The Ghost at the Table: A Novel (22 page)

“I usually go to her place every year, but my uncle’s been sick. My aunt’s arthritis is acting up, too. I offered to come down and do the turkey, but she said she just didn’t have the energy for it. I hope this isn’t too much trouble, having me to dinner.”

Frances smiled from beside the mourner’s bench, piled now with coats and hats, then graciously assured Mary Ellen that of course it was no trouble and said how wonderful it was that she could come, thanking her twice for the Calvados, which would go so well with the pie. Though Frances’s back was to me, I could see her face reflected in the cloudy old mirror. Two hectic spots of color had appeared on her cheeks.

“It’s
wonderful
that you could come,” she repeated, reaching for Mary Ellen’s hand. “Have you two met? Mary Ellen, this is my sister, Cynthia. The famous writer. Visiting from California.”

“Cynthia.
Hi.
” Mary Ellen’s face crumpled with enthusiasm. “I’ve heard so much about you. Your sister talks about you all the time.”

“Oh no,” I said before turning to say hello to the Fareeds.

Kamal, the young husband, was tall and slightly overbearing, with a big imperious nose and thick shiny black hair combed back off his forehead. His wife had a small apologetic face, gently rounded, with large soft brown eyes. She wore a green headscarf, a loose amber-colored silk blouse, black pants and neat little black fleece-lined snow boots, which she removed and set in the corner by the door, then replaced with stylish black pumps she pulled out of a plastic grocery bag. They both spoke perfect English, almost accentless in Kamal’s case. But they’d arrived overloaded with baggage—a cloth bouncy seat with a bar of brightly colored plastic toys, a portable crib in a rectangular carry case, a baby monitor,
a swollen quilted diaper bag (“How long are they staying?” I heard Jane whisper to Sarah and Arlen)—and also more pies, homemade, with perfectly crimped crusts. Two pumpkins and an apple.

“Who needs turkey with so much pie?” Walter said too loudly, toasting the pies with his beer bottle, red-faced above his blue Oxford shirt.

Eventually everyone was persuaded to move into the living room, where Wen-Yi and my father were sitting in heavy silence. My father peered up at the new arrivals truculently, one of his eyelids half closed. Frances excused herself to check on the turkey. The rest of us perched on the two sofas and chairs, trying to look interested in Jane’s jigsaw puzzle, while Walter took drink orders, then followed Frances into the kitchen. I sat next to Wen-Yi. The puzzle was of Rousseau’s
Sleeping Gypsy,
always so mysterious, with that huge lion pacing either hungrily or protectively behind the prone figure of the gypsy, who looks almost fatuously unconscious. Jane had already fit together most of the pieces around the edges. She and Wen-Yi were working together; every so often he proffered a piece between his long fingers that would prove to be just the one she was looking for. The Fareeds’ baby, whose name I didn’t quite catch (Ahmad?), was also a welcome diversion. Though the baby appeared to be perfectly comfortable asleep in his car seat, Kamal insisted that he be taken out and exhibited in his yellow pajamas, before he was put to bed in his portable crib. Kamal and Amina carried the crib upstairs, led by Jane, to assemble in Sarah’s room, while Sarah sat on the edge of the sofa holding the baby, her face tensing with responsibility when he drooled onto her shoulder.

“So,” I said to Mary Ellen, who looked disappointed not to be the one holding the baby. “You work with Frances?”

“Oh, I’m just her assistant.” She turned gratefully to me. “I’m not a designer. Not yet, anyway.”

“But is that what you’d like to do? Be a designer?”

“I’d love to be like Frances. She’s a genius at what she does.” Mary Ellen leaned toward me, smiling. “And she’s not wild about going out and spending people’s money, either, like some of these decorators. I really respect that. Half the time she just uses what’s already there, just changes things around so it all looks better. Like this upholstery?” Mary Ellen patted the carmine and cream floral cushion she was sitting on. “Well, it’s just inside out on the other sofa. Frances had bought all this fabric, but then she decided she didn’t want both sofas to match, so rather than buying a bunch of new fabric she reversed what she had for one of them. Isn’t that smart?”

I agreed that it was.

“She always says that when things match up too well they don’t appeal to the eye. It’s contrast that appeals to the eye. Isn’t that interesting? Being an interior decorator has a lot to do with understanding human nature,” she went on. “It’s a lot more than just knowing better than other people what things should look like.”

“Are you planning to start your own business?” I asked, hoping to get off the subject of Frances.

“Right now I’m not really into making plans,” she said, stroking the sofa cushion. “My mom died not too long ago. So right now I’m just kind of living for the moment.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Well, thanks,” said Mary Ellen. “She’d been sick for a long time.” She seemed on the brink of saying more when Walter reappeared with a tray of wineglasses, trailed by Kamal, who’d come back with Jane for the baby.

“Sarah’s decided to be premed,” Walter was telling Kamal.

Jane sat down with Arlen beside a shelf of carved wooden birds, leaving Wen-Yi to work on the puzzle alone.

“Hey, good for
you.
” Mary Ellen turned to Sarah. “That’s so great.”

“Thanks,” said Sarah briefly.

“Are you a doctor?” Mary Ellen asked Wen-Yi.

Wen-Yi stared back at her, elbows tucked into his sides, still wrapped in the plaid shawl. Taking pity on him, I explained to Mary Ellen that he was getting his PhD in mathematics at Tufts.

“Topology,” he offered finally.

“Top what?” Mary Ellen smiled encouragingly.

“String theory.” He pulled off the shawl and began explaining string theory to Mary Ellen and Sarah. Which left me with no one to talk to but my father, sitting silent and shrunken in his wheelchair, one clawlike hand drawn up against his chest.

“That’s such a neat old piano,” I heard Mary Ellen say next.

Jane and Arlen were having an earnest conversation in a corner, their foreheads inclined toward each other. “Actually, it’s a player organ,” Sarah said, watching them.

“Does anybody here play it?”

“No one has so far,” I said. “Want to give it a try?”

“
Oh
no.” Mary Ellen lifted the palms of her hands in mock distress. “I’m no musician.”

“You don’t have to be,” I reminded her. “You can make it play by itself, or you can play it like a regular organ. Either one.”

“Oh.” She straightened up, looking a little flushed. “Well, maybe I should get one for my aunt with arthritis. My aunt loves piano music.”

Frances came in at that moment. “I haven’t had a chance to
show you, Mary Ellen,” she said gaily, the pearl gray panels of her dress drifting behind her. “It came just last week. Our last remaining family heirloom,
snatched
from the abyss. It used to belong to Mark Twain.”

“It did?” said Arlen, looking up from his conversation with Jane. “For real?”

“Well, that was the
story.
” Frances smiled. “Anyway, the organ gave Cynthia the idea for her book, the one she’s working on now. Isn’t that right, Cynnie?”

“Not that I know of.”

Mary Ellen laughed awkwardly. “Well, that’s really neat,” she announced, “I mean, however you got the idea,” turning her pale eyes on me as Frances excused herself once more to go back to the kitchen.

I smiled back at her, ashamed for being rude to Frances, who after all was just making small talk, though that remark about the abyss had been ill chosen, given that our father was sitting right there. But I resented being turned into one of Frances’s pieces, with a charming story attached.

Mary Ellen began asking questions about my books and the subject of family heirlooms was dropped.

“Gosh,” she exclaimed eventually, “I’m just so impressed. I mean, it must be such hard work, coming up with all those ideas.”

“Probably no harder than anyone else’s work.”

“Hey, don’t sell yourself short.” Mary Ellen reached out to give my arm a little shake. “What you’re doing is really amazing.”

Frances was crazy, I decided, to think Walter could be interested in Mary Ellen. She was the sort of woman about whom married friends sighed and said, “Poor Mary Ellen, I just don’t understand
what
the problem is.” But they understood perfectly well what the problem was. Mary Ellen gave the fatal impression of Making
the Best of Things, with her seed pearls and her turquoise outfit, her plucky efforts at carrying on conversations with uncooperative people. She was a Good Sport, who Lived for the Moment. Few things are more off-putting than the sight of someone reduced to such a hand-to-mouth existence.

When Kamal and Amina returned from settling their baby, followed by Walter carrying a bottle of wine, I got up to see if I could help Frances. Who was herself a good sport, of course. The ultimate good sport, who could take bad luck and reverse it, the way she’d transformed our rotten old father, hunched like a bat in his wheelchair, grumpily waving away a glass of wine, into a bit of decorator’s gold: a nice old man by the fire on Thanksgiving.

A bottle of cabernet and two bottles of Sancerre were opened on the table, with two more cabernets breathing on the sideboard. By the time we sat down at the table we’d already gone through several bottles of wine and it was almost six o’clock. The dining-room windows, left uncurtained, were black.

“House rules: No talking about politics at dinner,” announced Frances, the last to pull out a chair. She wagged her finger in comic admonishment at Walter and Sarah. “We don’t want indigestion on Thanksgiving.”

Everyone laughed good-humoredly as Walter and Sarah picked up their napkins and pretended to wave them in surrender.

“To our kind host and hostess.” Kamal rose as Frances settled into her chair. “To Walter and Frances. Thank you for including us at your fine table.” He regarded them both solemnly, as if being included at a table decorated with gourds and pinecones were a grave initiation. “Many blessings.”

Crystal glittered as everyone raised their glasses; even Jane had a glass.

“To all,” echoed Amina.

“To all,” we said.

“To having dinner at all,” said Walter.

“Amen,” said Arlen.

“What a cute table,” said Mary Ellen.

We all smiled at each other, every face bathed in the friendly, emotional glow of candlelight. In addition to the white tapers in the six silver candlesticks, Jane had collected all the candles in the house, tea lights and votives and five or six thick white pillar candles, placing them along the windowsills and the oak sideboard, even balancing one between the wooden prongs of an antique rake on the wall. She’d found glass holders for the tea lights and votives; the white pillar candles she put on china saucers.

“Lovely,” agreed Amina.

Only Frances looked slightly dissatisfied. She had worked out a careful seating arrangement while everyone else was in the living room and she and I were hurrying back and forth through the kitchen’s swinging door, lighting candles, opening wine bottles, setting out the food in her Blue Willow serving dishes. But in the end, she’d left the kitchen too late to oversee who went where. The Fareeds were sitting together instead of being split up. Mary Ellen was to have been seated between my father and Jane, but now the girls were sitting with Arlen at the end of the table and Mary Ellen had wound up between Kamal and Walter, who was pouring her a glass of Sancerre. Frances and I were next to each other, with Wen-Yi on the other side of me.

“Would you like some wine, Wen-Yi?” I asked, leaning toward him.

“No thank you,” he said gruffly.

“Not a drinker?”

“No,” he said.

“How about some butter? Or are you more of a margarine man?”

He turned to give me a baffled look.

From the wall, the Common Ancestor watched with her elephant’s eyes, surveying the gingered carrots and the brussels sprouts, the dish of cranberry sauce, the two kinds of stuffing, mashed potatoes, baskets of bread, two silver gravy boats, and the rice pilaf, of course, in an overlarge bowl. The turkey, bronzed and glistening, had emerged from its plastic shroud and now rested majestically on a platter in front of Walter. We all took a moment to admire it, before Walter, standing officially at the head of the table, took a bone-handled carving knife from its velvet-lined wooden box and began to carve. Silver and china gleamed in the candlelight as, one by one, we passed our plates up to him and he served us slices of turkey, asking us whether we wanted light or dark meat. Then everyone started to talk at once and the room filled with the lively, optimistic sound of polite laughter and the clink of silverware.

Glancing up from the table, I tried to imagine how this scene would look to anyone passing by outside—the long white table laden with food, the candles, the lit faces of so many people—although no one would be passing outside, except maybe a coyote. How sad, I thought, already a little drunk, to be a coyote in Concord.

From her end of the table, Sarah was confessing to Amina that she was afraid of babies. Amina laughed, her hand splayed on her chest, admitting that before she had one herself, she too had been afraid of babies. (And why not be afraid of babies? I wondered,
holding the mashed potatoes for Sarah. Little time bombs, ticking with futures no one could predict. Who, for instance, could have foretold that baby Emily Dickinson, red-faced and squalling, spitting up her supper of mashed egg, would become the world’s most reclusive poet? Or that adorable blonde little Helen Keller would get scarlet fever before she was two years old and wake up one day deaf and blind—
or
that this catastrophe would be the making of her? How could anyone bear so much uncertainty? And yet I couldn’t stop watching Amina’s soft face across the table and the way she dropped her eyes as she talked about her baby, like someone trying to be casual when mentioning a lover.)