The Ghost at the Table: A Novel (17 page)

On either side of the bed, vaporizers whispered, sending up ghostly twists of steam. Only a small lamp by the chaise lounge had been left on. No sign of the bed tray; Frances must have carried it back down to the kitchen. A jumble of medications crowded the top of the nightstand, one empty vial lying on its side, next to one of Mrs. Jordan’s church pamphlets and a box of Kleenex, from which a wad of tissues had been pulled out and then dropped
on the floor. The pitcher of water that always sat by the bed was almost empty. A glass tumbler lay on the rug. Frances hadn’t bothered to refill the pitcher or pick up the glass. I felt a momentary satisfaction in being the one to notice these small derelictions and looked forward to mentioning them tomorrow to Mrs. Jordan, as further evidence of Frances’s carelessness and inconsiderate behavior.

“Good night, Mama.”

My mother didn’t answer, but she gave me an unblinking stare. Which was the way she often looked at people. Like a sad basilisk.

Her coughing, at least, had stopped for the moment. I could smell my father’s pipe smoke, which had traveled all the way up the stairs. I could also smell my mother. Urine, unwashed hair. And something else, a dank exhausted smell, not entirely masked by gardenia dusting powder. Moved by guilty repugnance, I went up to the side of her bed. But there was nothing I could do, except fix her pillows and try to push her back into place, then pick up the glass tumbler that was lying on the floor. Something was happening in this room that had been happening for a long time, something as obvious and inescapable as it was incomprehensible, something that should shock no one, and yet it had reduced me to an embarrassed bystander, an onlooker—not daughter, not child, but someone unrelated to the person in that bed, and utterly, utterly beside the point.

I leaned toward her and whispered, “Sleep well.”

At that moment my mother suddenly plunged forward like a jack-in-the-box and seized me by the wrist. It happened so fast and so unexpectedly that for an instant I couldn’t understand what had taken hold of me. A bracelet of pressure increased to a vise
around my wrist. Her thin fingers were surprisingly strong, taut as piano wires.

“
Mama,
” I cried.

For another instant, she retained her grip. Then she muttered something and collapsed back against the pillows. Although, curiously, she looked not so much exhausted as out of patience.

“Don’t watch” was what I thought I’d heard her say.

But later it would seem to me that I stood by her bed for hours, staring at a crust of dried spittle, like salt, at the corners of her mouth.

Eventually I took the pitcher into the bathroom to fill it with water, peering out of habit into the wastepaper basket, which was empty except for a white plastic cap. Back in the bedroom, I set the pitcher on the nightstand. Once again I fixed the pillows behind my mother’s shoulders, busily plumping them in the overbearing way of nurses in hospital movie scenes. I imagined her looking up at me with grateful eyes, thanking me for being such a loving child. I even took a Kleenex and dusted the nightstand. My mother was staring in my direction, yet she didn’t appear to be seeing me, or really anything in the room. She might have been gazing at the girl she used to be, that smart, self-conscious, long-chinned girl on Belknap Road, hunched on an Empire chair with a library book, or sweating in a wool cardigan and scratchy kneesocks, taking a forlorn walk around the neighborhood under the elm trees, watching the world melt and rush away from her.

I considered giving her a kiss on the forehead. But her hair was so dry. Her forehead was clammy. Her pale face looked like a face in a snapshot, one of those old brownish photographs left loose in the back of a family album, not good enough to fix on a page because the subject was captured in the act of turning away, her
expression indistinct, irreclaimable. Caught forever in a moment of not paying attention.

O
F COURSE
I
REALIZED
that something was wrong with my mother that night. I even realized that she might be dying. But since she had been dying, more or less, for years, and since I was angry about once again not figuring in anyone’s calculations, especially my mother’s, who looked as if she wished someone else had come into her room instead of me, Mrs. Jordan probably, I closed the bedroom door and went down the hall to my own room without calling down to my father, or to Frances. I read for a little while, then undressed, got into my nightgown, and climbed into bed.

Serves them all right, I remember thinking.

F
OR DAYS AFTER
my mother died Mrs. Jordan dragged herself about the house praying aloud, muttering and weeping, continuing to neglect her cleaning and vacuuming, so that the whole house retreated further and further behind a gray scrim of dust. “Loved that sweet lady,” she wailed from time to time, stretching out her thin, corded neck. She fixed her eyes on Frances or my father, who might be sitting at the kitchen table trying to have breakfast, my father eating eggs, toast, and bacon, Frances eating half a grapefruit, and leaving half of that.

“It was time for her to go,” said my father automatically.

“Loved her right to the end,” wept Mrs. Jordan.

By then we all knew that my father was in love, too, with Ilse.

This was discovered only a week or so after my mother’s funeral, after Helen had returned to Wellesley even though the college gave her permission to stay home and take her exams following the Christmas break. Since the end of September, it turned out, he and Ilse had been meeting in secret. He gave us all the
details, announcing lugubriously (a hand over his eyes) that he had something to “confess.” Hiking in the woods around Cromwell and Middletown, going to the movies in Storrs (buying tickets separately, standing separately in line, sitting in separate parts of the theater, then finding each other in the dark), having dinner at little country inns as far away as Litchfield.

Helen called my father to say that she would not be home for Christmas, that she intended to stay in Boston with her roommate’s family. She blamed herself for “not being there,” she told Frances, in a separate telephone conversation, to which I listened undetected from the upstairs extension; the next moment she declared she was never coming home again. But Frances and I had nowhere else to go. In a stunning display of callousness, or carelessness, or as a further “confession,” my father invited Ilse to move into our house as soon as he could get the master bedroom “ready.” In the meantime, she appeared nightly at our dinner table, blonde and bespectacled, and sat stolidly in her chair, eating everything on her plate.

At school, Frances and I began receiving curious, probing, not altogether sympathetic looks. Frances was more bothered by these looks than I was—in a perverse way, I found it vindicating to have people suspect that something beyond ordinary loss had happened to us. When my father announced on Christmas day that he was sending us both to boarding school, Frances seemed relieved. About our mother’s death, she claimed to feel nothing.

“R
EMEMBER HER THE WAY
she was when you were little,” my father advised me one cold December afternoon when he discovered me sitting in my mother’s room on the chaise lounge, staring out the window at the dark furled leaves of the rhododendrons.

But whenever I tried to picture my mother as she’d been when I was younger, I recalled unfair punishments and minor betrayals: how she had slapped Frances once for hitting me when I was actually crying about bumping my head on the underside of the dining-room table, and the way she used to tell me not to climb on her, that she was not a tree.

H
EART FAILURE, SAID
the coroner’s report. Though no autopsy was conducted. My mother’s heart had been weak for several years and it was not as common as it is now to get a second opinion on such things, even if the circumstances seemed slightly suspicious. Or maybe forensic science was simply less advanced back then. Except in truly nefarious cases, if someone died then she was dead, and that was pretty much all there was to it. I wouldn’t say death seemed more expected in those days, but it was somehow less surprising to people.

B
EFORE MY MOTHER DIED
, Mrs. Jordan took to scorching my father’s shirts with the iron, singeing toast, burning the fried chicken she made for dinner. If he objected, she would fold her short arms and give him an empty stare. Once she flashed her gold tooth.

“Not the only thing’s going to burn around here.”

The rancid soup, the empty medicine vial, the water glass on the floor. Not a reader of Nancy Drew mysteries and
Cherry Ames, Student Nurse
for nothing, it didn’t take me long to wonder whether my mother’s heart had failed on its own.

“It was a blessing,” Mrs. Jordan told me the night after my mother was buried in Cedar Hill cemetery, in the same plot near some mulberry trees where her own parents were buried under a
granite obelisk engraved
SEYMOUR
. In the summer the obelisk was covered with purple splotches, left by birds that ate the mulberries. We were sitting in Mrs. Jordan’s room, the room that used to be Frances’s, both of us on the canopy bed. The corners of Mrs. Jordan’s eyes were webbed with tiny red lines.

“It was what she wanted, praise the Lord.”

“What did she want?”

Mrs. Jordan leaned closer and took my hand, pressing it between her hard dry palms. She ate a clove of garlic every day, for health and digestion, and what she said next hit me with a raw blast: “Her release. She’d asked God to release her from her torment. And God heard.”

“She asked God?”

Mrs. Jordan nodded. Her face, usually remarkably furrowed and folded, like three baked potatoes pressed together, suddenly became smooth. The River of Life flowed through her, babbling with the voice of the God within.

“She asked and He heard. She asked for God’s help. We prayed on it together.”

I pictured those tasks Mrs. Jordan had so carefully arranged, so that my mother could think that she was “helping” by rinsing beans and drying lettuce, sorting the silverware by herself. I pictured the empty medicine vial by the bed.

I said: “I thought she didn’t believe in God.”

Mrs. Jordan didn’t answer but continued to gaze ecstatically at a pink wicker wastebasket with raffia butterflies in one corner of the room.

“Does my father know?” I asked, following her eyes, picturing now the white plastic cap in the bathroom’s wastebasket. “About God?”

I
N THE WEEK FOLLOWING
my mother’s death the singeing and the burning got worse. Frances complained about Mrs. Jordan’s staring at her. She complained that the laundry wasn’t getting done; there were bugs in her bed. When Mrs. Jordan started doing the laundry again, Frances claimed that Mrs. Jordan was using soap powder that gave her a rash. She claimed Mrs. Jordan purposely let the milk go sour; she let eggs go bad and then scrambled them for Frances. Mrs. Jordan, she insisted, was putting spiders in her pillowcase.

An uneasy conscience is a hair in the mouth.

“I
T’S TIME FOR HER
to
go,
” Frances told our father angrily one night, after I was supposed to be in bed. All that first week he had stayed home, though he was often on the phone. There were many details to be attended to. The master bedroom was being repainted a light leafy green, the mustard curtains replaced by bamboo shades. My mother’s clothes were being given away. He was ordering new furniture.

To Frances, he murmured that he would see what he could do.

“There’s nothing wrong with Mrs. Jordan,” I informed my father, the next morning. “There’s something wrong with Frances.”

Frances had stopped sleeping. At night she roamed around the house, turning on all the lights. Her teachers reported that she fell asleep at her desk. Her friends had stopped calling and dropping by. Her bike stayed parked in the garage. My father watched her all the time now, a deadpan look on his face.

T
WO WEEKS AFTER
my mother’s funeral, Mrs. Jordan left the house on Woodvale Road, taking with her only an old plaid cloth suitcase with a stubborn zipper, wearing a black raincoat and her shiny black straw Sunday hat, with the little net that came
down over her eyes. A taxi pulled into the driveway to transport Mrs. Jordan to the Hartford bus station. She planned to take a Greyhound bus to Greensboro, where she had a previously un-mentioned niece with “grandbabies.”

Before she went, Mrs. Jordan gave me a hug and said, “You be a good child.” She didn’t give Frances so much as a glance.

T
HE MORNING AFTER
Mrs. Jordan’s departure, I was halfway down the backstairs that led into the kitchen when I heard my father and Frances talking at breakfast. He was saying that Mrs. Jordan’s husband had been a wife-beater.

One night Mr. Jordan came home drunk, gave Mrs. Jordan a black eye, then passed out in their bed. Mrs. Jordan put on the kettle. She took all the dishcloths from the kitchen and used them to tie her sleeping husband to the bedposts. As soon as the water in the kettle boiled, she took the kettle off the stove, carried it into the bedroom and poured boiling water down the length of Mr. Jordan, starting with his feet. Then she called the police. The police took a look at Mr. Jordan, then at Mrs. Jordan’s black eye, and cited her for “disorderly conduct.”

A year and a half later, after months of suffering, Mr. Jordan died of cancer, an ordeal through which she nursed him faithfully.

The crook is in him and only waiting.

“Why did you hire her?” Frances sounded aghast.

“Your mother liked her. She said she was a poor soul who deserved a break and that a clear conscience wasn’t everything.”

“She tried to kill her
husband.
”

“She was protecting herself. Mrs. Jordan was a good woman,” my father added. “And she needed someone else to take care of. But your mother’s illness was too much for her, by the end. As even your mother seemed to realize.”

“She was cracked,” said Frances flatly.