The organ sits in an alcove by the fireplace where a green velvet love seat used to be, lit by a single wrought-iron lamp. It is carved with garlands and urns, it stands on clawed animal feet, and when Cynthia touches the keys nothing happens, because she has forgotten the bellows need pumping first. What she does notice is the smell, deep and almost intoxicating mildew, the same smell that met her at the front door. Her sister Frances has rescued their grandmother’s instrument from a storage unit on Cape Cod and wants to call it a legacy. In The Ghost at the Table by Suzanne Berne, that wheezing piece of furniture is the first of many objects asked to carry a story it cannot quite bear.
The Organ Was Never Mark Twain’s
Their father always claimed the organ had been a gift from Mark Twain, who supposedly took a shine to his red-haired mother in a New York hotel. Cynthia knows the tale is invented. She also knows, because it is her trade, how much a family can build on one invented detail. She writes children’s books about famous women told by their overlooked sisters, and her current project is the three Clemens girls, who grew up in the turreted house on Farmington Avenue about a mile from her own childhood home in West Hartford. Three girls in that family, three in hers: the coincidence is the hinge on which The Ghost at the Table by Suzanne Berne turns.
The Twain material could easily have been decoration. Berne makes it a mirror. At a strained first supper with their father Frances gushes about the sweet anecdotes in her sister’s outline, the Santa Claus letters and the bedtime stories, until Cynthia, irritated, starts listing what actually happened to the daughters: the early death from meningitis, the epileptic youngest drowned in her bath on Christmas morning, the old man’s habit of collecting young girls he called his Angelfish. Their elderly father, almost speechless after his stroke, manages one gruff instruction across the table to leave the dead alone. Nobody at that table is really talking about Hartford in the 1880s.
Frances Keeps the House, Cynthia Keeps the Score
The two sisters are the novel, and Berne is scrupulous about giving each her due. Frances is a decorator whose gift, she says, is making a client’s house look not as they lived but as they wish they had lived. She serves Scottish tea in proper cups, pieces quilts from rescued fabric and sets her guests’ plates on Blue Willow china. She is a curator of the family past, and the father seems to light up only when he looks at her.
Cynthia, unmarried and rootless in San Francisco, finds all this both enviable and suffocating. Her sharpness is the book’s chief pleasure and its main problem. She is funny about the coyotes in the Concord woods, the dour portrait the nieces call the Common Ancestor, the way the house smells of an era when people churned their own butter. She is less funny, and less fair, about nearly everyone else.
Concord itself does a good deal of quiet work. On a morning errand Cynthia drifts past the Old North Bridge, the Minute Man statue and the Alcott home, and falls into a reverie about the sisters history forgot, the ones who copied out the poems and kept the house while someone else became famous. It is a digression, and a lovely one, and it tells the reader exactly how Cynthia sees herself. The Ghost at the Table by Suzanne Berne is full of these sideways glances, where a town’s monuments and a family’s myths turn out to be made of the same stuff: a little truth, polished until it shines.
The centre of The Ghost at the Table by Suzanne Berne is a long flashback to the West Hartford house in the year their mother died. A long illness had kept her in bed behind yellow drapes for most of the girls’ childhoods. Their father sent notes up to her on her breakfast tray, and a housekeeper named Mrs. Jordan, devoted, pious and opaque, carried them. What happened on the night of the death, and who was in the room, is the question both sisters have answered differently for thirty years. The section is quiet, exact and genuinely chilling, and it is the reason to read the book.
Setting a Place for the Ghost at the Table
The holiday meal itself is worth the wait. Frances tells her guests a charming anecdote about a childhood Thanksgiving, while Cynthia silently remembers the real version, in which an electric carving knife, a temper and the family dog are involved. The tutor Wen-Yi later attempts the Moonlight Sonata on the out-of-tune organ, and the effect is both comic and grim. Berne is very good at the moment a party stops being polite. Sarah’s college friend Arlen, the one outsider who listens closely, hears the false note in Frances’s story at once, and his watchfulness gives The Ghost at the Table by Suzanne Berne a welcome second pair of eyes on a family that has stopped seeing itself.
She is less good with the crowd around the table. The reservations in The Ghost at the Table by Suzanne Berne are real enough to name together:
- Several guests, the maths tutor, the young doctor and his wife, the upbeat assistant, are types rather than people, and Cynthia’s view of them leans on stereotype the novel seldom questions.
- The opening chapters move slowly, spending a great deal of time on logistics before the central mystery tightens.
- The last part compresses a run of dramatic incidents into a couple of days, and a key piece of family history is delivered as conversation rather than scene.
Readers should know that illness and decline, a possibly deliberate overdose, self-harm, drinking, infidelity and paternal cruelty all run through the book, handled with restraint rather than spectacle.
The Writer Behind the Ghost at the Table
Suzanne Berne’s first novel, A Crime in the Neighborhood, took Britain’s leading prize for women’s fiction and established her as a writer of unease in comfortable places. She has taught at Harvard and Wellesley and later wrote Missing Lucile, a memoir about the grandmother she never knew. In the note that closes The Ghost at the Table by Suzanne Berne, she explains that her own father owned a set of Twain’s books, given to him after his mother died, and believed they had saved his life. She grew up reading them.
The turkey thread has a homelier source. Berne credits a friend’s account of defrosting a holiday bird as the seed of one of the novel’s best set pieces, a reminder that her Gothic effects are built from very ordinary materials.
What It Leaves Behind
The Ghost at the Table by Suzanne Berne is a family novel that behaves like a ghost story, with the dead mother present at every meal and nobody agreeing on what she would say. It is uneven, and its narrator’s acid can curdle, but its central flashback and its sense of a holiday as a stage for old grievances are hard to shake. Groups reading it during Thanksgiving week will find plenty to argue over, starting with which sister they believe.
Those who want more sisters with unreliable memories should go to We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson, where another household is shaped by a death at the dinner table. The Ice Storm by Rick Moody offers a different New England holiday weekend, in Connecticut, where families fail each other just as quietly.
The organ never plays a tune anyone wants to hear. Families keep theirs in the corner anyway.