The Ghost at the Table: A Novel

by Suzanne Berne

  “But we have to stay out of the dining room,” she went on, leading the way to the kitchen, usually the brightest, warmest room in the house, with a sanded wood floor and tall windows with folded-back shutters and Frances’s enormous old white Glenwood stove. Today the window shutters were closed and the kitchen felt as damp as the hall; only a small lamp above the stove had been switched on.

  “Jane’s with her math tutor.”

  Through the dining room door I could hear murmurings and what sounded like pages being turned. Frances listened tensely for a moment, then rolled her eyes. “Algebra. They’ve just started on variables.”

  “Variables.” I sat down gingerly at the round oak table by the windows. “Is Jane having a lot of trouble with math?”

  “Jane’s having a lot of trouble period.” Frances was filling the electric kettle. “Though nothing serious, of course.” She turned to face me. “I mean, she’s in high school. Do you remember high school?”

  “Mostly I’ve tried to forget it.”

  “Well, she’s in the middle of it and so she forgets everything else. Which, frankly, has made me a little scatter-brained myself lately.” Frances opened a glass-fronted cabinet. “Now, I had a tin of shortbread cookies in here. We have to have shortbread cookies if we’re going to have Scottish tea. I hope Walter and Jane didn’t eat them all.”

  “So, Frances,” I said, figuring it would be best to get this over with. “Why didn’t you tell me that Dad wasn’t in the nursing home yet?”

  Frances continued to riffle through her cabinets for a moment longer. Then she sighed and turned around, brushing a long wisp of hair out of her eyes.

  “Look, I’m really sorry, Cynnie,” she said. “I meant to tell you, but I kept thinking I’d have it all worked out before you got here. The woman who runs the home told me it was just going to be a few more days, then that turned into a few more days. I didn’t want to worry you, and right up until yesterday I thought it was all going to be taken care of. They were going to send a van down for him in the morning, but now that’s been messed up, too. Something to do with the holidays.” She sighed again and tucked another loose strand behind her ear. “I’m starting to wonder about this place, to be honest, though I don’t know what other choice we have at this point.”

  I’d watched her closely during this speech, but she remained composed and regretful, gazing back at me.

  “Can’t he stay on the Cape until after Thanksgiving?”

  “I’m afraid not. Ilse is going off traveling somewhere.”

  “Bird-watching?” Ilse was a biologist at the Oceanographic Institute in Woods Hole. Her specialty was shore birds.

  “Something like that. But she says she’s let him stay longer than she agreed to as it is. I’m really sorry about this, Cynnie.”

  It was on the tip of my tongue to say, Well, I’m going to Hartford, so you’ll have to deal with Dad on your own. But Frances looked so chastened, and so concerned about distressing me, that I stopped myself. How often on previous visits had I lain on one of her sofas with a headache, letting her bring me cups of tea and plates of sandwiches, listening to her repeat that she was sorry I wasn’t feeling well? I’d promised myself on the plane that this time I would not become pathetic around Frances.

  “I was going to go to Hartford tomorrow,” I said instead.

  “I know it’s a big imposition. You don’t have to come if you don’t want to.”

  “No, it’s all right.”

  “Really, it won’t take that long, I promise. We’ll drive to get him, drive to the nursing home, then be home in time for dinner. We could go to Hartford the day after tomorrow. Or right after Thanksgiving. Whatever you want.”

  “I’m sure it’ll be fine,” I said, magnanimously.

  The kettle had boiled. As she made our tea—the real way, warming the teapot first and using leaf tea, not tea bags—Frances talked about how nice it would be to see the Cape again, get a glimpse of the ocean, at least see Buzzards Bay. She’d opened a package of chocolate wafers, having given up on the shortbread cookies, and was arranging them on a Delft-blue china plate when the door to the dining room swung open behind me and I heard Jane come into the kitchen.

  “Aunt Cynnie!”

  “Well, if it isn’t the wee colleen,” I said, as Jane leaned over the back of my chair to give me a hug.

  I’d called Jane the “wee colleen” from the day she’d been born with bright red hair. But now she pulled away as if insulted, and when I turned around I realized my mistake. Jane had never been a pretty child—not in the robust, effortless way Sarah was pretty—but she’d been sassy and lithe and humorous, with her freckles and that curly red hair, elbows sticking out like coat hangers as she put her hands on her hips to announce that she was not tired enough to go to bed or that she would not eat putrid green beans at dinner, they were an excrescence. But in the two years since I’d seen her she’d lost the dignity of childhood and had begun to assume the absurdity and pathos that goes with having an adult body. She was suddenly, shockingly, fat, with a pronounced bust that she was trying to hide underneath a baggy black shirt, worn over a pair of black cargo pants stuffed into black lace-up commando boots. Her hair had grown bushy; she was wearing it in two stiff braids. Acne studded her chin and forehead. On the side of her neck was a small tattoo, which I hoped was temporary, of a heart with a knife through it.

  I smiled in confusion and made a doddering comment about how much older she looked, caught up suddenly in remembering myself at Jane’s age when my father used to call me “Pork Chop” or sometimes the “Porcellian princess.”

  Behind her stood a slender young Chinese man. Frances waved at him with a little flourish and introduced him as Wen-Yi Cheng. “Our math savior.”

  “We call him Wen-Two-Three,” scowled Jane.

  Taking no notice of either or them, Wen-Yi nodded in my direction, then declined Frances’s offer of tea, saying that he needed to get home, though his eyes strayed to the plate of chocolate wafers.

  “Wen-Yi lives in Arlington,” Frances told me. “He’s a doctoral student in applied mathematics at Tufts.”

  Wen-Yi nodded again as if these facts explained him entirely. He was a good-looking young man, no more than twenty-three or -four, a little bony and stoop-shouldered in his blue nylon cardigan, but with thick shiny black hair he kept tossing out of his eyes and a narrow face that had a lazy brooding sensuality about it, which suddenly sharpened into an expression of concentrated enthusiasm when he turned toward Frances.

  “I see you Wednesday afternoon?”

  “That would be fine, Wen-Yi.” She smiled as she opened the back door for him. “And don’t forget you’re coming to dinner on Thursday.”

  “I don’t forget.” He gazed at her with something of the same interest he’d displayed in the plate of chocolate wafers. “See you then. Bye for now.”

  “He’s coming?” Jane’s mouth fell open in exaggerated affront when Frances had closed the door behind him.

  Frances turned toward me. “He wanted to know if he could bring a pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving. He calls it ‘pump-king’ pie. Isn’t that sweet?”

  “Why didn’t you tell me Won Ton was coming?”

  “Stop it.” Frances frowned at Jane. “He’ll hear you.”

  “Mom. He’s already in his car.”

  “No, he’s not.”

  “Won Ton,” repeated Jane loudly.

  Through a gap in the window shutters I could see Wen-Yi, a lit cigarette in his mouth, climbing into a rusty mud-colored Datsun, parked out back by the potting shed. Hungrily pinching the cigarette between a thumb and forefinger, he took a deep drag, then leaned back in his seat to blow a luxuriant cloud of blue smoke at the windshield before starting the car and driving away. When I glanced up, I saw that both Frances and Jane had been watching, too.

  “I’ve asked him not to smoke in the house.” Frances was moving back toward the stove. “Anyway, I said pumpkin would be fine. Although I don�
��t really like store-bought pie. But someone else is baking a couple pies, anyway.”

  “Who?” demanded Jane.

  Frances picked up a dishrag and began wiping down the stove’s surface. “Your father has just informed me that he’s invited a new resident and his wife for dinner. They’re Egyptian.”

  Negative remarks about the Middle East had recently been made in the doctors’ lounge, Frances went on to explain, remarks overheard by the young resident. Walter wanted to smooth things over.

  “Great.” Jane gave her a dark look. “Thanksgiving at the UN.”

  “At least we know Wen-Yi eats turkey,” Frances said, ignoring Jane. “And of course pump-king pie.”

  “He’s the Pump-King.” Jane began fiddling with a wooden pepper mill, scattering pepper across the tabletop.

  “He’s lonely,” corrected Frances.

  “Or maybe he’s a summer squash. Little and yellow and—”

  “I said stop it.” Frances reached out and seized the pepper mill. For a moment she and Jane glared at each other.

  “You get pissed at me for everything.” Jane was the first to look away.

  “Watch your language,” snapped Frances.

  “Well, you do.”

  “Look. This is a nice young man who drives all the way out here—”

  “Oh right. Like he’s not getting paid.”

  I stood up, saying that I needed to use the bathroom, and went out into the hall. From the time Jane was small, it had been like this: Frances pruning Jane, Jane bristling back. Say please, say thank you. Don’t do that, that’s not nice. Pick, pick. Frances had always been restrictive with Jane, right down to the plainness of her name, while Jane treated each of Frances’s comments as a minor but incapacitating outrage. Yet I was never more envious of Frances than at moments like these, or maybe I was envious of Jane. I can’t recall ever arguing with my mother, who spent most of her time in bed with the bedroom door closed and the shades pulled down. Though from what I’d just glimpsed in the kitchen, the current squabble between Frances and Jane was complicated by some jealousy as well, created by a shared interest in Wen-Yi, who was taken with Frances, which Jane had figured out.

  The argument was still going on. In the bathroom, I splashed water on my face, then combed my hair with a tortoiseshell comb I found in the wooden medicine chest over the sink. Afterward I sat on the toilet lid for a few minutes, imagining myself back in my Dolores Street apartment, looking out my front window at the park across the street, where on sunny afternoons couples ate sandwiches under squat palm trees that looked like big pineapples. Deciding whether to make myself a salad for lunch that could serve as dinner as well. Deciding not to call the bookstore owner, then calling him at his store and hanging up when his wife, who worked with him, answered the phone. Recently, I’d been told, they’d gotten caller ID, at her insistence. I wondered if he had left a message on my answering machine, which would join others left on my answering machine, messages that I didn’t erase, but kept skipping over, delaying the moment when I would have to listen to them.

  The kitchen was quiet when I returned. Frances was sitting alone at the oak table, drinking tea.

  “Not a very welcoming scene,” she said ruefully. “Sorry about that.”

  I let her pour me a cup of tea. Frances used teacups and saucers for tea, never mugs. China creamers, sugar bowls, real silver teaspoons. Tea, for Frances, was an occasion. I always began my visits by enjoying her ceremoniousness: the lighting of candles at dinner, the use of cloth napkins and napkin rings, the sprigs of lavender placed between folded sheets in the linen closet. There was something almost religious about Frances’s attention to detail. But then the rigidity of these domestic rituals, their exhausting thoughtfulness, plus the unspoken demand for appreciation, started to curdle my enjoyment of them and finally made me feel put upon, until I couldn’t wait to get home to my own slipshod habits. Which always became more slipshod after one of my visits to Frances’s house.

  While I was stirring milk and sugar into my tea, Frances said, “You probably think I’m too critical of her.”

  “I don’t think anything. I just got here.”

  “She’s into the Goth look, as you may have noticed.” Frances blew on her tea to cool it. “There’s been some teasing at school.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  “And she’s gained a little weight.”

  I nodded, recognizing that something was being asked of me.

  “Walter thinks she should see a therapist.”

  “He does?” I said cautiously.

  “She came downstairs one morning with a couple scratches on her arm.”

  “Scratches?”

  “They were probably just scratches. Walter wasn’t sure. But my feeling is, you have to be careful about these things. Pay attention but not too much attention. Because then they’ll just do it to get more attention. And Jane’s always been after attention.”

  “But it seems like you have to pay attention—”

  Frances wasn’t listening. “Piercings, tattoos. You saw her neck. Henna,” she added quickly. “But who knows what’s next. I wish she wouldn’t wear so much black. If she would just try to look like someone in a decent mood she’d have an easier time.”

  I cast around for something helpful to say, but my head felt cottony and congested, as if I’d caught a cold on the airplane. Also, I was waiting for Frances to bring up the “rough time” with Walter she’d alluded to on the phone.

  Frances made a face. “Oh, it’s just the age. I know I’m too critical. But she’s so hard sometimes. She thinks everything is my fault. Though I don’t know what she’s so angry about, frankly. She’s had a perfectly nice childhood.”

  She gave me another rueful smile. “Then again I suppose everything is my fault. It has to be someone’s fault, so it might as well be mine.”

  I understood now that I was being asked to enlist on her side, ranged against unreasonable adolescence, so I nodded again. But my true sympathies lay with Jane and her bullheaded tantrums. I’d had terrible rages myself as a child, often directed at Frances. I remembered exactly that feeling of falling down a dark hole of rage, then being stuck at the dank bottom, with a mouthful of dirt. But mostly it was Jane’s refusal to act in her own best interests, her inability even to see what those best interests might be, that I recognized so well.

  “What time do we need to leave for the Cape tomorrow?”

  Frances stopped smiling and gazed into the teacup in her hands. Instead of answering she put down her cup and turned it around a few times in its saucer, making a hard chalky little noise. “Come into the living room for a minute,” she said at last, standing up. “I have something to show you.”

  I don’t know what I expected to see, one of Frances’s latest “finds” I suppose. Certainly I never dreamed it would be what greeted me from the far end of the living room, at first almost invisible in the rainy afternoon light filtering around the edges of those heavy drapes. Set into an alcove by the fireplace, in a spot previously occupied by a green velvet love seat, and illuminated by a single standing wrought-iron lamp, sat my grandmother’s player organ, which I had not seen since I was thirteen and had not imagined ever seeing again.

  “Where did you get that?” For a moment longer I held on to the hope that it was not our old organ, just one like it.

  Frances explained that when Ilse had called to say that she was divorcing our father, she’d offered the organ to Frances, perhaps as a sort of bribe in exchange for Frances making all the arrangements for him, or perhaps because Ilse had remembered that the organ was sitting in a climate-controlled storage facility in Hyannis and thought someone might come after her for the fees.

  “Can you believe it?” said Frances. “The one thing he held on to.”

  Upstairs Walter and Jane were walking around, their footsteps making the old floorboards creak. A window opened then shut. The rain had started up again.

  Frances’s face had a fl
ushed, exultant look, though again an apologetic note had come into her voice. “He probably figured it would be worth something someday.”

  I was away at boarding school when my father sold our house in West Hartford. My mother had died six months before and he was anxious to get rid of the house and everything in it. One April morning he’d held a yard sale of all our furnishings, selling also my mother’s books and her china and silver, and even our family photographs, which I guess people bought for their fancy brass frames. Only because he called Helen at the last minute, and she borrowed a friend’s car and drove to Hartford from Boston, were we able to salvage a few knickknacks, mostly things from our own rooms. People are shocked whenever I tell this story, which is probably why I’ve told it so often—I’m not immune to the glamour of the dysfunctional childhood—yet at the time my father’s desire to be free of his past life, so encumbered by illness, made a miserable sort of sense. Of course Helen couldn’t have loaded the organ into a borrowed car, even if she’d wanted to. But I did recall her mentioning that the organ wasn’t out on the lawn that day, with all the chairs and tables and rolled-up rugs, the gray stitching on their undersides wet with dew, and half a dozen embarrassed-looking neighbors brushing past the rhododendrons and azalea bushes, picking through damp cardboard boxes of old clothes and record albums.

  Frances had been watching me; now she gave a penitent little moan. “I know. It’s lousy. I shouldn’t have sprung this on you, too. I was going to say no when Ilse asked if I wanted to take it, but then I thought we should at least have something to keep in the family.”

  Clearly she’d hoped that I would be pleased that the organ had been rediscovered and was now regretting her decision to surprise me. Even so, I could feel her struggling to suppress her excitement.

  “You know, an heirloom,” she persisted. “Some kind of legacy. Something to hand down to the girls.”