Free The Hunger Moon by Suzanne Matson Page A

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    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 andliving 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