The Ghost at the Table: A Novel (3 page)

At the same time, I was thinking how amazing it was to be asking Walter such intimate questions. He was twelve years my senior and had always seemed like a remote person. Well meaning, decent, willing to be friendly and even solicitous toward me, but usually absent somehow when I visited, ducking out of conversations, excusing
himself after dinner, content to go up to his study and leave me and Frances to our “girl talk.” I found this male detachment a little oppressive—and a little judgmental—especially compared with most of the men I knew in San Francisco, who’d acquired a fizzy urbanity and liked “girl talk,” even if they were straight. At the same time I’d always been conscious of being attracted to Walter’s broad shoulders and brusque-looking five o’clock shadow, his shrewd, tolerant, ponderous masculinity that struck me as outdated but also, in a way that was almost embarrassing to think about, chivalric. He was chief of radiology at Cambridge City Hospital, and whenever he spoke it was with a natural authority and confidence, which at the hospital must have sounded ordinary enough but outside translated into an intimidating complacency, amplified by the fold of belly over his belt and the quiet assurance of his medical experience, all that vital, appalling knowledge about the human body that most of us don’t have, and don’t want to have, either. But we want someone else to have it.

“So who does she think you want to have an affair with?” I asked, when Walter shrugged again.

“This woman she’s hired as her assistant.” He reached around with one hand to massage the back of his neck, then frowned for a moment in irritable concentration. “Mary Ellen … Mary Ellen … I can’t even remember her last name. It’s crazy. I’ve met her maybe half a dozen times. She comes to the house to do Frances’s books and keep track of accounts, check on furniture orders. Nice person. Kind of an old maid,” he added thoughtlessly.

“Why doesn’t Frances just fire her then? Get her out of the way?”

“Good question,” said Walter. “She’s invited her to Thanksgiving dinner.”

“To Thanksgiving?”

“You know how Frances loves an occasion,” he said grimly.

We passed the town green in Concord Center, then the big white Colonial Inn with its long porches; a moment later we were going by the entrance to the Old North Bridge. Four or five school buses idled in the parking lot as we drove by, and despite the rain a troop of children in bright yellow and blue raincoats were vanishing toward the river.

“So, have you
ever
had an affair?” I felt emboldened by the unusual rapport that had sprung up between us in the car.

His face stiffened. Then he frowned and pushed his glasses back onto the bridge of his nose. Walter had a large fleshy handsome nose, broken in high school, though not by playing football, as you might expect; he fell off his bicycle when he ran into a fire hydrant. He said carefully: “What I think all this is about is that Frances is worried about your father.”

“Well,” I said with a little laugh, because Walter hadn’t answered my question. “I’m not surprised she’s worried. She’s hardly seen him in decades and now suddenly he wants to be part of the family again.”

Walter made a noncommittal noise.

“You know the old story, don’t you?” I asked.

“What story?” he said warily.

“I’m sure Frances has told you.” I leaned back in my seat, finally enjoying the clandestine feeling of talking about Frances with Walter. “That everyone used to think he killed our mother?”

Walter glanced at me sharply, his small grayish eyes alert with disapproval. “To be honest, Cynthia, that’s just the kind of thing I’d like you to avoid raising with Frances this weekend, if you don’t mind. We’ve got enough going on.”

I stared out my window at a gray stockade fence, then at a dark stand of pine trees. No need to warn
me
to behave myself. I was no
wallower in the past—the present had more than enough swamps, thank you very much. And I hadn’t asked to fly out here, either; we could damn well turn around and drive straight back to the airport if that’s how it was going to be.

But the conversation was over anyway, because we were pulling into the gravel driveway of Frances’s house. I just had time to ask, “So why didn’t Frances tell me that she was having such a hard time?” and for Walter to answer, “Because she was afraid you wouldn’t come,” when there was Frances herself, standing under the vines in the doorway, smiling and waving to us.

“An airy, barnlike Colonial” was my description of the Alcott house. “Perfect for neighborhood gatherings and amateur theatricals but snug enough for quiet evenings by the fire.” For Dickinson’s home in
Emily’s Room,
I wrote: “Cloistered behind a row of hemlocks waits a neat Federal-style redbrick house, hardly remarkable from the road, yet look closely, and you’ll see it’s lit from within by a bright unwavering spirit.” (
Compliments of General Electric?
scribbled Carita in the margin of this passage, knowing quite well that Don favored this sort of sentimental curlicue, my specialty.)

If I had to describe Frances’s house, I might begin by noting the old fieldstone walls, shaggy with English ivy, and the faded-looking forest green trim on the windows, also the wide-timbered double carriage doors set into a wing of the house that Frances had remodeled to look like an old stable, now the office for her interior design business. Perched atop the slate roof was a slatted dovecote
crowned by an oxidized copper goose. Even this late in November, the lawn was dappled with yellow maple leaves.

A spray of bittersweet hung on the front door. The rain had thinned to a mist and as I got out of the car the sun came out for an instant or two, which made everything seem luminous, the yellow leaves, the bittersweet, the old stone walls, and also slightly artificial, like a hand-tinted photograph.

“You’re here,” cried Frances, hurrying down the steps into the driveway, opening a big red umbrella over her head. “I can’t believe you’re here. And for Thanksgiving!
Incroyable!
”

“I can’t believe it, either.” I smiled idiotically as Frances dropped the umbrella onto the gravel and seized my hands. She held out my arms and gave them a joyful little crisscross swing, then surveyed me in my ratty sheepskin coat.

“Don’t leave that umbrella lying there open like that, Frances,” growled Walter, slamming the car doors. “It’ll get wet.”

He shouldered past us with my bags, giving us both a bear-like stare over the shoulder of his trench coat. I wondered if he was already regretting that I’d come. I always took up a lot of Frances’s attention during my visits, which I knew he sometimes minded. And Frances looked well enough. I’d been prepared for a gray-faced wreck, but she looked the same as always: tall, angular, comely. Elegant even in an old wool fisherman’s sweater, worn corduroy pants and scuffed leather boots, her auburn hair twisted in a casual knot, those light green eyes radiant with restrained but eager sympathy.

“Oh Walter,” she called after him. “It’s an umbrella, for gods-sake!” She drew me closer, whispering conspiratorially, “He’s getting
cantankerous.
”

Then she pulled me up the front steps and into the house,
clucking over how tired I must be, how hungry after my long flight now that the airlines had stopped serving food, not that airline food had ever been edible. Inside, the house hadn’t changed much since my last visit. Exquisitely unfussy, arranged with Frances’s “finds”: the mahogany coat rack with its tarnished brass hooks, gently faded Turkish rugs, the huge ornate old cloudy French mirror, slightly canted on the wall, so that whoever stepped into the hall saw themselves softened and framed, caught in a genteel tableau. The mirror was set over a handsome old walnut mourner’s bench that Frances had rescued from one of the fire sales or flea markets or estate auctions she was always attending. (“What are you looking for?” I asked her once, when she insisted that we had to drive all the way to Brimfield to an antiques fair. “Oh, everything,” she replied, smiling faintly.) The house even smelled as if it belonged to another era, a staid, ample, more enduring time when people baked every day, with real butter, and made their own soup stock, and used pie safes and enamel-lined ice boxes, both of which Frances had installed in her pantry, though she owned a modern refrigerator, of course, too. It was all completely familiar, more familiar somehow even than my own apartment, and yet as Frances took my coat I realized something was different.

It was the light, the house was too dark. Though it wasn’t yet four o’clock, Frances had turned on a lamp made from an old wooden sextant in the front hall, and also a lamp in what I could see of the living room—she didn’t believe in overhead lighting—and pulled the heavy moss-colored velvet drapes. There was also a sharp musty odor that struck me as strange. Frances was usually a scrupulous housekeeper, especially as the house doubled as an informal showroom for her clients.

“It’s so damp today,” she explained, when she saw me notice the curtains. And for the first time I did think she seemed altered
somehow, a little furtive. But the next instant she was her old self, smiling comfortingly. “Now what can I make you? Do you want a cup of tea? I have really nice Scottish tea.

“But we have to stay out of the dining room,” she went on, leading the way to the kitchen, usually the brightest, warmest room in the house, with a sanded wood floor and tall windows with folded-back shutters and Frances’s enormous old white Glenwood stove. Today the window shutters were closed and the kitchen felt as damp as the hall; only a small lamp above the stove had been switched on.

“Jane’s with her math tutor.”

Through the dining room door I could hear murmurings and what sounded like pages being turned. Frances listened tensely for a moment, then rolled her eyes. “Algebra. They’ve just started on variables.”

“Variables.” I sat down gingerly at the round oak table by the windows. “Is Jane having a lot of trouble with math?”

“Jane’s having a lot of trouble period.” Frances was filling the electric kettle. “Though nothing serious, of course.” She turned to face me. “I mean, she’s in high school. Do you remember high school?”

“Mostly I’ve tried to forget it.”

“Well, she’s in the middle of it and so she forgets everything else. Which, frankly, has made me a little scatter-brained myself lately.” Frances opened a glass-fronted cabinet. “Now, I had a tin of shortbread cookies in here. We have to have shortbread cookies if we’re going to have Scottish tea. I hope Walter and Jane didn’t eat them all.”

“So, Frances,” I said, figuring it would be best to get this over with. “Why didn’t you tell me that Dad wasn’t in the nursing home yet?”

Frances continued to riffle through her cabinets for a moment longer. Then she sighed and turned around, brushing a long wisp of hair out of her eyes.

“Look, I’m really sorry, Cynnie,” she said. “I meant to tell you, but I kept thinking I’d have it all worked out before you got here. The woman who runs the home told me it was just going to be a few more days, then that turned into a few more days. I didn’t want to worry you, and right up until yesterday I thought it was all going to be taken care of. They were going to send a van down for him in the morning, but now that’s been messed up, too. Something to do with the holidays.” She sighed again and tucked another loose strand behind her ear. “I’m starting to wonder about this place, to be honest, though I don’t know what other choice we have at this point.”

I’d watched her closely during this speech, but she remained composed and regretful, gazing back at me.

“Can’t he stay on the Cape until after Thanksgiving?”

“I’m afraid not. Ilse is going off traveling somewhere.”

“Bird-watching?” Ilse was a biologist at the Oceanographic Institute in Woods Hole. Her specialty was shore birds.

“Something like that. But she says she’s let him stay longer than she agreed to as it is. I’m really sorry about this, Cynnie.”

It was on the tip of my tongue to say, Well, I’m going to Hartford, so you’ll have to deal with Dad on your own. But Frances looked so chastened, and so concerned about distressing me, that I stopped myself. How often on previous visits had I lain on one of her sofas with a headache, letting her bring me cups of tea and plates of sandwiches, listening to her repeat that she was sorry I wasn’t feeling well? I’d promised myself on the plane that this time I would not become pathetic around Frances.

“I
was
going to go to Hartford tomorrow,” I said instead.

“I know it’s a big imposition. You don’t have to come if you don’t want to.”

“No, it’s all right.”

“Really, it won’t take that long, I promise. We’ll drive to get him, drive to the nursing home, then be home in time for dinner. We could go to Hartford the day after tomorrow. Or right after Thanksgiving. Whatever you want.”

“I’m sure it’ll be fine,” I said, magnanimously.

The kettle had boiled. As she made our tea—the real way, warming the teapot first and using leaf tea, not tea bags—Frances talked about how nice it would be to see the Cape again, get a glimpse of the ocean, at least see Buzzards Bay. She’d opened a package of chocolate wafers, having given up on the shortbread cookies, and was arranging them on a Delft-blue china plate when the door to the dining room swung open behind me and I heard Jane come into the kitchen.

“Aunt Cynnie!”

“Well, if it isn’t the wee colleen,” I said, as Jane leaned over the back of my chair to give me a hug.

I’d called Jane the “wee colleen” from the day she’d been born with bright red hair. But now she pulled away as if insulted, and when I turned around I realized my mistake. Jane had never been a pretty child—not in the robust, effortless way Sarah was pretty—but she’d been sassy and lithe and humorous, with her freckles and that curly red hair, elbows sticking out like coat hangers as she put her hands on her hips to announce that she was not tired enough to go to bed or that she would
not
eat putrid green beans at dinner, they were an
excrescence.
But in the two years since I’d seen her she’d lost the dignity of childhood and had begun to
assume the absurdity and pathos that goes with having an adult body. She was suddenly, shockingly, fat, with a pronounced bust that she was trying to hide underneath a baggy black shirt, worn over a pair of black cargo pants stuffed into black lace-up commando boots. Her hair had grown bushy; she was wearing it in two stiff braids. Acne studded her chin and forehead. On the side of her neck was a small tattoo, which I hoped was temporary, of a heart with a knife through it.