The Ghost at the Table: A Novel Page 8

  As we crested the dark drive, an odd thing happened: The house, fully lit, seemed to surge up at us suddenly like a stone steamboat, bearing down across a black river of lawn. Every window was ablaze, the curtains pulled back, light pouring out onto the dusky swells of surrounding shrubbery. A lavender plume of smoke curled from the chimney, drifting into the evening sky.

  It wasn’t until I’d turned off the ignition and leaned back in my seat that I remembered Sarah and her friend were expected to arrive that evening and that Walter must have wanted the house to look welcoming for them.

  A thin, distant howl sounded from the woods.

  “Coyotes,” Frances said, from a dark pocket beside me.

  “You’re kidding.”

  “They’ve moved into the woods around here. We have deer and foxes, too.”

  I could see Walter and Jane moving past the unshuttered windows in the kitchen. Jane was lifting a pot of something from the stove. My dream about Mrs. Jordan and her story of the old man came back to me.

  “So, besides the wild kingdom, who lived here before you?”

  In all the years Frances and Walter had owned their house, I’d never bothered to ask this question. It was a wreck when they bought it: rotting windowsills, holes in the roof, squirrels in the attic. Frances had spent almost a decade restoring that house, and yet I’d never been curious about it. Houses were not in my purview, since I never expected to own one myself; also I suppose I was envious. The less I thought about Frances’s house the better. Even now I was simply stalling before beginning the process of hauling out my father’s wheelchair, unfolding it and persuading him to climb into it. Frances didn’t move, either.

  “Some people named Prence owned the house,” she said. “An accountant and his wife. She died, then he did.”

  “Here?”

  “In Florida, I think.”

  “Good place to die,” said my father from the backseat. His breathing had sounded labored, almost stertorous, when we left Greenswood Manor, but it was more regular now.

  “What?” Frances looked startled. “What did he say?”

  I was surprised that she hadn’t been able to understand him but decided that now wasn’t the time to explain. “I think he’s just glad to be here.”

  Frances nodded then craned her neck around to smile briefly at him. As she opened her door, the van’s overhead light went on and the cool brisk scent of leaf mold and a whiff of skunk stirred in through the open door.

  “So,” she said, “I guess this is it.”

  But I could have sworn I caught a look of suppressed excitement on her face, the same expression that I’d imagined the day before, when she led me into the living room to show me her latest find.

  SARAH HAD CALLED while we were on the Cape to say that she and her friend weren’t coming until tomorrow; they would take a noon train from New York, after attending a rally of some kind at Columbia. By the time we received this explanation from Walter, without yet offering one of our own (“Later,” Frances said, hardly bothering to glance up at him), we had parked my father in the living room and returned to the kitchen. Frances stood warming her hands over a pot on the stove. Clad in a sweatshirt and sweatpants, Walter was leaning his elbows against a counter.

  “She’ll be here tomorrow,” he repeated.

  When we’d first appeared at the back door with Dad in his wheelchair, that gangsterish fedora clapped on to his head, I’d had the impression that Walter was not entirely surprised to see him with us. This impression deepened as I watched him stand patiently in his running clothes, waiting for Frances to say something.

  “There wasn’t a room for him,” I said finally.

  Walter lifted his eyebrows at Frances.

  “It’s just for a few days,” I said.

  For dinner Walter had heated a rotisserie chicken he’d picked up on his way home from the hospital, which he served with peas and white rice on Frances’s Blue Willow china. Frances had been collecting Blue Willow china, piece by piece, for years. She loved the calm scenes of willow trees and pagodas and curving footbridges, all uninhabited I realized, as I looked at my plate. Walter sat between me and my father on one side of the table, with Frances and Jane across from us. Jane had lit candles in the dining room and set the long cherrywood trestle table with cloth napkins folded into fans. Frances did not remark on her fan-shaped napkin but simply shook it out and put it in her lap.

  Everyone was self-conscious, given my father’s presence, but we all behaved well, at least for most of the meal. Jane went out of her way to be considerate, helping him from his wheelchair and into a ladder-backed chair, asking him repeatedly if there was anything he needed. It amazed me to see him sitting there like a ghost on the other side of Walter. The thin skin on his forehead was the spotted, vulnerable color of a dog’s belly and his hair was so white it was almost transparent. If I’d found it hard to look at him without his moustache during that lunch in Barnstable, the sight of him was almost unbearable now.

  Against the wall I was facing stood a mellow old oak dresser Frances used as a sideboard, its handles carved to look like acorns; according to Frances, it had once gone west in a covered wagon, only to come back again. Above the dresser hung a primitive oil of a jowly, tight-lipped woman in a mob cap, a lace fichu around her neck, her dark eyes as tiny as an elephant’s. Long ago Sarah and Jane had dubbed her the “Common Ancestor”; they insisted her eyes followed you if you moved around the room. A few gaunt dignified old wooden farm tools hung on the opposite wall. Everything in Frances’s house had a charming story attached, usually of how it was rescued at the last moment from the trash or from the hands of Philistines (“They were going to paint it!”), and I reflected, not for the first time, that almost nothing in my apartment had ever belonged to anyone else, or would be wanted by anyone else, either.

  Walter was trying to explain to me why managed health care was a failure, perhaps to allow Frances to settle down and eat her dinner. Not that she ate much. My father ate almost nothing. Whenever he raised his fork, whatever was on it fell off. Jane tried to help him by cutting up his chicken, but in the end she got up from the table, with a scathing look at her mother, who was sitting back in her chair with her eyes closed, and went into the kitchen. A minute later she came back with a spoon and a carton of peach-flavored yogurt. He didn’t eat much more of that, but it was an improvement over the odds he faced against rice and peas.

  “There’s no such thing as managed care in this country,” Walter was saying to me. “What we have now is unmanageable care.”

  Walter was doing a sturdy job of behaving as though my father’s arrival were no more inconvenient than if Sarah had come home with a second college friend for Thanksgiving. My father himself did not participate in the conversation beyond a few grunts, though he seemed perfectly alert, especially every time he looked at Frances. Then a slow kindling would come into his eyes, and half his mouth lifted, as though he were trying to smile.

  Walter and I got up to clear the dinner plates; Frances followed us into the kitchen a moment later, leaving Jane alone with Dad. As we were putting dishes in the sink I heard Walter mutter, “How am I supposed to deal with this?” Frances turned to him blankly, as if to say, Deal with what? She didn’t assure him that everything would be all right or insist that our father would just be staying for a few days, until Greenswood Manor had an opening. She simply said she’d take care of the dishes.

  Walter gave her a hard stare, then shrugged his shoulders. But he looked worried. It was usually Frances who looked worried, while Walter maintained an ironic distance from upsets and inconveniences. Worry, to Walter, was something extreme and personal, what you did when you had a grave illness. He saw that kind of worry every day. Frances’s generalized worrying, about terrorist plots and derailed elections and whether antiques were going out of style, made no more sense to him than her finicky concern with keeping the linen smelling fresh or whether she had shortbread cookies to serve with Scottish tea
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  Even so, Frances’s worrying usually came across as “just being careful” and wanting to “take care of things.” She married Walter when she was barely out of college, arguing at the time that it was silly to wait, that she wanted “to get on with life,” though now I wonder if she was worried that she’d never meet anyone else as handsome and successful. The same was true of the house, which she’d insisted on buying despite its decrepitude because she might never again find “such a bargain in Concord.” She approached worry pragmatically, going at it straight on, the way a carpenter might plane a board that was not quite level. And yet her attempts to alleviate her fears—like trying to persuade Sarah to leave New York and come home—could rise to the heroic, all while she maintained an attitude of efficient purpose. Even tonight, even after that unfortunate mix-up with the nursing home and my father suddenly on her doorstep, Frances didn’t seem so much worried as distracted. She had barely spoken during dinner. But as I watched her hesitate over whether to use dessert forks or spoons, it struck me that she was trying to figure out how to pretend that my father was an ordinary houseguest instead of an intruder.

  Once we sat down to dessert (a store-bought pumpkin pie bought by Walter, with vanilla ice cream), conversation in the dining room faltered, until finally it stopped altogether. A minute ticked past. I found myself locking eyes with the Common Ancestor, turning my head from side to side.

  Then Frances said abruptly, “Cynnie’s book is wonderful.”

  “My book?” I said, caught off guard.

  Everyone had turned toward me, even my father.

  I smiled deprecatingly and picked up my wineglass. “It’s still mostly just an outline. Frances read a few pages today in the car.”

  “Oh, come on,” she cried, her face suddenly animated. “It’s wonderful. You can tell them something about it, can’t you?”

  “It always sounds stupid when I start talking about it.”

  “Cynthia is writing about Mark Twain’s daughters,” Frances explained to Dad, who was across the table from her. She spoke slowly and loudly, although as far as I knew his hearing hadn’t been affected by his stroke. “About him and his daughters and their life in Hartford.”

  “Well, that sounds great,” Walter said kindly to me.

  “Cynthia does a beautiful job of capturing them,” continued Frances. “There were three girls, just like in our family, and they used to put on plays. They even did a play of Twain’s Prince and the Pauper, as a surprise for him. And it was so good he made them do it again for all the neighbors and insisted on being in it himself.”

  “Well, I think he kind of took over the play,” I interjected. “I’m not sure how the girls felt about it. There’s this one bizarre photograph”—I turned to Jane, thinking she might appreciate some of the stranger aspects of the Clemens family—“of Twain dressed in drag, with a bonnet on his head. He’s kicking up one leg and holding on to Susy, the oldest girl, who looks horrified. Actually, she looks more resigned—”

  “Tell about Twain dressing up as Santa Claus.” Frances’s face was pink as she poured herself a second glass of wine. “It’s the sweetest thing.”

  Walter shifted in his chair. “I heard Cynthia’s going to go down to Hartford to see his house while she’s here.”

  “I was hoping to go tomorrow—”

  “A trip down memory lane,” Frances said, fingering the stem of her wineglass. “Get Cynthia to tell you about the crazy notes the girls used to carry back and forth between the parents.”

  “They weren’t crazy,” I said, looking at her.

  “Funny, I meant. His were funny.”

  I was beginning to feel dazed and immobilized, the way I imagine people must feel when they are about to be overcome by an allergic reaction to something they didn’t realize they were allergic to.

  “Twain was funny as a writer,” I said stiffly, after a moment. “But at home he was kind of a monster.”

  “Oh, I’m sure he was difficult. But not a monster—”

  “Mom,” muttered Jane. “It’s her book.”

  “But he loved those little girls. You have it all in your outline, Cynnie. The Christmas presents. The stories he made up for them—”

  “Frances,” said Walter gently.

  Frances was usually the most diplomatic of conversationalists, perfectly attuned to other people’s discomfort and restlessness, adept at switching to new topics, even if she had to resort to making fun of herself to do so. Which she did at just that moment by slapping a palm to her forehead and saying, “Oh, for Pete’s sake. I’m sorry, Cynnie. Here I am going on and on like an old kook. I just got so excited. Their story just seems so real.

  “It must be fabulous,” she went on, her eyes gleaming in the candlelight, “to get to sit at home and figure all this out and choose what you want to tell from what happened.”

  I’d always known that at times Frances envied my freewheeling life, which could be arranged and rearranged and then left undisturbed—there was no one but me to knock my lampshades askew. Of course we both knew that I envied her life even more, for its settled commotion: the comings and goings of children, the husbandly phone calls about picking up something for dinner, the reliable everyday stir around meals and homework and clearing the table. Never in her life would Frances be greeted by a cold look of surprise, in an unfamiliar bed, on a morning when she had overstayed her welcome.

  “You’ve always been such a good storyteller,” she added placatingly.

  “Well,” I said, somewhat mollified, “in the real story Twain wasn’t such a great father.” I looked down at my plate, aware suddenly of my own father, sitting on the other side of Walter. “He was very unpredictable. He’d fly into terrible rages about little things, anything, like missing shirt buttons or the soup being cold. One minute he’d be laughing, the next minute screaming. I guess these days he’d probably be diagnosed as manic depressive.”

  “These days,” repeated Frances, interrupting me once more. “These days everybody’s got a diagnosis. I read the other day that Nabokov probably had Asperger’s syndrome. And scientists all have obsessive-compulsive disorder. Anybody interesting has something wrong with him.”

  She picked up her fork and looked at the slice of pie on her plate as if she couldn’t recall how it got there. Her ice cream had melted into a puddle.

  “How about his wife?” she asked suddenly. “She was supposed to be lovely. Didn’t she make Christmas baskets for poor people? Everybody loved her.”

  “Livy Clemens was an invalid.”

  Frances put down her fork reasonably. “But isn’t that what a lot of women were in those days, especially if they had difficult husbands? Neurasthenics. I was just reading something about it.”

  “Livy was paralyzed for two years after going skating as a teenager and falling on the ice.” I was annoyed at being goaded into divulging this information yet proud of knowing it. “She was never totally well after that. A faith healer finally got her out of bed by pulling up the window shades. But she died of hyperthyroid heart disease.”

  “Weird,” said Jane, looking interested for the first time since this conversation began.

  “As for the daughters,” I went on, before Frances could interrupt me again, “the oldest died of spinal meningitis when she was in her early twenties. The youngest was an epileptic, who drowned in her bath on Christmas morning in her thirties. After staying up all night wrapping presents for her father.”

  Frances made a hoarse little noise. Then, as if to stop herself from further protest, she reached out to square a pewter candlestick.

  “So what about the middle one?” Jane was pulverizing the pie crust on her plate, pinching it between her fingers. “Didn’t you say there were three daughters?”

  “Clara outlived everybody. She was the only one who got married.”

  I was watching Frances as I said this and caught a flicker of relief on her face.

  “Did she have any kids?” asked Jane.
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br />   “One daughter.”

  “What happened to her?”

  I tried to ignore the feeling that it was indecent to be talking about Mark Twain’s daughters in this way. Trotting out my facts and nuggets. Showing off how much I knew about their troubles. When they had been private people, as private as I was myself, full of painful reservations about who they were and what was expected of them, not forthcoming to strangers who would, of course, have been curious. I could see them so plainly, standing in front of their fancy brick house, with its turrets and balconies and porte cochere. Wearing yellowed white dresses of eyelet lace, black stockings and laced boots, their hair tied back with ribbons, their dark eyes sharp and distrustful.

  But Frances’s insistence on talking about my book as a confection (which it was) and her obvious identification with those charming little girls sitting at Daddy’s feet, begging for another story, infuriated me, so I said, “Clara’s daughter killed herself.”

  “She did?” Jane stopped playing with her pie crust.

  “None of the family is left?” Frances had gone pale.

  “Why did she kill herself?” said Jane.

  “Maybe it’s time to change the subject.” Walter rested a hand on my arm.

  I stayed very still, aware of the warmth of Walter’s hand through the fabric of my blouse. In all the years I’d known Walter, he’d never indulged in any patronizing flirtation with me, which I’ve seen other men practice like golf swings on the unmarried women in their lives. To his credit, Walter must have sensed my attraction to him, or at least wondered at my awkwardness around him, but he acted always in the same disinterested, avuncular way toward me, his wife’s younger sister. I found myself wishing I were alone with him, so that I could pour us each another glass of wine and explain everything to Walter that couldn’t go in my book. About the daughters who had once been lively, ambitious, and high-strung, like their father, but who for reasons both within and beyond their control had not done well, though their father had loved them so much he would have liked to stuff them in his pipe and smoke them like the most marvelous tobacco. And about their mother, who was always about to die but managed to hang on longer than anyone would have predicted. Whom their father had also loved, tenderly, consumingly (“Dear gravity” he’d called her); yet he was unable to stop himself from having rages in her presence and making terrible confessions, then begging her forgiveness with equal passion, subjecting her to an exhausting regimen of tantrums and absolutions that went on for decades. Until during her last two years, including her final months in a drafty Florentine villa, which the family had rented in an effort to save her health, her doctors wouldn’t allow him to visit her in her room except on special occasions, and then only for five minutes.