“Like The Turn of the Screw?” asked Michelle. She had lit a cigarette and now exhaled smoke from her narrow nostrils. When she’d asked earlier if she could smoke after dinner, he’d said “No problem,” but he was surprised that she still smoked. Now he was surprised that she knew about The Turn of the Screw. Quit making assumptions about people, he warned himself. He heard Anne’s voice saying that, since she had suggested that to him hundreds of times during their marriage.

“Not quite like The Turn of the Screw,” he said, “but subtle in the same way.” Subtle. “Sometimes it’s necessary for something to be subtle to be truly beautiful.”

Michelle batted ashes into the small bowl she’d brought out to use as an ashtray. She waited.

“In ‘The Jolly Corner,’ “continued Dale, “James has one of his typically Jamesian protagonists—a fifty-six-year-old guy named Spencer Brydon—return to New York and the States after decades spent in Europe. Brydon’s coming back to check on some property of his, including a tall old home in Manhattan where he grew up. . .”

“A place his family called The Jolly Corner,” guessed Michelle.

“Right. Anyway, the house is empty—no furniture—but in the story, Brydon becomes obsessed with it, returning night after night to climb the stairways and wander through the empty rooms in the dark, carrying only a small lantern or a candle. . . searching for something. . . for someone. . .”

“A ghost,” said Michelle.

“A Jamesian ghost,” agreed Dale. “Actually, Spencer Brydon is convinced that The Jolly Corner is haunted by the ghost of his alternate self.”

“Alternate self?” Michelle’s eyes were very green in the dying candlelight.

Dale shrugged. The cigarette smoke made him want a cigarette, although he had not smoked in more than twenty-five years. “The person he could and would have been if he had stayed in the United States,” he said. “If he had pursued money rather than the finer things of life he found in Europe.”

“Whoo,” Michelle said sarcastically. “Sounds scary. Real Stephen King territory.”

“Actually, it is sort of scary,” said Dale, trying to remember whether Clare had been in any of his graduate classes where he discussed “The Jolly Corner.” He thought not. “When he finally confronts the ghost of his alternate self,” he went on, “the apparition is pretty awful—brutal, missing fingers, a sort of Mr. Hyde to Spencer Brydon’s sophisticated Dr. Jekyll.” Dale closed his eyes for a second, trying to remember James’s phrasing. “‘Rigid and conscious, spectral yet human, a man of his own substance and stature waited there to measure himself with his power to dismay.’ “

“Cool,” said Michelle. “You have a good memory.”

Dale shook his head. “I just emphasize the same phrase over the years of teaching the story. . . over the decades of teaching the story.” He frowned. “Anyway—not much more to the tale. Spencer Brydon confronts the ghost of himself in the middle of the night and. . .”

“Dies?”

“Faints,” said Dale. He smiled. “This is a Jamesian hero, after all.”

“That’s how the story ends?” said Michelle, stubbing out her cigarette and looking dubious, a producer who had not especially liked a screenwriter’s pitch. “He faints? That’s it?”

Dale rubbed his chin. “Not quite. You get the idea that Spencer Brydon might have died—he’s unconscious for hours—except for the fact that his older lady friend, Alice Staverton, I think her name is, had come to the house with premonitions of danger for him. She gets the housekeeper—Mrs. Maloney or Mrs. Muldoon or some such—to let her in, and Brydon comes to with his head on Alice’s lap. His head pillowed, I think James puts it, ‘in extraordinary softness and faintly refreshing fragrance.’ “

“Sexy,” said Michelle.

Dale actually blushed. “I don’t think he. . . I mean, not deliberately. . . anyway, you get the idea in the end that he’s been saved from his alternate self by the love of a good woman. . .”

Michelle snorted politely. “The love of a good woman,” she said softly. “That’s a phrase I haven’t heard for a while.”

Dale nodded, still blushing like an idiot. “So it ends with Alice Staverton saying to Brydon, ‘And he isn’t—no he isn’t—you,’ or something like that, and hugging Brydon to her breast.” Dale quit, feeling sorry that he had brought the whole thing up.

Michelle smiled again and looked toward the ceiling. “So that’s what we’re going to find up there? Our alternate selves? Who we would have been if we’d both stayed in Elm Haven?”

“Scary thought, isn’t it?” said Dale, returning her smile.

“Terrifying,” agreed Michelle. She stood, reached into the purse she’d hung from the back of her chair, and removed a box opener. She thumbed a catch that slid a razor blade out of the end of the thing. “I came prepared.”

“Is that to fight off the ghosts?” said Dale, rising with her.

“No, stupid. It’s to cut through the plastic.”

FOURTEEN

I COULDN’T have told Dale what was waiting for him upstairs. I didn’t know. The Old Man had sealed off the second floor when I was three years old—not long after my mother died—and I had no memory of ever being up there. It may seem weird to have spent eight years in a house with the second floor sealed off behind plastic, but it didn’t seem that strange at the time. The Old Man was a fanatic for saving money, and I knew that it cost too much to heat the whole house for just the two of us. Also, on the second floor was their bedroom—the Old Man’s and my mother’s—and I understood early on that he hadn’t wanted to sleep up there after she died. Not that she died in the room. She died in the hospital at Oak Hill. At any rate, sleeping space was no problem as I got older—as old as I got—since the Old Man slept in his study and I began sleeping in the basement even before I went off to kindergarten.

As for calling the farm The Jolly Corner, well, that was just a conceit of mine after I’d read the James story when I was about seven. Essentially, I just liked the sound of the name. It’s true that the farm was anything but jolly with the Old Man on his regular drunken binges—he got angry when he drank—and both of us living our mostly silent and separate lives there. If there were any “alternative selves” haunting the house then, they belonged to the Old Man. My father had been intelligent enough, but he lacked that human gene that allows people to finish things. He’d dropped out of Harvard before World War II for no reason that he ever explained to me, and even with the GI Bill, he’d never gotten around to returning to school. His brother, my uncle Art, had not only graduated from college but had taught on the university level for a while. In a real sense, my uncle Art was the Jolly Corner-ish alternate-self ghost that the Old Man had to confront—Uncle Art had avoided the booze, written books, taught, traveled, married frequently, and basically just enjoyed himself through his life. Perhaps the Old Man lacked this enjoyment gene as well.

This Jolly Corner-ish idea of who he had become and what he had lost along the way had been buzzing through Dale Stewart’s brain for months. In writing his novel about the kids of Elm Haven in the summer of 1960, Dale had been staring unblinkingly at an innocence and breadth of potential that might have remained better off forgotten.

Potential, Dale had decided, was precisely the sort of curse that the Peanuts character Linus had once said it was. It was a burden before it was realized, and a constant specter after it had been failed to be realized. And every day, every hour, every small decision made, eliminated the remaining set of potential until—in what post-fifty Dale considered his last home stretch of life—that potential was fast dwindling toward zero.