The Ghost at the Table: A Novel (25 page)

We exchanged another look, expressionless on my part, imploring on hers. Drunk as I was, I understood perfectly well what Frances wanted from me, there in the living room with our father and her whole family listening: the tale of Mark Twain’s daughters and their pleasantly eventful childhood. She wanted what everyone wants—what even I wanted—a good story with a reasonable ending. But she’d gotten carried away, as she always did, with the decor. With the kittens and the cherubs and the Christmas letters. And so I was forced to brandish the sorrows of Mark Twain’s daughters to keep Frances from snatching them up, to save them from becoming bric-a-brac and bedposts.

“Wait,” interrupted Sarah. “What about the mother?”

“Wasn’t she there?” Jane chimed in. “While the girls were growing up?”

“She was there,” I said. “But I’m leaving her out. She was sick all the time and uncomplaining. Her part’s not that interesting. Anyway, then there was Clara, the middle one. She was the Survivor.”

I heard Walter make a restive noise and paused, having briefly lost track of which story I was telling. Everyone sat regarding me for several moments.

“What happened to Clara?” Sarah was asking, in a polite tone that suggested she’d had to repeat this question.

“Oh, she was fine.” I roused myself. “More or less. She got married. She found religion. Eventually she died. And that was the last of Mark Twain’s daughters.”

“But what about
her
daughter?” Jane stared down at the coffee table, playing with one of the scattered pieces of the jigsaw puzzle. “The one you told us about the other night. Isn’t there anything else about her?”

“Not really,” I said. “Drugs, depression. Life’s not worth living and no one cares about me. The usual. When you kill yourself, that’s pretty much it.”

“She killed herself?” said Arlen. “Wait, who’re we talking about?”

“Mark Twain’s
granddaughter.
” I frowned at him. “She overdosed. In a hotel off Sunset Boulevard. After spending time in a mental hospital. Pretty grabby stuff, huh? Nobody knows about her, either. Maybe she’ll be my next book.” I mimed holding up a book and reading the cover.
“The True Story of Mark Twain’s Granddaughter, an Insane Drug Addict
. Or:
No Matter How Sad Your Life Is, Hers Was Worse. Historical Fiction for Middle-Aged Girls
.”

Mary Ellen gave a little moan of dismay. The rest were silent. Outside the wind had picked up and was blowing against the windows, rattling the panes.

For my part I sat staring at the twisting patterns in Frances’s Persian carpet, wishing that I were back in San Francisco, sitting alone in my apartment with all the shades pulled down. It was clear to me that I was behaving badly and had been behaving badly, to varying degrees, all night, though no one had called me on it. But in the last ten minutes I’d crossed the line and now my behavior could no longer be ignored. I’d become obnoxious toward people who had only been trying to make conversation, who’d
shown an interest in my book because Frances had wanted them to be interested, for my sake, and hers. Because Frances had wanted an enjoyable holiday, spent among family and friends. And who could blame her? Except me.

When I glanced up again, the girls and Arlen were staring at the waning fire, which shot out blue sparks as a log broke in two. On one side of Frances, Wen-Yi gazed abstractedly at the tips of his black loafers. Walter had closed his eyes on the other side of her and leaned his head back against the sofa cushions.

Only Frances was staring at me and I’ll never forget the expression on her face that night, as if she’d just seen something cruel done to a child.

Then I thought I heard my father say, “I don’t get it.”

He was sitting more upright than he had all evening, his wheelchair pulled up near the sofa. His sparse white hair fluffed around his head, catching the lamplight behind him like a nimbus, leaving his face as dark as a mask.

“You don’t get it?” I turned toward him in despair. “
What
don’t you get? Why I’m writing this story?”

My father gazed steadily back at me.

“I’m not writing
this
story,” I told him, making a great effort at patience. “I’m just giving you the story behind the story I
am
writing. In my story, nothing bad happens to these girls at all. They live in a big fancy house with servants and lots of pets. Their parents love them. They put on funny plays and meet famous people and have wonderful Christmases. That’s
my
story.”

The room filled again with silence, which to my ears sounded as discordant as the organ music had a little while before. Then Sarah said quietly from her place on the floor, “Why do you want to do this kind of thing?”

“What kind of thing?”

“Tell stories like that about people.”

“I’m not telling stories.” The back of my throat ached. “I’m telling
a
story. I’m writing a book for girls.”

“I know—,” began Sarah.

My voice was starting to rise. “I can only write the story one way. There’s a formula we have to follow. I’m not Mark Twain, I’m not trying to be Mark Twain.”

“But what’s the
point,
” insisted Sarah, “of what you’re doing?”

“I thought points were for arguments,” murmured Jane by the coffee table.

“Everything’s got a point,” Arlen said, a little too wisely.

The heels of my hands were pressed so hard against the wooden seat of my chair that my thumbs hurt. “Fine,” I said, releasing my hands and focusing on the red haze of Arlen’s track suit. “You want a point? Okay. Here it is. The
point
is that Mark Twain’s daughters had every reason to expect better lives. They were good girls. They were good enough.”

I’d turned to face my father again, speaking slowly and carefully, the way Frances spoke to him, as if he were deaf.

“Everything started out right for them, but their mother got sick and their father couldn’t do anything about it. He tried, but he only made her worse. Then she died. He said he loved his daughters, he said he’d take care of them, but he didn’t. He was too selfish and irresponsible. He was a genius but he was also an idiot—he was like everybody else, only more so. And so what happened to them was even sadder and more pathetic than what happens to most people.”

The faces around me had started to blur.

“It’s a
joke,
” I said loudly, “what happened to Mark Twain’s
daughters. But no one wants to hear a bad joke, do they? No one wants an ugly sad story with a lousy ending. So you rewrite it. You redecorate. You make it a nice story. And then little girls will read it and feel that history is a nice place, full of nice families with nice sisters who loved each other. And even if their own lives aren’t so nice, they’ll believe everything will get nicer someday, because history always repeats itself. That’s the
point.
”

No one said anything. The candles wavered atop the organ, while another log broke up in the fire.

At last Walter stirred from his place on the sofa and gave an exasperated sigh.

“Okay then,” he said, clapping his hands together, then turning them inside out and stretching out his arms, “that’s it for me.” As if the credits had finally started to roll after an overlong movie, through which he’d sat dutifully. He dropped his arms and leaned forward, putting his hands on his knees. “It’s late. Don’t you agree, Frances? It’s getting late and our guests need to get on the road and the rest of us need to get to bed.

“Frances?” he repeated, standing up.

“Yes,” she said, not looking at him.

Everyone but me and my father stood up, too, and rubbed their eyes and straightened their clothing. Almost immediately there followed the general self-conscious bustle that always accompanies guests’ leave-taking, the business of finding coats and hats and remarking on the temperature outside,
Such an early winter, isn’t it a shame, I heard we’re in for another cold snap
, Jane wheeling my father into the hall so that he could say good-bye as well, and Mary Ellen not being able to thank Frances enough, and Frances saying she hoped Mary Ellen’s uncle felt better soon, then Wen-Yi saying his own stilted good-byes, while Sarah and Arlen wished him good luck with string theory and his doctoral dissertation,
Don’t get tied up in knots!
before coming back wordlessly into the living room to collect dessert plates and teacups, careful not to look at each other, and through it all I sat alone by the fire, which was now only embers, and tried to remember exactly what it was that I had just said.

Jane announced that she was going upstairs to watch television in her room. Sarah and Arlen were still in the kitchen, drying and stacking dishes, wiping counters, putting the last of the Fareeds’ pies into plastic containers. “Here I’ll get that,” they kept saying, seizing a dish towel or a plate, “I can do that.” When I offered to help they smiled obliquely and said not to bother, they would take care of it. Finally I sat down at the table and began drying Frances’s Blue Willow platters and serving dishes by hand, because Sarah and Arlen had not been thorough, and china, especially old china, should not be put away damp.

After Walter had wheeled my father off to get him ready for bed, Sarah told Frances that she should go to bed, too. “We’ll take care of everything,” she said. “We’re almost done.” If Sarah and Arlen were ignoring me, they were treating Frances as some sort of invalid, taking plates out of her hands, refusing to let her help wash the wineglasses.

“Go to bed, Mom,” Sarah repeated. “You’re worn out.”

“Well, I am tired,” she agreed reluctantly. “All right. Thank you, dear. You’ve been such a help.” She leaned toward Sarah to give her a kiss.

“And why don’t you sleep late tomorrow.” Sarah stepped back, hugging a large oval aluminum tray in front of her. “There’s no reason to get up. We can take care of our own breakfast. Stay in bed.”

Frances froze and looked at Sarah and the aluminum tray. Then suddenly she did seem exhausted. “I guess I will then. That’s very thoughtful of you, Sarah.”

Without acknowledging me, she turned and left the kitchen. A moment later we heard her go slowly up the stairs. Sarah and Arlen went back to moving around the kitchen, rinsing a few last cups and setting the roasting pan to soak in the sink. I continued to dry those fine old dishes by hand with a soft cloth, as Frances herself would have done, losing myself for a few minutes in a calm blue intricacy of pagodas and bridges and curving willow trees.

“Can I make you some tea, Aunt Cynnie?” asked Sarah. I shook my head, then watched as she and Arlen prepared cups of chamo-mile tea for each other, giggling slyly over some reference to dorm life that I didn’t understand. At last, yawning and stretching, they told me good night, said they hoped I’d sleep well, and went upstairs to watch television with Jane.

After they left I returned to the living room, intending to turn off all the lamps and blow out the candles before going up to bed. But it was so quiet in there, after the earlier tumult of guests and conversation, so restfully quiet, that after switching off the lamps I left the candles burning and settled onto the sofa. I poured myself a little of what was left in the sticky bottle of Calvados, still sitting on the coffee table amid Jane’s unfinished jigsaw puzzle. Outside,
the wind had picked up, racketing around the north side of the house, making the windowpanes rattle.

I’d been sitting there for perhaps a quarter of an hour when I heard Walter walking around downstairs, turning off lamps. He came into the living room and paused, noting the candles and my presence on the sofa. He came a few steps farther, then stopped by the fireplace and picked up the tongs to poke at the smoldering logs, at last coaxing a flame out of the embers. The sofa cushions sagged under his weight as he sat down beside me.

“Hi,” he said.

When I didn’t answer, he reached under his glasses to rub the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger, closing his eyes for a moment. At last he smiled and leaned back, twisting his face toward mine.

“An okay Thanksgiving, I thought.”

“Yes.”

“It turned out all right.”

“All things considered.”

“Do we have to consider all things?” he asked quietly.

I reached out to brush away a fragment of piecrust that had fallen onto the sofa cushion between us. “I suppose not,” I said. “The turkey was good,” I added, “even though it was toxic.”

That’s when he took my hand between both of his.

It was so welcome to feel the warmth of Walter’s hands around mine. I was so grateful that I almost wept. Grateful, too, for his kindness in sitting in the living room with me, though it was late and he must have been tired. I had done an unforgivable thing. I had tried to ruin Frances’s Thanksgiving. And yet Walter seemed to understand that I was not myself in this house. Also that my mistakes were probably punishment enough and that what I needed most at the moment was not reproach but simply company.

For a while longer we sat together on Frances’s sofa, neither of us speaking. Outside the wind roared. Once more the fire died down to embers. And as we huddled in that cold room, listening to the wind and watching the fire, I began, idly at first, to imagine Walter’s laying the palm of his hand against my cheek.

The pads of his fingertips would be slightly chapped, the dry hands of a doctor, who washed his hands often. I imagined his fingers lightly stroking my cheek.

Hush
, he would whisper.

Again and again I pictured this: his hand rising to cup my face, his voice gently urging me to hush.

Until finally, somewhere in the middle of this small fantasy, I realized that Walter was no longer watching the fire, but was instead looking at me, and had been looking at me for some time. When at last I glanced up and met his eyes, I was not entirely surprised to see that the expression on his face did not say
hush
at all. Instead it was an expression I knew well enough—too well, perhaps—a look of attention rapidly deepening into consideration, which is less focused than attention, but hungrier.

The candles on top of the organ had burned low, lighting the room with the murky glow of an old Dutch painting. Walter’s breathing had become shallow. Confusion dulled his big face as he gazed back at me; I suppose I looked enough like Frances in that indefinite light, and enough not like Frances in my red dress, to allow him to obscure what was going on in his mind. My own mind had grown suddenly clear and sharp, even as my arms and legs had gone heavy, and my heart began to run fast with the thin peculiar triumph that comes to me in moments like these, an exultancy wavering between arousal and disgust. But of course I wanted him to want me. It would be warm and comforting, and also vindicating, to be desired by Walter, decent upstanding
Walter, to have him groan and pull me against his chest and run his hands through my hair, and say that he couldn’t help himself. As his hands dampened around mine, I thought of his shirts hanging on the back of the study door. His black socks balled on the desk.