The Ghost at the Table: A Novel by Suzanne Berne

tight-lipped woman in a mob cap, a lace fichu around her neck, her dark eyes as tiny as an elephant’s. Long ago Sarah and Jane had dubbed her the “Common Ancestor”; they insisted her eyes followed you if you moved around the room. A few gaunt dignified old wooden farm tools hung on the opposite wall.Everything in Frances’s house had a charming story attached, usually of how it was rescued at the last moment from the trash or from the hands of Philistines (“They were going to
paint
it!”), and I reflected, not for the first time, that almost nothing in my apartment had ever belonged to anyone else, or would be wanted by anyone else, either.
    Walter was trying to explain to me why managed health care was a failure, perhaps to allow Frances to settle down and eat her dinner. Not that she ate much. My father ate almost nothing. Whenever he raised his fork, whatever was on it fell off. Jane tried to help him by cutting up his chicken, but in the end she got up from the table, with a scathing look at her mother, who was sitting back in her chair with her eyes closed, and went into the kitchen. A minute later she came back with a spoon and a carton of peach-flavored yogurt. He didn’t eat much more of that, but it was an improvement over the odds he faced against rice and peas.
    “There’s no such thing as managed care in this country,” Walter was saying to me. “What we have now is unmanageable care.”
    Walter was doing a sturdy job of behaving as though my father’s arrival were no more inconvenient than if Sarah had come home with a second college friend for Thanksgiving. My father himself did not participate in the conversation beyond a few grunts, though he seemed perfectly alert, especially every time he looked at Frances. Then a slow kindling would come into his eyes, and half his mouth lifted, as though he were trying to smile.
    Walter and I got up to clear the dinner plates; Frances followed us into the kitchen a moment later, leaving Jane alone with Dad. As we were putting dishes in the sink I heard Walter mutter, “How am I supposed to deal with this?” Frances turned to him blankly, as if to say, Deal with what? She didn’t assure him thateverything would be all right or insist that our father would just be staying for a few days, until Greenswood Manor had an opening. She simply said she’d take care of the dishes.
    Walter gave her a hard stare, then shrugged his shoulders. But he looked worried. It was usually Frances who looked worried, while Walter maintained an ironic distance from upsets and inconveniences. Worry, to Walter, was something extreme and personal, what you did when you had a grave illness. He saw that kind of worry every day. Frances’s generalized worrying, about terrorist plots and derailed elections and whether antiques were going out of style, made no more sense to him than her finicky concern with keeping the linen smelling fresh or whether she had shortbread cookies to serve with Scottish tea.
    Even so, Frances’s worrying usually came across as “just being careful” and wanting to “take care of things.” She married Walter when she was barely out of college, arguing at the time that it was silly to wait, that she wanted “to get on with life,” though now I wonder if she was worried that she’d never meet anyone else as handsome and successful. The same was true of the house, which she’d insisted on buying despite its decrepitude because she might never again find “such a bargain in Concord.” She approached worry pragmatically, going at it straight on, the way a carpenter might plane a board that was not quite level. And yet her attempts to alleviate her fears—like trying to persuade Sarah to leave New York and come home—could rise to the heroic, all while she maintained an attitude of efficient purpose. Even tonight, even after that unfortunate mix-up with the nursing home and my father suddenly on her doorstep, Frances didn’t seem so much worried as