The Ghost at the Table: A Novel (31 page)

“And poor Cynnie,” she said, opening a cabinet and lifting down glazed earthenware bowls for the soup. She set them on the counter beside the stove, glancing at me over her shoulder. “You look kind of like a priest in that collar.”

“Well, don’t expect any absolution from me.”

Frances laid out red cloth napkins and woven Mexican straw place mats, then went to fetch silverware from a drawer under the cabinets. “I wish you knew yourself better,” she said quietly. “I really do. If I had one wish, it would be that.”

“Waste of a good wish,” I said.

But Frances, as usual, wasn’t listening. “If you could only see what’s been in the way, all this time, the misunderstanding between us and Dad—”

“I don’t want to hear about him anymore.”

“It’s just that—”

“It was no misunderstanding,” I said as sharply and clearly as I could manage, “that I grew up feeling like no one cared whether I existed or not. Don’t argue with me,” I insisted, as Frances started to interrupt. “It doesn’t even matter
why
I felt that way or whether I was
right
to feel that way, only that I did feel that way.

“And don’t try to tell me that you understand,” I went on, my voice getting louder. “Because you don’t. You don’t know. You will never, even if you sat down and wrote a whole book about it, have any idea how I felt.”

Frances stayed silent, laying out our places.

“And you know what else?” I said, losing my temper altogether in the headlong, violent, brokenhearted way I had as a child. “When you get right down to it, Frances? Do you know who hates him more than anyone, hates him so much that she’d like to erase him from the face of the earth? It’s you. That’s who really hates him.”

Frances caught her breath. “You have no idea what you sound like.”

“You’re the one who’s never forgiven him for what happened,” I said coldly. “You’re the one who tried to off him this afternoon, right in front of our old house.”

“Oh my God, Cynthia.” Frances was shaking her head as she went back to setting the table. “Oh my God. If you could only hear yourself.”

“I hear myself well enough.” But now my conviction was beginning to flag, my blaze of self-righteousness burning down to sullenness. “You can pretend all you want that it was something different, but our childhood was a stupid mess. Our father was a cheater and our mother died, and by the end we all wanted her to.”

“That is not what it was like.” Frances looked up at me with dignity, a spoon in one hand. “That’s not what it was like for me.”

“Then lucky for you.”

Even before the words were out of my mouth, I knew they were true. Her childhood, spent in the same house, with the same parents, had been luckier than mine. It was as basic and as complicated as that. And not because of any real difference in what we’d been given—though Frances
had
been given more, by my father, by birth order, by genetic happenstance. But what we’d received hadn’t, in the end, created the disparity between us: it was simply that Frances had always been able to make more out of what came her way. That was her nature.

“Lucky for you,” I repeated.

“I’m sorry you’re still so angry,” she said, stepping back from the table as if to admire her arrangement.

“Yeah, well you can stop feeling sorry for me, because I’m going home tomorrow.”

“Oh come on, Cynnie. Don’t be like that.”

“You lied to me. You knew there wasn’t room for him at that nursing home. You were pretending the whole time.”

“I did not lie,” said Frances evenly. “I just took a chance.”

“A chance?”

“If there
had
been room for him that day we would have left him there, but since there wasn’t we took him home.”

“But you knew there probably
wouldn’t
be room.”

“You never know with those places.” Frances began wiping down the stove with a sponge. “And anyway, people lie to each other all the time. Sometimes for the other person’s own good.”

“I can’t listen to you anymore,” I said. “I will lose my mind.”

“I’m just trying to explain.” Frances had dropped the sponge and was moving around to my chair.

“Leave me alone.”

She leaned over me, her eyes full of concern. “No, I won’t leave you alone, Cynnie. You’re my sister. I want you to be happy. My family’s happiness is the most important thing in the world to me.”

And as I stared back at her I saw that it was true. Frances did want us all to be happy. She would do anything to make us happy. There was no unclearness in this regard, for Frances. I also saw that nothing had gone wrong for her today, in spite of Mark Twain’s house being closed, in spite of the accident and my injuries. In fact, those difficulties had only strengthened her hand; if I were truly paranoid, I’d almost think she had planned them. My account of our past was officially shut, hers flung wide open—soon
to be the accepted story. She had gotten everything she wanted. We were even going to have a nice meal to end the day. Tomorrow various doctors would pronounce us all healthy and well, and we would return home for another thoughtful dinner served on suitable place mats with cloth napkins. My father would never have to go to Greenswood Manor. In a few days, Frances would call the medical supply store in Watertown and ask them to deliver a hospital bed, while she went to work rearranging one of the downstairs rooms for him. By next week, she would have hired a nurse, a big soft-spoken middle-aged Carribbean woman with an Englishy name, Edwina or Millicent, who would perform all the onerous, embarassing duties that go with tending elderly patients, leaving Frances free to knit him bulky sweaters in soft yarns, bake custards for his lunch, sew a crazy quilt for his bed.

He could live out the end of his days with her, surrounded by ease and graciousness, and she would finally have what she’d been searching for, all these years, at estate sales and antiques fairs.

“I’m not hungry,” I said, standing up. “I’m going to bed.”

“Oh, don’t be like that,” said Frances once more, this time putting a hand firmly on my shoulder. “I know you’re hungry. Sit down.”

By the time I got into bed that night Jane was already asleep in her bunk, her light snores interrupted by occasional puppyish whimpers. I thought her snoring and my neck brace would keep me awake, but Walter had given me two Percocets after dinner and I fell asleep almost immediately.

I must have slept deeply for several hours. Then suddenly I wasn’t asleep anymore. The room was dark except for Jane’s blue nightlight, plugged into a socket near her desk. As I lay in bed looking at the nightlight I was reminded of those companionable little blue lights in the sleeper compartments of passenger trains, which seem to be provided to reassure you, if you wake in the dark, that wherever you’re going will be a calm and reasonable place. One winter when I was very young my whole family took an overnight train to Chicago so that my mother could consult a specialist there. It must have been in the days when her disease might still have been possibly nothing, something all in her head,
because I remember hearing later that the specialist was a psychiatrist. But all I recall of that trip is traveling on the train at night, lying in the bunk I shared with Frances, looking up at that little blue light and rocking with the motion of the train, listening to Frances’s steady breathing as we rushed past snow-covered towns and cities and farms and forests, the whole dark territory of the world outside our window.

Jane had stopped snoring. I should have closed my eyes and gone back to sleep, but I was very thirsty and my head hurt. Also, the foam collar around my neck was uncomfortable. So I got up slowly and painfully, being careful not to wake Jane, and felt my way out of her room and then downstairs to the kitchen to get a glass of water.

The kitchen was dark save for the illuminated clock on the stove. Outside, the snow had stopped and above the black juniper trees hung a new pale moon. I poured myself a glass of water at the sink and swallowed two more tablets from the vial Walter had set out for me on the kitchen table. It was after four, by the clock on the stove. Despite those tablets, I doubted I would get back to sleep that night, so I decided to make a cup of tea.

While waiting for the kettle to boil, I thought I’d just look in on my father. It must have been a difficult day for him, as well, all that time riding in the van, the visit to his old home and then the accident, the long hours spent in the hospital waiting room. I had an idea that he also might want something, a glass of water or a cold washcloth for his head, but be unable to get out of bed.

When I stepped into the passageway outside the kitchen that led to Frances’s bedroom, where he was sleeping, I saw that the door was open and that a light was on in the adjoining bathroom, lending an anemic white glow to the room. Sure enough, whatever
contraption Walter had rigged up was gone; if my father had needed to get up and go about his business, there would have been nothing to support him. But he was lying in bed asleep, breathing loudly, one hand resting on his stomach. He looked quite small, lying there in that tall white bed. Afloat in Frances’s big empty room, with its long dark windows and that wide gleaming floor. Like a boy asleep on a raft, a wash of night sky over his head.

I drew nearer to the bed and looked at him in the pallid light from the bathroom. His lips were parted and his cheeks sunken, his profile sternly defined against the white pillowcase. On his forehead was the dark medallion of his bruise.
My father
, I thought. I hoped he would open his eyes so that I could tell him I had come to see if he needed anything.

It was only then that I realized his breathing sounded wrong: It was too harsh, too shallow, too rasping and labored. Each breath began with a hollow intake and ended with a hard, drawn-out sigh. Rough breathing filled the room, and it seemed to come at me from different directions, as if more than one person were breathing.

I felt frightened and in sudden confusion turned to go back to the kitchen, but something prevented me from leaving. Old loyalties, the oldest kind of loyalties, mixed with old longings that even now I don’t care to name, mixed with an old familiar dread. And probably some of the same curiosity that underlies my interest in debunkings.

Not sure what else to do, I put my hand on his.

My father grew restless. His hand clenched. His chest rose and fell with each breath, like a bellows. He began to twitch and grimace in his sleep, although he did not seem to be in pain so much as gripped by annoyance. A tremor shook him. His lips drew back
from his teeth, giving him the appearance of bitter impatience. It was an expression I recalled well from my childhood, the expression on his face whenever we were stuck in traffic.
Enough
, that expression said.
I’ve had enough of this.
Filled with misgivings, I continued to watch his face, torn between a wish to console him for the affliction of being, once again, stuck somewhere he did not want to be, and a strange detachment.
My father
, I thought again, but this time indifferently, as if questioning whether it was true.

By then the room had become extremely cold and my teeth began to chatter. I tried to understand what I should do. His breathing was deafening. I must call someone. I must call Frances and Walter. I imagined myself going upstairs to Frances, calling her name softly until she opened her eyes, allowing her the chance I had denied to her, all those years before.
Come and say good-bye
. Or perhaps I would use the word
farewell
, which was more formal and poetic, a touch Frances might appreciate.

I must call Frances, I decided, trying to shake off my concern about what words to use, angered that even in a moment of extremity I had no choice but to go on being foolishly myself. But then I began to worry that my father might die while I was upstairs waking Frances, who was a heavy sleeper, and I could not stand to think of him slipping away from me like that, all alone. So I hesitated, knowing that either way I was losing an opportunity and unable to decide which one to lose.

What do you want?
I asked silently.
Tell me what you want.

As I stood holding my father’s hand, listening to his harsh, insistent breathing and asking for his guidance, which I did not expect to receive, his love of maps suddenly came back to me. And his skill at identifying trees, and his love of birds, which he could identify even by their calls. And the encouraging way
he used to carol songs as we marched in the chill morning air through the woods. In his own way he had tried his best with us, with me and Frances and Helen, the best that was in him. He had shown us how to walk in the woods. He had pointed out the accidents that could befall people and insisted that we learn to spell, thereby improving our chances of going through life unimpaired and correctly understood. Whatever he had done for us, or not done, must have seemed justifiable to him at the time. My mother, too, had done what she could in the midst of her illness, by asking little of us, except that we not watch her too closely. They, like most people, had done their best. You love whom you love, you fail whom you fail, and almost always we fail the ones we meant to love. Not intentionally, that’s just how it happens. We get sick or distracted or frightened and don’t listen, or listen to the wrong things. Time passes, we lose track of our mistakes, neglect to make amends. And then, no matter how much we might like to try again, we’re done. Whatever inspiring song we hoped to sing for the world is over, sometimes to general regret, more frequently to small notice, and even, if we were old or sick, to relief. It’s not easy to sit through the performance of another person’s life; so often it is music without music, as Mark Twain once said, referring to something else in one of his maxims. Though we have to try to hear it. It’s unbearable to think we can’t at least try.

I watched my father’s face, which seemed filled now with a fierce and somber privacy, dark and graven against the pillowcase. Eighty-two years of thoughts and imperatives were gathered within his body, and I knew so few of them. Yet even at this stark moment, I could not concentrate on my father. My head hurt. I kept thinking about how cold I was and about his clenched hand, which felt so fixed and unyielding under mine, as if it were an ashtray or a big seashell.