The Ghost at the Table: A Novel Page 15

  I pictured Wen-Yi Cheng sitting across the Thanksgiving table from Sarah, his narrow face aglow, those delicate nicotine-stained fingers brushing hers as he passed her the mashed potatoes while Jane watched. You like cranberry, Sarah? More butter, Sarah? More bread? Sarah, in college what you study?

  “What a nice young man,” said Frances, when he was gone.

  “I’ve seen a lot of nice young men,” I told her, “and he’s one of the nicest.”

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  “Just don’t keep too much cash in the house.”

  “You’re a paranoid person, Cynthia. Did you know that?” Frances stood up abruptly and began gathering up cups and saucers from the table. “Look, it’s almost five. I need to pull together something for dinner. And we need to wake up Dad.” She clattered the dishes into the sink, loudly enough to wake the dead. “Do you want to do it, or should I?”

  Instead of answering, I said: “Frances, did you really make a mistake about the nursing home?”

  She stared at me. “What?”

  “Did you want to have Dad here?”

  Frances turned on the faucet, testing the water with a finger until it turned hot. Then she held her hands under the running water as she filled the sink. Still not facing me, she said, “All I want is for this to work out. Everyone being here together for Thanksgiving. That’s all I want. Just a regular old-fashioned family holiday.”

  I snorted.

  Frances continued to hold her hands under the running water. “So if there’s any way you could loosen up. I mean, please, Cynnie. It’s just a few days.”

  “I’m not not loosened up.”

  She picked up a cup, rinsed it, and set it in the dish rack. Then she said in a small deliberate voice, “I wonder sometimes if you even know why you’re writing about Mark Twain’s daughters.”

  “Of course I know why,” I snapped. “It’s my job. Don’t be patronizing.”

  “Fine.” A long troubled glance at me. “Did you realize,” she asked after a moment, “that every year, on December 16, the day his mother died, Dad used to go to Cedar Hill and put flowers on her grave?”

  “No. And I’m not sure I really care, either.”

  Frances continued to rinse cups and saucers and stack them in the dish rack. At last she said with a faint smile, “All right, we’ll go wake him up together.”

  “He’s been sleeping a lot,” I observed.

  “Well, he’s an old man.” Frances turned off the faucet and reached for a dish towel to dry her hands.

  “So maybe we should let him sleep,” I said. “What does he want to be awake for, anyway?”

  “Whatever’s left,” she said.

  “Are you really so sure?”

  “What kind of a question is that?”

  “You saw what was in that bag with his medications, that statement Ilse put in about what he wants if anything happened.”

  Frances grimaced and waved her hand as if someone had blown smoke in her face. “After all this, you’re going to believe Ilse?”

  “He signed it, Frances.”

  She looked at me frankly. “Are you really so sure?”

  Even before the front door had opened, I could hear Sarah’s clear ringing voice. “It’s not like she’s disturbed or anything,” she was telling someone. “She’s just kind of out of it.”

  Fortunately only I was in the hallway at the time—I could hardly bear to imagine how Jane would react to being described this way—but the next instant the door flew wide and everyone was crowding inside, first Walter, then Sarah followed by another girl, who had her head down, both of them wearing blue wool coats and knitted hats, tracking in snow and a draft of frosty air before slamming the door shut, then Jane and Frances hurrying in from the kitchen, Frances exclaiming over how cold everyone must be before giving Sarah a quick, hard embrace. Sarah was apologizing for being so late. The train was delayed almost two hours; someone had reported an unclaimed Barney’s bag in one of the entrances to Penn Station, and the police had evacuated the whole station, though the bag turned out to contain only packages of panty hose.

  Sarah was still talking while she hugged Jane, then turned to me. I felt the brief press of her cold cheek against my own and breathed in the wintergreen scent of her shampoo and the brisk smell of snow trapped in her wool coat. Followed by a hard jab from the black umbrella that protruded from her leather satchel bag. She was taller, thinner, very pale. In the dim light of the front hall, she so strongly resembled Frances at the same age that I forgot about the umbrella pressing against my rib cage and thought my heart was contracting.

  “Hi, Aunt Cynnie,” she said, pulling away first. “It’s great to see you.”

  “Great to see you, too. What a nice umbrella,” I added witlessly.

  “Oh, everyone in New York carries an umbrella.”

  Then she introduced her friend, who was standing just behind her, obscured by the coatrack. Who was not a girl, it turned out, but a boy of about eighteen. Arlen. Arlen Lee Evans. Arlee. Short, portly, black. (I saw Frances draw a quick breath, then force herself to smile, and saw Sarah notice this with a small dry smile of her own.) Arlen’s hair, when he pulled off his hat, was in neat cornrows. He had a tiny diamond stud in his nose, a downy wisp of a moustache, and a large gap between his front teeth. Under his coat he wore a satiny cherry red track suit and several gold necklaces. Arlen had brought Frances a white paper sack of salt bagels from Zabar’s, which he presented to her in the hall as though he were handing her a bouquet of roses, along with a little bow that managed to be comical and courteous at the same time.

  “Why thank you, Arlen,” said Frances, smiling gamely. “How thoughtful!”

  More thoughtful than Sarah, who declared she’d brought nothing but a duffel bag full of dirty laundry.

  “I keep giving away all my change on the street,” explained Sarah. “So I never have quarters for the laundry machines.”

  “Never?” repeated Frances, recovering herself.

  Arlen laughed, then so did the rest of us. It was just like Sarah to turn an apparent lapse into a virtue. It was also just like Sarah not to tell anyone beforehand that the lab partner she was bringing home for Thanksgiving was male, not to mention gay and black. By her studied casualness, it was clear that she was pretending to herself, as much as to the rest of us, that such particulars did not signify, and we should be ashamed of ourselves if we thought they did. It was a little early in the visit for Sarah to fling down the gauntlet of her new independence, but I suppose she felt it had to be done immediately, if she was going to manage it at all.

  Snow was melting into little puddles on the floor. “Could we all please move out of the hall?” said Walter in a beleaguered voice.

  Frances ignored him, turning the full wattage of her charming smile on Arlen. “I’m so glad you could come for the weekend,” she said. “We’re always telling Sarah that we’re dying to meet her friends.”

  Touché, I thought, glancing at Sarah. Frances could be a formidable adversary when it came to adjusting particulars, especially in her own house, something that Sarah would do well not to forget.

  Frances remembered that our father was sitting a few steps away in the living room, installed in his wheelchair by the fireplace. “Sarah, darling,” she called, “could you come with me for a minute? Look who’s here, waiting to see you. Arlen, come meet my father, Robert Fiske.”

  I heard my father grunt a few words in response to Sarah’s greeting. He even produced a sinistral smile when Arlen seized his hand. In a cheerful treble twang, Arlen announced that he was from West Texas and that this was his very first time seeing snow. My father made a wry gasping noise and bobbed his head genially. He had always been hard to shock, to his credit, and this evening at least he was agreeing to play the part of the lovable old tolerant grandpa.

  Walter lugged the duffel bags upstairs. Jane was still hanging about uncertainly in the hall when we returned from the living room. She couldn’t
take her eyes off Arlen, who had several times smiled warmly at her, but she seemed unsure of what to say to Sarah. Jane and Sarah had an edgy relationship. As I understood it, Jane resented Sarah because Frances didn’t criticize her, while Sarah was convinced that Jane was the only one Frances ever worried about. I pictured both girls, years from now, lying on the couch in an analyst’s office. “My mother preferred my sister,” they would each say, confidently.

  “I have a new iMac,” Jane announced.

  “Cool,” said Sarah. Having only just arrived, amid tokens of her new exotic life—an umbrella that all New Yorkers carried, bagels from Zabar’s, a black lab partner with a diamond nose stud—she could afford to be generous. Jane smirked nervously.

  “Hey, is there a bathroom around here?” asked Arlen.

  “Of course there’s a bathroom,” said Frances, a little sharply.

  “This way, Arlee,” said Sarah, with a tiny note of triumph.

  She directed him to the downstairs bathroom off the kitchen, then headed upstairs after Walter, trailed by Jane. Frances disappeared into the pantry. For dinner that night, she had prepared a large salad of red leaf lettuce, arugula, and slivered almonds in a shallow wooden bowl, to be served along with couscous. At Jane’s suggestion, she’d also ordered a pepperoni pizza, which might be easier for Dad to eat, as he wouldn’t have to employ a knife and fork.

  While everyone dispersed about the house, I went back into the living room where my father was still sitting in his wheelchair.

  “So,” I said. “What do you think of Sarah’s little friend?” My father shrugged. He was not interested in Sarah or her friend. Instead he was gazing at the old player organ in the corner, muttering to himself.

  Eventually I realized he was asking, “Does it still work?”

  “You tell me.”

  My father cocked his head in a questioning way.

  “I thought it was gone,” I told him.

  He favored me with his lopsided smile. “Gone but not forgotten.”

  I gave him a hard stare; he stared back at me.

  I wasn’t surprised that he remembered our old game—my father had always had an excellent memory—but I was surprised he’d have the nerve to try to play it again.

  Together we pondered the organ for a few moments. Earlier that afternoon, Frances had rubbed the wooden surfaces with lemon oil and put an old Spode vase of dried marsh grasses, twigs, and cattails on top of the organ’s cabinet in an effort to harmonize the organ with the rest of the room. These decorations had failed to make any improvement. If anything the organ looked more out of place than before, when it had had at least a temporary, just-here-for-the-time-being air, like something she’d picked up for a client at an auction. Under that fragile vase of grasses, the organ loomed dark and disruptive, with its greasy wood and yellowed keys, its overdone fretwork and those grotesque scrolled legs ending in clawed feet. Nothing about it, not a single element, belonged in this comfortable, intelligent room of beautiful old things.

  As if he agreed with me, my father sighed gustily.

  Elsewhere in the house we could hear laughing, the sound of the refrigerator opening, Frances calling to Walter to bring her a bottle of wine from the basement. The house was filling up. Tomorrow it would be even fuller, crowded with Egyptians and hungry Chinese graduate students. The phone rang twice. No one came into the living room.

  We sat on together for perhaps five minutes more, transfixed by having nothing to say, when suddenly a strange arid wheezing erupted from my father, and I realized with a start that he was laughing. At first I couldn’t understand why, until it came to me that he was laughing at the predicament we were in. At our being related but having nothing to relate to each other, having nothing in common but mutual discomfort. After a moment, I laughed, too. He was just an old man. An old man who had suffered and been afraid, who had lost almost everything. An old man who was here to spend the holiday with his family, what was left of it. Why bother blaming him for anything now, when he was just an old man, whose greatest crime, in the end, had probably been impatience?

  I stopped laughing and looked away.

  “Here today,” I heard him mutter, “gone tomorrow.”

  He winched himself around in his wheelchair to peer at me.

  “Tomorrow is another day,” I said.

  DURING DINNER THAT EVENING, Sarah and Walter had an argument about the recent election. Though previously a Democrat, this time Walter had voted for President Bush, to Sarah’s pronounced distress.

  “How could you be such an idiot, Dad?”

  Patiently, Walter listed the reasons why he had voted for George Bush, which all added up to national security.

  “You’re an ostrich!” declared Sarah.

  “Listen,” replied Walter evenly. “You need to learn that people can see things differently and both be right.”

  “Not in this case,” said Sarah.

  Frances, who had never been interested in politics, asked them several times to stop arguing, then finally left the table and went into the kitchen, my father watching her with his half-frozen grin. She was followed a few moments later by Arlen, solicitously carrying his plate. After dessert, Sarah asked coolly if she could borrow Walter’s car, and she and Arlen and Jane went to a movie in Lexington.

  Walter wheeled my father off to help him get ready for bed while Frances sat at the kitchen table polishing silver and I lay on one of Frances’s carmine and cream Knole sofas, reading a vampire novel someone had left in the living room. Vampire novels have never appealed to me—I always empathize with the vampire, as you’re supposed to, which I find manipulative—but I was too tired to go upstairs and find my copy of The Prince and the Pauper, which I was reading for background material. I stopped reading when I realized that Walter had returned to the kitchen and that I could hear him talking to Frances.

  Once again she’d had quite a lot of wine at dinner, and the last time I passed through the kitchen a bottle was on the table with a half-filled glass next to it.

  “I don’t know why you had to get into it with Sarah tonight,” she was saying fretfully. “You could see she was exhausted. She looks terrible.”

  “She does not,” said Walter. “She looks fine.”

  “She’s too skinny. Did you see the bags under her eyes?”

  “Frances, she’s a college student. None of them sleep enough. And if she was so tired she wouldn’t have gone out to a movie.”

  “She went out to escape all the tension in the house after that argument.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. If there’s tension in this house, it’s not from what was said at the dinner table.”

  “That boy doesn’t have bags under his eyes.”

  “Arlen seems like a nice guy,” said Walter firmly.

  Frances went on as if he hadn’t spoken. “Sarah’s put him in the other bed in her room. She didn’t even ask me if it was all right. Though there’s nowhere else to put him. But I have to say, he’s not someone I’d have imagined Sarah picking for a friend.”

  “Why not?”

  “He strikes me as a little …” But then instead of saying what I expected to hear, Frances said, “Nosy.”

  “Oh come on,” Walter said, “he’s just being friendly.”

  “I don’t know what Sarah’s told him. But while you were arguing about George Bush he came into the kitchen and kept asking how I felt about having Dad here.”

  “Well, he did say he wants to major in psychology.”

  “Why,” said Frances, her voice beginning to spiral, “why do you never take anything I say seriously? I just said I thought Sarah didn’t look well and you dismissed me without even considering what I’d said.”

  “Oh come on. I did not dismiss you. But for godssake, Frances, you’re always worried about something. If I took every single one of your worries seriously—”

  This was unwise on Walter’s part, to go on the offensive. He was not by nature a bully, and whenever it came to arguin
g with Frances and the girls he was something of an innocent, blundering into ambushes he should have anticipated. Like most men who rarely question themselves, Walter didn’t understand how to be evasive, either.

  “Oh really?” demanded Frances. “Just how often do you bother to wonder what I’m worried about?”

  “Frances, calm down.”

  “Don’t tell me to calm down.”

  I wondered if I should try to intervene, pretend I was wandering into the kitchen for a glass of water. But I recalled that I’d told Frances I was going to bed early while she and Walter were helping my father get settled for the night. Afterward I’d changed my mind and decided to sit in the living room without anyone’s realizing I was there. It would look like I’d been purposely eavesdropping.

  “Don’t do this,” Walter said.

  “Do what? What am I doing?”

  “I don’t know,” he said heavily. “Confusing things.”

  “Confusing?”

  “Imposing things. Making things happen that weren’t supposed to.”

  Frances was silent for a moment. Then I heard her say, “Like what? What am I imposing, Walter?”

  Another pause, this time while Walter figured out what to say next. Finally he said: “This is about your father, isn’t it?”

  “I knew that’s what you’d say.” Frances sounded icily victorious. “You and Cynthia. The two of you. You’re in league.”

  “Frances, ever since you asked me if he could live here—”

  I sat up on the sofa, my heart thumping painfully.

  “I told you, there wasn’t room for him at the nursing home—”

  “I mean before, when he first had his stroke. When you asked back then, and I said no.” Walter paused again. He seemed to be struggling to figure out not just how to explain himself but how to understand what he was explaining. Finally, with an air of starting over, he said, “Ever since he had his stroke, it’s like you’ve been hoping—”