The Ghost at the Table

by Suzanne Berne

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Strikingly different since childhood and leading dissimilar lives now, sisters Frances and Cynthia have managed to remain "devoted"—as long as they stay on opposite coasts. When Frances arranges to host Thanksgiving at her idyllic New England farmhouse, she envisions a happy family reunion, one that will include the sisters' long-estranged father. Cynthia, however, doesn't understand how Frances can ignore the past their father's presence revives, a past that includes suspicions about their mother's death twenty-five years earlier.

As Thanksgiving Day arrives, with a houseful of guests looking forward to dinner, the sisters continue to struggle with different versions of a shared past, their conflict escalating to a dramatic, suspenseful climax.

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Release date: November 2, 2007

Publisher: A Shannon Ravenel Book

Print pages: 322

Sample

Going home for Thanksgiving wasn’t something I had planned on—or I should say, I hadn’t planned on going to Frances’s house in Concord, which over the years I’ve sometimes referred to as “home,” simply because it’s back east. But perhaps Frances heard me differently when I said “home,” perhaps she heard more than I meant to suggest. She is my older sister, after all, and there is that responsibility, often mixed with impatience, that older sisters feel toward their younger sisters, especially if those younger sisters have been, in one way or another, less fortunate than themselves. In any case, every year Frances asked me to come for Thanksgiving and Christmas, but every year for one reason or another, I said no. My visits to her usually happened in summer, when we were more likely to leave the house. Though of all the people in the world I probably love Frances best, after a day or so at home with her I found myself becoming lethargic and moody, leaving dishes in the sink, taking long naps in the afternoon. Meanwhile Frances’s normal good nature soon gave way to exasperation and apology. We both understood the effect we had on each other, only made worse by the holidays. Still Frances felt she needed to invite me, just as I needed to refuse. In this way, we absolved each other.

Or that’s how it worked until one October day, over a year ago now, when Frances called to say that our father would be spending Thanksgiving with her, for the first time in a quarter of a century, and she literally begged me to fly to Boston.

“Please, Cynnie,” she said on the phone. “It’s the first time in forever that we could all be together.”

All? I almost said. Our mother has been dead since I was thirteen. Soon after I was born she was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, which was later complicated by a heart ailment. Our older sister, Helen, died three years ago of lymphoma. Her funeral in Bennington had been the last time I’d seen my father, or Frances herself, for that matter. My father and his wife, Ilse, drove up to Vermont from the Cape, arriving just as the service began. The church was full of Helen’s patients and friends, several of whom spoke movingly of Helen, of her generosity and intelligence. Dad and Ilse stood at the back of the church wearing khakis and boat shoes, their hands in the pockets of their windbreakers. They refused to sit in the front pew with Frances and me, insisting that their legs felt stiff after the drive; then they skipped the burial and the gathering at Helen’s house afterward.

But in June my father had had a stroke, and now he was also getting divorced, at eighty-two, from Ilse, who was only in her fifties, but claimed that she couldn’t take care of him any longer. Frances had been making arrangements for him to enter a nursing home in a town near Concord. This was why he would be with her for Thanksgiving.

“Please come.” Frances lowered her voice. “It would really mean a lot to him.”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” I said.

“Please. Come for my sake, Cynnie. I don’t want any regrets and I’m sure you don’t, either.”

“I don’t have any regrets, at least not about him.”

But Frances wasn’t one to give up easily, especially when it came to finding a way to disguise some awkward angle or unsightly corner, which was perhaps why she’d succeeded so well as an interior decorator.

“Frankly,” she said, switching tactics, “I could use the moral support.”

“Moral support?”

“It might not be very easy with Dad, you know. A nursing home is a big change.”

When I didn’t say anything, she went on quietly, “And it’s a holiday. And Sarah will be coming home, her first time home since September, and I want it to be nice for her. So that’s a lot to manage, with Dad here, too.”

Sarah was Frances’s older daughter, a college freshman, who in the last couple years had become political. Sarah’s most recent cause, besides campaigning against the current administration, was “Doing Without.” People had too much stuff. Too much stuff was causing all the world’s problems. (Pollution. Nuclear proliferation. Sprawl.) I could tell Frances was afraid that if she didn’t make Sarah’s first homecoming a happy family occasion, Sarah might hold it against her somehow. She might believe that home itself was another thing that she could Do Without.

“But it’s only Thanksgiving Day that Dad will be at your house,” I pointed out to Frances. “Pick him up right before dinner and take him back right after. I’m sure the girls will help you. They’re old enough now. And Walter will.”

I could hear a distant ringing, like a call coming in on another line. Finally I had to say, “Won’t he?”

“Walter and I have been going through a rough time lately.”

“What kind of a rough time?”

“I can’t explain it on the phone.”

This was crafty. If there’s one universal covenant between sisters, it’s a primal interest in each other’s relationships. Frances and I had spent countless hours discussing the shortcomings of various men in my life, few of whom she’d ever met; yet she understood them perfectly and found complexities in their faults, which made those faults seem pardonable, or at least interesting, though she would always assure me that I was “better off” whenever one of them disappeared.

“Are you all right?” I demanded.

“No, I’m fine. I’ll tell you about it when you get here. Will you come, Cynnie? Please?”

“Well,” I said at last, “I have been meaning to visit Hartford.”

“For your book?” she asked, too enthusiastically. “Is it done? I can’t wait to read it. We can drive down together while you’re here. To see Twain’s house, you mean?”

“But I was going to come east in July, after I’ve finished a draft.”

“Oh, not July,” Frances almost wailed. “It can’t wait that long.”

“What can’t wait?”

“I can’t wait,” she said. “To see you.”

THAT NIGHT I CALLED my friend Carita for advice: Should I go home, to Frances’s, for Thanksgiving, knowing that it might be a depressing visit, especially since my father would be there? Also, I wasn’t feeling my best right then. I’d recently broken up with a man I had been seeing for almost a year. He owned a bookstore, which was where I’d met him, and he was married, which I had known from the beginning, just as I’d known I was going to be unhappy with him even before we’d started sleeping together.

“Don’t go,” advised Carita. “Families are toxic.”

“But Frances says she needs me to be there.”

“Frances can cope.” Carita was washing dishes while she talked to me. I listened for a moment to the homely sound of clinking silverware and water splashing in the sink. Carita’s family lived in Arizona, where her father built shopping malls; a portion of his income went to support an evangelical church that looked like a shopping mall. Carita herself was dark and wiry and flippant about almost everything. I pictured her warm untidy little kitchen, the string of red light-up chili peppers over the sink; the open spice jars; the refrigerator covered with magnets of dogs wearing kimonos, holding up photos of Carita and her girlfriend, Paula, on their trip to Hawaii and of their old, bad-tempered Yorkie, Prince Charles.

“I could visit Hartford while I’m there,” I said, “for the book.”

“Aren’t you originally from Hartford?”

“West Hartford.”

“Just say no,” she urged again. “Come over here for Thanksgiving. Paulie and I are cooking dinner.”

But by then I’d made up my mind to go to Concord and had only called Carita for the comfort of having someone try to argue me out of it.

“I wish I could,” I sighed, “but I guess blood is blood.”

“Blood,” observed Carita, “is bloody.”

CARITA AND I BOTH WORK for a small company in Oakland that publishes a series of books for girls called Sisters of History, fictionalized accounts of famous women “as told” by one of their sisters. We focus on the childhoods, how one sister was marked from the start as unusual, special in some way, while the other was remarkable, too, but not so remarkable. Yet devoted. Always devoted. The books are meant to be cheerfully earnest feminist stories, emphasizing “the strong bonds between sisters” and illustrating the message that the most important things in life are human relationships.

Four of us do the research and writing. We find journals, memoirs, letters, contemporary accounts that mention our subject’s sister and help create a persona for her. Then we make up what we can’t find or make up something to conceal what we do find, if it contradicts those “strong bonds.” On the company Web site we are described as “academic specialists in historical fiction,” though none of us majored in history in college; in fact, we were all English majors, like our editor, Don Morey, and he came up with Sisters of History in business school, after attending a lecture on marketing responsibly to children.

I cover literary women, which I consider the best category. Carita writes about famous women athletes. She refers to our books as “hysterical fiction for girls” and the “Lesser Lights Series,” mostly to needle Don when he starts talking about the social contribution we are making by producing books for girls that aren’t about teenage movie stars and diet fads. In interviews, he calls us the “Sisters Behind the Sisters of History.” Carita says he should call us the “Slaves of History,” but we’re paid pretty well, actually. Before Don hired me, I was teaching freshman composition courses at San Francisco State and proofreading for a magazine on exotic birds.

So far I had written books on Louisa May Alcott, Emily Dickinson, and Helen Keller, each from a sister’s perspective. Patriotically, we were beginning with American women. During one of my summer visits to Frances I toured Orchard House, the Alcott place, which is right in Concord, not far from Frances’s house. On another visit I borrowed her van and drove out to see the Dickinson home in Amherst. I never got to Tuscumbia, Alabama, to see the Keller homestead for Witness to a Miracle, the book I’d just finished. I felt the story suffered as a result. Context is everything when it comes to understanding a subject, and I like to include a blend of quoted detail and my own firsthand observations. “Here in the parlor on Lexington Street,” I wrote in the preface to The Little Alcotts, “with ‘furniture very plain’ and ‘a good picture or two hung on the walls,’ it’s easy to imagine the March daughters darning socks and staring into the fire. But it is the Alcott girls we are with today, and Louisa and her youngest sister, May, are having an argument in a corner by the Chickering piano.”

May Alcott, Lavinia Dickinson, and Mildred Keller all turned out to be colorful (i.e., secretly resentful) reporters on their sisters’ lives, and I had a file drawer full of letters from little girls saying how much they’d loved my books, that it was as if I’d written about them and their own sisters. Don had slated me to write about Harriet Beecher Stowe and her sister Catharine for my next book. In her later years Stowe had lived next door to the family of Samuel Clemens, Mark Twain; I used to pass by both places whenever we took Farmington Avenue to and from the highway in Hartford. Ever since I was a girl, I’d always felt a modest connection to Mark Twain’s daughters. They’d grown up about a mile from my house, and there were three girls in their family, as there had been in mine. And throughout my childhood one corner of our living room had been occupied by a hideous old Estey player organ, inherited from my grandmother, which my father claimed had originally belonged to Mark Twain himself. Which is why when I turned in the Keller book I decided to ask Don if I could write about Mark Twain’s daughters instead of Harriet Beecher Stowe.

This conversation took place about six months before Frances’s phone call. To celebrate my new book, Don had taken me to lunch near the office at a little Mexican restaurant with a yellow tiled floor and sticky wooden tables decorated with hammered brass studs.

“Sounds pretty Freudian to me,” he said, picking apart a crab-meat salad. “Mark Twain’s organ. I don’t know.”

“Well, that part was made up,” I admitted. “Mark Twain did have a player organ, but it was a different brand. My father was never one to let facts stand in the way of a good story.”

“How parental.”

Don was in a bad mood; he and his partner had been fighting again, this time over renovations to their house in the Berkeley Hills. But these lunches were a rare-enough occasion that I felt I needed to take my chances. Mark Twain’s daughters had had a “unique” historical viewpoint, I argued (they’d met both Ulysses S. Grant and Uncle Remus, for example), which shouldn’t be overlooked.

“Well, they can’t all have the same viewpoint.” Don put down his fork and looked around for our waiter.

“I’ll choose one of them,” I said, wishing I had Carita’s easy, sarcastic way with him. “She can tell the story. There’s always one person in a family who’s got everyone else’s number.”

I didn’t mention that I’d already chosen the youngest girl, Jean Clemens, to be my narrator, probably because Don would have objected as soon as I explained more about her. Little Jean. The “difficult” one. Twain’s least favorite. Little Jean suffered from epilepsy and was given to violent rages. Photographs showed a stolid, suspicious-faced child, with a bulky forehead and an exacting gaze. As a young woman she once tried to kill the family housekeeper, although naturally I couldn’t put information like that in my book. (Helen Keller also tried to kill the infant Mildred, by tossing her out of her cradle and knocking her head against the floor.) But I liked to collect unsavory facts about my subjects; I related better to them that way, especially as their journals and letters often insisted on one thing (“Had a gay luncheon today with the family, everyone home at last!”) but hinted at another (“I felt rather tired afterward and went for a walk by myself”). Usually it was loneliness that was hinted at, and of course loneliness is where a person is most easily understood.

Don folded his hands and gazed into his ruined salad. His heavy-lidded eyes and long oval face often gave the impression that he was languid and inattentive; in the last year he’d shaved his head, increasing his look of impassivity, which he sometimes used to his advantage, like an alligator that only appears to be asleep in the sun. I’d frequently wondered what he noticed about me while seeming not to notice anything.

“Were they fond of dear daddy?” he asked finally, opening his eyes a fraction. “Those charming little daughters?”

I said I was sure they were. He was Mark Twain, after all. “They also lived next door to Harriet Beecher Stowe,” I pointed out, “so some of my research on them could apply to a next book about her—”

Don frowned at me absently.

“And people love Mark Twain,” I continued, twisting my napkin. “Think of that documentary on public television. Father of American literature. Mark Twain daily calendars. Mark Twain T-shirts. Mark Twain dolls.”

For several years Don had been trying to get a toy company interested in manufacturing and marketing Sisters of History dolls, so far without luck. But a trio of sister dolls, I suggested now, Mark Twain’s daughters, in delightful Gilded Age dress, packaged with an equally delightful book about them, might finally prove irresistable. And wasn’t I his most dependable writer, conscientious about correct spelling, punctuation, and grammar, as well as my historical details? By the time the check arrived, he’d agreed to let me do what I wanted.

“Just don’t get distracted by Daddy.” He signed the check, then looked up and raised one eyebrow at me, smiling his alligator smile. “He’s gotten enough attention.”

“SO ARE YOU COMING?” Frances asked when she called again the next day.

It was one of those damp gray October afternoons when I had nothing planned for the evening. Fog pressed against the dusty windows of my apartment; the sour, flannelly smell of cooking beans had floated up through the heating vents from my landlady’s kitchen below. As I listened to Frances’s voice on the phone, I imagined her standing by her kitchen window, arranging apples in a bowl and looking out at the crispness of a New England fall. Sharp blue skies, geese flying overhead, the breeze filled with the scent of pine needles and woodsmoke. If the sun had been shining in San Francisco that afternoon, who knows whether I might have answered differently.

“All right,” I said. “But on one condition.”

“Anything. What?”

“That we don’t get into a lot of old stuff.”

“Of course not,” said Frances, and I’ll never forget how elated she sounded. “This is a holiday. I want it to be nice for everybody.”

I had forgotten that airline passengers could no longer be met at the gate, so I was briefly disheartened when I looked for Frances as I got off the plane at Logan and didn’t see her. But riding the escalator down to baggage claim, I spotted Walter’s thick gray hair and big, important-looking head near the luggage carousels. He was wearing a pair of rectangular, dark-framed glasses, a much trendier style than I’d have expected on him. Otherwise he looked tired and pale in his wrinkled Burberry trench coat and impatient at being somewhere other than the hospital in the middle of the day. When our eyes met, he seemed relieved to see me.

“Frances asked me to pick you up,” he said, as I stepped off the escalator. He stooped to give me a kiss on the cheek.

“How nice of you,” I said, trying to hide my disappointment.

As soon as he’d grabbed my bags, Walter plunged off toward the parking garage, while I trotted self-consciously behind, hurrying to keep up with him. Once we were heading out of the airport in his car, he noted that he was glad I could make it and that my visit would cheer Frances up. She had been feeling very low lately. Morose. Apprehensive. Sometimes she had trouble getting out of bed in the morning; he’d come home at night to find her still in her bathrobe. Couldn’t get errands done or manage to make dinner. Canceled appointments with clients for no reason, except that she was tired, or thought she might be getting the flu, or she forgot a date she’d made with friends, then was afraid to call to apologize in case they weren’t speaking to her. Sometimes she spent the whole day in her bedroom.

“Maybe it’s Sarah being gone,” he said testily. “That empty-nest thing.”

“But Jane’s still at home,” I said.

“Frances and Jane aren’t getting along.” Walter stared out at the road as a sleety rain began spattering the windshield. “Especially this week. Frances has been all jazzed up.”

“Jazzed up?” I was having trouble figuring out my role in this conversation. In the twenty-some years they’ve been married, Walter had never spoken to me about Frances.

He gave me a meaningful look under his thick eyebrows. “Acting like Thanksgiving is some kind of official state ceremony.”

“Well.” I relaxed slightly. “You know how Frances loves an occasion.”

Walter grunted. “Prepare yourself.”

“Thank God no one has a birthday this weekend,” I added, daringly, and we both laughed. I settled back in my seat, feeling comfortably dazed from the flight. Walter had put on a CD as we left the airport; now a meditative piano took over from a melancholy sax.

“Ever since your father’s stroke,” he began to say, “actually ever since Helen—” But then his beeper went off and he fumbled to unclip it from his belt.

I had forgotten about my father. It occurred to me that he might even now be at Frances’s house, on a furlough from the nursing home, and that in a few minutes I would have to greet him.

Walter glanced at his beeper, then pushed it back onto his belt, muttering, “She can wait.” When I looked at him inquiringly, he said, “A crazy patient.”

“Really crazy?”

“Crazy enough.”

I nodded sympathetically, though I wanted to ask, “Crazy enough to do what?” Instead I said, “So how’s the home, by the way?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Dad’s nursing home. How’s it working out?”

“He’s not there yet.”

“What?”

“Frances didn’t tell you?” Walter glanced sideways at me. “You and she are driving down to the Cape tomorrow to get him.”

“Driving to the Cape?” I stared at him. “To his house?”

“The nursing home was supposed to have an opening before now, but I guess whoever was supposed to die didn’t.” Walter gave a glum little laugh. “Anyway, the plan is for you two to take him.”

“But Frances didn’t say anything to me—”

“Frances has been forgetting everything lately. She probably thinks she told you all about it.”

“But she didn’t.”

“I can see that.”

We stopped talking for several minutes as I gazed out at the trees alongside the highway. Maples and oaks, the trees of New England. I always miss them when I’m in California, but whenever I come east the sight of them makes me feel claustrophobic, especially when they’re gray and skeletal, as they were that afternoon. New England trees grow too closely together, and there’s too much underbrush. Every Sunday when I was a child, my father used to herd us off on long damp hikes through the woods and old overgrown orchards of West Hartford, insisting on leaving the trail, crossing streams on slippery stepping-stones, bushwhacking through briars and blackberry bushes. Joking about Hansel and Gretel, asking if we had our bread crumbs handy.

I took a deep breath and turned back to Walter. “I’m sorry, but I can’t drive to the Cape.” My voice was calm, reasonable, the voice of a businesswoman with a full schedule who’s promised to spend time with her demanding relatives but must be firm about limits. “I’ve made plans to go to Hartford tomorrow, to do some research. I came out here early especially to do that.”

“Can’t you go another day?”

“I’ll rent a car to go to Hartford. Frances can drive down to get him.”

“Frances has almost stopped driving.” Walter kept his eyes on me. “She’s afraid of getting into a car accident. She says she’s having problems with her inner ear, that her balance is off, and she has dizzy spells and needs to get her thyroid tested, but it’s all bullshit. She’s depressed and she won’t admit it.”

Walter rarely used profanity. The air inside the car suddenly became charged and tense, but he continued talking, his voice growing hoarse. “It’s been worst for Jane. Every time the poor kid walks in the door, Frances finds some reason to leave the room. She says it’s because Jane blames her for everything and she can’t stand it.”

“But isn’t that sort of normal?” I was trying to attend to what he was saying about Jane while also trying to understand how Frances could have neglected to tell me that I was going to spend two hours in the car with my father, driving him to a nursing home.

Walter gave a consenting groan. “It’s been pretty much hell at home. Lucky for Sarah she’s at college.”

Although this was another worry, because Sarah was in New York. In October, Frances had read a magazine article about a potential terrorist plot to derail the presidential election by bombing major East Coast univers. . .