The Peacock Feast_A Novel by Lisa Gornick

Author:Lisa Gornick [Gornick, Lisa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Literary, Family Life, General, Sagas
ISBN: 9780374718497
Google: sKFaDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2019-02-05T15:27:06+00:00

* * *

Over the following days, Prudence felt herself sinking into an impenetrable loneliness. She, Prudence Theet, née Prudence O’Connor, daughter of servants, had unwittingly insulted Ella Jameson, inhabitant of a world populated by the likes of the Vanderbilts. That Prudence had sincerely and almost immediately apologized made no difference.

Rather than feeling indignant at this injustice, Prudence was ashamed. Ashamed that she had so dearly wanted Ella as a friend and had deluded herself into thinking it possible. Despite the poverty of her experience with having a friend, Prudence felt certain that friendship should encompass generosity: the generosity of spirit that allows for turbulence and disagreements. For forgiveness. Or perhaps—and this seemed even more painful—the breach with Ella had nothing to do with anything Prudence had said, but more with Ella’s having tired of the novelty of an intimate outside her circle, a circle Prudence existed on the periphery of only because of her marriage to Carlton.

The loneliness sank into her gut, making food revolting: beef looked like feces and chicken was a dead bird and vegetables dirty debris. It disturbed her sleep, so she would wake at four. Creeping into her dressing room, she would watch the sky lighten. One morning, at dawn, she saw a flock of swallows slashing the sky in a V formation. For a few moments, her spirits lifted as she imagined the birds an advance guard for the larger group, but the thought dimmed to be replaced by concern that they were an errant congregation that had lost their bearings.

With Prudence’s cheekbones hollow and her clavicle sharply outlined above the neckline of her dresses, Mrs. Meechin took to putting extra butter in Prudence’s dishes, Louise to bringing her hot chocolate made with cream. One morning, as she sat struggling to eat a few bites of the greasy eggs, Carlton announced that Dr. Hinley, CCB’s private physician, who came now every day to care for Robert, would be arriving shortly to examine Prudence.

Before Prudence could object, Carlton looked at her sternly. “I am not asking you. I am telling you.”

Dr. Hinley took her blood pressure and listened to her breathing with a stethoscope. He examined her throat and her ears. He palpated her abdomen, tested her reflexes with a tiny hammer he kept in his doctor’s bag. Then he and Carlton retired to Carlton’s library for coffee and Mrs. Meechin’s raisin buns, over which he presented Carlton with his diagnosis of Mrs. Theet: feminine melancholy, perhaps linked, he carefully suggested, to her infertile state, which he presumed from their lack of children, exacerbated by what he surmised to be residual anemia from what Carlton described as a miscarriage. Hinley prescribed bed rest, liver on alternate days, iron pills, and, in a month’s time, a trip to Arizona, where the dry desert air and the sunshine, he told Carlton, would be beneficial to his wife.

Not wanting to go to Arizona, where she feared the sun scorching her fair skin and a terrible silence over the desert landscape, Prudence forced herself to eat the liver Mrs.

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