Free Strangers at the Feast by Jennifer Vanderbes Page A

Who would take care of her?
    But Ginny’s only reply was: “Mom, don’t pry.”
    The stubbornness! Eleanor couldn’t help wondering if Ginny feared her disapproval, if this had set in motion a series of clandestine relationships that, lacking family support, were going kaput. Well, one couldn’t sit idly by and watch children wreck their lives.
    Ginny had mentioned David Eisenberg worked at the Animal Medical Center in Manhattan. Well, it was a cinch getting Milly Sinclair to bring in her Chihuahuas.
    What a son-in-law David Eisenberg would have been! Milly and Eleanor thought he looked like a young Steve McQueen. And how gently he handled little Pierre. Milly said the next best thing to having a doctor in the family was having a veterinarian.
    “Dr. Eisenberg,” Eleanor said upon leaving, “if there were a special someone in your life, I bet her family would be thrilled to meet you.” She gave him a wink.
    That night, she called Ginny, easing in with some chitchat about the shockingly high (well, this was true) prices on seedless grapes. “So, Ginny, how are things going with you and that David person?”
    “Not now.”
    “I would like to have this young man over for dinner. In fact, I insist on inviting him for dinner this Friday.”
    “Do that, Mom. But you should know we broke up last week.”
    Apparently David didn’t listen to Ginny when she talked, although Eleanor had seen him listen with rapt attention to Milly’s complaints about Pierre’s furniture chewing. Apparently David didn’t support her poetry—as if he could be expected to tend to his patients and read all her poems. David made her, on some fundamental level, uncomfortable—but how comfortable he had made Pierre!
    No man was good enough. If I’d had her attitude, thought Eleanor, I’d be knitting in a rocking chair somewhere right now, beside my cousin Gertrude.
    “Your father doesn’t always listen,” said Eleanor. “He doesn’t support every little thing I do.”
    “Mom, let’s not go there.”
    Then she vanished to India. For two months Ginny didn’t reply to e-mails, until one night she called and, in a strange whisper, asked Eleanor if she and Gavin could wire three thousand dollars. Ginny said it was an emergency, that she would pay them back. Eleanor thought she’d been moved to donate to a charity, that she was paying for one of those cleft palate operations, or maybe—she had seen a movie about this—Ginny had been swindled by a handsome young Indian posing as a prince.
    She wasn’t expecting her to come home with a child!
    Who knew what temperament the poor child had inherited. Add to that seven years of sleeping in a crowded, filthy orphanage—what kind of girl would she be? What did the adoption agency know about her? Were there any, well, guarantees? Ginny had been evasive about the details. She was a guardian, the legal adoption was pending, there was paperwork, lots of paperwork. That’s all she said.
    Eleanor dutifully sent toys and knit sweaters. Gavin set up a college fund, since they didn’t know what Ginny had managed to save from teaching.
    When they related the news, friends raised eyebrows at the word India .
    “We thought China was the hot spot for babies. Or Romania.”
    “Ginny feels connected to India. It’s the yoga.”
    Eleanor had her concerns about Ginny’s choice, but they were the concerns of a mother; she certainly wouldn’t let other people second-guess her daughter.
    “Ginny is a modern woman,” she said confidently. “She simply isn’t concerned with trends. She is a freethinker, always has been. In ten years, everybody will be living like her.”
    Gavin nodded.
    Above all else, they believed in loyalty.
    But now this: mute as well? Eleanor couldn’t understand how her daughter, who demanded such perfection of men, could accept a child with countless difficulties.
    Ginny drew Priya to her stomach, tucking her under one flap of her cardigan as though shielding her from