Cole Swensen
Ghost Stories - James’ Story
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