The Ghost at the Table: A Novel

by Suzanne Berne

  Only Wen-Yi, once more helping Jane with her puzzle, seemed alert, even hungry, frowning at a half-eaten piece of apple pie on someone’s plate, left balanced on the arm of the sofa. He’d hardly spoken during dinner and seemed intimidated by the flow of talk around him. Arlen had at first sat next to him in the living room and tried to ask about the night life at Tufts (“Do you go out to clubs?”), but Wen-Yi looked at him with such offended alarm that Arlen quickly gave up and went to sit on the floor with Sarah. Twice Wen-Yi had gone outside to smoke a cigarette in the driveway.

  When he went out a third time, I joined him. We stood in the lee of the potting shed, protected from the wind, and I let him cup my hands between his as we lit our cigarettes. I took a deep drag and felt the smoke burn my throat. When I stopped coughing, I took another drag and stared up at the tangle of branches, suddenly bare, over my head. The sky had cleared and looked black and glassy above the white dovecote and the copper weathervane on top of the house.

  “Cold,” remarked Wen-Yi.

  He seemed very young to me, as he stood in his thin black coat smoking in the snow. Young and seedy and famished, like a crow with his floppy dark hair and bony shoulders. He didn’t belong in Frances’s house any more than I did. It was entirely possible that once his tutoring with Jane was done he might never step inside such a nice house again.

  “Freezing,” I said.

  When we finished smoking, we dropped our butts into the snow. Then without exactly meaning to, and perhaps moved less by lust than by a confused maternal impulse, I leaned toward him and kissed him on the mouth. His lips felt thin and chilly against mine, but I pressed against him anyway, hoping to carry the thing off now that I’d started it, trying to ignore that he did not lean toward me in return and that when his hands closed around my elbows it was to move me gently away.

  Once we returned to the living room Wen-Yi and I sat on opposite ends of the sofa with Kamal, who looked to be falling asleep, between us. No one seemed to notice my red face. Perhaps revived by our encounter by the potting shed, Wen-Yi immediately became more talkative, returning to his doctoral dissertation, which he wanted to explain to Kamal. Amina made the baby clap his hands. Walter excused himself to watch the last few minutes of a football game upstairs on the TV in his study.

  Wen-Yi’s voice began to rise while talking to Kamal. As he spoke, he made small persuasive circling gestures with his narrow hands. K theory and group theory. Both parts of one theory, a theory of grand unification, Wen-Yi explained in his choppy English, using the same insistently helpful tone that Frances had used a few minutes ago when she was telling Amina how to make soup stock out of turkey bones and a bay leaf.

  Yes, yes, yes, nodded Kamal, his eyes beginning to close.

  Wen-Yi must be jealous of Kamal, I realized, who was about the same age, another foreigner, but without an accent, and with a family, plus a late-model silver Volvo sedan parked in the driveway.

  “Noncommunicative geometry,” Wen-Yi was telling Kamal, his tone becoming more aggressive.

  “Ah.” Kamal suddenly opened his eyes.

  “You see?” demanded Wen-Yi. He continued to stare hard at Kamal.

  “Fascinating,” muttered Kamal, belching discreetly.

  “All forces of universe all aspects of same thing, all going, same time. Nothing ever finish.” Wen-Yi handed Jane a piece of the gypsy’s mandolin. “You see?”

  Kamal nodded groggily again. Wen-Yi gave a fierce little smile.

  “Well, I don’t,” said Arlen affably from the floor. “What are you saying, Wen, there’s no such thing as time passing? That yesterday and today are the same thing, and we just tell ourselves they’re different?”

  “Yes,” said Wen-Yi.

  “Well, that’s crazy,” Arlen declared. “I’m glad I’m not making travel plans for some romantic getaway with you.”

  Wen-Yi stared at him in consternation, but Arlen was gazing into the fire, the tiny diamond in his nose glittering, serenely enjoying his revenge for Wen-Yi’s aghast look earlier. Beside him, Sarah was trying not to laugh.

  Adored Sarah. Slender, athletic, mostly well behaved. A girl who admired her father, but couldn’t bear to let her own mother put a hand on her shoulder.

  When I looked up, I saw that Frances was looking at Sarah, too. We exchanged a glance that was carefully blank.

  “My personal theory of the universe,” Arlen was saying, “is that we’re all stuck in it.”

  Mary Ellen blinked, then said, “That is so true,” as Kamal said, “Amazing, isn’t it?” before turning to Amina to murmur that the baby needed a change and that maybe she should nurse him before they left. They excused themselves to carry the baby upstairs. From the sound of footsteps overhead a moment later, it seemed that Kamal had decided to join Walter in front of the football game.

  Only my father, sitting quietly in his wheelchair, was watching Wen-Yi, apparently waiting for him to continue his discussion of string theory, waiting for some connection that had not yet been made. But Wen-Yi had given up. For a few minutes he focused sulkily on the jigsaw puzzle, handing Jane pieces so that she could be the one to put it together.

  Then perhaps to forestall going home, he looked at me and asked with dignity, “May I play your organ?”

  “Not mine,” I said ungraciously.

  “Hasn’t been restored yet, I’m afraid, or tuned,” Frances called out to Wen-Yi, smiling from the other sofa.

  Wen-Yi shrugged. If she could serve toxic turkey, that shrug implied, and allow her daughter to have a gay black boyfriend, then she could listen to an out-of-tune organ.

  I poured myself another thimble of Calvados. Wen-Yi settled onto the piano bench and frowned at the organ’s dark gummy-looking fretwork. He pumped the footboards and fiddled with a few of the stop knobs. Finally he cracked his knuckles and began to test the yellowed keys, making the pillar candles flicker above him. He was going to play Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata,” he informed us, then tried a few rapid scales that were completely dissonant, all the notes flat when they should have been sharp, and vice versa. But Wen-Yi continued to run his fingers doggedly up and down the keyboard. The organ wheezed and boomed and groaned, and at last a Frankenstein version of “Moonlight Sonata” lurched into the room.

  Everyone flinched. It was like listening to a dirge piped into a cave. Upstairs the baby began to cry. I found it actually disturbing, the way the notes vibrated within my chest, as if such an awful noise could be coming from me.

  My father was very pale, his skin almost translucent in the firelight as he sat calmly listening to Wen-Yi. But the music was irritating Frances. Her mouth was pulled down, eyes narrowed; she looked appalled. There was no way to excuse this music or to pretend it was something other than it was, which was an abomination.

  Happily, the organ was too badly out of tune. Wen-Yi could not play it after all.

  “Very sorry,” he said, quitting abruptly.

  “Oh, but that was wonderful,” cried Frances at once, clapping her hands together.

  The fire had died down; the room had become very cold.

  “Gosh,” said Mary Ellen, stifling a yawn on the hassock.

  “Next time,” promised Frances, “it’ll be all ready for you.”

  Wen-Yi shrugged and stood up. He gave Frances a little bow, then glanced around the room, pausing for a frown at me, as if he were once more considering that leftover piece of pie.

  “Sorry,” he repeated, shrugging again.

  THE FAREEDS LEFT FIRST, full of profuse thanks, refusing to accept foil-wrapped packets of leftover turkey and stuffing, or even extra slices of their own pies, obviously relieved to climb into their Volvo with their almond-milk baby and drive back to their apartment in Brighton. I imagined them turning to each other in the car, faces alight with relief at their escape. Such an odd assortment of guests! They would carry this feeling of deliverance all the way home and then into bed, startling each other with a playfulness and passion that had been mis
sing ever since little (Omar?) was born.

  Mary Ellen and Wen-Yi were also standing up to leave when Frances stopped them, insisting that everyone needed another glass of Calvados. Walter had rejoined us by then.

  “They have to drive, Frances,” he objected.

  “Well, they need some hot cocoa,” she replied, not looking at him. “And I want Cynthia to tell them about her book.”

  “Oh no,” I said, backing into a copper tub of firewood.

  “But it’s so interesting,” she persisted, turning to Mary Ellen. “Please sit down. Don’t listen to boring old Walter. Have another drink.”

  Frances had seated herself in the middle of the sofa and was pulling on Walter’s wrist, so that either he had to sit down with her or make a scene by shaking her off. No one else seemed to know what to do, so Mary Ellen perched again on the leather hassock and when Frances patted the cushion next to her, Wen-Yi reluctantly sat down on her other side. The girls and Arlen stayed where they were on the floor.

  “I’d like to hear about your book, Aunt Cynnie,” said Sarah.

  “Me too,” said Arlen.

  “There isn’t much to say,” I objected. “It’s just a book for girls.”

  “Just!” cried Frances.

  Walter laid his hand on her arm.

  “I’m taking Cynthia down to Mark Twain’s House in Hartford.” Frances put her hand over his, then turned to Mary Ellen. “It’s been completely restored to the way it was when he lived there. Down to the Tiffany wallpaper. Hand-stenciled,” she added.

  “How do you know that?” I asked, too astonished to object to her claim that she was “taking” me to Hartford.

  Frances glanced innocently at me. “I looked up the Web site to see when the house was open. It’s so fascinating,” she told Mary Ellen, “the idea of being able to re-create an entire era in such detail.”

  I decided that the only way to end this evening was to get it over with. So I sat down in the Hitchcock chair by the fireplace, fixed poor Mary Ellen with a baleful look, and began describing Mark Twain’s daughters by starting with Susy, the oldest. The brilliant one. Her father thought she’d make a great writer and praised her lavishly, but Susy had insisted on being an opera singer instead. She and Twain had once been close, so close that at thirteen she wrote an adoring biography of him, which begins, “We are a very happy family!” (However, she quickly goes on to mention Twain’s bad temper and his incessant smoking, noting deftly, “He has the mind of an author exactly, some of the simplest things he can’t understand.”) But as Susy got older there had been resentment on her part, perhaps abetted by her father’s excessive encouragement of her, which had gone to her head. A dislike of being Mark Twain’s daughter. A feeling that her father, with his antics and tantrums, was more clown than great man, that he lacked seriousness and kept her down and was the source of all her insecurities.

  “But tell about the Christmases. His Christmas letters.” Frances was frowning impatiently as she poured herself more Calvados, splashing a little onto the coffee table. “The kitten named Sin. And the stories he made up about the bric-a-brac—”

  “Meanwhile,” I continued, ignoring Frances, “the youngest daughter, Jean, was an epileptic. Not many people know this. First Susy died, then the mother died. And then Jean’s epilepsy got worse. Twain couldn’t handle poor Jean. They had never been close. She had fits, you know, in embarrassing places, like at people’s dinner parties, so he sent her away.”

  “Oh no,” said Mary Ellen, staring palely up at me from the hassock.

  “The cherubs,” prompted Frances in a stage whisper, holding a hand to one side of her mouth. “Cynnie, tell about the cherubs.” When I made no response, she turned to Mary Ellen and said assertively, “Twain bought this bed in Venice that had carved cherubs on the bedposts, which could come off, and the girls would take them down—”

  “Mom,” shushed Sarah.

  “By then Twain was living in New York, with his secretary,” I went on, raising my voice. “A young woman who wanted to marry him, that was the secretary, and she wanted his daughters out of the way. That’s what Jean and Clara thought, anyway. They hated the secretary.”

  “Was she, like, really mean?” asked Jane, gazing at me from the floor.

  “No.” I pretended to pause thoughtfully. “She wasn’t mean, exactly, but she knew a good meal ticket when she saw one.

  “Although in the end Twain took Jean back.” I resumed my ironical tone. “After the secretary was out of the picture. It turned out she’d been stealing his money, or that’s what Clara accused her of doing. So finally he decided he wanted his daughters around him again. He missed the old days. He wanted them to be one big happy family. But then, alas, Jean died suddenly one night. Drowned in her bathtub, during a fit, naturally, so they didn’t have much time together after all.”

  “But you’re not telling about the girls,” protested Frances, frowning at me. “You’re just describing them when they were grown up. Tell about your book, about when they lived in Hartford, and the funny stories they’d get Twain to tell them, and all the famous people they met—”

  We exchanged another look, expressionless on my part, imploring on hers. Drunk as I was, I understood perfectly well what Frances wanted from me, there in the living room with our father and her whole family listening: the tale of Mark Twain’s daughters and their pleasantly eventful childhood. She wanted what everyone wants—what even I wanted—a good story with a reasonable ending. But she’d gotten carried away, as she always did, with the decor. With the kittens and the cherubs and the Christmas letters. And so I was forced to brandish the sorrows of Mark Twain’s daughters to keep Frances from snatching them up, to save them from becoming bric-a-brac and bedposts.

  “Wait,” interrupted Sarah. “What about the mother?”

  “Wasn’t she there?” Jane chimed in. “While the girls were growing up?”

  “She was there,” I said. “But I’m leaving her out. She was sick all the time and uncomplaining. Her part’s not that interesting. Anyway, then there was Clara, the middle one. She was the Survivor.”

  I heard Walter make a restive noise and paused, having briefly lost track of which story I was telling. Everyone sat regarding me for several moments.

  “What happened to Clara?” Sarah was asking, in a polite tone that suggested she’d had to repeat this question.

  “Oh, she was fine.” I roused myself. “More or less. She got married. She found religion. Eventually she died. And that was the last of Mark Twain’s daughters.”

  “But what about her daughter?” Jane stared down at the coffee table, playing with one of the scattered pieces of the jigsaw puzzle. “The one you told us about the other night. Isn’t there anything else about her?”

  “Not really,” I said. “Drugs, depression. Life’s not worth living and no one cares about me. The usual. When you kill yourself, that’s pretty much it.”

  “She killed herself?” said Arlen. “Wait, who’re we talking about?”

  “Mark Twain’s granddaughter.” I frowned at him. “She overdosed. In a hotel off Sunset Boulevard. After spending time in a mental hospital. Pretty grabby stuff, huh? Nobody knows about her, either. Maybe she’ll be my next book.” I mimed holding up a book and reading the cover. “The True Story of Mark Twain’s Granddaughter, an Insane Drug Addict. Or: No Matter How Sad Your Life Is, Hers Was Worse. Historical Fiction for Middle-Aged Girls.”

  Mary Ellen gave a little moan of dismay. The rest were silent. Outside the wind had picked up and was blowing against the windows, rattling the panes.

  For my part I sat staring at the twisting patterns in Frances’s Persian carpet, wishing that I were back in San Francisco, sitting alone in my apartment with all the shades pulled down. It was clear to me that I was behaving badly and had been behaving badly, to varying degrees, all night, though no one had called me on it. But in the last ten minutes I’d crossed the line and now my behavior could no longer be ignored. I’d be
come obnoxious toward people who had only been trying to make conversation, who’d shown an interest in my book because Frances had wanted them to be interested, for my sake, and hers. Because Frances had wanted an enjoyable holiday, spent among family and friends. And who could blame her? Except me.

  When I glanced up again, the girls and Arlen were staring at the waning fire, which shot out blue sparks as a log broke in two. On one side of Frances, Wen-Yi gazed abstractedly at the tips of his black loafers. Walter had closed his eyes on the other side of her and leaned his head back against the sofa cushions.

  Only Frances was staring at me and I’ll never forget the expression on her face that night, as if she’d just seen something cruel done to a child.

  Then I thought I heard my father say, “I don’t get it.”

  He was sitting more upright than he had all evening, his wheelchair pulled up near the sofa. His sparse white hair fluffed around his head, catching the lamplight behind him like a nimbus, leaving his face as dark as a mask.

  “You don’t get it?” I turned toward him in despair. “What don’t you get? Why I’m writing this story?”

  My father gazed steadily back at me.

  “I’m not writing this story,” I told him, making a great effort at patience. “I’m just giving you the story behind the story I am writing. In my story, nothing bad happens to these girls at all. They live in a big fancy house with servants and lots of pets. Their parents love them. They put on funny plays and meet famous people and have wonderful Christmases. That’s my story.”

  The room filled again with silence, which to my ears sounded as discordant as the organ music had a little while before. Then Sarah said quietly from her place on the floor, “Why do you want to do this kind of thing?”

  “What kind of thing?”