The Ghost at the Table: A Novel Read online

  It was only then that I realized his breathing sounded wrong: It was too harsh, too shallow, too rasping and labored. Each breath began with a hollow intake and ended with a hard, drawn-out sigh. Rough breathing filled the room, and it seemed to come at me from different directions, as if more than one person were breathing.

  I felt frightened and in sudden confusion turned to go back to the kitchen, but something prevented me from leaving. Old loyalties, the oldest kind of loyalties, mixed with old longings that even now I don’t care to name, mixed with an old familiar dread. And probably some of the same curiosity that underlies my interest in debunkings.

  Not sure what else to do, I put my hand on his.

  My father grew restless. His hand clenched. His chest rose and fell with each breath, like a bellows. He began to twitch and grimace in his sleep, although he did not seem to be in pain so much as gripped by annoyance. A tremor shook him. His lips drew back from his teeth, giving him the appearance of bitter impatience. It was an expression I recalled well from my childhood, the expression on his face whenever we were stuck in traffic. Enough, that expression said. I’ve had enough of this. Filled with misgivings, I continued to watch his face, torn between a wish to console him for the affliction of being, once again, stuck somewhere he did not want to be, and a strange detachment. My father, I thought again, but this time indifferently, as if questioning whether it was true.

  By then the room had become extremely cold and my teeth began to chatter. I tried to understand what I should do. His breathing was deafening. I must call someone. I must call Frances and Walter. I imagined myself going upstairs to Frances, calling her name softly until she opened her eyes, allowing her the chance I had denied to her, all those years before. Come and say good-bye. Or perhaps I would use the word farewell, which was more formal and poetic, a touch Frances might appreciate.

  I must call Frances, I decided, trying to shake off my concern about what words to use, angered that even in a moment of extremity I had no choice but to go on being foolishly myself. But then I began to worry that my father might die while I was upstairs waking Frances, who was a heavy sleeper, and I could not stand to think of him slipping away from me like that, all alone. So I hesitated, knowing that either way I was losing an opportunity and unable to decide which one to lose.

  What do you want? I asked silently. Tell me what you want.

  As I stood holding my father’s hand, listening to his harsh, insistent breathing and asking for his guidance, which I did not expect to receive, his love of maps suddenly came back to me. And his skill at identifying trees, and his love of birds, which he could identify even by their calls. And the encouraging way he used to carol songs as we marched in the chill morning air through the woods. In his own way he had tried his best with us, with me and Frances and Helen, the best that was in him. He had shown us how to walk in the woods. He had pointed out the accidents that could befall people and insisted that we learn to spell, thereby improving our chances of going through life unimpaired and correctly understood. Whatever he had done for us, or not done, must have seemed justifiable to him at the time. My mother, too, had done what she could in the midst of her illness, by asking little of us, except that we not watch her too closely. They, like most people, had done their best. You love whom you love, you fail whom you fail, and almost always we fail the ones we meant to love. Not intentionally, that’s just how it happens. We get sick or distracted or frightened and don’t listen, or listen to the wrong things. Time passes, we lose track of our mistakes, neglect to make amends. And then, no matter how much we might like to try again, we’re done. Whatever inspiring song we hoped to sing for the world is over, sometimes to general regret, more frequently to small notice, and even, if we were old or sick, to relief. It’s not easy to sit through the performance of another person’s life; so often it is music without music, as Mark Twain once said, referring to something else in one of his maxims. Though we have to try to hear it. It’s unbearable to think we can’t at least try.

  I watched my father’s face, which seemed filled now with a fierce and somber privacy, dark and graven against the pillowcase. Eighty-two years of thoughts and imperatives were gathered within his body, and I knew so few of them. Yet even at this stark moment, I could not concentrate on my father. My head hurt. I kept thinking about how cold I was and about his clenched hand, which felt so fixed and unyielding under mine, as if it were an ashtray or a big seashell.

  O my father, forsake me not.

  I had not planned to think of these words—I am sure I had never thought them before in my life—but as soon as they came to me, they began to run through my head.

  O my father, forsake me not.

  The antique sound of them comforted me and I repeated them silently, over and over, until I was telling them like beads, until they became a gentle nonsense, like an old lullaby.

  O my father, forsake me not.

  My father jerked his head impatiently.

  I must call Frances, I told myself.

  But then I pictured, perhaps unfairly, what would inevitably follow if I went upstairs and roused Frances. The hysterical scene she would feel required to stage, with weeping and proclamations and frenzied prayers, while Walter called for an ambulance, which would probably arrive in time. Then the tubes, the injections, the mask over my father’s old face. The rush to the emergency room. Lights in his eyes. The rattle of curtains pulled, metal carts drawn up. Unfamiliar, unremarking faces peering down at him. Followed by heroic measures—so grueling and undignified for the object of heroism, splayed like a fish on the table. All so that he could live long enough to celebrate Christmas in Frances’s house, captive in his wheelchair in a corner of her living room, stuffed with custards and swathed in quilts, King Lear under the mistletoe, photographed for posterity and displayed proudly to visitors, the crowning heirloom in her collection.

  No matter what he’d done, he didn’t deserve a fate like that.

  I pressed his hand twice, to remind him I was there. Then I went into the bathroom to switch off the small distracting light that Frances had left burning. A folded blue woolen blanket lay at the end of the bed; I unfolded it and wrapped it around myself and then, because I was so cold, and because there was nowhere else to sit in that empty room, and because it seemed somehow the right thing to do, given the loneliness of the hour, I climbed onto the bed. In a moment I will go to Frances, I thought. I will wake Frances. But after a little while, I lay down beside my father.

  When I awoke the room was colder, as rooms always are just before morning. I don’t know how much time had passed, perhaps only a few minutes. Outside the stars had faded and somewhere deep in the house a heating pipe began to clank. I lay shivering under my blanket watching the sky lighten outside the window. Gray tree branches were becoming visible and an old curving stone wall reappeared at the edge of the lawn. The snowy rhododendron leaves at the window had turned faintly pink.

  It was at that awful, tender, insubstantial hour, so full of promise for the innocent, so desolate for the guilty, that all my courage failed me. Even now it was not too late. I could still run to Frances, still turn everything over to her. But as daylight seeped into the room I remembered my father’s advice to us, which was to keep going, no matter what, and finally that implacable advice, in all its obvious complexity, became clear to me.

  Once more I reached over and took his hand. His breathing had grown harsher, each ragged breath ending in a reluctant hiss as if he could not believe he would be required to go through all that again. It didn’t seem that he would have to wait much longer, but I would keep him company regardless. For the lonely moments of life, one wants company. And he was my father, after all.

  It has been mostly for Jane’s benefit that I have set down this record of what happened over Thanksgiving, so that sometime in the future, when Frances has ceased to believe that anything untoward happened at all, my version of those few days in November will stand as an argument for the unrel
iability of memory. I do worry about Jane and those silvery scratches on her arm, and I’d like her to know that even stories you believe to be exclusively yours can have various sides, and perhaps more than one ending, apart from the inevitable one.

  For instance, right now Frances would tell you that I watched coldly at my father’s bedside and did nothing. Walter would imply that my decision not to call an ambulance for a dying man ranks just below murder. Jane, who as a student of algebra understands variables, would probably conjecture that somehow or another, my father’s death was a misjudgment, even a misunderstanding. But soon enough all their memories of that night will change and what they will tell you may be something altogether different.

  I SHOULD ALSO MENTION that the bookstore owner and his wife just had twin girls. I have been contemplating whether to send them an inscribed copy of one of my books, maybe Mark Twain’s Daughters, recently published, praised by School Library Journal as “the moving story of a charming, difficult man and his fascinating daughters” and called “more complexly imagined than is commonly found in historical fiction for girls.” On the title page I would write: To the joys of reading. Carita thinks I’m being maudlin, but my intentions are sincere, and I do believe in promoting the joys of reading.

  In fact, I’ve spent the last three weeks touring around the country to promote this latest book. I even stopped briefly in Hartford, though I have not been home, by which I mean Frances’s house, since my father died, over a year ago now. Nor do I think I’ll be invited to visit any time soon. Carita has been a reassuring friend during this period, listening to my side of things, pointing out that people always behave toward their families in ways that would be considered criminal with anyone else. She and Paula and I were guests at Don’s newly renovated house in Berkeley this year for Thanksgiving; he prepared a turkey stuffed with oysters, which was slightly underdone.

  But I’m fairly confident that one of these days Frances will tell Walter that she understands what I did that night, or did not do, and why. She will explain how traumatized I was by my childhood, very much as my father was traumatized by his, both of us losing our mothers so young. She will say that she wants to let bygones be bygones, that we have a special bond. Time is precious and she doesn’t want any regrets. And there is that responsibility older sisters feel toward their younger sisters.

  Walter will resist at first. He will mention the disturbing scene at Thanksgiving, the fire in the living room, the ghastly morning when I was discovered asleep on my father’s bed. He will suggest instability. Or, not being an alarmist, he may employ the term dysfunctional, which Frances will rightly reject, pointing to the recent publication of my fourth book. If he has to, Walter will admit to Frances that I tried to seduce him on one of her Knole sofas.

  But Frances will find a way to excuse or explain all of it, and what she can’t excuse or explain, at least to Walter’s satisfaction, she will dismiss.

  “Blood is blood,” she will say.

  Acknowledgments

  A number of books were useful to me as I was writing this novel, in particular Justin Kaplan’s biography, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain, and The Autobiography of Mark Twain, edited by Charles Neider, who also edited Papa: An Intimate Biography of Mark Twain, Susy Clemens’s biography of her father. In addition, I read and found informative Mark Twain in the Company of Women, by Laura E. Skandera-Trombley; My Father, Mark Twain, by Clara Clemens; Susy and Mark Twain: Family Dialogues, arranged and edited by Edith Colgate Salsbury; Twain’s World, Essays on Hartford’s Cultural Heritage, published by the Hartford Courant; and The Quotable Mark Twain, edited by R. Kent Rasmussen. I’m grateful to the Mark Twain Memorial in Hartford, Connecticut, where I learned a great deal from several enjoyable tours I took of Mark Twain’s house over the last few years.

  I am indebted as well to E. J. Graff, Suzanne Matson, and Laura Zimmerman, who read early drafts and offered invaluable suggestions, and also to Madeline Drexler, Jeffrey Harrison, Marcie Hershman, Eileen Pollack, Phil Press, Marjorie Sandor, and Renee Shea for their encouragement and advice while I was working on this book, and to Allison Mendenhall, who long ago described defrosting a turkey. Thanks to Dr. Carrie Bernstein and Dr. Mark Ellenbogen for answering my questions and to Ann Stokes for providing me with a quiet place to work for a crucial week of revision. As always, I am deeply grateful to my agent, Colleen Mohyde, and to my editor, Shannon Ravenel, who I pray will never retire. Finally, I cannot thank Eve Berne and Ken Kimmell enough for their good-humored support and optimism on my behalf.

  But most of all I would like to thank my dear friend Maxine Rodburg, who read more drafts of this novel than should be humanly endurable, or at least medically advisable, and is the most generous, patient, and insightful of critics.

  A Shannon Ravenel Book

  Published by

  ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL

  Post Office Box 2225

  Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225

  a division of

  WORKMAN PUBLISHING

  225 Varick Street

  New York, New York 10014

  © 2006 by Suzanne Berne. All rights reserved.

  First paperback edition, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill,

  November 2007. Originally published by Algonquin Books

  of Chapel Hill in 2006.

  This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged a previous edition of this work as follows:

  Berne, Suzanne.

  The ghost at the table : a novel / by Suzanne Berne.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  “A Shannon Ravenel book.”

  ISBN 978-1-56512-334-2 (HC); ISBN 978-1-56512-579-7 (PB)

  1. Sisters—Fiction. 2. Family—Fiction. 3. Thanksgiving Day—Fiction. 4. Domestic fiction. I. Title.

  PS3552.E73114L37 2006

  813’.54—dc22

  2006040073

  E-book ISBN 978-1-56512-661-9

  The GHOST at the TABLE

  A Short Note from the Author

  Readers’ Group Questions and Topics for Discussion

  What I Don’t Know about Mark Twain

  A SHORT NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

  When I was about ten, I discovered in my father’s study a shelf of handsome, red, limp-leather volumes, their covers embossed with a man’s bewhiskered, scowling profile. It was a full set of Mark Twain’s books, given to my father as a boy not long after his mother died. He’d read them over and over, he told me, adding that Mark Twain had just about saved his life during those sad years. My father’s motherless boyhood was almost unthinkable to me—how could I survive without my own mother?—but I was impressed that his life had been saved by a writer, so I read the books as I found them, starting with Roughing It and ending with Joan of Arc. At times, I hardly understood what I was reading, but I carried on anyway, wanting to oblige my father and mesmerized by the voice of Mark Twain, that intimate, keen, wisecracking, impatient, thunderous, all-knowing voice. It sounded to me then like the voice of God.

  Twenty years later on a cold November afternoon, I arrived in the driveway of Mark Twain’s house in Hartford, where a tour was already underway. A young guide was telling a small crowd that visitors often believe that Mark Twain designed his house to look like a steamboat. I stepped back to look up at the house—which is large and rambling and built of bricks, and yet seems somehow buoyant, with a prowlike veranda and cheerful little balconies and three smokestack chimneys—and sure enough, it did look like a steamboat. But then the tour guide added that Twain did not intend for his house to look like a steamboat and that a host of other misconceptions were really wishful thinking on the part of his admirers.

  She went on to tell us that Mark Twain had fathered three daughters, the oldest of whom was called Susy. This was also my chil
dhood name, spelled slightly differently. Susy and her sisters used to put on plays in their schoolroom, in which they wore their mother’s gowns and impersonated English queens and ordered each other’s beheadings. I recalled similar dramatics with my own two younger sisters—we were likewise drawn to bloodthirsty themes. Our tour guide described how Twain had entertained his little girls by the living room fire, making up thrilling stories about the bric-a-brac on the living room mantle. My father, too, had been an inventive storyteller. He used to sit us next to him on the piano bench and tell wild, funny stories about ogres and witches based on the notes he played, ending always with a reverberant glissando.

  A dangerous but absorbing confusion began forming in my mind as I wandered through Mark Twain’s house, peering at his wallpaper and admiring his carved Venetian four-poster bed. The more I discovered about Mark Twain’s daughters, the more I felt I already knew. Their father had been hot-tempered and humorous; so had mine. They had lived in a big beautiful house, which was later lost to them; so had I. It hardly mattered that the differences between our families were far more numerous than the similarities; that there were similarities at all between my family and Mark Twain’s seemed heady enough.

  Ten years after visiting his house, I began a novel about Mark Twain’s daughters. It would be a historical novel, I decided, set in Hartford during the Gilded Age. I could already visualize the Merchant Ivory movie that would follow—three decorative little Victorian girls in white pinafores bowling hoops on a green lawn while their fierce-looking father smoked his corncob pipe in the background. But after three years of trying, I found that I could not do it.

  I sat down and listed various theories to account for my failure: Mark Twain would have resented such an intrusion into his family life. I had done too much research and become musclebound with facts. I identified too much with the daughters. No plot that I could devise did justice to the girls’ complexity, plus my motives for writing about them were murky and contaminated by self-regard. All true.