The Ghost at the Table: A Novel (16 page)

“Hello,” Ilse would call out, before anyone else had a chance.

It was also around then that Mrs. Jordan had begun calling my mother “the Mistress,” in a deliberate tone, though she had never done so before, and despite repeated efforts by my father to discourage her.

“Who do you think you work for,” he’d say jokingly, “Emily Post?” But soon this new formality got on his nerves. After breakfast one morning, he followed Mrs. Jordan into the kitchen and said in a challenging voice, “So if she’s the Mistress does that
make me the Master?” Mrs. Jordan stared at him impassively, then scraped leftover eggs and toast into the garbage pail.

Every morning she massaged “the Mistress,” tending to her stiff arms and legs, rubbing them with an oil made from juniper berries that was supposed to stimulate circulation. “The Mistress is lying down,” she would inform Frances, whenever Frances banged into the house after school. “So you be quiet.”

“I’m not making any noise,” said Frances, dropping her books on the floor, rattling plates, breaking a glass.

B
Y
H
ALLOWEEN, MY MOTHER
suddenly could no longer see well enough to read, not even large-print books, and reading had long been her great consolation. Since I felt the same way about reading myself, I volunteered to read aloud to her when I got home from school. For our debut selection, I studied my bookshelf, rejecting anything that looked depressing, and finally chose
Cherry Ames, Student Nurse
over my nearly complete collection of Nancy Drew mysteries. I was a great fan of Nancy Drew, mostly because of her boyfriend, Ned Nickerson, with whom I was secretly in love. Ned had a fresh outdoorsy crewcut manliness entirely missing from the pimple-faced ninth-grade boys at West Hartford Country Day who were so eager to put their hands up my shirt. My father might have once been something like Ned Nickerson, I thought, if he’d been less hot-tempered and more law-abiding. But my mother didn’t like mysteries, so in the evenings I read about the medical challenges surmounted by Cherry Ames in her white apron and blue-striped dress while my mother ate a few green grapes or sipped broth from a cup.

“Nothing like a good book for company,” Mrs. Jordan often commented afterward, washing dishes at the sink. Or maybe she said “the Good Book.” In Mrs. Jordan’s view, lack of prayer was
the chief reason for my mother’s decline. This was the opinion she offered to me, anyway. Of course by then my mother’s illness, though incurable and degenerative, had become an almost reasonable state of affairs, or at least accepted, as anything will if it continues for long enough. One night I overheard my father telling someone on the telephone that my mother could “go” at any moment. Although, he added, lowering his voice, she could just as likely linger on for years.

A
NOTHER RELAPSE
. This one happened at the beginning of November, and it was worse than all the relapses before. Once again, my mother lay in bed all day, sometimes breathing in fishlike gasps. She’d caught a bad cold and a cough, which threatened to turn into pneumonia. A thick fug of menthol and steam from two vaporizers filled her room, part of Mrs. Jordan’s attempts to ease my mother’s breathing. Mrs. Jordan’s tall black wig was now often askew; she was up and down the stairs all day, carrying liniments and oils, rubs and salves, syrups and pills, cups of chicken broth. The rest of her housework went largely neglected and when my father wasn’t home we had cold cereal for dinner. She hardly noticed me. Even when I asked her to sit with me in the kitchen while I did my homework, she was on her feet after a few minutes, remembering something she’d forgotten to do for my mother.

To no one in particular, she declared that she would not let the Mistress suffer.

Helen came home for a weekend and had to be forced to go back to college; my father literally pushed her into the car to drive her to the bus station. Frances claimed that my mother’s loud breathing was driving her crazy, that the smell of menthol was driving her crazy. She insisted on trading bedrooms with Mrs. Jordan, who was happy to move to the room next door to my mother’s. I
began waking in the night, hearing my mother calling out for Mrs. Jordan. Her voice was rough and demanding, weirdly mannish.
Please!
she sometimes shouted. Even when I pulled my pillow over my head, I could hear her. But then abruptly she would stop shouting, which was almost worse, because then I lay in bed waiting for her to start up again.

A few times when I got up to go to the bathroom I passed my mother’s door and each time there was the shadowy figure of Mrs. Jordan in her pink flannel nightgown, standing by the bed. Once my mother was lying across Mrs. Jordan’s lap. Mrs. Jordan was crooning to her, stroking her lank hair. Someone had pushed the curtains back for once, perhaps to open a window briefly and let in some fresh air. Moonlight illuminated my mother’s long pale arms, hanging limply over Mrs. Jordan’s dark legs, the one woman so big and pale and ungainly, the other so small and dark. In the glimpse I had of my mother’s white face, her open mouth was almost square.

F
RANCES TOOK UP
residence in the basement, spending hours locked in the bathroom with the torn yellow shower curtain. She was failing math. She was probably failing English, history, and social studies as well. She’d been kicked off the field hockey team because she kept fainting during games (the school thought it was drugs; I knew it was celery) and because her grades were so poor.

Where was my father for most of this time? At his office, at a meeting, out with clients. Off fishing, out hunting. Sometimes he slept at his office, claiming that my mother’s coughing kept him awake, too. The next evening he would return home distracted, either hugging me too hard or forgetting to say hello, mawkish one moment, irritable the next. I was used to these uneven displays
from him, which generally signaled “a busy time at work,” and did not pay much attention. But for the first time that I could recall, there were no Sunday morning nature hikes, no twilight walks with Frances around the neighborhood. No discussions, either, about their special bond.

O
NE NIGHT JUST BEFORE
Thanksgiving, when Mrs. Jordan was out at her weekly prayer meeting—at that point, one of the few times she would agree to leave the house—my father asked Frances in a quiet voice if she would take a bowl of soup upstairs to my mother. Frances was sitting in the living room, playing solitaire instead of writing a term paper on the Salem witch trials.

My father said, “She hasn’t eaten anything since lunch.”

Frances laid out another card.

“How long are you going to keep me waiting?” he asked.

Frances looked at him then, a long, steady look.

A rare thing, I remember thinking that night, to have my father at home for an entire evening, turning the pages of a bird guide on the sofa, smoking his pipe. He seemed to be making a deliberate effort to sit there with us, forcing himself not to leap up and find an excuse to drive off in the car for a quart of milk, which he might come back without, or the evening paper, which he would then forget to read. He’d even taken off his shoes. Outside it was snowing—a sleety, nasty snow. It felt almost cozy to have him there in the living room in his stocking feet, puffing on his pipe, his legs crossed, one foot gently bobbing. He had not criticized me at dinner when I ate a second slice of key lime pie for dessert. He smiled when I announced that I’d finished all my homework, unlike Frances, who hadn’t even started hers. To impress him, I’d taken
Walden
from the bookshelf and sat down with it on the other
end of the sofa, though I’m sure my father had never read
Walden
himself; it must have been my mother’s book. I didn’t understand what I was reading and kept skipping around, although I lingered over the line, “It is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes.”

Frances laid out another card, then another.

“Frances.”

“I’ll do it,” I offered. “I went up to check on her earlier,” I told him obsequiously. “She seemed okay.”

“Frances can do it,” said my father.

He watched her as she left the room. He watched her all the time lately, whenever he was home. He seemed to have something on his mind to tell her, but he hadn’t said anything out of the ordinary, except to make her drink a glass of milk at dinner and to demand to know why she wasn’t doing her homework. He’d been going through her school things, finding penciled comments from her teachers:
Please come talk to me about this paper. It seems that you gave up before you even got started …

If I caused him any concern, he didn’t show it.

Frances trailed into the kitchen, swishing her ponytail. My father hadn’t been past the doorway of my mother’s room in weeks, ever since she started that cough. If my mother got any worse she’d have to go to the hospital, and she was terrified of hospitals. “Whatever happens,” she used to tell my father, “don’t let me end up in the Plague Plaza.” Or the Morgue Marriott. Or La Casa des Corpses. In the old days, she’d had a cheerfully sardonic sense of humor, not unlike his own.

Mrs. Jordan had told him to stay out of the master bedroom. “You are too excited, Mr. Fiske,” she said. He could never sit still during his visits, but paced around the bedroom, accidentally knocking over books and medicine bottles, swearing at himself,
forgetting to leave his pipe downstairs, filling the room with fragrant noxious blue smoke. So instead of visiting, in the last few weeks he’d taken to writing her notes on three-by-five-inch file cards. Notes about the weather, how we were doing in school, what was for dinner. Notes that were supposed to be light and newsy, though often he couldn’t stop himself from mentioning small worries. (
Frances is neglecting her homework … A boy came by asking for Cynthia I didn’t like the look of …
)

Touchingly, and rather surprisingly, given his usual irreverence, he would sometimes add an inspirational saying at the bottom of the file card, sayings you might find on a daily calendar, like the one Frances had given him last Christmas.
Tomorrow Is Another Day. Patience Is the Art of Hoping.
My mother always looked pleased to get one of his notes on her tray. It was perhaps the central confusion of my childhood, my mother’s abiding love for my father. An attachment that in his own way he encouraged, which she must have taken for love in return, and perhaps it was. There had been many women in his life during their marriage—even as a child I knew that—and yet there had never been any one woman but her.

Mrs. Jordan would read my father’s note aloud, in the same furry contralto she used to read
Cherry Ames, Student Nurse
after I lost interest; then my mother would hold the file card for a few minutes. Often I examined these notes before the tray was taken upstairs. Several times when my father had written a note to my mother but neglected to add an inspirational saying, I tried scribbling one myself at the bottom of the card. But the only sayings I could ever recall were Mark Twain’s maxims, impressed upon me during those enforced Sunday hikes through the woods.

I am only human, although I regret it.

It didn’t occur to me until recently how those maxims must have sounded to my mother:

You can straighten a worm, but the crook is in him and only waiting.

An uneasy conscience is a hair in the mouth.

Be good & you will be lonesome
.

Up they went, to her dark bedroom, to be trumpeted by Mrs. Jordan, who read like a person hard of hearing, and did not notice the different handwriting at the bottom of those three-by-five-inch cards.

What must my mother have thought, lying in bed, listening to what she could have only assumed were declarations made to her by my father? Even if she recognized Mark Twain’s maxims—and she may not have, since she didn’t care for Mark Twain—they would have been easy to misinterpret. She must have known something about Ilse by then, who’d been in and out of our house for months. Did she think he was finally telling her that he’d waited long enough? That it was time for her to fade out so that he could marry someone else? I don’t know and never will. My mother and I were not close enough for confidences, though she might have tried to talk to Helen, or possibly even to Frances. But Helen was away, and Frances avoided her room like the Plague Plaza.

However no notes had gone up on the dinner tray in the last few days. My father had been away until just that evening on a business trip. Coincidentally, during those same few days Ilse had stopped showing up to coach Frances in math and to drive us around in the VW Beetle.

On the back cover of her green social studies notebook, Frances had written in crabbed letters:
I wish she would die so that he would stay home.

When I stepped into the kitchen to get a glass of water, I found
Frances setting the white wooden bed tray with folding legs, as we’d seen Mrs. Jordan do so often: a shallow china bowl, a spoon, paper towels, a plastic bib. She took a pot of soup out of the refrigerator. Just a little broth left in the pot, no more than a cup. My mother would never tolerate canned soup; she claimed she could taste the tin can. Usually Mrs. Jordan took pains to make a fresh pot of soup every other day, since chicken broth was now about the only thing my mother would eat. But Mrs. Jordan, overburdened with so many extra demands, was becoming forgetful.

Frances wrinkled her nose, commenting that the broth had an “off” odor. Should she throw it out, find something else? But there wasn’t anything else, not that my mother could eat. So she heated what remained of the broth on the stove, while I went back to the living room and to Thoreau’s chapter on solitude.

At around ten o’clock, my father told me to go up to bed. Frances had long since disappeared into the basement. On my way to the bathroom to brush my teeth, I stopped to look into my mother’s room and found her awake, propped up in bed by three or four pillows to help her breathe. A couple of the pillows had slipped down, pitching her awkwardly to the side and too far forward. The sight of her large bony frame half toppled over was alarming enough that I stepped all the way into the room.