The Ghost at the Table: A Novel

by Suzanne Berne

  FRANCES TOOK UP residence in the basement, spending hours locked in the bathroom with the torn yellow shower curtain. She was failing math. She was probably failing English, history, and social studies as well. She’d been kicked off the field hockey team because she kept fainting during games (the school thought it was drugs; I knew it was celery) and because her grades were so poor.

  Where was my father for most of this time? At his office, at a meeting, out with clients. Off fishing, out hunting. Sometimes he slept at his office, claiming that my mother’s coughing kept him awake, too. The next evening he would return home distracted, either hugging me too hard or forgetting to say hello, mawkish one moment, irritable the next. I was used to these uneven displays from him, which generally signaled “a busy time at work,” and did not pay much attention. But for the first time that I could recall, there were no Sunday morning nature hikes, no twilight walks with Frances around the neighborhood. No discussions, either, about their special bond.

  ONE NIGHT JUST BEFORE Thanksgiving, when Mrs. Jordan was out at her weekly prayer meeting—at that point, one of the few times she would agree to leave the house—my father asked Frances in a quiet voice if she would take a bowl of soup upstairs to my mother. Frances was sitting in the living room, playing solitaire instead of writing a term paper on the Salem witch trials.

  My father said, “She hasn’t eaten anything since lunch.”

  Frances laid out another card.

  “How long are you going to keep me waiting?” he asked.

  Frances looked at him then, a long, steady look.

  A rare thing, I remember thinking that night, to have my father at home for an entire evening, turning the pages of a bird guide on the sofa, smoking his pipe. He seemed to be making a deliberate effort to sit there with us, forcing himself not to leap up and find an excuse to drive off in the car for a quart of milk, which he might come back without, or the evening paper, which he would then forget to read. He’d even taken off his shoes. Outside it was snowing—a sleety, nasty snow. It felt almost cozy to have him there in the living room in his stocking feet, puffing on his pipe, his legs crossed, one foot gently bobbing. He had not criticized me at dinner when I ate a second slice of key lime pie for dessert. He smiled when I announced that I’d finished all my homework, unlike Frances, who hadn’t even started hers. To impress him, I’d taken Walden from the bookshelf and sat down with it on the other end of the sofa, though I’m sure my father had never read Walden himself; it must have been my mother’s book. I didn’t understand what I was reading and kept skipping around, although I lingered over the line, “It is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes.”

  Frances laid out another card, then another.

  “Frances.”

  “I’ll do it,” I offered. “I went up to check on her earlier,” I told him obsequiously. “She seemed okay.”

  “Frances can do it,” said my father.

  He watched her as she left the room. He watched her all the time lately, whenever he was home. He seemed to have something on his mind to tell her, but he hadn’t said anything out of the ordinary, except to make her drink a glass of milk at dinner and to demand to know why she wasn’t doing her homework. He’d been going through her school things, finding penciled comments from her teachers: Please come talk to me about this paper. It seems that you gave up before you even got started …

  If I caused him any concern, he didn’t show it.

  Frances trailed into the kitchen, swishing her ponytail. My father hadn’t been past the doorway of my mother’s room in weeks, ever since she started that cough. If my mother got any worse she’d have to go to the hospital, and she was terrified of hospitals. “Whatever happens,” she used to tell my father, “don’t let me end up in the Plague Plaza.” Or the Morgue Marriott. Or La Casa des Corpses. In the old days, she’d had a cheerfully sardonic sense of humor, not unlike his own.

  Mrs. Jordan had told him to stay out of the master bedroom. “You are too excited, Mr. Fiske,” she said. He could never sit still during his visits, but paced around the bedroom, accidentally knocking over books and medicine bottles, swearing at himself, forgetting to leave his pipe downstairs, filling the room with fragrant noxious blue smoke. So instead of visiting, in the last few weeks he’d taken to writing her notes on three-by-five-inch file cards. Notes about the weather, how we were doing in school, what was for dinner. Notes that were supposed to be light and newsy, though often he couldn’t stop himself from mentioning small worries. (Frances is neglecting her homework … A boy came by asking for Cynthia I didn’t like the look of …)

  Touchingly, and rather surprisingly, given his usual irreverence, he would sometimes add an inspirational saying at the bottom of the file card, sayings you might find on a daily calendar, like the one Frances had given him last Christmas. Tomorrow Is Another Day. Patience Is the Art of Hoping. My mother always looked pleased to get one of his notes on her tray. It was perhaps the central confusion of my childhood, my mother’s abiding love for my father. An attachment that in his own way he encouraged, which she must have taken for love in return, and perhaps it was. There had been many women in his life during their marriage—even as a child I knew that—and yet there had never been any one woman but her.

  Mrs. Jordan would read my father’s note aloud, in the same furry contralto she used to read Cherry Ames, Student Nurse after I lost interest; then my mother would hold the file card for a few minutes. Often I examined these notes before the tray was taken upstairs. Several times when my father had written a note to my mother but neglected to add an inspirational saying, I tried scribbling one myself at the bottom of the card. But the only sayings I could ever recall were Mark Twain’s maxims, impressed upon me during those enforced Sunday hikes through the woods.

  I am only human, although I regret it.

  It didn’t occur to me until recently how those maxims must have sounded to my mother:

  You can straighten a worm, but the crook is in him and only waiting.

  An uneasy conscience is a hair in the mouth.

  Be good & you will be lonesome.

  Up they went, to her dark bedroom, to be trumpeted by Mrs. Jordan, who read like a person hard of hearing, and did not notice the different handwriting at the bottom of those three-by-five-inch cards.

  What must my mother have thought, lying in bed, listening to what she could have only assumed were declarations made to her by my father? Even if she recognized Mark Twain’s maxims—and she may not have, since she didn’t care for Mark Twain—they would have been easy to misinterpret. She must have known something about Ilse by then, who’d been in and out of our house for months. Did she think he was finally telling her that he’d waited long enough? That it was time for her to fade out so that he could marry someone else? I don’t know and never will. My mother and I were not close enough for confidences, though she might have tried to talk to Helen, or possibly even to Frances. But Helen was away, and Frances avoided her room like the Plague Plaza.

  However no notes had gone up on the dinner tray in the last few days. My father had been away until just that evening on a business trip. Coincidentally, during those same few days Ilse had stopped showing up to coach Frances in math and to drive us around in the VW Beetle.

  On the back cover of her green social studies notebook, Frances had written in crabbed letters: I wish she would die so that he would stay home.

  When I stepped into the kitchen to get a glass of water, I found Frances setting the white wooden bed tray with folding legs, as we’d seen Mrs. Jordan do so often: a shallow china bowl, a spoon, paper towels, a plastic bib. She took a pot of soup out of the refrigerator. Just a little broth left in the pot, no more than a cup. My mother would never tolerate canned soup; she claimed she could taste the tin can. Usually Mrs. Jordan took pains to make a fresh pot of soup every other day, since chicken broth was now about the only thing my mother would eat. But Mrs
. Jordan, overburdened with so many extra demands, was becoming forgetful.

  Frances wrinkled her nose, commenting that the broth had an “off” odor. Should she throw it out, find something else? But there wasn’t anything else, not that my mother could eat. So she heated what remained of the broth on the stove, while I went back to the living room and to Thoreau’s chapter on solitude.

  At around ten o’clock, my father told me to go up to bed. Frances had long since disappeared into the basement. On my way to the bathroom to brush my teeth, I stopped to look into my mother’s room and found her awake, propped up in bed by three or four pillows to help her breathe. A couple of the pillows had slipped down, pitching her awkwardly to the side and too far forward. The sight of her large bony frame half toppled over was alarming enough that I stepped all the way into the room.

  On either side of the bed, vaporizers whispered, sending up ghostly twists of steam. Only a small lamp by the chaise lounge had been left on. No sign of the bed tray; Frances must have carried it back down to the kitchen. A jumble of medications crowded the top of the nightstand, one empty vial lying on its side, next to one of Mrs. Jordan’s church pamphlets and a box of Kleenex, from which a wad of tissues had been pulled out and then dropped on the floor. The pitcher of water that always sat by the bed was almost empty. A glass tumbler lay on the rug. Frances hadn’t bothered to refill the pitcher or pick up the glass. I felt a momentary satisfaction in being the one to notice these small derelictions and looked forward to mentioning them tomorrow to Mrs. Jordan, as further evidence of Frances’s carelessness and inconsiderate behavior.

  “Good night, Mama.”

  My mother didn’t answer, but she gave me an unblinking stare. Which was the way she often looked at people. Like a sad basilisk.

  Her coughing, at least, had stopped for the moment. I could smell my father’s pipe smoke, which had traveled all the way up the stairs. I could also smell my mother. Urine, unwashed hair. And something else, a dank exhausted smell, not entirely masked by gardenia dusting powder. Moved by guilty repugnance, I went up to the side of her bed. But there was nothing I could do, except fix her pillows and try to push her back into place, then pick up the glass tumbler that was lying on the floor. Something was happening in this room that had been happening for a long time, something as obvious and inescapable as it was incomprehensible, something that should shock no one, and yet it had reduced me to an embarrassed bystander, an onlooker—not daughter, not child, but someone unrelated to the person in that bed, and utterly, utterly beside the point.

  I leaned toward her and whispered, “Sleep well.”

  At that moment my mother suddenly plunged forward like a jack-in-the-box and seized me by the wrist. It happened so fast and so unexpectedly that for an instant I couldn’t understand what had taken hold of me. A bracelet of pressure increased to a vise around my wrist. Her thin fingers were surprisingly strong, taut as piano wires.

  “Mama,” I cried.

  For another instant, she retained her grip. Then she muttered something and collapsed back against the pillows. Although, curiously, she looked not so much exhausted as out of patience.

  “Don’t watch” was what I thought I’d heard her say.

  But later it would seem to me that I stood by her bed for hours, staring at a crust of dried spittle, like salt, at the corners of her mouth.

  Eventually I took the pitcher into the bathroom to fill it with water, peering out of habit into the wastepaper basket, which was empty except for a white plastic cap. Back in the bedroom, I set the pitcher on the nightstand. Once again I fixed the pillows behind my mother’s shoulders, busily plumping them in the overbearing way of nurses in hospital movie scenes. I imagined her looking up at me with grateful eyes, thanking me for being such a loving child. I even took a Kleenex and dusted the nightstand. My mother was staring in my direction, yet she didn’t appear to be seeing me, or really anything in the room. She might have been gazing at the girl she used to be, that smart, self-conscious, long-chinned girl on Belknap Road, hunched on an Empire chair with a library book, or sweating in a wool cardigan and scratchy kneesocks, taking a forlorn walk around the neighborhood under the elm trees, watching the world melt and rush away from her.

  I considered giving her a kiss on the forehead. But her hair was so dry. Her forehead was clammy. Her pale face looked like a face in a snapshot, one of those old brownish photographs left loose in the back of a family album, not good enough to fix on a page because the subject was captured in the act of turning away, her expression indistinct, irreclaimable. Caught forever in a moment of not paying attention.

  OF COURSE I REALIZED that something was wrong with my mother that night. I even realized that she might be dying. But since she had been dying, more or less, for years, and since I was angry about once again not figuring in anyone’s calculations, especially my mother’s, who looked as if she wished someone else had come into her room instead of me, Mrs. Jordan probably, I closed the bedroom door and went down the hall to my own room without calling down to my father, or to Frances. I read for a little while, then undressed, got into my nightgown, and climbed into bed.

  Serves them all right, I remember thinking.

  FOR DAYS AFTER my mother died Mrs. Jordan dragged herself about the house praying aloud, muttering and weeping, continuing to neglect her cleaning and vacuuming, so that the whole house retreated further and further behind a gray scrim of dust. “Loved that sweet lady,” she wailed from time to time, stretching out her thin, corded neck. She fixed her eyes on Frances or my father, who might be sitting at the kitchen table trying to have breakfast, my father eating eggs, toast, and bacon, Frances eating half a grapefruit, and leaving half of that.

  “It was time for her to go,” said my father automatically.

  “Loved her right to the end,” wept Mrs. Jordan.

  By then we all knew that my father was in love, too, with Ilse.

  This was discovered only a week or so after my mother’s funeral, after Helen had returned to Wellesley even though the college gave her permission to stay home and take her exams following the Christmas break. Since the end of September, it turned out, he and Ilse had been meeting in secret. He gave us all the details, announcing lugubriously (a hand over his eyes) that he had something to “confess.” Hiking in the woods around Cromwell and Middletown, going to the movies in Storrs (buying tickets separately, standing separately in line, sitting in separate parts of the theater, then finding each other in the dark), having dinner at little country inns as far away as Litchfield.

  Helen called my father to say that she would not be home for Christmas, that she intended to stay in Boston with her roommate’s family. She blamed herself for “not being there,” she told Frances, in a separate telephone conversation, to which I listened undetected from the upstairs extension; the next moment she declared she was never coming home again. But Frances and I had nowhere else to go. In a stunning display of callousness, or carelessness, or as a further “confession,” my father invited Ilse to move into our house as soon as he could get the master bedroom “ready.” In the meantime, she appeared nightly at our dinner table, blonde and bespectacled, and sat stolidly in her chair, eating everything on her plate.

  At school, Frances and I began receiving curious, probing, not altogether sympathetic looks. Frances was more bothered by these looks than I was—in a perverse way, I found it vindicating to have people suspect that something beyond ordinary loss had happened to us. When my father announced on Christmas day that he was sending us both to boarding school, Frances seemed relieved. About our mother’s death, she claimed to feel nothing.

  “REMEMBER HER THE WAY she was when you were little,” my father advised me one cold December afternoon when he discovered me sitting in my mother’s room on the chaise lounge, staring out the window at the dark furled leaves of the rhododendrons.

  But whenever I tried to picture my mother as she’d been when I was younger, I recalled unfair punishments an
d minor betrayals: how she had slapped Frances once for hitting me when I was actually crying about bumping my head on the underside of the dining-room table, and the way she used to tell me not to climb on her, that she was not a tree.

  HEART FAILURE, SAID the coroner’s report. Though no autopsy was conducted. My mother’s heart had been weak for several years and it was not as common as it is now to get a second opinion on such things, even if the circumstances seemed slightly suspicious. Or maybe forensic science was simply less advanced back then. Except in truly nefarious cases, if someone died then she was dead, and that was pretty much all there was to it. I wouldn’t say death seemed more expected in those days, but it was somehow less surprising to people.

  BEFORE MY MOTHER DIED, Mrs. Jordan took to scorching my father’s shirts with the iron, singeing toast, burning the fried chicken she made for dinner. If he objected, she would fold her short arms and give him an empty stare. Once she flashed her gold tooth.

  “Not the only thing’s going to burn around here.”

  The rancid soup, the empty medicine vial, the water glass on the floor. Not a reader of Nancy Drew mysteries and Cherry Ames, Student Nurse for nothing, it didn’t take me long to wonder whether my mother’s heart had failed on its own.

  “It was a blessing,” Mrs. Jordan told me the night after my mother was buried in Cedar Hill cemetery, in the same plot near some mulberry trees where her own parents were buried under a granite obelisk engraved SEYMOUR. In the summer the obelisk was covered with purple splotches, left by birds that ate the mulberries. We were sitting in Mrs. Jordan’s room, the room that used to be Frances’s, both of us on the canopy bed. The corners of Mrs. Jordan’s eyes were webbed with tiny red lines.

  “It was what she wanted, praise the Lord.”