James's Story.
In Henry James's 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 just as he was dying
in New York and a man whose mother showed up in his rooms
in Cambridge after she died.
Determined that her two similarly gifted friends should
meet, she makes numerous plans.
But oddly, something always comes to thwart them.
Finally, after she's 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 did,
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 the wedding gently
declares that she knows that he's
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 is so often with James,
were 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's 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, taut, and could not respond.
Although a light comes on all on its own, every day,
it just that time, time, they said, is stone.
I once had a heart made of string
and hung myself, my love.