***

Barney led the ghosts out onto the terrace. Mother gave a polite gasp at the view of the Hotel Pierre, rising to the right of the General Motors building. Two pigeons flew up from the floor of the cedar decking. The terrace was splendid on this June morning; the ivy on its fence glistened in the bright sun; its scarlet geraniums glowed.

“You certainly have a lovely apartment, Barney,” Mother said. As usual her voice held back somehow in the praise. There was a “Yes, but…” in it, if only by inflection.

For years he had ignored the way Mother gave with her words and took away with her voice. But now he said, “What’s wrong with it, Mother?”

Daddy was seating himself carefully in one of the lava gray deck chairs, as though, even dead, he had to protect himself from exertion.

Mother looked shocked, then reproachful. “I didn’t say there was anything wrong, Barney…”

Anger hit him suddenly and unexpectedly. “Damn it, Mother!” he said, astonished at the strength in his voice. “I heard the way you said it.”

She looked powerless but she came back instantly. “I wish you wouldn’t use that kind of language, Barney. I know that times have changed since we passed on, but your father…”

“Fuck my father,” Barney said. “It’s you I’m talking to, Mother.”

At the word “fuck” his mother gasped and fluttered her hand over her heart. For a moment she became Blanche DuBois, raped by Stanley Kowalski.

Barney glanced toward Daddy and saw his face frozen in pain. “I’m sorry, Mother,” he said. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

Mother’s relief was immediate. She became Lady Bountiful at once. “Oh, I suppose people talk that way all the time now,” she said, as if her absence from the living had produced the degeneration in standards she had always expected it would. “It’s just that we’re not used to it is all.”

He was wondering how she could know how people talked nowadays when she said, “Some things do come through to us, you know. Not a whole lot.”

“Where are you when you’re not here?” he asked. “Is it Purgatory?”

“Oh, no,” she said. “It’s not Purgatory. Your father and I don’t even know if there is a Purgatory. We’re in a quiet place,” she said, with the old hint of a whine in her voice, as if she were trying to tell him something too painful for words. That he didn’t write to her often enough?

He had shown them the whole apartment now, in the ten minutes since he had prayed to see them and they had, surprisingly, stepped out of the elevator. He had had no idea such things were possible, yet accepted it easily enough. There had been a lot of new and surprising things in his life lately and this was another of them.

He had only lived in the apartment six weeks, here on the Upper East Side between Fifth and Madison, with skylights and high ceilings and marble fireplaces. A year before he had been living in an old house near a small Ohio town, wishing he were dead. Now he had an $1,800-a-month apartment, was a slim fifty-one years old, had grown a beard. The folk art paintings on his walls alone had cost more than his annual salary as a professor. The apartment was the top floor of what had once been a millionaire’s mansion. Barney had made the money by writing a book about viruses that had, wildly, become a best seller for thirty-seven months. Two Nobel laureates had pronounced it the best work on the subject ever written.