Spider monkeys, pizza, pineapple fields, a grandmother’s gift, Romanians, exhumations, wrought iron, martinis, Palm Beach, apparitions, pet cemeteries & a shifting breeze.

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Here’s a story my grandma told me when I was a little boy, long before I lived here in Lake Worth. I don’t remember the context and it seems to me now a strange story to tell a little boy, and so if you are a little boy, maybe you shouldn’t read the rest of this paragraph. Then again, it is just the kind of story that fascinates little boys. Well, little boys like me, anyway. Here goes: Grandma was the oldest girl of thirteen kids, mind you, and her mother, my great-grandmother Anna, died in 1917, when the youngest child was only two years old, leaving Grandma, when she was just nineteen years old herself, to help her father tend to all those kids. She looked after her brothers and sisters until she married my grandpa, Arturo, almost six years later. This is probably why she told my own mom to wait to have kids and why she had only two children herself: my mom and my aunt. But back to the story. After her mother died and was interred in her tomb, one of Grandma’s brothers, or maybe it was one of her uncles, her mother’s brothers, wanted the body exhumed. Perhaps he was not there when Anna died, perhaps there was something to put in the coffin, perhaps he wanted her moved; I don’t recall. Like I said, I was a little boy when Grandma told me this story, and that’s a long time ago. Anyway, when they removed the coffin from the vault, they opened up the lid and her mother’s nose blew away in a gust of wind, right off her face.

That’s it. That’s the story. I’ve never asked anyone else in my family—not my mom or my aunt or my sister or my cousins—if they ever heard this story from Grandma. I recall being not quite sure what to do with the information when Grandma told me, and even now, it seems an odd thing to ask other relatives. “Did Grandma ever tell you about her mother’s nose?” I remember at the time wondering what happened to it: did it land somewhere, did it remain a nose for a while, did it turn to dust straightaway? Did someone find it?

It is a story I rarely think about unless it is Halloween, when suddenly it seems like a perfectly timely story. Perhaps it was Halloween when Grandma told it to me. What you should know, however, is this is not at all a typical story from Assunta DeLuca, my grandma. She was a small, feisty and strong Italian woman who, despite her strength, was scared of things like boats and escalators. She and Grandpa left their little town in Apulia in 1924. It took them 46 years to make their one return trip. And I wonder what is it like to go back to the place that was home for all your life before you left at age twenty-six—the only place you knew for all those years. By the time they returned to Lucera, my grandparents may have felt like ghosts themselves. Familiar places, far removed, changed by time and progress. Anyway, Grandma was not one for tales of the macabre or for ghost stories. And now she, too, is long gone—thirty years ago this year, in fact. So many things I never thought to ask her, and she is vanished with all her stories, save for the ones she shared with us. Which, for better or for worse, for me, and now for you, includes the story of her mother’s nose.

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Great lanterns hang down from pecky cypress ceilings; there are fountains and, every now and then, elaborate ironwork: gates and door knockers with faces that greet you.

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She probably had a closer relationship with death than we do today. Death was a more prominent part of people’s lives back in her time, not as removed. When someone died, the wake was usually right there in the family home. My dad remembered this when his grandma died. Maria Santa was her name; we have but one black-and-white photograph of her. She is an old woman with white hair, sitting in a photographer’s studio, clutching her purse tightly. Dad barely remembered her; she died when he was only ten years old. He did remember, though, that the wake was in their home, and Italian wakes can go on for a few days, usually three. Falling asleep is not easy when you are ten and there is a dead body in the house: this, too, is something Dad remembered.

Halloween, though, and these Days of the Dead that follow it: this is our time each year when we can stare death in the face and laugh at it. It is our time to flirt a bit with what lies beyond the veil, and it has been this way since time immemorial. Summer is gone; we are falling, like the leaves, into winter. Trees are focused now on growth beneath the ground. Animals are burrowing. Life is descending down beneath the earth, and so it is natural that our thoughts and our celebrations go there too. This is Halloween at its core, and this is the Halloween I like to tap into each year in my role as a Halloween traditionalist. Through the pumpkins and the masks, we hold up what is common to all of us, the thing that frightens us through and through, and take from it some of its power. It’s not always easy to do this—this will be our first Halloween and Dia de los Muertos since Dad’s passing—but we do these things and this is good, for part of it, too, is keeping the channels open. Love remains, love triumphs. Love is that bridge across time and space. And if we keep a period of time each year when we tend to that bridge and make that journey, are we not the better for it?

At the gates of Woodlawn Cemetery in our neighboring big city of West Palm Beach, there is an inscription carved into the top of the arch through which we pass as we visit: “That which is so universal as death must be a blessing.” I have wandered this cemetery on Dia de los Muertos in years past, and you may find me wandering there this year too. I like to visit cemeteries, especially on All Souls Day, even if I don’t know a soul there. Perhaps it is that universality, and perhaps it just feels right to do so. I hope when I am dead and gone, someone will wander through the cemetery where I am buried on the Day of the Dead. It was Henry Flagler who founded Woodlawn Cemetery for the city of West Palm Beach, built on seventeen acres of pineapple fields on the west side of Dixie Highway, and there it sits today, across the street now from the ever-expanding Norton Museum of Art, which also holds a few graves of Lake Worth pioneers, folks who had settled along the lake and died and were buried in a small plot on the east side of Dixie Highway and who never would have imagined, I’m sure, that a city would pop up on the quiet land where they slept. And so some of those graves now are below the Norton, beneath a trap door under the stage in the auditorium. They are the graves of pioneers whose steadfast families would not allow the sleep of their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents to be disturbed with a move across the street to Woodlawn, and so there they remain, beneath all the activity, alongside the roots of the old banyan tree that remains steadfast there as well through the museum construction. Who knows, maybe those families had heard stories like my grandma’s. Maybe they were concerned about noses or who knows what else blowing down the highway. Let them rest in peace.

But we all become ghosts, in our way, as we walk through this life, whether we leave behind homelands that we revisit decades later or leave behind paintings we’ve painted that are on display in a museum. We take our stories with us when we go, unless we are so fortunate as to have someone with a listening ear and a good memory (or, in my case, only a fairly decent one), and who will be there years and years later to remind others about us. And that’s not so bad, is it? (Lesson being: Tell your stories.)

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When they removed the coffin from the vault, they opened up the lid and her mother’s nose blew away in a gust of wind, right off her face.

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If you cross the Royal Park Bridge, across the Lake Worth Lagoon, on the opposite shore from Lake Worth and West Palm Beach and from Woodlawn Cemetery, you will find yourself in Palm Beach, a town that is in many ways a whole other world from the workaday world here on the mainland. And though folks have all kinds of interesting reasons to go to Palm Beach, Seth and I, we like to go there for pizza. There’s the regular pizza joint in Lake Worth, right downtown, where we place our standard order for an Eggplant Florentine pie and a large Greek salad to go on an almost weekly basis. But sometimes we get a hankering for the pizza place at Via Mizner in Palm Beach, where we sit in the breezy courtyard, breezy no matter the time of year. The pizza there is really good and the vodka martinis are really cold and some nights, like last night, we were seated at the table directly adjacent to two small gravestones. One sits over the grave of Laddie, a golden retriever, and the other over the grave of Addison Mizner’s beloved pet spider monkey, Johnnie. The grave marker is as fine a tombstone as any human’s. It reads, “JOHNNIE BROWN: THE HUMAN MONKEY. DIED APRIL 30, 1927.”

There are no cemeteries on Palm Beach, but there are these two tombstones. Addison Mizner, he was the great architect who helped Henry Flagler create his vision for Palm Beach and other parts of South Florida, in a distinct Mediterranean Revival style that was the norm here all the way through the great building boom of the 1920s. He built Via Mizner, the building that now holds Pizza al Fresco, in 1923. It’s a lovely old building, or more a collection of connected buildings, charming, imaginative, with many levels: two, three stories in places, with one five-story tower that was Mr. Mizner’s residence. Indeed, numerous mysterious narrow staircases lead up to apartments just like his, while below there are winding paths and courtyards, paths that meander through merchants’ shops. Great lanterns hang down from pecky cypress ceilings; there are fountains and, every now and then, elaborate ironwork: gates and door knockers with faces that greet you. It is a quirky old place, and though the pizza is wonderful, it is the building that really draws us there when we decide to go, and we always take the paths that meander the longest to get there, for this is what the building beckons you to do. And though we’ve lived here a very long time, we’ve never seen the building by light of day; Via Mizner’s charm makes it a place I’ve only ever wanted to see at night. To be there in the daytime would, I fear, rob me of some of its mystery, for to be at Via Mizner at night is to be anywhere: Venice? Seville? Marrakech? The breezy courtyards allow you to drift anywhere you imagine yourself, perhaps even dangling on the edge of the North American continent, with the vast expanse of the Atlantic Ocean only steps away.

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Falling asleep is not easy when you are ten and there is a dead body in the house: this, too, is something Dad remembered.

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Little Johnnie Brown’s grave and that of his golden retriever pal, Laddie, are there beneath the tower where Addison Mizner lived. You certainly won’t even notice them if you’re not sitting right there in the courtyard at Pizza al Fresco at Via Mizner. Our dinner last night was late; it always is, and as we left, the staff were shutting the place down. At the time we leave, it’s typical to see no one at all along the way—maybe just one or two lonely wanderers, if you’re lucky. It is, after all, a quiet town, Palm Beach, a community of great wealth, but typically of the early-to-bed, early-to-rise sort. As the night wears on, all grows quieter and quieter. There are those, however—the sleepless who are out for a walk, or the Romanian workers heading back to their residences on Peruvian Avenue after a night of playing cards—who have wandered about late in the darkness, way past midnight, long after the tardiest patrons of the shops of Via Mizner have retired. As they walk past the shops, past the fountains and the wooden doors, sometimes they hear footsteps and muffled voices, and so it’s no surprise to them to see, just a little ways ahead of them, a tall, heavyset man in a suit and a hat. Which is perhaps odd enough these days, but it is Palm Beach, after all. And if the man in the suit and hat turns toward them, they notice, too, a monkey on his shoulder. The monkey’s tail is long and curling, and it switches back and forth and sometimes up around the man’s head. The man always lifts his hat to them, a gesture of hello, before he turns to ascend one of the narrow staircases, the ones with the iron gates. The gates never open, though; there is never a creaking sound of a hinge that needs oil nor the sound of the gate closing behind him. And when they reach the spot where he was, they say, the man and the monkey are gone, always. The empty staircase lies ahead of them, beautiful colored tiles on all the risers, and separating the space between them and the stairs, the wrought iron gate. Nothing there, nothing at all, nothing they can see. I’ve looked into those gates myself and up those stairs on many a night, and I, too, see nothing, nothing perhaps but a decorative face in the wrought iron, staring back at me with unblinking stillness, as the breeze drifts past, up and down the stairs through the iron gates, the apparent breath of an old building, inhaling, exhaling, into the night.

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John Cutrone is the author of the Convivio Book of Days, a blog focused on the seasonal round of the year and the idea that each day can include at least a bit of ceremony. He is, as well, a letterpress printer and book artist and a partner with Seth Thompson in Convivio Bookworks, their home-based press in Lake Worth, Florida.

Lead image: Steven Lilley