Ghost Stories - James’ Story

In Henry James' version, an unnamed narrator discovers she has two good friends who’ve had the 
same experience—a woman whose father came to her in a gallery in Italy as he was dying in New 
York, and a man whose mother showed up in his rooms in Cambridge just after she'd died. 
Determined that her two similarly-gifted friends should meet, she makes numerous plans, but 
oddly, something always comes up to thwart them. Finally, after she has become engaged to the 
male friend, our narrator decides that she really must arrange this meeting, so she fixes up 
something so simple that it cannot fail. However, at the last minute, she finally gets it: these two 
are destined to fall in love—there's really no other possibility—and so she herself, and through 
subterfuge, prevents this last attempt. Last because, by sheer coincidence, her female friend dies 
that night. In the morning, overcome with guilt and remorse, the woman tells her lover what she 
has done, but he declares, “That’s not possible! She came to my rooms just before midnight!” The 
woman insists that it must have been her ghost, while the man insists that she was alive. They 
finally agree to disagree and get on with their lives. Except that the woman notices a change in 
him, and one week before their wedding, gently declares that she knows that he has been keeping 
up a liaison with her dead friend ever since that fatal night, and though he denies it, he doesn’t do 
so very vigorously, and allows her to break off their engagement. 

Needless to say, neither ever marries. 

And as it so often is with James, we are never sure if the ghost occurred, or if the woman was not 
simply eaten up by a jealousy engendered by her guilt, or, much more likely, by a different 
jealousy, a jealousy for that other world, which her obsession with that detail of her friends' lives 
tells us she preferred to her friends all along. 

James' version is unusual, too, in that it is the only ghost story I know in which a ghost is genetic, 
a kind of corner-of-the-eye that just can't stop in time       and heard the other arrive        though way 
across town                     or felt a line drawn taught                         and could not respond

although a light comes on             all on its own            every day at just that time             time,
they say, is stone. I once had a heart           made of string                and hung myself, my love