The Ghost at the Table: A Novel (2 page)

This conversation took place about six months before Frances’s phone call. To celebrate my new book, Don had taken me to lunch near the office at a little Mexican restaurant with a yellow tiled floor and sticky wooden tables decorated with hammered brass studs.

“Sounds pretty Freudian to me,” he said, picking apart a crab-meat salad. “Mark Twain’s organ. I don’t know.”

“Well, that part was made up,” I admitted. “Mark Twain did have a player organ, but it was a different brand. My father was never one to let facts stand in the way of a good story.”

“How parental.”

Don was in a bad mood; he and his partner had been fighting again, this time over renovations to their house in the Berkeley Hills. But these lunches were a rare-enough occasion that I felt I needed to take my chances. Mark Twain’s daughters had had a “unique” historical viewpoint, I argued (they’d met both Ulysses S. Grant and Uncle Remus, for example), which shouldn’t be overlooked.

“Well, they can’t all have the same viewpoint.” Don put down his fork and looked around for our waiter.

“I’ll choose one of them,” I said, wishing I had Carita’s easy, sarcastic way with him. “She can tell the story. There’s always one person in a family who’s got everyone else’s number.”

I didn’t mention that I’d already chosen the youngest girl, Jean Clemens, to be my narrator, probably because Don would have objected as soon as I explained more about her. Little Jean. The “difficult” one. Twain’s least favorite. Little Jean suffered from epilepsy and was given to violent rages. Photographs showed a stolid, suspicious-faced child, with a bulky forehead and an exacting gaze. As a young woman she once tried to kill the family housekeeper, although naturally I couldn’t put information like that in my book. (Helen Keller also tried to kill the infant Mildred, by tossing her out of her cradle and knocking her head against the floor.) But I liked to collect unsavory facts about my subjects; I related better to them that way, especially as their journals and letters often insisted on one thing (“Had a gay luncheon today with the family,
everyone home at last!”) but hinted at another (“I felt rather tired afterward and went for a walk by myself”). Usually it was loneliness that was hinted at, and of course loneliness is where a person is most easily understood.

Don folded his hands and gazed into his ruined salad. His heavy-lidded eyes and long oval face often gave the impression that he was languid and inattentive; in the last year he’d shaved his head, increasing his look of impassivity, which he sometimes used to his advantage, like an alligator that only appears to be asleep in the sun. I’d frequently wondered what he noticed about me while seeming not to notice anything.

“Were they
fond
of dear daddy?” he asked finally, opening his eyes a fraction. “Those charming little daughters?”

I said I was sure they were. He was Mark Twain, after all. “They also lived next door to Harriet Beecher Stowe,” I pointed out, “so some of my research on them could apply to a next book about her—”

Don frowned at me absently.

“And people
love
Mark Twain,” I continued, twisting my napkin. “Think of that documentary on public television. Father of American literature. Mark Twain daily calendars. Mark Twain T-shirts. Mark Twain dolls.”

For several years Don had been trying to get a toy company interested in manufacturing and marketing Sisters of History dolls, so far without luck. But a
trio
of sister dolls, I suggested now, Mark Twain’s daughters, in delightful Gilded Age dress, packaged with an equally delightful book about them, might finally prove irresistable. And wasn’t I his most dependable writer, conscientious about correct spelling, punctuation, and grammar, as well as my historical details? By the time the check arrived, he’d agreed to let me do what I wanted.

“Just don’t get distracted by Daddy.” He signed the check, then looked up and raised one eyebrow at me, smiling his alligator smile. “He’s gotten enough attention.”

“S
O ARE YOU COMING
?” Frances asked when she called again the next day.

It was one of those damp gray October afternoons when I had nothing planned for the evening. Fog pressed against the dusty windows of my apartment; the sour, flannelly smell of cooking beans had floated up through the heating vents from my landlady’s kitchen below. As I listened to Frances’s voice on the phone, I imagined her standing by her kitchen window, arranging apples in a bowl and looking out at the crispness of a New England fall. Sharp blue skies, geese flying overhead, the breeze filled with the scent of pine needles and woodsmoke. If the sun had been shining in San Francisco that afternoon, who knows whether I might have answered differently.

“All right,” I said. “But on one condition.”

“Anything. What?”

“That we don’t get into a lot of old stuff.”

“Of course not,” said Frances, and I’ll never forget how elated she sounded. “This is a holiday. I want it to be nice for everybody.”

I had forgotten that airline passengers could no longer be met at the gate, so I was briefly disheartened when I looked for Frances as I got off the plane at Logan and didn’t see her. But riding the escalator down to baggage claim, I spotted Walter’s thick gray hair and big, important-looking head near the luggage carousels. He was wearing a pair of rectangular, dark-framed glasses, a much trendier style than I’d have expected on him. Otherwise he looked tired and pale in his wrinkled Burberry trench coat and impatient at being somewhere other than the hospital in the middle of the day. When our eyes met, he seemed relieved to see me.

“Frances asked me to pick you up,” he said, as I stepped off the escalator. He stooped to give me a kiss on the cheek.

“How nice of you,” I said, trying to hide my disappointment.

As soon as he’d grabbed my bags, Walter plunged off toward the parking garage, while I trotted self-consciously behind, hurrying to keep up with him. Once we were heading out of the airport
in his car, he noted that he was glad I could make it and that my visit would cheer Frances up. She had been feeling very low lately. Morose. Apprehensive. Sometimes she had trouble getting out of bed in the morning; he’d come home at night to find her still in her bathrobe. Couldn’t get errands done or manage to make dinner. Canceled appointments with clients for no reason, except that she was tired, or thought she might be getting the flu, or she forgot a date she’d made with friends, then was afraid to call to apologize in case they weren’t speaking to her. Sometimes she spent the whole day in her bedroom.

“Maybe it’s Sarah being gone,” he said testily. “That empty-nest thing.”

“But Jane’s still at home,” I said.

“Frances and Jane aren’t getting along.” Walter stared out at the road as a sleety rain began spattering the windshield. “Especially this week. Frances has been all jazzed up.”

“Jazzed up?” I was having trouble figuring out my role in this conversation. In the twenty-some years they’ve been married, Walter had never spoken to me about Frances.

He gave me a meaningful look under his thick eyebrows. “Acting like Thanksgiving is some kind of official state ceremony.”

“Well.” I relaxed slightly. “You know how Frances loves an occasion.”

Walter grunted. “Prepare yourself.”

“Thank God no one has a birthday this weekend,” I added, daringly, and we both laughed. I settled back in my seat, feeling comfortably dazed from the flight. Walter had put on a CD as we left the airport; now a meditative piano took over from a melancholy sax.

“Ever since your father’s stroke,” he began to say, “actually ever
since Helen—” But then his beeper went off and he fumbled to unclip it from his belt.

I had forgotten about my father. It occurred to me that he might even now be at Frances’s house, on a furlough from the nursing home, and that in a few minutes I would have to greet him.

Walter glanced at his beeper, then pushed it back onto his belt, muttering, “She can wait.” When I looked at him inquiringly, he said, “A crazy patient.”

“Really crazy?”

“Crazy enough.”

I nodded sympathetically, though I wanted to ask, “Crazy enough to do what?” Instead I said, “So how’s the home, by the way?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Dad’s nursing home. How’s it working out?”

“He’s not there yet.”

“What?”

“Frances didn’t tell you?” Walter glanced sideways at me. “You and she are driving down to the Cape tomorrow to get him.”

“Driving to the Cape?” I stared at him. “To his
house
?”

“The nursing home was supposed to have an opening before now, but I guess whoever was supposed to die didn’t.” Walter gave a glum little laugh. “Anyway, the plan is for you two to take him.”

“But Frances didn’t say anything to me—”

“Frances has been forgetting everything lately. She probably thinks she told you all about it.”

“But she didn’t.”

“I can see that.”

We stopped talking for several minutes as I gazed out at the trees alongside the highway. Maples and oaks, the trees of New
England. I always miss them when I’m in California, but whenever I come east the sight of them makes me feel claustrophobic, especially when they’re gray and skeletal, as they were that afternoon. New England trees grow too closely together, and there’s too much underbrush. Every Sunday when I was a child, my father used to herd us off on long damp hikes through the woods and old overgrown orchards of West Hartford, insisting on leaving the trail, crossing streams on slippery stepping-stones, bushwhacking through briars and blackberry bushes. Joking about Hansel and Gretel, asking if we had our bread crumbs handy.

I took a deep breath and turned back to Walter. “I’m sorry, but I can’t drive to the Cape.” My voice was calm, reasonable, the voice of a businesswoman with a full schedule who’s promised to spend time with her demanding relatives but must be firm about limits. “I’ve made plans to go to Hartford tomorrow, to do some research. I came out here early especially to do that.”

“Can’t you go another day?”

“I’ll rent a car to go to Hartford. Frances can drive down to get him.”

“Frances has almost stopped driving.” Walter kept his eyes on me. “She’s afraid of getting into a car accident. She says she’s having problems with her inner ear, that her balance is off, and she has dizzy spells and needs to get her thyroid tested, but it’s all bullshit. She’s depressed and she won’t admit it.”

Walter rarely used profanity. The air inside the car suddenly became charged and tense, but he continued talking, his voice growing hoarse. “It’s been worst for Jane. Every time the poor kid walks in the door, Frances finds some reason to leave the room. She says it’s because Jane blames her for everything and she can’t stand it.”

“But isn’t that sort of normal?” I was trying to attend to what he
was saying about Jane while also trying to understand how Frances could have neglected to tell me that I was going to spend two hours in the car with my father, driving him to a nursing home.

Walter gave a consenting groan. “It’s been pretty much hell at home. Lucky for Sarah she’s at college.”

Although this was another worry, because Sarah was in New York. In October, Frances had read a magazine article about a potential terrorist plot to derail the presidential election by bombing major East Coast universities. From then on, she’d called Sarah two, three, four times a day, just to make sure she was all right, until Sarah stopped answering her cell phone.

“And you can imagine what
that
did to Frances.” Walter jutted his chin at the road. Sarah hadn’t been home once all fall, he told me, and had only agreed to come for Thanksgiving if she could bring a friend. “For protection,” he added.

I sat up in my seat. Walter had always sided with Frances when she and the girls had differences, at least publicly. They’d had their problems over the years, of course, but in the way that mature, successful married people were supposed to have problems: as something to “work through” so that they could be even more satisfied with their lives than before, at least until their next set of problems. But the problems Walter was describing didn’t sound like regular problems. With something like panic, I thought of my quiet apartment on Dolores Street with its pale blue walls and narrow view of the East Bay, and of the cheerful Thanksgiving I would be missing at Carita’s apartment, mariachi music on the stereo, those chili lights glowing, her little dog barking as people came in and out.

Tomorrow I would go to Hartford, as planned. Walter could drive Frances to Cape Cod to pick up our father.

We passed a humped, sandy landfill, then a sign for Walden
Pond. Rain was falling harder now, streaking my window. Walter’s beeper sounded again; this time he turned it off without checking the message. Somewhere the woman who had paged Walter was waiting for his call, perhaps sitting anxiously beside the phone, clutching a slip of paper in her hand. A horn section came on the CD.

“She also thinks I want to have an affair,” he said abruptly.

I tried not to look shocked. Frances had warned me they were going through a rough time, but I’d never expected Walter to confide something so personal to me, just as I’d never expected him to complain about Frances, or that their rough time could involve an affair.

“Well,
do
you?” I turned in my seat to face him.

Walter flinched. “No. But Frances won’t listen to me.”

When I asked why Frances thought he wanted to have an affair, he sighed, finally loosening his grip on the wheel as we stopped at a traffic light. “Because she’s afraid I’ll have an affair. And these days she goes right from being afraid that something will happen to believing it’s already happening.”

“Could she
want
you to have an affair?”

But this thought was too capricious for Walter and he glared at the road, once more gripping the wheel. When the light changed, I asked more carefully, “Why is she
afraid
that you’ll have an affair?”

He shrugged and said he didn’t know.

“There must be some reason.”