The Ghost at the Table: A Novel (8 page)

But perhaps even then I’d begun to get an inkling, because the next moment I heard myself say to Ilse, “Just out of curiosity,
suppose we decide to leave right now without him. What about that?”

“Then he goes to a motel.” Ilse’s lips drew back, exposing both rows of her square white teeth.

I pictured my father sitting alone in his wheelchair beside an empty swimming pool, a fluorescent pink
VACANCY
sign winking behind him, one letter burnt out.

“You wouldn’t do it,” I said.

Ilse shrugged. “People are always doing things no one thought they would do.” Then, raising her eyebrows, she gave Frances the strangest look, almost a warning look, as if the two of them were speaking over my head, the way adults do around children.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

“No?” Ilse held my gaze for another moment, then gave a final shrug and led the way into the living room, where my father was waiting for us.

F
RANCES MUST HAVE
prepared me better than I thought, or maybe I’d prepared myself over the past weeks of reading brochures about whirlpools and physical therapy, because the sight of him was not a shock but rather confirmatory. He sat bonelessly in his wheelchair, his mouth sagging to one side, his skin the color of damp paper towels. Eyes dull, nose tumid, neck a tidepool of wattles. A mollusk in a blue blazer.

Worse to remember what he had been: Slim, very upright and fastidious—sprightly, if that word didn’t imply girlishness. A head of thick auburn hair and that glossy little red moustache, which he used to stroke between his thumb and forefinger. His face long, fine, triangular. The same shape, in fact, as Frances’s.

He was always moving in those days, fiddling with his tie or a button on his jacket, snapping his fingers, glancing around,
growling demands or complaints or funny, disparaging comments. Impatience seemed to galvanize him, like electricity. Even in the coldest weather he went without a hat or scarf, leaving his coat open, a man of barely contained internal combustion. My mother, on the other hand, had had poor circulation and was often cold. She aged very quickly, as chronically ill people do, while he continued to transmit itchy vigor and a youthful sure-footedness, springing up on the balls of his feet as he walked, climbing stairs two at a time. Now he was bloated and shriveled, with a fat abdomen and spindly arms. A straggle of thin gray whiskers hung from his cheeks.

Heidi’s goat,
I thought, before I could stop myself.

Litter surrounded his wheelchair: Styrofoam cups and paper plates, dirty napkins, piles of old newspapers, some gone yellow. The rest of the cottage was, at least as far as I could tell, as neat as it had been the last time I saw it, except for this one corner of the living room, which Ilse had ceded to my father. Wisps of steam trailed over his head, issuing from a round plastic vaporizer that whispered behind him. The bad smell I’d noticed earlier was stronger here. For a moment I was afraid I might be sick.

“Well, we made it,” Frances announced at my elbow. “Just like the postman. Through snow and sleet.” Gratefully, I realized she was trying to sound unflappable, which must have cost her something after that ugly skirmish with Ilse. She stepped over an open box of doughnuts. “Hi, Dad.”

He snarled something that sounded like “Get out.”

Frances blinked. “I’m sorry, Dad? What was that?” She turned to me with an apprehensive look. “What did he say?”

Ilse had come up behind us, carrying what looked like a black leather bowling bag.
MEDICATIONS
was written on a strip of masking tape on one side. She smiled curtly. “You will understand him
better when you spend more time with him.” Then she busied herself with rotating his wheelchair so that it faced the foyer. With an effort she managed to roll the wheelchair right over a drift of newspapers.

Stepping back, she gestured for me to take the handles as if she were a pilot handing over the controls. “It is not going to snow here,” she said, as I began pushing the wheelchair toward the door. “It has not snowed once all fall. We do not usually get snow until Christmas.”

With Ilse’s help, I navigated my father’s wheelchair out of the cottage and down the walkway, where I parked him next to the minivan. He sat barking out furious vocables. “Ha!” he cried, his face turning blotchy and purplish. “Hey!”

“Don’t worry, Dad,” said Frances firmly, but looking scared. “Everything’s going to be all right.”

Then he stopped saying anything, his hands lying open on his knees like an empty pair of gloves. Frances went back into the cottage with Ilse to get his suitcases and boxes, leaving me to keep watch on him. I turned my face toward the bay, inhaling the fresh briny air.

“Well, Dad,” I began. I was waiting for him to shout at me, as he had done so often when I was younger, pointing and snapping his fingers, growling at me to be quiet so he could hear the weather report on the radio, or the baseball score, or a commercial for razor blades. I even expected him to hit me with one of those limp-looking hands, and half hoped he would, so that I could feel justified for not caring what happened to him. But he never looked in my direction.

Together Frances and Ilse made several trips from the house to the car, loading suitcases and boxes in the back of the van. “I guess that’s it,” said Frances. We helped my father into the backseat
and belted him in. Again I expected him to protest and thrash around, but he was compliant enough, motionless once we’d got him settled in his seat. Ilse handed in his overcoat and an old dented gray fedora. Then she demonstrated how to fold and unfold the wheelchair, which was stowed last. Frances climbed into the passenger seat once more and sat looking down at her lap. Ilse had gone to stand near the Japanese maple, one hand shading her eyes, though the day was still overcast. The back of her white blouse luffed in the breeze.

“Good-bye,” I said. Then I surprised myself by adding, “I’m sure he’ll miss you.”

“He never cared so much for me,” said Ilse.

She stepped over to the curb and stooped to peer in at the old man inside the van. He refused to look at her but sat staring out at a lantern-shaped bird feeder set on an aluminum pole near the driveway.

“Be well, Robert Fiske,” she said. When I looked again she was up the stone-flagged path, shutting the door to their cottage.

To postpone the moment when I would have to be alone with my father and Frances, I walked over and picked two or three of the brown hydrangea flowers. There wasn’t anything more to do—no further ceremony marking the end of this part of my father’s life and ushering him and his boxes into what was left—so with a final look at the bay, I got into the van and laid the flowers on the dashboard. Maybe during the drive to Boston I’d ask my father why he’d held on to that organ all these years, when he’d got rid of everything else. But probably Ilse hadn’t told him about that, either, that she’d forged his name and signed the thing over to Frances.

Donated
his organ.

I shocked myself by laughing out loud.

“What?” Frances looked whitely over at me.

“
Stop,
” she hissed, leaning over the emergency brake. “Stop laughing.”

I found a tissue in my coat pocket and blew my nose, then took several deep breaths before starting the car.

“So, Dad,” said Frances, as we pulled away from the curb, her voice as cheerful as if we were taking him out to the movies. “Off we go.”

When he gave no response from the backseat, Frances turned to smile at him, then quickly turned back around.

“Shouldn’t we tell him?” I murmured. “Where we’re heading?”

“No,” said Frances, her smile still fixed. “Not now.”

But as Buzzards Bay disappeared behind us, followed by the cottage with its green lawn, the Japanese maple and the tidy hydrangeas, I glanced into the rearview mirror at my father’s pale slack face and saw that of course he knew where he was headed, even if no one was going to tell him.

The affair between Dad and Ilse began the summer before Frances was a high-school junior and I was a freshman. My mother had been sick all that summer, so sick that we couldn’t go to the house in Wellfleet we usually rented for the month of August. Instead Helen ferried Frances and me back and forth from the West Hartford Country Club pool in a little orange VW Beetle that my father bought secondhand from a neighbor. The plan had been that Frances would take over this job after Helen went to college, but Frances kept failing her driving test. When Helen left for Wellesley at the end of August, Ilse was hired as an informal chauffeur and given use of the VW Beetle in exchange for driving Frances and me to the pool in the afternoons. She drove us to the dentist and to doctors’ appointments, and once to buy school clothes downtown. In September, when school began, she was hired to coach Frances in math and science two afternoons a week, because Frances’s grades were poor and my father was afraid
she wouldn’t get into a good college. Ilse was a graduate student in biology at UConn. A friend of my mother’s whose husband was the department chair had recommended her.

A bit of company for the girls,
the friend probably said.
A little distraction.

But soon enough, people must have seen what was going on, that the wrong company had been distracted. Someone must have tried to interfere, especially in the first weeks after my mother died, when it became clear that Ilse had moved into our house. I like to imagine that one of the neighborhood mothers met Ilse in the supermarket, firmly blocking the aisle with her grocery cart.

I’m sorry, but would you mind telling me what’s going on here? Those girls have just lost their mother.

Then again, Ilse was not easy to talk to. Back then her English was imperfect, for one thing, which often made her sound coldly formal even during casual exchanges (“May I compose for you an egg?” she asked me once at breakfast). This unsociable impression was underlined by those severe eyeglasses and her habit of calling my father by his full name. But to be fair, there had always been a shyness about Ilse and, in the case of Frances and me, a reluctance to address our confusion and resentments straightforwardly, perhaps because she didn’t understand what to do for us and was afraid that we would fall upon her, like wolves, at the first sign of uncertainty. She had indeed been young, only in her midtwenties.

It was hardest on Frances when Ilse moved in. She refused even to speak to Ilse and, if she absolutely had to request something from her, would go to elaborate lengths to request it through me. With our father she adopted a shrill, wisecracking tone, calling him “Oldster” and “Grandpa” at every opportunity. Whenever he put on a raincoat she called him the Ancient Mariner. Frances
had always been our father’s favorite. Willing to go for walks with him in the evening when he got home from work; play games of Scrabble; laugh at his jokes. She did not deplore him, like Helen, or sulk at him, like me. I suppose after enjoying so many years of preference, Frances could not understand how he could suddenly prefer Ilse.

We were not invited to attend the ceremony when our father and Ilse got married that spring under the Tuscan columns inside Hartford’s City Hall, but neither was anyone else, except my father’s lawyer. Frances and I were both in boarding school in New Hampshire by then, hastily enrolled after Christmas. For their honeymoon, my father and Ilse planned to take a cruise to the Arctic Circle. His indemnity company was sold to Aetna at around the same time, and it seemed prudent to retire. The business had been losing money for years.

And people in the neighborhood were talking. A cousin of my mother’s had written to the office of the Connecticut Medical Examiner, asking about an inquest, though nothing came of it but the rumors that followed. It was the neighbors who’d told our cousin about Ilse, how she’d moved in two weeks after my mother died.
Going in and out the front door like she owns the place
.
He’s old enough to be her father
. They hinted to the cousin that my mother might have been given something. Slipped an overdose of one of her medications. It was clear who could have done such a thing: a man who buried his wife and took up with a foreign blonde girl practically the next day.

Meanwhile Ilse did her calisthenics in our living room every morning, in tights and leotards, by the French doors, in full view of the men on the street driving by on their way to work. She made her own yogurt in squat plastic containers. My father bought her a little dog, a dachshund; in the evenings she walked it through the
neighborhood, her topknot bobbing. By April, when Ilse and my father got married, the whispering was loud enough that even Ilse, with her imperfect English, was disturbed. And so off they went. No house. No furniture. No children. They sold the VW Beetle. They even gave away the dog. It wasn’t as hard as you might think. Get rid of one thing, then another; it becomes quite easy. Simple Living, they probably thought of it. Doing Without.

I was recalling this history of my father and Ilse as we stopped at a McDonald’s for lunch, because I still could not fathom why Ilse had turned him out of their house. Nothing that had taken place in their cottage this morning explained it. He had been old for a long time. She’d been in the habit of looking after him for years. Even given my father’s stroke and the additional care he required, I could not figure it out.

Ilse never would have allowed my father to eat at a McDonald’s, for instance, but when I suggested it, he did not object. I ordered for all of us from the car window into a speakerphone set into a gigantic lit-up menu, though my father didn’t answer when I asked him what he wanted. So I ordered him a hamburger and a Coke and the same for myself. Frances only wanted a cup of tea, which they didn’t have.

After we got our order, I pulled into the parking lot, where it took us several minutes to arrange my father’s meal for him in the cardboard tray that had been provided. I saw him watch Frances’s hands shake as she spread a paper napkin on his lap. He ignored his Coke and did not touch his hamburger. When I was done with my lunch I handed his tray to Frances and took mine; together we walked over to a yellow trash barrel beside the restaurant doors.