The Ghost at the Table: A Novel Page 4

  It was even uglier than I remembered. Plangent, with those carved garlands flowering along the upper cabinet, a morbid-looking urn on either end of the stop knobs, the two columnar legs ending in clawed animal feet. It was also more battered than I remembered, scarred from years of being abused by my sisters and me, and probably by children before us, who had banged at the keys, pretending to play “Pilgrims’ Chorus” from Tannhäuser, or a Bach minuet, while the organ’s internal machinery turned the old music rolls. When I examined the mahogany case, I saw that the varnish had coarsened, gone rucked and bumpy like an old hide.

  Frances was still watching me anxiously, waiting for some response. Not sure what my intentions were, I crossed the room and sat down on the organ’s bench. Self-consciously, I touched a few of the keys. No sound at all, except the tap of my fingernails against the celluloid. I’d forgotten that you had to pump the footboards first and get the internal bellows going. The whole thing smelled deeply, richly, almost intoxicatingly of mildew—the smell that had greeted me when I first came into the house. So much for climate-controlled storage.

  “Isn’t it gorgeous?” Frances had come up behind me. “There’s a whole box of music rolls, too. And look at this.”

  She reached behind the hinged music rack into a little hidden cupboard I’d never known about and pulled out a brown-spotted pamphlet titled “Instructions for the Care and Working of Your Estey Player Reed Organ,” which opened with a list of its bass and treble stops. “The world’s most miraculous instrument!” read an encomium on the front of the pamphlet. “A mechanical apparatus endowed with human capabilities!”

  “They’re pretty rare now,” Frances was saying as I handed back the pamphlet. “I looked them up online. And this one’s in perfect condition. I just need to get it cleaned and tuned.”

  Rain slashed at the window panes. “Oh Cynnie,” she whispered, resting one hand on my shoulder. “I just thought you’d be glad that there was something left, you know, after all this time—

  “Of course,” she said, withdrawing her hand, “you can have it if you want.”

  This was offered insincerely. Frances was a generous person, who gave to charities and volunteered for school committees and fed stray cats like Wen-Yi and listened for hours to her friends’ marriage problems and their worries about wayward children. But she had a streak of real greed when it came to heirlooms. One of the few things Helen had saved for me from that yard sale was an old porcelain Wedgwood bowl with a raised pattern of blue grape leaves. The bowl used to sit on the front hall table, holding Christmas cards during the holidays, and during the rest of the year extra house keys, pennies, receipts, ticket stubs, bits of junk. Frances always minded that I had it. When I told her that the bowl had cracked—a man I was dating had mistakenly poured boiling water into it one night while we were draining spaghetti noodles—a look of actual pain crossed her face. Though later she’d agreed that things like bowls were meant to be used.

  The organ seemed to be gathering gloom as the afternoon ticked away and the room grew darker. Such rot, I thought, sliding my hands off the keys. Heirlooms. Legacies. Such fraud.

  “I mean, you’re the historian,” Frances added, looking at me searchingly. “And there was that story Dad used to tell about Mark Twain—”

  “It’s fine,” I said, standing up. “I don’t want it.”

  My father’s story was that Mark Twain had given the organ to my grandmother when she was a little girl, after he caught sight of her red hair in the Vanderbilt Hotel in New York. She was having iced cakes in the lobby with her father while some other child stumbled through “Fur Elise” on the hotel piano, and Twain heard her say that the only bad thing about pianos was having to play them.

  Pure fiction. Iced cakes. The Vanderbilt Hotel. “Fur Elise.” All except for my grandmother’s red hair and perhaps that innate unwillingness to apply herself, a stubborn incapacity that from all accounts may have been her defining feature.

  “But,” objected Frances, determined to be selfless now that she’d secured what she wanted, “it’s yours if—”

  “I don’t have room for something like that. Anyway, it’s fine.”

  And it was fine. In a few days I would be back on the plane to San Francisco, returning to my apartment and my desk made from a door laid across a pair of dented aluminum file cabinets. Fog would drift past the windows, my landlady would simmer her beans, and Frances and my father would return to being things I didn’t need to think about very often. Tomorrow we’d drive him to his nursing home. Sarah was arriving from New York the next day. Frances would make chestnut stuffing for the turkey. It would be splendid. There was nothing wrong with her. Walter was just getting cantankerous.

  Frances gave a caught little laugh. As if she’d read my thoughts, she said, “You’re such a good sport. To come out here, when you didn’t want to. And then to put up with all my—” She shook her head helplessly at herself.

  Then she pointed to the slim gold watch on her wrist. “Hey look, it’s after five. Time for a glass of wine.”

  “How about a whole bottle,” I said feelingly.

  She laughed again and began walking around the living room, turning on the rest of the lamps. “Two bottles!” Her hands were shaking, with relief, probably, at having successfully staked her claim to the organ. I watched her fiddle with the silk lampshades, making sure they weren’t crooked; suddenly I couldn’t bear to see her face and what I imagined must be her expression of postponed gloating. Instead I looked around the living room at the framed antique botanical prints and the bookcases full of china figurines and handsomely bound books. Frances had recovered her two Knole sofas in a subtle floral pattern of carmine and cream, one sofa with the colors reversed, both of which went perfectly with the old Persian carpet on the floor. In this bower of sense and order the organ looked like a toadstool, lurking in its unlit corner. But Frances seemed not to notice. She was telling me that she and Walter had recently bought a case of wine on eBay, which was stored in the basement (“our version of a fall-out shelter”) along with a stationary bike and a freezer full of Lean Cuisine frozen dinners, and fifteen cans of lobster and sherry bisque, which Walter had won in a raffle.

  “Good to know that you’re planning ahead for the Apocalypse,” I said. “But somehow I can’t picture Walter buying raffle tickets.”

  Frances corrected the position of a celadon bowl filled with beach stones. “Oh, my assistant’s always selling tickets for one good cause or another. She’s not here today, but you’ll meet her at Thanksgiving. Mary Ellen. Such a sweetheart, and she’s been a lot of help to me, but kind of a kook. Walter feels sorry for her.”

  “He mentioned Mary Ellen,” I said. “In the car.”

  “Oh, he did?”

  She turned to smile at me. Frances had one of those rare, encouraging smiles that made you feel not only important in ways you’d never felt with anyone else but that also made you want to confess all your sins and petty crimes to her, convinced that she’d continue to believe the best of you and overlook your failings.

  “He didn’t say anything about raffle tickets, though,” I went on. “Or about feeling sorry for her.”

  “No, he wouldn’t.” Frances turned away again. “Walter likes to think he doesn’t get emotionally involved with people. He can’t afford to, as a doctor. Now, what should we have for dinner? Lobster bisque, since I mentioned it? While we get smashed?” Then she added soberly, “Too bad we have to drive to the Cape in the morning.”

  “Well, all the more reason to get drunk tonight.”

  “Yes,” she said. “All the more reason.”

  As we were heading back to the kitchen, she glanced back at me over her shoulder. “By the way, do you mind driving tomorrow? I’ve finally given in to bifocals, but my new glasses give me vertigo if I wear them for too long.”

  BEFORE DINNER I ASKED Frances if I could lie down for half an hour. Almost since my arrival, I’d felt as if I could not catch my breath,
and a glass of red wine had made me dizzy. Frances led me upstairs to Walter’s study, a long, pleasant, low-ceilinged room on the second floor at the top of the stairs, with three windows at the far end, overlooking the driveway and part of the front lawn. Walter himself had gone for a run, leaving Frances and me to pull out the sofa bed, which we made up together. When we were done, Frances covered the bed with one of her crazy quilts, randomly pieced from old dresses and skirts she found at thrift stores and rummage sales or from old clothes of her own that she couldn’t bear to throw out. Quilting was one of her hobbies, along with cooking, gardening, restoring furniture. She had that knack, almost extinct these days, for making what she needed out of whatever was available or remaking something so that it served a new and better purpose. She would spend any amount of time on these projects, especially if they were intended as gifts. Sarah and Jane each had a quilt Frances had created for them from scraps of their baby clothes, and she made one for Helen a few months before Helen died. I saw it after the funeral, hanging on the wall of Helen’s living room: fabric squares silk-screened with poems and good wishes and photographs of smiling people, mailed to Frances at her request by Helen’s friends.

  The quilt on my bed was done in subdued, faded colors, from what looked to be scraps of dish towels. It was actually very pretty. When I praised it, she bent down to smooth out a corner. “You can have it if you want.” Then quickly, because she never liked to be thanked, she said, “What I like about quilts is, you know, the months it took you to make one, that’s where they went.”

  We stood for a moment longer, contemplating Frances’s crazy quilt; then she went to Walter’s rolltop desk to close his laptop computer and tidy a few things away, among them a pair of balled black socks, which she dropped into a drawer. On the back of the door hung several men’s dress shirts on wooden hangers.

  Frances saw me looking at the shirts. “I’ve had a cough. Walter sleeps in here sometimes so I won’t keep him up all night.”

  “I’m happy to sleep downstairs on the sofa,” I offered, though I did not want to sleep downstairs on the sofa and felt cold despair even at the prospect.

  Frances held her forefinger to her mouth. “Don’t be silly.” She smiled quickly at me, then backed out of the door, lifting Walter’s shirts on their hangers as she went. “Come down whenever you’re ready.”

  The girls’ rooms were also on the second floor. Next door, on the other side of the wall, Jane was rattling at her computer keyboard. I lay down on the bed and closed my eyes, listening to Jane typing and to the comfortable sounds of Frances moving around in the kitchen below, the scrape of pots being set on the stove and footsteps as she walked back and forth. Briefly I pictured the lean, bearded face of the bookstore owner, then with surprising ease put him out of my mind. The phone rang. Jane clumped down the stairs. Bits of conversation floated up to me, including a short emphatic argument that had to do with homework.

  As I lay there listening, I found myself thinking about my mother, lying in her dim cluttered bedroom day after day while the rest of the household went on without her. Hearing the voices, laughter, complaints, feet on the staircase, doors slamming, the occasional clogged sound of angry weeping. I wondered what had passed through her mind on those long afternoons. It wasn’t that we’d forgotten about her. We’d simply learned not to require her, at least not in the most basic way that mothers are required by children: to be present without causing concern, or pity. In nearly all my memories of my mother, she is in bed, propped against the cushioned green vinyl headboard, surrounded by stacks of books, framed photographs behind dusty glass, squads of medicine bottles, boxes of tissues, all swimming in a kind of yellow murk created by mustard-colored cretonne drapes pulled across the windows. She looks up from a book, gazing fretfully around, looking for Helen or perhaps wondering if Mrs. Jordan, our housekeeper, is coming up with her tray, or when Frances and my father will be back from their evening walk. “Oh Cynthia,” she says, smiling vaguely at me in the doorway, “it’s you.”

  I must have fallen asleep still thinking about my mother because though I was in Frances’s house, it was also the house in West Hartford, and Mrs. Jordan was there. She was ironing bed-sheets and telling me that an old man had once lived in Frances’s house. His family was gone; he’d lived alone. No one had bothered to check on him and he was found days after he died, sitting in a chair in the living room.

  “But your sister doesn’t mind him.” Mrs. Jordan wagged her tall black wig. “Not the way some persons would.”

  “Who?” I asked. My voice sounded like a child’s voice, though in my dream I was a grown woman.

  “You know,” said Mrs. Jordan, in her old impenetrable way of answering questions by not answering them. Then she went back to ironing, muttering and shaking her head. As I watched her brown arm move back and forth with the iron, I saw that the bedsheet was one of Frances’s crazy quilts but like the one she’d made for Helen, with writing and good wishes and smiling photographs on it.

  When I woke the room was dark and my mouth was dry. I was afraid that everyone had gone ahead and eaten dinner without me. But I’d only been asleep for twenty minutes, according to my watch, though as sometimes happens with unrestful naps, it had felt like so much longer.

  The next morning was gray and colder, edged with that stealthy New England chill that turns your fingernails purple even inside your gloves. Frances was worried about snow as we headed south in her big white Plymouth Voyager. She sat huddled in the passenger seat, looking ashen and aristocratic in a long high-collared black cashmere coat buttoned to the neck, turning on the radio every few minutes, hunting for a weather forecast. The rest of the time she looked out her window.

  I was glad to be driving, something I’ve always been good at and enjoy, although I don’t own a car myself. But once in a while I borrow Carita’s old Dodge and spend the day driving along Route 1 through Marin, a perilously scenic road that curves and snakes first along cliffs above the valley, then above the ocean. I find it soothing, negotiating switchbacks and hairpin turns, then at last bursting out onto those lion-colored headlands. The wide view of the Pacific you get from up there is sometimes blue, sometimes silver or gray, and like all views of the ocean, always exhilarating, but also strangely upsetting, like a place remembered from childhood but forgotten until it’s right in front of you again.

  During dinner the night before, Frances had tried to tell me what to expect when I saw my father. She and Walter had visited him at Cape Cod Hospital after his stroke. The stroke had left him partly aphasic and paralyzed on his right side. He was having trouble feeding himself and needed to use a wheelchair most of the time, although he could walk short distances with a cane. “He’s a shadow of his former self,” Frances told me, her voice quavering. She’d had quite a lot to drink by then, and I saw Walter unobtrusively take the wine bottle and put it on the floor by his chair.

  Now in the car she began to hum to herself, tapping her fingers together. Several times she began to say something, then stopped. Her hands were trembling again. I didn’t know how to feel about the prospect of confronting my father in his helpless condition and I resented the sight of Frances’s trembling hands and the easy access she seemed to have to sadness, or regret, or whatever it was that was gripping her just then.

  Other than at Helen’s funeral, the last time I’d seen my father was five or six years before over lunch at a seafood restaurant in Barnstable. I’d come east on one of my summer visits and Frances and I were spending two weeks in a rented house in Wellfleet with Sarah and Jane, while Walter stayed in Boston and came down on the weekends. It was Frances’s idea to call our father. We’d just found out about Helen’s diagnosis and Frances was frantic. Helen had gone all the way through medical school, had passed her board exams and completed her residency, only to set herself up in Bennington as a homeopathic practitioner. Now she was intending to treat herself with homeopathic remedies. Frances wanted us to hold a family conference to tal
k Helen out of this plan, which Frances insisted to me was suicidal. She tried to persuade Helen to come down to the Cape for a weekend—the excuse was my visit—and at first Helen agreed. But at the last minute there was some crisis, an outbreak of whooping cough among her patients, or German measles, some disease that shouldn’t be around anymore, and Helen begged off. She must have known what Frances was up to. By then Frances had arranged lunch with our father, and it seemed too late to back out. So she made the girls pull T-shirts over their shorts and bathing suits and one afternoon we drove to one of those dowdy little seafood places that serve beer in waxed paper cups and steamed clams in a plastic bucket.

  Our father met us inside, wearing a coat and tie; he’d shaved off the trim little moustache he’d always worn and without it his face looked naked. I found it embarrassing to look at him. “How’s Seattle?” he asked me, then apologized when I reminded him that I was living in San Francisco. “Hard to keep it all straight at my age,” he said, giving me a cagey smile.

  Ilse had come along, too, tanned and ready-looking in a belted khaki pants suit. She had always tanned impressively, especially with her light blue eyes and her white-blonde hair, which she still liked to wear in a topknot. Ilse didn’t say much at lunch until the bread came and Frances declined to take a roll from the basket, mentioning that she was cutting back on starch. With a heavy sigh, Ilse began to criticize diets that advised people to avoid starches and carbohydrates. In Switzerland, she noted, in Lausanne, where she had grown up, no one worried about starches and carbohydrates. She grew almost animated as she listed the reasons for consuming starches and carbohydrates, chief among them being the importance of “eating sensibly,” followed by an anecdote about refusing a bowl of boiled oats one morning in childhood and then going to school hungry. “I never did that again,” she told us with satisfaction. After that she stopped talking, but as if to prove her point, she ate her lunch steadily and thoroughly, a fine mist of perspiration gathering above her short upper lip, strands of hair sticking to her temples.