The Ghost at the Table: A Novel Page 9

  Such an intricate life this family had led, with all their hopes and disappointments, all their strange negotiations with each other. But now the girls were just curiosities. Remarkable mostly for their sad endings. I would have liked to explain all that to Walter, to the careful listening expression on his face, though as he took his hand off my arm I was also irritated to think that he was listening so carefully to me for Frances’s sake, which was also why he now wanted me to stop talking.

  “Of course, they weren’t always miserable,” I began.

  “Maybe she should be your narrator.” Frances was leaning intently toward me across the table. “Clara, the one who managed to go on.”

  Perhaps this last interruption, and the presumption behind it, was what made me say, “Here’s another tidbit for you. Twain had a thing for young girls.”

  Frances looked shocked. “What?”

  “He collected girls when he was an old man. He called them his ‘Angelfish.’ He wrote them letters, invited them to his house for lunch. Got them to dress up for him. In harem outfits.”

  I figured this disclosure would stop the conversation dead, but by the time I stopped speaking Frances had already recovered.

  “Oh, they say that sort of thing about everybody.” She made a wry mouth. “The minute somebody’s famous, he gets called a pedophile.”

  “Mark Twain liked little girls?” Jane’s eyes were wide.

  “Has everyone had enough dessert?” Walter reached for Jane’s plate and stacked it on top of his own.

  “All people want to do,” complained Frances, “is find the cracks in things.”

  I smiled to myself. Pinned over my desk in San Francisco was a white file card, on which I’d typed out a quote from an essay by Virginia Woolf: “If life has a base that it stands upon,” the quote begins, “if it is a bowl that one fills and fills and fills …” The card was pinned to the wall above my mother’s cracked Wedgwood bowl. A clever comment, I used to think, on the nature of memory, until Carita stopped by one afternoon and gave this arrangement a pitying look, noting that mordant humor was out of style. She did, however, approve of my plan to write a book about Virginia Woolf someday, from the perspective of her “backward,” possibly autistic half sister Laura, the granddaughter of Thackeray. Even cracked bowls have their uses.

  “But what did Twain do with those girls?” Jane was asking.

  “Well, as far as I can tell,” I admitted, “he mostly just played cards with them. Although there is one story about a girl who—”

  “Wait! I just thought of something.” Frances began clinking her fork against her dessert plate. “Here’s something I just thought of. What if she was one of them? One of Twain’s little girls?”

  We all looked at her in confusion, which she seemed to enjoy, because she paused to take a prolonged sip of wine before she said, “Dad’s mother.”

  Jane stared. “What are you talking about?”

  “Our grandmother, Cynnie’s and mine. There’s a story Dad used to tell,” she said to Walter, “that Mark Twain gave the organ to her.”

  “The one in the living room?” said Jane.

  “But Dad made that story up.” My head ached as I leaned forward to peer down the table at my father. “Twain did have an organ, but—”

  “Well, there must be some kind of truth to the story.” Frances took another sip from her wineglass. “Otherwise why’d he tell it?” She smiled playfully and I realized belatedly that she had been teasing me and that everything she’d said tonight, all her bright comments about my book, had probably been nothing more than an attempt to lighten an uncomfortable evening.

  My father had remained quiet throughout this discussion, watching Frances and pushing at the pie on his plate with a spoon. In the brief silence that followed, he lifted his head to look back at me.

  “Mark Twain,” he said, in his rough, gargly voice. “Leave ’em alone. Leave ’em all back there.”

  “Are you getting a cough, Dad?” Frances set down her wineglass, looking concerned. “Walter? What do we have in the house for a cough?”

  I started to correct her and explain what he’d actually said, but by then I’d drunk several glasses of wine myself, and my father’s angry gaze, suddenly turned my way, made me pause. Up until now, every time I’d glanced at him he had been looking at Frances, an expression of almost childish enjoyment lifting the mobile side of his face, while the other side sagged in a frown, like one of those old-fashioned tragicomic masks.

  “It’s time to get you to bed,” she told him gently.

  On the ride to Concord that evening, Frances and I had held a terse conference about sleeping arrangements, agreeing that our father would not be able to climb the staircase to get to the second floor. He would have to be put downstairs in Walter and Frances’s bedroom. She and Walter would sleep in the study. Sarah and her friend would be in Sarah’s room. I would move in with Jane, who had bunk beds.

  Frances and Walter’s bedroom was off the kitchen—it was the house’s original kitchen, in fact. At one end was an enormous old fieldstone fireplace, big enough inside for a child to stand upright. Frances had put skylights in the ceiling and installed a set of French doors leading out to a brick patio at the back of the house. Otherwise the room was furnished only with an iron bedstead, painted white, and so tall that you needed a wooden step to climb onto the mattress. Two closets held Frances’s and Walter’s clothes, cabinets in the adjoining bathroom contained personal items. Frances wouldn’t allow anything else in the room, not a clock, not a phone, not even a rug on the wide pine board floors.

  Given Frances’s affinity for objects, it was curious that her bedroom was so stark—though Carita once remarked that I myself lived like a Bedouin, hardly bothering to unpack my suitcases even after two years in my present apartment. “When you’ve moved around as much as I have,” I’d told her, implying romantic quandaries and hurried exits, “unpacking starts to seem like an act of faith.” But mostly I’d moved from apartment to apartment because I didn’t have much reason to be one place over another, which made it hard to want to stay anywhere for very long. You could say just the opposite for Frances, and yet here was that vacant room, her “refuge,” she often said, where Walter had told me she was lately spending entire days.

  Walter and Jane stood up and went off to find their coats, preparing to go out to the van to carry in my father’s suitcases.

  “Coming, Cynnie?” Frances had risen as well and I had little choice but to stand up, too.

  “Here we go, Dad.” A moment later she was wheeling the wheelchair up to the table and leaning down to help him stand. “When Walter comes back in he’ll help you get ready for bed. We’re putting you in our room. It’s quiet and it gets a lot of light in the morning. I think you’ll like it. It’s very peaceful.”

  “Because it’s empty,” I joked, in revenge for Frances’s teasing.

  “Yes.” Frances smiled cautiously at me. “Now, will you give me a hand, Cynnie, by opening the door?”

  The headache that had been gathering behind my forehead all day had built into a thundercloud by the time I transferred my things from the study into Jane’s bedroom. Fortunately Jane insisted that I didn’t need to change the sheets on the sofa bed for Frances and Walter.

  “You look pretty clean.”

  “Appearances can be deceiving,” I mumbled.

  Her own room was small and dark and square, painted a dusky purple. In addition to the bunk beds against one wall, covered with zebra-striped nylon spreads, the room was furnished with a dresser and a desk and chair, all of which had been painted a sticky-looking black. A black plastic beanbag chair slumped in one corner beside a very dirty pink shag rug. A small Sony television sat on a plastic milk crate in front of the beanbag chair. On the walls were posters of rock bands, baleful-looking young men in black with names like Insomniac and the Strokes spelled out in Gothic lettering. Books, magazines, spills of school papers, hair elastics, gum wrappers cluttered eve
ry surface, accompanied by the smell of unwashed underpants, Patchouli perfume and bubble-gum, which rose up threateningly at me as soon as I crossed the threshold. It was exactly the sordid bedroom one would expect for a girl like Jane, yet its ugliness was unnerving, not just because it was deliberate but because it seemed so methodical.

  “Mom hates this room,” said Jane with gloomy pride.

  I tried to respond, but when I turned my head I saw flashes of forked lightning.

  “I don’t care what she thinks. She’s totally losing it.” Jane sat down cross-legged on the other end of the bunk. “And she hates me.”

  “She does not,” I managed to say, sitting down on the bottom bunk.

  “She does. You should hear her on the phone to her friends.” Jane dropped her voice in a good imitation of Frances’s cool breathy register: “The stress is really getting to me. It’s getting worse. I don’t know how long I can take it.”

  “How do you know she’s talking about you?”

  “Trust me,” said Jane. “I know.”

  Ordinarily I would have loved a moment like this, when I could play the wise, hip aunt in whom the girls could confide about bad boyfriends or drug experimentation, listening while they complained about their mother, who didn’t understand anything, who was sneaky and tyrannical and deliberately obtuse, who read their diaries, and wouldn’t let them go to friends’ houses unless she knew the parents would be home, whose very being was inimical to the tentative, cherished, ill-advised visions they were forming of themselves. In other words, a mother I would have given anything to have had myself. But tonight I was having trouble even speaking clearly. A few minutes before, Walter had given me a vial of aspirin with codeine and I had taken four pills when he’d told me to take two. Mercifully, I could feel my eyes starting to close.

  “I’m sure all your friends feel the same way about their mothers.”

  “I don’t have any friends,” said Jane, with the same proud gloom.

  “Do you think you could turn that off?” With an effort, I pointed to the gooseneck lamp on Jane’s desk, which was angled toward me and shining interrogatively.

  Jane got up and turned off the lamp, then bent down and switched on a little blue glass nightlight shaped like a flower and plugged into the wall socket. Then she turned off the other lamps in the room as well, so that we were bathed suddenly in soothing blue light. “How’s that?”

  “Much better. Thanks.”

  Jane was quiet for a few moments and I began to get ready for bed, aware that she was watching me as I stood up to unbutton my blouse and clumsily pull off my jeans, then drag my nightgown over my head.

  “Were you your mother’s favorite?” she asked suddenly.

  “My mother?” I said, taken aback. “I’d say Helen was.”

  “Not my mom?”

  “She was Dad’s favorite.”

  Jane pondered this information for a few moments, staring at her black beanbag chair. “Why do you think Aunt Helen never got married?”

  “She didn’t want to,” I said. “She liked living alone.”

  “Why?”

  “I think she thought it was simpler.”

  “Is that what you think, too?”

  “Sometimes,” I allowed, feeling that I was about to say something disastrously wrong. “I guess mostly.”

  Jane fell silent again. Then she asked, “So what was she like? Your mother?”

  “I didn’t really know her that well. She was sick a lot.”

  “Were you and Mom there, the night she died?”

  I hesitated then nodded, not sure where this interview was headed, or what had sparked it, wishing only that it would end soon.

  “So, what happened?”

  It was then that I realized Jane had been saving these questions up for some time. That she must have asked Frances the same ones but hadn’t been satisfied with the answers, and now that Helen was gone there was no one else left to ask but me.

  “Well, she was in her bed,” I told her slowly, “as she usually was, you know, because she was sick. That night we both went up to see her, and then the next morning she was dead. I think Frances felt in some way responsible,” I added, thinking this might explain to Jane why Frances had avoided talking about our mother, “for not minding more.”

  “Not minding?”

  “About her dying.”

  “You can have the bottom bunk,” Jane offered, when I finished buttoning my nightgown. I thanked her a little too fervently.

  “I sleep in the top bunk, anyway.”

  She continued to watch while I pawed around for my toothbrush, finally upending my stained old flowered toiletries bag, scattering tampons and a dial of birth control pills across the dark bedroom floor. Jane glanced with interest at the birth control pills as I began putting everything back in my bag.

  “So do you think she killed herself?”

  “Who?” I froze as I stooped to gather up my tampons.

  “Your grandmother. Who we were talking about at dinner. The one who owned the organ. Mom says she was hit by a streetcar.”

  “She told you that?”

  Jane nodded, biting a red-lacquered thumbnail, a pouch of soft babyish flesh folding behind her chin. “She said it could have been an accident or on purpose. She said Granddad was there and saw it happen. That’s why he had such a hard time when your mom died.”

  “He had a hard time?” I wasn’t sure I’d understood her correctly. “That’s what your mother told you?”

  Jane quit chewing on her thumbnail and began examining the split ends on one of her braids. “I can’t really remember now. Something like that.”

  “But what did she say?”

  Jane’s eyes were crossed from staring at the end of her braid. “Oh, I guess that he was, like, traumatized by losing his mother. And so nobody should blame him for stuff he did later. I don’t know,” she said, dropping the braid and blinking cautiously up at me. “I forget.”

  “I didn’t realize she was such a fan of pop psychology.”

  “Well, she’s really into spiritual stuff. This ‘free your mind’ stuff. She’s got all these dumb books now, like, Every Moment Is Now and Take Life One Breath at a Time.” Jane gave an arch laugh.

  “Your grandfather,” I told her, “is hardly blameless.”

  “But it must have been really gruesome. Seeing your mother die like that.” Jane immediately looked solemn, impressed at having such a terrible incident in her own family history.

  After a moment she said, “Mom says your dad would have been hit, too, but his mom pushed him out of the way at the last minute and saved him.”

  “Well, who knows what really happened. He was only seven.”

  “Gruesome,” breathed Jane again.

  “So what else has she told you?” I said, hoping to sound casual as I pleated the front of my nightgown.

  Jane shifted on the edge of the bunk. “Oh, not much. She says you guys had a pretty happy childhood. That you took nature walks in the woods and stuff like that, and had a big house. That your dad was funny and told a lot of jokes.” She shrugged. “I guess having your mom sick was hard, but she doesn’t really talk about that. She mostly talks about him.”

  “Him?” I repeated. “She talks about him?”

  “Lately she has been.”

  “Does she tell you about him and Ilse? And before Ilse?”

  Jane shrugged again and began picking at a welt on her chin with her dirty painted fingernails. “Not really.”

  “So how does she explain why she never sees him?” I tried to seem amused, as if the whole idea of Frances talking about our father must be some sort of amiable prank. “If we had such a lovely childhood?”

  Jane looked thoughtful. “She says for a long time she was mad at him. But then they made up.”

  “They made up?” My headache, which had begun to recede, suddenly redoubled.

  “Yeah. She went down to the Cape to see him after Aunt Helen died.”

 
“Ah,” I said, pretending to have already known this.

  Frances and I had long had a pact about my father, closely observed, that he was the source of everything that had ever gone wrong in our lives. My problems with men, Frances’s obsessiveness, my headaches, her phobias about flying on airplanes. Anything we had trouble with, it was because of him. He was weak, selfish, cruel, just this side of venal, and even if he spent the rest of his life repenting the offenses he had committed, it would not be enough. The perfidy of our father was an absolute, like the speed of light.

  I lay back heavily on the bunk and closed my eyes. “It’s been a long day,” I heard myself say. “I think I’m going to try to get some sleep.”

  “Okay,” Jane said falteringly.

  I wished she would leave, but she continued to sit at the end of the bunk, picking at her chin. At last the mattress springs creaked as she stood up.

  When I opened my eyes, she was standing close to me, reaching for something on the upper bunk. The loose sleeves of the oversized shirt she was wearing had slipped back and I found myself staring at the inside of one of her forearms. Even in that dim blue light, a thin crosshatch of scars was faintly visible.