The Ghost at the Table: A Novel (20 page)

“He strikes me as a little …” But then instead of saying what I expected to hear, Frances said, “Nosy.”

“Oh come on,” Walter said, “he’s just being friendly.”

“I don’t know what Sarah’s told him. But while you were arguing about George Bush he came into the kitchen and kept asking how I felt about having Dad here.”

“Well, he did say he wants to major in psychology.”

“Why,” said Frances, her voice beginning to spiral, “
why
do you never take anything I say seriously? I just said I thought Sarah didn’t look well and you dismissed me without even considering what I’d said.”

“Oh come on. I did not
dismiss
you. But for godssake, Frances, you’re always worried about something. If I took every single one of your worries seriously—”

This was unwise on Walter’s part, to go on the offensive. He was not by nature a bully, and whenever it came to arguing with Frances and the girls he was something of an innocent, blundering into ambushes he should have anticipated. Like most men who rarely question themselves, Walter didn’t understand how to be evasive, either.

“Oh really?” demanded Frances. “Just how often do you bother to wonder
what
I’m worried about?”

“Frances, calm down.”

“Don’t tell me to calm down.”

I wondered if I should try to intervene, pretend I was wandering into the kitchen for a glass of water. But I recalled that I’d told Frances I was going to bed early while she and Walter were helping my father get settled for the night. Afterward I’d changed my mind and decided to sit in the living room without anyone’s realizing I was there. It would look like I’d been purposely eavesdropping.

“Don’t do this,” Walter said.

“Do what? What am I doing?”

“I don’t know,” he said heavily. “Confusing things.”

“Confusing?”

“Imposing things. Making things happen that weren’t supposed to.”

Frances was silent for a moment. Then I heard her say, “Like what? What am I
imposing,
Walter?”

Another pause, this time while Walter figured out what to say next. Finally he said: “This is about your father, isn’t it?”

“I
knew
that’s what you’d say.” Frances sounded icily victorious. “You and Cynthia. The two of you. You’re in league.”

“Frances, ever since you asked me if he could live here—”

I sat up on the sofa, my heart thumping painfully.

“I
told
you, there wasn’t room for him at the nursing home—”

“I mean before, when he first had his stroke. When you asked back then, and I said no.” Walter paused again. He seemed to be struggling to figure out not just how to explain himself but how to understand what he was explaining. Finally, with an air of starting over, he said, “Ever since he had his stroke, it’s like you’ve been hoping—”

“Hoping what?” said Frances, when he didn’t go on. “What, Walter? Can’t you even
say
what’s on your mind?”

“All right. Why’d you insist on inviting her to Thanksgiving?”

“She’s alone. No one should be alone on Thanksgiving.”

“What about friends—”

“She doesn’t have any. Not that I ever hear about, anyway.”

“But you knew it would complicate—”

“It’s not
her
fault,” she interrupted. “I’m not blaming
her.
”

Walter made an exasperated noise. “But can’t you see what you’re doing? Pushing people together like this? Have you even considered that you could be wrong?”

A long pause, during which I felt light-headed and slightly sick. Who were they talking about, me or Frances’s assistant? And was that what Frances had wanted all along? To have Dad live with her?

Whatever they said next was obscured by the loud beating of my heart, but then I heard Walter say, “It’s all the same thing. Maybe you
want
me to have an affair. That’s what Cynthia thinks.”

“That’s disgusting,” Frances said coldly.

But she must have finally realized that she could be heard all over the house, because after that she dropped her voice, and a few minutes later I heard both of them go upstairs, leaving me alone in the living room.

Walter was the one on the sofa the next morning when I came downstairs a little after seven. I hadn’t slept much the night before and he didn’t look as if he had, either.

“Morning,” he said thickly, reaching for his glasses.

Then he pretended to me that he’d caught Frances’s cough—he even coughed, once or twice, to prove it—and said he had slept in the living room to avoid waking everyone else. He looked cold and stiff and almost elderly, struggling to sit up on the sofa, wrapped in an old green plaid flannel bathrobe with his gray hair sticking up.

“Well, happy Thanksgiving,” I told him, trying to sound light-hearted, as if Walter’s sleeping on the sofa was just the beginning of a harum-scarum day full of unpredictable demands and concessions.

Together we went into the kitchen, where I folded back the shutters and turned up the heat. While Walter went out in his
slippers to look for the paper in a drift of snow, I made coffee for both of us, using the ground coffee and the plastic filter that I’d bought for myself in town the day before. I even found proper mugs at the back of a cabinet. Outside it was again snowing lightly. Snow weighed down the topmost branches of a big Douglas fir by the shed, dislodging in powdery drifts when a crow lifted up from a branch and flapped into the ash-colored sky. A soft blue-gray light shone in through the windows and despite my sleepless night, and my uneasiness about last night’s argument between Walter and Frances, I experienced one of those miraculous reversals that can accompany daylight. So what that Frances had wanted my father to come live with her? She felt sorry for him. She was a generous person, even if her generosity was sometimes inconvenient. As for her suspicions about Walter and her assistant, they were clearly unfounded. She’d reached middle age; she was rattled by having a daughter go off to college; her business wasn’t what it had been; she was feeling left behind. There was nothing to worry about when it came to Frances and Walter. They’d survived too much over the years to be hurt by a silly argument, any more than Walter and Sarah had wounded each other by arguing over politics at dinner. I sat holding my coffee mug, warmed by my own reasoning, appreciating the simple quiet of the old house and the snow falling outside the windows.

Eventually we could hear my father stirring in the big bedroom off the kitchen. Walter went in to help him get out of bed, which my father could not do easily on his own, and into the bathroom. I made more coffee and put on some toast while they shaved and dressed together, Walter shaving my father. Then Walter wheeled him into the kitchen and while everyone else slept on into the morning, the three of us sat drinking coffee and reading the paper
and looking out the window at the snow. Until Frances suddenly appeared, tense and wraithlike in a pair of gray sweatpants and one of Walter’s white button-down shirts.

“Walter,” she demanded, without greeting any of us. “Where is the turkey?”

“The turkey?”

“I asked you yesterday to take out the turkey. Where did you put it?”

“You didn’t ask me to take out the turkey.”

“Yes, I did. Yesterday morning.”

“Frances—,” he began.

“Oh my God,” she said, raising her hands melodramatically. “Don’t tell me the turkey is still in the basement freezer.”

Here it was, almost ten o’clock on Thanksgiving morning, with eleven people expecting to sit down to dinner at four thirty that afternoon. Frances kept repeating these particulars as Walter carried the turkey up from the basement and dropped it with a stony thunk on the kitchen table. Twenty-seven pounds of solid ice.

“Would it fit in the microwave?” I wondered.

Frances was holding the base of her throat.

Walter glanced at her irritably. “We’ll buy another turkey.”

“All the stores are closed.”

My father said nothing but sat in his wheelchair peering around with an expression of unfathomable satisfaction, while the rest of us stared at the frozen turkey, whose gelid condition seemed to have lowered the temperature in the kitchen by ten degrees.

Arlen ambled into the kitchen, again wearing the red track suit. He said good morning, yawned and patted his mouth, then looked with interest at the table.

“Frozen bird? That happened to my mom once.”

“Really.” Frances tried to smile. “What did she do?”

“Put it in the bathtub.” He gave a gravelly laugh.

“The
bathtub
?”

“Then I used a hair dryer on it.”

“Is that why you’re a vegetarian?” I asked.

“That’s why he’s a psychology major,” said Walter, not looking at Frances.

“Heh-heh,” laughed Arlen, fingering his downy moustache.

Frances was the only one who didn’t look amused. “Well, did it work?”

H
ALF AN HOUR LATER
, I was kneeling on the cold blue ceramic tiles of Frances’s bathroom floor, submerging the turkey in the Jacuzzi. According to Arlen, there was some danger that the skin would soften faster than the rest of the bird and depart from its corpus. Gentle massage, he said, was key.

I turned on the Jacuzzi jets and the steaming water began to bubble like an enormous cauldron. Even so, my hands ached from trying to hang on to the cold turkey, which kept slipping away from me and clunking to the bottom of the tub. Arlen had elected to keep me company in the bathroom. He supplied the information about massage, plus the word
corpus,
surprisingly without reproach, especially for someone who did not even eat eggs. I was reminded of Mrs. Jordan, who had also been a vegetarian, though she was in no other way, except the most obvious, anything like Arlen. Mrs. Jordan had often prepared meat for us without comment, expertly frying hamburgers and broiling steak, but never got over her habit of asking us how we would like our “flesh” cooked.

In the kitchen, Walter was calling all the grocery stores in the area. My father had been left to the ministrations of Jane, who was making oatmeal again for his breakfast, while Sarah and Frances
got to work on the rest of dinner. Arlen lowered himself down beside me on the tiles.

“Your hands must be freezing,” he said. “Let me help.”

While we took turns floating the turkey back and forth between us, Arlen told me that he had asthma and that being a vegan was the only thing that had helped. His mother was a dietician. His stepfather was a security guard at an oil refinery. Arlen himself intended to get a PhD in clinical psychology, then go home to West Texas.

“Therapist to the oil wives,” he said, giving the turkey a push. “That’s my plan. They have the worst problems.”

“And why is that?”

“Well, for starters, all that guilt over their money and big houses, and being skinny and beautiful? People thinking they have no right to get depressed? It’s got to be terrible.”

I must have looked genuinely taken aback because he smiled and said, “I’m just fooling with you. I want to work with kids.”

He would make a wonderful therapist, I assured him, if he could get a frozen turkey to soften up, which made Arlen laugh. He laughed easily, I noticed, and often, with a throaty appreciative chuckle. No wonder somber Sarah liked him. Though there was something a little too canny about his eyes, a kind of prudent watchfulness, which I figured had to do with spending his formative years being a gay black boy with asthma in West Texas. I began to enjoy kneeling in the big steamy bathroom, the two of us passing the turkey back and forth, guiding it under the frothing water. After a while I found myself telling Arlen about the Sisters of History, and about San Francisco—which he said he dreamed of visiting—and about the fog, and my neighborhood on the edge of Noe Valley, and Carita and Don. It was such a relief to talk about my life in San Francisco, and Arlen seemed so
interested, that I went into more detail than I’d intended, especially when I began describing my research on Mark Twain’s daughters. I hit all the high points: Susy’s early death, Clara’s neurotic ailments, Little Jean and her uncontrollable rages. How as Jean got older, and her epilepsy got more severe, she grew convinced that her father didn’t love her, that no one really loved her. She became obsessed by the thought that she would never marry or have children. As a result, she was excessively devoted to animals. Though in my book, I added, Jean was just “quirky.” A kind of nineteenth-century Harriet the Spy, who snoops and listens in on family conversations, and knows everything about everyone, without being quite able to put it all together. Back and forth floated the turkey, blanched and puckered and prehistoric-looking, like something chipped out of a glacier.

“Wow,” said Arlen, sitting back on his heels. “That’s some family you got there.”

Jane appeared in the doorway, sent by Frances to check on our progress.

“Gross,” she remarked, gazing down at the turkey in the Jacuzzi.

“It’s in a transitional phase,” I told her.

“Yeah, right.” Jane rolled her eyes. “From bad to worse.” Then she said, “By the way, Ilse just called.”

“Ilse.” I stared. “What did
she
want?”

Jane shrugged. “Sarah talked to her. I think she was just checking on Granddad.”

“My father’s wife,” I explained to Arlen. “Who didn’t bother to tell him that he was supposed to be going to a nursing home. How did she know he was here, anyway?” I said to Jane.

She shrugged again.

“Well, that’s strange,” I said, when Jane had left. I pictured
Ilse’s drawn face, her pale straggling topknot, the curt way she’d muttered, “He never cared so much for me.” Why would she call to check on him? To make sure we weren’t sending him back?

But thinking about Ilse, especially while kneeling on a cold bathroom floor, was a sure way to bring on a headache, so I asked Arlen what we had been talking about before Jane interrupted and he reminded me that we’d been discussing Mark Twain.

“I read
Huckleberry Finn
in high school,” he said disapprovingly. “I thought it was racist.”

“You have to read it in context,” I told him. “People often make the mistake of judging Twain by contemporary standards.”