The Ghost at the Table: A Novel Read online

  Loud enough to wake the dead. But it was not upon her yet; she had one more endless moment to hesitate. And as she stood there she repeated to herself that she was tired. Her back hurt; she had a cough; she was sick of shopping. Her life had been unhappy and was unlikely to improve. That could very well have been her last thought, a trite self-pitying reflection.

  But I don’t believe it. She was a mother, after all, no matter how worn out and uninvolved. As the screech of brakes filled her ears and a smoky wind blew her black coat about her ankles, she reached out to seize the little boy’s wrist, hard enough to leave a mark, hard enough to thrust him back, and out of the way.

  Don’t watch, she said.

  “THERE YOU GO,” said the partner with relief.

  Someone took my hand. I felt a sharp pressure above my wrist. The ambulance driver was busy with some equipment, a pole with a clear plastic bag attached. “I just gave you something to relax,” he told me. He seemed to be speaking to my father as well, whose wheelchair had been pushed close to where I was now lying on a rolling metal cot. Above us the sky was beginning to darken.

  “I’m fine,” I tried to say.

  “It’s all right,” a voice said. “Just an accident.”

  My father’s face was level with mine, not six inches away. It was the same face he’d always had, a long triangular elegant face, only much older. After a moment or two I expected him to turn away, perhaps to look around for Frances. But he kept his eyes on mine.

  “THEY SAID I CAN GO,” I told Frances, when I found her sitting in a row of hard-looking plastic chairs near the emergency room door, my father asleep in his wheelchair beside her. Evening had come on. The waiting room windows were dark. A potted palm tree stood under the fluorescent lights a few feet away from the reception desk, its green fronds casting long slender shadows on the floor that stirred whenever anyone passed by.

  “Oh my God.” Frances stood up and reached out to touch my neck brace.

  I moved away from her hand. “The doctor said I’ll have to wear this thing for a while. Otherwise I guess I’ll be fine.”

  To avoid looking at Frances, I looked at my father, who had a mottled purple bruise on his forehead.

  “Is he okay?” I asked Frances. “Did someone examine him?”

  Frances explained that an emergency room doctor had taken his blood pressure, then given him an EKG and found that his heart rate was normal, then ruled out the need for an MRI. As she was finishing this report, a stout nurse with gray bangs appeared and repeated all the same things. My father opened his eyes to listen to her.

  “We were concerned about that,” the nurse pointed to the bruise on his forehead, “especially since he’s had a stroke. If it were up to me, I’d keep him here overnight for observation, but she”—the nurse looked at Frances—“won’t agree to it.”

  “But is he all right?” I asked.

  “Dr. Kirsanov says he’s okay,” the nurse went on, squaring her shoulders. “She’s our attending that talked with your sister here. That bruise looks worse than it is, but he should go to his own doctor tomorrow and have a full physical. He’s an old man.” The nurse frowned at Frances. “It’s not doing him any favors, you know, putting him through all this.”

  “It was an accident,” said Frances.

  WALTER LOOKED HARRIED and upset when he arrived in the emergency room waiting area in his Burberry coat but almost comically relieved to see the three of us more or less ambulatory. In the car, Frances sat up front with him and I sat in the back with my father. My father fell asleep right away, while I listened to Frances’s murmuring voice explain to Walter what had happened (“Who was driving?” he’d asked, almost immediately). Otherwise it was a quiet trip home. Snow was falling again, not very hard, more of a cold white mist.

  Most of the house was dark when we arrived sometime after nine o’clock. Walter unlocked the back door to the kitchen, then returned to the car to help my father into his wheelchair. In the dark kitchen a tiny green light shone from the dishwasher, indicating that it had completed its cycle. I switched on a lamp by the door. The house was warm after the chilly outdoor air, yet once we took off our coats I felt a draft and also noticed the acrid smell of smoke, left over from two nights before. One of the kitchen windows was open an inch or two, letting in cold air mixed with a little snow. Frances must have opened it before we left that morning, to air the room out, then forgotten to close it again.

  “Home sweet home,” sighed Frances, coming in behind me.

  She offered to make something for a late supper, but my father indicated that he wanted to go to bed. Jane came into the kitchen to greet us and ask questions about what had happened. She peered with concern at my neck brace and hoped my neck didn’t hurt too much; but once she had satisfied herself that we were all right she said that she was tired and went upstairs to her room. While Walter was getting Dad settled for the night, Frances went into the dining room and came back carrying Jane’s Thanksgiving centerpiece, which she set on the kitchen table. Then she poured herself a glass of red wine from a half-empty bottle on the counter. She offered a glass to me. I said that I’d like water instead.

  “I’ve been meaning to ask,” she said, getting up to fill a glass for me at the sink. “Why were you laughing this afternoon? What was that all about?”

  “Nothing.”

  “No really. What was so funny?”

  “Just something I remembered.”

  “You do know I’m sorry”—she set the water in front of me—“for everything that’s happened.”

  “No, you’re not,” I said. “You just realize you should be.”

  Frances sat down again across from me and took a sip of her wine, then leaned her elbow on the table. “One would think,” she said, gazing at me tiredly, “that after a day like today, you’d at least want a glass of wine.”

  “One would think,” I agreed.

  “Oh well, you probably shouldn’t, anyway. After those tranquilizers.”

  “Probably not. By the way,” I said, pointing to a sprig of bittersweet in the centerpiece, “that stuff is poisonous.”

  “But it’s pretty,” said Frances.

  For a silent moment we looked at each other. Then Frances sighed and got up again. She opened the refrigerator and took out a pot of turkey soup she’d made the day before to heat on the stove. When Walter came back to the kitchen, he placed a few calls to his hospital to arrange for my father to have a physical examination in the morning. He wanted an orthopedic surgeon, a friend of his, to take a look at me and at Frances as well. Just to be on the safe side.

  “You’re not leaving tomorrow,” he announced to me gruffly. “We’ll have to call the airline.” He accepted the glass of wine Frances had poured for him.

  “Poor Walter,” said Frances, sitting down with him, wisps of reddish hair curling around her face. “What a lot of trouble we’ve been.”

  “To trouble.” Walter raised his glass, though he didn’t look at me.

  They sat together at the kitchen table and drank while I sat and watched them. Walter put his hand on Frances’s shoulder as he got up to retrieve a second bottle of wine from the basement. She smiled up at him, a slow contrite smile, then reached out to pull his empty chair closer to hers. With his rescue of her from Hartford, their gravitational system had been restored. Frances relied on Walter, he needed her to rely on him. Elementary.

  Frances stood up again to check to see if the soup was hot, saying that Walter must be starving. She found a loaf of French bread in the pantry and a wedge of Parmesan in the refrigerator. In a few minutes she had made a salad of spinach leaves, walnuts, and sliced apple. The warm salty fragrance of turkey soup lit the air and I realized how hungry I was. Frances grated cheese to sprinkle on split quarters of the bread, which she placed on a cookie sheet to slide under the broiler to toast. Hardy, nourishing fare, the perfect supper after a long day. It was wonderful to watch Frances concoct something good and meaningful out of almost nothin
g. She had a real talent for such things.

  “And poor Cynnie,” she said, opening a cabinet and lifting down glazed earthenware bowls for the soup. She set them on the counter beside the stove, glancing at me over her shoulder. “You look kind of like a priest in that collar.”

  “Well, don’t expect any absolution from me.”

  Frances laid out red cloth napkins and woven Mexican straw place mats, then went to fetch silverware from a drawer under the cabinets. “I wish you knew yourself better,” she said quietly. “I really do. If I had one wish, it would be that.”

  “Waste of a good wish,” I said.

  But Frances, as usual, wasn’t listening. “If you could only see what’s been in the way, all this time, the misunderstanding between us and Dad—”

  “I don’t want to hear about him anymore.”

  “It’s just that—”

  “It was no misunderstanding,” I said as sharply and clearly as I could manage, “that I grew up feeling like no one cared whether I existed or not. Don’t argue with me,” I insisted, as Frances started to interrupt. “It doesn’t even matter why I felt that way or whether I was right to feel that way, only that I did feel that way.

  “And don’t try to tell me that you understand,” I went on, my voice getting louder. “Because you don’t. You don’t know. You will never, even if you sat down and wrote a whole book about it, have any idea how I felt.”

  Frances stayed silent, laying out our places.

  “And you know what else?” I said, losing my temper altogether in the headlong, violent, brokenhearted way I had as a child. “When you get right down to it, Frances? Do you know who hates him more than anyone, hates him so much that she’d like to erase him from the face of the earth? It’s you. That’s who really hates him.”

  Frances caught her breath. “You have no idea what you sound like.”

  “You’re the one who’s never forgiven him for what happened,” I said coldly. “You’re the one who tried to off him this afternoon, right in front of our old house.”

  “Oh my God, Cynthia.” Frances was shaking her head as she went back to setting the table. “Oh my God. If you could only hear yourself.”

  “I hear myself well enough.” But now my conviction was beginning to flag, my blaze of self-righteousness burning down to sullenness. “You can pretend all you want that it was something different, but our childhood was a stupid mess. Our father was a cheater and our mother died, and by the end we all wanted her to.”

  “That is not what it was like.” Frances looked up at me with dignity, a spoon in one hand. “That’s not what it was like for me.”

  “Then lucky for you.”

  Even before the words were out of my mouth, I knew they were true. Her childhood, spent in the same house, with the same parents, had been luckier than mine. It was as basic and as complicated as that. And not because of any real difference in what we’d been given—though Frances had been given more, by my father, by birth order, by genetic happenstance. But what we’d received hadn’t, in the end, created the disparity between us: it was simply that Frances had always been able to make more out of what came her way. That was her nature.

  “Lucky for you,” I repeated.

  “I’m sorry you’re still so angry,” she said, stepping back from the table as if to admire her arrangement.

  “Yeah, well you can stop feeling sorry for me, because I’m going home tomorrow.”

  “Oh come on, Cynnie. Don’t be like that.”

  “You lied to me. You knew there wasn’t room for him at that nursing home. You were pretending the whole time.”

  “I did not lie,” said Frances evenly. “I just took a chance.”

  “A chance?”

  “If there had been room for him that day we would have left him there, but since there wasn’t we took him home.”

  “But you knew there probably wouldn’t be room.”

  “You never know with those places.” Frances began wiping down the stove with a sponge. “And anyway, people lie to each other all the time. Sometimes for the other person’s own good.”

  “I can’t listen to you anymore,” I said. “I will lose my mind.”

  “I’m just trying to explain.” Frances had dropped the sponge and was moving around to my chair.

  “Leave me alone.”

  She leaned over me, her eyes full of concern. “No, I won’t leave you alone, Cynnie. You’re my sister. I want you to be happy. My family’s happiness is the most important thing in the world to me.”

  And as I stared back at her I saw that it was true. Frances did want us all to be happy. She would do anything to make us happy. There was no unclearness in this regard, for Frances. I also saw that nothing had gone wrong for her today, in spite of Mark Twain’s house being closed, in spite of the accident and my injuries. In fact, those difficulties had only strengthened her hand; if I were truly paranoid, I’d almost think she had planned them. My account of our past was officially shut, hers flung wide open—soon to be the accepted story. She had gotten everything she wanted. We were even going to have a nice meal to end the day. Tomorrow various doctors would pronounce us all healthy and well, and we would return home for another thoughtful dinner served on suitable place mats with cloth napkins. My father would never have to go to Greenswood Manor. In a few days, Frances would call the medical supply store in Watertown and ask them to deliver a hospital bed, while she went to work rearranging one of the downstairs rooms for him. By next week, she would have hired a nurse, a big soft-spoken middle-aged Carribbean woman with an Englishy name, Edwina or Millicent, who would perform all the onerous, embarassing duties that go with tending elderly patients, leaving Frances free to knit him bulky sweaters in soft yarns, bake custards for his lunch, sew a crazy quilt for his bed.

  He could live out the end of his days with her, surrounded by ease and graciousness, and she would finally have what she’d been searching for, all these years, at estate sales and antiques fairs.

  “I’m not hungry,” I said, standing up. “I’m going to bed.”

  “Oh, don’t be like that,” said Frances once more, this time putting a hand firmly on my shoulder. “I know you’re hungry. Sit down.”

  By the time I got into bed that night Jane was already asleep in her bunk, her light snores interrupted by occasional puppyish whimpers. I thought her snoring and my neck brace would keep me awake, but Walter had given me two Percocets after dinner and I fell asleep almost immediately.

  I must have slept deeply for several hours. Then suddenly I wasn’t asleep anymore. The room was dark except for Jane’s blue nightlight, plugged into a socket near her desk. As I lay in bed looking at the nightlight I was reminded of those companionable little blue lights in the sleeper compartments of passenger trains, which seem to be provided to reassure you, if you wake in the dark, that wherever you’re going will be a calm and reasonable place. One winter when I was very young my whole family took an overnight train to Chicago so that my mother could consult a specialist there. It must have been in the days when her disease might still have been possibly nothing, something all in her head, because I remember hearing later that the specialist was a psychiatrist. But all I recall of that trip is traveling on the train at night, lying in the bunk I shared with Frances, looking up at that little blue light and rocking with the motion of the train, listening to Frances’s steady breathing as we rushed past snow-covered towns and cities and farms and forests, the whole dark territory of the world outside our window.

  Jane had stopped snoring. I should have closed my eyes and gone back to sleep, but I was very thirsty and my head hurt. Also, the foam collar around my neck was uncomfortable. So I got up slowly and painfully, being careful not to wake Jane, and felt my way out of her room and then downstairs to the kitchen to get a glass of water.

  The kitchen was dark save for the illuminated clock on the stove. Outside, the snow had stopped and above the black juniper trees hung a new pale moon. I poured myself a
glass of water at the sink and swallowed two more tablets from the vial Walter had set out for me on the kitchen table. It was after four, by the clock on the stove. Despite those tablets, I doubted I would get back to sleep that night, so I decided to make a cup of tea.

  While waiting for the kettle to boil, I thought I’d just look in on my father. It must have been a difficult day for him, as well, all that time riding in the van, the visit to his old home and then the accident, the long hours spent in the hospital waiting room. I had an idea that he also might want something, a glass of water or a cold washcloth for his head, but be unable to get out of bed.

  When I stepped into the passageway outside the kitchen that led to Frances’s bedroom, where he was sleeping, I saw that the door was open and that a light was on in the adjoining bathroom, lending an anemic white glow to the room. Sure enough, whatever contraption Walter had rigged up was gone; if my father had needed to get up and go about his business, there would have been nothing to support him. But he was lying in bed asleep, breathing loudly, one hand resting on his stomach. He looked quite small, lying there in that tall white bed. Afloat in Frances’s big empty room, with its long dark windows and that wide gleaming floor. Like a boy asleep on a raft, a wash of night sky over his head.

  I drew nearer to the bed and looked at him in the pallid light from the bathroom. His lips were parted and his cheeks sunken, his profile sternly defined against the white pillowcase. On his forehead was the dark medallion of his bruise. My father, I thought. I hoped he would open his eyes so that I could tell him I had come to see if he needed anything.