Gershwin’s Ghost by Jerome Charyn

1

The memory was riven into Gabriel’s skull like a razor blade of burn-ing light. How could he forget? Having just arrived at his “majority” as a junior at Dartmouth, he had one obligation, only one, to deliver a check to some stranger who was his dad.
His mom’s chauffeur had never been to the Bronx. The GPS, primitive at the time, had led them astray, as if Claremont Park belonged to some random ghost.
“My father works there,” Gabe had to insist. “Right in the park.”
The chauffeur, Morrisy, an ex-Marine, was also his mom’s body-
guard; Gabe’s, too, in this part of the Bronx.
“Gabriel,” Morrisy said, “have you ever visited your father in
Claremont Park, visited him at all?”
“No, sir,” Gabe said.
Morrisy squinted at Gabe. “Jesus, son, you don’t have to ‘sir’ me.
I’m your mom’s handyman.”
“More than that,” Gabe said, “much more. You fix all her problems.”
Morrisy flicked his tongue like a lizard. “Well, what does your
father do at Claremont Park, if we can ever find the damn place?”
“I think he’s a playground director, sir.”
“You mean a parkie?
“I wouldn’t know. I’ve never met a playground director. I study
economics in New Hampshire.”
Morrisy laughed. “Come on, kid. Didn’t I drive you and your
mom up to your dorm?”
“That was ages ago,” Gabe said, dueling with his mom’s Marine.
“I live off campus now.”
“Still,” the chauffeur said, “Dartmouth College was easier to find
than Claremont Park.”
Then they suddenly swerved beside a wall, and that wall climbed along the very edge of Claremont Park, which looked like the grounds of a broken castle, and Morrisy parked his silver Lexus on Clay Ave-nue, a street of apartment houses with crooked fire escapes. Gabe wouldn’t permit him to leave the Lexus, and Morrisy rebelled.
“This is a rough neighborhood, kid. Your mom would never for-
give me if – “
“Mr. Morrisy, neither of us has ever been here before. It might not
be rough at all. Besides, I’m on a mission.”
“Yeah,” the ex-Marine said, “to find your lost father.”
“He isn’t lost,” Gabe said. “He decided to dump us.”
“And live like a starving poet in his own private garret when he
had it all.”
“He isn’t a poet,” Gabe said. “He writes short stories.”
“And hasn’t published a single one, I suppose,” the ex-Marine
chortled.
Gabe was piqued. He had to protect the validity of this stranger.
“Bartholomew Starr has published in most of the quarterlies and mimeographed magazines that still exist. He’s had one hundred and seven publications, if my count is correct.”
Morrisy basked in his own triumph. His pale eyes lit with a pale
fever. “And not a single person can recall his name.”
“I can.”
“Well, that makes sense. You’re his son.”
“And his devoted reader,” Gabe said, as he wandered off into Claremont Park. He couldn’t find a soul in a series of winding hills that looked like battle terrain. The one thing Gabe remembered from his childhood was Batholomew’s tale about the antiaircraft gun that had commanded the highest hill of Claremont Park during World War II, and the gunnery sergeant who sat in his little chair that could be raised and lowered with a tiny lever. That image of the lever and the sergeant’s helmet had captured Gabe and was still vital and vivid in his mind. This sergeant, it seems, was a terrible flirt and the favorite of local housewives. . .
Finally a woman in an olive green uniform appeared; she had a badge and a billed cap. She could have been the captain of Claremont Park, attending to her vast domain.
“Excuse me, ma’am,” Gabe said. “I’m looking for the playground
director.”
“Which one?” she asked.
Gabe panicked; he still remembered Bartholomew as a youngish, fleet-footed man in his battered slippers, gliding from room to room in the family penthouse overlooking the Hudson. George Gershwin had once inhabited the same penthouse. It’s where he had composed “Rhapsody in Blue,” according to Gabe’s mom, who never boasted about it. But she did tell Gabe once that she liked living near Gersh-win’s ghost.
Gabe had to re-imagine his father as a much older man. “He
stoops, I guess, and has grey hair.”
The woman smiled. “Oh, Bart. He’s in the equipment shack.” And
she pointed to a tiny brick shed at the crest of the nearest hill. “Are
you related?”
“No,” Gabe said in a panic. “I’m just a family friend.”
“Young man,” she whispered, “it’s time for him to retire. He’s
been here too long. Claremont Park, that’s all he knows.” The woman shook Gabe’s hand. “He’s got bronchitis, Bart does.”
And she went down the hill with all the aplomb of a general.
Gabe walked over to the shed and knocked on the steel door. The shed had a tiny window, the size of a tablet, and he couldn’t see in-side. He heard a man cough, and then a voice, filled with phlegm, came through the steel.
“That you, Gilda?”
“No,” Gabe said. “It’s Gabe – Gabriel Starr.”
He heard several latches click. The door opened. And Gabe was filled with a despair he could never have imagined. The man inside was wearing the same battered slippers from the penthouse on River-side Drive.
“Come in – please.”
The shack was filled with gardening equipment – a lawn mower, several spades and digging tools. Other than that it had a tiny desk and a single chair. On the desk was a parade of pencils that Gabe re-membered as a boy, a soap eraser, and a spiral notebook. The desk did have a coffee machine, and near it was a narrow sink.
“You keep staring at my feet,” the man said.
“Forgive me. It’s your slippers. I remember them from your days on Riverside Drive. Mom had to search and search for a shoemaker who could repair those slippers with the same exact velvet.”
“Are you really Gabe?” the man asked. He was wearing a moth-eaten sweater and the drab olive green trousers of the Parks Department.
“Yes, Dad,” the boy said.
The man’s cheeks began to quiver. “Don’t call me that – please.”
“Then what should I call you?”
“Bart,” the man said, “just Bart . . . Would you like some coffee? I have a tiny fridge under the desk. It’s illegal, but they allow it.”
“Yes, Bart,” Gabe said, “I’ll have some coffee – with you.”
The man rinsed a pair of mugs in the sink, and Gabe smiled; the mugs must have come from a museum or a gift shop; they had pic-tures of Moby Dick and a whaler stamped on them, the Pequod. The man brewed the coffee, then took out two pieces of crumb cake from the fridge, and a carton of milk. He offered Gabe a napkin and a plas-tic spoon.
“Sara Lee,” Gabe said. “You always loved Sara Lee. It was the one bakery in the world – with its crumb cake. A goddamn sugar bomb.”
The man seemed hurt by Gabriel’s remark. “I can offer you a biscuit.”
“No,” Gabe said. “I love Sara Lee.”
They stood there, with the desk as a kind of shelf, drank the cof-fee in silence, and scooped up the crumb cake with the plastic forks.
“How did you find me?” the man asked.
“Bart, you grew up in Claremont Park – you’re a homing pigeon. Didn’t you tell me that story about the antiaircraft sergeant and the housewives who adored him?”
The fork shivered in the man’s fist. “You were a baby. How could you . . .?”
“Bart, he’s the hero of ‘A Gunner’s Tale.’”
The man’s eyes began to dart in the shed’s dim light. “What are
you talking about?”
Gabe’s words were tinged with dramatic flair. “The Weehawken
Review, Volume XVII. I can recite every word.”
The man tossed his crumb cake onto the desk. “You’ve been track-ing me, like Natty Bumppo, dammit. I abandoned you, Gabe, when you were eleven, gave up your mother’s river view – and her favorite party guest, Gershwin’s ghost.”
“Eight, Dad, I was eight when you left.”
The man sheltered his head in his hands. “That’s impossible. I
wouldn’t have . . . I suppose you’re going to ask me why I returned to the Bronx.”
The man’s head reemerged from the chapel of his hands. He was grey, yes, and stooped in his moth-eaten sweater, but he hadn’t aged, not really. He had the same savage temperament, the same sense of being absent and present, despite the racking cough. He glided across the narrow shed in his ancient slippers. Gabe couldn’t believe it – his half-forgotten father walked with a distinct melody.
“I couldn’t bear it, the doormen with their winged collars, the ele-vators in hammered gold . . .”
“Trifles, Dad. Did you ever love my mom?”
Bartholomew picked at the crumb cake. “She needed her soirees.”
“She hasn’t had one in years – she introduced you to every fuck-ing publisher in Manhattan.”
“They were all prepared to pounce on the novel I would never write . . . I disappointed her. I couldn’t deliver. I wasn’t as faithful as Gershwin’s ghost.”
“Yeah, blame it all on Gershwin’s ghost. You left us. The ghost is still there.”
“Gabe, I didn’t earn a dime. I was a middle-aged man trying to discover his craft.”
Gabe mocked him now. “So you moved back in with your par-ents on Sheridan Avenue . . . and became a parkie. Yes, I am Natty Bumppo, in my own way. I had Mom’s lawyers search the city rec-ords. You inherited your parents’ rent-controlled apartment. You win obscure awards. I can track you myself – on the web, even if you don’t have a Wikipedia page.”
“Why would I want one?”
“Jesus, Dad – so people might notice that you’re alive, that you’ve worked so hard at your craft.”
Bartholomew was silent for a moment. He sipped some coffee from his whaling mug and nibbled at his Sara Lee. “I’m still learn-ing,” he said.
“Dad, will your apprenticeship be over when you retire from your shed in the park?”
“The words slip away,” Bartholomew said, his eyes deeply etched in the growing darkness. “You have to be vigilant. The sentences are never mine. I can’t catch the music . . . But why did you come? I stayed away on purpose. I didn’t want to interfere. Your mom could have divorced me in a minute.”
“But she never did.”
Gabe’s voice had turned shallow in the shed. He was silent for a moment. He took an envelope out of his pocket and handed it to this scribbler whose devotion to his craft seemed like a milder form of madness.
“What is this?”
“Money, Dad, the very thing you scoff at. But call it a family fellowship from the little boy you tossed away. I just reached my majority – I’m twenty-one.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Open the envelope, Dad,” Gabe said.
Bartholomew opened the envelope and found a check for twenty-five thousand dollars, signed by Gabe himself.
“I still don’t understand.”
Gabe’s cheeks were quivering now. “Mom made me rich – upon my majority. And I promised myself a long time ago that I would give you something, once I could afford it.”
“Please,” Bartholomew uttered in a bronchial whisper, “it’s kind, and generous. But I have a job. And as your mother’s lawyer-detectives uncovered . . . I’m in possession of my parents’ rent-controlled apartment. I can’t take your money. I can’t.”
“But you could buy yourself some free time, Dad, away from this shed.”
Bartholomew seemed perplexed. Then he stared at his little domain. “I write here, Bart. This is my writer’s room. I make my rounds and then I sit at my desk.”
“I met your boss, Dad,” Gabe announced in a slightly ominous tone.
“Gilda?”
“I think so. They’ll pull you screaming out of this shack one day soon.”
“I suppose they will,” Bartholomew said. “But it’s not that important. I have my notebook. I’ll write while I’m on a park bench.” “And when it rains, Dad?”
Bartholomew smiled; several of his teeth were black. The Parks Department must have had a paltry dental plan.
“Then I’ll write on Sheridan Avenue . . . near my Sony Trinitron.” Gabriel guffawed as gently as he could. His father was back in the Middle Ages. “I remember that TV. It belonged to your father – at least it did in a story of yours.”
“It’s indestructible,” Bartholomew said. “I couldn’t live without it . . . Gabe, I can’t accept your check.”
Bartholomew folded the envelope and dug it into Gabriel’s pocket.
And now it was Gabriel who sat down in the shed’s single chair. “Dad, if I was a Wikipedian, you’d have a Wikipedia page.”
Bartholomew began to pace again, with the step of a princely cat.
“And what would it say? ‘Bart Fishman, alias Bartholomew Starr. Book Publications: None.’”
”But you taught at the New School. Mom says you were the best teacher she ever had. She fell in love with you the first moment you entered the class, dressed like an elegant hobo, with a silk handker-chief in your breast pocket. That’s what she said. You were a shark searching for prey. She couldn’t resist.”
“It was nothing,” Bartholomew said. “I taught a few weeks in place of a friend who’d had a heart attack.”
“And married Mom after a month.”
“Ah,” Bartholomew said. “Is that how Vivian tells it? It was in two
stages. I was a serf, and then a husband.”
Gabe was bewildered. “What kind of a serf?”
“She said she was going blind. Some fancy disease. I don’t remem-ber the name. And she wanted me to read the classics to her, at fifty dollars an hour. It’s more than I made at the New School . . . I recited War and Peace to her – every line – and she listened with cold com-presses on her brow. She proposed to me during one of the battlefield scenes.”
“You could have refused, Dad. You must have known there was nothing wrong with her eyes.”
“Dammit,” Bartholomew said. “I’d already signed the prenup. I said that if we ever had a child, and something happened to Viv, I wanted the right to remain in that penthouse until the child’s . . .
“Majority,” Gabe said. “You see, Dad, there is poetic justice. And I found you at just the right time.”
His father turned away. He was curled over in his moth-eaten sweater, like a hunchback. He’d begun to sob without shame. “I couldn’t,” he muttered, “I couldn’t raise you on Riverside Drive, I couldn’t.”
Gabe felt a surge of pity for this sobbing grey man. “Dad, you had a full scholarship to Harvard, for Christ’s sake. You were Phi Beta Kappa. You crossed Harvard Yard with the ghost of – “
“Henry James. But I was at the bus terminal every other week-end.”
“Why?” Gabe asked, with a burning rage in his eyes. “Why? Was it Sheridan Avenue that you missed?”
“Yes,” Bartholomew said. “You’d never understand. It was the curve of the streets, the smell of the bricks . . . I was close with my mom and dad. He barely made a living. He was a clerk. He’d come home with numbers written on his sleeve. He was always adding and subtracting.”
“And they couldn’t survive without their boy who commuted from Harvard Yard.”
“No,” Bartholomew said, “it was the other way around. I needed the comfort of their faces. I didn’t belong with Henry James.” “Dad, was it a mental breakdown, a kind of terminal homesick-ness?”
“Perhaps,” Bartholomew said, wiping the tears with his knuckles, like some half-wild beast.
“I looked for you,” Gabe said. “I wrote you letters . . . “
“I still have them,” Bart said.
“But you never answered, not once.”
Gabe wasn’t blind to his father’s agony. “I couldn’t bear – to reconnect.”
Gabe shouldn’t have come. Bartholomew had his little cage in Claremont Park, where he’d tinkered around as a boy, beside the soldier with the antiaircraft gun. And Gabe had intruded upon his grounds. But some anger still welled up somewhere from within. He missed this grey man without ever realizing it, that’s how much his mother had covered up Bartholomew’s tracks. And he couldn’t say why, but he pecked the grey man on his forehead, as if he were taking leave of a little boy.

2

It was Thanksgiving, you see, and Gabe was home from New Hampshire. The lobby was festooned with cardboard pumpkins and silken paper meant to look like a host of cranberries. Gabe rode up to the tower in a festive mood. The door to his mother’s penthouse was unlocked. It was the middle of the afternoon, and he realized that Vivian would be in an alcoholic daze, with half a pitcher of vodka martinis sloshing around somewhere in her head. But Viv was perfectly sober. She bore into Gabe with her green eyes like some grand inquisitor. She’d just celebrated her fiftieth birthday, but she looked withered and worn compared to that little grey man in the shed.
“You went to see him, didn’t you? You had poor Morrisy wander around in the Bronx. Did you find your dad’s dollhouse?” “Yes, Mother, I did.”
“Yes, Mother, I did.” Her green eyes lost their color for a moment, and all vitality was bled out of her. She couldn’t function without her vodka fix. And then her composure came back.
“Did he ask about me, that father of yours with his pen name? Bar-tholomew Starr? I’m sure he stole it from Scott Fitzgerald.”
“Then why did you borrow it, Mother? Mrs. Bartholomew Starr.”
“I took from him whatever I could – that bit of elegance. Why not? I had a perfect right . . . You offered him money.”
Gabe nodded his head.
“How much?” she asked
“Five figures, Mom. That’s all you need to know.”
“And he took it.”
“No,” Gabe said.
“Where’s the check?”
Gabe handed her the envelope. She didn’t even look inside. She tore the envelope into bits and pieces with a crazed concentration. “That’s all we need to know,” she said and marched towards her bedroom with an air of triumph.
“Mom, show me where he worked.”
Vivian seemed confused, scattered all of a sudden, like a ventrilo-quist’s dummy with its jaw gone awry. “Worked? What do you mean?
Your father never worked. I supported him.”
“Wrote,” Gabe said. “Where did he write?”
“I can’t remember,” she said with a smirk. “It was so long ago. He deserted us . . . I let him have a shoemaker’s bench. I put it on the radiator. He liked to stand and look at the whip of the water. That’s what he said. The whip of the water. It refreshed him. I had to take care of all the accounts. I threw them on the bed. He’d come in. And we’d make love, on the different piles of paper. That was the best of Bartholomew, the best.”
“Why did you tell him that you were going blind?”
She glared at Gabe. “What do they teach you at Dartmouth? Do you have to talk Mandarin to your own mother?”
“You hired him to read to you – fifty dollars an hour. War and Peace.”
“I had to invent a tale. He was so damn proud. I told him I suffered from word blindness – like Baudelaire. Gabriel, I had to lie. And little by little he moved in. I gave him a closet and filled it with satin shorts. I introduced him to everyone. But he didn’t seem to care. He sat at his cobbler’s bench. He cobbled away.”
“Mom,” Gabe said, “Baudelaire suffered from aphasia – it’s seri-ous. He died of it. And Dad believed you?”
Vivian pursed her lips. “Bartholomew believed what he wanted to believe. But he wouldn’t travel, wouldn’t accompany me on trips abroad – I had accounts in Basel and Berlin. I had to cull them, as my advisors warned me.”
Gabe suddenly stared at his mother’s throat. “What are you wear-ing?”
She covered her throat with a hand. “Oh, that, it’s nothing – your father’s Phi Beta Kappa key. I put it on from time to time. You never noticed. You don’t have his inquisitive mind.”
“And yet his stories are crammed with details about Paris, Basel, Berlin.”
“Oh, he was the clever one,” Vivian said. “He pumped me dry, like a vampire. I had to sit for hours.”
It didn’t matter what his mother said. Gabe seemed to learn less and less about his father, as if every path led to its own mystery.
“Mom, I’m not Baudelaire. I don’t suffer from aphasia . . . I’ve never seen you wear that key.”
“It was a whim,” she said. “Jesus, you spent more time with him than I did when you were little. He took you to Grant’s Tomb. You were inseparable.”
A weird hunger engulfed Gabe. “And still he left.”
Vivian stood there, surrounded by her trophies and antiques – a silk dressing screen that Sarah Bernhardt had once used, a Bible from the Lincoln White House, a quill that might have belonged to Edgar Allan Poe. She had bid for these marvels at various auctions. She had her own lust to acquire.
“I warned him,” she said to Gabe, “that if he dared leave, he would lose us forever. And I meant it.”
“Mom, Mom,” Gabe said, “we lost him.”
“Oh my dear,” she said, fondling the Phi Beta Kappa key on its gold chain, “we lost him long before he left . . . Craft, he called it. He was culling his own language, plucking out all the fat feathers. But, darling, he couldn’t creep out from under that craft of his. He visited with us from time to time, when he wasn’t at his cobbler’s bench. We weren’t real to him. And he wasn’t real. He was . . .”
“Like Gershwin’s ghost.”
She smiled her Cleopatra smile, green eyes widening into their own inescapable world. “Not at all. Gershwin’s ghost brings me pleasure. I can summon him at will. He still lives here, you know.”
“Perhaps that’s why Dad left.”
“Don’t be silly,” she said.
He went through the purgatory of Thanksgiving, had cranberry sauce with his mom and her banker friends. They weren’t friends. They were vassals of some sort, highly-paid serfs. He wouldn’t go back to Claremont Park. He couldn’t unbreak what was broken. He did not exist for his dad. He’d return to Hanover, finish up the semester, get into a work-study program during his Christmas break, and use Riverside Drive as some kind of hub between Manhattan and JFK. Perhaps he’d go to Thailand or Singapore, settle into the business office of a Singapore hospital, try to discover the mechanics of how a hospital sank or survived . . .

3

His dad died a few years later, still without a Wikipedia page. Gabe collected the best of his father’s stories, called them Sightings & Other Tales, had them printed privately, and sold out the first edition. Meanwhile, Gabe went on to Harvard Business School, and soon managed a whole chain of hospitals on the Eastern Seaboard. After his mother died, he invested in the hospitals he managed until he needed his own bankers in Basel and Berlin. He tried to recoup his father’s slippers and the Sony Trinitron, but he was much too late. The house on Sheridan Avenue had been gutted and rebuilt.
And then one day a parcel arrived without a return address. It was held together by bits of string. He tore the parcel apart. Inside were Bartholomew’s battered velvet slippers and a single sentence in a barely legible scrawl. To Gabriel, it said, from Gershwin’s Ghost.
This was his real inheritance. Had his father left the parcel with a friend, a coworker perhaps at Claremont Park? His mother’s blood-hound lawyers couldn’t trace the parcel. And Gabriel didn’t give a damn. He’d settled into a bachelor’s stubborn ways. He had several long-term liaisons with married women, but they all ended badly, with a bit of grief.
He could have made a bundle on his mom’s penthouse. But where else would he go? He kept the trinkets that mattered to her and got rid of the rest. He had the penthouse repainted. He found a Sony Trinitron on eBay and sat it near his bed. It was like inhabiting a world of constant bleeding colors. He padded about in Bartholomew’s slip-pers, went onto the terrace and watched the passing tugboats create crease after crease in the whip and swell of the water. It was as much of a life as Gabe could bear.

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Jerome Charyn is the author of more than fifty works of fiction and nonfiction, includ-ing Ravage & Son (Liveright, 2023); Big Red: A Novel Starring Rita Hayworth and Orson Welles (Liveright, 2022); Sergeant Salinger (Bellevue Literary Press, 2021); Cesare: A Novel of War-Torn Berlin (Bellevue Literary Press, 2020); In the Shadow of King Saul: Essays on Silence and Song (Bellevue Literary Press, 2018); Jerzy: A Novel (Bellevue Literary Press, 2017); and A Loaded Gun: Emily Dickinson for the 21st Century (Bellevue Literary Press, 2016).