The Ghost at the Table: A Novel Page 16

“Hoping what?” said Frances, when he didn’t go on. “What, Walter? Can’t you even say what’s on your mind?”

  “All right. Why’d you insist on inviting her to Thanksgiving?”

  “She’s alone. No one should be alone on Thanksgiving.”

  “What about friends—”

  “She doesn’t have any. Not that I ever hear about, anyway.”

  “But you knew it would complicate—”

  “It’s not her fault,” she interrupted. “I’m not blaming her.”

  Walter made an exasperated noise. “But can’t you see what you’re doing? Pushing people together like this? Have you even considered that you could be wrong?”

  A long pause, during which I felt light-headed and slightly sick. Who were they talking about, me or Frances’s assistant? And was that what Frances had wanted all along? To have Dad live with her?

  Whatever they said next was obscured by the loud beating of my heart, but then I heard Walter say, “It’s all the same thing. Maybe you want me to have an affair. That’s what Cynthia thinks.”

  “That’s disgusting,” Frances said coldly.

  But she must have finally realized that she could be heard all over the house, because after that she dropped her voice, and a few minutes later I heard both of them go upstairs, leaving me alone in the living room.

  Walter was the one on the sofa the next morning when I came downstairs a little after seven. I hadn’t slept much the night before and he didn’t look as if he had, either.

  “Morning,” he said thickly, reaching for his glasses.

  Then he pretended to me that he’d caught Frances’s cough—he even coughed, once or twice, to prove it—and said he had slept in the living room to avoid waking everyone else. He looked cold and stiff and almost elderly, struggling to sit up on the sofa, wrapped in an old green plaid flannel bathrobe with his gray hair sticking up.

  “Well, happy Thanksgiving,” I told him, trying to sound light-hearted, as if Walter’s sleeping on the sofa was just the beginning of a harum-scarum day full of unpredictable demands and concessions.

  Together we went into the kitchen, where I folded back the shutters and turned up the heat. While Walter went out in his slippers to look for the paper in a drift of snow, I made coffee for both of us, using the ground coffee and the plastic filter that I’d bought for myself in town the day before. I even found proper mugs at the back of a cabinet. Outside it was again snowing lightly. Snow weighed down the topmost branches of a big Douglas fir by the shed, dislodging in powdery drifts when a crow lifted up from a branch and flapped into the ash-colored sky. A soft blue-gray light shone in through the windows and despite my sleepless night, and my uneasiness about last night’s argument between Walter and Frances, I experienced one of those miraculous reversals that can accompany daylight. So what that Frances had wanted my father to come live with her? She felt sorry for him. She was a generous person, even if her generosity was sometimes inconvenient. As for her suspicions about Walter and her assistant, they were clearly unfounded. She’d reached middle age; she was rattled by having a daughter go off to college; her business wasn’t what it had been; she was feeling left behind. There was nothing to worry about when it came to Frances and Walter. They’d survived too much over the years to be hurt by a silly argument, any more than Walter and Sarah had wounded each other by arguing over politics at dinner. I sat holding my coffee mug, warmed by my own reasoning, appreciating the simple quiet of the old house and the snow falling outside the windows.

  Eventually we could hear my father stirring in the big bedroom off the kitchen. Walter went in to help him get out of bed, which my father could not do easily on his own, and into the bathroom. I made more coffee and put on some toast while they shaved and dressed together, Walter shaving my father. Then Walter wheeled him into the kitchen and while everyone else slept on into the morning, the three of us sat drinking coffee and reading the paper and looking out the window at the snow. Until Frances suddenly appeared, tense and wraithlike in a pair of gray sweatpants and one of Walter’s white button-down shirts.

  “Walter,” she demanded, without greeting any of us. “Where is the turkey?”

  “The turkey?”

  “I asked you yesterday to take out the turkey. Where did you put it?”

  “You didn’t ask me to take out the turkey.”

  “Yes, I did. Yesterday morning.”

  “Frances—,” he began.

  “Oh my God,” she said, raising her hands melodramatically. “Don’t tell me the turkey is still in the basement freezer.”

  Here it was, almost ten o’clock on Thanksgiving morning, with eleven people expecting to sit down to dinner at four thirty that afternoon. Frances kept repeating these particulars as Walter carried the turkey up from the basement and dropped it with a stony thunk on the kitchen table. Twenty-seven pounds of solid ice.

  “Would it fit in the microwave?” I wondered.

  Frances was holding the base of her throat.

  Walter glanced at her irritably. “We’ll buy another turkey.”

  “All the stores are closed.”

  My father said nothing but sat in his wheelchair peering around with an expression of unfathomable satisfaction, while the rest of us stared at the frozen turkey, whose gelid condition seemed to have lowered the temperature in the kitchen by ten degrees.

  Arlen ambled into the kitchen, again wearing the red track suit. He said good morning, yawned and patted his mouth, then looked with interest at the table.

  “Frozen bird? That happened to my mom once.”

  “Really.” Frances tried to smile. “What did she do?”

  “Put it in the bathtub.” He gave a gravelly laugh.

  “The bathtub?”

  “Then I used a hair dryer on it.”

  “Is that why you’re a vegetarian?” I asked.

  “That’s why he’s a psychology major,” said Walter, not looking at Frances.

  “Heh-heh,” laughed Arlen, fingering his downy moustache.

  Frances was the only one who didn’t look amused. “Well, did it work?”

  HALF AN HOUR LATER, I was kneeling on the cold blue ceramic tiles of Frances’s bathroom floor, submerging the turkey in the Jacuzzi. According to Arlen, there was some danger that the skin would soften faster than the rest of the bird and depart from its corpus. Gentle massage, he said, was key.

  I turned on the Jacuzzi jets and the steaming water began to bubble like an enormous cauldron. Even so, my hands ached from trying to hang on to the cold turkey, which kept slipping away from me and clunking to the bottom of the tub. Arlen had elected to keep me company in the bathroom. He supplied the information about massage, plus the word corpus, surprisingly without reproach, especially for someone who did not even eat eggs. I was reminded of Mrs. Jordan, who had also been a vegetarian, though she was in no other way, except the most obvious, anything like Arlen. Mrs. Jordan had often prepared meat for us without comment, expertly frying hamburgers and broiling steak, but never got over her habit of asking us how we would like our “flesh” cooked.

  In the kitchen, Walter was calling all the grocery stores in the area. My father had been left to the ministrations of Jane, who was making oatmeal again for his breakfast, while Sarah and Frances got to work on the rest of dinner. Arlen lowered himself down beside me on the tiles.

  “Your hands must be freezing,” he said. “Let me help.”

  While we took turns floating the turkey back and forth between us, Arlen told me that he had asthma and that being a vegan was the only thing that had helped. His mother was a dietician. His stepfather was a security guard at an oil refinery. Arlen himself intended to get a PhD in clinical psychology, then go home to West Texas.

  “Therapist to the oil wives,” he said, giving the turkey a push. “That’s my plan. They have the worst problems.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Well, for starters, all that guilt over their money and big houses, and being skinny
and beautiful? People thinking they have no right to get depressed? It’s got to be terrible.”

  I must have looked genuinely taken aback because he smiled and said, “I’m just fooling with you. I want to work with kids.”

  He would make a wonderful therapist, I assured him, if he could get a frozen turkey to soften up, which made Arlen laugh. He laughed easily, I noticed, and often, with a throaty appreciative chuckle. No wonder somber Sarah liked him. Though there was something a little too canny about his eyes, a kind of prudent watchfulness, which I figured had to do with spending his formative years being a gay black boy with asthma in West Texas. I began to enjoy kneeling in the big steamy bathroom, the two of us passing the turkey back and forth, guiding it under the frothing water. After a while I found myself telling Arlen about the Sisters of History, and about San Francisco—which he said he dreamed of visiting—and about the fog, and my neighborhood on the edge of Noe Valley, and Carita and Don. It was such a relief to talk about my life in San Francisco, and Arlen seemed so interested, that I went into more detail than I’d intended, especially when I began describing my research on Mark Twain’s daughters. I hit all the high points: Susy’s early death, Clara’s neurotic ailments, Little Jean and her uncontrollable rages. How as Jean got older, and her epilepsy got more severe, she grew convinced that her father didn’t love her, that no one really loved her. She became obsessed by the thought that she would never marry or have children. As a result, she was excessively devoted to animals. Though in my book, I added, Jean was just “quirky.” A kind of nineteenth-century Harriet the Spy, who snoops and listens in on family conversations, and knows everything about everyone, without being quite able to put it all together. Back and forth floated the turkey, blanched and puckered and prehistoric-looking, like something chipped out of a glacier.

  “Wow,” said Arlen, sitting back on his heels. “That’s some family you got there.”

  Jane appeared in the doorway, sent by Frances to check on our progress.

  “Gross,” she remarked, gazing down at the turkey in the Jacuzzi.

  “It’s in a transitional phase,” I told her.

  “Yeah, right.” Jane rolled her eyes. “From bad to worse.” Then she said, “By the way, Ilse just called.”

  “Ilse.” I stared. “What did she want?”

  Jane shrugged. “Sarah talked to her. I think she was just checking on Granddad.”

  “My father’s wife,” I explained to Arlen. “Who didn’t bother to tell him that he was supposed to be going to a nursing home. How did she know he was here, anyway?” I said to Jane.

  She shrugged again.

  “Well, that’s strange,” I said, when Jane had left. I pictured Ilse’s drawn face, her pale straggling topknot, the curt way she’d muttered, “He never cared so much for me.” Why would she call to check on him? To make sure we weren’t sending him back?

  But thinking about Ilse, especially while kneeling on a cold bathroom floor, was a sure way to bring on a headache, so I asked Arlen what we had been talking about before Jane interrupted and he reminded me that we’d been discussing Mark Twain.

  “I read Huckleberry Finn in high school,” he said disapprovingly. “I thought it was racist.”

  “You have to read it in context,” I told him. “People often make the mistake of judging Twain by contemporary standards.”

  Arlen looked unconvinced. For a few minutes we pushed the turkey back and forth, dangling our wrists in the hot water. Eventually, he wanted to know what was wrong with old Mr. Fiske.

  “A long life.” I sighed.

  Arlen looked sympathetic.

  “Plus he’s had a stroke.”

  “That’s too bad.” Then he asked, “How’d your mom die?”

  Long ago I made it a rule never to inquire about people’s bereavements, beyond the most commonplace questions. It seems intrusive, for one thing, to be openly curious about someone else’s afflictions, and also risky. In my experience, people’s sorrows are always in danger of bursting out; it’s only through careful inattention that they can be contained. But Arlen appeared to have no such reservations.

  “Was it sudden?”

  “Yes and no.” Reluctantly, I explained about my mother’s long illness, first the Parkinson’s, followed by the heart ailment. The respites and the relapses, which got progressively worse. Then the bad cold she contracted. The fishlike gasps. One night Frances had taken her up some broth on a tray. The next morning, she was dead.

  “So Frances was the last one she saw? That must’ve done a number on her.”

  “Actually,” I said, “it was me.”

  “Sorry?”

  “I was the last one to see her.”

  He shook his head. “It’s so hard on kids, when they lose their moms.”

  “Not if they barely had one in the first place.”

  Arlen winced, then paddled his plump hands in the water while the turkey bobbed up and down. After a moment he said softly, “How about your dad? Where was he? Wasn’t he there?”

  “He was there. Part of the time.” Then I said quickly, “Frances tries to make him seem like a nice old guy, but he wasn’t so nice back then. In fact, he was cheating on her right up to the night before she died.”

  We both listened to the bubbling of the jets. In the bright light of the bathroom, the tiny diamond in Arlen’s nose glinted and glittered. I was aware—I’d been aware all along—of where this conversation was going. Sarah must have asked Arlen to root out information about her mother and grandfather over the holiday, had perhaps even banked on the surprise of him to get everyone talking.

  Or maybe not. Maybe the presence of Arlen was designed instead to shut everyone up. Maybe Sarah had dragged him along as a distraction, a deflection. Something to ward off her mother. (What assurances and promises had Frances tried to extract from Sarah, during those October phone calls?) The more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that Walter was probably right, that Arlen had been brought along by Sarah for “protection” from her family. Except that Arlen’s own curiosity was getting the better of him.

  IN THE KITCHEN, Sarah was peeling potatoes. Walter stirred the gingered carrots, while brussels sprouts roasted in the oven and a tall stainless steel pot of water simmered on the stove. Frances had prepared two kinds of stuffing, one with sausage, port, dried cherries, and hazelnuts; the other with corn bread and sage. Already the kitchen smelled savory and complex, a mix of butter and garlic and onions and different herbs. Exactly the way a kitchen is supposed to smell right before Thanksgiving.

  As I walked in, Sarah was telling Walter that she was going to declare herself as premed, although this announcement did not seem to surprise Walter. Their differences of the night before seemed to have been forgotten. Neurology, Sarah was thinking, would be her specialty.

  “What do you think, Dad?”

  Frances was not taking part in the conversation. As I filled the kettle to make myself a cup of tea, Frances hardly glanced up from her station near the sink, where she was polishing her Waterford crystal goblets. Eventually, I noticed that she was polishing the same goblet over and over.

  “Are you okay?” I said in a low voice.

  “Of course,” she said, not turning around. “I’m fine.”

  Uncharacteristically, Frances had given up on her centerpiece and let Jane take charge of the table, which she’d covered that morning with a heavy white damask tablecloth. When I looked into the dining room, I saw that Jane had again folded the napkins into fan shapes. She’d also done a clever thing with the striped gourds, grouping them with the nuts and the Indian corn around the base of each of Frances’s six silver candlesticks, placed at intervals down the middle of the long table. For a centerpiece, she’d taken a fluted silver dish and filled it with pinecones, interspersed with a few sprigs of bittersweet she’d clipped from the spray on the front door. The pinecones carried a fresh lively scent of sap.

  “That looks really nice,” I said as Jane hustled pa
st me with forks and knives. “Very abundant.”

  She nodded, moving around the table with her fists full of silverware. In the interim since she’d visited us in the bathroom, she’d twisted her red hair into a bun, bristling with bobby pins, and changed out of her black cargo pants into a tight moth-eaten black silk dress worn over torn fishnet stockings and her combat boots, to which she’d added a pair of elbow-length black gloves. With her hair in a bun, her tattoo was on full display.

  “Very nice,” I repeated.

  “Thanks,” she said, not looking up.

  When I returned to the kitchen, Frances was still polishing goblets. I reminded her that we needed to prepare a rice dish for Arlen, and the Egyptians if it turned out they didn’t eat turkey. I also reminded her that, as a vegan, Arlen would not eat butter, and so we should serve margarine as well. Frances didn’t respond. Sarah and Walter were now discussing premed requirements and whether she should take Chem II in the spring or wait until next fall. Sarah had decided to quit playing JV field hockey, so that she could have more time to study. Walter wasn’t sure this was a wise idea. She was only a freshman, after all, and exercise was important. As far as I could tell, they still hadn’t asked Frances’s opinion about Sarah’s plan to become a neurologist or whether she should quit playing field hockey. In fact, they seemed to have forgotten that she was there.

  But just as I was going to mention the rice dish and margarine again, Frances put down the crystal goblet she was polishing and went to stand close beside Sarah. Sarah and Walter continued talking. After a moment Frances put a hand on Sarah’s shoulder.

  Sarah stiffened.

  “Whatever you do, darling”—Frances was smiling tensely— “just keep going.”

  Sarah gave her a mystified look. I was startled myself to hear Frances use that particular phrase, until I realized that it must have been the most encouraging phrase she knew. Perhaps she was using it now to encourage herself as much as Sarah.

  “You just keep going,” Frances repeated.

  “Okay, Mom,” said Sarah in a humoring tone.