The Ghost at the Table: A Novel

by Suzanne Berne

  “WHAT’S WRONG WITH your mother?” neighborhood kids used to ask. “Is she crazy?” Frances hit one of them in the mouth once, a short devious wet-eyed boy named Kirby Harper, and split his lip, though she’d been aiming to hit him in the stomach.

  “Nothing’s wrong with her,” she spat, “except she has to live on the same street as your mother.”

  “What’s wrong with her?” Frances asked my father.

  “Well, pretty much everything,” he might answer, with a sad, supple smile behind the black bowl of his pipe. Other times he might sigh, “Nothing’s wrong with her that a miracle wouldn’t fix.”

  To the same question, Helen would have answered: “My father’s what’s wrong with my mother.”

  Helen loved our mother, who had not been sick when Helen was little and whom, like me, Helen called “Mama.” She often did her homework sitting on the chaise lounge in our mother’s room, chewing on a pencil eraser, interrupting her trigonometry calculations to ask if Mama needed anything. She carried up cups of tea, and bowls of chicken broth, lukewarm, which during bad periods Helen spooned into her mouth. (“Open wide,” she sometimes said, unforgivably.) One humid July evening when our mother complained of the heat, Helen took an entire box of Kleenex and floated each white tissue out of the bedroom window. The next morning, the lawn was covered with snow.

  The wings of Helen’s nostrils were always red. Even in summer, her lips looked chapped. If anyone asked what she was thinking, she smiled and said, “Oh, you know.”

  Frances avoided our mother, whom she called Mother, when she called her anything. No cups of tea. No bedtime kisses. She disliked the distinction of having the only sick mother in the neighborhood, a mother who lay in bed all day and sometimes drooled. Such a parent implied something abnormal about the child as well, some festering possibility.

  ONE AFTERNOON WHEN I was about eight, all the children on the street were running through the sprinkler fan in our yard, playing hide-and-seek. My hiding spot was behind the chaise lounge in my mother’s room, where no one would ever bother looking for me. I’d been there for what felt like hours, and no one had noticed me yet.

  “And that wasn’t the only time.”

  Peering around the back of the chaise lounge, I could see my mother smiling faintly, propped up in bed. She was talking to Helen in her slow, raspy voice.

  “When I was a girl,” she was saying, “sometimes when I was taking a walk, I’d look up and suddenly it would seem like everything in front of me was moving. Trees, houses, fences, driveways. Sweeping by me, like in a flood.”

  “Probably an optical illusion,” said Helen sagely.

  My mother paused for so long that I could hear the rattle of her breath in her chest. Then she said: “But the strange part was, the only way I could get it to stop was to picture myself as a grown woman. Holding up my hand and saying ‘Stop.’ The first time was by accident, but then I tried it again, and it worked. I’d look back at myself, say ‘Stop.’ And it would all stop.”

  After a moment, Helen asked, “What did you look like?”

  “What’d I look like?”

  From my hiding spot, I saw my mother lurch sideways in surprise. Fingers of sunlight pushing past the mustard cretonne drapes, illuminating busy constellations of dust motes revolving in the air. For another long moment she was silent; then her lips began to move once more. But by then I was no longer listening, struck by an appalling, fascinating thought: What if you looked into the future and didn’t recognize yourself? What if you saw someone else looking back at you instead?

  HIDING WAS A GAME at which I excelled. One of my favorite hiding places was inside the enormous leathery rhododendron that grew near the back steps, where I could sit cross-legged on the mulch with dirt clinging to my knees and watch whatever went on in the backyard while bees buzzed around my ears. I must have been about ten when one afternoon I spied on my father and Frances during one of their “chats,” often conducted on warm Sunday afternoons in the glider, during which they congratulated each other for being so alike.

  “With the two of us,” he was telling her that afternoon, taking a slow pull on his pipe, “the important thing is to keep going.”

  “But why wouldn’t we?” Frances kicked out her legs to make the glider swing faster. I swatted at a bee. Frances was not a very good student, for all her other stellar qualities, but she was starting high school and in a few years would have to apply to college, and even at the time I understood that my father was trying to find an encouraging way to tell her to buckle down.

  He blew two smoke rings, which hung bluely in the air.

  “Sometimes things get in the way. All I’m saying is that you have to keep going no matter what happens.” His voice was suddenly stern. “Otherwise you’ll wake up one day and find you haven’t gone anywhere, and then it’s too late.”

  “It’ll never be too late for me,” declared Frances.

  “No,” he agreed, blowing another perfect smoke ring. “We’ll make sure of that.”

  Then he said, as he often did in those days: “The two of us have a special bond.”

  Frances had just impressed him by identifying a bobwhite quail by its call, then whistling to it and getting the quail to call back from a grassy thicket. Bob-white! Poor poor bob-white! As a boy, he revealed, he used to whistle to bobwhites himself when he and his friends hiked out to Talcott Mountain, where they hunted for caves and tried to trap minnows with their hands, and the rest of the time threw rocks at each other. He described how a female bobwhite would pretend to have a broken wing if a fox threatened her chicks and drag herself across the ground as a decoy. When Frances asked if the male bobwhite would do the same thing, he said he didn’t know.

  By then my father had taken to sleeping a few nights a week at his office in Constitution Plaza. He was working on an insurance project, he told Frances that day in the glider, as they coasted back and forth, shoulders gently bumping, hand in hand. Something very involved, a project having to do with surety claims and trusts.

  Be good & you will be lonesome.

  MY MOTHER GOT WORSE, then she got better. Then she got worse again. Meanwhile Helen grew smarter and smarter, while Frances became skinnier and more athletic, and I stayed pretty much the same, except that by the time I was eleven my baby fat had begun morphing into breasts, a good year or so ahead of my classmates. Boys discovered me, and I discovered that if I let them push their hands up my shirt, they would mutter endearments like “You’re really great” into my hair. This gave me a previously unknown feeling of importance, and I became mildly addicted to the tight warmth in my chest when a boy asked hoarsely if I’d like to “go for a walk,” though I tried not to overdo it. Then Helen was eighteen, Frances was sixteen, and it was time for Helen to go to college.

  Helen didn’t want to apply to college, despite her admirable grades, but according to my father Helen had her life to consider and wasn’t going to be allowed to ruin it. Education was a necessity. He wanted her to become a doctor. A famous brain surgeon. So when I was thirteen Helen went off to Wellesley, which was where my mother had gone to college.

  Conversation at dinner, never lively, now almost stopped altogether. My father ate quickly when he was at home, which was increasingly seldom, then went into the living room and looked at his maps while he smoked his pipe. Often he went out again. Frances sometimes didn’t show up for dinner at all, deciding to ride her bike to a friend’s house for dinner instead. On those nights I ate in the kitchen with Mrs. Jordan, then went up to my room to read. We did not own a television set; my father called them “idiot boxes” and wouldn’t allow one in the house. A shame, as a lot of what happened that fall might have been less absorbing to me if I’d had something else to watch.

  A FEW WEEKS AFTER Helen left for college, my mother enjoyed one of her surprising respites. Some mornings Mrs. Jordan helped her downstairs and left her to sit on the living room sofa. Once she tried to braid my hair. Another day she asked Frances
for a bowl of potato chips. Though Frances pretended not to understand her. Frances was less well behaved lately. My father had spoken to her several times about doing her homework, which she kept neglecting.

  It was around then that Mrs. Jordan began assigning my mother small tasks. Sorting silver, rinsing lettuce. Mrs. Jordan spent considerable time arranging these tasks beforehand, pulling all the leaves off a head of lettuce, for instance, so that all my mother had to do was swish the lettuce around with her hands in a sinkful of tepid water. Often my mother made a mess of these tasks, splashing water on the counter, knocking silver to the floor, upsetting a collander of green beans. Mrs. Jordan praised her anyway and declared that she did not know what she would do without my mother’s assistance. I found it galling that Mrs. Jordan was treating my mother the way she used to treat me when I wanted to help her bake cupcakes. But my mother didn’t seem to notice, or if she did, she didn’t mind; she would sit for an hour or more in the laundry room, handing up napkins and pillowcases to Mrs. Jordan to be ironed.

  Mrs. Jordan was the color of coffee beans. She had a gold front tooth and a black wig that looked like a turban, and wore a white uniform, although my parents did not require this, and white orthopedic shoes, which I sometimes tried on because they made a pleasant squishing sound when I walked in them, like the sound of walking through spring mud. Somewhere in the deep foliage of her genetic history she must have had pygmy ancestors, because I towered over her, and Mrs. Jordan claimed that her mother was even shorter and her father had been able to fit under her mother’s arm.

  Mrs. Jordan was from Greensboro, Kentucky, and belonged to the River of Life Church, which met in a storefront at the corner of Mather and Vine, and worshipped, as she put it, “the God within.” Sometimes she left religious pamphlets around the house: pages printed in purple ink from a ditto machine, stapled inside thin floppy pastel covers, with titles like “Have You Saved Yourself Today?” and “The Lord’s Love Touches You No Matter Who You Are.” A small room in our basement had been made over to Mrs. Jordan and had acquired her distinctive peppery scent of perspiration and the lacquered smell of the fixative she sprayed on her wig. There was also an adjoining little bathroom that had ochre walls and a torn shower curtain the color of egg yolks that gave me the horrors when I was younger, though sometimes I visited Mrs. Jordan’s bathroom just to look at it. She’d been hired through a friend of my mother’s, because she needed “a change of scene.” That was the explanation I was given for how Mrs. Jordan got from Greensboro, Kentucky, to West Hartford. I once saw her without her wig and was astonished that she wasn’t bald, as I’d assumed, but had perfectly ordinary hair, although it was parched-looking and gray.

  Frances claimed that Mrs. Jordan “was not all there,” but Mrs. Jordan did all of our cooking and cleaning, and greeted me when I came home from school with a plate of Pepperidge Farm cookies and a glass of chocolate milk, even though at thirteen I realized that I should have been drinking Tab and eating celery sticks, like Frances. In my opinion, Frances was the one who wasn’t all there. In the last few months she’d gotten so thin that her period had stopped, though no one else knew this but me, inveterate investigator of bathroom trash baskets.

  Mrs. Jordan never paid much attention to Helen and Frances, beyond telling them to get out of the kitchen or to stop trimming their bangs and leaving hair in the bathroom sink. She was nicer to me and sometimes sat at the kitchen table sipping a cup of Postum while I had my snack and asked about my day. But the one she really loved was my mother. Loved her with a frank intensity that I found surprising at the time, not understanding what my mother could possibly offer to anyone, stuck upstairs in her bedroom all day long. Mrs. Jordan had no children of her own. She often washed and dressed my mother and combed her hair, once my mother was unable to do those things easily for herself, so perhaps her affection had a maternal aspect. But their relationship also involved a service my mother had rendered to Mrs. Jordan in hiring her, a service that had never been defined for me but was important enough to have placed Mrs. Jordan permanently in her debt.

  Mrs. Jordan was always distraught when one of my mother’s respites ended. Each time she truly believed, despite all evidence to the contrary, medical and otherwise, that her prayers had been answered, and that my mother was finally getting well.

  AS SOON AS HELEN left for college, Ilse started appearing at our house every afternoon to prepare Frances for the math section of the SATs, which Frances would be taking for the first time that year. If Ilse was still in the house when my father came home from work, he would invite her to stay for dinner. Soon it became clear, at least to me, that Ilse was taking extra care with Frances’s SAT preparation, inventing new problems for her to solve, prolonging their struggles with geometry and Algebra II until past six o’clock, when my father’s voice would be heard in the front hall, demanding that someone come “say hello” to him.

  “Hello,” Ilse would call out, before anyone else had a chance.

  It was also around then that Mrs. Jordan had begun calling my mother “the Mistress,” in a deliberate tone, though she had never done so before, and despite repeated efforts by my father to discourage her.

  “Who do you think you work for,” he’d say jokingly, “Emily Post?” But soon this new formality got on his nerves. After breakfast one morning, he followed Mrs. Jordan into the kitchen and said in a challenging voice, “So if she’s the Mistress does that make me the Master?” Mrs. Jordan stared at him impassively, then scraped leftover eggs and toast into the garbage pail.

  Every morning she massaged “the Mistress,” tending to her stiff arms and legs, rubbing them with an oil made from juniper berries that was supposed to stimulate circulation. “The Mistress is lying down,” she would inform Frances, whenever Frances banged into the house after school. “So you be quiet.”

  “I’m not making any noise,” said Frances, dropping her books on the floor, rattling plates, breaking a glass.

  BY HALLOWEEN, MY MOTHER suddenly could no longer see well enough to read, not even large-print books, and reading had long been her great consolation. Since I felt the same way about reading myself, I volunteered to read aloud to her when I got home from school. For our debut selection, I studied my bookshelf, rejecting anything that looked depressing, and finally chose Cherry Ames, Student Nurse over my nearly complete collection of Nancy Drew mysteries. I was a great fan of Nancy Drew, mostly because of her boyfriend, Ned Nickerson, with whom I was secretly in love. Ned had a fresh outdoorsy crewcut manliness entirely missing from the pimple-faced ninth-grade boys at West Hartford Country Day who were so eager to put their hands up my shirt. My father might have once been something like Ned Nickerson, I thought, if he’d been less hot-tempered and more law-abiding. But my mother didn’t like mysteries, so in the evenings I read about the medical challenges surmounted by Cherry Ames in her white apron and blue-striped dress while my mother ate a few green grapes or sipped broth from a cup.

  “Nothing like a good book for company,” Mrs. Jordan often commented afterward, washing dishes at the sink. Or maybe she said “the Good Book.” In Mrs. Jordan’s view, lack of prayer was the chief reason for my mother’s decline. This was the opinion she offered to me, anyway. Of course by then my mother’s illness, though incurable and degenerative, had become an almost reasonable state of affairs, or at least accepted, as anything will if it continues for long enough. One night I overheard my father telling someone on the telephone that my mother could “go” at any moment. Although, he added, lowering his voice, she could just as likely linger on for years.

  ANOTHER RELAPSE. This one happened at the beginning of November, and it was worse than all the relapses before. Once again, my mother lay in bed all day, sometimes breathing in fishlike gasps. She’d caught a bad cold and a cough, which threatened to turn into pneumonia. A thick fug of menthol and steam from two vaporizers filled her room, part of Mrs. Jordan’s attempts to ease my mother’s breathing. Mrs. Jordan’s tall black wi
g was now often askew; she was up and down the stairs all day, carrying liniments and oils, rubs and salves, syrups and pills, cups of chicken broth. The rest of her housework went largely neglected and when my father wasn’t home we had cold cereal for dinner. She hardly noticed me. Even when I asked her to sit with me in the kitchen while I did my homework, she was on her feet after a few minutes, remembering something she’d forgotten to do for my mother.

  To no one in particular, she declared that she would not let the Mistress suffer.

  Helen came home for a weekend and had to be forced to go back to college; my father literally pushed her into the car to drive her to the bus station. Frances claimed that my mother’s loud breathing was driving her crazy, that the smell of menthol was driving her crazy. She insisted on trading bedrooms with Mrs. Jordan, who was happy to move to the room next door to my mother’s. I began waking in the night, hearing my mother calling out for Mrs. Jordan. Her voice was rough and demanding, weirdly mannish. Please! she sometimes shouted. Even when I pulled my pillow over my head, I could hear her. But then abruptly she would stop shouting, which was almost worse, because then I lay in bed waiting for her to start up again.

  A few times when I got up to go to the bathroom I passed my mother’s door and each time there was the shadowy figure of Mrs. Jordan in her pink flannel nightgown, standing by the bed. Once my mother was lying across Mrs. Jordan’s lap. Mrs. Jordan was crooning to her, stroking her lank hair. Someone had pushed the curtains back for once, perhaps to open a window briefly and let in some fresh air. Moonlight illuminated my mother’s long pale arms, hanging limply over Mrs. Jordan’s dark legs, the one woman so big and pale and ungainly, the other so small and dark. In the glimpse I had of my mother’s white face, her open mouth was almost square.