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.
Eleanor had gathered from Patty’s annual Christmas letter that after his many terms in Congress as an increasingly vocal voice of “family values,” Matt had recently been elected to the Senate. Patty acknowledged, in the letter, that her brother’s politics seemed a little far to the right for her taste. But it was all just politics, she said. “You know my brother,” she wrote at the bottom of the letter, in the part of her message meant for Eleanor alone. “All he really believes in is money and beer.”
Eleanor was washing the dishes when Matt Hallinan’s voice came on the radio as that week’s guest on a show called Talk of the Nation. “There’s been a lot of talk about Senator Hallinan lately,” the host of the program announced. “Some movers and shakers in Washington are mentioning him as a contender for the number-two spot on the ticket, next time out.”
Matt would be in his late fifties now, but Eleanor knew from the Hallinan family Christmas card that she still received every year that he was still reasonably fit, with a smiling wife and a couple of attractive clean-cut blond children. If he were chosen to run on the Republican ticket for vice president, of course, he’d be in a great position for
the top spot, down the line. “So what do you think about that idea, Senator?” the host asked him. “Is the White House in your sights?”
If Darla were still alive, this would have been the kind of moment that would have inspired Eleanor to pick up the phone and call her, knowing there was at least one person on the planet who would understand the feelings that suggestion brought forth in her, the image of President Hallinan. As it was, she just picked up a Brillo pad—scrubbing harder than necessary.
“I’d be honored and humbled,” he said. “I’ll serve the American people in any way I’m called to serve. If that includes the White House, so be it.”
The host of the program was asking him something about his political philosophy now.
“Some people may call me a dinosaur,” he said. “But for me, it all goes back to the traditional values I was raised on. Love of country. Love of family. Love of God.
“Americans are losing sight of the strong moral values of our forefathers,” he went on. “Drugs. Divorce. Gays in the military. Children left in day care while their moms collect welfare and unemployment. Liberals are turning us into a nation of crybabies. We’ve got men who wake up one morning and decide they’re going to be a woman, women deciding to be men. You never know who you’re going to run into anymore, when you walk into a public restroom.”
“Of all the issues facing America today,” the host asked Matt Hallinan, “what, for you, is the most serious?”
“We’ve got thousands of babies being murdered in our country every day,” he said. “Sometimes I can’t sleep at night, just thinking about them.”
Hearing his voice—surprisingly familiar, after all these years—had a more disturbing effect on Eleanor than she would have anticipated. She was back in the summer of 1969. The front seat of his car.
Matt Hallinan’s breath on her face, his fingers pinching her nipples. Her skirt around her waist, her underpants around her ankles.
And later, the trip to Poughkeepsie. The back room. The five hundred dollars. The silent drive back to her dormitory as blood soaked the sanitary napkin between her legs.
It was a call-in show. More than once, they’d announced the phone number. “If you’ve got a question or a comment for our guest,” the host was saying, “now’s your chance. Come on, listeners, let Senator Hallinan hear from you.”
Eleanor stood frozen at the sink, staring at the radio. She pictured Matt Hallinan as he had been all those years back, a bored frat boy going to summer school and figuring out how to cheat his way into law school.
“Crybabies.” Maybe that was the term Matt Hallinan chose for every human being who ever acknowledged pain or struggle about something other than his team not making it to the Super Bowl.
She thought about Toby, bent over the Richard Scarry book, working so hard to relearn the words for every single thing he used to know. Harry Botts, sharing a beer with Jerry Henderson after a game—Jerry laughing, as he took a swig. “You don’t have AIDS or anything, do you?” Darla and all those years of cleaning houses, hiding her cash in a secret bank account to make her getaway, and finally managing to pull it off. Packing that U-Haul with everything she was able to salvage from her old life for the new one she’d believed she was just beginning. Only taking as much as she could get out of the trailer while Bobby was at work. Standing at the gas pump as she had that night and turning around to see him standing there—the man she’d been trying to get away from for over twenty years, Bobby. With a gun he’d picked up at a Walmart.
Most of all, Eleanor thought about what Al must have endured—Al, presented with his grandmother’s annual gift of a ruffled dress, Al, making the decision to transition from the sex he was born with to the gender he was meant to be. For a moment there, she took in the full weight of Al’s courage. She felt something like physical pain, imagining how it would be for her son, hearing Matt Hallinan’s words now.
Another picture then: Matt Hallinan, pushing her underpants down around her ankles, whispering into her ear. One small step for man.
“We’re waiting for your call,” the host said again. Eleanor picked up her phone.
She drew in her breath. This time it wasn’t the old pattern—that familiar feeling she always got, entering Crazyland, of stepping off the edge of the world. Eleanor was surprisingly calm as she dialed the number. No doubt hundreds of people were calling in. She’d never get through.
A minute later, there was a voice on the other end. “You’ve reached Talk of the Nation,” the woman said. “Where are you calling from?”
“Brookline, Massachusetts.” She gave her first name, all they asked for.
“And do you have a question for our guest?” Before she had time to consider this, she was on the air.
“You should remember me, Senator Hallinan,” she said. “The summer I was sixteen, I stayed with your family and you used to give me rides to work. I thought you were like a big brother.”
Off in the studio someplace in Washington, she could feel his discomfort. Matt Hallinan must have been thinking fast, figuring out how to finesse the situation, but Eleanor wasn’t done talking.
“At that time,” she said, “you were trying to figure out a way to get out of going to Vietnam. As I recall, you were going to hire someone to take an exam for you, to get into law school. But that wasn’t the main thing I remember about those rides, Matt. It’s what happened in the car . . .”
He was trying to cut in now. “I don’t know who this person is,” he said. “I guess you get a lot of crazies on this show.”
“I was your sister Patty’s roommate at school. I think you know that. My parents had just died in a car accident.”
From her kitchen in Brookline, Eleanor spoke into her cell phone. Her voice was steady.
“This caller doesn’t seem to have a question,” Matt Hallinan was saying. “Let’s move on to someone who does.”
“Matthew Hallinan raped me that summer,” Eleanor said. “When it turned out I was pregnant, he took me to have an illegal abortion.”
The host of the show had stepped in now. “These are serious charges you’re making here . . .”—she must have consulted her notes—“. . . Eleanor. Do you have anything to say in response, Senator Hallinan?”
“This caller is obviously a nutcase,” Matt Hallinan said.
The line went dead, but Eleanor had said what she had wanted. Long ago, she and Darla had made a pledge. Darla would leave Bobby. Eleanor would settle her score with the man who’d raped her in the front seat of his parents’ car. She had just done that.
Within ten minutes of Eleanor’s call to Talk of the Nation, her phone rang. It was a producer on the program, calling to say a reporter from CNN had heard Eleanor’s call and wanted to speak with her. They weren’t giving her number out without her authorization.
The reporter called five minutes later. “I need to know, before anything else, if you are prepared to go on the record with your allegation concerning Matthew Hallinan,” she asked Eleanor.
No doubt most people would have told her to consult an attorney first. (She was the daughter of one. All these years after his death, she knew what he would have told her.)
Eleanor recounted her story for the reporter. The summer in Rhode Island. The rape. The abortion.
“And you were how old at the time?” the reporter asked.
Sixteen.
Within a week of the CNN story, four other women had made statements concerning experiences of sexual assault at the hands of Senator Matthew Hallinan. Eleanor was asked to appear on the Today program. Though he declined an invitation to address the allegations himself, a spokesperson from his office appeared to say that the charges were baseless.
The next week, the New York Times ran a picture of Matt Hallinan at a fraternity party, in his law school days, hoisting a flag made from women’s underpants and carrying a sign that said, “No Means Yes.” Shortly after, Senator Hallinan announced that out of a desire to spend more time back home with his famil
y in Rhode Island, he would not be running for a second term in the Senate.
A letter arrived from Patty. “Good job ruining my brother’s life,” she’d written.
Eleanor didn’t write back.
96.
Crash
Cam called—an event so rare Eleanor didn’t recognize the number when it showed up on her phone.
“Elijah’s with you, right?” he asked.
“He’s at a gig,” she told him. “A new band wanted to try him out. He’s so excited.”
She was so startled to hear Cam’s voice that it took her a moment to realize the rest. She could make out the word “accident.” The word “truck.” Ambulance. Emergency room.
“It’s Coco,” Cam said. Except for the day of Toby’s accident, she had never heard him sounding this shaken. “She was on the back of some guy’s bike and a truck hit them.”
Her first thought was of Elijah. Eleanor was not his mother, but the news of injury to the woman who was struck her like a physical blow. She pictured this boy she’d come to love, hearing the news. His mother, injured on a highway, airlifted to Boston, awaiting surgery.
“They called me from the hospital,” Cam said. He was actually crying. “Even though we aren’t married anymore, my name was still the one on the card in her wallet.”
Coco was alive. Concussion and a fractured jaw. Massive internal injuries. Also a broken pelvis. One of her legs was pretty mangled. The doctors weren’t sure they could save it.
For a moment all Eleanor could hear on the other end of the line was the sound of the man she used to be married to, crying about the woman he used to be married to. All Eleanor could do was listen.
“I was so mad at her for what she did,” he said. “But I didn’t want her to die. If things had just stayed how they were, none of this would have happened.” That was always the truth, wasn’t it? If things had just stayed how they were.
Count the Ways Page 40