Free The Ghost at the Table: A Novel by Suzanne Berne

Victorian code of conduct that excluded saying anything overtly unpleasant—the same code that now required her to use teacups instead of mugs, and forgo overhead lighting, and insist that Jane would feel better if she stopped wearing so much black.
    “I want a list,” Frances began sputtering now, her voice high and breathy, almost childlike. “I want a list of every dime he’s spent on you and I want it back.”
    “There is no money,” said Ilse, a small humiliating smile playing about her lips, “if that is what you came for.”
    “Liar.”
    “Frances.” I reached to take her arm. Frances continued to glare at Ilse, while Ilse gazed back at her. She looked more interested, than anything else, in what Frances would say next. I might have even caught a quiver of pity in the attentive way she examined Frances’s face.
    “Is that what you think I have had with him?” she asked finally. “Some life of leisure?”
    Frances was almost panting. “Oh, go to hell,” she said, ridiculously.
    Ilse gave another little smile, as if she weren’t seeing Frances at all but only someone pretending to be Frances. “I was very young then,” she repeated. “But I am not young anymore.” Then she sighed and pushed at her pale hair.
    At that moment I found myself actually feeling sorry for Ilse, for her skeletal years of tending an old man and satisfying her appetites only at meals, watching the sunset every evening from a picture window. No children of her own for company, his never visiting. She had indeed been young when she married my father. By my reckoning, Ilse couldn’t be more than a few years past fifty now.
    “Well, take care of him,” she told Frances. “You have waited long enough.”
    An eloquent look of dislike passed between them, though once again there seemed to be something else as well, a kind of concurrence that I did not understand, as if something had been finally agreed upon that had previously been in doubt.
    But perhaps even then I’d begun to get an inkling, because the next moment I heard myself say to Ilse, “Just out of curiosity,suppose we decide to leave right now without him. What about that?”
    “Then he goes to a motel.” Ilse’s lips drew back, exposing both rows of her square white teeth.
    I pictured my father sitting alone in his wheelchair beside an empty swimming pool, a fluorescent pink VACANCY sign winking behind him, one letter burnt out.
    “You wouldn’t do it,” I said.
    Ilse shrugged. “People are always doing things no one thought they would do.” Then, raising her eyebrows, she gave Frances the strangest look, almost a warning look, as if the two of them were speaking over my head, the way adults do around children.
    “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.
    “No?” Ilse held my gaze for another moment, then gave a final shrug and led the way into the living room, where my father was waiting for us.
    F RANCES MUST HAVE prepared me better than I thought, or maybe I’d prepared myself over the past weeks of reading brochures about whirlpools and physical therapy, because the sight of him was not a shock but rather confirmatory. He sat bonelessly in his wheelchair, his mouth sagging to one side, his skin the color of damp paper towels. Eyes dull, nose tumid, neck a tidepool of wattles. A mollusk in a blue blazer.
    Worse to remember what he had been: Slim, very upright and fastidious—sprightly, if that word didn’t imply girlishness. A head of thick auburn hair and that glossy little red moustache, which he used to stroke between his thumb and forefinger. His face long, fine, triangular. The same shape, in fact, as Frances’s.
    He was always moving in those days, fiddling with his tie or a button on his jacket, snapping his fingers, glancing around,growling demands or complaints or funny, disparaging comments. Impatience seemed to galvanize him, like electricity. Even in the coldest weather he went without a hat or scarf, leaving his coat