The Ghost at the Table: A Novel

by Suzanne Berne

  Just at that moment Frances cried, “And there it is!”

  She slowed down as we approached Twain’s brick mansion, sitting behind a scatter of leafless trees. I thought I remembered it facing the street, but it was set back from the road, overlooking what had once been a ravine but was now a parking lot. Against the drab November landscape of Farmington Avenue, the house glowed reddish orange, like an enormous jack-o’-lantern. Bands of brick shone in a complex pattern of polychromed scarlet and black. All the woodwork and railings had been painted a rich brown. In my memory, the house was an old haunted mansion, dark and decrepit, with boarded up windows and rickety balconies.

  “See,” said Frances, gesturing toward her window. “Completely restored.”

  Farmington Avenue was the main thoroughfare into West Hartford and I’d often passed Twain’s house when I was a girl, though I went inside it only once, with the rest of the fourth grade of West Hartford Country Day. We were allowed no farther than the entrance hall, where the tiled floor was littered with what looked like pencil shavings. A handsome carved mahogany staircase reared up to the second floor, but some of the steps were broken and spindles were missing from the banisters. Plaster had fallen from the walls, and yellow tape stretched across doorways as if we had walked in on a crime scene.

  I was remembering this as Frances pulled into a space in the almost empty parking lot. “Well, here we are,” she said, a little shrilly, sliding her hands off the steering wheel. “Everybody out.”

  But in a reprise of the day we visited Greenswood Manor, my father at first refused to leave the van. Without warning he’d turned sullen and mean, as if he’d gotten a jolt of something besides surprise when we ran off the highway. He wouldn’t look at Frances when she asked what was wrong and batted at her hands when she tried to unclip his seat belt for him.

  “Dad,” she said finally. “Just what are you going to do out here by yourself?”

  He stopped batting at Frances’s hands and she persuaded him to swing his legs over the runningboard so that she and I could help him down into the parking lot and then seat him in his wheelchair. Frances said not to bother trying to get his overcoat on him, since we would be going directly inside. She placed his old fedora on his head then draped his overcoat around his shoulders.

  Above us towered the house on its hill, reachable only by a steep set of stairs, which had not been recently shoveled, and an almost equally steep handicapped ramp. But by pushing together, Frances and I got the wheelchair up the hill. Small brown-painted signs, the sort you find in national parks, directed us to the gift shop at the back of the house, where tickets could be purchased for both the Mark Twain House and the Harriet Beecher Stowe House next door.

  However, once we arrived at the door marked MUSEUM SHOP we were met by a laminated rectangular white notice declaring that both houses would be closed for the next two weeks “for security reasons.” The notice thanked the public for its patience and cooperation. It was signed THE MARK TWAIN MEMORIAL.

  Our breath rose in clouds in the cold sunlight as we stood squinting at each other.

  “I thought you checked the Web site,” I said to Frances.

  “I did, but that was a couple weeks ago. There wasn’t any mention then of the house being closed.”

  “Isn’t that strange.”

  She gazed calmly back at me. “You could have called ahead, Cynnie. I just assumed it would be open.”

  My father sat looking at us from his wheelchair, his fedora cocked rakishly on his head. His expression was similar to the one he’d worn on Thanksgiving morning, when we discovered that the turkey was still frozen.

  It was Frances who suggested that we might as well look around. Cupping our gloved hands around our eyes, we pressed against the windows of the dark gift shop to peer in at shelves of books and displays of corncob pipes, straw hats, mugs, china figurines of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, calendars featuring Mark Twain in his famous white suit, posters of Mark Twain puffing on his pipe. Even a china toothbrush holder, decorated with a picure of Mark Twain with a cigar in his mouth.

  “He would have loved this,” I heard myself say.

  “You mean he would have hated it.” Frances stepped back from the window.

  “No, he would have loved it but pretended to hate it.”

  With Frances pushing Dad’s wheelchair, we walked around the side of the house to look at it from the lawn, a sharp wind scattering brown leaves across the snowy path. Not a security guard in sight. We could have broken a window and climbed in if we’d wanted to. Clouds like old ragg wool socks rolled overhead. Though I was pretending otherwise, I was glad the house was closed. I’d spent the better part of a year trying to imagine what had gone on inside those brick walls, and yet now that I was here I found myself reluctant, even afraid to step inside, as if the dimensions I’d invented for those girls might vanish when I was faced with actual ceilings and doorways.

  “You’re shaking,” observed Frances.

  “I’m just cold.”

  It was cold standing out on the lawn, so we followed the path to a carriage house set a little distance away, pausing to look across at Harriet Beecher Stowe’s trim cottage, with its regular lines and kitchen garden. Writing about sensible Harriet and her even more sensible sister Catharine would be a relief, I decided, though I was sure that neither of them would remain sensible for long, once I started looking into their history.

  “Quite a place he built for himself.” Frances was again looking at Mark Twain’s house. The sun had come out from behind the clouds, making the roof slates glitter. “Did he live here most of his life?”

  “No. It’s where his daughters grew up, though. None of them wanted to live here again after Susy died. When he was an old man, he built another house called Stormfield.”

  “What a gloomy name. Is that where he entertained the Angel-fish?”

  I stared at the house, pretending not to hear the question.

  In the course of my research, I’d sometimes flattered myself that Mark Twain would have liked me, if we’d ever met, that I might have been chosen to be an Angelfish during those final years of his life, when everyone he loved seemed to have left him. Young, smart, high-strung, pretty enough, I would have listened to his stories, played cards with him after lunch, dressed up in scarves and performed a harem dance in the parlor. I would have welcomed it all, even the spasmodic grip of an elderly hand on my arm, the malodorous breath, the yellow teeth. And not for the sake of being able to say someday, “Oh yes, I knew Mark Twain.” But for the attention itself. The nervous intoxicating bask of it.

  For Frances’s benefit, I pointed out several windows at the top floor of the house, where I thought Twain’s study must have been, then to what were probably the windows of the girls’ schoolroom below. I described the historical plays the sisters had staged, with Susy and Clara playing rival queens, ordering each other’s heads chopped off, while Little Jean played the bailiff, signing death warrants.

  “You really do know everything about them,” said Frances politely. She bent down to adjust the collar on Dad’s tweed jacket, then pulled his overcoat more securely around his shoulders.

  “But here’s what I’d like to know,” she continued, in the same polite tone as she straightened up, “if Twain was such a bad father to his daughters, why don’t we know about it?”

  “Because,” I said sharply, “Clara protected him. After he died she made sure only praiseworthy information got out about him.”

  “Well,” said Frances, smiling patiently at me, “how do you know that it wasn’t all true? That what Clara wanted people to know about him wasn’t the same as how he really was? Maybe because she loved him she wanted good things said about him.”

  It seemed I wasn’t any better than Walter in avoiding Frances’s ambushes, except that I had finally learned how to surrender once I’d been waylaid. For instance, I happened to know that for twenty-seven years after her father died, Clara had left his gravestone blank
. I also knew that Clara hadn’t told her daughter, Nina, that Mark Twain was her grandfather until Nina was a teenager. But I was tired of sharing facts like these with Frances, who would only find a way to twist them so that they meant the opposite of what I thought they meant. Probably I would never understand what had happened to Mark Twain’s daughters any better than she did, but at least I was willing to admit it.

  “If we leave right now,” I said, consulting my watch, “we could be back in Concord by four.”

  “But Cynnie.” Frances blinked at me. “We have to at least have lunch.”

  I don’t believe it was ever a conscious part of Frances’s plan, to visit our old house in West Hartford that day. Like me, she probably believed she intended to drive straight back to Concord after lunch, to be home before dark. Even Frances had her limits when it came to revisiting the past. But as we were finishing our sandwiches at a Subway shop on Farmington Avenue, Frances said that she wanted to see if the old neighborhood looked the same.

  “Maybe some other time.” I got up to throw away our napkins and paper plates and put our soda cans into a green plastic recycling bin.

  “There probably won’t be another time.” Frances gazed up at me. “Come on, we’re all the way here. It’s only another mile or so.” Frances turned to our father. “What do you think, Dad?”

  He shrugged. He had hardly touched his roast beef sandwich. His head was sunk between his shoulders and a corner of his mouth hung open.

  “Dad seems tired,” I said. “He doesn’t look well. I think we should be getting home.”

  “Cynnie. We’re here. We’ll stay in the car,” she said. “We’ll just drive by. It won’t take more than a few minutes.”

  I said that I didn’t feel very well. My headache was worse and I’d felt queasy all through lunch. Frances took out her bifocals and put them on again. She announced that she would drive, she knew the way. I could sit in the passenger seat and close my eyes.

  “You don’t even have to look,” she added.

  “Of course I’m going to look,” I snapped.

  But as soon as we started driving Frances got lost, turning up first one side street after another, each time thinking that the street was an old shortcut she used to take years ago on her bicycle. As we crisscrossed Farmington Avenue, shabby apartment buildings fell away; the trees got taller and the houses bigger. Bungalows mixed with brick colonials, set amid parklike expanses of lawn. By now it was almost three o’clock. The sun was getting low, shining right in our eyes, making it difficult to see.

  “Here,” Frances kept saying. “I know it’s right here.”

  Half an hour passed before we were heading down the road that led to Stone Ridge Farms.

  Frances pointed out various landmarks. There’s the Harpers’ old house. That’s where the Marlatts lived. My goodness, they’ve added another story. Not much to see. Stone Ridge Farms had become just another subdivision. Houses, yards, driveways. I recognized a flounce of cattails along the road, where there had always been a marshy stretch. Otherwise, the woods were gone. The fields were gone.

  When we reached Woodvale Road, Frances slowed down, then after a minute or two pulled over and stopped the van altogether. We were at the curve where the potato field had once stretched for acres, wide and rutted, off to the left. Now a girdle of asphalt ran past a series of oversized stucco Tudors with brass doorknockers and Palladian windows.

  “Will you look at that,” she said in a wondering voice.

  “All right. I’ve seen it. Let’s go.”

  My father said nothing. He had fallen asleep.

  “Just a little farther.” Frances was driving again, but she sounded as if she’d been holding her breath. “We haven’t even reached the house yet.”

  The afternoon sun was directly in our eyes now as Frances slowed down, then once more stopped the van. I had to raise my hand against the glare.

  “What are you doing?” I asked. “You’re in the middle of the road.”

  “There it is,” she said.

  The house looked more or less the same as I remembered, only smaller, which is so much the rule in these situations that even its smallness wasn’t a surprise. Gray-painted shingles, black shutters, a holly wreath on the front door. The rhododendrons were still there, though they had been pruned. Neatly shoveled brick steps. In the yard, a half-melted snowman wearing a red scarf.

  What had I expected? Crumbling masonry, missing shingles, splintered front door hanging off its hinges. Open garbage cans, a chained barking dog. Children in torn pajamas, weeping on the steps. Actually, I think I’d simply expected the house not to be there at all. Deleted, along with my presence in it. A skipped space in the row of houses. But there it was, shingles intact behind the rhododendrons, windows unbroken, one of those wire cages on top of the chimney to keep the raccoons out. Though I did not look at Frances, I understood that she felt the same way, though for different reasons. Perhaps in the whole of our lives, we had never felt so alike as at that very moment, as we stared at our old house and were disappointed by the plain sight of it, and also relieved. And disappointed to be relieved. After all the ghost stories about the past we’d told ourselves over the years, we had neglected to imagine anything so terrifyingly commonplace as a gray-shingled house with a lawn, where we had lived until it was time to move on and where nothing had been done to us that was much worse or much better than what we had gone on to do to ourselves.

  And yet it was at that same moment, as we crept past the respectable home of our childhood, that out of nowhere an enormous black car came hurtling at us from the opposite direction.

  AS ANYONE WHO HAS ever been in even a minor car accident knows, there’s a lucid, arrhythmic moment before the collision happens. Time lengthens. Colors brighten, right angles sharpen. There’s also a sense of quiet, as in music, when the tempo changes and arrives at the grace note. So this is it, you think. What it’s all been leading up to. You would like to make better use of that grace note, that glass instant, when all should be made clear. But of course, you don’t.

  A VOICE WAS CALLING and calling, calling from somewhere outside my window, a voice that had gone thin and cracking.

  You idiot, shouted the voice.

  Perhaps, I thought, this is what it feels like to be dead. An insulting flatness.

  FROM THE FAR CORNERS of my vision, I saw Frances shifting around in the driver’s seat. Her air bag had not inflated.

  “I’m so sorry,” she kept repeating.

  “Idiot!” shrieked the voice outside my window.

  Slowly that voice came into focus. Straight blonde hair cut to her chin, a mouth smeared with red lipstick. A hard, unpleasant face. But something was wrong with my neck and I could not move my head to turn away from her.

  “I have children in my car,” she screamed.

  “I’m so sorry,” Frances was insisting.

  “NECK INJURY,” SAID the ambulance driver to his partner.

  “How about the old guy?”

  “I checked him out. Just a bruise on his forehead. They weren’t going very fast.”

  “Friggin’ air bags.”

  “Friggin’ SUVs,” said the driver, glancing across the road.

  The driver was young and red-haired, with pink bunchy cheeks. His partner was older, with a dark, withered-looking face and thick black eyebrows above gentle furtive brown eyes. He smelled of breath mints. A drinking problem, I decided, having ample time to examine him as he leaned over my seat to examine me, recognizing that delicate, almost formal withdrawal in his face, which I’ve also seen on the faces of homeless men who sit all day in the park across from my apartment. Though his hands, as he fixed a foam collar around my neck, were perfectly steady. As were Frances’s, I realized, as she tried to offer me a thermos cap of water.

  “She can’t have any water yet, ma’am,” he told her. “Not till she gets checked out at the hospital.”

  “Why?” said Frances. “What are they going to do?”
r />   “A CT scan. Chest X-ray. She’s got a possible concussion. Maybe a broken rib.”

  “I’d like to call my husband.” Frances began to climb out of the van.

  “You were driving, ma’am?”

  THE AMBULANCE DRIVER and his partner were trying to shift me by degrees onto a hard narrow board laid across the front seat.

  “Try to breathe slowly,” said the ambulance driver.

  “Keep as still as you can,” urged his partner.

  “We can’t get you out of here unless you stay still.”

  “Calm down, Cynnie,” whispered Frances from somewhere behind them. She sounded frightened. “Stop laughing and calm down, okay?”

  As a child, I often got in trouble for laughing at inappropriate moments, in French class, for instance, or during graduation ceremonies, or while a visitor was saying grace at the dinner table. Frances, who never had this problem, once told me her secret: if you want to stop laughing, imagine something sad in detail. This strategy did not always work for me and in fact sometimes had the reverse effect. But sometimes it did work. The ambulance driver and his partner were both frowning now, one with frustration, the other with what seemed to be genuine concern, telling me to keep still.

  And so because it was the first sad thing that came to me, I pictured December 16, the day my father’s mother died. Killed, perhaps by accident, perhaps not, by stepping in front of a streetcar at the intersection of Main Street and Asylum Avenue.

  It would have been cold that day as well, just a week or so before Christmas. The streets would have been gray and crowded, already getting dark at four o’clock. Her little boy lagged behind her, whining about the cold, complaining that his feet were wet, asking for toys she could not afford. Still she walked on, ignoring his cries, seeming not even to hear them. One last shop to visit. One more shop. This was how she got through the tiring duties of her life, by repeating to herself that she had to do them until they were done. One more shop. She began to cross the trolley tracks. Then suddenly, for no reason that onlookers could later explain, she stopped. Hesitated in the middle of the tracks that snowy late afternoon, in a big black coat, her arms full of packages, the child clutching at her sleeve. Wet trolley tracks stretched to either side of her, vanishing in opposite directions. Voices called out to her. The clanging of the streetcar became deafening, then even louder.