The Ghost at the Table: A Novel Read online

  “Frances has always been fine,” I said, gazing up at him.

  But Walter wasn’t listening to me. “And for your information she doesn’t feel anything but sorry for your father. It’s been twenty-five years. She wants to get on with things. Stop trying to drag her back into things that don’t matter anymore.”

  “Me? Dragging her back?”

  “So the hell with you and what you think you know.”

  How could we have gotten to this point? It was only a few days ago that Walter and I had sat in his car, discussing Frances like two comrades. A few minutes ago he was holding my hand by candlelight. I could not understand how I could be so unfairly accused of being stuck in the past, when clearly it was Frances who was stuck, when she was the one who had engineered our father’s arrival in her house, who had schemed to get our grandmother’s organ, who wouldn’t turn up the heat or allow for decent lighting. I hadn’t lied to anyone. I hadn’t cheated. How could I be to blame?

  Because it was convenient. Because it was believable. Even I half believed that I was to blame for everything that had gone wrong, from Frances’s plans for a nice family Thanksgiving to Walter’s “misjudgment.”

  Carefully I reminded myself that all I had done was to try to be of help, the lapses of this particular evening aside. I had come to Concord with every intention of being reasonable, of acting the way sisters were supposed to act when presented with the ungovernable fact of a father who was old and sick and most likely about to die. If my visit had resulted in falseness and confusion, it was not entirely my fault; in fact, it was possible that it was not my fault at all. It was also possible that it did not matter who was at fault.

  “I’ve heard enough,” Walter was saying. “I’m going to bed.”

  “Walter, listen. It was Frances who—”

  “I’ve heard enough.” He was already halfway across the living room.

  But just then Walter stopped dead. Not to reconsider anything we’d said, but because both of us had become aware of a strange sound.

  At first it sounded like a distant crumpling, like tin foil being uncrinkled and smoothed out, a low caustic rustling. For a disoriented moment I thought it might be a dog or a coyote that had somehow slipped into the house through the back door, drawn by the smell of turkey carcass, nosing in the garbage. But the sound was coming from the dining room. Part hiss, part crackle, part long ghostly sigh.

  Then suddenly it resolved into a single voice, as if a guest had been forgotten and was still sitting at the table waiting to be served.

  “She’s so out of it.”

  Another voice answered, less distinctly.

  Then the first came again: “I mean it, she is so totally out of it.”

  More mutterings, followed by static. It was Sarah and Arlen, I realized. Though it took me another minute to figure out that they’d gone into Sarah’s room, where earlier that evening the Fareeds had set up their portable crib and the baby monitor. In their hurry to depart the Fareeds must have forgotten to take the baby monitor with them, and Sarah and Arlen’s voices were being transmitted from upstairs.

  “She’s always been out of it. But now she’s like this—freak.” Sarah was perfectly audible now. “I mean, did you get a load of that dress?”

  “She’s not a freak,” came Arlen’s light drawl. “She’s depressed.”

  “Of course she’s depressed. Who isn’t depressed?”

  “No, more than that. I talked to her.”

  “You did—”

  “We had a long chat.”

  “Well, good for you.” Sarah sounded angry.

  I pictured Arlen and Jane sitting together in the living room by the shelf of carved birds. It had probably made Sarah jealous, that cozy little scene. Sarah had always been possessive about her friends, never willing to include her sister or overlook Jane’s eccentricities, even though Sarah had had all the advantages. But there was nothing wrong with Jane that getting away from home, and out from under Sarah, wouldn’t cure.

  “Cynthia,” Walter said, not moving.

  “It’s just Sarah and Arlen,” I told him, raising my hand.

  Arlen’s drawling voice had continued on, “Though if you ask me, I’d say it’s more than simple depression, I’d say she’s in some kind of arrested—”

  A clarifying word or two was lost here in the static, then Arlen’s voice returned: “A pretense at normalcy, but everything comes back to—”

  “You think everything’s about people’s mothers,” interrupted Sarah.

  “Well, because—”

  More static.

  So it was Frances, I realized, sitting back against the sofa cushions. Not Jane. It was Frances they were discussing; Frances who was depressed, whose life was arrested, who was out of it. Hadn’t Walter told me the same thing in the car? No longer able to drive, spending days in her room. How had I missed how deeply disturbed she was? I thought of Frances’s story at the dinner table, about my father carving the Thanksgiving turkey. Arlen, the outside observer, had recognized that story for what it was, a pitiful attempt to polish the past. Frances must have gone over this incident again and again in her mind, trying to smooth every jagged edge, just as she’d done with our father and everything she recalled about him. But now here he was in her house, as unregenerate as ever, the fly in her amber. It all made sense. Arlen was very sharp. Nothing got by him.

  “Let’s turn it off,” I said to Walter, who was still standing motionless in the middle of the room, staring at the dark doorway. He’d heard enough about Frances for one night. “Let’s not listen to them. They don’t know anything. They’re kids. We don’t need to hear what they think.”

  But the voices had begun to crackle once more in the dining room, small and thin and persistent. “She’s pathetic.”

  “She’s fine,” I told him.

  “Cynthia.” Walter had turned finally and was staring now at me. “Just who do you think they’re talking about?”

  It was long past midnight, though exactly what time it was, I didn’t know, having forgotten to put on my watch when I was getting dressed. Everyone else had gone to bed. Only I was still awake, wrapped in the shawl Wen-Yi had worn earlier, still sitting in the living room in the fading candlelight.

  Outside the wind was still battering at the dark windows, tearing at the ivy and blowing down the chimney with a hollow sound. It hadn’t been coyotes howling earlier, just the wind as that cold front blew in from Canada. I could feel the barometer dropping.

  The fire had gone out long ago and Frances’s furniture had settled deeply into the gloom. Only the white pillar candles still burned, the color of moonlight on top of the organ around the Spode vase. Burning lower and lower in their saucers, their wax walls thinning and curling inward, but still burning.

  And then wax began to overflow the saucers.

  I didn’t notice at first. Dripping candle wax doesn’t make a noise, like dripping water, and I had closed my eyes for a few minutes. But gradually an acrid smell drifted toward me from across the room. When I opened my eyes I saw a thin white stream run down the mahogany side of the organ cabinet. Then another, and another. Like little burst dams, the candles on top of the organ gave way, one by one, releasing spills of hot wax down the front of the cabinet now, then onto the carved fretwork, onto the scrolls and garlands, the stop knobs and finally onto the keyboard, seeping between the celluloid keys. Silently I waited to see what would happen next, amazed by all this quiet damage that I had done nothing to cause, while white wax continued to spill unctuously onto the organ.

  Then a twig fell sideways from Frances’s arrangement of dried grasses. Just a twig. The bottom half of the twig stayed lodged in the vase, but the tip of it fell into one of the candle flames, a tiny flame, which had burned so low it had turned blue.

  It took only another few moments for the vase of dried grasses and cattails to catch fire, almost as if it had been put there for that purpose, an enormous wick set atop the enormous candle of my g
randmother’s organ. Soon a warm busy glow lit the room, a homely glow, not particularly menacing, even as the flames shot higher.

  I wish I could deny that I sat and watched this small conflagration take place. Watched calmly, almost greedily, and with something more than fascination. But that would be a lie. Nestled on the sofa in my sister’s lovely living room, wrapped in her lovely shawl, drunk on her lovely bottle of Calvados, and with gladness in my heart, I watched her only bona fide family heirloom catch fire and took the time to note that the living room did not have a smoke detector fastened onto the ceiling. Nor did the front hall, for that matter. Smoke detectors, like television sets, don’t go well with antiques, and both had been banished from the lower regions of Frances’s house.

  I am only human, although I regret it.

  Even so I couldn’t have remained on that sofa for longer than a few minutes. Before the flames had a chance to catch at the curtains or the carpet, or even to scorch one of the lampshades, I had scrambled to my feet.

  My first thought was to douse the fire with water—not having any water at hand, I seized the bottle of Calvados and unwisely emptied what was left in it onto the organ. This of course made the fire blaze higher. Next I tore off the shawl and tried to smother the flames with it—somewhat more effective, though I knocked over the vase, which broke into pieces and sent burning grasses scattering onto the Persian carpet. I slapped at the grasses with the shawl, until the shawl, too, caught fire. Then I ran to the kitchen, threw the shawl into the sink, which was full of soaking pans, found the fire extinguisher beside the refrigerator, and ran with it back to the living room to spray onto the organ.

  After that it took only a few moments to put out the flames, which had not actually grown very big. Nor was the damage very serious, once I’d turned on a lamp to see by: a brown scorch mark had seared onto the ceiling, the Spode vase was broken into several pieces, a palm-sized hole was burnt into the carpet.

  The organ itself was a smoking mess—beyond all hope of reclaiming—but the rest of the living room was spared. And at last my head cleared enough that I could look around and evaluate exactly what had happened, or rather what I had done, by not doing anything.

  Four

  Walter was the first one downstairs on Friday morning. When he saw the charred organ in the living room, the scorch marks on the ceiling, the broken vase, I thought for a moment he was going to call the police. Then I thought he was going to put me in the car and take me straight to the airport.

  I hadn’t gone to bed that night at all. I’d stayed up airing the living room and putting to right what I could. When Walter arrived downstairs, I was on my hands and knees in my velvet dress, picking bits of burnt grass out of the carpet.

  “What is this?” he said faintly, stumbling as he stepped into the living room. He tightened the cord on his bathrobe. “What happened here?”

  I explained that I had fallen asleep on the sofa and that when I awoke the room was in flames.

  “Why didn’t you call any of us?”

  I didn’t answer. Walter had just started to say something else, less faintly, when Frances came creeping downstairs in her long blue flannel nightgown.

  Her hands flew to either side of her face. “Oh my God, Cynnie,” she cried. “Are you all right?”

  I’d expected tears and recriminations, once she’d seen her spoiled living room, but Frances had only sympathy for me and what I’d gone through.

  “How awful for you,” she kept saying, hardly glancing at the room.

  I went off to wash my hands in the bathroom. The sight of my face in the mirror gave me a start. Red-eyed as a banshee, hair wild, my cheeks and forehead streaked with soot. No wonder Frances had looked so concerned. As I came out of the bathroom a few minutes later I heard her and Walter talking in the front hall.

  “I can’t believe you, Walter,” Frances was saying, making no effort to keep her voice down. “What’s wrong with you? She saved the house from burning to the ground.”

  “All I’m saying—,” Walter began, but then Sarah and Arlen came downstairs, and everything had to be explained to them.

  They were not as sympathetic as Frances.

  “So it was the candles?” Sarah asked me, her eyes narrow, her serious young face still pink and puffy with sleep. “You passed out and the candles overflowed, and then one of them caught the organ on fire? And you didn’t bother to tell anyone?”

  Arlen leaned against a doorjamb, watching me as he stroked his downy little black moustache.

  Frances spent the rest of the morning making calls to house painters and restoration specialists, while I sat with her in the kitchen. I should have gone to bed, but I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to sleep. I was also afraid of leaving Frances alone to listen to what the others might tell her.

  After her first shock when viewing the damage to her living room, Frances declared that it wasn’t much, after all. She could have the room professionally steam-cleaned in a day and the ceiling repainted. The organ looked unsalvageable to me, but Frances claimed that she’d seen a lot worse. A man she knew in Reading specialized in reconditioning antique musical instruments, even ones that had been through floods and fires. I could not understand how she could be taking the injuries to her living room so calmly—Frances, who was normally unhinged by dirty plates left in the sink. The carpet, too, she concluded, could be neatly repaired, the coffee table repositioned to cover the damaged spot, though it would be expensive to match such old wool. But when I offered to pay for everything Frances wouldn’t hear of it.

  “I can’t stand to think what would have happened if you hadn’t woken up. No, it’s my fault,” she said, “for not making sure all those candles were put out.”

  Jane, too, seemed to think I was some sort of a hero. “And the whole time the rest of us were asleep.” She looked at me with admiration.

  As for my father, when he was wheeled into the kitchen for breakfast and treated by Frances to the story of my brave night, he didn’t make any comment at all, just kept staring at me, a little blankly, the way you do with someone you can’t quite place, but whom you know you’ve seen before.

  THAT WAS FRIDAY. Sarah and Arlen left on Saturday morning, a little before nine. Originally they had planned to stay in Concord until Sunday, but on Friday afternoon they announced that they needed to get back to New York for a rally they’d forgotten they had promised some friends they’d attend. I didn’t believe them, and I could tell Frances didn’t, either, but she made only a token protest (“You just got here”), barely seconded by Walter. Sarah would be back in three weeks for Christmas. And I wasn’t the only one who’d suffered under the scrutiny of Sarah and Arlen.

  Walter drove them to the train station Saturday morning, and then went on to the hospital for his scheduled rounds. Otherwise he might have gone to Hartford with us. He did not seem keen on our trip to see the Mark Twain House and on Friday evening had tried several times to dissuade Frances from going, first suggesting that I go by myself, then, when Frances declared that she wanted to go with me, pointing out that my father could not be left alone for the entire day.

  “He’s coming with us,” announced Frances.

  I’d lost all interest in visiting Hartford myself and said as much to Frances. I explained that I could use photographs of the Mark Twain House to get the furniture right and what I remembered of Hartford to fill in the flora and fauna and the street names. I even mentioned an historical novelist I know who never bothers with period detail in his novels but simply begins the first chapter with “London 1865,” or “Vienna 1703,” and the reader imagines the rest.

  It was Frances who insisted.

  “You flew all the way out here for this,” she told me in the kitchen. “I’m going to make sure you get what you came for.”

  “The traffic on 84 is going to be terrible.” Walter was resting both hands on the back of a chair. “It’s Thanksgiving weekend. All those people going back to New York.”

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sp; Frances made a careless gesture with her hands.

  “And they’re calling for more snow.”

  “Walter, stop it. I’m sure we’ll be fine.”

  “What about Jane?” His voice hardened. “Go if you want, but there’s no way I’m letting you take Jane.”

  I thought it was all over then. Walter had finally made himself clear. But, pale and quiet in her black wool sweater and faded denim pants, Frances only stared back at him. “Fine,” she said at last, setting her jaw. “If you’re that worried about the weather, Walter, Jane can go into Cambridge with you. I’m sure she’d love to spend the day poking around Harvard Square.”

  He turned from Frances to look at me. I cannot describe the expression on his face because I could not stand to look at him. “If you’re driving, Cynthia,” he said, in a low, even voice, “I’m warning you, you’d better be careful.”

  THOUGH FRIDAY HAD been overcast, and Walter kept predicting more bad weather, Saturday proved to be a clear bright day, one of those late fall mornings when the sky is the impossible blue of a child’s balloon, expanding behind scribbles of bare tree branches.

  It was just after eleven. I was once again driving Frances’s van. She sat beside me in the passenger seat, in her high-collared black cashmere coat, my father in the backseat. Concord appeared deserted, the streets of the village almost empty of cars, the stores still closed. Clapboard houses shone in the cold sunlight, snug and insular behind their well-tended hedges.

  “Isn’t this exciting, Dad?” said Frances. “Going to Hartford? I’ll bet you haven’t been there in years.”

  I looked into the rearview mirror. He was sitting behind Frances staring out the window at the passing trees and houses.

  He did not look well this morning. His face was gray and one of his eyelids was drooping; bluish hollows dented his cheeks. A few minutes later he fell asleep, his head angled toward his shoulder. As we got onto the highway, Frances began to say something about checking the oil before we left, but then stopped herself. Soon enough, we’d passed Worcester and within half an hour I was slowing down for the Sturbridge tolls, and then we were on I-84, heading southwest.