The Ghost at the Table: A Novel

by Suzanne Berne

  By the time I got downstairs for breakfast the next morning, Frances had clearly been up for hours. As I stumbled into the kitchen in my nightgown and a pair of Jane’s wool socks, my head still aching, Frances was standing in the pantry rapidly opening and closing cabinets, concerned that she might not have enough food for Thanksgiving, now that Walter had invited the Egyptian resident and his wife and baby, who were Muslim, she was belatedly realizing, and might have dietary restrictions. It went without saying there’d be no driving to Hartford today. Not with my father in residence. Not with one of Frances’s Occasions planned for tomorrow. Plus Sarah had sent an e-mail “reminding” Frances that her chemistry lab partner, Arlee, was a vegan.

  “Which means, basically, nuts,” Frances said. She opened another cabinet and rifled through the contents, pulling out a package of macaroni and tossing it onto the counter, where it joined a jumble of boxes and cans. “I mean, she can eat nuts. And grains and vegetables, but no refined sugar and nothing with eggs.”

  I pictured a hollow-cheeked girl, with long colorless hair and round granny glasses. Pale and morose from vitamin B deficiency and not enough sugar.

  “Is she an animal rights activist?” I asked grudgingly.

  Frances opened another cabinet, keeping her back to me. “Probably. Sarah only likes activists these days. It doesn’t even matter what kind. Probably she’s a poultry activist. Posing as a Thanksgiving guest.”

  “She’ll probably try to free your turkey.”

  “Blow up my roasting pan.”

  We both laughed. Then I said, “Frances, why didn’t you tell me that you’d been going down to the Cape?”

  She turned around, but I couldn’t tell whether I had startled her.

  “Jane says you and Dad have ‘made up,’ whatever that means.”

  “I went down to see him a few times,” Frances said quietly. “That’s true. To check on how he was doing after Helen died.”

  “But why didn’t you tell me?” I was horrified to feel my eyes begin to fill.

  “I would have. I didn’t mean to hide anything from you, Cynnie. But you seemed so angry with him after the funeral that I couldn’t think how to bring it up. You told me you never wanted to see him again.”

  “But why did you care,” I said, “how he was doing?”

  Frances gave me a commiserative look. “He asked me to lunch, the first time. And I didn’t tell you because I was worried you’d feel deserted or something, by my going to see him.”

  “But I would have understood,” I insisted, though I was quite sure I would not have understood. I didn’t understand now. How could Frances have wanted to have lunch with our father, alone, especially after the way he’d behaved toward Helen? Never visiting her in Vermont during her illness, never even calling her on the phone. Showing up late for the funeral, refusing to sit with us, dodging her friends, making excuses not to go to the private memorial service at her house. Who was he, to ask Frances to lunch?

  “I’m really sorry, Cynnie, if this has upset you.”

  “It hasn’t upset me.” I looked down at my feet in Jane’s socks. “I’m glad you and he have patched things up.”

  “Don’t be angry.”

  “I’m not angry. I just don’t like being lied to.”

  “No one’s lied to you, Cynnie.”

  “So promise me you didn’t arrange that mix-up at the nursing home on purpose.”

  Frances looked grave. “I would never do something like that.”

  “Fine. Then promise me.”

  “I promise I didn’t arrange that mix-up.”

  For a minute or two neither of us said anything.

  “Do you think Egyptians eat stuffing?” Frances had returned to her disorganized counters and shelves.

  “I have no idea.”

  “What about cranberry sauce?”

  “I think it’s pork they don’t eat,” I said, crossing my arms and leaning stiffly against the doorjamb. “By the way, where is—” It seemed strange to refer to him easily as “Dad,” as if we were a normal family, about to have a normal Thanksgiving, over which our normal old father would preside.

  “He’s in my room.” Frances was reading the back of a box of rice. “Lying down. He’s taken his medications and he ate a little oatmeal for breakfast.”

  “He asked you for oatmeal?”

  “Jane made it for him. Before she left for school.”

  I hadn’t even heard Jane leave that morning. The whole house had been awake and filled with industry and purpose, and I’d slept through it all.

  “She asked him what he wanted and she said he said oatmeal.” Frances looked up. “I offered to make him eggs or an English muffin, but I couldn’t tell if he was saying yes or no.”

  The image of Jane in her black combat boots and dirty red fingernails serving oatmeal to my father was more than I could stomach, especially without a cup of coffee. Yesterday Walter had gone out early and brought me back a large coffee from town before he left for the hospital. Frances no longer drank coffee because she said it made her “jumpy.”

  Frances had moved to a bookcase beside the pantry. She began flipping through a cookbook. “I’m trying not to take it personally,” she went on lightly, “that I can’t get Jane to pick up a towel off the bathroom floor, but she’ll make him oatmeal.”

  “So how does he seem this morning?” I resolved not to take it personally that no one had thought of coffee for me that morning. “Did he sleep okay?”

  Cookbook in hand, Frances returned to her cabinet inventory. “Well, I think so. Walter says he thinks he did. I can’t understand anything he says.”

  “It’s not that hard to understand him.”

  Frances turned to me with a frown, as if I was being competitive.

  “I can’t believe it,” she said, banging another cabinet door shut. “Walter waltzes off to work and now I have to go to the grocery store on the day before Thanksgiving, which will be a zoo, because he invited a horde of Egyptians for dinner, and I’m supposed to figure out how to feed them.”

  A zoo. A horde. Frances always exaggerated in a disparaging way when she was secretly pleased about something. Walter and the children were the masses; when I came for a visit, she told her friends that the house was bursting with relatives. In this way she created a whole world for herself, teeming with event, with just a few people.

  “Oh Lord!” she cried, in mock exasperation.

  “Do you want me to go?”

  “Plus there’s the centerpiece to do. And I can’t find my tablecloth—”

  “I don’t mind going.”

  She stared down at the open cookbook she was holding. “I had everything so well planned.”

  “Frances,” I said. “I’ll go.”

  Frances looked up at me almost blindly. “Really? You wouldn’t mind? Because I’ve forgotten a couple other things, too. Are you sure?”

  When I assured her that I was willing, she began naming all the things she needed from the store, including ornamental striped gourds for her Thanksgiving centerpiece. How quickly my plan of going to Hartford had become moot for everyone, I thought sourly. What’s a little lost research when a Thanksgiving centerpiece is at stake? Though truthfully, I didn’t mind going out. I could buy myself a large cup of coffee, and it would be good for me to get away from Frances for a while. A walk in town. A little fresh air. Maybe I’d even buy myself a pack of cigarettes to take outside and smoke behind Frances’s potting shed, just like when I was a teenager, sneaking cigarettes behind the field house at boarding school. The adolescent sight of Wen-Yi smoking in his car the other day had reawakened old cravings.

  “This is so great of you, Cynnie,” said Frances, as I got up from the table. “Let me find my wallet.”

  “I’ll take care of it. Will you be all right with—”

  “He’s asleep. At least, I think he is.”

  We paused for a moment in the kitchen, staring at each other, clearly having the same thought: What
if he’s not sleeping? What if he’s dead?

  “I’m sure he is,” I said.

  “Stop scaring me,” said Frances.

  “I’m not trying to scare you. Can he get out of bed on his own?”

  “Walter rigged up a kind of railing for him with a couple of chairs.” Her face darkened momentarily, perhaps at the idea of something being rigged in her house.

  “And he has water? And—something to read?”

  Again we stared at each other, lost in the immensity of our father’s possible, unanswerable desires.

  “I’m sure he’ll be fine.” Briskly, Frances reverted to her old capable self. She would find her tablecloth, folded with dried rose petals in a drawer. She would make extra cranberry sauce with orange rind and whole cranberries. She would joke about vegans. Although her voice sounded thin when she asked, “You won’t be gone long, Cynnie, will you?”

  IT WAS EVEN COLDER outside than the day before, but I was glad to be driving into Concord Village, past all those boxy, upright, old clapboard houses, with their raked yards and clipped privet hedges, past the parking lot for the Old North Bridge, swarming this morning with visitors wearing hooded Patriots football sweatshirts. In third grade at West Hartford Country Day, I stood by my desk one bright fall afternoon, watching particles of chalk dust float in a shaft of sunlight, and recited:

  By the rude bridge that arched the flood,

  Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,

  Here once the embattled farmers stood

  And fired the shot heard round the world.

  I remember puzzling over how a bridge could be rude and how a shot could be heard all the way around the world, yet I never thought to ask for an explanation. My childhood was full of confusions like these, almost willfully acquired, since I would never admit when I didn’t understand something. Not just because I was afraid of looking stupid but because the natural order of things appeared to me to include dusty obscurities, intended to remain unclear.

  As I drove around the village that morning looking for a coffee shop, I admired the deep blue of the sky, which made the day look warmer than it was, shining above the tall white Congregational church, the prosperous storefronts and granite stoops, the tidy streets full of cars and vans and people in parkas walking along the sidewalks with shopping bags. It was a pretty town, and I liked the oldness of it, which was both convincing and unhaunted—a place where the past could be taken for granted because it was everywhere, from the enormous copper beech trees to the tilting slate gravestones in the cemetery just opposite a children’s clothing store. And yet Concord’s antiquity was why all those tourist buses sat idling in the parking lot of the Old North Bridge. Perhaps it was my years in California that made me appreciate Concord’s achievement in being historic without being moribund or becoming a theme park; I never visited this town without feeling moved, though I would never admit it to Frances. With her, I pretended to think Concord was stuffy and quaint, full of Unitarians and women with frosted pageboys who became militant when a Dunkin’ Donuts was proposed for Main Street. Concord, after all, had banned The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn when it was first published (Louisa May Alcott priggishly scolded Twain for not providing “something better to tell our pure-minded lads and lasses”). But it was here that the Alcott girls once took long walks with their exciting, infuriating, improvident father, debating whether to give up wearing cotton, because it was picked by slaves, which would leave them in virtuous but scratchy wool all year long, debating whether to live on apples, debating whether God might be a woman. Stepping over horse dung in the street, quizzing each other on Greek vocabulary, waving to Mr. Thoreau, to Mr. Emerson, to Mr. Nathaniel Hawthorne, as carelessly as I said hello to my landlady when I passed her on the stairs. If I squinted, I could almost see them standing under an old oak tree, their cheeks pink in the chilly fall air.

  It was four years ago, during my visit back east to see Orchard House, that Helen had telephoned one morning to tell Frances and me about her diagnosis, about which she’d known for some time, and to explain that she was treating herself. Please don’t worry. Her voice was calm, tired, slightly impatient. The voice of someone already used to being sick. I’m sure I’ll be fine. Perhaps I should have argued with her, as Frances did. Instead, later that same day, I stood in the front parlor of Orchard House, where Anna Alcott was married, “with lilies twined in her hair,” just like Meg March in Little Women, and marveled at how little things had changed. Upstairs, Louisa’s room still held her half-moon shelf desk, built by her father, set between the windows overlooking Lexington Road. In her bedroom, May Alcott had drawn figures in ink on the walls, defacing the woodwork and wallpaper; the drawings were still perfectly visible. She had also used a hot poker to burn decorative designs into a bread board, as a present for her mother. The bread board was still on display in the kitchen, the designs looking as freshly scorched as if they had been burned in yesterday.

  At last I spotted a Dunkin’ Donuts that had been unsuccessfully opposed. I parked the van and went inside. While I waited for my coffee, I reflected on how attached I had grown over the years to my historical characters, those unheralded sisters, May Alcott, Lavinia Dickinson, and Mildred Keller. More attached, in some ways, than to the people I knew. It wasn’t so much that I identified with them—which of course I did—as I found them reassuring. Even inspiring. May Alcott, for instance, would always remain dear to me for her clumsy-looking bread boards and amateurish drawings. She’d persuaded Louisa to let her illustrate the first edition of Little Women, then to bankroll a sojourn in Paris to study art; she got married in Europe, got pregnant, then died a few weeks after childbirth, leaving her daughter for Louisa to raise. Her refusal to be ashamed of herself for not being as gifted, for mooching off her sister, for forging lustily on, demanding whatever she could get while she could get it, that’s what I admired. May hadn’t been anybody’s favorite; she died young but not young enough to be glorified, like her sister Elizabeth, immortalized by Louisa as saintly Beth, “the family angel,” while May wound up as selfish, prissy Amy March. Naturally, she deserved something back. That must have been her reckoning. Quid pro quo.

  Then there was cranky old Lavinia Dickinson, whom I also loved, mostly for her crankiness. Lavinia must have had some reckoning to do herself, when she yanked open the bottom drawer of Emily’s bedroom dresser a few weeks after Emily died and discovered a locked box full of poems hand-sewn into booklets, each one a perfect betrayal of their sisterly compact. For years, Lavinia had played Cerberus at the door, barking at visitors while Emily hovered like Persephone on the upstairs landing or watched from the windows, shrinking into the shadows, neither here nor there, grateful for Lavinia’s protection. Or so Lavinia had thought.

  I never hear the word “escape”

  Without a quicker blood,

  A sudden expectation,

  A flying attitude.

  Poor flabbergasted Lavinia. She must have sat right down on the floor in her apron and skirts, a hand over her mouth. Sat down and stared at those meticulous little pages, each one crammed with cryptic ecstasies and fierce meditations, most at first glance incomprehensible, all of them flauntingly unconcerned with rhyme or the usual pieties or even proper punctuation. Wondering how she could have been so cruelly duped. So that’s what Emily had been doing, those tiresome years when Lavinia had been answering the door and making excuses. Delivering Emily’s little notes and weird nosegays to the neighbors, trying to ignore their baffled expressions. Laundering those infernal white dresses. Haggling with shopkeepers, toting packages to the post office, shooing spying children out of the garden, being the drudge, the grump, surrendering whatever hopes she may have had of marrying and having children of her own, all so that Emily—pale, crepuscular Emily, watching everything with her sherry-colored eyes—could hide in the house, baking bread and growing heliotropes, demanding that most unreasonable of demands, to be left alone. And all this time Emily had been plotting jail breaks.
Had been having jail breaks. No wonder Lavinia first considered burning those booklets.

  As for mousy Mildred Keller, whom I loved least but perhaps understood best, I often imagined her sitting glumly on a parlor chair, swinging her feet, watching Helen scrabble words into people’s astonished hands, peevishly wishing that she could go deaf and blind, too, so someone would notice her.

  How to cope with not being the beloved? With not being the favorite, the brilliant one, the remembered one?

  By getting your own back. By being cranky. By waiting on the parlor chair until it suddenly dawns on you that you are not deaf and blind, that you are not dumb, and that it’s time to say something, even if no one is listening.

  By acquiring, at all costs, a flying attitude.

  AFTER BUYING WHAT Frances had requested at the grocery store, I put off returning to the house for a little while longer and drove around the countryish outskirts of Concord to look at old stone walls, another thing that you can’t find in California. A man was standing on a ladder outside his house, hanging Christmas lights on a blue spruce. Which seemed preposterous, until I realized how late Thanksgiving was this year. On my way back through town, I stopped at a pay phone and, on an impulse, called Carita in San Francisco, forgetting about the time difference.

  When she answered the phone she sounded sleepy and annoyed. “What is it?” she demanded. “Are you all right?” I could hear Paula murmuring in the background, so I said that everything was fine. “Why are you calling then?” And I was forced to admit that I did not know why I was calling, except that I’d wanted to hear, as I put it, “a friendly voice.” “You’re not all down in the dumps about him, are you?” she asked, referring to the bookstore owner. I answered truthfully that I’d hardly given him a thought. No, just the usual family tensions. “Grist for the mill,” yawned Carita, which was what she always said when writer friends complained about their families. “Take notes.” Perhaps if she’d been more awake, Carita would have questioned me further, and I could have said that I was regretting my decision to come east and missing the Thanksgiving she and Paula were hosting in their apartment on Alvarado Street, with the chili lights and the mariachi music and barking Prince Charles. Which might have made me believe, at least for the time being, that Carita’s Thanksgiving was what I was missing. But instead she told me to “hang in there,” then said good-bye and hung up.