The Ghost at the Table: A Novel (32 page)

O my father, forsake me not.

I had not planned to think of these words—I am sure I had never thought them before in my life—but as soon as they came to me, they began to run through my head.

O my father, forsake me not.

The antique sound of them comforted me and I repeated them silently, over and over, until I was telling them like beads, until they became a gentle nonsense, like an old lullaby.

O my father, forsake me not.

My father jerked his head impatiently.

I
must
call Frances, I told myself.

But then I pictured, perhaps unfairly, what would inevitably follow if I went upstairs and roused Frances. The hysterical scene she would feel required to stage, with weeping and proclamations and frenzied prayers, while Walter called for an ambulance, which would probably arrive in time. Then the tubes, the injections, the mask over my father’s old face. The rush to the emergency room. Lights in his eyes. The rattle of curtains pulled, metal carts drawn up. Unfamiliar, unremarking faces peering down at him. Followed by heroic measures—so grueling and undignified for the object of heroism, splayed like a fish on the table. All so that he could live long enough to celebrate Christmas in Frances’s house, captive in his wheelchair in a corner of her living room, stuffed with custards and swathed in quilts, King Lear under the mistletoe, photographed for posterity and displayed proudly to visitors, the crowning heirloom in her collection.

No matter what he’d done, he didn’t deserve a fate like that.

I pressed his hand twice, to remind him I was there. Then I went into the bathroom to switch off the small distracting light that Frances had left burning. A folded blue woolen blanket lay at the end of the bed; I unfolded it and wrapped it around myself
and then, because I was so cold, and because there was nowhere else to sit in that empty room, and because it seemed somehow the right thing to do, given the loneliness of the hour, I climbed onto the bed. In a moment I will go to Frances, I thought. I will wake Frances. But after a little while, I lay down beside my father.

When I awoke the room was colder, as rooms always are just before morning. I don’t know how much time had passed, perhaps only a few minutes. Outside the stars had faded and somewhere deep in the house a heating pipe began to clank. I lay shivering under my blanket watching the sky lighten outside the window. Gray tree branches were becoming visible and an old curving stone wall reappeared at the edge of the lawn. The snowy rhododendron leaves at the window had turned faintly pink.

It was at that awful, tender, insubstantial hour, so full of promise for the innocent, so desolate for the guilty, that all my courage failed me. Even now it was not too late. I could still run to Frances, still turn everything over to her. But as daylight seeped into the room I remembered my father’s advice to us, which was to keep going, no matter what, and finally that implacable advice, in all its obvious complexity, became clear to me.

Once more I reached over and took his hand. His breathing had grown harsher, each ragged breath ending in a reluctant hiss as if he could not believe he would be required to go through all that again. It didn’t seem that he would have to wait much longer, but I would keep him company regardless. For the lonely moments of life, one wants company. And he was my father, after all.

It has been mostly for Jane’s benefit that I have set down this record of what happened over Thanksgiving, so that sometime in the future, when Frances has ceased to believe that anything untoward happened at all, my version of those few days in November will stand as an argument for the unreliability of memory. I do worry about Jane and those silvery scratches on her arm, and I’d like her to know that even stories you believe to be exclusively yours can have various sides, and perhaps more than one ending, apart from the inevitable one.

For instance, right now Frances would tell you that I watched coldly at my father’s bedside and did nothing. Walter would imply that my decision not to call an ambulance for a dying man ranks just below murder. Jane, who as a student of algebra understands variables, would probably conjecture that somehow or another, my father’s death was a misjudgment, even a misunderstanding. But soon enough all their memories of that night will change and what they will tell you may be something altogether different.

I
SHOULD ALSO MENTION
that the bookstore owner and his wife just had twin girls. I have been contemplating whether to send them an inscribed copy of one of my books, maybe
Mark Twain’s Daughters
, recently published, praised by School Library Journal as “the moving story of a charming, difficult man and his fascinating daughters” and called “more complexly imagined than is commonly found in historical fiction for girls.” On the title page I would write:
To the joys of reading.
Carita thinks I’m being maudlin, but my intentions are sincere, and I do believe in promoting the joys of reading.

In fact, I’ve spent the last three weeks touring around the country to promote this latest book. I even stopped briefly in Hartford, though I have not been home, by which I mean Frances’s house, since my father died, over a year ago now. Nor do I think I’ll be invited to visit any time soon. Carita has been a reassuring friend during this period, listening to my side of things, pointing out that people always behave toward their families in ways that would be considered criminal with anyone else. She and Paula and I were guests at Don’s newly renovated house in Berkeley this year for Thanksgiving; he prepared a turkey stuffed with oysters, which was slightly underdone.

But I’m fairly confident that one of these days Frances will tell Walter that she understands what I did that night, or did not do, and why. She will explain how traumatized I was by my childhood, very much as my father was traumatized by his, both of us losing our mothers so young. She will say that she wants to let bygones be bygones, that we have a special bond. Time is precious and she doesn’t want any regrets. And there is that responsibility older sisters feel toward their younger sisters.

Walter will resist at first. He will mention the disturbing scene at Thanksgiving, the fire in the living room, the ghastly morning when I was discovered asleep on my father’s bed. He will suggest instability. Or, not being an alarmist, he may employ the term
dysfunctional
, which Frances will rightly reject, pointing to the recent publication of my fourth book. If he has to, Walter will admit to Frances that I tried to seduce him on one of her Knole sofas.

But Frances will find a way to excuse or explain all of it, and what she can’t excuse or explain, at least to Walter’s satisfaction, she will dismiss.

“Blood is blood,” she will say.

A number of books were useful to me as I was writing this novel, in particular Justin Kaplan’s biography,
Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain
, and
The Autobiography of Mark Twain
, edited by Charles Neider, who also edited
Papa: An Intimate Biography of Mark Twain,
Susy Clemens’s biography of her father. In addition, I read and found informative
Mark Twain in the Company of Women
, by Laura E. Skandera-Trombley;
My Father, Mark Twain
, by Clara Clemens;
Susy and Mark Twain: Family Dialogues
, arranged and edited by Edith Colgate Salsbury;
Twain’s World, Essays on Hartford’s Cultural Heritage
, published by the
Hartford Courant;
and
The Quotable Mark Twain
, edited by R. Kent Rasmussen. I’m grateful to the Mark Twain Memorial in Hartford, Connecticut, where I learned a great deal from several enjoyable tours I took of Mark Twain’s house over the last few years.

I am indebted as well to E. J. Graff, Suzanne Matson, and Laura Zimmerman, who read early drafts and offered invaluable suggestions, and also to Madeline Drexler, Jeffrey Harrison, Marcie Hershman, Eileen Pollack, Phil Press, Marjorie Sandor, and Renee Shea for their encouragement and advice while I was working on this book, and to Allison Mendenhall, who long ago described defrosting a turkey. Thanks to Dr. Carrie Bernstein and Dr. Mark Ellenbogen for answering my questions and to Ann Stokes for providing me with a quiet place to work for a crucial week of revision. As always, I am deeply grateful to my agent, Colleen Mohyde, and to my editor, Shannon Ravenel, who I pray will never retire. Finally, I cannot thank Eve Berne and Ken Kimmell enough for their good-humored support and optimism on my behalf.

But most of all I would like to thank my dear friend Maxine Rodburg, who read more drafts of this novel than should be humanly endurable, or at least medically advisable, and is the most generous, patient, and insightful of critics.

A Shannon Ravenel Book
Published by
A
LGONQUIN
B
OOKS OF
C
HAPEL
H
ILL
Post Office Box 2225
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225

a division of
W
ORKMAN
P
UBLISHING
225 Varick Street
New York, New York 10014

© 2006 by Suzanne Berne. All rights reserved.
First paperback edition, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill,
     November 2007. Originally published by Algonquin Books
     of Chapel Hill in 2006.

This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

The Library of Congress has cataloged a previous edition of this work as follows:
Berne, Suzanne.

The ghost at the table : a novel / by Suzanne Berne.—1st ed.
    p. cm.
“A Shannon Ravenel book.”
ISBN 978-1-56512-334-2 (HC); ISBN 978-1-56512-579-7 (PB)
1. Sisters—Fiction. 2. Family—Fiction. 3. Thanksgiving Day—Fiction. 4. Domestic fiction. I. Title.
PS3552.E73114L37 2006
813’.54—dc22

2006040073

E-book ISBN 978-1-56512-661-9

A Short Note from the Author

Readers’ Group Questions and Topics for Discussion

When I was about ten, I discovered in my father’s study a shelf of handsome, red, limp-leather volumes, their covers embossed with a man’s bewhiskered, scowling profile. It was a full set of Mark Twain’s books, given to my father as a boy not long after his mother died. He’d read them over and over, he told me, adding that Mark Twain had just about saved his life during those sad years. My father’s motherless boyhood was almost unthinkable to me—how could I survive without my own mother?—but I was impressed that his life had been saved by a writer, so I read the books as I found them, starting with
Roughing It
and ending with
Joan of Arc.
At times, I hardly understood what I was reading, but I carried on anyway, wanting to oblige my father and mesmerized by the voice of Mark Twain, that intimate, keen, wisecracking, impatient, thunderous, all-knowing voice. It sounded to me then like the voice of God.

Twenty years later on a cold November afternoon, I arrived in the driveway of Mark Twain’s house in Hartford, where a tour was already underway. A young guide was telling a small crowd that visitors often believe that Mark Twain designed his house to look like a steamboat. I stepped back to look up at the house—which is large and rambling and built of bricks, and yet seems somehow
buoyant, with a prowlike veranda and cheerful little balconies and three smokestack chimneys—and sure enough, it
did
look like a steamboat. But then the tour guide added that Twain did not intend for his house to look like a steamboat and that a host of other misconceptions were really wishful thinking on the part of his admirers.

She went on to tell us that Mark Twain had fathered three daughters, the oldest of whom was called Susy. This was also my childhood name, spelled slightly differently. Susy and her sisters used to put on plays in their schoolroom, in which they wore their mother’s gowns and impersonated English queens and ordered each other’s beheadings. I recalled similar dramatics with my own two younger sisters—we were likewise drawn to bloodthirsty themes. Our tour guide described how Twain had entertained his little girls by the living room fire, making up thrilling stories about the bric-a-brac on the living room mantle. My father, too, had been an inventive storyteller. He used to sit us next to him on the piano bench and tell wild, funny stories about ogres and witches based on the notes he played, ending always with a reverberant glissando.