Strangers at the Feast (24 page)

“Who’s Stanford White?” asked Douglas.

“A famous architect!”

“Famous for what?”

“
Other
famous buildings. Listen, I have to go. I don’t want to miss my train.”

It was Wednesday and she had canceled her usual afternoon Ladies’ League tea, noting for the secretary her appointment in the city so that members might get wind of it. She put on her purple tweed suit and tucked a copy of
Good Housekeeping
into her red Liz Claiborne purse—she wanted to appear to be an avid reader of the magazine.

“I’m meeting Colleen McKay for lunch,” she announced to the concierge.

As she stepped into the club’s vast foyer, the walls rose majestically around her. She was led upstairs past a row of gilt-framed portraits of, no doubt, famous club members.

In a wood-paneled dining room, Colleen sat examining the contents of a large portfolio. Her chair was pushed back from the table, her legs crossed at the ankles, and she wore a slim beige pantsuit with a white silk blouse. When she saw Eleanor, her eyes lit up. Her slim gold watch rattled as she waved. She was a blonde now, though Eleanor was fairly sure that in college she’d been a brunette.

She zipped closed her portfolio. “My God, I’ve been dropped into a wormhole and am back in 1970!” Her hug was surprisingly muscular and she offered a kiss on each cheek. “Gorgeous, absolutely gorgeous. They must be pumping omega-3s into the suburban tap water. All my girlfriends outside the city have the smoothest skin!”

Eleanor, who religiously lathered her skin each night with cold cream, smiled.

The room was lined with wooden bookcases; marble busts sat atop the shelves. Eleanor had certainly been to fancy restaurants before, but the austere elegance of this space struck her. The nearby tables were filled with men and women who all looked close to her age. They wore business attire, and she sensed in their demeanor
a certain gravitas. They weren’t just wealthy, they were accomplished, intellectual.

“Look. That’s Shirley Hazzard in the corner,” Colleen said.

Eleanor didn’t recognize the name, but nodded excitedly.

“So is this your usual spot?”

“Oh, you don’t have to whisper, hon. It’s a little stuffy, I admit. But it’s so
easy
. My schedule is so insanely busy that it’s great having a place that I can depend on, where I know they’ll get me in and out in under an hour. It’s frightening how much time you can waste just getting from one appointment to the next if you don’t plan well. My office is just a few blocks away.”

“Do you have a window?”

Gavin had complained for years about not having a window.

“Ellie, I could fire shots at the Chrysler Building if I wanted to.”

“Oh, my,” she said, embarrassed that her husband didn’t have a window office. “Well, vitamin D is essential to a positive mood.”

“I should slip some into the coffeepot at the office. Some of those people are what human resources calls ‘attitude challenged.’ I call it P-S-Y-C-H-O.”

A waiter set down a martini. “Oh, thank you, Jose! Ellie, my dear, sweet Jose knows exactly how I like my martinis. Are you sure you won’t have anything? Prosecco? White wine? Very well, then.” She clinked her martini glass to Eleanor’s water glass. “To old friends!”

She took a long sip. Eleanor noticed she wasn’t wearing a wedding ring.

“Tell me all about
vous
!”

Eleanor rummaged in her purse. “My son and his wife just had twins. Brandon and Brian. Aren’t they precious?” As she set the photos out, she recalled a vague rumor from thirty years earlier about Colleen having had an affair with a married classics professor and a clandestine late-night drive to Canada to take care of a “situation.” Or maybe that was Lydia Siller. So many girls got into trouble in those days. “And this is Douglas and Denise in front of their new house in
Stamford. And I have a daughter, too, who lives here in the city. Ginger. I don’t have a picture. She’s just been made a professor of… history. We’re just thrilled her career is going so well. It’s only a matter of time before the right man scoops her up.”

“Perfect!” Colleen dug a notepad and pencil out of her briefcase. “She’d be a great angle for this project. You see, we’re doing this special issue on women of
our
generation, their life choices, how they imagined their lives thirty years ago, what their lives are now. We’re wedged between the greatest generation of 1950s postwar, suburban drudgery and the generation of, well, your daughter. We were the first women who actually had to make choices and we all made very different ones. Obviously, among our usual writers, there’s a bias. We’ve got elevators crammed with women who took the professional path to one degree or another; what we need are some women who took the other road, but who can put a noun and verb together in an interesting way. We’re looking at a handful of girls from the Wellesley class of 1970, and this will be: ‘Thirty Years Later, Where Are They?’ I was thinking back to Wellesley and remembered you wrote some good articles for the paper. Good enough to stick in my mind. I went to look you up—I almost thought you’d gone the professional route—but couldn’t find your name anywhere. But the alumni office had your married name. Kitty Skyler said she’d seen you at the five-year reunion and you were already on baby number two. I thought,
Perfecto!
”

“Kitty Skyler. Did she ever marry?”

“Twice divorced. But she’s working on her third novel, a mystery series, under the name Kate Ashmond. They’re a bit slice and dice for my taste, but she has a real following.”

“What about Beatrice Cummings? She was in our dorm, right?”

“She’s a painter.”

“A painter! And Claire? Claire Purcell?”

“Mergers and acquisitions at Pettigrew. God, have I kept up with more classmates than you? Here I always thought I lacked school spirit! Don’t
tell the alumni fund or they’ll have me arranging reunions. Ellie, do you know what you want yet?” Colleen glanced at her watch. “We should order. The Chilean sea bass is fantastic.”

She signaled the waiter, and Eleanor excitedly opened the menu. Goodness, the sea bass cost twenty-eight dollars. Did they send someone out on a fishing boat? She was appalled that most of the entrées cost over twenty dollars. For that amount she could prepare dinner for her entire family. She closed the menu and ordered the cauliflower soup, and buttered herself a hulking piece of olive bread. She chewed slowly.

“Anyway, the point is, Ellie, we need your side of it. A lot more of our readers are like you than they are like me. What the hell do
I
know about
Good Housekeeping
? I’ve had the same Polish cleaning lady for twenty years. I have no earthly idea what Pine-Sol is used for. I live in a loft. I’m on face-lift
numero dos
. But I know how to pick writers. And I think our readers want their lives written about by someone who really gets their choices.”

Eleanor perked up. “You’d want me to write about
myself
?”

“Well, yourself, your family, your memories of college, and maybe what it was like to send your daughter to college, to have a careerist daughter. Anything you want, but something that reflects the changes of the last thirty years. I’d be your editor, and we can talk it through as it takes shape. It’s personal and creative. We can throw in some statistics at the end if we need to buff it up. And the pay isn’t shabby. Look, your kids are grown and out of the house. This could be a nice way to fill some time. And who knows what it could lead to.”

“Pay? You mean a salary?”

“We buy the article, a onetime product. At one dollar a word. And we’re aiming for at least a thousand words, maybe two, so that’s not shabby. And you’d see your byline in print.”

“I have to discuss this with my husband.”

Colleen let out a small laugh. “Naturally.”

Eleanor took a long sip of ice water. Never in all her life had she
seen a paycheck with her name on it. And she hadn’t seen her name in print since those student-newspaper articles, but, oh, how she had enjoyed carrying her little reporter’s notebook! She had a sudden vision of the women in her gardening club, especially Emily Sanders, who went on about her reproductive-rights committee, waving the magazine: “Eleanor’s written an article!”

With the last piece of bread she sopped up the remains of her soup. On Colleen’s plate lay the forked-over remains of her sea bass and a baked potato. Such waste.

Eleanor imagined hosting a cocktail party, perching on the sofa, and recounting the story of this very moment with Colleen. She’d mention the sea bass because her friends—especially Ruth—would find that a stunning detail.
Well, I really had no idea what she was going to ask me
.
I thought she was just feeling nostalgic. I thought the poor thing
was going through a divorce!
She’d leave copies of the magazine around the house, on her bookcase, just as Ginny did with her poems and articles.

“Of course, I’ll have to look at my calendar and see when I might carve out the time. March and April tend to be very busy with my gardening club, but I’ll certainly consider it and ring you back soon.”

“If you could let me know by the end of next week.”

Jose set down the check and Eleanor glanced at the total; those martinis had sent the bill well over seventy dollars. With dismay, and a deep sense of injustice, she lifted her purse.

“Silly, Ellie. This is on my club tab. And Condé Nast will pick it up.”

Eleanor wondered how Colleen’s company felt about her fancy martinis, and thought: If I were the boss, I’d run a much tighter ship. Then she felt ridiculous. She’d gone from housewife to the boss of Condé Nast in under an hour!

Colleen rushed off to another meeting, and Eleanor stepped into the bustling, sunny street. She smiled at a young woman who looked like Ginny.

In Bryant Park, she sat and fumbled in her purse for something
to write on. Ginny always scribbled her ideas in little notebooks. All Eleanor had were a few back pages in her daily planner, mostly filled with the medallion numbers of taxicabs, in case anything should happen to her.

On the one blank page left, she wrote:

Wellesley 1970

Thirty years

Find
thesis statement

Make an outline

“Ginny!” she said into her cell phone. “I’m in the city! Remember I told you I was having lunch with an old college classmate? Well, we just wrapped up at the Century Club, and I thought I’d see if you wanted to have tea. I could come by. It won’t take me long to get there.”

“Mom, I’m in my campus office.”

“Well, I could come by there. We wouldn’t have to meet for very long!”

“You don’t have to shout into the cell phone.”

“It’s just all very exciting, Ginny.”

“Mom, I can’t just pop out and meet people in the middle of the day. I have a
job
. I’d love to see you, but just not now. Can we schedule something for when I’m not working?”

“Yes, dear. Of course. We’ll look at our calendars later.”

Eleanor sat on the bench and once again examined her notes. She added:
Busy and important daughter
. And stared at the words.

Sadness often took hold of Eleanor when she looked at the grown-up Ginny. All the magical moments they had shared were lost in the sea of Ginny’s childhood memories, floating between the flotsam of bad playdates and difficult math exams.

Eleanor looked at all the people in the park; student types reading
novels, tourists taking photos. She took a deep breath and decided not to sully her spirits. What a day it had been!

She wasn’t going to begrudge Ginny her schedule. What child should put aside goals on a mother’s account?

She thought about having a one-thousand-dollar paycheck. What would she do with such money? She would buy Gavin something for his telescope. She’d never bought her husband a gift that she hadn’t paid for with his money.

The thought made her so happy she treated herself to an ice-cream cone, two scoops with sprinkles, and bought a postcard of Bryant Park so she would remember the day.

She addressed it to herself:
Dear Eleanor, Congratulations on this great opportunity!
She slipped it into her purse and made her way to Grand Central Station.

DENISE

In the beginning, she and Douglas wanted simple things: children, a comfortable house, maybe a lawn large enough to host parties. Perhaps they imagined someday sitting on deck chairs at a yacht club.

Neither of them was intellectual. Denise wasn’t going to write a book on American policy in Latin America. Douglas wasn’t going to cure cancer. They had no delusions of grandeur, nor did they waste their twenties living on frozen burritos while trying to break into theater or alternative music. As Denise saw it, artists and intellectuals were always demanding respect because they didn’t make money. It made them feel superior.

Denise couldn’t stand people who felt superior.

And poverty did not impress her.

She had grown up in a family of coupon clippers, in a house where they turned off the heat at night, where one winter, they lined their coats with blanket scraps. Her father, a welder, had been out of work since U.S. Steel closed, but he knew everything about metal, what was valuable. Car batteries. Copper tubing. Bed springs. He once instructed Denise and her brothers to carry a steel post fifteen blocks to collect thirty-five dollars. Her mother ran a beauty shop during the day and worked nights as a nurse; the few hours she was home, she was usually shouting. The family never went hungry, but they never stopped worrying about money.

In high school, Denise worked two jobs: salesgirl at a jewelry store and waitress at Red Lobster. She envied the customers in the jewelry
store, and hated the restaurant customers, penny-pinchers who complained there wasn’t enough lobster in their eight-dollar seafood pasta, people she feared becoming. She made good grades and played softball and eventually went to Penn State. She held down another two jobs in college and worked for years in New York City until she married Douglas. She’d dated plenty, and there had been what she considered an adventurous yet respectable number of one-night stands, but Douglas was the only man she’d ever considered marrying.