; where a saint seeks to correct her one mistake; and where disconnected souls long to be reunited. In the past, Ned will find his future. his destiny.

Beautifully detailed and startlingly original, Madeleine's Ghost is written with contemporary sensibility and classic style, remarkable for its breadth and depth. This is an astonishing tale of past lives and lost loves, of history and hope, that establishes Robert Girardi as a wonderfully gifted novelist.

Excerpt

Stones are falling from the ceiling of my apartment. First one, then two, then dozens. I take refuge beneath the kitchen table as they bounce and dance across every surface, denting the toaster, gouging into the old linoleum of the floor. The falling stones are like a rain of hail, but so absurd in this setting that I want to laugh.

The first stone hit five minutes ago with a solid thump on the arm of the orange Naugahyde easy chair in the living room, then rolled into my lap. It was egg-shaped and smooth and wet, as if it had just been dredged up from the bottom of the river. A second hit the television and fell behind the gas heater in the fireplace. I counted five more like warning drumbeats; then I ran for the table. Now they bounce and roll all over, making quite a racket. They don't seem to come from anywhere. There are no holes in the ceiling. The stones flash into air just below the tin egg-and-anchor molding and fall as if they are falling from a great height.

The whole manifestation lasts about ten minutes. I wait fifteen minutes more before emerging carefully into the daylight from beneath the table. The smooth stones lie in piles in the kitchen, in the living room across the rug, on the couch, and on the television set, which appears undamaged. There are no stones in the bathroom or in my bedroom, but I find the largest pile heaped up on the bare floor in Molesworth's old room when I push open the door.

I take about an hour and a half to remove all the stones to the garden. The job requires five trips with a full suitcase, which I empty in the corner of the yard under the dry-rotted grape trellis. There is quite a little mound out here now, enough to pave a short walkway. I kick at it in frustration before I go back upstairs to collapse on the couch.

This is the second time in the last three weeks.

It is about two in the afternoon, Tuesday, mid-June, with the sun hot on my back and the sky seared and brown-looking above the island. The collar of my shirt is soaked with sweat.Just a block away the Manhattan Bridge creaks ominously in the heat, its abutments age blackened and massive as the pyramids. I am wearing an unseasonable tweed jacket, swamp green corduroy pants, a heavy powder blue oxford cloth button-down, and a regimental stripe tie -- the only presentable outfit in my closet. I am shaved and sober and calling on Father Rose in the rectory of St. Basil's Cathedral on Jay Street in Brooklyn.

A flat-faced woman in thick spectacles answers the door cautiously, pressing her nose against the barred peephole like a deep-sea diver in an old-fashioned brass helmet peering out at the ocean floor.

"I'm here to see the priest," I say.

"Father isn't seeing anyone right now. He's busy," she says,and goes to shut the peephole.

"Wait, I have an appointment."

"Step back," she says.

I step back, and a moment of silence follows in which the woman scowls and looks me up and down. I get the feeling she doesn't care for the striped tie. It's hardly the welcome one expects at the front door of a church, but I don't blame her. This neighborhood is bad, loomed over by the same projects to the east that threaten my derelict neighborhood just to the south.

At last she nods, slides the bolts, and opens the door. A dismal smell pervades such places, rectories and army barracks, places reserved exclusively for the use of men: ammonia and boiled cabbage dinners and long, terrible Sunday evenings without the sound of a woman's voice.

We go into a narrow hallway and up some stairs lined with dark paneling and hung with faded nineteenth-century prints of saints and Jesus praying in the Garden at Gethsemane, apostles sleeping the sleep of the craven behind Him in the weeds, and enter a small waiting room set with two rows of old pews and a few rump-sprung easy chairs. On an end table there are yellow copies of Catholic Digest and Highlights for Children magazine. I settle down to wait with the adventures of Goofus and Gallant in the latter as the woman goes to warn the priest.

Father Rose is lining up a putt when I am ushered into his chambers a few minutes later. He is hunched over the putter at one end of a mock putting green of AstroTurf, the hole opposing him an odd contraption that resembles a large aluminum daisy.

"Father Rose?" I say. "I'm Ned Conti, I called yesterday..."

This is not the moment to speak. The priest, hardly awareof my presence, follows through with the putt. The ball goes awry,hooks to the left, and rolls under a chair. He gives a small strangled sound, and his shoulders slump. Waiting for him to recover, I glance around the room. It is bright and cheery, free from the religious gloom that pervades the rest of the rectory. Golf trophies stand dustless in glass-fronted shelves to one side. Autographed photos of Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer flankthe abstract sixties-era crucifix hanging beside a window overlooking the handball courts in the asphalt park across the street.

"Putting is a gift from God," the priest says wearily, wiping the head of his putter with a handkerchief. He is a lean fellow, with a long face, and resembles a sort of amiable Charlton Heston. "It's like grace. The one thing in golf you can't really practice. You've got to have the knack, that's all."

He points the putter to a floral-print love seat against the wall. I sit, and he sinks back against the edge of his desk withthe easy grace of a man who has spent his life on the links. His face is tanned; his wrists are specked with freckles. He crosses his legs, and I can see he's wearing expensive two-tone golf shoes,cleats unscrewed, though his black cassock is threadbare and traditional, pulled in with a simple square-buckled brown beltafter the manner of the Jesuit Brothers at Loyola, who enjoyed the austerity of their priestly robes to the point of vanity. After all, there is nothing classier than basic black.

"Now, what can I do for you, Mr. Conti?" Father Rose says when we are settled.

"I came about your advertisement in the U.S. Catholic Historian," I say. "Historical research. That's my field. I'm a research historian. Have you gotten many responses?"

Father Rose frowns at his putter. "Are you a golfing man?"

I confess that I am not.

"I'm crazy about the game." He gestures at the trophy cases. "Maybe too crazy."

He pushes off the desk suddenly and strides back and forth across the room, putter held behind his back in one hand in a posture that I recognize immediately as characteristic.

"Last year," he says, "with the permission of the bishop, Itook a few months off to join the PGA tour. I was quite the golfstar in college, you know, but in our family it was traditional for the youngest son to join the priesthood. First time back incompetition in something like twenty-five years, and I made thecuts. All in all, for an old guy, I didn't do too badly, perhaps because I was careful to dedicate each ball to a different saint. After expenses, I came out of it with a net profit of five thousand seven hundred dollars. I have set aside these winnings for a special research project."

"Oh, yes," I say, trying to sound like I really don't need themoney. "What sort of project?"

"It is of grave spiritual significance to the future of Brooklyn. This is all I will say for now."

We go down into the churchyard to walk in the heat among the graves. Father Rose examines my credentials for a few minutes in silence, putter under his arm, lips pursed in concentration, a posture that befits a man with weighty matters to consider.

"B.A., Loyola University of the South," he reads aloud from my curriculum vitae to the mortuary heat of the afternoon. "New Orleans is a little wild, they say. I hear the Jesuits have a pretty good time down there."

I shrug, noncommittal.

"Do you know that city well?" He looks over at me, shielding his eyes against the sun.

"It's been a long time," I say. "But I think I could still get around."

"I don't mind telling you that certain aspects of my project touch on New Orleans. A knowledge of the place might be useful."

"Then I'm your man," I say. "It's fate."

He ignores this and goes back to my resume. "Catholic grammar school, Catholic high school... and now Ph.D. candidate in French history, Georgetown University. Well, an excellent Catholic education, Mr. Conti." He folds my CV into a pouch in his cassock. "You must be a man of sound convictions."

"I try, Father," I say, and give him the toothy smile of a used-car dealer. Actually my education is more a testament to my parents' faith than my own. I hated Catholic school. The nuns pulled on my hair and beat me with rulers. My mom forced me to go through the twelfth grade; Catholic scholarships paid for the rest.

"And how's your doctoral thesis coming along?"

"It's almost finished," I lie. "Another month, and I send it off to the committee."

The truth is, I started out right but got lost somewhere along the way. I haven't touched my thesis in nine months: Shakos and Epaulets-- Military Fashions and Ideas in the First Empire. The grand title conceals a scratched over ream of half-baked theories and poor scholarship concerning the effect of fancy uniforms on the

Copyright © 1995 by Robert Girardi

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