The Ghost at the Table: A Novel (7 page)

For some reason I felt rebuked, even though once again she’d been complimenting me. We passed a cranberry bog, watery and secretive-looking this time of year, hedged by tall yellow grasses and gray bracken.

After a minute Frances sighed. “Dad used to love Mark Twain.”

It was part of family lore that
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
was the sole book my father claimed to have read from start to finish. Even with the newspaper, he only read the first parts of articles on the front page; he rarely bothered to find the continuation of a story to see what else had happened. I have no idea how he got through the insurance claims he’d had to review at his office.

“Remember Dad’s Twainisms?” Frances asked dreamily some time later, taking off her glasses as the high gray arch of the Bourne Bridge appeared in front of us. “Those sayings he used to quote? Did you know he got them off a daily calendar I gave him one Christmas?” She looked proud at this recollection.

Then she said, “Remember the notes he used to send up on her tray?”

She was talking about the tray Mrs. Jordan used to carry back and forth between my mother’s room and the kitchen, once my mother stopped coming downstairs for meals. Often my father would scribble a note to her before he left for work in the morning and leave it to be carried up on her breakfast tray.

“Did you know,” said Frances, “that he sometimes used to put sayings on the notes, to cheer her up?”

“I remember,” I said, merging with the traffic onto the bridge, “that she didn’t like Mark Twain.”

“She didn’t?” Frances turned to me in surprise.

Irritably, because I felt I’d been more familiar with these notes than Frances had, I said, “She thought Twain was a big blowhard. Especially compared with the writers she liked.”

“Who did she like?” Frances looked honestly puzzled.

“Jane Austen. The Brontës. Willa Cather. Didn’t you ever go in and read to her?”

I asked this question knowing full well that Frances had never read to our mother. Especially toward the end Frances had avoided her whenever possible, almost insolently, pretending not to understand when she spoke, pretending not to hear when Mrs. Jordan said, “Save my legs,” and asked her to carry something upstairs to our mother’s room.

“I don’t remember,” said Frances, shaking her head. She stacked my pages and slipped them back into their envelope.

Steel pylons flicked past as we crossed the bridge. Below gaped the gray canal, scattered here and there with white sails, like torn bits of paper.

“Are you okay?” Frances asked, once we were over the bridge.

“It’s a little hot in here,” I said. “Do you mind if I open the window?”

“It doesn’t feel hot to me. Are you getting carsick? Remember how you used to get carsick on the way to school?”

“No,” I snapped. “I’m just
hot.
”

“Well, by all means,” said Frances, a little crossly. “Open the window then.”

We reached the town of Pocasset just before noon. My father had bought a small shingled cottage here when I was in college, so that Ilse could be close to Woods Hole, where she was conducting some sort of postgraduate work, and he could have a view of the sea, which he insisted was the only view embraced by human beings that never changed, since it was always changing. But for years he and Ilse traveled so much that they rarely had a reliable address. The cottage was rented out except for the summers. But when my father turned seventy-five, they decided to live there year-round, and that’s when Ilse went to work at the institute. What my father did with himself after that, I never knew.

The clouds were clearing as we drove through the little town and it seemed as if the Cape had been having milder weather than up north. Most of the scrub oaks along the back roads still had their leaves, and when we turned down a sandy dirt driveway where
FISKE
was painted in faded letters on a splintered gray oar nailed to a pine tree, and drove out onto the spur of land my father
owned above the bay, we discovered an exquisite little Japanese maple, defiantly scarlet, planted by itself, like a flag, on the grass in front of my father’s cottage. A row of neat hydrangeas edged the walkway, a few pale blue petals showing here and there among the faded brown flowers. The breeze was fresh after the drive, and full of salt, and as we got out of the van we stopped for a moment to appreciate the calm silvery gleam of the bay.

Ilse opened the door before we had a chance to ring the bell. She was wearing a white blouse that was slightly too small for her, white sweatpants, and white leather moccasins. Even though it was November, her face was darkly tanned.

“Come in.” Ilse’s accent sounded more clipped than I remembered. “He has been waiting for an hour.”

“I’m sorry, but the weather held us up.” Frances was trying to remain polite, but the wings of her nostrils flared. “We thought it was going to snow. And there was traffic coming over the bridge.”

Ilse stared at her moodily, then stepped aside so we could enter the foyer, which opened into the living room and the kitchen. I had only visited the cottage a few times before and my impression had been of airy rooms full of watery light from the bay. But the cottage seemed to have grown smaller, what I could see of it from the foyer, and more crowded. Even the view had shrunk. Framed by the living room’s picture window, the bay looked flat and metallic, as if it were hanging on the wall.

“Hello, Dad,” called Frances, as Ilse shut the front door.

Ilse did not offer to take our coats, and with relief I understood that this visit was meant to be short. The cottage was very warm. The smell of bleach rose from the foyer’s tiled floor, mixing with an almost tidal reek of bathroom odors and fried meat and stale heated air, queasily cut with a floral air freshener.

“Dad? We’re here.”

No answer.

Ilse had packed him two suitcases. They were crowded into the foyer along with six or seven large cardboard boxes, each labeled with black marker in Ilse’s blocky scientific print:
SUMMER CLOTHES, WINTER CLOTHES, BOOKS, PAPERS
. One box was marked:
ROBERT FISKE/PERSONAL EFFECTS
. I just had time to reflect, not very coherently, or originally, on the sad irony of how much went into the making of a life, yet how quickly it was packed away, before I realized that there were too many boxes for my father’s “shared accommodations” at Greenswood Manor.

“Frances,” I murmured, “he knows where he’s going, doesn’t he?”

“Of course he does.”

She turned to Ilse, who was now standing by the suitcases with her hands on her hips, surveying us as if she were deciding whether we might fit into a box as well.
Robert Fiske/Estranged Daughters.
Ilse’s eyes seemed to be watering, but that could have been her contact lenses. When I first knew her she’d worn heavy black-framed glasses—the type once favored by Aristotle Onassis—which had made her wide Scandinavian face look not just severe but slightly insensible. The glasses were gone, but she still had the same white-blonde hair gathered into a topknot, perhaps a little scantier now, still the same impersonal blue gaze. Still the same pale swollen voluptuous mouth, startling in such an otherwise dispassionate face.
Liver Lips,
Frances and I had called her, when Ilse first appeared at our house. She’d never changed her name, either. Ilse Arnholm.

Though when I looked more carefully I saw that what I’d taken for a tan was taupe-colored makeup, thickly applied, extending from her hairline to just below her jaw, as if Ilse couldn’t be bothered with her neck, figuring no one would look that far.

Frances said quietly, “Ilse? You told him about the arrangements, didn’t you?”

Ilse squinted back at her with pursed lips. “Arrangements?”

“He knows where he’s going, right?”

“He is going with you.”

“She means,” I cut in, “where we’re taking him.”

“He is going with you.” Ilse was peering closely at Frances. “He thinks he is going to you.”

I felt my face go white. “But I’m sure Frances made it very clear—”

“He wants to be with you.”

“But you made it clear,” I insisted, turning to Frances. Frances stared back at me, eyes wide above the black collar of her coat. I waited for her to say something, to remind Ilse of their arrangement, agreed upon weeks ago, but she seemed too shocked to speak. It was worse for her, I remember thinking. She still had some unresolved feelings for our father—whatever had led her to visit five or six nursing homes and worry about jokes made at his expense—while I had none. I did not care what became of him. It was fury on Frances’s behalf that led me to round on Ilse in that close odorous little foyer.

“Listen,” I said. “Frances agreed to find a good place for him. Which she did. And as I understand it, you promised—”

“I did not promise anything.” For the first time since our arrival, Ilse looked directly at me, with surprise.

We’d been keeping our voices pitched low, but now suddenly from the living room came the sound of my father shouting unintelligibly in a harsh, glottal voice. When I took a step backward, I could just see the toes of his shiny black wingtips, resting on the metal footrests of a wheelchair.

“You can’t do this,” I said to Ilse.

“Do what?”

“Leave us with him like this.”

“I am not leaving you,” she pointed out, returning her gaze to Frances. A cautious, calculating look had replaced her surprised expression. “You are taking him.”

“Making
us
tell him,” I said.

Pale hair wisped around her face, a few strands catching in the corners of her mouth. “He is your father.”

“He’s
your
husand,” I shot back. “You married him.”

“I was very young.” She twisted her mouth. “I did not know anything then.”

“He had plenty of money, you knew that.”

I expected some retort at this accusation, which was not entirely fair—Ilse had never been interested in money; on the contrary, she’d always insisted on a rather frugal lifestyle with my father—but as I was speaking a surprised expression had once more come over her face. She glanced at Frances and then returned her gaze to me, shaking her head in disbelief. “You really do not know?”

“Know what? How you used him?”

“Used
him
?” Ilse gave a barking laugh.

Else,
Frances and I used to call her, pretending to misunderstand her name. As in: Or Else. Ilse was Norwegian, though she’d grown up in Switzerland.
The Swiss Miss. The Goatherd.
We’d spent hours mimicking her accent up in our rooms:
Vell, vat do you sink of cuckoo clocks und chocolate? Vee ver neutral during zee war, had to stay home to protect zee cuckoo clocks und zee chocolate.
Stuffing ourselves with potato chips filched from the pantry, our mouths greasy with spite and despair.
Heidi marries her grandfather. She keeps his wallet in her dirndl.
In return, Ilse had never looked upon us with anything more than a quiet, enduring, annihilating disregard.

Yet now, a quarter of a century later, when Frances and I should be impossible to disregard, when we were grown women, with a husband and children, in Frances’s case, with lives at least as adult and significant as Ilse’s own, it seemed that she had once more outmaneuvered us. Ilse didn’t want to deal with her old husband’s wrath at being stuck in a nursing home—let his daughters be the ones to tell him. Then she could go back to measuring the wing span of storm petrels, or researching the nesting habits of pelagic birds, or whatever it was she did, while we hauled his molting old seagull carcass away.

Or that’s how it seemed to me at the time, though even then I had the feeling that I was missing something, some confusing undercurrent running just below the surface of this encounter. Ilse was not a wicked person, only phlegmatic and self-absorbed. Her tone was most likely not as clipped as I heard it, her reddened eyes not impersonal but full of guilt and worry and exhaustion and panic. But during those few minutes in that narrow foyer, I was overcome by the feeling that nothing had changed, that once more I was a frightened, furious teenager, and that if I stayed in that house another half hour, I’d be calling her Else and making snide comments about cuckoo clocks.

“You old bitch,” said Frances, breaking her silence.

I don’t think I’d heard Frances insult anyone since she was seventeen, when she’d decided almost overnight to adopt a Victorian code of conduct that excluded saying anything overtly unpleasant—the same code that now required her to use teacups instead of mugs, and forgo overhead lighting, and insist that Jane would feel better if she stopped wearing so much black.

“I want a list,” Frances began sputtering now, her voice high and breathy, almost childlike. “I want a list of every dime he’s spent on you and I want it back.”

“There is no money,” said Ilse, a small humiliating smile playing about her lips, “if that is what you came for.”

“Liar.”

“Frances.” I reached to take her arm. Frances continued to glare at Ilse, while Ilse gazed back at her. She looked more interested, than anything else, in what Frances would say next. I might have even caught a quiver of pity in the attentive way she examined Frances’s face.

“Is that what you think I have had with him?” she asked finally. “Some life of leisure?”

Frances was almost panting. “Oh, go to hell,” she said, ridiculously.

Ilse gave another little smile, as if she weren’t seeing Frances at all but only someone pretending to be Frances. “I was very young then,” she repeated. “But I am not young anymore.” Then she sighed and pushed at her pale hair.

At that moment I found myself actually feeling sorry for Ilse, for her skeletal years of tending an old man and satisfying her appetites only at meals, watching the sunset every evening from a picture window. No children of her own for company, his never visiting. She had indeed been young when she married my father. By my reckoning, Ilse couldn’t be more than a few years past fifty now.

“Well, take care of him,” she told Frances. “You have waited long enough.”

An eloquent look of dislike passed between them, though once again there seemed to be something else as well, a kind of concurrence that I did not understand, as if something had been finally agreed upon that had previously been in doubt.