The Ghost at the Table: A Novel

by Suzanne Berne

  “Hello, Dad,” called Frances, as Ilse shut the front door.

  Ilse did not offer to take our coats, and with relief I understood that this visit was meant to be short. The cottage was very warm. The smell of bleach rose from the foyer’s tiled floor, mixing with an almost tidal reek of bathroom odors and fried meat and stale heated air, queasily cut with a floral air freshener.

  “Dad? We’re here.”

  No answer.

  Ilse had packed him two suitcases. They were crowded into the foyer along with six or seven large cardboard boxes, each labeled with black marker in Ilse’s blocky scientific print: SUMMER CLOTHES, WINTER CLOTHES, BOOKS, PAPERS. One box was marked: ROBERT FISKE/PERSONAL EFFECTS. I just had time to reflect, not very coherently, or originally, on the sad irony of how much went into the making of a life, yet how quickly it was packed away, before I realized that there were too many boxes for my father’s “shared accommodations” at Greenswood Manor.

  “Frances,” I murmured, “he knows where he’s going, doesn’t he?”

  “Of course he does.”

  She turned to Ilse, who was now standing by the suitcases with her hands on her hips, surveying us as if she were deciding whether we might fit into a box as well. Robert Fiske/Estranged Daughters. Ilse’s eyes seemed to be watering, but that could have been her contact lenses. When I first knew her she’d worn heavy black-framed glasses—the type once favored by Aristotle Onassis—which had made her wide Scandinavian face look not just severe but slightly insensible. The glasses were gone, but she still had the same white-blonde hair gathered into a topknot, perhaps a little scantier now, still the same impersonal blue gaze. Still the same pale swollen voluptuous mouth, startling in such an otherwise dispassionate face. Liver Lips, Frances and I had called her, when Ilse first appeared at our house. She’d never changed her name, either. Ilse Arnholm.

  Though when I looked more carefully I saw that what I’d taken for a tan was taupe-colored makeup, thickly applied, extending from her hairline to just below her jaw, as if Ilse couldn’t be bothered with her neck, figuring no one would look that far.

  Frances said quietly, “Ilse? You told him about the arrangements, didn’t you?”

  Ilse squinted back at her with pursed lips. “Arrangements?”

  “He knows where he’s going, right?”

  “He is going with you.”

  “She means,” I cut in, “where we’re taking him.”

  “He is going with you.” Ilse was peering closely at Frances. “He thinks he is going to you.”

  I felt my face go white. “But I’m sure Frances made it very clear—”

  “He wants to be with you.”

  “But you made it clear,” I insisted, turning to Frances. Frances stared back at me, eyes wide above the black collar of her coat. I waited for her to say something, to remind Ilse of their arrangement, agreed upon weeks ago, but she seemed too shocked to speak. It was worse for her, I remember thinking. She still had some unresolved feelings for our father—whatever had led her to visit five or six nursing homes and worry about jokes made at his expense—while I had none. I did not care what became of him. It was fury on Frances’s behalf that led me to round on Ilse in that close odorous little foyer.

  “Listen,” I said. “Frances agreed to find a good place for him. Which she did. And as I understand it, you promised—”

  “I did not promise anything.” For the first time since our arrival, Ilse looked directly at me, with surprise.

  We’d been keeping our voices pitched low, but now suddenly from the living room came the sound of my father shouting unintelligibly in a harsh, glottal voice. When I took a step backward, I could just see the toes of his shiny black wingtips, resting on the metal footrests of a wheelchair.

  “You can’t do this,” I said to Ilse.

  “Do what?”

  “Leave us with him like this.”

  “I am not leaving you,” she pointed out, returning her gaze to Frances. A cautious, calculating look had replaced her surprised expression. “You are taking him.”

  “Making us tell him,” I said.

  Pale hair wisped around her face, a few strands catching in the corners of her mouth. “He is your father.”

  “He’s your husand,” I shot back. “You married him.”

  “I was very young.” She twisted her mouth. “I did not know anything then.”

  “He had plenty of money, you knew that.”

  I expected some retort at this accusation, which was not entirely fair—Ilse had never been interested in money; on the contrary, she’d always insisted on a rather frugal lifestyle with my father—but as I was speaking a surprised expression had once more come over her face. She glanced at Frances and then returned her gaze to me, shaking her head in disbelief. “You really do not know?”

  “Know what? How you used him?”

  “Used him?” Ilse gave a barking laugh.

  Else, Frances and I used to call her, pretending to misunderstand her name. As in: Or Else. Ilse was Norwegian, though she’d grown up in Switzerland. The Swiss Miss. The Goatherd. We’d spent hours mimicking her accent up in our rooms: Vell, vat do you sink of cuckoo clocks und chocolate? Vee ver neutral during zee war, had to stay home to protect zee cuckoo clocks und zee chocolate. Stuffing ourselves with potato chips filched from the pantry, our mouths greasy with spite and despair. Heidi marries her grandfather. She keeps his wallet in her dirndl. In return, Ilse had never looked upon us with anything more than a quiet, enduring, annihilating disregard.

  Yet now, a quarter of a century later, when Frances and I should be impossible to disregard, when we were grown women, with a husband and children, in Frances’s case, with lives at least as adult and significant as Ilse’s own, it seemed that she had once more outmaneuvered us. Ilse didn’t want to deal with her old husband’s wrath at being stuck in a nursing home—let his daughters be the ones to tell him. Then she could go back to measuring the wing span of storm petrels, or researching the nesting habits of pelagic birds, or whatever it was she did, while we hauled his molting old seagull carcass away.

  Or that’s how it seemed to me at the time, though even then I had the feeling that I was missing something, some confusing undercurrent running just below the surface of this encounter. Ilse was not a wicked person, only phlegmatic and self-absorbed. Her tone was most likely not as clipped as I heard it, her reddened eyes not impersonal but full of guilt and worry and exhaustion and panic. But during those few minutes in that narrow foyer, I was overcome by the feeling that nothing had changed, that once more I was a frightened, furious teenager, and that if I stayed in that house another half hour, I’d be calling her Else and making snide comments about cuckoo clocks.

  “You old bitch,” said Frances, breaking her silence.

  I don’t think I’d heard Frances insult anyone since she was seventeen, when she’d decided almost overnight to adopt a Victorian code of conduct that excluded saying anything overtly unpleasant—the same code that now required her to use teacups instead of mugs, and forgo overhead lighting, and insist that Jane would feel better if she stopped wearing so much black.

  “I want a list,” Frances began sputtering now, her voice high and breathy, almost childlike. “I want a list of every dime he’s spent on you and I want it back.”

  “There is no money,” said Ilse, a small humiliating smile playing about her lips, “if that is what you came for.”

  “Liar.”

  “Frances.” I reached to take her arm. Frances continued to glare at Ilse, while Ilse gazed back at her. She looked more interested, than anything else, in what Frances would say next. I might have even caught a quiver of pity in the attentive way she examined Frances’s face.

  “Is that what you think I have had with him?” she asked finally. “Some life of leisure?”

  Frances was almost panting. “Oh, go to hell,” she said, ridiculously.

  Ilse gave another little smile, as if she weren’t seeing Frances a
t all but only someone pretending to be Frances. “I was very young then,” she repeated. “But I am not young anymore.” Then she sighed and pushed at her pale hair.

  At that moment I found myself actually feeling sorry for Ilse, for her skeletal years of tending an old man and satisfying her appetites only at meals, watching the sunset every evening from a picture window. No children of her own for company, his never visiting. She had indeed been young when she married my father. By my reckoning, Ilse couldn’t be more than a few years past fifty now.

  “Well, take care of him,” she told Frances. “You have waited long enough.”

  An eloquent look of dislike passed between them, though once again there seemed to be something else as well, a kind of concurrence that I did not understand, as if something had been finally agreed upon that had previously been in doubt.

  But perhaps even then I’d begun to get an inkling, because the next moment I heard myself say to Ilse, “Just out of curiosity, suppose we decide to leave right now without him. What about that?”

  “Then he goes to a motel.” Ilse’s lips drew back, exposing both rows of her square white teeth.

  I pictured my father sitting alone in his wheelchair beside an empty swimming pool, a fluorescent pink VACANCY sign winking behind him, one letter burnt out.

  “You wouldn’t do it,” I said.

  Ilse shrugged. “People are always doing things no one thought they would do.” Then, raising her eyebrows, she gave Frances the strangest look, almost a warning look, as if the two of them were speaking over my head, the way adults do around children.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

  “No?” Ilse held my gaze for another moment, then gave a final shrug and led the way into the living room, where my father was waiting for us.

  FRANCES MUST HAVE prepared me better than I thought, or maybe I’d prepared myself over the past weeks of reading brochures about whirlpools and physical therapy, because the sight of him was not a shock but rather confirmatory. He sat bonelessly in his wheelchair, his mouth sagging to one side, his skin the color of damp paper towels. Eyes dull, nose tumid, neck a tidepool of wattles. A mollusk in a blue blazer.

  Worse to remember what he had been: Slim, very upright and fastidious—sprightly, if that word didn’t imply girlishness. A head of thick auburn hair and that glossy little red moustache, which he used to stroke between his thumb and forefinger. His face long, fine, triangular. The same shape, in fact, as Frances’s.

  He was always moving in those days, fiddling with his tie or a button on his jacket, snapping his fingers, glancing around, growling demands or complaints or funny, disparaging comments. Impatience seemed to galvanize him, like electricity. Even in the coldest weather he went without a hat or scarf, leaving his coat open, a man of barely contained internal combustion. My mother, on the other hand, had had poor circulation and was often cold. She aged very quickly, as chronically ill people do, while he continued to transmit itchy vigor and a youthful sure-footedness, springing up on the balls of his feet as he walked, climbing stairs two at a time. Now he was bloated and shriveled, with a fat abdomen and spindly arms. A straggle of thin gray whiskers hung from his cheeks.

  Heidi’s goat, I thought, before I could stop myself.

  Litter surrounded his wheelchair: Styrofoam cups and paper plates, dirty napkins, piles of old newspapers, some gone yellow. The rest of the cottage was, at least as far as I could tell, as neat as it had been the last time I saw it, except for this one corner of the living room, which Ilse had ceded to my father. Wisps of steam trailed over his head, issuing from a round plastic vaporizer that whispered behind him. The bad smell I’d noticed earlier was stronger here. For a moment I was afraid I might be sick.

  “Well, we made it,” Frances announced at my elbow. “Just like the postman. Through snow and sleet.” Gratefully, I realized she was trying to sound unflappable, which must have cost her something after that ugly skirmish with Ilse. She stepped over an open box of doughnuts. “Hi, Dad.”

  He snarled something that sounded like “Get out.”

  Frances blinked. “I’m sorry, Dad? What was that?” She turned to me with an apprehensive look. “What did he say?”

  Ilse had come up behind us, carrying what looked like a black leather bowling bag. MEDICATIONS was written on a strip of masking tape on one side. She smiled curtly. “You will understand him better when you spend more time with him.” Then she busied herself with rotating his wheelchair so that it faced the foyer. With an effort she managed to roll the wheelchair right over a drift of newspapers.

  Stepping back, she gestured for me to take the handles as if she were a pilot handing over the controls. “It is not going to snow here,” she said, as I began pushing the wheelchair toward the door. “It has not snowed once all fall. We do not usually get snow until Christmas.”

  With Ilse’s help, I navigated my father’s wheelchair out of the cottage and down the walkway, where I parked him next to the minivan. He sat barking out furious vocables. “Ha!” he cried, his face turning blotchy and purplish. “Hey!”

  “Don’t worry, Dad,” said Frances firmly, but looking scared. “Everything’s going to be all right.”

  Then he stopped saying anything, his hands lying open on his knees like an empty pair of gloves. Frances went back into the cottage with Ilse to get his suitcases and boxes, leaving me to keep watch on him. I turned my face toward the bay, inhaling the fresh briny air.

  “Well, Dad,” I began. I was waiting for him to shout at me, as he had done so often when I was younger, pointing and snapping his fingers, growling at me to be quiet so he could hear the weather report on the radio, or the baseball score, or a commercial for razor blades. I even expected him to hit me with one of those limp-looking hands, and half hoped he would, so that I could feel justified for not caring what happened to him. But he never looked in my direction.

  Together Frances and Ilse made several trips from the house to the car, loading suitcases and boxes in the back of the van. “I guess that’s it,” said Frances. We helped my father into the backseat and belted him in. Again I expected him to protest and thrash around, but he was compliant enough, motionless once we’d got him settled in his seat. Ilse handed in his overcoat and an old dented gray fedora. Then she demonstrated how to fold and unfold the wheelchair, which was stowed last. Frances climbed into the passenger seat once more and sat looking down at her lap. Ilse had gone to stand near the Japanese maple, one hand shading her eyes, though the day was still overcast. The back of her white blouse luffed in the breeze.

  “Good-bye,” I said. Then I surprised myself by adding, “I’m sure he’ll miss you.”

  “He never cared so much for me,” said Ilse.

  She stepped over to the curb and stooped to peer in at the old man inside the van. He refused to look at her but sat staring out at a lantern-shaped bird feeder set on an aluminum pole near the driveway.

  “Be well, Robert Fiske,” she said. When I looked again she was up the stone-flagged path, shutting the door to their cottage.

  To postpone the moment when I would have to be alone with my father and Frances, I walked over and picked two or three of the brown hydrangea flowers. There wasn’t anything more to do—no further ceremony marking the end of this part of my father’s life and ushering him and his boxes into what was left—so with a final look at the bay, I got into the van and laid the flowers on the dashboard. Maybe during the drive to Boston I’d ask my father why he’d held on to that organ all these years, when he’d got rid of everything else. But probably Ilse hadn’t told him about that, either, that she’d forged his name and signed the thing over to Frances.

  Donated his organ.

  I shocked myself by laughing out loud.

  “What?” Frances looked whitely over at me.

  “Stop,” she hissed, leaning over the emergency brake. “Stop laughing.”

  I found a tissue in my coat pocket and blew my nose, then took se
veral deep breaths before starting the car.

  “So, Dad,” said Frances, as we pulled away from the curb, her voice as cheerful as if we were taking him out to the movies. “Off we go.”

  When he gave no response from the backseat, Frances turned to smile at him, then quickly turned back around.

  “Shouldn’t we tell him?” I murmured. “Where we’re heading?”

  “No,” said Frances, her smile still fixed. “Not now.”

  But as Buzzards Bay disappeared behind us, followed by the cottage with its green lawn, the Japanese maple and the tidy hydrangeas, I glanced into the rearview mirror at my father’s pale slack face and saw that of course he knew where he was headed, even if no one was going to tell him.

  The affair between Dad and Ilse began the summer before Frances was a high-school junior and I was a freshman. My mother had been sick all that summer, so sick that we couldn’t go to the house in Wellfleet we usually rented for the month of August. Instead Helen ferried Frances and me back and forth from the West Hartford Country Club pool in a little orange VW Beetle that my father bought secondhand from a neighbor. The plan had been that Frances would take over this job after Helen went to college, but Frances kept failing her driving test. When Helen left for Wellesley at the end of August, Ilse was hired as an informal chauffeur and given use of the VW Beetle in exchange for driving Frances and me to the pool in the afternoons. She drove us to the dentist and to doctors’ appointments, and once to buy school clothes downtown. In September, when school began, she was hired to coach Frances in math and science two afternoons a week, because Frances’s grades were poor and my father was afraid she wouldn’t get into a good college. Ilse was a graduate student in biology at UConn. A friend of my mother’s whose husband was the department chair had recommended her.

  A bit of company for the girls, the friend probably said. A little distraction.

  But soon enough, people must have seen what was going on, that the wrong company had been distracted. Someone must have tried to interfere, especially in the first weeks after my mother died, when it became clear that Ilse had moved into our house. I like to imagine that one of the neighborhood mothers met Ilse in the supermarket, firmly blocking the aisle with her grocery cart.