The Ghost at the Table: A Novel Read online

  I still wasn’t ready to face Frances and my father, so I drove aimlessly around for a while longer, then pulled into the parking lot at the Old North Bridge and got out to have a look at the Minute Man statue. He is very good-looking, the Minute Man, in a noble, guileless, slightly numbskull way. I read somewhere that Daniel Chester French used a local gardener as his model, then fell in love with him. Unrequited. Though at least French had his statue to admire whenever he wanted and someone bronzed and attractive to gaze permanently back at him.

  Finally I walked across the bridge (not the original Old North Bridge but a copy that is now itself old and historic) and sat down on a bench overlooking an empty field full of frozen ruts.

  The field reminded me of a vacant stretch of land across the street from our house in West Hartford. An abandoned potato field that bordered a stream, left over from the days when Stone Ridge Farms, as our development was called, had actually been a farm. Neighborhood children used it mostly for warfare; it was where we poked each other with sticks and pulled down each others’ pants, shrieking with rage and excitement, pelting each other with mud. During one of these battles, someone unearthed a scatter of rust-colored bones by the old stonewall: a femur, some ribs. Most likely the remains of an animal, but rumors quickly spread that a child had been buried in the potato field, then later that several little skeletons had been found. Soon the field became known as the Bloody Lot. Screams were imagined, then heard, and piteous weeping. The piteous weeping was especially audible during loud thunderstorms. Dogs began to bark. Everyone heard it then.

  One summer evening I was playing with a small band of children in the field when we dug up some sort of tubers at the far end, maybe they were potatoes—knobby, thin, yellow potatoes. We decided to roast them on sticks over a little fire made of twigs and kindled with someone’s father’s silver butane lighter. When we ate them they tasted of dirt. Bloody dirt. A few of them fell into the fire and had to be clawed out with sticks. We ate the potatoes ravenously, even the charred ones, rushing out into the arterial dark to dig up more, out in the dark where treacherous ruts could make a child fall and twist her ankle and be left maimed and helpless, prey to escaped convicts and child murderers, until dawn broke, when a search party of parents would find her, asleep and filthy, probably violated, covered with dew. But no one fell. No one called us in to go to bed, either, though it was late.

  “Bloody Lot!” we shrieked, capering around the fire, thrusting our sticks into the air. “We have conquered the Bloody Lot!”

  Eventually parents did come out to call their children. They stood on the edge of the field swinging flashlights, calling indulgently at first, then more urgently, in some cases angrily—noticing the embers from our fire—until all the children were gone. Except me. No one came to call for me, not even Mrs. Jordan, and in the end I ran across the dark muddy field by myself. When I opened the front door, out of breath, dirty and red-eyed, shirt torn, my face streaked with soot, Frances and my father looked up from where they were playing Scrabble in the living room.

  “Pomegranate,” my father was saying, “does not have an i in it.” He was an excellent speller, despite never reading books, and encouraged games of Scrabble because the rest of us were not.

  For a moment they regarded me with identical surprise.

  “Well hello, Cynthia,” said my father at last, going back to the game. “Shouldn’t you be in bed?”

  WHEN I RETURNED to the house it was almost noon. Frances and my father were seated in the kitchen at the round oak table, apparently listening to the dishwasher, the shutters closed, a plate of untouched-looking dry toast between them. Frances leapt up to meet me.

  “There you are,” she called out, her eyes unnaturally wide.

  I explained that I’d got lost.

  “Did you?” she said, still in that unfocused way.

  My father had also turned to look at me, his whole body shifting in his wheelchair. “Where have you been?” he asked, clearly enough.

  “It’s Cynthia, Dad,” Frances told him patiently. “She’s just come back.”

  I smiled and set the grocery bags down on top of the stove. “I’ve been shopping. Sit down, Frances. I’ll put these away.”

  “Oh no,” protested Frances. “You’ve been out all morning. I’ll do it.” Smiling, she got up to carry the two bags into the pantry. But she lost her grip on the second bag as she hoisted it up and two cans of cranberry sauce came tumbling out onto the floor, rolling away toward the sink.

  “Klutz,” she scolded herself, stooping to retrieve the cans. Then she added in a scandalized voice, “Canned cranberry sauce? It’s full of preservatives. Cynnie!”

  “For emergencies,” I said. “In case Egyptians eat preservatives. All those mummies, you know?”

  Frances grimaced, then took the bags into the pantry. The counters, which had been a mess when I left, were now immaculate, everything back in the cabinets, the section with the marble pastry top scrubbed, appliances standing at attention, metal surfaces gleaming like artillery.

  My father peered at me from his seat at the table, his eyes still keen and discerning in that half-stalled face, with something of their old marauding glint.

  “She,” he said slowly, under the dishwasher’s pensive sloshing, “is a wreck.”

  Or maybe he said, “I can’t eat this dreck,” meaning the dry toast. Exactly the sort of thing, in the old days, he might have said.

  “Oh, she’s okay,” I said softly.

  He lifted both hands, letting them hang trembling in the air.

  I understood that he had noticed it, too, the way Frances’s fingers shook. I also understood why he was noticing. What had apparently begun in my infancy as a trembling in my mother’s left arm, a twitching of her fingers, had gradually crept into the increasing exhaustion and clumsiness that so often characterize Parkinson’s, until by the time I was in elementary school she spent most of her day in bed. Though there had been swift, surprising respites, too, weeks and months when she flexed her fingers more easily and walked downstairs by herself, leaning on the bannister.

  “Psychosomatic,” I told my father, who was watching me closely. “She’s very suggestible. Especially with you being here.”

  “Hah?” he said.

  I was bending down to repeat myself when Frances came back through the pantry door. “Well—” she began.

  But whatever she meant to say next was lost as she stared at the two of us, my father and me, leaning toward each other, in the middle of what must have looked like a shared secret.

  Two

  My father did not believe in God. And after being married to my father for a while, neither did my mother, who believed instead in him, surprised and grateful that he’d married her when she was well over thirty, and beholden to him the way plain wives often seem beholden to handsome husbands. He was also witty and smart and energetic, and he’d sprung her from her girlhood home, that dull, prim house on Belknap Road, where my grandparents continued to live into their eighties, with its ugly but “good” Empire furniture and its three sets of “good” china, though no one, in my memory, ever went there for dinner, including us.

  My father’s family was not “good,” or even particularly acceptable, and he didn’t like to talk about them. He was the son of a Jewish pianist from St. Petersburg (Fishel became Fiske at Ellis Island, something I didn’t learn until I was in college), who floated up the eastern seaboard looking for work as a music teacher, eventually landing in Hartford and setting himself up as a piano tuner. In Hartford he met red-haired, blue-eyed, Protestant Miss Adele Timms, paid companion for an elderly woman who had a house on Asylum Hill.

  My father always maintained that his parents met through an acquaintance who worked at a concert hall, but I imagine them each walking alone one afternoon on Prospect Avenue, kicking through fallen leaves. A streetcar rattles past, carrying no hint of its dark role in my grandmother’s future. The sky is cobalt. The breeze is sweet with rotting l
eaves. Migrating geese fly honking overhead, filling the air with that lonely exhilarating autumnal sound that when you’re young makes you feel as if anything could happen to you but also that nothing will. Adele wears a wide-brimmed straw hat trimmed with a black bow the size of a pair of garden shears. Pausing at the same intersection to watch the geese, my grandparents strike up a conversation. She remarks on his accent. He remarks on her hat. Music is mentioned, a shared fondness for Tchaikovsky discovered. Adele’s father, a saloon owner, once had gentlemanly pretensions—before Prohibition ruined him—and had doted on his pretty daughter. As a girl, Adele had been given lessons on a rented pianola. She was also taken occasionally to concerts in New York, then treated to tea at a shop. Poor Adele. Just pampered enough to believe that life should include music and fancy hats and that one should hope for love, not money. Otherwise she would have known better than to linger for a streetcorner chat with Leo Fishel.

  As they continue to stand on that curb in Hartford, but no longer with the excuse of migrating geese to hold them, Leo—sensing a kindred dissatisfied spirit—reveals his disdain for piano-tuning, and Adele makes several unflattering remarks about her elderly employer, who is not the lady she pretends to be. After another few minutes of vivid but mannerly complaint, they discover that on Sundays both enjoy a stroll in Bushnell Park. Perhaps one afternoon … ?

  The elderly woman was where the organ came from: she gave it to my grandmother as a wedding present because Adele used to work the organ for her in the evenings; probably the old lady hadn’t liked its wheezy, funereal music any more than I had and was glad for an excuse to get rid of it. She had been a secretary for Mark Twain’s friend Charles Dudley Warner—the sole basis for my father’s story that Mark Twain had owned the organ and given it to my grandmother. From a mustard seed of truth sprout the most egregious lies. And, of course, the most enduring stories.

  After they married, Leo and Adele lived in a tenement on slummy Front Street, in a narrow three-room apartment next door to a quarrelsome Polish family with seven children. Adele hung up white net curtains, which quickly browned in the sun, and insisted on having tea at four o’clock every afternoon while the organ played “The Wedding March” from Lohengrin. She had liked, my father once told me, “nice things.” In that apartment my father was born, and there my grandmother gave up on white net curtains and Lohengrin, switched from tea to cooking sherry, and took to lying down every afternoon with a washcloth over her eyes. Until one day she stepped, accidentally or on purpose, in front of a Hartford streetcar. That’s as much as I know about my father’s parents, and half of that I’ve had to invent.

  After his mother died he went to live with a distant cousin, an elderly spinster he was instructed to call Miss Rush. The only thing he liked about Miss Rush was her house on Westerly Terrace, which had soft carpets, a crystal chandelier in the dining room, and always smelled lushly of furniture polish, instead of boiled cabbage, the prevailing scent in the apartment on Front Street. And for his thirteenth birthday, she gave him a copy of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which he read, famously, all the way to the end. Otherwise, Miss Rush made him go to church and sent him to an all-boys school on Asylum Hill and tried to do her best by him, but he was a disappointment. A scapegrace. That was the old-fashioned word my father used to describe himself in his tales of Miss Rush, from whom he escaped at the age of fifteen when she died of peritonitis. He did odd jobs on the Front Street wharves; he smoked; he drank. He played in crooked card games arranged to set up other players, whom he referred to grandly as “marks” and “sitting ducks.” He supported himself this way for several years, before being drafted in World War II. He also “chased skirts.” Especially when he was on leave from the army, when he looked so dashingly respectable in his khaki uniform. But the day he set eyes on my mother, coming uncertainly down the steps of the Hartford Public Library in a pink belted dress from Bonwit Teller that did not suit her, carrying a stack of five books, one of which she dropped, he reformed.

  Because she was the one. From the moment he retrieved that book to hand back to her, Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence (I’m inventing this, too, but it’s the kind of book she would have been checking out of the library, for the second or third time), from the instant he eyeballed her calfskin gloves with the tiny pearl fastenings, then watched her tuck in her long chin, blushing and stammering in apology, he knew: the ultimate sitting duck.

  He believed in necessity, he often told us, without explaining what he meant. But it wasn’t hard to figure out: A handsome man without money, brought up with an appreciation for “nice things,” needs to marry a rich woman. Since good-looking rich women weren’t likely to bother with him, he’d try for a plain one. At least Elizabeth Seymour was a plain educated one, conveniently dwindling at home, waiting on elderly parents. My parents had not been badly matched. Her money, her good manners, her knowledge of the right people, the right way to behave at dinner parties, the right house to buy, had, for a while, appeased and encouraged him. And his unsentimental regard for necessity made him well suited for selling insurance, a business in which he was set up, reluctantly, by her father, who had been president of an indemnity company.

  As for the sleeping dragon of his former appetites, he believed in exercise.

  EVERY SUNDAY MORNING, no matter what the weather, while everyone else on Woodvale Road attended services at either the Episcopal or Congregational church, or slept late, or watched cartoons in their pajamas, my father dragged his three daughters out of bed, gave us each a slice of cold buttered toast and an apple, and herded us into his black Lincoln Continental, reminding us not to touch the leather upholstery with our fingers, and drove us to a state park for a nature walk. This weekly exercise was to keep us “trim,” a goal made more urgent by his failure so far with me. But most of all, he loved being out in the woods. He should have been a trapper or maybe a forest ranger. He had a collection of topographical maps covering southern New England that he pored over in the evenings, looking for hikes we might not have yet taken. Often we’d drive half the morning to get to a trailhead he had determined on earlier that week. Once there, he would leap from the car, while we clambered over each other in the backseat, pinching and squabbling, arriving outside just in time to see him march off, his old fishing hat quickly disappearing into the trees. Usually he was out of sight before we started walking. But his thick-soled yellow boots left waffle-patterned footprints in the dirt or mud or snow, and he would often whistle show tunes, to keep our spirits up and to let us know where he was if he got too far ahead. Or he would sing out joyfully in his chocolatey baritone:

  Oh my darlin’, oh my darlin’,

  Oh my darlin’ Clem-en-tine,

  You are lost and gone forever,

  Dreadful sorry,

  Clementine.

  Sometimes when we stopped for a rest, he would entertain us with grisly claims filed by people hoping for insurance money: thumbs severed by blender blades, hands macerated by garbage disposals, noses blown off by exploding camp stoves. But always the story was more complicated than it at first seemed. Always there were extenuating circumstances. Carelessness on the part of the injured person, faulty judgment, plain bad luck. “Don’t be too quick to assign blame,” he would caution us. “Don’t forget to accuse the accuser.” Or he would reminisce about World War II, when he was a corporal in the infantry, the best time in his life, he insisted, because it was so straightforward.

  “Shoot or be shot,” he might say, with horrible though unconvincing relish. “Eat or be eaten.”

  “That’s a cliché, Dad,” I would say.

  This was the signal for a “cliché war,” where I dueled with my father using pat phrases; the idea was to shout clichés as quickly as possible, jumping off from a word used in the previous cliché, until you ran out. The spouter of the last cliché won. One bad apple spoils the whole barrel! The apple never falls far from the tree! Can’t see the forest for the trees! Can’t step in the same rive
r twice! Twice burned, never forgotten! It was my father’s game, created to spite Miss Rush, whose speech had been stuffed with platitudes, repeated endlessly, probably because he never listened to her. I had taken to this game with enthusiasm; it was the only time I can recall having my father’s full attention.

  Often these cliché wars led my father to quote Mark Twain’s maxims, which he insisted would never become clichés because they were true, whereas true clichés were only obvious. The human race consists of the damned & the ought-to-be damned. Be good & you will be lonesome. And his favorite maxim of all: You can straighten a worm, but the crook is in him and only waiting.

  I was good at cliché wars, but only Frances, with her long legs, could keep up with my father on a nature walk. She enjoyed his outrageously flinty assessments of the human condition, and once she was awake and warmed up enough she enjoyed walking. The two of them often pointed out birds to each other; they could identify trees even by the twigs.

  Helen was not interested in birds or trees, or in my father’s World War II stories, or in his “eat or be eaten” philosophizing, which disgusted her even when she knew he was kidding. By the time she was in high school, she usually found ways to get invited to other girls’ houses on Saturday nights.

  I was not so lucky. While my father and Frances tramped ahead, I stumbled along in my scratchy red wool coat, left to follow those waffle-patterned tracks as best I could, tripping over roots, whipped in the face by thin tree branches, my pants’ legs muddy from falling into leaf-choked streams. Hoping desperately to avoid his impatience, which in spite of his many moments of high good humor was always rumbling, always threatening to erupt into a fulminating, explosive, all-consuming rage. At my chubbiness, my laziness, my sulkiness, my stubborn failure to be as smart as Helen or as athletic and well-behaved as Frances. Rages that he frequently regretted but rarely restrained.