Strangers at the Feast (17 page)

Sometimes, while Eleanor was trying to sleep, a headache made camp between her temples; deep in her mind she heard a clanging of tent stakes, felt a tightening of canvas. At which point she took a pill, put on her robe and slippers, and tiptoed downstairs. It was strange, then, the silence of her house. All those years of children’s voices and footsteps. The
bap-blip-boom
of Douglas’s video games. Ginny pacing the house whispering into the cordless telephone. The bickering.

It was hard to believe there were times, years earlier, when she had thrown down her apron and cried, “Can I please just have a minute of quiet! A moment alone!”

Because in the silence, in the solitude, Eleanor heard things, saw things. When she sat alone at night, the sound of a raccoon wrestling the lid off a trash can tripped her heart. In the distance, dogs barked—but at whom? The headlights of a passing car made her flinch; she brought her hands to her eyes. Away, away.

When had the nights begun to frighten her?

When she was little, her mother had read to her from
Forgotten Civilizations of the World
. Stories of the Inca, the Easter Islanders, the Roman emperors. The final chapter told the story of Pompeii, the city lost under ash and lava for seventeen hundred years.

Her mother said the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius began at five in the morning, while everyone was asleep. The volcano was now at rest, but who knew when it might awaken. Her mother stopped the hands of Eleanor’s alarm clock at 4:45 a.m.

“Now five o’clock will never come,” she said. “You will always be safe.”

When she left Eleanor’s room and switched off the light, Eleanor lay in bed, imagining she was a girl in Pompeii, AD 79, the night before the eruption. By flashlight, she wrote notes—
Dear Citizens, My name is Eleanor and I am nine years old and I like strawberry ice cream and maraschino cherries and I am very afraid of dogs. This was my room, please keep it clean—
which she would then fold and tuck inside one of her Mary Jane shoes, putting the shoe inside her schoolbag, the schoolbag inside a pillowcase, the pillowcase underneath her bed, where it would be spared volcanic ruin.

What would she write now?

Dear Citizens, I am fifty-nine years old. I am a wife and mother. This was my house for three decades. I am still afraid of dogs; I don’t know why.

Ginny had gone to Pompeii on an archaeological dig. Eleanor could not understand—such a terrifying place to visit.

“Mom, you’ve been telling me about Pompeii since I was in diapers.”

Had she? Certainly, Eleanor had read to her children from
Forgotten Civilizations
. Ginny returned home with wondrous photographs: Ginny standing tanned and dust-covered, leaning on a shovel; Ginny at a candlelit picnic table drinking wine with archaeologists.

Well, maybe Eleanor could go, too. She left Italy brochures and Fodor’s guides on Gavin’s desk, but he called ruins one of the world’s great practical jokes. That people spent thousands of dollars and flew across oceans to get a firsthand look at where something
used
to be made him grunt with laughter. Gavin would go to museums and look at paintings. He would visit a church or a beautiful courthouse. But ask him to visit something that
was
a church or a courthouse? No, he would not live in the past.

The traffic had come to an almost full stop, and Gavin was fiddling with knobs. She looked at his face—the silver sideburns, the coarse jaw on which she could see every pore, every hair follicle—this sixty-year-old version of the boy she met on the beach in Cape Cod.

“Okay, seventy-three degrees,” said Gavin. “Does this please my wife?”

GINNY

As Ginny left Westchester County heading north on I-95, the brightly lettered Connecticut sign welcomed her. She traced the edge of the Long Island Sound, where, even in November, the white sails of weekend yachts shimmered in the sun.

The Siwanoy, Quiripi, Rippowam, and Pequots had once roamed this coast, trading beaver skins and wampum, fishing for oysters and herring. Until first the Dutch, then the Puritans, pulled the deed trick. Someday, Ginny thought she’d write an article on writing, how societies with elaborate languages who didn’t have paper had gotten the short end of history’s stick.
Saying
the land belonged to you, even living on it, didn’t have the oomph of
writing
that it was yours. Or so the early Europeans believed. They waved their deeds, but the Pequots fought. The ensuing Pequot War—the first war between Native Americans and Europeans—bound together the Windsor, Weathersfield, and Hartford settlements, forming the colony of Connecticut to ensure that the Pequots were “blotted out.”

Connecticut was good at blotting out. Exiting the interstate, Ginny cut north across downtown Stamford, which looked nothing like the city she’d known growing up, where her mother insisted they roll up the car windows and lock the doors. The areas where you could buy an Italian sub from a store run by an actual Italian, the parts where Salvation Army and Goodwill shops catered to the town’s dwindling supply of janitors and home aides, were shrinking. Over the years, HOPE VI money had been thrown at the city.
Homeownership and Opportunity for People Everywhere. Housing projects were torn down, then supposedly rebuilt, cleaned up. The new versions were fancier, sure, but smaller, and filled with white people. Who knew where the low-income black families had ended up? Bridgeport, probably. Bridgeport was the corner where the rest of Connecticut swept its poverty.

Stamford, now a bastion of corporate wealth, had started to look to Ginny like a vast office park. In between the deserted bunkerlike buildings, a few sushi bars and tapas lounges were tucked away. She drove past a Bennigan’s that had been wedged beside the mall. In the distance, the triangular top of Douglas’s Obervell Tower pierced the sky.

Poor Douglas. Four years earlier he’d been happily waving around blueprints; he’d brought a mock-up of the tower to Thanksgiving. But now his big career break had gone bust. He was proud, though, and painstakingly upbeat. When Ginny called to ask how he was doing, he changed the topic, asking about her romantic troubles, barraging her with unsolicited advice. Playing protective big brother made him feel useful. But the way Douglas had harassed her that morning about her oven mishap made Ginny think he was feeling unusually glum.

Ginny drove toward the residential area north of downtown and finally into the wooded area where Douglas and Denise had bought their third house. Deerkill Road. How anyone could want to live on a street with that name was beyond her.

Pulling onto the broad, white-pebble driveway, Ginny saw that she and Priya were the first ones there. At the far end of the vast lawn, the two-story gray house sat like an amusement-park castle, faux stones and fake turrets and a confusion of dormers used to create the illusion of European grandeur. Never had a word so aptly captured cheap elegance: McMansion. The house made her think, when she first saw it, of the JonBenét Ramsey house, gothic and shadowy, a house so
large your child could be murdered in one part and you wouldn’t hear a sound.

Two massive oak trees, stripped of foliage, framed the house. Already they were winter trees, dark and muscular, with thick branches beseeching the sky, almost human in their nakedness. They must have started shedding weeks ahead of the trees near her house. It was colder up here, damp even. What Ginny fondly thought of as typhoid weather. As she stepped from the car she belted her cardigan.

They lugged their pans of food up the stone walkway, and Priya’s eyes took in the gray marble pillars, the massive windows, the towering shrubbery.

“If you learn to play Monopoly really well,” said Ginny, “ta-da.”

They set down all the food and plunked themselves on the steps.

“Look at all this mess,” said Ginny. And Priya began to arrange the pans into a tidy row.

“No, no. It’s fine. It’s okay to be a kid, sweetie. No one’s going to send you away, I promise.”

Priya drew her knees to her chest and let out a sharp, frustrated sigh, a sound that Ginny had heard several times before, a sound that made Ginny think Priya wanted to speak.

“Sweetie, you’ve been a really good sport today. It’s a lot of people to take in at once. But you have a great big family who will take care of you now. I love you, you know that? I really love you.”

Ginny feared her declarations of love were starting to sound pathological, but the family counselor had said to reassure Priya, in the face of her depression, that she was welcomed. In three months, Ginny had consulted virtually every book and therapist and DVD on the subject of raising an adoptive child; if there was one thing Ginny had mastered, it was research.

“You’re more responsible than I am,” Ginny said. She rubbed Priya’s back and laughed. “Come on, they ought to send
me
away!”

Ginny scanned the yard—easily ten times the size of her parents’.
Maybe that was the source of the strain between Douglas and her father. Who respected paternal authority when fathers no longer had desirable property to pass along?

So much ink—including Ginny’s own—had been wasted on the shifts in women’s domestic lives that fatherhood had been overlooked. Maybe for her keynote address she could say something about land, patriarchy, geography… there were connections to make.

Her paper on the emasculation of the American warrior—God, why had her father thumbed through
that
?—had been a start. The idea, not her own, was that war was still the most rigidly gendered social activity. Tracing the role of the warrior from Native American ceremonies to present day, she argued that post—World War II, the status of the American warrior had been so greatly diminished as to allow the final blurring of gender lines. As far as she was concerned, it was no accident that the Vietnam War coincided with unprecedented advances for feminism. Male power depended upon respect for the warrior, so the shame of Vietnam had completely undermined American masculinity. When the good men were those who
refused
to fight, things went topsy-turvy.

“Good God, did you teleport around that traffic?” Douglas was cradling the turkey, mummified in saran wrap. “I didn’t mean to strand you out here. There’s a key in the planter.”

“We were enjoying your estate.” Ginny stood and brushed off her clothes. “But I think it needs a name. You know, something understated. Like Pangaea or Gondwanaland.”

“Two point nine acres, Gin. Big enough for three football fields.” He craned the turkey behind his head. “Now let’s see if academics have any hand-eye coordination.”

“Doug, cut it out,” said Denise.

Douglas lowered the turkey and looked shamefully at the ground. Ginny recognized the look from when he was a child, when their father would turn his back on Douglas’s antics.

“I bet we can get this stuff on the table in under an hour,” said Ginny.

Denise marched toward the door, Laura in one arm, a vat of yams in the other. “The cleaning lady doesn’t come until Monday,” she said dully. “We weren’t expecting company.”

Denise opened the door, though it would be hard later for Ginny to remember if Denise used her keys. Everyone was talking and carrying things. It would be difficult to say with certainty if the door had been locked.

ELEANOR

Such splendor, such elegance, thought Eleanor as she stepped into the enormous white travertine foyer. A wide, dark-wood staircase laid with a royal blue carpet curved upward to the second floor. To her left spread a large living room with bay windows, to the right, the dining room and kitchen.

This was Douglas’s third house. Eleanor had been quite impressed by the first two, but this one practically took her breath away. She even felt a flutter of embarrassment at how minuscule her house now seemed. But she had lived there almost thirty-five years and took great comfort in the familiar. It pleased her that the bottom of the oak banister was still smoothed and bald from where her children had braced their hands for their final leap into the living room. She loved the closet door on which, at every age, she had penciled Douglas’s and Ginny’s heights. And even though the little palm prints once lining the upstairs hallway had long been painted over, she remembered them, remembered the way her children had touched everything.

Eleanor even maintained a fondness for the small Manhattan apartment she and Gavin had moved into after he returned from Vietnam. They crammed all the furniture from her mother’s house into a railroad-style one-bedroom. Their upstairs neighbor, an opera singer, began practicing arias at 7:00 a.m., and at night, couples stumbling out of the Irish pub downstairs squealed with drunken laughter as
they whistled down taxis. But it was the first home of Eleanor’s own, a space that she could decorate and order, and it made her feel wonderfully adult.

Worried about Gavin’s mysterious silences, or the slow clenching of his jaw when she asked about his work, she spent her afternoons preparing mushroom soufflés or crabmeat casseroles, dishes that, although they occasionally suffered from lumpiness or her overexcitement with the salt shaker, showed that she would spare no effort in trying to lift her husband’s spirits.

When Gavin arrived home, she lit candles and proudly served dinner on their walnut table. Gavin enjoyed playing cards, so after dessert—peach cobbler or baked apples—he taught Eleanor poker, blackjack, and bridge. He would explain the value of each card, and she would brag about how much money she saved by buying the meat on Fourteenth Street and the vegetables at the corner grocery. In these moments, Eleanor believed Gavin would eventually revert to his former animated self, that time and love would mend whatever wounds the war had left. She believed that fatherhood, too, would reinvigorate him.

Certainly for Eleanor, Douglas’s birth marked the beginning of a magical time. Motherhood suited her as nothing else ever had. She adored pushing around Douglas’s stroller, describing to him the beautiful stone facade of the American Museum of Natural History, the cars that whizzed by, the oaks and elms of Central Park. They took the bus downtown to gape at the newly built World Trade Center.