Free Keeping the Feast by Paula Butturini Page A

and Anna’s visit.
    The next day, the noisy rattle of the telex machine sent me running up the two flights of stairs to John’s office. The telex was not, as I had been praying, from John but from my foreign desk at the Tribune . It was eerily short, with a peculiar demand: I was to call immediately one of the Tribune ’s main editors, the man who had hired me, at his home outside Chicago. When I finally managed to get through, I was told what I had begun to fear: John had been shot.
    Cathy and I spent the rest of Christmas Eve trying to sift through utterly conflicting reports about details of John’s shooting the previous night. The only solid information available was that he had been shot while riding in a car in Timişoara, the city where the revolution had erupted, and that the colleagues with whom he was traveling had left him in a municipal hospital before continuing on to the capital, Bucharest.
    At some point I called the Los Angeles Times house to tell them the news, only to receive a second shock: One of our closest friends in Warsaw, John Daniszewski of the Associated Press, also had been wounded the previous night. Incredibly, he too had been shot in an unrelated attack in Timişoara the same night as my John, though neither of them knew the other was even there, much less lying wounded in different hospitals.
    Later that evening, the remnants of our Christmas Eve dinner party gathered as planned: John Daniszewski’s wife, Drusie; Cheryl Bentsen, whose husband, Chuck, was trying to get into Romania for the L.A. Times ; our house guest, Cathy; and me. Each of us was doing what came naturally: Cathy was drinking; Cheryl was smoking; Drusie was popping Christmas cookies; and I was in the kitchen, preparing the crabmeat risotto I had been planning to serve before news of the shootings had reached us. None of us was hungry, no one particularly wanted to eat. But I was hoping that the habitual motions of chopping onions and stirring rice would remind me of normality, make me feel less crazed, make both Johns somehow miraculously unhurt. It didn’t work.
    I have a single photo of that Christmas Eve taken in our living room. The tree is standing in the background. Plates of Christmas cookies and cakes, baked before the news came in, are resting on a table in the foreground. Cheryl, chin in hand, is sitting in an armchair, staring off at nothing. “Christmas in hell,” I later wrote on its back, though we had not quite reached our destination yet.
    Christmas morning, twelve hours after learning both Johns had been shot, Drusie and I set off to join them. Christmas dinner was the ham and Snickers special of the Polish airline. Christmas supper was take-out Chinese in Paris, of all places, where after a day of airline hell Drusie and I ended up, twice as far away from our wounded husbands as when we had started out that fogbound morning in Warsaw. Chopsticks in hand, we sat around the table of one of my John’s colleagues, who with his wife and two children helped us get through the surreal nightmare of that holiday evening. I was trying to talk myself into believing that John wasn’t badly injured, or that he might be evacuated to Yugoslavia by the time I finally got there. Deep down, I didn’t believe it for a minute.

6
    Potions
    W hen I was seven or eight and still prone to occasional childhood fevers, I craved a cup of my mother’s sickroom tea. Nothing tasted better, when I had a 101-degree fever, than hot tea, not too strong, sweetened with honey and floating a thin wedge of lemon, served in one of my mother’s special china cups. The trick was to drink it at just the right speed, not so slowly that the tea began to cool, not so fast that the lemon failed to mellow in the hot, golden liquid. When the tea was finished, the lemon lay at the bottom of the cup, and I would gnaw the pulp away from the rind and imagine the fever germs withering away. Whenever I needed my mother’s sickroom tea, my mother and