The Ghost at the Table: A Novel Read online

It had to be confusing for Frances, I thought, as I watched the three of them continue to stand awkwardly by the stove. Sarah withdrawing into her life at college, Jane so moody and critical. No longer little girls in handmade cotton smock dresses, clamoring to bake Christmas cookies or sew Halloween costumes. Even Walter was changing, now that he was head of his department at the hospital and had achieved more or less all that he was going to achieve. I had the impression that middle age was chafing at him and that what Frances saw as cantankerousness was his increasing restlessness, especially with her intense domesticity—the candles, the tablecloths, the Thanksgiving hubbub—which he’d once looked upon proudly but now found constrictive. And yet he must have recognized that to ask her to behave differently would not only be cruel, by now it would be impossible. Keep going, that’s what was left.

  “You know, there’s probably still time for you to take a nap, Mom.” Sarah dropped her shoulder under Frances’s hand but in such a way that she might have just been shifting her weight. “You look totally done in.”

  I hadn’t noticed before, but Frances did look exhausted. In fact, she looked like someone who hadn’t slept in days.

  “Go ahead, Frances,” urged Walter. “We can handle the rest.”

  Walter and Sarah smiled at Frances. Frances stood there for another moment, going pale, her hand hovering a fraction above Sarah’s shoulder.

  “I’m fine,” she said.

  “Ah So,” said Jane, spying the battered Datsun from the kitchen window. “Here comes Mr. Chopsticks.”

  “Oh no, he’s early,” Frances cried.

  But when Sarah and I opened the front door, it was to the deep elegiac blue of snow at dusk. Across the driveway, a line of tall junipers stood like the crenellated towers of a castle into which snow fell dreamily. A single light shone in the distance from a neighbor’s window. Against this tranquil backdrop stood Wen-Yi on the front steps, in a thin black coat, an orange wool watch cap, and black tasseled loafers that looked brand new but had already been ruined by his walk from the driveway through the snow. In one hand he carried a boxed pumpkin pie.

  Fortunately, I’d just managed to put on lipstick and mascara and change into the long claret-colored velvet gown I had worn the Thanksgiving before, at a dinner at Don’s house. I had bought the gown one afternoon when Carita and I were shopping at a vintage clothing store in Berkeley; it had tight sleeves and a low-cut neckline, trimmed in gold thread, which was flattering on me, and the dark velvet showed up the auburn highlights in my hair. Yet as I glanced down at myself now in the doorway, I realized that what had been charmingly vampy in San Francisco looked garish in Concord, and suddenly I worried that I was as ridiculously dressed as Jane.

  Sarah had also changed, into a high-necked white blouse and a long black skirt made of some soft, knitted material, and a pair of black suede boots. Her smooth brown hair was swept back, held behind her head with a tortoiseshell clip.

  Wen-Yi stared at us mournfully, then looked down at his soggy tasseled loafers.

  “Would you like to take them off?” asked Sarah. “I could get you a pair of slippers. I’m sure my dad has an extra pair.”

  He considered this offer for a moment, torn between comfort and propriety, or perhaps worried that the black dye from his wet loafers had bled onto his white socks. Then he shook his head and declared that he was “very happy.” I introduced him to Sarah and he surrendered the boxed pie to her, then handed me his coat and orange cap.

  Arlen was sitting at the kitchen table, drinking a cup of tea and eating a handful of raw cashews, still clad in his track suit. Wen-Yi’s eyes widened at the sight of Arlen, who grinned in return. Walter had a dish towel slung over his shoulder and his sleeves rolled up. He was putting the turkey, thawed at last, into the oven.

  “A small miscalculation.” Frances gave Wen-Yi a panicky smile as he entered the kitchen. “I’m afraid the turkey’s going to be a little behind schedule.” But as if to make up for this tepid greeting, she made a show of bustling over to Wen-Yi and giving him a kiss on the cheek, then looping her arm through his. She hadn’t changed out of the clothes she’d been wearing since morning and they made an odd-looking pair, Wen-Yi in a blue suit and a yellow striped tie, Frances in sweatpants. Wen-Yi glanced nervously at Walter, whose eyeglasses had steamed up from the heat of the oven.

  “Did you meet Sarah?” asked Frances animatedly. “And this is her good friend, Arlen. You know Walter, of course.”

  “Of course,” said Walter, straightening up.

  Walter had done some quick thinking. By calling a neighbor for advice, he had found out about a special plastic turkey bag in which the turkey would roast in half the usual time. Walter had walked through the woods to the neighbor’s house to get one of those bags while I was upstairs dressing. Roasting plastic would release toxins, Walter explained now to Wen-Yi, taking a pull from a bottle of beer, but what the hell.

  Frances noticed Wen-Yi’s damp shoes and asked if he’d like to sit by the fire. I followed as she led him by the hand to the living room, where Jane was working on a jigsaw puzzle she’d spread out on the coffee table while my father watched. Frances must have asked Jane to find something to engage him. My father, too, was wearing a coat and tie; Walter had helped him get into them.

  Jane said hello to Wen-Yi and my father nodded while Frances introduced them, then Frances found a plaid shawl on the back of a chair and insisted on winding it around Wen-Yi’s shoulders. She made him sit down on the sofa beside Jane.

  “That should warm you up!” she exclaimed.

  Wen-Yi looked relieved when Frances said that she had to get back to the kitchen. Gone was his usual pouty smolder, and I saw that Frances had offended him with her fussing. In his new black tasseled loafers, he’d done his best to look debonair and sophisticated, a proper doctoral candidate. But now Frances had gone and bundled him in a hairy old plaid shawl. As she left the room, Wen-Yi was leaning over the jigsaw puzzle with his elbows on his knees, pointedly not watching her go.

  THE EGYPTIANS ARRIVED late because of the snow, toting their almond-colored baby, half swallowed in a white snowsuit and steadfastly asleep in his padded car seat. Walter introduced them as the Fareeds, Kamal and Amina.

  Right behind them was Mary Ellen Gunderson, Frances’s assistant, Walter’s supposed inamorata, who drove up in her car at the same time they did. They’d already met out in the driveway.

  “How nice!” said Frances, who had changed at last, into a Japanese-looking gray silk dress, made of several long filmy overlapping panels that floated diaphanously whenever she moved. A beautiful dress but in its own way as overdone and theatrical as mine. She seemed to be floating now as she greeted her guests, asking for their coats, cooing over the baby, hoping that they weren’t frozen from their trek across the driveway.

  While she and Walter attended to the Fareeds, I took Mary Ellen’s camel’s hair coat and the pricey bottle of Calvados she’d brought Frances as a hostess present. Mary Ellen was less New Agey than I’d pictured her, about thirty-five, solid and muscular-looking, wearing a strand of seed pearls and a bright turquoise wool skirt and sweater set. Her dark hair was chopped at chin length, framing a square, sallow, good-humored face speckled with tiny brown moles. Her one startling feature was the color of her eyes, an unusual pale blue, which the turquoise outfit was obviously meant to enhance. Hovering in the doorway, she apologized to Frances for being late, saying that she’d been on the phone with her aunt in New Jersey.

  “I usually go to her place every year, but my uncle’s been sick. My aunt’s arthritis is acting up, too. I offered to come down and do the turkey, but she said she just didn’t have the energy for it. I hope this isn’t too much trouble, having me to dinner.”

  Frances smiled from beside the mourner’s bench, piled now with coats and hats, then graciously assured Mary Ellen that of course it was no trouble and said how wonderful it was that she could come, thanking her twice for the Calvados, which would go so well with the
pie. Though Frances’s back was to me, I could see her face reflected in the cloudy old mirror. Two hectic spots of color had appeared on her cheeks.

  “It’s wonderful that you could come,” she repeated, reaching for Mary Ellen’s hand. “Have you two met? Mary Ellen, this is my sister, Cynthia. The famous writer. Visiting from California.”

  “Cynthia. Hi.” Mary Ellen’s face crumpled with enthusiasm. “I’ve heard so much about you. Your sister talks about you all the time.”

  “Oh no,” I said before turning to say hello to the Fareeds.

  Kamal, the young husband, was tall and slightly overbearing, with a big imperious nose and thick shiny black hair combed back off his forehead. His wife had a small apologetic face, gently rounded, with large soft brown eyes. She wore a green headscarf, a loose amber-colored silk blouse, black pants and neat little black fleece-lined snow boots, which she removed and set in the corner by the door, then replaced with stylish black pumps she pulled out of a plastic grocery bag. They both spoke perfect English, almost accentless in Kamal’s case. But they’d arrived overloaded with baggage—a cloth bouncy seat with a bar of brightly colored plastic toys, a portable crib in a rectangular carry case, a baby monitor, a swollen quilted diaper bag (“How long are they staying?” I heard Jane whisper to Sarah and Arlen)—and also more pies, homemade, with perfectly crimped crusts. Two pumpkins and an apple.

  “Who needs turkey with so much pie?” Walter said too loudly, toasting the pies with his beer bottle, red-faced above his blue Oxford shirt.

  Eventually everyone was persuaded to move into the living room, where Wen-Yi and my father were sitting in heavy silence. My father peered up at the new arrivals truculently, one of his eyelids half closed. Frances excused herself to check on the turkey. The rest of us perched on the two sofas and chairs, trying to look interested in Jane’s jigsaw puzzle, while Walter took drink orders, then followed Frances into the kitchen. I sat next to Wen-Yi. The puzzle was of Rousseau’s Sleeping Gypsy, always so mysterious, with that huge lion pacing either hungrily or protectively behind the prone figure of the gypsy, who looks almost fatuously unconscious. Jane had already fit together most of the pieces around the edges. She and Wen-Yi were working together; every so often he proffered a piece between his long fingers that would prove to be just the one she was looking for. The Fareeds’ baby, whose name I didn’t quite catch (Ahmad?), was also a welcome diversion. Though the baby appeared to be perfectly comfortable asleep in his car seat, Kamal insisted that he be taken out and exhibited in his yellow pajamas, before he was put to bed in his portable crib. Kamal and Amina carried the crib upstairs, led by Jane, to assemble in Sarah’s room, while Sarah sat on the edge of the sofa holding the baby, her face tensing with responsibility when he drooled onto her shoulder.

  “So,” I said to Mary Ellen, who looked disappointed not to be the one holding the baby. “You work with Frances?”

  “Oh, I’m just her assistant.” She turned gratefully to me. “I’m not a designer. Not yet, anyway.”

  “But is that what you’d like to do? Be a designer?”

  “I’d love to be like Frances. She’s a genius at what she does.” Mary Ellen leaned toward me, smiling. “And she’s not wild about going out and spending people’s money, either, like some of these decorators. I really respect that. Half the time she just uses what’s already there, just changes things around so it all looks better. Like this upholstery?” Mary Ellen patted the carmine and cream floral cushion she was sitting on. “Well, it’s just inside out on the other sofa. Frances had bought all this fabric, but then she decided she didn’t want both sofas to match, so rather than buying a bunch of new fabric she reversed what she had for one of them. Isn’t that smart?”

  I agreed that it was.

  “She always says that when things match up too well they don’t appeal to the eye. It’s contrast that appeals to the eye. Isn’t that interesting? Being an interior decorator has a lot to do with understanding human nature,” she went on. “It’s a lot more than just knowing better than other people what things should look like.”

  “Are you planning to start your own business?” I asked, hoping to get off the subject of Frances.

  “Right now I’m not really into making plans,” she said, stroking the sofa cushion. “My mom died not too long ago. So right now I’m just kind of living for the moment.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Well, thanks,” said Mary Ellen. “She’d been sick for a long time.” She seemed on the brink of saying more when Walter reappeared with a tray of wineglasses, trailed by Kamal, who’d come back with Jane for the baby.

  “Sarah’s decided to be premed,” Walter was telling Kamal.

  Jane sat down with Arlen beside a shelf of carved wooden birds, leaving Wen-Yi to work on the puzzle alone.

  “Hey, good for you.” Mary Ellen turned to Sarah. “That’s so great.”

  “Thanks,” said Sarah briefly.

  “Are you a doctor?” Mary Ellen asked Wen-Yi.

  Wen-Yi stared back at her, elbows tucked into his sides, still wrapped in the plaid shawl. Taking pity on him, I explained to Mary Ellen that he was getting his PhD in mathematics at Tufts.

  “Topology,” he offered finally.

  “Top what?” Mary Ellen smiled encouragingly.

  “String theory.” He pulled off the shawl and began explaining string theory to Mary Ellen and Sarah. Which left me with no one to talk to but my father, sitting silent and shrunken in his wheelchair, one clawlike hand drawn up against his chest.

  “That’s such a neat old piano,” I heard Mary Ellen say next.

  Jane and Arlen were having an earnest conversation in a corner, their foreheads inclined toward each other. “Actually, it’s a player organ,” Sarah said, watching them.

  “Does anybody here play it?”

  “No one has so far,” I said. “Want to give it a try?”

  “Oh no.” Mary Ellen lifted the palms of her hands in mock distress. “I’m no musician.”

  “You don’t have to be,” I reminded her. “You can make it play by itself, or you can play it like a regular organ. Either one.”

  “Oh.” She straightened up, looking a little flushed. “Well, maybe I should get one for my aunt with arthritis. My aunt loves piano music.”

  Frances came in at that moment. “I haven’t had a chance to show you, Mary Ellen,” she said gaily, the pearl gray panels of her dress drifting behind her. “It came just last week. Our last remaining family heirloom, snatched from the abyss. It used to belong to Mark Twain.”

  “It did?” said Arlen, looking up from his conversation with Jane. “For real?”

  “Well, that was the story.” Frances smiled. “Anyway, the organ gave Cynthia the idea for her book, the one she’s working on now. Isn’t that right, Cynnie?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  Mary Ellen laughed awkwardly. “Well, that’s really neat,” she announced, “I mean, however you got the idea,” turning her pale eyes on me as Frances excused herself once more to go back to the kitchen.

  I smiled back at her, ashamed for being rude to Frances, who after all was just making small talk, though that remark about the abyss had been ill chosen, given that our father was sitting right there. But I resented being turned into one of Frances’s pieces, with a charming story attached.

  Mary Ellen began asking questions about my books and the subject of family heirlooms was dropped.

  “Gosh,” she exclaimed eventually, “I’m just so impressed. I mean, it must be such hard work, coming up with all those ideas.”

  “Probably no harder than anyone else’s work.”

  “Hey, don’t sell yourself short.” Mary Ellen reached out to give my arm a little shake. “What you’re doing is really amazing.”

  Frances was crazy, I decided, to think Walter could be interested in Mary Ellen. She was the sort of woman about whom married friends sighed and said, “Poor Mary Ellen, I just don’t understand what th
e problem is.” But they understood perfectly well what the problem was. Mary Ellen gave the fatal impression of Making the Best of Things, with her seed pearls and her turquoise outfit, her plucky efforts at carrying on conversations with uncooperative people. She was a Good Sport, who Lived for the Moment. Few things are more off-putting than the sight of someone reduced to such a hand-to-mouth existence.

  When Kamal and Amina returned from settling their baby, followed by Walter carrying a bottle of wine, I got up to see if I could help Frances. Who was herself a good sport, of course. The ultimate good sport, who could take bad luck and reverse it, the way she’d transformed our rotten old father, hunched like a bat in his wheelchair, grumpily waving away a glass of wine, into a bit of decorator’s gold: a nice old man by the fire on Thanksgiving.

  A bottle of cabernet and two bottles of Sancerre were opened on the table, with two more cabernets breathing on the sideboard. By the time we sat down at the table we’d already gone through several bottles of wine and it was almost six o’clock. The dining-room windows, left uncurtained, were black.

  “House rules: No talking about politics at dinner,” announced Frances, the last to pull out a chair. She wagged her finger in comic admonishment at Walter and Sarah. “We don’t want indigestion on Thanksgiving.”

  Everyone laughed good-humoredly as Walter and Sarah picked up their napkins and pretended to wave them in surrender.

  “To our kind host and hostess.” Kamal rose as Frances settled into her chair. “To Walter and Frances. Thank you for including us at your fine table.” He regarded them both solemnly, as if being included at a table decorated with gourds and pinecones were a grave initiation. “Many blessings.”

  Crystal glittered as everyone raised their glasses; even Jane had a glass.

  “To all,” echoed Amina.

  “To all,” we said.

  “To having dinner at all,” said Walter.

  “Amen,” said Arlen.

  “What a cute table,” said Mary Ellen.