The Ghost at the Table: A Novel (26 page)

I’d been in this deliberately vague charged-up situation often enough to predict what would happen next: his stubbly cheek rasping against mine, the sour smell of alcohol on his breath as our mouths met, then his tongue probing, my neck craning back until it ached. That prediction was almost enough to make me stand up and say good night.

But Walter was still holding my left hand between both of his, looking at me intently. I glanced down at the back of his hand, which was broad and hairy; the nails were very clean. When I laid my right hand on top of his I could feel his bones under his skin. Gently, very gently, I began circling the base of his thumb with the pad of mine.

He made a small hissing noise between his teeth.

For a long moment the two of us sat there, staring at each other, until once more I began that gentle circling with my thumb. His palm moistened, arched. But as I leaned in toward him, Walter moaned and pulled his hands away.

“No,” he said.

Around us the living-room furniture emerged from the shadows to loom over us. My face was so hot that it felt scalded—it must have looked scalded. My hands were freezing. Ravening maw, I repeated to myself silently, with scornful detachment. You are a ravening maw. How could you be such a ravening maw?

Eventually I heard myself say, “I guess we got a little carried away tonight.”

“You’ve had a lot to drink,” he said hoarsely.

From far off in the woods, a high-pitched howling began.

“I think it might be better if I left tomorrow instead of Sunday.”

“You don’t have to go, Cynthia.”

“I think I should.”

“Frances won’t want you to.”

“I’ve had enough of what Frances wants.”

Two or three votive candles guttered on top of the organ, their saucers filling with wax. The howling continued.

“And if Frances
knew
—,” I began with a little laugh.

“Knew what?” he said shortly.

“What you and I—”

“Forget it. It wasn’t anything.”

“Frances wouldn’t forget it,” I said.

He gave me a flat look. “Nothing just happened, Cynthia. Do you understand? You are drunk.”

We sat surrounded by the dark shapes of Frances’s beautiful things. Then Walter’s beeper went off. He unhooked the beeper from his belt, glanced at it, then turned it facedown on the coffee table. Watching him, I recalled his apprehensive expression when his beeper had gone off in the car, and it came to me that I’d probably been fooled by Walter, too, dependable Walter, so solid and reliable in his blue Oxford shirt. That he might be as big a liar as Frances.

Those new trendy eyeglasses, the restlessness, the casual pressure of his hand on my arm, my shoulder, lingering a few moments longer than necessary. What had nearly happened just now on the sofa. He wouldn’t want calls on his home or office phone; his beeper number would be the best choice.

“So who are you sleeping with?” I asked. “One of your patients?”

Walter stared at me. Then he sighed and passed his hand over his face.

“Come on,” I said.

Evidently Walter had drunk too much that night as well. Or maybe he felt he owed me something, after rejecting me. Most likely he just had to confess to someone, the way guilty people always do.

Because finally, unwillingly, he looked at me over the top of his glasses and said: “It wasn’t a patient. And it was only once. Frances and I have never had problems that way, if that’s what you’re thinking.” He paused and glanced away, pushing his glasses back onto the bridge of his nose.

“But you cheated on her.”

He flinched. “It was a misjudgment I made,” he continued after a moment.

“That’s one way of putting it.”

“It wasn’t anything,” Walter said crossly. “It didn’t mean anything to me.”

“Just physical?”

He frowned. “Men and women are different.”

“That’s a cliché, Walter.”

“So what,” he said brutally.

Suddenly I felt so tired that I could hardly summon the energy to add, “And by the way, Frances
knows.
”

“No, she doesn’t.”

“I heard you two arguing the other night.”

“Oh, that.” He gave a dismissive shrug. “What you heard,” he said grimly, “is Frances being worried.”

“She
suspects
you, though. And it turns out she’s right.”

“She’s not right. There’s nothing to be right about.”

I considered this statement for a moment. “So you
don’t
want to sleep with Mary Ellen?”

Walter made an irritable gesture with his hand. “God no. I don’t know why Frances is so obsessed with that woman. Or why she insisted on inviting her tonight.” Now his face was screwed up in angry perplexity. “Who the hell knows what she wanted to prove.”

Then his face cleared. “Anyway, she knows I’d never leave her.”

“Why not?”

He looked at me sternly. “Because I wouldn’t. I’m married to Frances. People can act badly in a marriage and still want to stay married. That’s pretty elementary, Cynthia. I’m not excusing what I did, but I didn’t do it to hurt my marriage.”

Such a sap, I thought. Walter is a sap. Even in cheating, he’s a sap. Going out and sleeping with people who don’t matter to him, pretending Frances would understand.

“I love Frances,” he was saying.

“Of course you do,” I replied. “That’s why you lied to her.”

“People lie to each other all the time, for all sorts of reasons, some of them good. For godssake, Cynthia,” said Walter, losing his temper. “What do
you
know about it?”

“You’d be surprised at what I know. Especially what I know about Frances and lying.”

“Such as?” said Walter tensely. He must have been thinking of Wen-Yi. Men like Walter can’t imagine being betrayed by their wives except for a younger man.

“Did you know that my father was a card shark? A con artist?”

“What?” Walter looked bewildered.

“Nothing big. Before he met my mother and got into the insurance racket.”

“I don’t understand what you’re getting at.”

“He’s half Jewish, though he pretends to be such a WASP. I bet you didn’t know that, either.”

“Cynthia,” said Walter. “What are you telling me this stuff for?”

“Because you don’t know anything,” I said. “You don’t even know what you think you know. Frances hasn’t told you anything. She doesn’t think our father killed our mother. She thinks
she
did. And she thinks our father set her up to do it.”

“Why would she think that?” Walter looked horror-struck.

I stared back at him.

“You’re exhausted,” he told me. Shrewdness had come back into his eyes. “And you’ve had too much to drink.”

“So have you.”

A muscle jumped in his cheek. Even in such poor light, I could see that he was struggling to say the right thing, to climb out of the dangerous position he’d put himself in by sitting too close to me on the sofa, and breathing hard, then offering up his confession. Probably he’d never found himself in this sort of moral quicksand before, not even with his cheating, his one “misjudgment,” which to his mind was probably no worse than forgetting to defrost the turkey. But what could he say that wouldn’t sink him further? He must have been quite frightened.

“I’m sorry, Cynthia.”

“Not as sorry as you should be. She doesn’t care about you half as much as she cares about him.”

Walter stood up so abruptly that he bumped against the coffee table, hard enough that several of Jane’s jigsaw pieces fell onto the
carpet. For a moment he stared down at them, unable to decide whether to pick them up or leave them there.

“Worry about yourself,” he said unsteadily. “Frances will be fine. Frances
is
fine.”

Behind his heavy glasses his face looked elderly and querulous, as if I’d glimpsed Walter ten or fifteen years from now, at a time when he himself was no longer well.

“Frances has always been fine,” I said, gazing up at him.

But Walter wasn’t listening to me. “And for your information she doesn’t feel anything but sorry for your father. It’s been twenty-five
years.
She wants to get on with things. Stop trying to drag her back into things that don’t matter anymore.”

“Me? Dragging
her
back?”

“So the hell with you and what you think you know.”

How could we have gotten to this point? It was only a few days ago that Walter and I had sat in his car, discussing Frances like two comrades. A few minutes ago he was holding my hand by candlelight. I could not understand how I could be so unfairly accused of being stuck in the past, when clearly it was Frances who was stuck, when she was the one who had engineered our father’s arrival in her house, who had schemed to get our grandmother’s organ, who wouldn’t turn up the heat or allow for decent lighting. I hadn’t lied to anyone. I hadn’t cheated. How could I be to blame?

Because it was convenient. Because it was believable. Even I half believed that I was to blame for everything that had gone wrong, from Frances’s plans for a nice family Thanksgiving to Walter’s “misjudgment.”

Carefully I reminded myself that all I had done was to try to be of help, the lapses of this particular evening aside. I had come to Concord with every intention of being reasonable, of acting the way sisters were supposed to act when presented with the
ungovernable fact of a father who was old and sick and most likely about to die. If my visit had resulted in falseness and confusion, it was not entirely my fault; in fact, it was possible that it was not my fault at all. It was also possible that it did not matter who was at fault.

“I’ve heard enough,” Walter was saying. “I’m going to bed.”

“Walter, listen. It was Frances who—”

“I’ve heard
enough.
” He was already halfway across the living room.

But just then Walter stopped dead. Not to reconsider anything we’d said, but because both of us had become aware of a strange sound.

At first it sounded like a distant crumpling, like tin foil being uncrinkled and smoothed out, a low caustic rustling. For a disoriented moment I thought it might be a dog or a coyote that had somehow slipped into the house through the back door, drawn by the smell of turkey carcass, nosing in the garbage. But the sound was coming from the dining room. Part hiss, part crackle, part long ghostly sigh.

Then suddenly it resolved into a single voice, as if a guest had been forgotten and was still sitting at the table waiting to be served.

“She’s so out of it.”

Another voice answered, less distinctly.

Then the first came again: “I mean it, she is so totally
out
of it.”

More mutterings, followed by static. It was Sarah and Arlen, I realized. Though it took me another minute to figure out that they’d gone into Sarah’s room, where earlier that evening the Fareeds had set up their portable crib and the baby monitor. In their hurry to depart the Fareeds must have forgotten to take the baby monitor with them, and Sarah and Arlen’s voices were being transmitted from upstairs.

“She’s
always
been out of it. But now she’s like this—
freak.
” Sarah was perfectly audible now. “I mean, did you get a load of that dress?”

“She’s not a freak,” came Arlen’s light drawl. “She’s depressed.”

“Of course she’s depressed. Who isn’t depressed?”

“No, more than that. I talked to her.”

“You did—”

“We had a long chat.”

“Well, good for you.” Sarah sounded angry.

I pictured Arlen and Jane sitting together in the living room by the shelf of carved birds. It had probably made Sarah jealous, that cozy little scene. Sarah had always been possessive about her friends, never willing to include her sister or overlook Jane’s eccentricities, even though Sarah had had all the advantages. But there was nothing wrong with Jane that getting away from home, and out from under Sarah, wouldn’t cure.

“Cynthia,” Walter said, not moving.

“It’s just Sarah and Arlen,” I told him, raising my hand.

Arlen’s drawling voice had continued on, “Though if you ask me, I’d say it’s more than simple depression, I’d say she’s in some kind of arrested—”

A clarifying word or two was lost here in the static, then Arlen’s voice returned: “A
pre
tense at normalcy, but everything comes back to—”

“You think everything’s about people’s mothers,” interrupted Sarah.

“Well,
because
—”

More static.

So it was Frances, I realized, sitting back against the sofa cushions. Not Jane. It was Frances they were discussing; Frances who was depressed, whose life was arrested, who was out of it. Hadn’t
Walter told me the same thing in the car? No longer able to drive, spending days in her room. How had I missed how deeply disturbed she was? I thought of Frances’s story at the dinner table, about my father carving the Thanksgiving turkey. Arlen, the outside observer, had recognized that story for what it was, a pitiful attempt to polish the past. Frances must have gone over this incident again and again in her mind, trying to smooth every jagged edge, just as she’d done with our father and everything she recalled about him. But now here he was in her house, as unregenerate as ever, the fly in her amber. It all made sense. Arlen was very sharp. Nothing got by him.

“Let’s turn it off,” I said to Walter, who was still standing motionless in the middle of the room, staring at the dark doorway. He’d heard enough about Frances for one night. “Let’s not listen to them. They don’t know anything. They’re kids. We don’t need to hear what they think.”

But the voices had begun to crackle once more in the dining room, small and thin and persistent. “She’s
pathetic.
”

“She’s
fine,
” I told him.

“Cynthia.” Walter had turned finally and was staring now at me. “Just who do you think they’re talking about?”

It was long past midnight, though exactly what time it was, I didn’t know, having forgotten to put on my watch when I was getting dressed. Everyone else had gone to bed. Only I was still awake, wrapped in the shawl Wen-Yi had worn earlier, still sitting in the living room in the fading candlelight.