Ghost of the Second U. S. Bank
by Martha Turner

Trudy has published other stories, but not the document I’m fingering, thirty-four pages and yellowed with age. Our private tale starts and ends on a rainy weekday evening in March, forty-six years ago, when we were both at Penn.
“Why don’t we?” I say. I stand at the window in our room and peer through the blinds at Chestnut Street, shellacked by rain.
“What?” Trudy answers, without looking up from the papers strewn across her bed. 
“Why don’t we?” I repeat. I don’t feel the need to spell things out. If she looks up, she’ll notice I’m peeping out the window. 
Finally, her gaze meets mine. She says, “O.K. Let’s …” but it’s plain she’d rather stay and finish her paper. 
I reach my closet first and pull on my coat; Trudy follows. Down on the street, it feels like an adventure already, walking to the subway at 34th and Market. I like going places with Trudy when it’s rainy – we both have London Fog trench coats, the only time our wardrobes overlap.
Trudy’s rich, her stuff the best of the best. When she decided she needed a new wallet she went to Caldwell’s, best jewelry store in Philadelphia, and bought an elephant skin wallet. I used to borrow Trudy’s things – her long yellow suede coat, her orange plaid mohair dress, and her forest green velvet slacks – until I realized I got compliments when I wore her clothes, but never with mine.
Even now, so many years after that night, we still don’t look like friends. Expensive describes Trudy. I’m rag-tag, buttons hanging by a thread, beauty school hair cuts.
In case you think I’m calling Trudy rich and she’s just wealthy or moderately well off, I’ll give it to you straight. When her parents died, and she and her brother called in the appraisers to square things with the IRS, Trudy learned that ten million in folk art graced the walls of the family homestead, a gentlemen’s farm in New Jersey. The Christmas after Trudy got married, her parents gave her the house she and her new husband had recently rented. And then there were the stock exchange seats they gave her, a matched set, one on the New York and one on the American.
By unspoken agreement, we get off at City Hall and head south toward Society Hill. This was back in the days when Philly was a ghost town on weekday evenings, living up to its reputation as a three restaurant town. Back then, office workers hopped on the Pennsylvania Railroad at days end and headed for the northern and western suburbs.
With Chestnut Street to ourselves, we make our way toward Eighth, then over to Delancey. Maybe it’s the half-rain that keeps everyone off the streets, but it feel like the city’s inhabitants are sequestered elsewhere, like the city belongs to us.

 Trudy writes – 
Walking down Delancey, I think once about my paper, still not puzzled out, half-strewn across my bed and due tomorrow.
So conscientious and methodical in my work, I have never left a paper half undone. No malaise, no ennui prevents the completion of my papers or jeopardizes the attainment of my A’s. Only this creature before me who doesn’t wash her feet. [She’s referring to me, Murphy.]
For one night Murphy sat in the lounge in a green lace slip, her bare feet propped on a hassock. The soles were black and Renee looked at them with disgust. She said, “Murphy, aren’t you going to wash your feet before you go to bed?”
Murphy fingered the lettuce colored lace upon her breast and said. “They’re so far away from the real me.”
But Murphy takes care of me, feeds my soul, unaware she is doing so most of the time, it being second nature to us, as natural as falling is to rain, to feed each other’s souls. The ones around us don’t understand it, so when Murphy says – about a book, a doorway, or a plate of meat – “I think it’s –” and I say, “Yes,” they will often nudge one another or some such thing. The ones around us don’t seem to catch what this part of us is all about. They think friends are, I don’t know, “People who say let’s meet for lunch on Monday.” We never meet for lunch on Monday. We only meet (coming across the green I’ll suddenly see Murphy; I’ll feel the mixture of joy and shock one feels at seeing someone of one’s own, an extension of oneself, suddenly and strangely independent and free, a separate person who has just come from a room where one has never been, having heard words one hasn’t heard, spoken by people one hasn’t necessarily ever seen; then Murphy will stop looking at the treetops or the clouds or the gothic spires, she’ll interrupt the thoughts that I’m not sharing, as she suddenly sees me) and she says, “Why don’t we –” and then we go have lunch. Others ask me, “Why doesn’t she finish her sentences?”

Tiny droplets of mist expand the glow of the street lamps giving the city an enchanted look. I feel like dancing. I skip ahead then come back to Trudy who’s swinging around a parking meter.
We continue down Delancey Street and I begin to feel Trudy has a destination in mind. Ask or play dumb, I’m thinking, when a man dressed in black rushes toward us, like a missile shot from a narrow alley. I grab Trudy’s arm and stand statue still, afraid to run.
Missing us, the man in black stops, turns, lifts his black fedora and says, “Don’t mind me girls, I always run out of dark alleys.”
I suck in my breath, but he turns again and dashes down the street. Breath returns. We stare at each other, and then relax, smiling.
“Excuse me girls,” Trudy cackles.
“That hat …” I say. Trudy bends over laughing. I follow suit, then straighten up.
“Maybe we’ve been daring enough,” I whisper. “Let’s go back …”
“Murphy, there’s this building I’ve wanted to show you. Not far from here. I’ve been hoping you wouldn’t find it on your own.”
I nod my head O.K., ashamed to admit that now the evening has an eerie feel about it and now I want to go back to the dorm. 
Trudy leads the way. We don’t speak. I listen for other footsteps but hear only the sounds of our flats slapping the wet sidewalk. And traffic noises, far away.

We stand looking up. Strickland’s Greek pediment rises above us, massive. I have told Murphy about Strickland, shown her other buildings other times, but not this one. We climb the shallow steps, delighting in the sensuousness of slender slices of stone. We sit beneath the pediment on the portico floor. Spare and solid Doric columns are all in a line in front of us.
“This is my favorite, Murphy. I’ve sort of saved it. I hoped you wouldn’t, just one day wandering down here by yourself … I hoped you wouldn’t find it and come back to the dorm and tell me, ‘There’s this building that really looks like a Greek temple,’ you would have said.”
She is wandering beside the row of columns, touching them.
“Tonight is the night to show you. There’s this thing about tonight,” I say.
Murphy is running her fingers up and down the flutings.
“It’s like you want to lick them, isn’t it, those flutings? They’re so smooth and concave,” I say.
“You really do know about buildings,” Murphy says.
Then Murphy takes a seat, cross-legged, her back against the flute striped heavy column, looking at the roof of the portico. My brown satchel bag sits on the marble floor, midway between us, alone.

I think about how much I like this building and how Trudy’s the best friend I’ve ever had. And I remember that just a couple of nights ago, talking to Jane in the lounge, I said Trudy was pompous. I want to take it back. In parochial school, I learned that’s called detraction, a sin. I look over at her, but it’s her bag between us that I see, and it seems to have gotten bigger. It’s an Etienne Aigner, probably the biggest, most expensive one they make. It’s brown with lots of brass studs which look like sentries protecting the contents. Anybody with a bag like that would have lots to protect. I look past the bag to Trudy, who looks more vulnerable than her purse. I consider confession.

“There’s something I really – there’s this thing I did …” Murphy says.
I wait. My bag waits. I, waiting, notice my bag. I see that it looms upon the marble floor, a separate thing. There, halfway between Murphy and me, become independent, is a bag, no one’s.
“Last week when you were talking to all those people in the lounge about the new Louis Kahn building and the lines and angles and everything. You sounded so cold, so categorical, so smug, you just made me sort of – I just didn’t even want to look at you for a while.
I sit looking down at my crossed legs, the cold runs along the bottom of my thighs.
“Oh well.” I look blindly at the bag. “I guess I’ve been guilty of pride.”
“But what you just said – the thing about the flutings, the textures. They mean something to you. In a physical way. An emotional way. You’re not all categorical.”
The independent bag seems larger than before, browner, more endowed with bagness.
“I did this really bad thing,” Murphy says. “I told Jane you were all smug and categorical.” 
This is betrayal.
And yet who else would sit and tell you, breathy-voiced and straight.
It’s not betrayal, it’s whim, impulse, as natural as –

Eyes in my lap, I wait to hear if she’ll forgive me. Head still low, I slide a look at Trudy. My eyes stop at her bag, bigger now. Is it floating? Trudy, me and her purse. My eyes return to my lap. I long for forgiveness.

“Do you know what I thought to myself when I was so annoyed with you?” Murphy says.
“What?”
“I thought, well, she’s only a sophomore.” [I was a junior then.]
Now Murphy is laughing.
At her silly mind. At our silly humanity,
Now I am laughing too.
“Murphy, look.” I have seen the bag again, sitting beneath our laughter. “Do you? Do you see?”
We look at the bag, alone on its circle of floor beneath Strickland’s mighty pediment.
“It’s like it can move, like it will slide along or rise up in the air.”  
“It’s …”Murphy says.
“Alive. Look at it.”
“It’s this mystical thing.”
We sit and watch the bag.
It is sentient, not accessory.
It is something we will never be able to tell to anyone.
_____________

I put Trudy’s yellowed manuscript back in its manila folder, but that night still hounds me. Before switching off my computer that evening, I head for Google. I try “ghost purses” and find nothing of value. I try “Greek temple Chestnut St Philadelphia,” and the first listing I find is titled, The Monster of Chestnut Street.
From the article, authored by the Federal Reserve, I learn that Strickland’s Greek temple started life in 1816 as the Second Bank of the United States, a pre-cursor of the Federal Reserve. The article reads, “… Martin Van Buren, who would succeed Jackson as president, visited the White House one day and found his mentor lying on a couch, pale and gasping for breath. ‘The Bank, Mr. Van Buren, is trying to kill me,’ he said in a whisper. Then Jackson grasped his friend’s hand tightly and added, ‘but I will kill it…’” Jackson did, vetoing the Second Bank’s re-authorization bill. 
Searching further, I discover the Bank’s on the Philadelphia Ghost Tour. 
By now, it’s too late to call Trudy, who’s often in bed by nine. Tomorrow, I’ll tell her about my discoveries.
Then maybe we’ll decide to take the Ghost Tour or maybe we’ll meet half-way in Princeton for dinner, at Lahiere’s. Or maybe she’ll come to Philly and we’ll wander along the Wissahickon.
Or maybe I’ll visit her at the farm. I’ll say, “Trude, I really like those candlesticks.”
She’ll say, “Sixteenth century, Dutch,” and I won’t hold it against her.
It doesn’t matter what we do.
With Trudy, I feel alive.