The Ghost at the Table: A Novel

by Suzanne Berne

  I had forgotten that airline passengers could no longer be met at the gate, so I was briefly disheartened when I looked for Frances as I got off the plane at Logan and didn’t see her. But riding the escalator down to baggage claim, I spotted Walter’s thick gray hair and big, important-looking head near the luggage carousels. He was wearing a pair of rectangular, dark-framed glasses, a much trendier style than I’d have expected on him. Otherwise he looked tired and pale in his wrinkled Burberry trench coat and impatient at being somewhere other than the hospital in the middle of the day. When our eyes met, he seemed relieved to see me.

  “Frances asked me to pick you up,” he said, as I stepped off the escalator. He stooped to give me a kiss on the cheek.

  “How nice of you,” I said, trying to hide my disappointment.

  As soon as he’d grabbed my bags, Walter plunged off toward the parking garage, while I trotted self-consciously behind, hurrying to keep up with him. Once we were heading out of the airport in his car, he noted that he was glad I could make it and that my visit would cheer Frances up. She had been feeling very low lately. Morose. Apprehensive. Sometimes she had trouble getting out of bed in the morning; he’d come home at night to find her still in her bathrobe. Couldn’t get errands done or manage to make dinner. Canceled appointments with clients for no reason, except that she was tired, or thought she might be getting the flu, or she forgot a date she’d made with friends, then was afraid to call to apologize in case they weren’t speaking to her. Sometimes she spent the whole day in her bedroom.

  “Maybe it’s Sarah being gone,” he said testily. “That empty-nest thing.”

  “But Jane’s still at home,” I said.

  “Frances and Jane aren’t getting along.” Walter stared out at the road as a sleety rain began spattering the windshield. “Especially this week. Frances has been all jazzed up.”

  “Jazzed up?” I was having trouble figuring out my role in this conversation. In the twenty-some years they’ve been married, Walter had never spoken to me about Frances.

  He gave me a meaningful look under his thick eyebrows. “Acting like Thanksgiving is some kind of official state ceremony.”

  “Well.” I relaxed slightly. “You know how Frances loves an occasion.”

  Walter grunted. “Prepare yourself.”

  “Thank God no one has a birthday this weekend,” I added, daringly, and we both laughed. I settled back in my seat, feeling comfortably dazed from the flight. Walter had put on a CD as we left the airport; now a meditative piano took over from a melancholy sax.

  “Ever since your father’s stroke,” he began to say, “actually ever since Helen—” But then his beeper went off and he fumbled to unclip it from his belt.

  I had forgotten about my father. It occurred to me that he might even now be at Frances’s house, on a furlough from the nursing home, and that in a few minutes I would have to greet him.

  Walter glanced at his beeper, then pushed it back onto his belt, muttering, “She can wait.” When I looked at him inquiringly, he said, “A crazy patient.”

  “Really crazy?”

  “Crazy enough.”

  I nodded sympathetically, though I wanted to ask, “Crazy enough to do what?” Instead I said, “So how’s the home, by the way?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Dad’s nursing home. How’s it working out?”

  “He’s not there yet.”

  “What?”

  “Frances didn’t tell you?” Walter glanced sideways at me. “You and she are driving down to the Cape tomorrow to get him.”

  “Driving to the Cape?” I stared at him. “To his house?”

  “The nursing home was supposed to have an opening before now, but I guess whoever was supposed to die didn’t.” Walter gave a glum little laugh. “Anyway, the plan is for you two to take him.”

  “But Frances didn’t say anything to me—”

  “Frances has been forgetting everything lately. She probably thinks she told you all about it.”

  “But she didn’t.”

  “I can see that.”

  We stopped talking for several minutes as I gazed out at the trees alongside the highway. Maples and oaks, the trees of New England. I always miss them when I’m in California, but whenever I come east the sight of them makes me feel claustrophobic, especially when they’re gray and skeletal, as they were that afternoon. New England trees grow too closely together, and there’s too much underbrush. Every Sunday when I was a child, my father used to herd us off on long damp hikes through the woods and old overgrown orchards of West Hartford, insisting on leaving the trail, crossing streams on slippery stepping-stones, bushwhacking through briars and blackberry bushes. Joking about Hansel and Gretel, asking if we had our bread crumbs handy.

  I took a deep breath and turned back to Walter. “I’m sorry, but I can’t drive to the Cape.” My voice was calm, reasonable, the voice of a businesswoman with a full schedule who’s promised to spend time with her demanding relatives but must be firm about limits. “I’ve made plans to go to Hartford tomorrow, to do some research. I came out here early especially to do that.”

  “Can’t you go another day?”

  “I’ll rent a car to go to Hartford. Frances can drive down to get him.”

  “Frances has almost stopped driving.” Walter kept his eyes on me. “She’s afraid of getting into a car accident. She says she’s having problems with her inner ear, that her balance is off, and she has dizzy spells and needs to get her thyroid tested, but it’s all bullshit. She’s depressed and she won’t admit it.”

  Walter rarely used profanity. The air inside the car suddenly became charged and tense, but he continued talking, his voice growing hoarse. “It’s been worst for Jane. Every time the poor kid walks in the door, Frances finds some reason to leave the room. She says it’s because Jane blames her for everything and she can’t stand it.”

  “But isn’t that sort of normal?” I was trying to attend to what he was saying about Jane while also trying to understand how Frances could have neglected to tell me that I was going to spend two hours in the car with my father, driving him to a nursing home.

  Walter gave a consenting groan. “It’s been pretty much hell at home. Lucky for Sarah she’s at college.”

  Although this was another worry, because Sarah was in New York. In October, Frances had read a magazine article about a potential terrorist plot to derail the presidential election by bombing major East Coast universities. From then on, she’d called Sarah two, three, four times a day, just to make sure she was all right, until Sarah stopped answering her cell phone.

  “And you can imagine what that did to Frances.” Walter jutted his chin at the road. Sarah hadn’t been home once all fall, he told me, and had only agreed to come for Thanksgiving if she could bring a friend. “For protection,” he added.

  I sat up in my seat. Walter had always sided with Frances when she and the girls had differences, at least publicly. They’d had their problems over the years, of course, but in the way that mature, successful married people were supposed to have problems: as something to “work through” so that they could be even more satisfied with their lives than before, at least until their next set of problems. But the problems Walter was describing didn’t sound like regular problems. With something like panic, I thought of my quiet apartment on Dolores Street with its pale blue walls and narrow view of the East Bay, and of the cheerful Thanksgiving I would be missing at Carita’s apartment, mariachi music on the stereo, those chili lights glowing, her little dog barking as people came in and out.

  Tomorrow I would go to Hartford, as planned. Walter could drive Frances to Cape Cod to pick up our father.

  We passed a humped, sandy landfill, then a sign for Walden Pond. Rain was falling harder now, streaking my window. Walter’s beeper sounded again; this time he turned it off without checking the message. Somewhere the woman who had paged Walter was waiting for his call, perhaps sitting anxiously beside the phone, clut
ching a slip of paper in her hand. A horn section came on the CD.

  “She also thinks I want to have an affair,” he said abruptly.

  I tried not to look shocked. Frances had warned me they were going through a rough time, but I’d never expected Walter to confide something so personal to me, just as I’d never expected him to complain about Frances, or that their rough time could involve an affair.

  “Well, do you?” I turned in my seat to face him.

  Walter flinched. “No. But Frances won’t listen to me.”

  When I asked why Frances thought he wanted to have an affair, he sighed, finally loosening his grip on the wheel as we stopped at a traffic light. “Because she’s afraid I’ll have an affair. And these days she goes right from being afraid that something will happen to believing it’s already happening.”

  “Could she want you to have an affair?”

  But this thought was too capricious for Walter and he glared at the road, once more gripping the wheel. When the light changed, I asked more carefully, “Why is she afraid that you’ll have an affair?”

  He shrugged and said he didn’t know.

  “There must be some reason.”

  At the same time, I was thinking how amazing it was to be asking Walter such intimate questions. He was twelve years my senior and had always seemed like a remote person. Well meaning, decent, willing to be friendly and even solicitous toward me, but usually absent somehow when I visited, ducking out of conversations, excusing himself after dinner, content to go up to his study and leave me and Frances to our “girl talk.” I found this male detachment a little oppressive—and a little judgmental—especially compared with most of the men I knew in San Francisco, who’d acquired a fizzy urbanity and liked “girl talk,” even if they were straight. At the same time I’d always been conscious of being attracted to Walter’s broad shoulders and brusque-looking five o’clock shadow, his shrewd, tolerant, ponderous masculinity that struck me as outdated but also, in a way that was almost embarrassing to think about, chivalric. He was chief of radiology at Cambridge City Hospital, and whenever he spoke it was with a natural authority and confidence, which at the hospital must have sounded ordinary enough but outside translated into an intimidating complacency, amplified by the fold of belly over his belt and the quiet assurance of his medical experience, all that vital, appalling knowledge about the human body that most of us don’t have, and don’t want to have, either. But we want someone else to have it.

  “So who does she think you want to have an affair with?” I asked, when Walter shrugged again.

  “This woman she’s hired as her assistant.” He reached around with one hand to massage the back of his neck, then frowned for a moment in irritable concentration. “Mary Ellen … Mary Ellen … I can’t even remember her last name. It’s crazy. I’ve met her maybe half a dozen times. She comes to the house to do Frances’s books and keep track of accounts, check on furniture orders. Nice person. Kind of an old maid,” he added thoughtlessly.

  “Why doesn’t Frances just fire her then? Get her out of the way?”

  “Good question,” said Walter. “She’s invited her to Thanksgiving dinner.”

  “To Thanksgiving?”

  “You know how Frances loves an occasion,” he said grimly.

  We passed the town green in Concord Center, then the big white Colonial Inn with its long porches; a moment later we were going by the entrance to the Old North Bridge. Four or five school buses idled in the parking lot as we drove by, and despite the rain a troop of children in bright yellow and blue raincoats were vanishing toward the river.

  “So, have you ever had an affair?” I felt emboldened by the unusual rapport that had sprung up between us in the car.

  His face stiffened. Then he frowned and pushed his glasses back onto the bridge of his nose. Walter had a large fleshy handsome nose, broken in high school, though not by playing football, as you might expect; he fell off his bicycle when he ran into a fire hydrant. He said carefully: “What I think all this is about is that Frances is worried about your father.”

  “Well,” I said with a little laugh, because Walter hadn’t answered my question. “I’m not surprised she’s worried. She’s hardly seen him in decades and now suddenly he wants to be part of the family again.”

  Walter made a noncommittal noise.

  “You know the old story, don’t you?” I asked.

  “What story?” he said warily.

  “I’m sure Frances has told you.” I leaned back in my seat, finally enjoying the clandestine feeling of talking about Frances with Walter. “That everyone used to think he killed our mother?”

  Walter glanced at me sharply, his small grayish eyes alert with disapproval. “To be honest, Cynthia, that’s just the kind of thing I’d like you to avoid raising with Frances this weekend, if you don’t mind. We’ve got enough going on.”

  I stared out my window at a gray stockade fence, then at a dark stand of pine trees. No need to warn me to behave myself. I was no wallower in the past—the present had more than enough swamps, thank you very much. And I hadn’t asked to fly out here, either; we could damn well turn around and drive straight back to the airport if that’s how it was going to be.

  But the conversation was over anyway, because we were pulling into the gravel driveway of Frances’s house. I just had time to ask, “So why didn’t Frances tell me that she was having such a hard time?” and for Walter to answer, “Because she was afraid you wouldn’t come,” when there was Frances herself, standing under the vines in the doorway, smiling and waving to us.

  “An airy, barnlike Colonial” was my description of the Alcott house. “Perfect for neighborhood gatherings and amateur theatricals but snug enough for quiet evenings by the fire.” For Dickinson’s home in Emily’s Room, I wrote: “Cloistered behind a row of hemlocks waits a neat Federal-style redbrick house, hardly remarkable from the road, yet look closely, and you’ll see it’s lit from within by a bright unwavering spirit.” (Compliments of General Electric? scribbled Carita in the margin of this passage, knowing quite well that Don favored this sort of sentimental curlicue, my specialty.)

  If I had to describe Frances’s house, I might begin by noting the old fieldstone walls, shaggy with English ivy, and the faded-looking forest green trim on the windows, also the wide-timbered double carriage doors set into a wing of the house that Frances had remodeled to look like an old stable, now the office for her interior design business. Perched atop the slate roof was a slatted dovecote crowned by an oxidized copper goose. Even this late in November, the lawn was dappled with yellow maple leaves.

  A spray of bittersweet hung on the front door. The rain had thinned to a mist and as I got out of the car the sun came out for an instant or two, which made everything seem luminous, the yellow leaves, the bittersweet, the old stone walls, and also slightly artificial, like a hand-tinted photograph.

  “You’re here,” cried Frances, hurrying down the steps into the driveway, opening a big red umbrella over her head. “I can’t believe you’re here. And for Thanksgiving! Incroyable!”

  “I can’t believe it, either.” I smiled idiotically as Frances dropped the umbrella onto the gravel and seized my hands. She held out my arms and gave them a joyful little crisscross swing, then surveyed me in my ratty sheepskin coat.

  “Don’t leave that umbrella lying there open like that, Frances,” growled Walter, slamming the car doors. “It’ll get wet.”

  He shouldered past us with my bags, giving us both a bear-like stare over the shoulder of his trench coat. I wondered if he was already regretting that I’d come. I always took up a lot of Frances’s attention during my visits, which I knew he sometimes minded. And Frances looked well enough. I’d been prepared for a gray-faced wreck, but she looked the same as always: tall, angular, comely. Elegant even in an old wool fisherman’s sweater, worn corduroy pants and scuffed leather boots, her auburn hair twisted in a casual knot, those light green eyes radiant with restrained but eager sy
mpathy.

  “Oh Walter,” she called after him. “It’s an umbrella, for gods-sake!” She drew me closer, whispering conspiratorially, “He’s getting cantankerous.”

  Then she pulled me up the front steps and into the house, clucking over how tired I must be, how hungry after my long flight now that the airlines had stopped serving food, not that airline food had ever been edible. Inside, the house hadn’t changed much since my last visit. Exquisitely unfussy, arranged with Frances’s “finds”: the mahogany coat rack with its tarnished brass hooks, gently faded Turkish rugs, the huge ornate old cloudy French mirror, slightly canted on the wall, so that whoever stepped into the hall saw themselves softened and framed, caught in a genteel tableau. The mirror was set over a handsome old walnut mourner’s bench that Frances had rescued from one of the fire sales or flea markets or estate auctions she was always attending. (“What are you looking for?” I asked her once, when she insisted that we had to drive all the way to Brimfield to an antiques fair. “Oh, everything,” she replied, smiling faintly.) The house even smelled as if it belonged to another era, a staid, ample, more enduring time when people baked every day, with real butter, and made their own soup stock, and used pie safes and enamel-lined ice boxes, both of which Frances had installed in her pantry, though she owned a modern refrigerator, of course, too. It was all completely familiar, more familiar somehow even than my own apartment, and yet as Frances took my coat I realized something was different.

  It was the light, the house was too dark. Though it wasn’t yet four o’clock, Frances had turned on a lamp made from an old wooden sextant in the front hall, and also a lamp in what I could see of the living room—she didn’t believe in overhead lighting—and pulled the heavy moss-colored velvet drapes. There was also a sharp musty odor that struck me as strange. Frances was usually a scrupulous housekeeper, especially as the house doubled as an informal showroom for her clients.

  “It’s so damp today,” she explained, when she saw me notice the curtains. And for the first time I did think she seemed altered somehow, a little furtive. But the next instant she was her old self, smiling comfortingly. “Now what can I make you? Do you want a cup of tea? I have really nice Scottish tea.