The Ghost at the Table: A Novel (27 page)

Outside the wind was still battering at the dark windows, tearing at the ivy and blowing down the chimney with a hollow sound. It hadn’t been coyotes howling earlier, just the wind as that cold front blew in from Canada. I could feel the barometer dropping.

The fire had gone out long ago and Frances’s furniture had settled deeply into the gloom. Only the white pillar candles still burned, the color of moonlight on top of the organ around the Spode vase. Burning lower and lower in their saucers, their wax walls thinning and curling inward, but still burning.

And then wax began to overflow the saucers.

I didn’t notice at first. Dripping candle wax doesn’t make a
noise, like dripping water, and I had closed my eyes for a few minutes. But gradually an acrid smell drifted toward me from across the room. When I opened my eyes I saw a thin white stream run down the mahogany side of the organ cabinet. Then another, and another. Like little burst dams, the candles on top of the organ gave way, one by one, releasing spills of hot wax down the front of the cabinet now, then onto the carved fretwork, onto the scrolls and garlands, the stop knobs and finally onto the keyboard, seeping between the celluloid keys. Silently I waited to see what would happen next, amazed by all this quiet damage that I had done nothing to cause, while white wax continued to spill unctuously onto the organ.

Then a twig fell sideways from Frances’s arrangement of dried grasses. Just a twig. The bottom half of the twig stayed lodged in the vase, but the tip of it fell into one of the candle flames, a tiny flame, which had burned so low it had turned blue.

It took only another few moments for the vase of dried grasses and cattails to catch fire, almost as if it had been put there for that purpose, an enormous wick set atop the enormous candle of my grandmother’s organ. Soon a warm busy glow lit the room, a homely glow, not particularly menacing, even as the flames shot higher.

I wish I could deny that I sat and watched this small conflagration take place. Watched calmly, almost greedily, and with something more than fascination. But that would be a lie. Nestled on the sofa in my sister’s lovely living room, wrapped in her lovely shawl, drunk on her lovely bottle of Calvados, and with gladness in my heart, I watched her only bona fide family heirloom catch fire and took the time to note that the living room did not have a smoke detector fastened onto the ceiling. Nor did the front hall, for that matter. Smoke detectors, like television sets, don’t go well
with antiques, and both had been banished from the lower regions of Frances’s house.

I am only human, although I regret it.

Even so I couldn’t have remained on that sofa for longer than a few minutes. Before the flames had a chance to catch at the curtains or the carpet, or even to scorch one of the lampshades, I had scrambled to my feet.

My first thought was to douse the fire with water—not having any water at hand, I seized the bottle of Calvados and unwisely emptied what was left in it onto the organ. This of course made the fire blaze higher. Next I tore off the shawl and tried to smother the flames with it—somewhat more effective, though I knocked over the vase, which broke into pieces and sent burning grasses scattering onto the Persian carpet. I slapped at the grasses with the shawl, until the shawl, too, caught fire. Then I ran to the kitchen, threw the shawl into the sink, which was full of soaking pans, found the fire extinguisher beside the refrigerator, and ran with it back to the living room to spray onto the organ.

After that it took only a few moments to put out the flames, which had not actually grown very big. Nor was the damage very serious, once I’d turned on a lamp to see by: a brown scorch mark had seared onto the ceiling, the Spode vase was broken into several pieces, a palm-sized hole was burnt into the carpet.

The organ itself was a smoking mess—beyond all hope of reclaiming—but the rest of the living room was spared. And at last my head cleared enough that I could look around and evaluate exactly what had happened, or rather what I had done, by not doing anything.

Walter was the first one downstairs on Friday morning. When he saw the charred organ in the living room, the scorch marks on the ceiling, the broken vase, I thought for a moment he was going to call the police. Then I thought he was going to put me in the car and take me straight to the airport.

I hadn’t gone to bed that night at all. I’d stayed up airing the living room and putting to right what I could. When Walter arrived downstairs, I was on my hands and knees in my velvet dress, picking bits of burnt grass out of the carpet.

“What is this?” he said faintly, stumbling as he stepped into the living room. He tightened the cord on his bathrobe. “What happened here?”

I explained that I had fallen asleep on the sofa and that when I awoke the room was in flames.

“Why didn’t you call any of us?”

I didn’t answer. Walter had just started to say something else,
less faintly, when Frances came creeping downstairs in her long blue flannel nightgown.

Her hands flew to either side of her face. “Oh my God, Cynnie,” she cried. “Are you all right?”

I’d expected tears and recriminations, once she’d seen her spoiled living room, but Frances had only sympathy for me and what I’d gone through.

“How
awful
for you,” she kept saying, hardly glancing at the room.

I went off to wash my hands in the bathroom. The sight of my face in the mirror gave me a start. Red-eyed as a banshee, hair wild, my cheeks and forehead streaked with soot. No wonder Frances had looked so concerned. As I came out of the bathroom a few minutes later I heard her and Walter talking in the front hall.

“I can’t
believe
you, Walter,” Frances was saying, making no effort to keep her voice down. “What’s wrong with you? She saved the house from burning to the ground.”

“All I’m saying—,” Walter began, but then Sarah and Arlen came downstairs, and everything had to be explained to them.

They were not as sympathetic as Frances.

“So it was the candles?” Sarah asked me, her eyes narrow, her serious young face still pink and puffy with sleep. “You passed out and the candles overflowed, and then one of them caught the organ on fire? And you didn’t bother to tell anyone?”

Arlen leaned against a doorjamb, watching me as he stroked his downy little black moustache.

Frances spent the rest of the morning making calls to house painters and restoration specialists, while I sat with her in the kitchen. I should have gone to bed, but I was afraid that I wouldn’t
be able to sleep. I was also afraid of leaving Frances alone to listen to what the others might tell her.

After her first shock when viewing the damage to her living room, Frances declared that it wasn’t much, after all. She could have the room professionally steam-cleaned in a day and the ceiling repainted. The organ looked unsalvageable to me, but Frances claimed that she’d seen a lot worse. A man she knew in Reading specialized in reconditioning antique musical instruments, even ones that had been through floods and fires. I could not understand how she could be taking the injuries to her living room so calmly—Frances, who was normally unhinged by dirty plates left in the sink. The carpet, too, she concluded, could be neatly repaired, the coffee table repositioned to cover the damaged spot, though it would be expensive to match such old wool. But when I offered to pay for everything Frances wouldn’t hear of it.

“I can’t stand to think what would have happened if you hadn’t woken up. No, it’s
my
fault,” she said, “for not making sure all those candles were put out.”

Jane, too, seemed to think I was some sort of a hero. “And the whole time the rest of us were
asleep
.” She looked at me with admiration.

As for my father, when he was wheeled into the kitchen for breakfast and treated by Frances to the story of my brave night, he didn’t make any comment at all, just kept staring at me, a little blankly, the way you do with someone you can’t quite place, but whom you know you’ve seen before.

T
HAT WAS
F
RIDAY
. Sarah and Arlen left on Saturday morning, a little before nine. Originally they had planned to stay in Concord until Sunday, but on Friday afternoon they announced
that they needed to get back to New York for a rally they’d forgotten they had promised some friends they’d attend. I didn’t believe them, and I could tell Frances didn’t, either, but she made only a token protest (“You just
got
here”), barely seconded by Walter. Sarah would be back in three weeks for Christmas. And I wasn’t the only one who’d suffered under the scrutiny of Sarah and Arlen.

Walter drove them to the train station Saturday morning, and then went on to the hospital for his scheduled rounds. Otherwise he might have gone to Hartford with us. He did not seem keen on our trip to see the Mark Twain House and on Friday evening had tried several times to dissuade Frances from going, first suggesting that I go by myself, then, when Frances declared that she wanted to go with me, pointing out that my father could not be left alone for the entire day.

“He’s coming with us,” announced Frances.

I’d lost all interest in visiting Hartford myself and said as much to Frances. I explained that I could use photographs of the Mark Twain House to get the furniture right and what I remembered of Hartford to fill in the flora and fauna and the street names. I even mentioned an historical novelist I know who never bothers with period detail in his novels but simply begins the first chapter with “London 1865,” or “Vienna 1703,” and the reader imagines the rest.

It was Frances who insisted.

“You flew all the way out here for this,” she told me in the kitchen. “I’m going to make sure you get what you came for.”

“The traffic on 84 is going to be terrible.” Walter was resting both hands on the back of a chair. “It’s Thanksgiving weekend. All those people going back to New York.”

Frances made a careless gesture with her hands.

“And they’re calling for more snow.”

“Walter, stop it. I’m sure we’ll be fine.”

“What about Jane?” His voice hardened. “Go if you want, but there’s no way I’m letting you take Jane.”

I thought it was all over then. Walter had finally made himself clear. But, pale and quiet in her black wool sweater and faded denim pants, Frances only stared back at him. “Fine,” she said at last, setting her jaw. “If you’re that worried about the weather, Walter, Jane can go into Cambridge with you. I’m sure she’d love to spend the day poking around Harvard Square.”

He turned from Frances to look at me. I cannot describe the expression on his face because I could not stand to look at him. “If you’re driving, Cynthia,” he said, in a low, even voice, “I’m warning you, you’d better be careful.”

T
HOUGH
F
RIDAY HAD
been overcast, and Walter kept predicting more bad weather, Saturday proved to be a clear bright day, one of those late fall mornings when the sky is the impossible blue of a child’s balloon, expanding behind scribbles of bare tree branches.

It was just after eleven. I was once again driving Frances’s van. She sat beside me in the passenger seat, in her high-collared black cashmere coat, my father in the backseat. Concord appeared deserted, the streets of the village almost empty of cars, the stores still closed. Clapboard houses shone in the cold sunlight, snug and insular behind their well-tended hedges.

“Isn’t this exciting, Dad?” said Frances. “Going to Hartford? I’ll bet you haven’t been there in years.”

I looked into the rearview mirror. He was sitting behind Frances staring out the window at the passing trees and houses.

He did not look well this morning. His face was gray and one of his eyelids was drooping; bluish hollows dented his cheeks. A few minutes later he fell asleep, his head angled toward his shoulder. As we got onto the highway, Frances began to say something about checking the oil before we left, but then stopped herself. Soon enough, we’d passed Worcester and within half an hour I was slowing down for the Sturbridge tolls, and then we were on I-84, heading southwest.

It had been twenty years at least since I’d driven from Boston to Hartford, yet everything looked more or less the same. Rocky outcroppings, hills, woods, some light industry. A highway service island appeared on my left, where Frances and I had once stopped for gas in a borrowed car when we were both in college, then spent half an hour trying to figure out why we couldn’t get the car started again, only to realize that Frances had left it in gear. We’d shrieked with laughter for miles.

The sky had clouded over and the traffic, which had been light as we left Massachusetts, began to get heavier. Frances leaned back against her headrest, gazing out through the windshield at the highway. In the winter sunlight her skin looked worn, almost brittle, the color of old porcelain. Dad was still asleep, snoring lightly through his nose. Frances turned her head to glance back at him.

Then in a small, determined voice she said, “I have something to tell you.”

At first I thought she was going to bring up the fire in the living room and tell me that she knew what I’d done, by letting it get out of hand. But instead she said: “It’s about what I said at dinner the other night, about there having been misunderstandings.”

“Oh, that,” I said, relieved.

She peered at me alertly. “It’s about what happened. All the old stuff. It wasn’t the way you think.”

“What are you talking about?”

“When I went to see Dad on the Cape.” She furrowed her eyebrows. “I didn’t tell you but I went a bunch of times, not just once or twice. We spent a lot of time together and had a chance to really talk. It was pretty amazing. I mean for the first time he told me about his mother, about going to her grave every year on December 16. He told me about that day when she died. It was so traumatic for him, Cynnie. It’s colored his whole life. He was just a little boy.”

“So?” I said thinly.

Frances took a deep breath. “So, we really had a chance to go over everything. We’d never done that before, told each other what we remembered.”