The Ghost at the Table: A Novel (13 page)

“This is so great of you, Cynnie,” said Frances, as I got up from the table. “Let me find my wallet.”

“I’ll take care of it. Will you be all right with—”

“He’s asleep. At least, I think he is.”

We paused for a moment in the kitchen, staring at each other, clearly having the same thought:
What if he’s not sleeping? What if he’s dead?

“I’m sure he is,” I said.

“Stop scaring me,” said Frances.

“I’m not trying to scare you. Can he get out of bed on his own?”

“Walter rigged up a kind of railing for him with a couple of chairs.” Her face darkened momentarily, perhaps at the idea of something being rigged in her house.

“And he has water? And—something to read?”

Again we stared at each other, lost in the immensity of our father’s possible, unanswerable desires.

“I’m sure he’ll be fine.” Briskly, Frances reverted to her old capable self. She would find her tablecloth, folded with dried rose petals in a drawer. She would make extra cranberry sauce with orange rind and whole cranberries. She would joke about vegans. Although her voice sounded thin when she asked, “You won’t be gone long, Cynnie, will you?”

I
T WAS EVEN COLDER
outside than the day before, but I was glad to be driving into Concord Village, past all those boxy, upright, old clapboard houses, with their raked yards and clipped privet hedges, past the parking lot for the Old North Bridge, swarming this morning with visitors wearing hooded Patriots football sweatshirts. In third grade at West Hartford Country Day, I stood by my desk one bright fall afternoon, watching particles of chalk dust float in a shaft of sunlight, and recited:

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood
And fired the shot heard round the world.

I remember puzzling over how a bridge could be rude and how a shot could be heard all the way around the world, yet I never thought to ask for an explanation. My childhood was full of confusions like these, almost willfully acquired, since I would never admit when I didn’t understand something. Not just because I was afraid of looking stupid but because the natural order of things appeared to me to include dusty obscurities, intended to remain unclear.

As I drove around the village that morning looking for a coffee shop, I admired the deep blue of the sky, which made the day look warmer than it was, shining above the tall white Congregational church, the prosperous storefronts and granite stoops, the tidy streets full of cars and vans and people in parkas walking along the sidewalks with shopping bags. It was a pretty town, and I liked the oldness of it, which was both convincing and unhaunted—a place where the past could be taken for granted because it was everywhere, from the enormous copper beech trees to the tilting slate gravestones in the cemetery just opposite a children’s clothing store. And yet Concord’s antiquity was why all those tourist buses sat idling in the parking lot of the Old North Bridge. Perhaps it was my years in California that made me appreciate Concord’s achievement in being historic without being moribund or becoming a theme park; I never visited this town without feeling moved, though I would never admit it to Frances. With her, I pretended to think Concord was stuffy and quaint, full of Unitarians and women with frosted pageboys who became militant when a
Dunkin’ Donuts was proposed for Main Street. Concord, after all, had banned
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
when it was first published (Louisa May Alcott priggishly scolded Twain for not providing “something better to tell our pure-minded lads and lasses”). But it was here that the Alcott girls once took long walks with their exciting, infuriating, improvident father, debating whether to give up wearing cotton, because it was picked by slaves, which would leave them in virtuous but scratchy wool all year long, debating whether to live on apples, debating whether God might be a woman. Stepping over horse dung in the street, quizzing each other on Greek vocabulary, waving to Mr. Thoreau, to Mr. Emerson, to Mr. Nathaniel Hawthorne, as carelessly as I said hello to my landlady when I passed her on the stairs. If I squinted, I could almost see them standing under an old oak tree, their cheeks pink in the chilly fall air.

It was four years ago, during my visit back east to see Orchard House, that Helen had telephoned one morning to tell Frances and me about her diagnosis, about which she’d known for some time, and to explain that she was treating herself.
Please don’t worry.
Her voice was calm, tired, slightly impatient. The voice of someone already used to being sick.
I’m sure I’ll be fine.
Perhaps I should have argued with her, as Frances did. Instead, later that same day, I stood in the front parlor of Orchard House, where Anna Alcott was married, “with lilies twined in her hair,” just like Meg March in
Little Women,
and marveled at how little things had changed. Upstairs, Louisa’s room still held her half-moon shelf desk, built by her father, set between the windows overlooking Lexington Road. In her bedroom, May Alcott had drawn figures in ink on the walls, defacing the woodwork and wallpaper; the drawings were still perfectly visible. She had also used a hot poker to burn decorative designs into a bread board, as a present for her
mother. The bread board was still on display in the kitchen, the designs looking as freshly scorched as if they had been burned in yesterday.

At last I spotted a Dunkin’ Donuts that had been unsuccessfully opposed. I parked the van and went inside. While I waited for my coffee, I reflected on how attached I had grown over the years to my historical characters, those unheralded sisters, May Alcott, Lavinia Dickinson, and Mildred Keller. More attached, in some ways, than to the people I knew. It wasn’t so much that I identified with them—which of course I did—as I found them reassuring. Even inspiring. May Alcott, for instance, would always remain dear to me for her clumsy-looking bread boards and amateurish drawings. She’d persuaded Louisa to let her illustrate the first edition of
Little Women,
then to bankroll a sojourn in Paris to study art; she got married in Europe, got pregnant, then died a few weeks after childbirth, leaving her daughter for Louisa to raise. Her refusal to be ashamed of herself for not being as gifted, for mooching off her sister, for forging lustily on, demanding whatever she could get while she could get it, that’s what I admired. May hadn’t been anybody’s favorite; she died young but not young enough to be glorified, like her sister Elizabeth, immortalized by Louisa as saintly Beth, “the family angel,” while May wound up as selfish, prissy Amy March. Naturally, she deserved something back. That must have been her reckoning. Quid pro quo.

Then there was cranky old Lavinia Dickinson, whom I also loved, mostly for her crankiness. Lavinia must have had some reckoning to do herself, when she yanked open the bottom drawer of Emily’s bedroom dresser a few weeks after Emily died and discovered a locked box full of poems hand-sewn into booklets, each one a perfect betrayal of their sisterly compact. For years, Lavinia
had played Cerberus at the door, barking at visitors while Emily hovered like Persephone on the upstairs landing or watched from the windows, shrinking into the shadows, neither here nor there, grateful for Lavinia’s protection. Or so Lavinia had thought.

I never hear the word “escape”
Without a quicker blood,
A sudden expectation,
A flying attitude.

Poor flabbergasted Lavinia. She must have sat right down on the floor in her apron and skirts, a hand over her mouth. Sat down and stared at those meticulous little pages, each one crammed with cryptic ecstasies and fierce meditations, most at first glance incomprehensible, all of them flauntingly unconcerned with rhyme or the usual pieties or even proper punctuation. Wondering how she could have been so cruelly duped. So
that’s
what Emily had been doing, those tiresome years when Lavinia had been answering the door and making excuses. Delivering Emily’s little notes and weird nosegays to the neighbors, trying to ignore their baffled expressions. Laundering those infernal white dresses. Haggling with shopkeepers, toting packages to the post office, shooing spying children out of the garden, being the drudge, the grump, surrendering whatever hopes she may have had of marrying and having children of her own, all so that Emily—pale, crepuscular Emily, watching everything with her sherry-colored eyes—could hide in the house, baking bread and growing heliotropes, demanding that most unreasonable of demands, to be left alone. And all this time Emily had been plotting jail breaks. Had been
having
jail breaks. No wonder Lavinia first considered burning those booklets.

As for mousy Mildred Keller, whom I loved least but perhaps understood best, I often imagined her sitting glumly on a parlor chair, swinging her feet, watching Helen scrabble words into people’s astonished hands, peevishly wishing that she could go deaf and blind, too, so someone would notice her.

How to cope with not being the beloved? With not being the favorite, the brilliant one, the remembered one?

By getting your own back. By being cranky. By waiting on the parlor chair until it suddenly dawns on you that you are not deaf and blind, that you are not dumb, and that it’s time to say something, even if no one is listening.

By acquiring, at all costs, a flying attitude.

A
FTER BUYING WHAT
Frances had requested at the grocery store, I put off returning to the house for a little while longer and drove around the countryish outskirts of Concord to look at old stone walls, another thing that you can’t find in California. A man was standing on a ladder outside his house, hanging Christmas lights on a blue spruce. Which seemed preposterous, until I realized how late Thanksgiving was this year. On my way back through town, I stopped at a pay phone and, on an impulse, called Carita in San Francisco, forgetting about the time difference.

When she answered the phone she sounded sleepy and annoyed. “What is it?” she demanded. “Are you all right?” I could hear Paula murmuring in the background, so I said that everything was fine. “Why are you calling then?” And I was forced to admit that I did not know why I was calling, except that I’d wanted to hear, as I put it, “a friendly voice.” “You’re not all down in the dumps about
him,
are you?” she asked, referring to the bookstore owner. I answered truthfully that I’d hardly given him a thought. No, just the usual family tensions. “Grist for the mill,” yawned Carita, which
was what she always said when writer friends complained about their families. “Take notes.” Perhaps if she’d been more awake, Carita would have questioned me further, and I could have said that I was regretting my decision to come east and missing the Thanksgiving she and Paula were hosting in their apartment on Alvarado Street, with the chili lights and the mariachi music and barking Prince Charles. Which might have made me believe, at least for the time being, that Carita’s Thanksgiving
was
what I was missing. But instead she told me to “hang in there,” then said good-bye and hung up.

I still wasn’t ready to face Frances and my father, so I drove aimlessly around for a while longer, then pulled into the parking lot at the Old North Bridge and got out to have a look at the
Minute Man
statue. He is very good-looking, the Minute Man, in a noble, guileless, slightly numbskull way. I read somewhere that Daniel Chester French used a local gardener as his model, then fell in love with him. Unrequited. Though at least French had his statue to admire whenever he wanted and someone bronzed and attractive to gaze permanently back at him.

Finally I walked across the bridge (not the original Old North Bridge but a copy that is now itself old and historic) and sat down on a bench overlooking an empty field full of frozen ruts.

The field reminded me of a vacant stretch of land across the street from our house in West Hartford. An abandoned potato field that bordered a stream, left over from the days when Stone Ridge Farms, as our development was called, had actually been a farm. Neighborhood children used it mostly for warfare; it was where we poked each other with sticks and pulled down each others’ pants, shrieking with rage and excitement, pelting each other with mud. During one of these battles, someone unearthed a scatter of rust-colored bones by the old stonewall: a femur, some
ribs. Most likely the remains of an animal, but rumors quickly spread that a child had been buried in the potato field, then later that several little skeletons had been found. Soon the field became known as the Bloody Lot. Screams were imagined, then heard, and piteous weeping. The piteous weeping was especially audible during loud thunderstorms. Dogs began to bark. Everyone heard it then.

One summer evening I was playing with a small band of children in the field when we dug up some sort of tubers at the far end, maybe they were potatoes—knobby, thin, yellow potatoes. We decided to roast them on sticks over a little fire made of twigs and kindled with someone’s father’s silver butane lighter. When we ate them they tasted of dirt. Bloody dirt. A few of them fell into the fire and had to be clawed out with sticks. We ate the potatoes ravenously, even the charred ones, rushing out into the arterial dark to dig up more, out in the dark where treacherous ruts could make a child fall and twist her ankle and be left maimed and helpless, prey to escaped convicts and child murderers, until dawn broke, when a search party of parents would find her, asleep and filthy, probably violated, covered with dew. But no one fell. No one called us in to go to bed, either, though it was late.

“Bloody Lot!” we shrieked, capering around the fire, thrusting our sticks into the air. “We have conquered the Bloody Lot!”

Eventually parents did come out to call their children. They stood on the edge of the field swinging flashlights, calling indulgently at first, then more urgently, in some cases angrily—noticing the embers from our fire—until all the children were gone. Except me. No one came to call for me, not even Mrs. Jordan, and in the end I ran across the dark muddy field by myself. When I opened the front door, out of breath, dirty and red-eyed, shirt
torn, my face streaked with soot, Frances and my father looked up from where they were playing Scrabble in the living room.