Living with Ghosts

By Oliver Broudy

At dusk on a spring night severalyears ago a stranger arrived at my door. He was old and uncertain, watery-eyed and paper-skinned, his clothes ill-fitting. How he arrived there was a mystery. No car was parked behind him on the street. But on learning who he was, my wife and I immediately invited him in, understanding at once the anguish and complexity of his visit.

He was the man whose house we had recently bought, and whom (thanks to the absurd pretensions of real estate) we had never actually met. He was therefore a very special kind of stranger, one with whom we shared a very intimate bond yet knew absolutely nothing about. Except of course that we had taken something precious from him. And that he had for some reason returned.

I had been present when age and Alzheimer’s compelled my grandparents to move out of their house. I know therefore the bewildered woe of that moment. So with a kind of surprised guilt we welcomed our visitor, perversely offering the hospitality of his own house back to him. He wandered through the altered rooms in a daze, pausing at a window to note the uprooted rhododendrons. We followed behind offering meager explanations and, when those failed, tea.

Urgently we hoped that he would find some sense of continuity in the living spirit now in residence, and by what means we could we sought to bring this spirit to his attention, showing where the children played and how we had changed the basement to accommodate guests.

He declined the tea and departed with a murmur. I’m not sure that he even noticed us, or heard anything that we said. His mind was full of things we could not see.

A moment after he left I realized I should have offered to call a cab, but when I returned to the door he had already vanished. Had someone been waiting, just beyond the streetlight? Or was he a kind of haunting, a disheveled revenant risen from the cemetery down the street?

In the years since, this man, the previous owner of my house—although this title seems radically insufficient for him—has remained somewhere in the back of my mind, a ghostly presence I have never quite figured out how to resolve.

Recently, however, I received another visit. I first noticed them through a window, loitering on the street, and I immediately grew vigilant, wondering what piece of hideous salesmanship I would need to rebuff at the door. (My wife has vetoed putting up a kindly worded “no soliciting” sign but somehow she is never around when visitors call.)

As it turned out, it was a woman in her late 40s, accompanied by two teens, a boy and a girl. The woman was hunched with friendly, effusive apologies, but while her words were directed at me her gaze went over my shoulder. She had grown up here. She was in the area because her father had died and she wanted to show her old home to her daughter and her nephew.

They, the teens, were awkward in a way that was familiar to me, muddling through another contrived adult scenario as best they could. About their awkwardness there wasn’t much that I, or anyone, could do. But the woman at least I could invite in, feeling less guilty this time, but still strangely under the impression that it was my obligation to demonstrate that I was worthy. That she had reason to feel good—to the extent that one could—about the passing of her old home into new hands.

The woman, nervous, rode through the visit on a cushion of chatter and departed much the same way, jestingly telling her nephew that he mustn’t mention the visit to his father, because he (the father) had sworn to never return.

Several weeks later I received an email from this latest visitor containing a clipping of the first visitor’s obituary, which after seven years of wondering I read avidly.

He was born in Leipzig in 1933. His family escaped Nazi Germany and arrived in the U.S. two years later. Due to a clerical error his high school transcript registered a 4.0 GPA and he was accepted to Yale. On graduating, he went on to med school at Columbia, studying tropical medicine for several months in Surinam. There he learned the local language and was later hired by Alcoa to teach it to their engineers. In doing so, the obit noted, it became apparent to him that the local laborers were greatly underpaid, so he decided to help them unionize. For this he was expelled from the country.

Later, during his medical residency, he was institutionalized for several months in a psychiatric hospital; the obit did not say why. While there he started an inmates’ newsletter and agitated for patient rights. After med school he moved with his wife (recently wed) to a coal mining town in Kentucky, because he wanted to practice medicine where he could make a real difference. A few years later he and his wife returned to New York so she could finish her thesis on French literature. He got a job at a community health center in the South Bronx, where he helped develop a new model of care that involved training community members to become health care workers.

His name, by the way, was Tom. Tom and his wife left New York in 1977—much as my wife and I did three decades later—presumably to raise their children. In the decades that followed, Tom focused on treating asthma, eventually writing a patient-friendly book on the subject that sold more than two million copies. He was always politically active, hosting phone banks and advocating for various causes. Around seven years ago he sold the house he had lived in for 35 years and moved with his wife to, I assume, a care facility. Three years later his wife died. Four years after that he did too.

I looked up from this new information with an eerie sense of recognition, as if I were reading not Tom’s obituary but my own. I’ve always thought it rather random that I should occupy one particular moment in time as opposed to any other, and in this instance it fleetingly seemed as if whatever power kept me headlocked in the current one had momentarily deflexed.

Was Tom, even then, when he arrived on my doorstep, wondering how it all could have been, and how it all could so easily vanish? Is there a way to live your life such that these questions are comfortably resolved before the need to exit arrives?

The obit mentioned that Tom had kept a blog, and that stories of his life as a doctor in Kentucky could be found there. The stories, it turned out, were engagingly written, with a wry humor. There was one about a boy who came in with blue hands. After some moments of pondering Tom eventually deduced that the color was due not to bad circulation but a new jean jacket.

I read on, fascinated, yet with growing ambivalence. Perhaps it really was better to abide by the usual pretense, that an exchange of property should be transacted immaculately, like an adoption. After all, the less you know about your home’s previous owners, the easier it is to pretend that it is uniquely your own. It is a particular privilege to believe that your house was built for you alone—much as children believe the same of the world itself. With adulthood we scrap that illusion, of course, but it is comforting to hoard some vestige of it.

Besides, what if the previous owner turned out to be unpleasant? What if, instead of documenting medical work in Kentucky his blog tracked the strip malls he built in Illinois? Or the forests he slashed in Brazil? I already labor mightily to vanquish the memory of the contractor who built my bathroom. I do not have energy to spare.

Most people, thankfully, are not like my bathroom contractor. They may not be saints, but by and large they live lives filled with struggles not unlike our own. The struggle to succeed, to be happy, to love well, to be good people.

And there is, besides, something kind of empty and impersonal about a house devoid of history. At least to a native New Englander. If history burdens you the thing to do is move to California and buy a big empty house that speaks to you of possibility. As New Englanders we are uncomfortable with emptiness. We are more comfortable with clutter. It gives us something to do. We are a rather fussy people after all, preoccupied with the size of things and how much can be fit inside them: closets, Tupperware containers, lifetimes.

Anyway, I rather like Tom—his sensitive mind and dry wit, his commitment to good causes. I live with his ghost, now. He is respectful, quiet, allowing himself to comment only rarely. Make the most of the day, he says. Only that, and I’ll forgive you for the rhododendrons.