The Ghost at the Table: A Novel Read online

  “What did she want?”

  Mrs. Jordan leaned closer and took my hand, pressing it between her hard dry palms. She ate a clove of garlic every day, for health and digestion, and what she said next hit me with a raw blast: “Her release. She’d asked God to release her from her torment. And God heard.”

  “She asked God?”

  Mrs. Jordan nodded. Her face, usually remarkably furrowed and folded, like three baked potatoes pressed together, suddenly became smooth. The River of Life flowed through her, babbling with the voice of the God within.

  “She asked and He heard. She asked for God’s help. We prayed on it together.”

  I pictured those tasks Mrs. Jordan had so carefully arranged, so that my mother could think that she was “helping” by rinsing beans and drying lettuce, sorting the silverware by herself. I pictured the empty medicine vial by the bed.

  I said: “I thought she didn’t believe in God.”

  Mrs. Jordan didn’t answer but continued to gaze ecstatically at a pink wicker wastebasket with raffia butterflies in one corner of the room.

  “Does my father know?” I asked, following her eyes, picturing now the white plastic cap in the bathroom’s wastebasket. “About God?”

  IN THE WEEK FOLLOWING my mother’s death the singeing and the burning got worse. Frances complained about Mrs. Jordan’s staring at her. She complained that the laundry wasn’t getting done; there were bugs in her bed. When Mrs. Jordan started doing the laundry again, Frances claimed that Mrs. Jordan was using soap powder that gave her a rash. She claimed Mrs. Jordan purposely let the milk go sour; she let eggs go bad and then scrambled them for Frances. Mrs. Jordan, she insisted, was putting spiders in her pillowcase.

  An uneasy conscience is a hair in the mouth.

  “IT’S TIME FOR HER to go,” Frances told our father angrily one night, after I was supposed to be in bed. All that first week he had stayed home, though he was often on the phone. There were many details to be attended to. The master bedroom was being repainted a light leafy green, the mustard curtains replaced by bamboo shades. My mother’s clothes were being given away. He was ordering new furniture.

  To Frances, he murmured that he would see what he could do.

  “There’s nothing wrong with Mrs. Jordan,” I informed my father, the next morning. “There’s something wrong with Frances.”

  Frances had stopped sleeping. At night she roamed around the house, turning on all the lights. Her teachers reported that she fell asleep at her desk. Her friends had stopped calling and dropping by. Her bike stayed parked in the garage. My father watched her all the time now, a deadpan look on his face.

  TWO WEEKS AFTER my mother’s funeral, Mrs. Jordan left the house on Woodvale Road, taking with her only an old plaid cloth suitcase with a stubborn zipper, wearing a black raincoat and her shiny black straw Sunday hat, with the little net that came down over her eyes. A taxi pulled into the driveway to transport Mrs. Jordan to the Hartford bus station. She planned to take a Greyhound bus to Greensboro, where she had a previously un-mentioned niece with “grandbabies.”

  Before she went, Mrs. Jordan gave me a hug and said, “You be a good child.” She didn’t give Frances so much as a glance.

  THE MORNING AFTER Mrs. Jordan’s departure, I was halfway down the backstairs that led into the kitchen when I heard my father and Frances talking at breakfast. He was saying that Mrs. Jordan’s husband had been a wife-beater.

  One night Mr. Jordan came home drunk, gave Mrs. Jordan a black eye, then passed out in their bed. Mrs. Jordan put on the kettle. She took all the dishcloths from the kitchen and used them to tie her sleeping husband to the bedposts. As soon as the water in the kettle boiled, she took the kettle off the stove, carried it into the bedroom and poured boiling water down the length of Mr. Jordan, starting with his feet. Then she called the police. The police took a look at Mr. Jordan, then at Mrs. Jordan’s black eye, and cited her for “disorderly conduct.”

  A year and a half later, after months of suffering, Mr. Jordan died of cancer, an ordeal through which she nursed him faithfully.

  The crook is in him and only waiting.

  “Why did you hire her?” Frances sounded aghast.

  “Your mother liked her. She said she was a poor soul who deserved a break and that a clear conscience wasn’t everything.”

  “She tried to kill her husband.”

  “She was protecting herself. Mrs. Jordan was a good woman,” my father added. “And she needed someone else to take care of. But your mother’s illness was too much for her, by the end. As even your mother seemed to realize.”

  “She was cracked,” said Frances flatly.

  “It was your mother’s idea,” he insisted.

  THAT NIGHT FRANCES came into my room while I was reading The Secret of the Old Clock for the third time. She sat down on the end of my bed and related the story of Mrs. Jordan and Mr. Jordan, dropping her voice to a whisper when she reached the part about the knotted dishcloths, then again when she repeated what my father had said about Mrs. Jordan “needing someone else to take care of.”

  After she finished, I smiled at her with pity and hatred.

  “That’s what he wants you to think.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Frances was paler than I’d ever seen her, as pale as one of Mrs. Jordan’s pamphlets with their limp purple pages. Her long hair hung in dirty strings. Under her eyes were bruise-colored thumbprints.

  “Use your head. Mrs. Jordan is religious.”

  “So?”

  “So she believes in God. As in hell.”

  “What does that mean?” Frances was beginning to look scared.

  “I know what he’s hiding. I went up there that night.”

  Again I saw the empty vial, the tumbled water glass. Smelled again the pipe smoke in the hall.

  “After you were there.” I dropped my voice to a whisper, just as Frances had a few moments before. “The night she died. She was still alive, and she knew.”

  Frances’s lips twitched. “Knew what?”

  My mother lunged forward, seizing my wrist with her bony fingers, leaving angry red marks. Again I confronted those staring eyes, not staring at me. What had she known? Clearly she’d known something, if only that she was about to stop knowing anything. Perhaps if there’d been a hint of relief on that face, a shade of composure, some consoling smile summoned for my benefit, or at least a frank look in my direction, I might not have continued on and said what I said. But there had been no relief, no composure. Only a monstrous indifference.

  I said: “I saw what he did.”

  “What?” Frances was hardly breathing. “What did he do?”

  As I looked into Frances’s frightened eyes, a terrible calm spread through me, a fatalistic calm, not unlike what I felt poised at the end of the high-dive board at the West Hartford Country Club, staring down for a few seconds at the sunburned, half-naked bathers below, who could not help me, once I launched myself into the air above that turquoise cupful, any more than I could help myself. And it was in this same suspended moment that I glimpsed the true power of mendacity: you can always be persuaded to doubt your own certainties but never your own lies.

  I pretended to hesitate, the reluctant bearer of ill tidings.

  “What?” Frances reached out and grabbed my wrist, squeezing hard, exactly where my mother had gripped me.

  “That soup you gave her?” I said. “Do you remember how it smelled?”

  Frances nodded doubtfully.

  “Do you remember an empty bottle of pills on her nightstand?”

  “No.” Frances’s eyes were shrinking green dots.

  “And a water glass on the floor, that had been knocked over? As if maybe someone had been in a hurry?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Why do you think Dad asked you to take the soup up to her?

  “Because he knew you wouldn’t notice anything,” I hissed triumphantly, when she didn’t answer. “And if you did, he kne
w you wouldn’t care. You’re too out of it to notice anything these days.”

  Her face had turned to clay. My own cheeks were hot. How neatly I put the clues together. Ned Nickerson would be amazed. Except that I’d added a couple.

  “I’ll ask him,” she said in a small voice.

  “Go ahead,” I shrugged, as she stood up. “But he’ll just say she was sick and give you his sad look. And then he’ll start talking about your special bond.”

  Frances stepped back as if I’d shoved her.

  “Time for her to go,” I mimicked my father’s voice. “Do your homework, Frances.”

  LATER I TRIED to take it all back. My mother was wrong about conscience, and Mark Twain was right.

  “That wasn’t true,” I told Frances, a few days after Ilse moved in. My father had installed Ilse in the master bedroom, along with a new king-sized bed made of blond wood and equipped with a mirrored headboard. A bit of furor had accompanied the arrival of this bed; the frame was too wide for the front door and it eventually had to be disassembled on the sidewalk, under the gaze of several neighbors.

  I found Frances in the basement, in the room that had been Mrs. Jordan’s, lying in bed with a sheet pulled over her head.

  “Go away,” said Frances, from under the sheet.

  “I need to tell you something.”

  “Go away.”

  “What I said about Dad wasn’t true. I was joking.”

  But by then it was too late, as I must have known it would be. I never said anything to my father about what I’d told Frances and how she’d reacted. I didn’t care about him, especially not once he and Isle began their travels and left us at school. Although Frances and I soon made up, of course.

  Three

  Frances was fretting over the striped gourds I’d bought for too much money at the supermarket. They did not make a festive enough centerpiece, arranged in a wide milky green glass bowl, even when she added miniature ears of Indian corn and walnuts, chestnuts and filberts, heaping the nuts plentifully. Something was missing. The gourds looked measly. She should have asked for bunches of russet and gold chrysanthemums or some pepperberry branches. Or clementines and pears for a fruit pyramid. But when I offered to go out again, Frances said not to bother, even though she’d also forgotten to ask me to buy Wondra for making gravy and would have to use flour tomorrow instead, which meant lumps. And she couldn’t find the bag of fresh cranberries she was sure she’d bought, so now we’d have only the canned cranberry sauce. But it was after four, and the roads would be getting icy.

  “And, anyway, I’ll just forget something else,” she added, smiling regretfully.

  Jane and Wen-Yi Cheng were in the dining room for their tutoring session, murmuring over equations. Rather, Wen-Yi could be heard murmuring. Jane was silent.

  “Did you two have a nice chat last night?” Frances asked, coming away from listening at the door. “Before you went to bed?”

  “I had a headache.”

  Frances looked relieved. “You’ve always been her favorite aunt, you know.”

  “Well, she doesn’t have any others,” I said disagreeably.

  “If she does want to talk to you. You don’t have to tell me about it. Whatever she says.”

  “You’d just like me to give you a hint.”

  “No.” Frances looked at me. “I’d just like to know that she’s talking to someone.”

  I pretended to stare out the window at the snow. Our father was once again napping. Walter had said he would pick up Sarah and her friend from the Route 128 train station at five, which meant they would get stuck in rush-hour traffic. There was so much to do, Frances kept saying, turning a gourd over and over in her hands.

  “And those Egyptians,” she said finally with a little laugh. “How could Walter have invited a bunch of Egyptians to dinner? What was he thinking?”

  As I watched Frances arrange and rearrange the striped gourds in the glass bowl, I wondered if she had any idea what Walter did or thought about all day. She seemed resigned to having no clue about what Jane had on her mind, or certainly what was going on with Sarah.

  “Damn,” said Frances dropping several gourds onto the floor.

  As she bent to pick them up, I noticed again that her hands were shaking.

  “Have you gone to see anybody,” I asked, “about your hands?”

  She glanced at me. “I told you, I’m just cold.”

  “Turn up the heat then.”

  “This is an old house.” One by one, Frances put the gourds back into the bowl. “It’s drafty. And it would cost a mint to keep the heat above sixty all day. Walter thinks I’m being stingy, but I really don’t mind the cold. It’s sort of like eating what’s in season. If it’s summer, you should be hot and eat berries; if it’s winter, you should be cold and eat squash.”

  “And if you have a weird family, you should be weird.”

  “I suppose.” She gave me a tired smile. “If you’re talking about Jane.”

  “Well, it’s also too dark in here.”

  “Is it?” said Frances, straightening up.

  “You should get track lighting.”

  Frances made a face. She counted track lighting as one of the great sins of the modern world, along with nuclear power plants, chemical warfare, and preservatives.

  “I was joking,” I said.

  She smiled at me again, and I saw that there was no point convincing her that her house was dark and cold, because she was already perfectly aware of it and had decided, for whatever reason, that she liked it that way, perhaps because it seemed more authentic.

  “It’s supposed to snow again,” she said.

  “I didn’t hear anything about snow.”

  But when I folded back the window shutters, I saw that it had indeed begun to snow, very lightly, already collecting in the rhododendrons, coating the leaves with a white skin of frost.

  • • •

  “LESSONS NOT GOING well for Jane.”

  The math tutoring session was over. Wen-Yi was sitting in the kitchen with Frances and me, warming his hands around a cup of tea. Although she had so much to do that she couldn’t possibly get all of it done, not to mention that someone should look in on our father who’d been asleep for what was beginning to seem a very long time, Frances had decided to sit down and have a cup of tea, too. Jane had disappeared upstairs as soon as her tutoring session was over.

  “She don’t want pay attention.”

  “She’s been having some trouble at school.” Frances offered Wen-Yi a plate of green apple slices.

  He shook his head. “She say algebra is stupid.”

  Snow was now falling thickly from a sky the color of an old pie tin. In the distance a neighbor’s dog had started to bark: a piercing, hysterical, frenzied barking. Maybe a coyote was bothering the dog.

  “Algebra is very important,” said Frances soothingly.

  She and Wen-Yi were sitting close together on one side of the round oak table. Clearly this wasn’t the first time Wen-Yi had complained about Jane’s lack of focus, but from the ardent way he peered at her over his teacup I decided it might be the first time he’d sat so close to Frances.

  “But it’s hard for her,” Frances was saying.

  “She not pay attention,” said Wen-Yi stubbornly.

  “Maybe she doesn’t think algebra is relevant,” I offered. “I mean, for her life.”

  “Of course algebra is relevant.” Frances frowned at me.

  To change the subject, I asked Wen-Yi which province in China he was from, then didn’t listen to his answer, convinced that I wouldn’t remember it. He peered at me for a moment, before turning away to examine Frances’s bowl of striped gourds, inquiring whether they were for Thanksgiving dinner.

  “Oh no,” Frances smiled, “they’re just for decoration.”

  Wen-Yi looked slightly shocked. Frances had told me that sometimes he sat on the edge of the kitchen table while she chopped vegetables for the evening meal, asking what she w
as making, how it would be prepared. Food was of great interest to Wen-Yi. His other topic was DVDs. He was always asking if she’d seen this or that DVD (he had a taste for thrillers and crime movies), affecting amazement when she hadn’t. He himself had apparently viewed hundreds of DVDs, all in the last year. “Oh, you must see True Lies,” he might tell her. “You must see The Usual Suspects.”

  Frances sighed and sat back in her chair. “Well, I certainly appreciate all your patience, Wen-Yi. I know it’s not easy, trying to explain things to someone who doesn’t want to understand.”

  Wen-Yi seemed dissatisfied with the direction the conversation was taking. I could see him casting about for what to say next.

  “Jane say her grandfather move here.”

  “Only temporarily.” I wished Wen-Yi would leave. I didn’t like his hangdog attentions to Frances. “And speaking of Dad,” I added significantly. “Shouldn’t we—”

  “He here now? Your old father?” Wen-Yi actually glanced around the kitchen, as if expecting to see an apple-cheeked grandpa in suspenders and a red flannel shirt sitting in a rocker by the stove, whittling clothespins.

  Frances explained that our father was waiting to move into a nursing home. He’d had a stroke, she told Wen-Yi, and also now he was getting a divorce. “At eighty-two.”

  “Eighty-two?”

  I couldn’t help feeling irritated at the disapproval that briefly clouded his face. In China all aged grandparents probably lived with their dutiful children for years, smiling peacefully over their rice bowls until one day they fell into them.

  Wen-Yi was smiling again at Frances. “Thank you for tea. I see you tomorrow. Dinner at four thirty?”

  “Yes,” said Frances. “My older daughter will be here, too.”

  “Wait till you meet Sarah,” I told him, making an “okay” ring with my thumb and forefinger.

  Frances frowned at me once more, then turned back to Wen-Yi. “She’s coming home for Thanksgiving. She’s at Columbia,” she said proudly.

  That morning while I was getting dressed, I’d found a pencil sketch of Wen-Yi under some textbooks on Jane’s desk. The likeness was quite good and must have taken her some time—she’d caught in particular the sensual plummy curve of his mouth—but then she had drawn a thick red circle around his head and a slash across his face.