The Ghost at the Table: A Novel Page 5

  Dad talked mostly to Sarah and Jane, though he kept looking at Frances. He asked them polite questions about how they were enjoying the beach, then insisted on paying the check before we were done eating. Frances did not bring up the subject of Helen; instead she played with the piece of broiled fish on her plate and watched him talk to the girls, a tense, abstracted look on her face.

  In the van, she reached once more for the radio, then changed her mind and folded her hands in her lap.

  “It’ll be all right,” I told her. “If you’re worried about Dad, I’m sure he’s resigned himself by now. It won’t be that big a deal.”

  Frances cleared her throat.

  “Listen,” I said. “He’s probably relieved to be shut of Ilse at last. No more boiled oats for breakfast. Or muesli. Isn’t that what they call it in Switzerland? Muesli. She probably made him eat muesli every morning. Think of that.”

  “You’re right,” she said. “I’ll think of that.”

  “So how can she do this to him, do you think?” I asked after a few minutes had gone by with neither of us saying anything. “It’s pretty extreme. I mean, she’s never been that awful, and she knew he was older when she married him. His getting sick can’t be unexpected.”

  Frances stared at the windshield. “She doesn’t want to care for him anymore.”

  “Well, of course not. No one wants to take care of someone, but they do. People are always doing it. What I don’t understand is why now she won’t do it.”

  Frances looked stony. “It got too hard for her.”

  We drove on. Frances consulted the sky every few minutes to see if it was starting to snow. Bands of oak trees flickered by, a few coppery leaves clinging to the branches. Open marshes appeared ringed by pale yellow cattails and sumac stalks, then disappeared again. Here and there we passed the wooded backyards of small plain houses. When we went by a service island, Frances asked if I thought we should check the air pressure in the tires; they had looked low to her when we got in the car. Every time I accelerated to pass another car, she clutched the door handle.

  “Why don’t you tell me about the nursing home where Dad’s going,” I suggested, the second time she mentioned checking the tires. “What’s it called again?”

  “Greenswood Manor. And it’s an assisted-living facility.”

  “Like a climate-controlled storage facility?”

  She gave me a repressive look. “Did you read that brochure I sent you?”

  I had read the brochure. Whirlpools, physical therapy, adjustable meal plans. “Organized Activities” included arts and crafts, sing-alongs, and ice-cream socials. Private rooms on every floor, some with kitchenettes, each with a small balcony overlooking “spacious grounds,” until you got to the fourth floor, which was the “full care” wing. No kitchenettes. No balconies. No more spacious grounds. “Shared accommodations” were provided.

  “A secure environment,” I quoted from the brochure, “for those entering a transitional phase of life.”

  “I visited six or seven places,” Frances said defensively, “and this was the best one. At least for what he can afford.”

  “I’m not criticizing. Who wouldn’t like a secure environment these days?”

  “He won’t like it if you start making jokes.”

  “Frances.” I kept my eyes on the oil truck ahead of us. “He’s not going to like any of this. He’s not supposed to. So let’s both stop pretending there’s some way to make it nice.”

  “Well, it could be nice,” she said with a strangled little laugh. “It just depends on your attitude.”

  “My attitude?”

  “A person’s attitude. In general.”

  SEVERAL TIMES DURING the drive to the Cape I tried to ask Frances about herself and Walter, but she brushed off my questions as if she had no idea why I would be asking them. Then she asked if I was interested in anyone, so I told her about the man I’d been seeing, that he was tall and funny, French Canadian, and that he owned a bookstore in Berkeley, which was not doing well. I omitted that he was married, falsely implying that it had been my decision to end things when the truth was that he’d cooled off almost as soon as I’d said I was in love with him. We were standing inside an Oakland coffee shop we often went to, waiting for a table, looking out the plate glass window at the sidewalk as it started to rain. As I watched the pavement darken, he told me that he and his wife had decided to “give it another chance.” “How many chances do you get?” I recall asking him, genuinely curious, but I must have sounded bitter because he only shook his head and said he was sorry.

  “It wasn’t going anywhere,” I said to Frances, trying to seem weary of the whole idea of relationships with men.

  “That’s too bad,” said Frances, looking slightly bored herself. Usually she would have demanded all sorts of particulars.

  For a time we listened to the radio and talked about the wealthy women who were Frances’s clients, several of whom were cheating on their husbands and ignoring their children.

  “Everyone’s out there looking for something else,” said Frances reproachfully, “when they probably already have it right at home.”

  In my experience, home was what usually sent people out looking for something else, but I refrained from saying so. Frances went on to deplore the new trend in interior decorating, favored by these same clients, which was called “Simple Living.” Sleek, spare, stern-looking rooms. Slate-topped coffee tables, taut leather chairs, recessed lighting. Nothing extraneous, nothing old. A place you could leave in a minute and it would look as if nobody had ever been there. The opposite of Frances’s own curatorial style, which I privately referred to as “Ancestral Manse.”

  “Mary Ellen’s into it, too. She’s been pushing me to get into feng shui.” Frances was gazing out the window at a gray cement industrial office complex with medieval-looking black slits for windows. “Mary Ellen’s into curative atmospheres. You know, healing sounds. Fragrances.”

  I imagined a small olive-skinned woman. Frizzy black hair, large expressive eyes. Expensively textured clothes, heavy silk pajama pants, big soft sweaters of merino wool, bought out of some fretful need for consolation.

  “Well, are you?” I asked.

  “Am I what?”

  “Letting her push you into it.”

  Frances sighed. “People like a house to feel like a home. I know that sounds obvious, but it’s true.” She pressed her lips tightly together for a moment. Then with a peculiar vehemence, she went on, “No matter what kind of house it is, or who the people are, I can make it look like they’ve always lived there. Not how they would have actually lived in the house but how they wish they’d lived there.” She gave an agitated little shrug.

  “Well,” I said, “home is where the heart is.”

  “That’s right,” said Frances, though I had been joking.

  We drove for a while longer in silence, the wooded areas getting scrubbier and sandier, denser, with more pitch pines, which meant we were getting closer to the Cape.

  “HOW’S THE BOOK COMING?” Frances asked, when we again had been quiet for too long. I told her that my research was coming along well, then without thinking added that I’d brought along the outline in my shoulder bag.

  As soon as I’d spoken, Frances said, “Can I see it?”

  It was just an outline, and I’m usually reluctant about showing unfinished work to anyone; but a distraction seemed like a good way to stop Frances from worrying about snowstorms or whether we were going to have a flat tire. She opened my bag and fished out the manila envelope with my summary inside, maybe six or seven pages in all, then took out her brand-new bifocals and settled back in her seat.

  She read quietly and absorbedly, slipping each page neatly behind the last one after she finished it. I tried not to watch her read, though I noticed she kept smiling; once or twice she murmured something I didn’t catch.

  When she was done she looked up. Her face was flushed, almost damp.

  “Oh Cyn
nie,” she said. “It’s so good.”

  “How can it be good?” I said, pleased but trying to sound off-hand. “It’s not even written yet.”

  “But everything you have here is so wonderful. Those three little girls and that big house. The people who came to visit. All their pets.” She gazed down at the pages in her hands, scanning different paragraphs. “‘A cat named Satan and a kitten named Sin.’ I love that. And the plays they put on in their schoolroom, pretending to be English queens in their mother’s gowns. And Christmas, with Twain dressed up as Santa, writing them letters beforehand about what presents they wanted. How he gave the oldest one a wooden ark, with two hundred carved wooden animals, ‘such as only a human being could create, and only God call by name without referring to the passenger list.’” Frances’s eyes were shining. “That’s so perfect.”

  “He acted like God, all right,” I said, flattered.

  “And how there were three girls, like us. I can’t wait to read the whole thing when you’re done.”

  “Well, my deadline’s in about six months.”

  Frances was hardly listening. “Their mother sounds lovely, too. The way Twain called her ‘his gravity,’ and she called him ‘Youth.’ And the removable wooden cherubs on their bedposts that she let the girls take off and wash in the sink and dress up in doll clothes.” She glanced up again. “But what was she sick with?”

  “Various ailments. Heart problems eventually. She was always sick. They were all hypochondriacs. The whole family. Always trying out new fads, water cures, different diets. They really got into this thing called the ‘mind cure.’”

  “What?” said Frances absently.

  “The basic theory was you could cure yourself of anything just by deciding you felt better.”

  Frances shook her head over the page in her hand.

  “The oldest girl, Susy, was neurotic,” I offered, as she went back to reading, “and probably anorexic, although she died young so no one really knew how she would have turned out. Clara, the middle one, was pretty screwed up as well. She had a nervous breakdown when their mother died. Then with Little Jean, the youngest one—”

  But Frances was once again immersed in the outline. “I love what you’ve got here about Clara, how accident prone she was, but no matter how many accidents she had, she was always fine.”

  I glanced at her sideways. “Of course, those accidents weren’t always her doing.”

  As is probably clear, my favorite part of writing historical fiction is divulging material about my subjects that I can’t include in my books. I love the amused interest in people’s eyes as they listen to an off-color anecdote about the Alcotts—the nudist who’d lived with them for six months, for instance—or Helen Keller, who in middle age tried to elope with a much-younger suitor by climbing out of a window (an attempt foiled, by the way, by Mildred). I love their guilty pleasure in debunkings. Everyone enjoys hearing about the indignities and blunders and terrible losses suffered by other people, especially if those other people were admired or special in some way. Unfortunately, or fortunately, if you’re a novelist, it’s human nature.

  “That family was full of accidents.” I shifted more comfortably in my seat. “Three fires. All in the nursery or the schoolroom. Near drownings. Collisions. Like the time Twain let go of the handle of Clara’s baby buggy on a hill to light his cigar, and she bounced out and landed on her head. Or the time Jean was run over by—”

  “But kids are like that,” Frances interrupted. “They’re survivors. It’s amazing what they can go through and come out without a scratch.”

  I gave her a sharp look, but she was perfectly serious. She leafed to the last page, smiling happily. “This is great what you have here about the parents. How they sent notes back and forth by the daughters when the mother was sick and couldn’t see the father, and the daughters read the notes and sometimes changed them if they thought his language was too strong, or if he got ‘carried away’ in describing something that made him mad. He must have had quite a temper,” she said admiringly.

  “He had a terrible temper. His children were afraid of him.”

  Frances looked startled. “But he sounds so funny and charming. Those stories he made up for the girls, about the bric-a-brac on the mantelpiece. How they would boss him around and make him tell the stories a certain way. They adored him.” She rustled the papers. “You’ve captured that so well.”

  “Frances, I’m writing a book for fourth graders.”

  “Well, they’re lucky,” she said, reaching up to twist a button on her cashmere coat. “I wish I’d had something like this to read when I was that age.”

  For some reason I felt rebuked, even though once again she’d been complimenting me. We passed a cranberry bog, watery and secretive-looking this time of year, hedged by tall yellow grasses and gray bracken.

  After a minute Frances sighed. “Dad used to love Mark Twain.”

  It was part of family lore that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was the sole book my father claimed to have read from start to finish. Even with the newspaper, he only read the first parts of articles on the front page; he rarely bothered to find the continuation of a story to see what else had happened. I have no idea how he got through the insurance claims he’d had to review at his office.

  “Remember Dad’s Twainisms?” Frances asked dreamily some time later, taking off her glasses as the high gray arch of the Bourne Bridge appeared in front of us. “Those sayings he used to quote? Did you know he got them off a daily calendar I gave him one Christmas?” She looked proud at this recollection.

  Then she said, “Remember the notes he used to send up on her tray?”

  She was talking about the tray Mrs. Jordan used to carry back and forth between my mother’s room and the kitchen, once my mother stopped coming downstairs for meals. Often my father would scribble a note to her before he left for work in the morning and leave it to be carried up on her breakfast tray.

  “Did you know,” said Frances, “that he sometimes used to put sayings on the notes, to cheer her up?”

  “I remember,” I said, merging with the traffic onto the bridge, “that she didn’t like Mark Twain.”

  “She didn’t?” Frances turned to me in surprise.

  Irritably, because I felt I’d been more familiar with these notes than Frances had, I said, “She thought Twain was a big blowhard. Especially compared with the writers she liked.”

  “Who did she like?” Frances looked honestly puzzled.

  “Jane Austen. The Brontës. Willa Cather. Didn’t you ever go in and read to her?”

  I asked this question knowing full well that Frances had never read to our mother. Especially toward the end Frances had avoided her whenever possible, almost insolently, pretending not to understand when she spoke, pretending not to hear when Mrs. Jordan said, “Save my legs,” and asked her to carry something upstairs to our mother’s room.

  “I don’t remember,” said Frances, shaking her head. She stacked my pages and slipped them back into their envelope.

  Steel pylons flicked past as we crossed the bridge. Below gaped the gray canal, scattered here and there with white sails, like torn bits of paper.

  “Are you okay?” Frances asked, once we were over the bridge.

  “It’s a little hot in here,” I said. “Do you mind if I open the window?”

  “It doesn’t feel hot to me. Are you getting carsick? Remember how you used to get carsick on the way to school?”

  “No,” I snapped. “I’m just hot.”

  “Well, by all means,” said Frances, a little crossly. “Open the window then.”

  We reached the town of Pocasset just before noon. My father had bought a small shingled cottage here when I was in college, so that Ilse could be close to Woods Hole, where she was conducting some sort of postgraduate work, and he could have a view of the sea, which he insisted was the only view embraced by human beings that never changed, since it was always changing. But for years he and
Ilse traveled so much that they rarely had a reliable address. The cottage was rented out except for the summers. But when my father turned seventy-five, they decided to live there year-round, and that’s when Ilse went to work at the institute. What my father did with himself after that, I never knew.

  The clouds were clearing as we drove through the little town and it seemed as if the Cape had been having milder weather than up north. Most of the scrub oaks along the back roads still had their leaves, and when we turned down a sandy dirt driveway where FISKE was painted in faded letters on a splintered gray oar nailed to a pine tree, and drove out onto the spur of land my father owned above the bay, we discovered an exquisite little Japanese maple, defiantly scarlet, planted by itself, like a flag, on the grass in front of my father’s cottage. A row of neat hydrangeas edged the walkway, a few pale blue petals showing here and there among the faded brown flowers. The breeze was fresh after the drive, and full of salt, and as we got out of the van we stopped for a moment to appreciate the calm silvery gleam of the bay.

  Ilse opened the door before we had a chance to ring the bell. She was wearing a white blouse that was slightly too small for her, white sweatpants, and white leather moccasins. Even though it was November, her face was darkly tanned.

  “Come in.” Ilse’s accent sounded more clipped than I remembered. “He has been waiting for an hour.”

  “I’m sorry, but the weather held us up.” Frances was trying to remain polite, but the wings of her nostrils flared. “We thought it was going to snow. And there was traffic coming over the bridge.”

  Ilse stared at her moodily, then stepped aside so we could enter the foyer, which opened into the living room and the kitchen. I had only visited the cottage a few times before and my impression had been of airy rooms full of watery light from the bay. But the cottage seemed to have grown smaller, what I could see of it from the foyer, and more crowded. Even the view had shrunk. Framed by the living room’s picture window, the bay looked flat and metallic, as if it were hanging on the wall.