“I can’t take one more minute of your bitterness about my dad,” Ursula said. “You want me to stop loving him, but I never will.”
It felt to Eleanor as though the ground was giving way. It felt as though her heart might stop beating, or—the opposite—explode. The room seemed to be spinning. All she could see was the face of her daughter. No sign of love there.
“Don’t come back. Don’t ever come back.Don’t plan on seeing your granddaughter ever again.”
94.
Even Better Than You Thought It Would Be
Eleanor had learned this a long time ago: Even with the things she would have said were unsurvivable, she survived them. Not without great sorrow and cost. But she kept on with her life.
For a few weeks after her return from Vermont, Eleanor spoke to nobody. She couldn’t eat. Most nights she was in bed by eight thirty. All she wanted to do was close her eyes and shut out the world.
A woman she knew from Pilates, who’d heard about Ursula’s pregnancy and the trip to Vermont to meet the baby, stopped her on the street a few days after, to ask for the details.
“There’s nothing better than being a grandparent, right?” the woman said. “As much as people tell you how great it’s going to be, until it happens to you, it’s hard to imagine.”
Eleanor just nodded.
At first Eleanor held out hope that things might get better with Ursula. She called, but Ursula didn’t pick up. She wrote her daughter a letter, of course, and then another. She woke in the middle of the night, imagining what she’d say to Ursula if she got a chance to speak to her, but she never did.
A year after Louise’s birth, she sent a stuffed elephant for Louise, a necklace for Ursula. Like all the other gifts, they went unacknowledged. Six months later, when the second Christmas passed with no word once again, Eleanor told herself she had to let go of hoping things would change. The loss of her daughter and her granddaughter was eating her alive, or would if she let it.
She looked for good things where she could. Her times with Toby. Her work. And, oddly, Elijah. The child she had not given birth to,whose gigs she attended now and then (where she was invariably the oldest person in the room), but only if they started earlier than ten o’clock. How had it happened that the child who brought her greatest joy, at this point in her life, was Elijah, the son of her ex-husband and the woman for whom he’d left her, who lived in her daughter’s old bedroom and sometimes, late at night, sat in the kitchen and talked about life.
She understood now that stupid expression “Life goes on.” It did, actually. As time passed, it became harder to remember, sometimes, why she had seen as so important all those things that no longer mattered at all. Old arguments, ancient injuries, faded away. She knew, of course, the reason why she and Cam had parted, but now she wondered: Did any of that make any sense? What if they’d worked it out? Carried on, with the same losses and regrets, but hauled them along with them, side by side, instead of breaking everything apart. Was anybody really better off? Maybe they’d just substituted one brand of disappointment for another. Imagine if, that night she’d confronted Cam about the affair with Coco, he had told her he was sorry. What if he’d said, “Let’s keep our family together”? What if she herself had set her bitterness aside?
“Intact family.” The words the teacher at Alison’s school had used, referring to what other families were, that hers was not. What was the opposite?Broken home.
Now it was all behind them, of course. They’d moved on. Another stupid expression, Eleanor thought. As if they were navigating a game board, landing on Marvin Gardens with a hotel on it. Passing Go. Or—in a different game—sent back to the Molasses Swamp to begin all over again. They had made other lives, with all these other unlikely aspects neither of them would have imagined once: Yoga. Greeting cards. Physical therapy. Hollywood. Elijah.
Eleanor and Cam barely knew each other anymore. It was all about the next generation now—the survivors of the divorce. Their children, and their children, and someday, the ones after that.
Sometimes Eleanor would run into one of her old friends from softball days when she was back in Akersville for a visit with Toby.When she did, the conversation nearly always seemed to turn to grandchildren.
Pictures came out. Stories of family vacations together. Babysitting the grandkids while their parents—those children who’d played in the dirt together long ago, nights at the ball field—went out for a date night. Mostly what the women said—the wives from long-ago days on the bleachers—was how wonderful it was being a grandparent. The best time of life, maybe, because you got all the joy of the children without all the struggle. Now and then, they’d complain about how tiring it was, times they were on duty with the grandkids for a whole weekend, times the kids dropped them off unannounced. But even when they seemed to complain, it was apparent to Eleanor how much they loved even the hard parts. The best thing ever, they kept telling her.
A little over a year after Louise’s birth, she ran into Jeannie Owen, the one of their group who had not been out of maternity clothes in all the seasons they’d shared the bleachers at their husbands’ games. Jeannie had taken out her phone to show pictures of her recent visit to Hampton Beach with her daughter Paulette’s youngest.
“Your kids give you any grandkids yet?” Jeannie asked. The idea being, apparently—to Jeannie, at least—that grandchildren were a gift children bestowed on their parents. A gift bestowed, or withheld, depending.
“Ursula has a little girl, Louise,” Eleanor said. “They live in Vermont.”
“Best thing ever, right?” Jeannie said. Here it came again: “As great as everyone tells you it is, until it happens to you, you can’t even imagine.”
“Just great,” Eleanor said, as Jeannie scrolled through the pictures on her phone, displaying images of the various babies, toddlers, and preschoolers her children had provided for her. “The grands,” she called them. She was so busy showing them off, she never got around to asking Eleanor for pictures of Louise. Just as well. Other than the ones she’d taken that first day Louise came home from the hospital, she didn’t have any.
Her own life as a grandparent was small and simple. Every few weeks, from when Louise was less than a year old, Eleanor sent a her a postcard—an art reproduction from a museum she’d visited, or a picture of a baby animal, with some small observation of the kind a child might enjoy, assuming her parents showed it to her. (Louise was three years old now. How did that happen?) Now and then she sent Louise a drawing she’d made for her—a picture she made of Louise—as she imagined her—doing some interesting activity, though this was difficult. She didn’t even know Louise. Was she the kind of little girl who liked pictures of ballerinas, or kittens, or monkeys? Elijah had shown her a few photographs, but Eleanor didn’t actually know what Louise looked like.
One of the things Eleanor had learned about being a parent whose child has shut you out of her life was that people formed judgments about you—much as they’d done when she’d moved away from the farm, and all the softball wives assumed she’d abandoned her family. Even if you had seemed, up until then, like a normal and reasonable person, this fact about yourself—that your own child had felt the need to ban you from seeing your grandchild—was sufficient to call your whole existence into question.
For this and other reasons, she had learned not to speak of Ursula’s choice to cut her out of her life. That didn’t keep her from grieving it daily. Or holding out hope—the thing Ursula, in particular, had been so good at—that someday things might be different.
95.
The White House in His Sights
For a few years now, Eleanor had been aware of Matt Hallinan’s career in Washington. During his first term in Congress he’d made a name for himself with a speech on the floor of the House of Representatives about traditional family values and the importance of prayer in the schools. The story he’d told that day—something about his grandmother baking bread, and a puppy, and going hunting with his dad—had made such a stir that he’d been invited to speak at the Republican National Convention back when he was still in his thirties.
