The Hunger Moon (8 page)

Renata wanted to pick him up and take him to bed with her. But if she did, it would so clearly be for her comfort and not his. She took herself back to bed, promising herself the compromise of bringing him to her room when he woke up during the night for a feeding.

At two
A
.
M
., Charlie was still sleeping, and Renata was still awake, turning in her empty bed. At three, she moved her pillows and blankets into his room, lying on the floor and waiting for him. At five, his cries woke her, and she finally carried him back to bed with her to nurse, and to hold on to him.

R
ENATA’S NEXT FEW DAYS
were spent stocking up her kitchen, buying cleaning supplies and prints for the walls, and shopping for new clothes for both of them. The city was still a maze to her. Even along her regular errand routes she found herself making the same wrong turns day after day, as if she needed to run through a set course of errors before she would let herself find home.

The dark and chill were daunting. Winter in L.A. used to mean breaking out a heavy cotton sweater. Now she found herself combing the stores for a goose-down coat. She finally came upon the one she wanted: bright red and mid-calf, made of weightless down and nylon. Even on sale, it was close to three hundred dollars. She didn’t care. It warmed the dark like a chili pepper, and its brightness made her think of California.

This had been the first time in her life she could go out and buy anything she needed in one fell swoop, without having to pay
it off a little at a time. It pleased her that everything they used was new, that the apartment was so modern. But Renata needed to get back to work after the New Year so she could leave the rest of their savings intact. She wanted to keep enough for a down payment on a house for them someday—where, she didn’t know. She had started to drive around neighborhoods, not because she was ready to think about a house yet, but because she was curious about what that life looked like. She knew now that houses didn’t have to look like the one she grew up in, with unmowed grass and drawn curtains. But she had nothing else to go on. Some afternoons she drove down streets where children were climbing off school buses, lunch boxes and drawings in hand, and saw them run to the front doors opening to greet them. She studied the way Christmas lights encircled bedroom windows, and how families had their names printed neatly on their mailboxes. She watched children roller-skate on their sidewalks, chased by their dogs, and saw parents pull into their driveways with grocery bags and briefcases. She liked to think that the shouts and barks and happy calls going back and forth on these streets were weaving their way into Charlie’s sleep, and that as he napped in his car seat, these were recorded in his being as the sounds of his life.

E
LEANOR HAD GROWN UP
in a house with servants. From birth through the age of twelve she had a nanny. The family also kept a cook, housekeeper, and gardener. Her father, Jackson Donleavy, was a button manufacturer who weathered the Depression by switching his emphasis from wholesale to retail in 1930, buying three small storefront businesses in Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn to sell sewing notions directly to the individual customer. Because more housewives were making their own clothes during those years, as well as keeping old clothes longer by mending or refurbishing them, he prospered in the notions business, opening more stores throughout the region, and actually increased button production when other manufacturers in the garment industry were closing their factories.

Although Eleanor had grown up somewhat luxuriously, she had, from the time of her marriage, lived a normal middle class life, at least until Robert’s endless surgical residencies were finished and he began to earn enough not only to keep them very comfortably but to send Eleanor to law school. Only when she had begun her law studies did they hire household help—a nanny for the children, and a housekeeper. Having paid help was not an enormous adjustment for her; she was accustomed to the role that
servants played in a house: they were to be treated fairly and kindly, and as long as they were competent and honest, they were entitled to every consideration an employer might extend to make the working conditions pleasant. This included inquiring in a general way after their welfare and that of their families, but, in Eleanor’s mind, stopped short of forming a genuine friendship.

This was the very relationship Eleanor intended to create with her new helper, June. The girl certainly was eager to be useful to her, and had impressed Eleanor with her willingness to work. But the fact was that at this time in her life, Eleanor found it difficult to have a stranger coming and going in her house, although it did turn out to be a relief to have help—even light amounts of shopping and housework had been wearing her out lately. Eleanor would rather have avoided a lot of small talk with June, and simply wished to hand her lists of things to do, but June tended to chatter on. All the talking unnerved Eleanor in the beginning, accustomed as she was to the silence of living alone. But as June’s visits passed, she began to grow used to it, letting it flow over her like music.

June’s voice
was
musical; it had the lilt and optimism of youth as she told Eleanor about a new piece of choreography she was learning, the grade she had received on her statistics exam, or the bugs that she waged war against in her studio apartment. Little by little, and unasked by Eleanor, she began revealing things about her background: her parents’ divorce and father’s remarriage, how she wished she had not been an only child, and that she wished she had the courage to quit school and be a dancer in New York. Eleanor surprised herself by beginning to look forward to these visits, to be kept current in the life of June. She was not prepared, however, for June’s curiosity about her own life, the questions about the boxes in the spare room, the need to know the names of all the characters whose photos were on her refrigerator, the wish to hear about what Eleanor had done over the weekend.

She was certainly not prepared when June asked for her assistance
on a school project for some class fantastically called Dying and Grief.

“I just can’t seem to begin the paper,” June said. “It’s about mourning. Do you think you could tell me some things about how you felt when your husband died? I mean, not really personal things, but did you go through some stages of grief? There are supposed to be four stages, you know—or maybe it’s five—at least that’s what the books say.”

Eleanor was so taken aback by the question that she could only murmur something noncommittal and change the subject. She was sure June felt embarrassed, and she regretted that. But what in the devil did the girl expect her to tell her? June didn’t bring it up again and Eleanor had no idea if she had begun writing her paper. Lately though, when Eleanor was sitting in her armchair having her morning coffee, watching the birds at her feeders, her thoughts kept turning to Robert, and their marriage, and his death. The feeder was now attracting several kinds of birds, and Eleanor kept meaning to get a book from the library to identify them. June had brought over a bag of mixed seed that her mother in Worcester concocted. “My mother makes the mix every year for Christmas presents,” June announced. “She didn’t mind me taking some early to give you when I told her you weren’t having any luck with your feeders.” Eleanor had been startled by the girl’s observation, and even more by the fact that she had been right: it wasn’t just a poor year for birds, as Eleanor had assumed; it was that the birds didn’t want what she had been offering. They came now for June’s seed.

Some sort of brown bird was now perched on the rim of the feeder; another, which might have been its mate, was grooming itself on the deck railing.

In many ways, she and Robert had been perfectly suited for each another. Both were disciplined, and more intellectual than emotional. They waited until they had both graduated from college to become engaged, and then, while Robert went to war, Eleanor worked for her father as a bookkeeper, saving money and
living at home. They never made a misstep out of self-indulgence or recklessness. Robert’s career proceeded just as they expected from someone so talented and ambitious; the children were never ill beyond the usual childhood maladies; and, after Peter was in kindergarten, Eleanor surprised neither of them by the way she sailed through her legal studies, graduating second in her class and rapidly achieving promotions at the Department of Public Welfare, where she became chief counsel.

Her life had not had too many disappointments. When she miscarried a baby between Helen and Janice, she remembered that she could not stop crying for a week. She and Robert both attributed the uncontrolled tears to hormonal shifts. When the week passed, she gave herself a list of spring-cleaning chores to do, and spent the next month cleaning closets, painting rooms, and digging up the soil in the garden. A few months later she was pregnant with Janice, and the miscarriage was forgotten. When Eleanor’s father died she went through the customary mourning rituals, but really, his death was a relief. He had been so unhappy confined to bed for the last few years that Eleanor could not truly be sad at his passing.

Her mother’s death fifteen years later was harder for Eleanor, who herself was beginning to feel the onset of arthritis and digestive problems, which were her family’s hallmarks of aging. She had always identified with her cool, competent mother, and to see her shrink to ninety-seven pounds and then fall into a period of vague fretfulness before finally dying was frightening to Eleanor. In the last year or so that Charlotte rattled around the Forest Hills house, forgetting to eat, arguing with her housekeeper—who herself was seventy, but too loyal to retire—Eleanor worried constantly. Her mother would not hear of giving up the house, though the stairs were a clear danger to her and she had lost interest in its gardens and grounds. Eleanor and her sister, Isabel, were on the verge of hiring a twenty-four-hour nurse when Charlotte died in her sleep of a stroke.

By the time Eleanor came into her half of the Donleavy inheritance,
she and Robert were well established in their fields. Their children were through with college and had their grandfather’s trust funds to draw on for graduate school. Even after investing the bulk of her mother’s estate, Eleanor and Robert had more money than they could easily spend. It was a period of second honeymoon for them: travels to Bombay one season, Kenya the next; fishing trips in Alaska and the Florida Keys; castle tours of Europe and a walking excursion in the Scottish Highlands. Eleanor felt them growing younger with each journey, as if the good luck of having extra money could buy time as well as exotic sights.

I
N RETROSPECT
, E
LEANOR FOUND IT IRONIC
that her doctor husband could never be bothered to get himself regular physicals. It wasn’t arrogance, exactly, that made him assume that he could diagnose himself. Partly it was a kind of supreme confidence that someone who was so successful at treating other people’s maladies could not fall prey to any himself. And, in fact, he was rarely sick. Eleanor thought that Robert saw sickness as somehow beneath him personally, though he was compassionate to his patients. Maybe it was because he saw so many weak and vulnerable people—powerful men brought low by a heart valve or a blood vessel, reduced to wearing those backless hospital smocks—that he, Robert, decided that will alone could keep him healthy.

Though she knew it was a fallacy to correlate what kind of failure the body experienced with personality, Eleanor could not help thinking that for her husband’s body to repay him for all his self-discipline and intelligence with an inoperable brain tumor was a kind of gross cosmic insult. He claimed later that he had had very few symptoms in the beginning, and she was forced to believe it, because otherwise she would have been too angry with him for not seeing a doctor sooner. By the time his headaches and blurred vision made it impossible for him to perform surgery, it was too late. Less than a year later, he was an irascible stranger who would
wander muttering down the street in his robe and slippers. The loss of control over his personality was the hardest part for Eleanor to watch, and she knew that in his moments of clarity it was what caused Robert himself the most humiliation and pain. Overnight he had become the kind of person to whom busy specialists spoke too loudly and talked about in the third person, as if he were not in the room.

Her children were with her when she buried her husband, and Peter, especially, stepped in to oversee the arrangements. It was a dignified Presbyterian service, though Robert hadn’t been much of a churchgoer. His colleagues paid their respects in dark expensive suits, and spoke movingly of the Robert who ran the surgery department, omitting all reference to the eccentric and distraught character they had paid embarrassed visits to in the last three months. She supposed she had been, if not comforted by the burial rituals, at least occupied enough by them to propel her through the first period of shock. Her daughters provided a buffet back at the house after the funeral, and as Eleanor held the familiar party crystal in her hand, receiving condolences, she fought the surreal feeling that they were having a few people in for cocktails to celebrate someone’s birthday or promotion, and that Robert would be back shortly from stepping out to get more ice.