The Ghost at the Table: A Novel

by Suzanne Berne

  We all smiled at each other, every face bathed in the friendly, emotional glow of candlelight. In addition to the white tapers in the six silver candlesticks, Jane had collected all the candles in the house, tea lights and votives and five or six thick white pillar candles, placing them along the windowsills and the oak sideboard, even balancing one between the wooden prongs of an antique rake on the wall. She’d found glass holders for the tea lights and votives; the white pillar candles she put on china saucers.

  “Lovely,” agreed Amina.

  Only Frances looked slightly dissatisfied. She had worked out a careful seating arrangement while everyone else was in the living room and she and I were hurrying back and forth through the kitchen’s swinging door, lighting candles, opening wine bottles, setting out the food in her Blue Willow serving dishes. But in the end, she’d left the kitchen too late to oversee who went where. The Fareeds were sitting together instead of being split up. Mary Ellen was to have been seated between my father and Jane, but now the girls were sitting with Arlen at the end of the table and Mary Ellen had wound up between Kamal and Walter, who was pouring her a glass of Sancerre. Frances and I were next to each other, with Wen-Yi on the other side of me.

  “Would you like some wine, Wen-Yi?” I asked, leaning toward him.

  “No thank you,” he said gruffly.

  “Not a drinker?”

  “No,” he said.

  “How about some butter? Or are you more of a margarine man?”

  He turned to give me a baffled look.

  From the wall, the Common Ancestor watched with her elephant’s eyes, surveying the gingered carrots and the brussels sprouts, the dish of cranberry sauce, the two kinds of stuffing, mashed potatoes, baskets of bread, two silver gravy boats, and the rice pilaf, of course, in an overlarge bowl. The turkey, bronzed and glistening, had emerged from its plastic shroud and now rested majestically on a platter in front of Walter. We all took a moment to admire it, before Walter, standing officially at the head of the table, took a bone-handled carving knife from its velvet-lined wooden box and began to carve. Silver and china gleamed in the candlelight as, one by one, we passed our plates up to him and he served us slices of turkey, asking us whether we wanted light or dark meat. Then everyone started to talk at once and the room filled with the lively, optimistic sound of polite laughter and the clink of silverware.

  Glancing up from the table, I tried to imagine how this scene would look to anyone passing by outside—the long white table laden with food, the candles, the lit faces of so many people—although no one would be passing outside, except maybe a coyote. How sad, I thought, already a little drunk, to be a coyote in Concord.

  From her end of the table, Sarah was confessing to Amina that she was afraid of babies. Amina laughed, her hand splayed on her chest, admitting that before she had one herself, she too had been afraid of babies. (And why not be afraid of babies? I wondered, holding the mashed potatoes for Sarah. Little time bombs, ticking with futures no one could predict. Who, for instance, could have foretold that baby Emily Dickinson, red-faced and squalling, spitting up her supper of mashed egg, would become the world’s most reclusive poet? Or that adorable blonde little Helen Keller would get scarlet fever before she was two years old and wake up one day deaf and blind—or that this catastrophe would be the making of her? How could anyone bear so much uncertainty? And yet I couldn’t stop watching Amina’s soft face across the table and the way she dropped her eyes as she talked about her baby, like someone trying to be casual when mentioning a lover.)

  Wen-Yi was talking to Jane—he’d finished off his turkey and stuffing before most of us had got started—telling her that he had studied piano in China and won a competition. When he first came to Boston from China he played a church organ for Saturday evening services at a Catholic church in Medford that had lost its regular organist. The priest was a friend of his landlady. Wen-Yi went to all the church suppers, where spaghetti was often served. Lasagna. Italian dishes.

  “Didn’t they taste weird to you?” Jane wanted to know.

  “Free,” shrugged Wen-Yi.

  Walter was telling Kamal about a new MRI the hospital was leasing, the most recent model from GE. “I hear it’s a marvel.” The gingered carrots were still going around the table, followed by the brussels sprouts like little green planets in their blue dish. Twice Wen-Yi pressed against my arm as he reached for the bowls and dishes that were passed to him. Conversations reeled around me, orbiting separate topics; faces leaned in and out of the candlelight. Now it was no longer babies and MRIs being discussed but embryonic stem cell research, the outrageous cost of housing in Boston, and the television show Fear Factor on which minor celebrities allowed themselves to be covered with scorpions or dropped into snake pits. (“It’s a reality show,” Jane explained to Frances, who had never heard of Fear Factor.) At the far end of the table, Arlen asked my father a question about the insurance industry, and after some hesitation my father appeared to be answering. Such marvels, I thought, lifting my wineglass. Such wonders. Even little Whatsisname, asleep upstairs in his portable crib, his wheezes and snuffles broadcast from a lozenge-shaped white transmitter plugged in by the door. Doing our best to enjoy ourselves, to blend in, to be a part of this gathering, to pass dishes and choose between butter or margarine. Deciding for this one evening to ignore the coyotes outside the window and to concentrate instead on the bright table laid before us with old silver and lovely old china and bowls of fragrant food, surrounded by the gleam of cheerful company. It was all there on the table, everything a person could ever want. And I realized that I was glad to be in Frances’s house, that I had been right to come. I would not, at that moment, have wanted to be anywhere else in the world. I sipped my wine and watched the faces around me talking and laughing, while the candles glowed and flickered and threw shadows on the walls.

  FRANCES WAS TELLING Sarah and Arlen about a Thanksgiving she remembered from our childhood. Casting laughing glances at our father, she described how he had carved the turkey so painstakingly that finally our mother told everyone at the table that they were eating Michelangelo’s Turkey.

  “And cold as marble, too!” concluded Frances. “By the time he got done with it.

  “Remember that, Cynnie?” she said, turning to me.

  I must have been about nine during the Thanksgiving she was describing. While carving the turkey, my father had had trouble with the electric carving knife he’d received for Christmas the year before and was wielding for the first time. My mother kept begging him to use an ordinary carving knife, but he refused. While the knife buzzed angrily, jumping around on the turkey, he hacked off bits of bone and gristle, his mouth twisting each time he swore at himself, his face turning red. In the end, he’d thrown the whole platter of turkey to the floor, snarling that he was no “goddamn Michelangelo,” then he refused to allow anyone to pick the turkey up off the carpet, even when Molly, our fox terrier, began to gnaw at it. Though my mother tried to save the evening by laughing and saying that if my father was no Michelangelo, at least he had an artistic temperament.

  “You’ve got a much better memory,” I told Frances, “than mine.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said, smiling at me. “I seem to be forgetting everything these days.”

  Then she turned her smile on our father, who lifted half his mouth in a gallant attempt to smile back at her. From his end of the table, Arlen sent me a sympathetic look. It gave me some comfort to realize that he’d heard it, too, the false note, the wistful unreality of Frances’s story.

  “Did you get enough turkey, Cynnie?” Frances was asking. “More than enough,” I answered, turning away.

  WELL ALONG INTO the evening, after six or seven bottles of wine (Jane had drunk her glass, plus half of Arlen’s, and now her head lolled against the back of her chair), the talk turned naturally enough to gratitude, it being Thanksgiving. Mary Ellen proposed that we go around the table and say what we were all thankful for in our lives, whi
ch is what they did each year at her aunt’s house in New Jersey. But then Sarah proposed instead that we each describe something we were proud of having done for someone else. Because, she said gravely, activism was not promoted enough in American culture.

  A draft had slipped into the room and I shivered, trying not to yawn. Turkey always made me tired. I’d also drunk too much and spilled gravy on my red velvet dress.

  Thankfully, at first the answers were facetious: Kept my hair, offered Walter, so that Frances didn’t have to be married to a baldy. Arlen announced that he was proud of not eating any turkey so that there could be more for the rest of us, for which he received light applause from everyone but my father and Wen-Yi, neither of whom seemed to be following the conversation. I gazed at Jane’s centerpiece of pinecones and bittersweet and thought of saying that I was proud of not having done anything for anyone so that nobody had to feel indebted to me. But now the tone had shifted, the candles flickered and became serious as everyone refilled their wineglasses and looked into their plates.

  Amina spoke first, saying that she was proud of her decision to come to university in America to study law even though her parents had wanted her to stay in Damascus. Recently Amina had set up a free advocacy service at the hospital, for other Middle Eastern women living in Boston, wives of residents and medical students, who were having immigration troubles or complications with their visas. Though some were very depressed and came to talk more about their worries than their legal problems.

  “It’s very difficult for them,” Amina said with a mindful glance at Frances. “These women have done nothing, but still they are afraid. They feel guilty for leaving behind their mothers, their sisters. They’re afraid for their children. They don’t want to go back, but back there is all they think about. It’s like they never left.”

  Everyone at the table nodded and looked thoughtful. Sarah leaned forward and promised to send Amina a book she was reading for her freshman seminar on the political oppression of women. Amina smiled back at her, but clearly Sarah did not understand what she was talking about, as even Sarah, sitting back suddenly in her chair, seemed to realize. Kamal had put an arm protectively around his wife’s shoulders. He was proud of spotting a spinal tumor in a woman who the chief resident had said was pretending to be sick; if she’d been sent home she would have been paralyzed within a month.

  One at a time, each person at the table spoke. Walter, too, had solved baffling and near-fatal cases, and, it went without saying, he was proud of having provided for his family. Mary Ellen was proud of having left Boulder, Colorado, where she’d settled because she loved to ski, and moved back to Peabody to care for her widowed mother, who had died the year before after suffering for nearly a decade from early-onset Alzheimer’s. By the end Mary Ellen’s mother had forgotten her own name. What a faithful daughter, I thought when Mary Ellen finished speaking, especially as her mother wouldn’t have noticed if she’d disappeared. Along with everyone else I smiled at Mary Ellen compassionately, though it struck me there was something impervious about her steady good nature. All that well-meaning chitchat, her bright outfit, those sturdy muscular arms and legs. Having cleaned her plate and contributed a worthy anecdote, she now sat up straight in her chair, regarding the turkey carcass with her pale blue eyes, appearing to ask nothing except to be thought of as a nice woman who’d appreciated her dinner. Yet here she was, next to Walter, getting the first choice of meat, getting her wineglass filled first. It was almost smug, this business of carrying on as if she didn’t mind having thrown her youth and vitality away on someone who didn’t remember her from one minute to the next.

  Now it was my father’s turn to reveal what he was proud of having done for someone else. For a long moment he looked down the table at Frances; finally he mumbled something and waved his hand, pass on, pass on—but amiably, modestly, the patriarch with too many epic sacrifices to choose one. Sarah and Arlen were both proud of volunteering as mentors in an inner-city literacy program on the Lower East Side. Then it was my turn, and unable to think of anything else, I said that I was proud of the social contribution I was making by writing books for girls that weren’t about teenage movie stars and diet fads. Wen-Yi was proud of his math tutoring. Of helping young people, “like Jane,” understand that mathematics was a remarkable world of theory and calculation, not just meaningless problems. (Jane smiled dreamily at this and closed her eyes.) People saved, people cured. Pinecones in a dish.

  Even Jane woke up to say that she was proud of having organized a petition at school to protest the ban on wearing baseball caps in the classrooms, though she did not wear baseball caps herself.

  Frances was the only person who had not yet spoken. Her face was flushed as she gazed at the old dining-room windows, where candle flames were reflected and repeated in the wavery rectangles of each dark pane. How youthful she looked in the candlelight. So fair and fine-boned, so unfaded, hardly older-looking than her own daughters, though of course in daylight she looked quite different. She was caring and good, a truly good person, I thought, with the tired fondness brought on by the end of a long day of shared labor. Look at what a nice dinner she’d made, what a lovely evening she had orchestrated. I even forgave her for that Thanksgiving story. She just wanted things to look the way she wanted them to look, that was all. No crime in that. Meanwhile, the pause was lengthening and becoming conspicuous. Frances sighed deeply, yet even then she held back from speaking for another moment, fingering her wineglass.

  At last she said quietly, “What I am proud of is being able to bring my whole family together tonight. We’ve been kept apart, some of us, for a long time by misunderstandings. But all that’s now in the past.”

  She turned her head to look first at me, then at our father. “And I’m just grateful there’s still time for us to recognize what we have in each other.”

  There was a long, draping silence.

  Then I laughed. Frances was refusing to leave the earlier conversation, I realized; she was being facetious. Teasing, once again. But no one else laughed. Instead a murmur of approval rippled around the table.

  Kamal actually bowed to her from his chair, pressing his buff-colored palms together. He was, I thought, in spite of his princely looks, an asinine young man. Someone who would wake up a sleeping baby to put it to bed. But at his end of the table, my father was also raising his hands. Tremulously, he clapped them, twice.

  Misunderstandings?

  She smiled at me with that enchanting smile.

  The next moment I had lurched to my feet and started to clear the table, clattering dishes together, spilling wine, upsetting Jane’s harvest arrangement so that nuts rolled across the tablecloth. My eyes stung and I could hardly see what I was doing.

  You conniver, Frances, I thought furiously. You cheat. Luring me out here, pretending to need my help. Pretending to put him in a nursing home. Knowing that if you told me the truth, that you wanted to pretend we were all one big happy family, having a nice big happy family reunion in your nice big house, I would never have agreed to come. My feelings didn’t matter. My memories didn’t count.

  I picked up a stack of Frances’s Blue Willow plates, imagining how satisfying it would be to drop them on the floor.

  Fortunately at that moment the baby began to wail upstairs, his urgent cries vibrating through the monitor. Amina jumped up to hurry to him, and a moment later Walter followed to see to the fire in the living room. Sarah and Jane had already risen to help me clear the dishes. Everyone else began shifting, blinking, looking foolish, like people who’ve been sitting in the dark when the lights come on.

  But just as they were all rising from the table, scraping back chairs and stretching and folding napkins, there came the sound of a person clearing his throat, and I heard my father say distinctly: “Proud to be here.”

  A pause. Encouraging smiles in his direction. Nice old guy, the rest of them were thinking. Unfair to be so disabled, to be so old. Must have been quite a figure in his
day, and still sharp as a tack. Good to have the voice of experience chime in to remind us all of what’s really important.

  Arlen was looking at my father in his chair. “And what makes you so proud of being here?” he asked gently. “Mr. Fiske?”

  “Her.” He raised his good hand to point to Frances.

  “What?” Frances was smiling gauzily. “What did he say?”

  “Her,” he repeated, now looking at me.

  “He’s so hard to understand.” Frances shook her head. “Really, that’s the hardest thing about a stroke. Though we’re making progress, isn’t that right, Dad?”

  “Hah,” he said, still looking at me.

  Amina was yawning behind her hand on one of the sofas, while the baby gazed imperturbably from her lap, his hair spiked into tiny black exclamation points. Kamal had already dismantled the portable crib, leaving it folded beside the rest of their paraphernalia in the front hall. Jane was back at work on The Sleeping Gypsy, looking sleepy and rumpled herself, sitting cross-legged on the floor, her black dress tucked up around her knees. She’d brought in most of the candles from the dining room and set them on top of the organ, around the vase of twigs and grasses, making the room glow with suggestive warmth.

  Sarah and Arlen sprawled on the carpet on the other side of the coffee table. Sarah had rolled up her white sleeves, exposing the big elbow joints on her thin arms, looking very like Frances had as a girl, propped up by her elbows, staring at the fire. I was still furious with Frances but had recovered myself enough while I was in the kitchen, rinsing dishes, that I was able to sit collectedly in the living room. Walter had brought out the bottle of Calvados Mary Ellen had given Frances, which he was pouring into thimble-sized sherry glasses, while Mary Ellen watched from a hard leather hassock next to my father’s wheelchair. The snow had stopped, Wen-Yi reported after stepping outside for a cigarette. A cold front was coming in from Canada, said Kamal; he’d heard the weather report on the radio in the car. But still everyone sat on, half stupefied, unwilling to surrender the warmth of the living room for the cold outside, though no one had said anything sensible for the last twenty minutes and in fact had resorted to talking about the baby, sure sign of a dying conversation.