Ghost Story

by Peter Straub

The group called the Chowder Society had only a few rules: they wore evening clothes (because thirty years ago, Sears had rather liked the idea), they never drank too much (and now they were too old for that anyhow), they never asked if any of the stories were true (since even the outright whoppers were in some sense true), and though the stories went around the group in rotation, they never pressured anyone who had temporarily dried up.

None of them knew it was their golden age, nor that it was coming to an end: in fact they would have seen their lives, in the usual fashion of people with comfortable existences, a sufficiency of friends and the certainty of food on the table, as a process of gradual and even imperceptible improvement. Having survived the crises of youth and the middle years, they thought they had wisdom enough to meet the coming crises of age; having seen wars, adulteries, compromise and change, they thought they had seen most everything they would see—they’d make no larger claim.

In fact, neither of their children had written to Ricky and Stella for several months. They had been happy infants, sullen adolescents, and now, both of them nearly forty, were unsatisfied adults—in many ways, still adolescent.

“Pete read in a magazine that she’s only seventeen years old.” “In that case, she’s a public menace.”

We’re lawyers, he said to himself, we think like that. We can’t help it; we put the pettifogging first and the people second.

It struck me that there was an androgynous quality to her passivity; just as there is, perhaps, an androgynous quality to a prostitute.

My notions of getting back to novel-writing vanished. I could not invent feelings when I was so taken over by them myself;

We see things, but we don’t believe them; we feel things—people watching us, sinister things following us—but we dismiss them as fantasies. We dream horrors, but try to forget them.

Until then he had blindly (he now thought) imagined that adulthood and marriage meant release from the passionate confusions of youth.

These things aren’t new. They’ve probably been around for centuries—for longer than that. They’ve certainly been talked about and written about for hundreds of years. I think they are what people used to call vampires and werewolves—they’re probably behind a thousand ghost stories.

When we had to choose our colleges, the staff would give us talks about ‘the East.’ ‘The East’ was where they wanted us to go—it was simple snobbery, and my school was very old-fashioned in that way, but the school would look better if a big proportion of its seniors went on to Harvard or Princeton or Cornell—or even a state university on the East Coast. Everybody pronounced the word the way a Muslim must pronounce the word Mecca. And that’s where we are now.” “Did you go East?” Ricky asked. “I don’t know if Edward ever mentioned it.” “No. I went to California, where they believed in mysticism. They didn’t drown witches, they gave them talk shows.”

“And if we see them? If they are waiting for us?” “Then we try to put up a better fight than Sergeant York,” Ricky said. “I suppose. Do you remember Sergeant York, Don?” “No,” Don said. “I don’t even remember Audie Murphy. Let’s go.”

Could you defeat a cloud, a dream, a poem? —Alma Mobley

Hawthorne, James was now Hawthorne, James and Whittacker. “Pity his name isn’t Poe,” Ricky said, but Stella didn’t think that was funny.