Free The Hunger Moon by Suzanne Matson Page B

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 wouldwander 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.
    It was not as if Eleanor hadn’t been given time to rehearse his death. She had, and during the last months, when illness filled the house, hanging over her life with its sour smell and its released chaos of emotions, she had longed for the equilibrium of normalcy—which, given the scenario that lay ahead, meant she had longed for Robert’s impending death. She had never wanted him to leave her, but when he already had left her, and the wasting stranger who was blind, bedridden, and did not know her transformed her life into a state of siege, she wanted Robert’s body to die with the rest of him.
    She shocked her children by taking a leave of absence and going on a cruise within a month of the funeral.
    “Mother, don’t you think it would be better for you if youstayed home where all your friends are?” Helen asked on the phone from Houston. “Or, if you need a change of scene, why not come here?” Eleanor could hear her five- and seven-year-old grandsons fighting in the background. This was about the time Helen had first begun to speak to her in a tone that suggested that she, Helen, was the aggrieved parent and Eleanor the misguided child. Her daughter’s tone was plaintive and demanding at the same time, as if somehow her mother were not being fair for making an independent decision that Helen could not see the logic of.
    Eleanor spent a week poring over cruise-line brochures, and men booked three weeks on a mid-size ship departing from Florida. She took a few thick novels with her, but spent most of her time on a shaded deck chair just staring at the line where the sky and sea met. She was able to discern enormous complexity in that line after a few days of watching it—how sometimes it was invisible to her eye, yet certainly there; how at sunset it would sometimes reveal to her a quick flash of the most improbable green. She didn’t remember much afterward about her fellow passengers, although she surely must have talked to them every night at dinner. She did receive the attentions of a seventy-ish widower who pressed her to accompany him on