The Ghost at the Table: A Novel (12 page)

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.

By the time I got downstairs for breakfast the next morning, Frances had clearly been up for hours. As I stumbled into the kitchen in my nightgown and a pair of Jane’s wool socks, my head still aching, Frances was standing in the pantry rapidly opening and closing cabinets, concerned that she might not have enough food for Thanksgiving, now that Walter had invited the Egyptian resident and his wife and baby, who were Muslim, she was belatedly realizing, and might have dietary restrictions. It went without saying there’d be no driving to Hartford today. Not with my father in residence. Not with one of Frances’s Occasions planned for tomorrow. Plus Sarah had sent an e-mail “reminding” Frances that her chemistry lab partner, Arlee, was a vegan.

“Which means, basically, nuts,” Frances said. She opened another cabinet and rifled through the contents, pulling out a package of macaroni and tossing it onto the counter, where it joined a jumble of boxes and cans. “I mean, she can eat nuts. And grains and vegetables, but no refined sugar and nothing with eggs.”

I pictured a hollow-cheeked girl, with long colorless hair and round granny glasses. Pale and morose from vitamin B deficiency and not enough sugar.

“Is she an animal rights activist?” I asked grudgingly.

Frances opened another cabinet, keeping her back to me. “Probably. Sarah only likes activists these days. It doesn’t even matter what kind. Probably she’s a poultry activist. Posing as a Thanksgiving guest.”

“She’ll probably try to free your turkey.”

“Blow up my roasting pan.”

We both laughed. Then I said, “Frances, why didn’t you tell me that you’d been going down to the Cape?”

She turned around, but I couldn’t tell whether I had startled her.

“Jane says you and Dad have ‘made up,’ whatever that means.”

“I went down to see him a few times,” Frances said quietly. “That’s true. To check on how he was doing after Helen died.”

“But why didn’t you tell me?” I was horrified to feel my eyes begin to fill.

“I would have. I didn’t mean to hide anything from you, Cynnie. But you seemed so angry with him after the funeral that I couldn’t think how to bring it up. You told me you never wanted to see him again.”

“But why did you care,” I said, “how he was doing?”

Frances gave me a commiserative look. “He asked
me
to lunch, the first time. And I didn’t tell you because I was worried you’d feel deserted or something, by my going to see him.”

“But I would have understood,” I insisted, though I was quite sure I would not have understood. I didn’t understand now. How could Frances have wanted to have lunch with our father, alone, especially after the way he’d behaved toward Helen? Never visiting
her in Vermont during her illness, never even calling her on the phone. Showing up late for the funeral, refusing to sit with us, dodging her friends, making excuses not to go to the private memorial service at her house. Who was
he,
to ask Frances to lunch?

“I’m really sorry, Cynnie, if this has upset you.”

“It hasn’t upset me.” I looked down at my feet in Jane’s socks. “I’m glad you and he have patched things up.”

“Don’t be angry.”

“I’m not angry. I just don’t like being lied to.”

“No one’s lied to you, Cynnie.”

“So promise me you didn’t arrange that mix-up at the nursing home on purpose.”

Frances looked grave. “I would never do something like that.”

“Fine. Then promise me.”

“I promise I didn’t arrange that mix-up.”

For a minute or two neither of us said anything.

“Do you think Egyptians eat stuffing?” Frances had returned to her disorganized counters and shelves.

“I have no idea.”

“What about cranberry sauce?”

“I think it’s pork they don’t eat,” I said, crossing my arms and leaning stiffly against the doorjamb. “By the way, where
is
—” It seemed strange to refer to him easily as “Dad,” as if we were a normal family, about to have a normal Thanksgiving, over which our normal old father would preside.

“He’s in my room.” Frances was reading the back of a box of rice. “Lying down. He’s taken his medications and he ate a little oatmeal for breakfast.”

“He asked you for oatmeal?”

“Jane made it for him. Before she left for school.”

I hadn’t even heard Jane leave that morning. The whole house
had been awake and filled with industry and purpose, and I’d slept through it all.

“She asked him what he wanted and she said he said oatmeal.” Frances looked up. “I offered to make him eggs or an English muffin, but I couldn’t tell if he was saying yes or no.”

The image of Jane in her black combat boots and dirty red fingernails serving oatmeal to my father was more than I could stomach, especially without a cup of coffee. Yesterday Walter had gone out early and brought me back a large coffee from town before he left for the hospital. Frances no longer drank coffee because she said it made her “jumpy.”

Frances had moved to a bookcase beside the pantry. She began flipping through a cookbook. “I’m trying not to take it personally,” she went on lightly, “that
I
can’t get Jane to pick up a towel off the bathroom floor, but she’ll make
him
oatmeal.”

“So how does he seem this morning?” I resolved not to take it personally that no one had thought of coffee for me that morning. “Did he sleep okay?”

Cookbook in hand, Frances returned to her cabinet inventory. “Well, I think so. Walter says he thinks he did. I can’t understand anything he says.”

“It’s not that hard to understand him.”

Frances turned to me with a frown, as if I was being competitive.

“I can’t believe it,” she said, banging another cabinet door shut. “Walter
waltzes
off to work and now I have to go to the grocery store on the day before Thanksgiving, which will be a zoo, because he invited a horde of Egyptians for dinner, and
I’m
supposed to figure out how to feed them.”

A zoo. A horde. Frances always exaggerated in a disparaging way when she was secretly pleased about something. Walter and
the children were the
masses;
when I came for a visit, she told her friends that the house was
bursting with relatives.
In this way she created a whole world for herself, teeming with event, with just a few people.

“Oh Lord!” she cried, in mock exasperation.

“Do you want me to go?”

“Plus there’s the centerpiece to do. And I can’t find my tablecloth—”

“I don’t mind going.”

She stared down at the open cookbook she was holding. “I had everything so well
planned.
”

“Frances,” I said. “I’ll go.”

Frances looked up at me almost blindly. “Really? You wouldn’t mind? Because I’ve forgotten a couple other things, too. Are you sure?”

When I assured her that I was willing, she began naming all the things she needed from the store, including ornamental striped gourds for her Thanksgiving centerpiece. How quickly my plan of going to Hartford had become moot for everyone, I thought sourly. What’s a little lost research when a Thanksgiving centerpiece is at stake? Though truthfully, I didn’t mind going out. I could buy myself a large cup of coffee, and it would be good for me to get away from Frances for a while. A walk in town. A little fresh air. Maybe I’d even buy myself a pack of cigarettes to take outside and smoke behind Frances’s potting shed, just like when I was a teenager, sneaking cigarettes behind the field house at boarding school. The adolescent sight of Wen-Yi smoking in his car the other day had reawakened old cravings.