The Last Spirits of Manhattan: A Novel - Hardcover

McDermott, John A

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1668058731 ISBN 13: 9781668058732

Publisher: Atria Books, 2025

Synopsis

Based on a true story, this sparkling and witty novel whisks you to 1956 Manhattan, where famed director Alfred Hitchcock is hosting a star-studded party in an allegedly haunted house…only for the soiree to be interrupted by a ghostly party crasher.

After fleeing her mundane life in the Midwest, Carolyn Banks finds herself in her enigmatic great-aunts’ eerie mansion on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Inside its crumbling façade, suspense director Alfred Hitchcock is throwing a party, gleefully informing his celebrity guests that the venue is supposedly haunted. It all seems like a fun gag, but Carolyn knows that the line between reality and the supernatural is dangerously blurred here.

Soon, the paranormal entities are mingling with guests like Charles Addams and Henry Fonda. As Carolyn grapples with romantic entanglements and ghostly encounters, she discovers long-buried family secrets, challenging her understanding of love, loyalty, and legacy. A striking mix of the haunting and the heartwarming, The Last Spirits of Manhattan is an unputdownable novel about a family reunion unlike any other, set against the bewitching backdrop of 1950s New York City.

About this title

About the Author

John A. McDermott was born and raised in Madison, Wisconsin. He now serves on the board of directors for the Writers' League of Texas and teaches creative writing at Stephen F. Austin State University. Prior to teaching, he worked as an actor, bartender, house painter, and advertising copywriter. He lives in Nacogdoches with his wife and teenage daughter. This is his first novel.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

1

February 11, 1956

WHITE LIGHTS SPARKLED AGAINST the restaurant’s broad windows. Across the harbor, the neighborhoods of Superior, Wisconsin, glowed. If she looked through her reflection to what lay beyond the glass, Carolyn Banks saw long ships in the dark water, ore boats going out to the Great Lakes. Behind the restaurant loomed the hills of Duluth. The Flame had the best view of both cities. Look up and there were the ice-gleaming streets. Look across, there was the frigid lake. Between them was Malcolm, preparing his marriage proposal.

It wasn’t unexpected. Malcolm fondly reminisced about their yearlong courtship as opening argument. He was good at laying things out, but Carolyn found herself listening vaguely, weighing the moment when the house photographer would stroll by to capture her ambivalent mood. The languid notes of the piano in the next room, the candle flickering in the opaque red centerpiece jar, neither made her feel less divided.

Usually when the Flame’s cameraman captured a moment, her older sisters, the twins, Helen and Maud, would laugh and say, “Another toothpaste advertisement!” Carolyn did have a fantastic smile and she dated handsome men. But the twins vetoed boy after boy with extraordinary teeth. “Look at the two of you,” they’d sneered, tossing aside the glossy photo in its thick paper folder. “You’d have monstrous babies.”

Her sisters hadn’t thought anyone was good enough—until Malcolm. Helen and Maud liked him. He was loyal and smart, they were right to point out. That fella’s okay, they chimed. Sure, he had glorious teeth, but it worked. Malcolm looked like Laurence Olivier, and everyone said Carolyn favored Joan Fontaine.

“You make a matching set,” they’d said.

“An imposter pair,” Carolyn countered. “And if we’re playing Rebecca, there has to be a dead wife.”

They laughed. They always laughed. It was a wonderful way to dismiss her. “But he’s one of us,” they insisted.

There it was: Her sisters approved of Malcolm Tower because he fit the family. He had graduated Exeter and then Yale, just like their father and their older brother, Andrew. Malcolm worked at the bank, which their father captained. His job at First National made it cozy. Yet for all their fawning over him, Carolyn waffled. Perhaps that was unwise, but she couldn’t shake her hesitation.

If only her mother were here to tell Carolyn what to do. Her mother, her closest confidante, her sweetest advisor, her best friend, six months dead and forever silent on every matter that confused Carolyn. She would never benefit from her direction or hear her voice again.

And here came the cameraman.

“Smile, lovebirds!” He was older, jovial, a little drunk. An occupational hazard. How else to bear the boredom? This guy had shot every young person in the port cities at least once, twice, maybe more depending on their dating life. Carolyn had half a dozen Flame photos in her scrapbook. This time he lurched before setting the shot and caught himself on the edge of the table, rattling the ice in their cocktails.

“Whoa there,” Malcolm cautioned and slid closer to her, squeaking across the red leather booth, hips touching. He slung one arm around her shoulders and squeezed too tightly. She resisted the fleeting impulse to shake it off, because… why? Malcolm was the real deal, he was. No dead wives in his past, no shadowy children lurking in some forlorn country house. She wasn’t going to do better, and she could have done much, much worse.

Pop! The birth of one more portrait, this one titled Banks in Limbo.

After the war, when the boys came back—except for Andrew, who’d died on Normandy Beach—the twins had gathered handfuls of proposals. Some of those guys would have married any breathing body. Her sisters, far better than merely breathing, had both hitched young. Carolyn was only thirteen on V-E Day, but now at twenty-four, she knew what those fellas wanted: a darling miss; the house with the sugar-scented kitchen; the well-tended children. Safety. Her mother had offered the same a generation earlier (not that it saved her from grief or cancer). Carolyn found her sisters’ beaux from those years too intense, so dedicated to doing well in school, landing a spouse, getting ahead in a career. And here was Malcolm, too young to have been called up for Europe or Japan, and lucky to have missed Korea, but still gung-ho to settle down. He was college-educated, able-bodied, and gainfully employed, dating an intelligent, attractive woman who supposedly loved him. He wouldn’t expect anything but affirmation.

Where did her diffidence come from? Her father would call it dithering. Malcolm was offering her everything her sisters had. Here was security and happiness on a clean and sturdy plate. Take it, her mother might have said, and Andrew, sweet dead Andy, what would he have given for that sort of life?

The strand of electric lights blocking the full view of the lake didn’t feel romantic; they were tired remnants from holidays past. Leftovers. Malcolm had come back to Superior after New Haven and had met Carolyn while she was helping her mother bear the indignities of her last months. The twins, busy with their own small children, had helped, but Carolyn was the most attentive nurse. It was a string of hazy days, of baths and bedpans, pills for her swelling, pills for her pain. Dates with Malcolm were an escape from her mother’s illness. With her mother gone, Carolyn felt elbowed into marrying a boy who treated her well. She couldn’t stay on the market forever, her sisters warned. This time, with this boy, she should say yes.

The bulb flashed again. Malcolm beamed his matinee-idol smile; he could turn the charm off and on at will. She imagined what the photographer saw, their grinning, not-entirely-sober faces. Pretty people in a pretty place by pretty plates. Her mind flashed to her work at Sutter’s, the store where she clerked, here on the Minnesota side of the bridge. Carolyn appreciated the store’s ordered beauty, the delicate bone china in tasteful patterns, the gleaming silverware, or silver plate if you were on a budget. Place settings, wineglasses, water goblets, demitasse cups. It was frivolous and functional and really meant nothing, but everything, at once. Carolyn had worked at the shop in Duluth all through high school and then again after she’d dropped out of the university in Madison. She dealt with nervous brides all the time, all day long. She didn’t relish being one.

And after the vows, she’d probably have to give up her job: Betty, her last single friend from high school, had just gotten married and promptly canned from the phone company because the boss didn’t think married women needed the work. “You’ve got a husband now,” he told her as he handed her the pink slip. “Relax. Let him bring home the bacon. You have a baby.”

Would Mr. Sutter fire her if she went from Carolyn Banks to Carolyn Tower? Worse, Malcolm would expect her to quit. He’d want a wife just like his mother. Just like her sisters. How her aunts, back East—well, great-aunts—had counseled Maud and Helen when they were teenagers and Carolyn, still a child, her mouth full of angel cake, had squirmed at their advice for women of means.

“If you play with pigs,” Great-Aunt Isabella had pronounced in the ornate parlor of her Manhattan home, “you are going to get dirty.”

She’d steadied her gaze at the girls, first the twins, then at little Carolyn, who wasn’t so young as to escape her line of fire. Great-Aunt Mariah sat next to her sister, a mountain of iron-gray hair piled on her head in outdated Victorian fashion, hands folded in her lap. The twins, wearing penny loafers and rolled socks, their legs crossed at the ankles, sat silently, while Carolyn stared at her Mary Janes. Her mother had listened from the threshold of the room. Later Carolyn would admit to her mother she liked getting dirty and her mother had laughed. Years later, Carolyn loved work, the glass display cases, spotless every morning, the gleaming knives on green velvet, the plates and platters, Wedgwood and Spode, delicate and smooth, she loved it all.

Candlelight cast tiny stars on the side of her glass. The trio of whiskey and water and the late hour, amplified by Malcolm’s baritone, made her head wobble. Carolyn was not a wobbly sort.

“So,” Malcolm said, “in summation, gentlewoman of the jury: do you think you—”

Pop! Carolyn thought the man with the camera was back, but the lights went out all around the room. All that remained were dancing wicks on tabletops. Superior burned even brighter across the water.

The maître d’ soothed the crowd—“Stay calm, everyone! No need to get ruffled!”—but no one was panicking. Except for Carolyn, who could anticipate Malcolm’s next sentence without hearing it. Laughter rolled from the kitchen, across the long bar, and Malcolm’s easy chuckle made her feel simultaneously lighter and excruciatingly heavy with awareness of every moment. In the corner of the room, someone inhaled on a cigarette and its orange end flared. Malcolm found her hands again on the tabletop and laid his fingers across hers, poised to finish his thought. She was primed: a deer waiting for the crack of broken twigs that meant danger in the shadows.

Then, in the quiet dark, she heard a voice by her ear, as clear as a radio. Her mother’s voice, hushed but strong, urging, “Go.” Carolyn’s fingers brushed at her hair, grazed her earrings. “Go,” her mother insisted.

Could no one else hear her? She glanced at Malcolm and felt his steady gaze, eyes alight like a cat at night, some trick of the wick and the flame.

A lumbering shadow jostled the table and a man grunted “Excuse me.” Carolyn watched as the photographer stuck out his hand for balance and dipped the cuff of his sleeve over the dancing flame. It caught, a bright blur at his wrist, brilliant in the black room, and before the fire could eat more man or material, she doused it with the remains of her highball, mostly melted ice, a quick flick and a splash. A bitter scent—scorched cloth, burned hair—wafted over the table. The man patted his arm and staggered away with a mumbled thank you, thank you. Then they were sitting in the dark again.

“That was—” Malcolm said, surprised admiration in his tone, “efficient.”

“Thank you,” she answered, still trying to tally the swift jumble of fire and water, stunned by the speed of it all.

“You could have kept him burning,” he snickered. “A light in the dark.” Carolyn winced, but Malcolm couldn’t see that. He plowed on. “So, I was interrupted.”

“Wait,” she blurted, sitting up straighter. Never meet a challenge with poor posture, her mother always said. “I have to go somewhere.”

Malcolm swiveled to take stock of the restaurant. “Can you find the ladies’ room without light?”

“No,” she said, “not that.”

“Then what do you mean?” His voice grew firm.

What did go mean? Carolyn had heard her mother in the dark, but that wasn’t possible. Where? she wanted to ask. Go where? And she felt a gentle brush on her cheek, a kindness. “New York,” she said, testing the words. She nodded. “Yes, New York.” Carolyn was surprisingly certain that was what her mother meant. But where did that certainty come from? She had no clue. And now that she’d said it, she felt adrift again.

“What?” His tone was confused and angry.

She wasn’t surprised by that. She was more concerned with feeling her way along the conversation from here, her hands patting a damp cave wall. Where was she going with this? “I need to go to New York.”

“That was sudden.” His expression shifted in the shadows, difficult to read, but she knew he wasn’t smiling.

“Yes, I suppose so,” she agreed. He wasn’t wrong.

“And you’ll come back when, exactly?”

“Soon,” she said. “Sooner rather—”

“Than later,” he finished. “I was going to ask you something important.” He tapped a cigarette from his familiar pack of Pall Malls.

“I know.” She flinched. “I mean, I’m pretty sure.”

Malcolm raised his lighter and it sparked with a metallic click. He took a drag, held it, then let the smoke drift from his slightly parted lips. She looked away and imagined his initials engraved on the lighter, MAT, behind his firm grip, a memory of other evenings. “But are you sure you know what I was going to say?” His voice was edged with amusement.

“I think so,” she said. She kept her spine straight. “Yes, I do know what you were going to say.”

Malcolm laughed. Then she joined him. They were the only table laughing.

“I need a little time,” she offered weakly. Carolyn wondered why she couldn’t simply say yes, why she couldn’t say yes and they’d get it over with and everyone would be happy and her life would move forward. That was a sort of Go, Go, wasn’t it? Perhaps she was imagining her mother’s resistance. Maybe it was her own convenient hallucination.

“I can wait,” he said. She sensed a flicker of something hard dart across his eyes. “But not forever.”

“Thank you,” she said, though she doubted that was the proper response. “Thank you, Malcolm.”

“I want to offer the right thing at the right time.” He glanced out to the icy lake. “And I want you to respond in the way I want for the right reasons.”

There was commotion across the building and electric lights burst on all over, to strangers’ cheers and a neighboring couple’s surprised “Oh!” There was the gleaming lighter and their glasses of melting ice. There was the wet tablecloth and the soggy wick on the white candle in the red jar, water pooling on the wax. Carolyn looked at Malcolm, his attention on the glittering windows. Her mother’s voice seemed a phantasm, a trick of the air. No. She wanted to believe what she’d heard and still, it left her so unsure of what was next, sitting on the shoreline, waiting for a recognizable horizon to come into view.

Edition details

• Publisher: Atria Books
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1668058731
• ISBN 13: 9781668058732
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 336