The Ghost at the Table: A Novel

by Suzanne Berne

  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.

  I tried to speak matter-of-factly. “Listen, Frances. We can’t just arrive at this place without him knowing what’s going to happen.”

  “I don’t know what to say.” Frances was once again looking frightened.

  “Just say, I’m sorry, Dad. I don’t know what Ilse let you think, but you can’t live with me. I’ve got too much to take care of as it is.”

  Frances gazed at me helplessly.

  “There’s your work,” I prompted. “And Walter’s schedule.”

  My father said nothing when we got into the van, but I could see in the rearview mirror that he was clutching his knees. Knobby-looking knees, jutting uncomfortably under the woolen fabric of his dark blue trousers.

  Once we were back on the highway, I waited for Frances to begin. She sat with her hands tightly folded, gazing out her window at the scrub pines and the occasional rocky outcropping, laced with snow.

  “Frances?” I said. “Isn’t there something you wanted to say?”

  She turned toward me with a stricken expression.

  “Something you wanted to tell Dad?”

  She grimaced, then shook her head.

  “Thanks a lot,” I muttered.

  “Dad?” I said loudly, keeping my eyes on the road. “Frances and I want you to know that we’ve found a nice place for you to live, not far from her house. A really good place, where you’ll get the appropriate sort of care.”

  Appropriate. A cold finical word that I’d always disliked. But I went on to describe the physical therapy program at Greenswood Manor, the adjustable meal plan and the spacious grounds, mentioning that Frances had visited a number of residences over the past few weeks and had chosen this one as the best. “Very sanitary,” I added, thinking that maybe this, at least, might appeal to him, after that moat of dirty plates and doughnut boxes.

  He said nothing. I couldn’t tell if he was surprised, or relieved, or whether he’d even been listening. He pretended to be asleep for the rest of the drive.

  The sun came out near Brockton. Frances tapped her trembling fingers together and hummed. Every now and then she would start to say something, then change her mind and go back to humming.

  “What’s with your hands?” I asked around Braintree. We’d reached the outskirts of Boston, the gray harbor in the distance, and the wharves and warehouses, the rickety triple-decker houses by the highway where even in winter people hang sheets and underwear on the lines between back porches.

  “Just cold,” she said, almost inaudibly.

  “They were shaking yesterday, too.”

  “I’m cold,” repeated Frances, tucking her hands inside her coat sleeves.

  Soon we were on the Mass Pike and a few minutes later taking the Watertown exit. Frances directed me through a residential area full of modest capes and duplexes, American flags fluttering over the doorways. Light was draining steadily out of the afternoon, sinking into the trees and darkening the streets to a slate-colored blue.

  The entrance to the nursing home was just off a main thoroughfare, set back from the street by a parking lot and a sloping lawn. Feathery white pines shielded the view of a neighboring service station and a supermarket, apparently the extent of the spacious grounds. Greenswood Manor itself was a long L-shaped, two-story building, constructed of that staring yellow brick so often used for municipal courthouses and Greek Orthodox churches. In the parking lot I found a space in front of the cement walkway, which led to a set of automatic glass front doors.

  “Here we are,” I announced.
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  Still he said nothing. Getting him out of the car proved harder than getting him into it. He refused to give us any assistance; in fact, his door was locked when we went around to his side, and I wondered if he’d locked it while Frances and I were opening the trunk and wrestling with his wheelchair (the keys, fortunately, were in my coat pocket). Once we had his wheelchair unfolded and set up by his door, he held on to the armrest of his seat, refusing to move. But just when I thought we’d have to drag him out, he allowed us to swing his feet onto the van’s running board, then help him step down and ease him into the chair. After that I was able to push him up the walkway and into the building without any trouble.

  A young Haitian nurse was sitting behind the reception desk. She took my father’s and Frances’s names, then smiled shyly and pointed to a waiting area around the corner, promising to let the director know we’d arrived. We rolled my father into an atriumlike common room, which had a curved wall of long glass windows that appeared not to have been washed in several years, the whitish film of accumulated dirt cutting down, however, on the glare from the lowering sun. A wide-screen TV was bolted onto another wall, faced by rectangular sofas and square chairs upholstered in shades of toast. Several elderly men were sitting on the chairs, one staring at the floor, two reading newspapers.

  We sat down by windows overlooking a cluster of leafless syringa bushes. My gaze kept sliding down to my father’s black wingtip shoes, which Ilse must have polished for him. They had the oily sheen of anthracite. Television babble floated toward us from a corridor, accompanied by the humid, rather comforting smell of starchy unspiced food being prepared in large quantities in an invisible kitchen. Frances stared at the squares on the linoleum floor. My father closed his eyes.

  We waited ten or fifteen minutes. The two old men rustled their newspapers. A few nurses in pale green scrubs walked by. At last a heavy, copper-skinned woman came threading her way toward us through the chairs, calling out, “Mrs. Rosenfeld?”

  Her voice had a pleasant islandy lilt to it. West Indian, maybe. Frances and I stood up. With an empty smile, Frances asked the woman to please call her Frances, then she introduced me as Cynthia. The woman nodded but introduced herself as “Ms. Watson” and reminded Frances that they had spoken several times on the phone. She looked to be about my age, with a short afro of apricot-colored hair. She wore a peacock blue dress and red patent-leather toeless high-heeled sandals, an outfit chosen, it seemed to me, to enliven her surroundings as much as possible. Around her neck hung a plastic beaded necklace, which might have been strung by a resident during Organized Activities.

  “Hello, Mr. Fiske,” she said, bending down to smile into his face. She took one of his hands between hers. “Nice to meet you.”

  Then she straightened up and in the next breath declared that she was very surprised to see us.

  “Surprised?” I echoed.

  Ms. Watson continued to address herself to Frances, who still wore that empty little smile. “I thought I had made it very clear the last time we spoke, Mrs. Rosenfeld. We do not yet have the opening we anticipated.”

  “What? I’m sorry, what did you say? I’m his other daughter,” I explained, when Ms. Watson glanced questioningly at me.

  “We anticipate there will an opening for Mr. Fiske.” Her broad face remained polite, though now more guarded. “But at present we do not have one.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Frances tentatively.

  “You don’t have an opening?” I said.

  Ms. Watson gazed down at my father. “I am sorry, Mr. Fiske, for your inconvenience.”

  “There’s no room for him tonight?” I repeated foolishly.

  “I am very sorry,” she told me, the lilt to her voice becoming more pronounced. “But I believe I made myself very clear on this, you know, to Mrs. Rosenfeld here, when we spoke last week.”

  “Frances?” I said, feeling like a latecomer to a long, complicated conversation. “What’s this about?”

  Frances’s smile had vanished. “Of course there’s an opening,” she said. “They’re just trying to get us to pay for a more expensive room. I hear about this kind of thing all the time.”

  “I assure you”—Ms. Watson gave her an austere look—“there is no room available.”

  “No room at the inn,” said my father suddenly. His voice was low and slurry, as if he were speaking through a mouthful of ice cubes.

  “What, Dad?” said Frances. “Did you need something?”

  “He needs a room,” I told her, my face growing hot. “And it doesn’t look like he’s going to get one here. At least not today.”

  “Nonsense.” Frances was still gazing at my father. “This is some kind of a mistake. Or someone’s trying to take advantage of us.”

  “No one is taking advantage of you, Mrs. Rosenfeld.”

  Ms. Watson frowned at Frances, while behind her the long dirty windows glowed with vanishing afternoon light. How pushy Frances must seem to her. How entitled, with her “nonsense,” her fussy worries about being taken advantage of. But Frances was always clumsy with people she was trying to get to do something for her. It was one of her few flaws.

  I beckoned to Ms. Watson and the two of us moved several steps away from my father’s wheelchair.

  “If you don’t mind, could we go over this again?” I lowered my voice. “Just so I understand. My sister called you a month or so ago and asked about putting my father on your waiting list. And you told her that you expected to have an opening.”

  “Your sister and I have had several conversations about an opening for your father,” interrupted Ms. Watson. “We have a great deal of demand at present. Especially for acute care.”

  “But she said she’s been calling to check on the waiting list, and you spoke to her last week—”

  “I told her there wasn’t an opening.”

  Frances had joined us by then. She glanced uncertainly at me. “I remember her saying that a space would be available. That’s what I heard her say.”

  I kept my eyes on Ms. Watson. “Did you say when you expected an opening?”

  “I said I would let her know when we had one.”

  “And a van. Did you say you had a van that might be able to go get him?”

  “We do have a van, yes.” Ms. Watson sounded puzzled. “I probably mentioned that. We do sometimes provide transportation for new residents.”

  Frances gave me a level look. “Cynnie. There’s been a mix-up. That’s all.”

  I ignored her. “But you don’t have an opening today?” When Ms. Watson shook her head, I said, “Is there any way that—”

  That she hurry along the resident who was lingering so inconveniently? Fix up a bed in the supply closet? Whatever it was that had prompted the beginning of my question, it did not reach my mind as a full-blown idea and I stopped abruptly, too rattled by Frances’s inexplicable misunderstanding to chase down whatever possibility had slipped past me.

  A buzzer sounded. From a distance came the sound of voices, one of them raised in a nearby room. “I didn’t say that,” said the voice, reedy with frustration. “I didn’t say I wanted my dinner tray put there. What I said was—”

  “We’re not leaving,” said Frances, “until you find him a room.”

  Ms. Watson laced her hands together. “I am very sorry,” she told me, turning decisively away from Frances. “When we have an opening, I will be sure to telephone you.”

  “Oh please,” cried Frances, her voice grating in that quiet room full of dusty windows. “We’ve just driven two hours from the Cape. What are we supposed to do?”

  Ms. Watson suggested that we might have to drive back again, adding once more that she was very sorry but that she had nothing to offer us.

  Frances unfolded her arms and pointed dramatically at my father. In her long black cashmere coat, she looked queenly and bleak, the opposite in every way from Ms. Watson in her crayon-bright clothes; yet Frances had also, it seemed to me, dressed to set a certain
tone. And for the second time that day I found myself wondering what I might be missing, what stabilizing piece of information lay just beyond my reach.

  “His wife won’t let him back in the house. Look at him,” she demanded, in a voice that must have carried all the way to the automatic front doors and out to the bare syringa bushes. “Look at him,” she cried. “He’s old and sick. He has nowhere to live. He can’t take care of himself. Have a little Christian sympathy. It’s two days before Thanksgiving.”

  Ms. Watson gave Frances a faint smile that seemed to imply that her plea for Christian sympathy was misdirected. “I have no choice in this matter, Mrs. Rosenfeld. I suggest you take your father home with you. Perhaps after the holiday, you know, things will have changed.”

  “He’s had a stroke.”

  “Try to be patient, Mrs. Rosenfeld.”

  Ms. Watson glanced toward the old men in their windbreakers, who had been observing this altercation over the tops of their newspapers with a marked lack of interest, as if our little gun battle amid the brown chairs hardly registered in the high seas of incorrectly placed dinner trays. Then she looked hard once more at Frances, who dropped her arm.

  “Mrs. Rosenfeld,” she said quietly. “There is nothing I can offer your father tonight. You’ll have to do what you can for him for the present.”

  “For the present?” repeated Frances, as if she had no idea what that meant.

  At Ms. Watson’s suggestion, we made a detour on our way home to stop at a medical supply shop in Watertown, where Frances rented a special stool so that my father could sit down in the shower, as well as a chrome contraption that fit over the toilet to give him railings to hold on to for support. Frances had neglected to bring along her cell phone when we left that morning, and we’d been too distracted at Greenswood Manor to think of calling from there, so we hadn’t phoned ahead to tell Walter of the change in plans. By the time we got back to Concord and drove up the steep gravel driveway, it was almost six o’clock.