The Ghost at the Table: A Novel Page 22

  It had been twenty years at least since I’d driven from Boston to Hartford, yet everything looked more or less the same. Rocky outcroppings, hills, woods, some light industry. A highway service island appeared on my left, where Frances and I had once stopped for gas in a borrowed car when we were both in college, then spent half an hour trying to figure out why we couldn’t get the car started again, only to realize that Frances had left it in gear. We’d shrieked with laughter for miles.

  The sky had clouded over and the traffic, which had been light as we left Massachusetts, began to get heavier. Frances leaned back against her headrest, gazing out through the windshield at the highway. In the winter sunlight her skin looked worn, almost brittle, the color of old porcelain. Dad was still asleep, snoring lightly through his nose. Frances turned her head to glance back at him.

  Then in a small, determined voice she said, “I have something to tell you.”

  At first I thought she was going to bring up the fire in the living room and tell me that she knew what I’d done, by letting it get out of hand. But instead she said: “It’s about what I said at dinner the other night, about there having been misunderstandings.”

  “Oh, that,” I said, relieved.

  She peered at me alertly. “It’s about what happened. All the old stuff. It wasn’t the way you think.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “When I went to see Dad on the Cape.” She furrowed her eyebrows. “I didn’t tell you but I went a bunch of times, not just once or twice. We spent a lot of time together and had a chance to really talk. It was pretty amazing. I mean for the first time he told me about his mother, about going to her grave every year on December 16. He told me about that day when she died. It was so traumatic for him, Cynnie. It’s colored his whole life. He was just a little boy.”

  “So?” I said thinly.

  Frances took a deep breath. “So, we really had a chance to go over everything. We’d never done that before, told each other what we remembered.”

  I kept my eyes on the road and said nothing.

  “I’ve been waiting for the right time to tell you. But after the last few days—well, there’s never going to be an exact right time, so I want to go ahead now. Because we put it all together, Dad and I.”

  “You put all what together?”

  Frances looked at me with compassion. “What happened, Cynnie. To our mother. And why everything happened that happened afterward.”

  “So that’s what this whole Thanksgiving has been about?” My voice was very calm.

  “I needed to bring you and Dad together, while there’s still time.”

  When I didn’t say anything, she reached out and touched my sleeve. “Dad explained it all to me, what I hadn’t known, and I explained to him what he hadn’t known. Now we both understand.”

  Cars kept switching into my lane to avoid the ones coming off the entrance ramps. Twice I had to brake suddenly. I glanced into the rearview mirror, but my father appeared to be fast asleep.

  Frances was still talking. “You were just a little kid then. I didn’t want anyone thinking it was you.”

  “What?”

  She looked at me patiently. “Please listen. I’m trying to explain. Remember how strangely I acted afterward about Mrs. Jordan? How rotten I acted about Ilse? I was trying to look guilty. I didn’t really think that you’d done anything, but her dying was so sudden, and you were always so angry. Don’t you remember, how angry you were back then? And that awful story you told about the soup being poisoned, when I knew she hadn’t eaten any. I was the one who took it up to her. It just seemed so—weird. So suspicious, I guess. So I had to pretend, to make it seem like if it was anyone, it was me.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Of course Dad believed me,” Frances continued, lowering her voice still further. “I wanted him to, but I guess part of me also couldn’t stand that he would, that he could think that about me.” She paused to take another breath. Then with a little laugh she said, “All these years, I thought I was covering up for you, and he thought he was covering for me.”

  What followed then was a very peculiar experience, perhaps the most peculiar of my life. As Frances went on to relate her version of this story, a version she and my father had pieced together between them, I heard what she was saying, but not in the normal way of hearing. Her words came to me more as images projected on a screen. Images that were both familiar, God knows, though I’d spent years trying to forget them, but also as strange as if I’d never seen them before:

  A girl heading upstairs, carrying a tray into the room where a woman lies in bed. Steam from a vaporizer hissing on the floor, the night table cluttered with medicine bottles and vials of pills. The girl sees the glass knocked over onto the floor, the tissues pulled out of the box and scattered. It offends her, this disorder, and confirms her feeling of being unfairly burdened, having to contend with such a mess. She does not stoop to pick up the glass or the box of tissues, does not even see the empty vial of pills, lying on its side. The woman in the bed stares as the girl puts down the tray, then refuses the spoonful of soup the girl reluctantly offers. But the woman is often not hungry; her refusal to eat tonight is not unusual. After a few minutes the girl takes up the tray and without closing the door behind her, goes back downstairs.

  A younger girl climbs the stairs to the same room. Stops at the doorway to glance in, then steps inside, coming closer and closer to the woman on the bed. What does she do? She straightens up the room. Why does she feel she must straighten up the room, pick up the fallen glass, fill that water jug?

  What is she cleaning up after?

  Then it’s a man, sometime later, who passes the open doorway of that same room. Something also causes him to stop and look in. Is it the glimpse of that empty medicine vial on the night table that makes him pause? The vial is neatly lined up beside a regiment of other bottles—not tipped over, as it had been an hour or so before, as if dropped by a clumsy hand. And missing its cap. The man was in the woman’s room earlier that evening, putting his head round the door to say hello, before remembering that he had his pipe in his mouth. The room has been tidied since then: plumped pillows, a filled water jug with an empty water glass beside it. Every surface wiped clean. He takes time to note all this.

  Then he sees the woman on the bed.

  After a little while, after he has sat for a time on the edge of the bed, and before he has called the ambulance, which will arrive much too late to be of use, this is what else he thinks about:

  A crabbed message on a school notebook. Strong athletic arms and legs, growing thinner and thinner. Failing grades, lost friends. Her cold avoidance of this room.

  And gradually, over the next few days, he calculates all of it, the whole dreadful equation. He had pushed Frances to it. In all his years in the insurance business, indemnifying people against the terrible things that could happen to them, he’d never had to pay for one like this: How long are you going to keep me waiting? he’d demanded that night, when she balked at carrying the soup upstairs to our mother’s room. Frances can do it, he’d said, when I offered to carry the soup up instead. So Frances had done it. Emptied the pills from that vial into her hand, then into the broth, watched them dissolve. Because she loved him, because she needed him, because she was afraid he was being driven away by the suffocating vapors of illness and grief. That was the story he put together from all those details, a story that, like most stories people tell themselves about other people, was mostly about him.

  Keep going, he’d told her. Don’t let anything stand in your way. No matter what.

  But he’d been talking about her homework.

  In the end, what frightened him most was not what Frances had done but what other people would do if they became convinced she was guilty. (Who knew what a young girl would say under questioning?) They would come for her. Put her somewhere. In a hospital. Jail even. For whole nights, he had lain awake thinkin
g. He’d lost his mother and his wife; he wasn’t going to lose his daughter, too.

  But how to keep others from suspecting? Especially sullen Cynthia, who seemed to notice everything, and what she didn’t notice, she imagined. There’s something wrong with Frances. Frances is the one who’s the problem.

  Find a distraction, a diversion. Make a bargain with fate. A bargain that he probably never intended to honor—since fate always wins in the end, cheating once you’ve got what you wanted seems justified. Anyone in the insurance business understands this kind of reasoning. In time all would be resolved—that’s what he thought. Time heals all wounds, etc.

  Send us off, drive us away, only long enough to invite us back again, or at least get Frances back. That was his plan. Almost three decades later, during those long secret intimate lunches on the Cape, in dark little clam shacks decorated with fishing nets and lobster buoys, he had laid out for Frances the whole sad scheme, how every apparently selfish thing he’d done had all been an effort to save her.

  But Frances knew she had not killed our mother. Of course not. And she never believed that he had, either, for the simple reason that she thought I had done it.

  Use your head, I’d said that wintry night, when Frances came up to my bedroom and sat on the end of my bed, kneading the coverlet between her thin fingers, eyes hopeful, eager to believe my father’s insinuations about why Mrs. Jordan had been sent away that morning in her black straw Sunday hat. Mrs. Jordan would have solved everything.

  And as far as I knew, Mrs. Jordan had solved everything, by taking the cap off that vial of pills and leaving the open vial on the bedside table, within reach of even the most maladroit hand, if that hand was truly determined. But Frances never knew about the cap in the bathroom wastebasket. She never knew that my mother had reached out and been accurate and deft enough to seize my wrist that night and squeeze it hard. Because I had never told her.

  That’s what he wants you to think, I’d said instead. I know what he’s hiding. Don’t bother asking him. He’ll just start talking about your special bond.

  “You always minded it so much,” Frances said now, turning to me in the van, fixing me with her sympathetic blue eyes. “The closeness between Dad and me.”

  “You’re crazy,” I said.

  “Listen to me, Cynnie. It was a long time ago. I’ve tried to be as careful as I could in helping you realize what happened. I’m sorry if I’m being clumsy now. But we’re running out of time. I’m just bringing it all up to lay it to rest.”

  Waking a sleeping baby to put it to bed.

  “Pretty tidy, don’t you think?” I tightened my grip on the steering wheel, feeling light-headed. “Both you and Dad, exemplars of selflessness.”

  “What I’m trying to say—”

  “It’s a bunch of bull, the whole thing, and you know it.”

  “Cynthia.” Frances put a hand to her face.

  Exits were coming quickly now, one after another as we neared Hartford. Signs flickered by, announcing all the old towns: Wethersfield, Newington, Waterbury. The highway dipped as we went downhill. Hills, trees curved upward on either side of me. It was like driving inside of an enormous bowl.

  Frances was talking again. “I’m only telling you all this because tomorrow you’re going back to California and I don’t know when we’ll see each other again. I don’t know if you’ll see him again. It’s so important after all we’ve lost not to lose any more chances.”

  “Chances for what?”

  “To get on with life. That old stuff is over. It doesn’t matter. Let it go. Dad just wants us all to be happy.”

  “I have been getting on with life. In case you haven’t noticed.”

  Her voice was very sad. “That’s not my impression.”

  I checked the rearview mirror to see if my father was still asleep, then I said, “You were the one who hated her.”

  “No.” Frances stared straight ahead. “I hated her being sick.”

  Two oil trucks thundered by, making the van shudder.

  “Frances,” I said, my head starting to throb, “don’t you see what he’s really after? Can’t you see why he’s fed you all this crap? He knew his marriage was going south, probably quite a while ago. He’s an old opportunist. He always has been. Talk about chances. He knows how to grab a last chance when he sees one.”

  Though wouldn’t it be wonderful, I found myself thinking in sudden exhaustion—the dazed, trembling exhaustion that always precedes one of my headaches—wouldn’t it be wonderful if it were true? That all my father’s selfishness had really been an act of heroic protection. Why not give in to it? One story’s as good as another. And as this thought came to me, I realized at the same moment that it didn’t matter. None of it mattered. We would never know exactly what happened to our mother and knowing wouldn’t change anything, anyway. Because what both Frances and I understood perfectly well, what neither of us could forget or forgive or admit to each other, is that while our mother was alive we’d wished she would die so that we could stop worrying about it.

  “Did Ilse find out about all this?” I demanded, as another mystery was suddenly solved. “Did she get to hear this tale of noble sacrifice?”

  Frances made an ambiguous noise.

  “Let me ask you another question,” I said hoarsely. “How come Dad never told anyone else this story?”

  “He still thought he was protecting me.” Frances turned toward me again, her eyes shiny with unshed tears. “He didn’t want Walter to find out, or the girls. He thought it could still ruin my life. But when Helen died, he realized there wasn’t much time left. For us—”

  “It wasn’t me,” I said.

  “I know,” she said, and now the tears began to fall freely down her cheeks. “Oh Cynnie. But you were so angry back then, and she’d been sick for such a long time. You were really young and not really a part of things, somehow, not the way you should have been, and it was all so confusing. It just seemed like it could have been—”

  “How long,” I said, “did you think that?”

  Frances shook her head gently. “All I want you to know is that it’s not important. We still have each other. Nothing’s changed.”

  My palms were damp and my fingertips ached with cold. One at a time, I lifted my hands off the steering wheel to run them against my pants’ leg.

  “Are you all right?” said Frances suddenly.

  There was an old weigh station, fortunately, on the side of the highway. I pulled the van safely off the road, bumping over a low curb and bouncing across a rough apron of grass and dirty snow, broken glass popping under the tires, finally coming to a stop beside a rusted trash barrel. A thick metal chain gated off the abandoned scales directly ahead of us. I turned off the ignition, then leaned forward to rest my forehead against the steering wheel, drawing deep shaky breaths while Frances reached around to unroll my window a few inches.

  “Forgot to eat breakfast this morning,” I muttered finally. The taste of the coffee I’d drunk rose in my throat.

  Frances turned in her seat to ask my father if he was all right and he gave a few reassuring grunts to indicate that he was unharmed by our unexpected detour. Cars hurtled past us on the left, the rush of displaced air buffeting the side of the van. The breeze from the open window blew icily against the back of my neck, filling the van with exhaust fumes.

  “I think we should sit here for a few minutes.” Frances laid her hand on my back as I closed my eyes, my forehead still pressed against the steering wheel. “Let’s just take a few minutes and rest here.”

  “Don’t touch me,” I said.

  She took her hand away. But soon enough there was her kind, inexorable voice again. “I packed some things this morning for the drive, I’m sure I have something in here you could eat.”

  “I don’t want anything.”

  She began rummaging in a canvas bag at her feet, then held up a bag of dried apricots and a jar of cocktail peanuts. “Your hands are shaking,” she said,
looking at me closely as I sat back in my seat.

  “I’m just cold.”

  “You need to get your blood sugar up.”

  Frances poured me a cup of tea from the stainless steel thermos she’d also thought to pack. Then once she’d made sure I’d had a few sips of tea, she told me to get out of the van. “Switch places with me. I’ll drive.”

  When I stared at her, she held up her new bifocals. “I brought them along, just in case.” When I continued to look at her, she said, “Cynthia, this is my van. I drive it all the time.”

  We changed seats and Frances put on her glasses, then started the van.

  “Just keep taking deep breaths,” she said, glancing at me. Then she leaned over the steering wheel, concentrating on the traffic before pulling back onto the highway.

  FRANCES LOOKED TENSE but she drove carefully and competently. It seemed only a few minutes before downtown Hartford’s familiar gray skyline rose up before us. Gritty, bland, forlorn Hartford, which Twain once described as a pastoral dream of commerce, a sober, affluent town, balancing “capacious ornamental grounds” with business and factories.

  “Travelers,” said my father, quite clearly, as we took our exit. After a moment I realized that he was referring to the insurance company.

  “Aetna,” he added. “Life and Casualty.”

  “What’s he saying?” asked Frances.

  “Nothing,” I told her.

  After another block or two, we turned onto Farmington Avenue. The Mark Twain House comes up sooner than you’d expect in that glum stretch of apartment buildings, which seemed unchanged since when I was a child. Broken cement steps, buckled sidewalks, overgrown lawns.

  When my father was a boy, grassy lots sprawled in place of the liquor stores and cheap apartment buildings. Once there had been flowering trees, handsome houses, acres of green lawn. Farmington Avenue had been one of the most beautiful streets in Hartford when Twain built his house here.