Free Keeping the Feast by Paula Butturini

long-lashed beauty so arresting that housewives pushing their carts through the A&P would stop my mother, a stranger, in the aisles to rave. I had pale blue eyes and pale “spaghetti hair,” as my grandmother Jennie used to sigh, brushing and brushing it a hundred strokes, hoping it might magically develop Danny’s curls, or my mother’s rich chestnut color. Nothing seemed fair. Saviors weren’t supposed to get sick. Saviors weren’t supposed to be in need of saviors themselves.
    I came home from school to learn that Danny had developed nephrosis, a kidney ailment that, until the invention of cortisone, used to kill its victims before they were four. He was already lying in a crib in St. Vincent’s, the hospital where the nuns wore the same winged headdresses as the nuns at my school, but whose robes were a ghostly white instead of a comforting navy blue. I was not yet sure what it all meant.
    My mother, always described in our family as high-strung, was acting higher-strung than I ever remembered her. I knew that high-strung normally meant yells—nervous, angry, howling yells that escaped her throat before she really knew they were lurking inside her head. High-strung meant that when you came in the back door from school, you waited till you rounded the corner from the hallway to the kitchen to see which mother had her hands in the sink. There was the mother who happily asked how school had gone and poured my milk and gave me a couple of my grandmother Jennie’s homemade oatmeal cookies. And there was the other mother, always a stranger, who would be standing there quiet and sad or shaking and howling with anger, her hands in dishwater or scrubbing at vegetables, trying to pretend nothing was wrong.
    But on this day, she was sobbing and crying without control, a version of high-strung I had never seen, and frightened, I ran up to my bedroom. When I heard her dialing the phone, though, I silently slipped back down to eavesdrop from the front hall. Talking to Jennie, she sobbed more than talked. It took only a few minutes to realize that the brother for whom I had waited seven years might not come back home. She mentioned cortisone, a new drug then, which the doctors hoped might keep the disease in check, but even then they were concerned about its possible long-term effects.
    T wenty-four days after our wedding in Rome, I was downstairs in the Times house in Warsaw when I heard the telex machine in John’s attic office clatter to life. It was shortly after two p.m. on Christmas Eve. I was hoping it was John, finally cabling to tell me he had arrived in Romania, where he had been sent to report.
    It was to have been our first Christmas and New Year’s together as newlyweds. We had had a full, happy holiday planned: an old friend was flying in from Rome, we were hosting Christmas Eve dinner with our closest Warsaw friends, and Peter and Anna were coming for the week after New Year’s. Then, the week before Christmas, the Romanians toppled Nicolae Ceauşescu, the most hated Communist dictator in the Eastern bloc. John was on his way to cover the heavy fighting, our personal plans abruptly overturned.
    Ordinarily I would have gone to report, too, but five weeks after my beating, my wounds still felt fresh, my scars still hairless slashes, fish-belly white, across my scalp. I was still having severe headaches and felt drained after so little as climbing a flight of stairs. Most of all, I felt a strong premonition of danger.
    Uncharacteristically panicky, I had cried and argued with John to refuse the Romania assignment, even though rationally I knew he couldn’t possibly beg off the story. Finally, I talked myself into believing that my premonition was nothing more than fallout from my beating. I heard myself agree that while he was gone I would try to salvage Christmas with the help of Cathy, our Time magazine friend from Rome who was already en route to Warsaw. John promised to do his best to return in time for Peter