The narrator of The Ghost at the Table,
Suzanne Berne’s third novel, is Cynthia Fiske. Cynthia is a writer herself, a
novelist of sort. She works for a small company that publishes a series of
books for girls called ‘Sisters of History’. The books are fictionalised
accounts of famous women ‘as told’ by one of their sisters. The books are meant
to be cheerful, feminist stories, emphasizing the bond between the sister who
was unusual from the start and destined to achieved glory and the other,
remarkable—but not so remarkable—, sister. Cynthia covers literary women and
has written moderately successful ‘fiction’ on Louisa may Alcott, Emily
Dickinson, and Helen Keller, each from a sister’s perspective. She is
contracted to write about Harriet Beecher Stowe and her sister. In her later
years Harriet Stowe lived next to the family Samuel Clemens, better known to
the literary world as Mark Twain. Mark Twain had three daughters, none of whom
became famous and two died in their twenties. Cynthia grew up in Hartford, the
town where Twain lived with his family, and a family heirloom, an old Estey
player organ, according to the family legend, belonged to Mark Twain himself.
Cynthia’s father has told his daughters that Twain gifted the organ to his
mother when she was a child. This is partly the reason why Cynthia wants to
write about Mark Twain’s daughters instead of Harriet Beecher Stowe. But is
that the only reason?
Cynthia has always felt a modest connection
with Twain’s daughters and not just because they had grown up only a mile from
the house she grew up in. Cynthia’s family too has three daughters and Cynthia,
the youngest, believes that she was the least favourite of her father, just as
Jean, Twain’s youngest daughter, was his least favourite. Cynthia’s mother had
taken ill—with an illness which was initially thought to be psychosomatic but
later turned out to be early onset Parkinson’s Disease—soon after her birth,
and her abiding memory of her mother is as a valetudinarian, forever confined
to her bed, the bedroom smelling of a concoction of stale medicinal smells, her
remissions becoming more and more infrequent, before she finally succumbed when
Cynthia was thirteen. Even here, Cynthia feels, is a similarity with Twain’s
family: Twain’s wife too was a chronic invalid and died when the daughters were
young. Cynthia is invited for Thanksgiving by her middle and only surviving
sister, Frances—the eldest, Helen, having died of cancer a few years before—,
to her house in Concord, New England, not very far from where they grew up. But
there is a catch. Frances also intends to invite their father, who—eighty-two,
paralysed with stroke, and in the process of getting divorced from his much
younger second wife—has been shifted to a nearby Nursing Home, for the
Thanksgiving dinner. Cynthia, a woman more sour than a lemon tree in full
bloom—having worked her way through a number of unsatisfactory and unfulfilling
relationships, the most recent of which involved an affair with a married man,
she finds herself unattached and on the wrong side of forty—, has issues with
her father. She does not like him. She considers him to be ‘selfish, cruel, and
just this side of venal’. She blames him for having an affair when their
increasingly infirm mother was alive and allowing the woman—who has disposed
him off now that he has had a stroke—to move into their house within days of
his wife’s death. She blames him for putting in a perfunctionary appearance at
the memorial service of their eldest sister. Above all she blames him for their
mother’s death. Over the years Cynthia and Frances—with whom Cynthia had an
uneasy relationship in childhood—have gone over these issues again and again,
and Cynthia has always believed that Frances shares her views of their father.
Cynthia is therefore surprised when Frances—now married happily, for all
outward appearances, to a doctor and having two teenage daughters of her
own—invites her to the Thanksgiving dinner to which she is also planning to
bring their father—to whom Cynthia hasn’t spoken in years—from his nursing
home. Frances would very much like a family reunion because, she says, their
father, who is in very frail health, is not long for this world, and Frances
does not want any regrets. Cynthia is not convinced but allows herself to be
persuaded to visit her sister, telling herself that she would visit Mark
Twain’s house in Hartford the day after Thanksgiving. When Cynthia arrives in
Concord she has a few unpleasant surprises awaiting her. Firstly, her
brother-in-law, Walter, who comes to pick her up tells her that he and Frances
are going through difficult times; he also puts forth a very convincing case
which leads Cynthia to believe that her sister is on the verge of accumulating
all the symptoms that would have the psychiatrists get their prescription pads
out and write a hefty dose of Prozac. Finally—and this really throws
Cynthia—Walter informs her that her father is still in his martial home in Cape
because of some mix-up of dates with the nursing home and that Frances is
planning to drive to Cape and bring him back, except that she has lost the
confidence to drive, which means Cynthia will have to drive to Cape. When
Cynthia arrives at Frances’s home she finds her sister a bit preoccupied but
not in the midst of a heavy-duty mental breakdown which is what she has been
led to believe. The two sisters drive down to Cape the next day where Cynthia
endures a very awkward encounter first with his father’s second wife, and then
with the manager of the nursing home who informs them bluntly that there is no
vacancy in the nursing home and what is more she had informed Frances about
this very clearly almost a month ago. The sisters have no choice but to bring
their paralysed father to Frances’s home where he would stay until some old
biddy in the nursing home pops his clogs and a vacancy arises. Cynthia begins
to suspect that Frances has actually planned all this; that there was no mix-up
of dates with the nursing home; that the reason Frances wants her father not
just for a few hours on the Thanksgiving day but for several days is the
surviving members of the Fiske family, forced into closed proximity over two
days, would clear the air poisoned ever since their mother died all those years
ago. Over the next three days, an increasingly prickly Cynthia manages to get
into awkward situations with Frances’s family, including her brother-in-law,
her nieces, and Frances herself. During the Thanksgiving dinner she
successfully ruins the festive mood by telling stories of the unhappy lives of
Mark Twain’s daughters, hinting heavily at the similarities between Twain’s
family and her own family. She eavesdrops on conversations between her nieces
and friends and believes that they are worried about their mother. Finally, it
is time to lift the lid on some unwelcome home truths about what really
happened all those years ago in the night their mother died; who did what and
with what intentions; and who was responsible.
The Ghost at the Table
is a well-paced novel that is part family chronicle (of a dysfunctional family)
and part mystery. Berne keeps the reader’s interest going by drip-feeding
titbits of the Fiske family via a series of strategically placed flashbacks. It
is an astute and poignant portrayal of the lies that families tell themselves
and others and go through their lives believing in them until the moment is
reached when dissembling is no longer an option. The tale cambers over an array
of themes, some of which uncomfortable. The climax, when it arrives, has, one
gets the impression, a deliberate anticlimactic feel to it, but it is no less
wise and humane for that, and believable.
Berne is very adept at evoking ambiance.
The Thanksgiving dinner, for example, is described in a way that luminously
calls forth the awkwardness felt by those sitting at the table, accentuated by
the attempts of some at false bonhomie, the posturing and sneering of
adolescents, barely suppressed hostility of some members of the party towards
others, and the unspoken—and for that reason unrequited—expectations. It is
altogether very compelling.
A great deal of pleasure of reading The
Ghost at the Table comes from Berne’s simple yet pellucid and vividly
evocative prose, made crunchy by a wry sense of humour. At the same time an
understated tone of menace pervades the narrative, reminiscent of To
Kill A Mocking Bird. The reader experiences a sense of unease as the
plot progresses, as he tries to fathom what is lurking under the surface of
superficial cheeriness. It is all done very subtly. The interspersing of the
Fiske family history with the real life family history of Mark Twain is a deft
touch. The parallels between the lives of the Twain girls and the Fisk women
are drawn, like everything else in the novel, almost impalpably. There isn’t
one false note in the almost-300 pages of the novel. Berne is like a master
choreographer who has planned the performance to perfection.
Suzanne Berne won the Orange prize for
literature for her brilliant debut novel The Crime in the Neighbourhood. With
The
Ghost at the Table, her third novel, Berne makes a return to her
scintillating form after a slightly lackadaisical second novel. It is a
marvellous novel which Berne as a writer in the tradition of Harper Lee.
