The Brooklyn Collection of the Central Library was one of the few remaining places in the world—or at least in New York City, which to Meg Rhys meant essentially the same thing—where quiet was a priority, where shushing was still de rigueur. This had been Meg’s default joke, when asked what on earth a person studied in Library Sciences school. “I’m majoring in hushing,” she would say, “it’s a lost art.” And then sometimes, if she’d had a cocktail, she’d pull down her cat-eye glasses and wink. The “sexy librarian” trope was something every Information Science scholar had to deal with in one way or another, and it was best to decide your stance early and stick to it, like with giving money to panhandlers on the subway.
Truly it was a lost art, the shushing, the hushing, she was reminded when a caffeine yen lured her from her nun’s cloister of the Brooklyn Collection into the bowels of the library. The Central Library was meant to itself approximate the shape of an open book—a neat architectural trick few of its patrons acknowledged as they waited grumpily for their turns on the public computers—with the atrium serving as its spine. At one end/page of the atrium was the entryway to the Children’s Library; at the other end/page, the glorious Languages and Literature sections; at the other axis lay the Information Commons, which sounded so much more exalted than what it was, less a Library of Alexandria–style chamber of wonders and more a mob of internet portals, in truth, the part of the library that the Bookish Orthodox like Meg wished didn’t need to exist at all. Like many librarians in the city system, despite being devoted to books, Meg had cut her teeth at an underfunded branch deep in a Bengali enclave of Brooklyn, teaching recent immigrants how to Google. She still associated search engines with the smell of curry.
The atrium ceiling soared to the heights of knowledge or at least the second floor, where strung along the balcony hallway like beads on an abacus were the small specific universes of the Brooklyn Collection, History/Biography, Science/Technology, and so on. The result of this secular Pantheon, an unfortunate side effect unforeseen to good old Githens and Keally as they designed the space, was a constant pullulating cacophony. “Shh,” said Meg to no one, “shh.”
Meg had just gotten a coffee from the little cafe tucked in a corner of the atrium when she saw a man cooing at a Don Rickles–faced toddler who did not feel like waiting its turn to check out a stack of Seuss. Meg knew the man, she did, and in a way that made her stomach deflate, only she wasn’t sure why. She’d lived within New York City’s radius for her whole life—formative years on the Upper West Side, college in Fort Greene, adulthood in Park Slope and then Prospect Heights, her escape from the nest imitating the limping, cloistered flight of a partridge—so he could have come from any chapter of her life. It happened frequently that someone lifted the book of Meg and shook the spine, sending pages flying every which way for her to put back in order.
After a minute of feeling ill at the sight of him—handsome, bland, Jewish-y, armored in a well-curated blend of preppiness and hipster- lite—Meg realized he was associated with her sister Kate, dead now over a decade. Oh yeah. He was the ex. Or was it an ex- situation? They had of course never broken up. It was some feminine-sounding name he had, a word full of vowelly air she hadn’t understood until seeing it written down. She couldn’t remember it now, only the breathy way Kate had said it.
“Meg!” he acted happy to see her, which was vaguely repulsive to her, and not just from him—as a rule, anyone who was that happy to see her turned her into a Groucho Marx routine. He had lifted the child now, and it squirmed around looking unpleasant, its nose leaking two honey-like ropes. Aryeh. That was his name. But she wouldn’t say it.
“Hello,” Meg said. She would be pleasant. Or she would be neutral. It wasn’t his fault, none of it was his fault, except that he had the audacity to be standing there before her, breathing air, taking up space, existing all over the place. When someone you loved died, you never quite forgave everything else for being alive.
“I’ve been wondering if I’d run into you! I thought I remembered you worked here. Remy loves the storytime. We’re here all the time. We’ve even learned to come early enough to get a ticket. I’m a stay-at- home dad now, it’s pretty funny.”
Was it? It didn’t seem particularly out of character to Meg, but maybe he had different ideas about himself than what he telegraphed. People were so often mysteries only to themselves.
Meg closed her eyes to center herself. In moments of stress the lobby noise rubbed her raw. It had always struck Meg—particularly when she looked down from the second floor balcony and reflected that the library had begun its life as an ambitious Beaux-Arts palace before the Depression stalled it for a few decades, at which point the half-built ruin had been transformed into something else altogether—that the space wanted to be more elegant than it was. The same could have been said, she supposed, for the entire city. She wished she could have seen that original Beaux-Arts building brimming with people straight out of Edith Wharton, that the bodies shuffling about, near-nude on what was likely the last day of summer, were shaped into corsets and suits, that parasols were involved. Bustles. Hoop skirts. Top hats. Outside there would be horses and dust, sure, a deadly pollen of smallpox bobbing on the breeze, deeply problematic institutionalized racism, yes, a troubling lack of women’s suffrage, definitely, but inside, there would be no sproingy dings of iPhones receiving text messages, no grown men in flip-flops.
Meg knelt so that she was at eye-level with the child, who had been released and now stood knock-kneed, as if poised to escape. “Hello, Remy,” she said. She knew herself to have a rapport with children unique to nonparents; unlike most adults in their lives, she needed nothing from them.
Remy leaned close, pointed at her earrings. Meg tried to remember what earrings she was wearing. “Ah yes, those are called pearls,” she told the child. “Oysters make them, in their guts, at the bot- tom of the sea.” It was, like most things told to children in order to explain the world, mostly a lie. Meg’s were polymer curds made God knew how, probably by exploited women somewhere dreadful, but she had calculated correctly, and the child’s eyes grew wide, and he—Meg decided it was a he because she associated the name Remy with her seventh grade French textbook and a recurring gym-shorts- bedecked character on whom she’d had an aching crush—told her something unintelligible of his own experience of the ocean. Aryeh nodded adoringly.
Meg recalled the secular shiva they’d had at her parents’ apartment, the way he, Aryeh, had come bearing a ruinous casserole, his eyes dry and his boots muddy, the way he’d sat miserably as Mrs. Fishman from 2E accosted him with her favorite memories of Kate, the way her mother had eaten the food to be polite, the way Meg had felt nothing but fury at this oaf compounding their family’s tragedy with charred mushroom cream.
She stood up and smiled crisply. “Where does he get a name like Remy?” she asked. It wasn’t meant to sound accusatory, only to remove from Aryeh’s face the “I’m so sorry” smile. It had been almost ten years. People could stop being all “Oh, I’m so sorry” all the time. She couldn’t, but they could. Meg blew on her coffee. The child was throwing picture books onto the floor now, trying to reclaim Meg’s attention. Meg budgeted three more minutes for this encounter. She wanted the rest of her break for sitting outside in the sun, eyes closed, like a turtle.
“Oh, she—” said Aryeh, and Meg raised her eyebrows in recognition of her error—who could tell anymore! What had happened to gender anyway?—“Her mother is French, and she’s named for her grandfather.” Of course. Out of loyalty, Meg immediately hated the French wife, seeing her in a flash: a humorless cross between Jean Seberg and a mentally stable Emma Bovary, sitting in an office somewhere with a scarf tied chicly about her neck. Nothing next to Kate. A poor replacement, as everything was. And the little family probably lived in an improbably sunny apartment in Park Slope, and sent the child to French-language playgroup, and read Knausgaard in their couples’ book group. Aryeh was still talking. “You look great, Meg, really. It’s so great to see you. How are your parents, how are Nora and Martin? I feel terrible that we’ve fallen out of touch—”
“Oh, don’t. We did that on purpose,” Meg said, but he took it as a joke. She started backing away. She didn’t think she’d be able to stand it if he said The Thing, oh please oh please, she thought, anything but The Thing, and then he said it, a little distracted, as he tracked Remy’s weaving between the café tables of put-upon novelists scowling up from their laptops, “We’ve got to get together sometime.”
Meg put a hand on his arm and said, with the equanimity she’d earned in her most recent half-decade or so of Not Really Giving a Fuck, “No. We really don’t. But I’m here every weekday from nine to five, if you ever need me. Trust me, I know what it’s like. It’s okay if you miss Kate and want to talk or something. It’s fine.”
The name slapped him almost audibly across the face. Kate! He was trying, poor thing, but he didn’t know what to say. No one ever knew what to say, and it was nearly impossible for whatever they did say to be the right thing anyway, so she didn’t actually mind the piscine way he opened and closed his mouth, and to make it easier on him, she smiled—a flashy smile, the one for men—and said, “So nice to see you. Your child is adorable. Enjoy the books.” Then she went to the bathroom to reapply the red lipstick she habitually wore as a shield against the unironic form of spinsterhood, cleaned her cat-eye glasses on a fold of her skirt, and hurried back upstairs, feeling after all too weak for the bustle she was sure to encounter outside.
There was never a bustle in the Brooklyn Collection. There was hardly ever a buzz, merely a murmur. When she walked in, Head Librarian Helen was showing someone how to read the Sanborns, ancient fire insurance maps with onionskin palimpsests of precomputerized record keeping. Meg loved showing people the Sanborns. The know-it-all big sister in her expe- rienced a clean high when telling people how to do things. “Here’s the key,” she’d tell amateur genealogists, “see, here’s how you can tell which buildings were wood-frame.” But she’d wasted time with the modern-cultural-jumble of a family downstairs, and Helen had gotten the guy.
Meg took her coffee to her desk in the back room and placed it on the cat-faced coaster beside the yellowed photograph of herself and Kate as kids at the shore. It was such a clichéd image of summery childhood that it held no sting for her, no more so than if it had been the picture that came in the frame or a still from the flashback scene in a film.
Which was a lie, of course it was. In the aftermath of the Aryeh encounter, she sipped her coffee and stared at the photo until the silence changed in tenor from inert to expectant. Someone had asked something. Was asking.
“Honey? You all right?”
Meg stood too quickly, as if Helen had challenged her to a duel. “Of course! What? Can I help the patron, is that what you asked?”
Helen frowned. “He wants the internet,” she said, shrugging. She always said the word “internet” dubiously, as if it were something that hadn’t proven its place in the universe, like string theory or Pluto.
The patron in question had all the earmarks of being Meg’s favorite kind. She could tell by his demeanor he was pursuing a personal project of some sort. They were the best researchers—guileless, easy to please, hungry for guidance. And he was extremely good-looking, tall and broad-shouldered, with startling, intelligent hazel eyes flashing behind his glasses—which never hurt either. Well, sometimes it did hurt actually, making it difficult to concentrate, making her lean in too closely while pointing out keys or signatures, drawing her attention to her breath. (Did it stink? Was she panting? Would he mistake her untreated low-grade asthma for lechery?)
She glided—she’d had to learn how to move this way, the “creative movement” element of librarianship—over to the patron’s side. “You needed help with the computer?” she asked in her hushiest voice. He startled, despite her gentle approach. He had nervous eyes, for which Meg was thankful; his shifting gaze made it easier for her to stare at him. But she wouldn’t be weird, she would stay focused, she was at work, he needed her help. He had something he needed to get off his chest. He shrugged and said: “The lady thought I could find the lock number on some website . . . ?”
Lock number. Helen tended to rush incomprehensibly through the steps of building research, a task she found beneath her, being a genealogy gal herself. Patrons were left not understanding even what actual words had been said. “Block and lot number, maybe?” Meg supplied. He nodded uncertainly.
Meg gestured to their computer, an outdated box with a poorly calibrated screen. “I’m trying to find out some information about my dad’s house,” he said. He spoke cleanly and precisely, like a scientist or a mathematician, or, she tried not to think, someone on the IT-end of the autism spectrum. She nodded. She knew. “It’s obviously an old house. My dad says it’s been there since at least the thirties. He’s had tenants for a long time, but their leases are all up soon, and the place needs some renovation before we can sell. We just wanted to know— well—a little bit about the history of the place. You know?”
“Sure, of course,” said Meg, summoning the ACRIS database and watching the man out of the corner of her eye. She offered him the computer stool. He genteelly refused, standing at a distance behind her. “And what exactly do you want to know about it? How old it is? If there’s ever been a fire? If additions were added?” Meg prompted, knowing these weren’t right but giving him time to warm up. “Original owners?” She asked for the street address and typed rapidly, her coffee frothing volcanically in her gut, the hot-guy-adrenaline lighting up her synapses. “Here, you can see the basics. Block and lot number, zoning documents. Certificates of Occupancy. This is kind of neat.” She clicked to bring up a crooked scan of the house’s Bill of Sale from 1931 and zoomed in on the scrawled signature. She loved seeing the handwriting, that tangible reminder that behind these records there had been, all along, people, actual alive people, living their stories, never thinking that someday a real estate receipt would be all that remained of them, and yet because of that signature, were somehow still alive.
“Ye-ah. Perhaps. Yes. I think so. I’ve been compiling a list from the Criss-Cross directory of all the residents before he bought it in the seventies.”
Meg smiled. “Ooh, very good. You know what you’re doing, I see.” The man laughed. “Well, I do a lot of research for my work, so I’m used to archives and that kind of thing. The problem here is, well. I guess—I’m not exactly sure what I’m looking for. Stories, really. If anything . . . unusual ever happened here. In the house, I mean.” He rubbed his forehead. “I don’t know. The original owners would be interesting to know. Or . . .” He still hadn’t met Meg’s gaze. “It’s a strange house,” he said finally, as the records with the block and lot number materialized on the screen. “My dad—he’s always had a hard time getting tenants to stay. I always wonder why, you know? It’s a nice old building. Good bones, as they say. Everyone’s supposed to love ‘prewar charm’ right? It’s pre-all the wars.”
Meg smiled. “Bed-Stuy, huh,” she said, squinting at the Google Street View she’d opened in another browser window.
“My parents always called it that, but now people say it’s Crown Heights. I guess even Crown Heights sounds better to folks than Bed-Stuy? Realtors,” said the man, shrugging. Something between them relaxed; real estate angst, the lingua franca of New York. Realtors were always changing the name of a neighborhood to exaggerate a proximity or escape a troubled past, and it was funny unless you were apartment-hunting, in which case, it was confusing at best, infuriating at worst. Meg had grown up—her parents still lived—on a block now called “Prime Upper West Side” and dotted with million dollar properties that had been tenement rentals when she was in elementary school. To this day, she experienced a secret thrill when walking above Eighty-Sixth Street, which had been the absolute don’t-go-there-or- you’ll-immediately-become-a-junkie boundary of her youth. Now the only threat was that she’d spend too much on a kombucha.
“The most recent record I see is a purchase in 1970 by a Harmon Williams,” said Meg.
The man nodded. “That’s my dad. I’m Ellis,” he said, holding out his hand for her to shake. She took it, registering electric shocks up and down her arm, her whole body warmed as if possessed or stricken with a fast-moving and deadly fever. “Meg Rhys,” she said. “Nice to meet you.” Malaria, maybe.
They moved back to the table, and Ellis told Meg about how, after inheriting quite a bit of 1970-dollars, his father had bought the house and lived there briefly in all its bohemian splendor with Ellis’s mother, a politically active nurse. They’d been as committed to the troubled neighborhood as anyone, but once they had Ellis, they struggled with their consciences—sure, they wanted to help “bring the neighborhood up,” but they also wanted their son to go to good schools, to imagine a future for himself defined by college and career and the great privilege of possibility. Harmon had taken a mentor’s advice to divide up the house into apartments—cheaply and not that well, they could now admit—and rented them out for extra income while he and his family moved to an apartment in Park Slope.
He’d tried to be a good landlord, but it wasn’t always easy. The house was spacious by Brooklyn standards. But. The building was unignorably old and drafty, and the floors creaked, and the roof leaked, and the plumbing failed, and a huge public housing project loomed a few blocks away. “Then the riots in ’91. How’s a neighborhood supposed to move past that? My dad always says the city will never forgive Crown Heights for those riots.” Ellis shook his head. “Anyway, now he’s ready to fix it up and sell it. He’s done, you know, ready to move on.”
“I see,” said Meg, chewing on the inside of her lip. Among the greatest benefits of librarian life (healthcare, a pension, the ability to waive late fees) were the masses of stories she got to collect. It was like being a hairdresser, only you didn’t have to touch people. “Well. Let’s start here. Now that we have the block and lot number, you’ll want to check to make sure that the block and lot number hasn’t changed, which we can do with these Sanborn maps we already have out. Did Helen explain how they work? They were meant to be simply fire insurance maps, but it so happens that because they recorded which houses were made of what, they also give us a way of imagining what these neighborhoods looked like.”
She surveyed the maps he had out and scurried off to select the right one for his address, birthing the huge bound volume with the steady hands of a rare documents midwife, and placing it on the table before him. They sat side by side at the large table, and she showed him the key, where to locate the block and lot number. Soon she was running her finger over the house in question.
“That’s funny. It sits at a kind of a weird angle, doesn’t it? Off the grid, a little bit? Well, if you want to find out when the house was actually built and its original owners, you’d look at the land conveyances, but our stacks and the online records don’t go back that far—it’s likely pre- 1900s but has not been landmarked, do I have that right? So it wouldn’t be in the digitized records, which is too bad. You could check out the city directories for the 1800s or visit the DOB.” She was speaking too quickly now, channeling Helen—there was simply too much pleasure to be plumbed from the obedient progression of information—so she stopped and transcribed it for him. “Department of Buildings. Probably first you’ll want to go to the Brooklyn Historical Society, and they should have the land conveyance, which will tell you the name of the first owner. And from there you can check the census listings to find who else was listed in the household. That will include family, servants, boarders, and so on.” Meg paused. She tended to exhaust people quickly. She knew herself well enough by now to accept this.
“Right. Start at the beginning. That makes sense.” Ellis Williams nodded. “It’s an old house,” he said again.
“Right.” Meg pictured the Renaissance Revival brownstones for which Crown Heights was famous, with their crumbled, once-stately stonework and desiccated stained glass panels, the elegance still legible beneath the ruin, lining the avenues like architectural Norma Desmonds. Kate had briefly rented a room in an old Crown Heights mansion: a beautiful building on a terrifying block.
“Funny that you’re looking into all this history now, just as you’re planning to sell it.” Meg tried to make her voice sound casual, sifted through some papers as she spoke. “Did anything in particular spark your interest? Sometimes, when people begin renovations, they find artifacts that make them wonder what their houses have seen, is why I ask.” There was a pause. Meg was about to move to fetch a city directory—which she loved not as much as the fire maps, since they didn’t seem as poetic, but which she still savored for their spidery scripts—when Ellis clamped a hand on her arm and leaned forward. Her arm zipped with electricity. They both looked around, but Helen and Gil had disappeared into the back archives.
Ellis moved his hand away as if embarrassed but kept his eyes fixed on hers. “Is there a way”—he said in a husky near-whisper—“to see if strange things have ever happened? To see if anyone has ever reported . . . strange things?”
The hair on Meg’s neck pricked up, like an improperly stroked cat. “What kind of strange things do you mean, Mr. Williams?” Because no one else was in the room, she leaned close to him, close enough to see dark freckles faintly speckling his nose, and said, “You mean, like, ghosts?”
He blinked. She’d said it aloud. She’d made it real. There was a freighted silence, and then they both laughed nervously and leaned back, as if they’d awkwardly kissed. “Now, I hear how that sounds, Miss—sorry, what was your name again?”
“Rhys. Meg Rhys.”
“That’s a nice name. I like that name. Now Miss Rhys.”
“Meg, please.” Because if they were going to talk about this, they were going to have to be friends, and because Meg had a name that made people feel automatically friendly toward her, its cozy single syllable and indistinct old-fashionedness like invitations to intimacy.
“Meg,” he said. Her name sounded sweet in his voice. “I know it sounds crazy. To be clear, I don’t really believe in the idea myself. It’s the kind of thing my dad talks about, but, well. I’m a science guy myself. Still. I mean, I’ve always wondered why the previous owner—this old lady who had lived there since the thirties—was in such a hurry to unload the building. She sold it to my dad for a song, even by 1970s standards. And since then, well, like I said, strange things have happened in this house. It’s the first floor apartment. Upstairs, there’s been the same lady renting for a long time, and she seems fine. But downstairs. Year after year, the tenants bolt. Sometimes before the lease is up. Who does that? Sometimes they leave half their stuff behind, never even ask about the security deposit—they just want out. A Haitian guy once told me, with a completely straight face, that we had some bad voodoo in that house.” Now that he’d begun saying the things he’d never said, he seemed unable to stop. He leaned forward, went on urgently: “They complain, ‘There’s a cold spot in the middle of my bedroom.’ We check the heat. Nothing. They say, ‘There’s a cat stuck in the walls, I hear it scratching and crying at night.’ We check the walls. Nothing. They tell me their stuff moves around without them, their windows slam open and shut. My dad’s replaced all the windows. No change. He’s getting too old for this shit, you know? And the thing is.” He looked down at his hands now, unable to meet her gaze. “I remember. I remember from spending time there as a kid. It just always had a weird feel to it. A weird, chilly something. Unsettling. Like we weren’t welcome there. Like it wanted us out. My parents always told me I was imagining it, even though I knew they felt it too. But I wonder, you know?”
Meg nodded. “If there’s a ghost.”
“It’s crazy, I know. But I’ve heard crazier, I guess. What if there was a murder or something, years ago, and some restless spirit’s been squatting this whole time? My grandma always talked about spirits, and I swore she was just senile, but I gotta say, I’m beginning to wonder.”
“It’s really not unusual,” Meg said. “We get haunted house questions a lot.”
“My dad.” Ellis sighed. “My dad is ready to be done with the place. He wants to renovate the house and sell it for a cool million. Just move on. He tells me some yuppie couple is going to snatch it up. The neighborhood is changing so fast, he thinks now is the time.”
“He’s probably not wrong. Brooklyn’s infested with millionaires these days. They’re like bedbugs; once they’re there, it’s so hard to get them out.”
Ellis allowed a small smile. “Well, that’d be just fine with me. A million dollars would sure help my parents retire.”
“Definitely, I hear you. So? What’s your hesitation? Then the house would be someone else’s problem.”
“Well, exactly. It would be someone else’s problem. How can we, in good faith, take someone’s money for a house that might be—you know.”
“Haunted.”
“Sure.”
“Now, Mr. Williams, that is unusual.”
“What’s that?”
“Ethics in real estate.”
He smiled again and shrugged. “Maybe you’re right.”
“I usually am. But let’s put that aside for a minute. Maybe we really can find out if something bad happened—or someone died or something—in your house, and you can do with that knowledge what you will.” Her imagination had already sprinted off toward a gloriously vicious murder, blood seeping into a frilly Edwardian gown; a ghost woman floating down a curving staircase, hunting her wayward lover.
Meg moved toward the card catalogue with its typewritten hagiographies of city street names, but at that moment Helen appeared, reminding her that a group of middle school students would be arriving soon. Oh, the students! With their shifty postures and disdain for history, their poster boards and dioramas and accordingly minuscule sense of scale. Meg reluctantly excused herself to pull some noncirculating volumes for the undeserving tweens, and by the time she returned to the table, Ellis Williams was gone.
Oh well. She hoped he found his ghost, or whatever he was really looking for. So it went. She’d get a chapter of a person’s story, they would confess something they’d never told anyone. Later she might see them on the street, and they would double-take but not wave, unable to place her. She was a living, breathing missed connection.
◆
Excerpted from Unseen City by Amy Shearn (Red Hen Press, 2020). Reprinted with permission from the publisher.