The Ghost at the Table: A Novel (11 page)

“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.

“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.

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 every 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.