The Ghosts in the Layers?

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HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: It's tempting, isn't it? To think of who has been the same places you've been, in the past, and waaaaay in the past? It crosses my mind whenever I walk on Boston Common, or go to Lexington and Concord,  or stroll down the street in Salem. You cannot tell me the present is all that's--present.

Our dear friend of the Reds Jeannette DeBeauvoir has been thinking just the same thing. 

The Ghosts in the Layers
By Jeannette deBeauvoir

I walk down Commercial Street—which here in Provincetown is our Main Street—and I think about what I’m seeing. I pass Lewis Brothers’ Ice Cream, and smile at the memory of my stepdaughter working there when she still lived with me. 

I stop in to East End Books for a lively conversation with my friend Jeff. I might go to the Portuguese Bakery for a decadent pastry—bittersweet memories, those, of breakfasts with my ex-husband. I have to go see Chomo at her Himalayan shop and find out what’s on sale. I’ll check out what Nan or Deborah put in the window at the venerable Provincetown Bookshop. If it’s a nice day, I might treat myself to a Bulgarian salad that I’ll take out on the pier and eat while watching the harbor. I’ll end up at the post office and have at least two conversations and three dog-petting sessions there. As I walk, I say hello to a lot of people; those of us who live year-round in this tourist destination pretty much know each other, at least by sight. 

And as I do all this, I realize that what I’m seeing is just a small slice of this street. I’m seeing what’s relevant to my life.

Which means I’m missing rather a lot.

I’ve talked a lot about the importance, to me, of using place when writing fiction, of populating one’s books with real shops and restaurants and streets and people. But it’s only recently that I’ve begun to think about the layers that exist everywhere, layers certain people see and others don’t. 

Commercial Street also has smoke shops, leather shops, bars, clothing stores, sex shops, antiques and home décor… I know they’re there, but they don’t really register. I don’t have a reason to go in, or a memory to attach to them. And what that means is readers of my Provincetown mystery series aren’t really experiencing Provincetown, are they? They’re experiencing my experience of Provincetown, and everybody’s mileage varies.

When I start thinking like that, I feel my head might explode.

To complicate things even more, there are ghosts that live in those layers, faces and voices and memories of people and things that are no more. I already mentioned two of my own: the ghost of my former marriage, the ghost of my stepdaughter handing out ice cream cones. There’s the memory of the old gatehouse at the Murchison estate, now replaced by something modern and forgettable; the real soda/malt shop with a long shiny counter that used to be part of Adams’ Drugstore; the horse farm over on Nelson that’s now condos.

Provincetown has more than its share of real ghosts, too, as we remember a time when men came here to die of an alienating plague; back then, there was a new funeral every week. Or we can listen to the wind that whispers over the dunes, reminding us of all the shipwrecked victims who died on our shores when the Cape was still the Atlantic’s favorite graveyard. 

Marc Cohn might have seen the ghost of Elvis when he was walking in Memphis; I strive to see the ghosts of my literary predecessors here, of Edna St. Vincent Millay scratching away in a cold attic room, of Eugene O’Neill staging plays on Lewis Wharf, Tennessee Williams at the Little Bar of the Atlantic House, Norman Mailer roaringly drunk and brawling with fishermen, John Dos Passos decrying war in three volumes of work. I don’t even expect most people are looking for the same ghosts as I am!

These thoughts could rapidly become paralyzing, as you can well imagine.

Of course, realistically, my perspective is valid. It’s the perspective I’ve given to my protagonist, Sydney Riley, who is actually quite a lot like me in ways both comfortable and distressing. But I also wonder if I have a responsibility toward those other layers, those other ghosts. Am I being honest in not including them? Yet how can I access things I don’t know about?

I don’t know the answer to those questions. Do you?

The one thing I know I can do is keep some of it alive. Honor some of the people who lived and died here and whose lives were so meaningful to the town. Ellie, the transgender woman who used to—at age 78—belt out Frank Sinatra in front of town hall.

 Richard Olson, the historian, who for decades sat at the bar at Napi’s and dispensed amazing wisdom. Tim McCarthy, activist, who was never without his video camera, documenting life. Names that in another ten years will have disappeared from memory, because they weren’t famous anywhere but here. But they were part of here, and so in my latest mystery, A Killer Carnival, Ellie is remembered; it’ll be Richard’s turn for my November release, The Christmas Corpses. And perhaps someone will pick up the book and muse, “yeah, right, I remember Richard! Gosh, I’d forgotten all about him.”

And maybe somewhere Richard will be smiling.

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: I'm sure that's true! And lovely to think about. And yes, we can honor them through our writing ,and our reading, as well. 

I know we've talked about "ghosts" before. But even if you haven't encountered them personally, where are places you've gone where you think they might still be?

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Jeannette de Beauvoir writes mysteries and historical fiction, sometimes intersecting the two. A Killer Carnival, Book Four of the Sydney Riley Provincetown mystery series, is just out, as Ptown’s Carnival parade starts with a bang—literally. More about her at jeannettedebeauvoir.com.

(PS from Jeannette: Just as a postscript, as I was writing this article, Atlas Obscura popped up in my inbox inviting readers to share a real place they’d discovered through a work of fiction. Timing is everything! You can see them all here.)