A Place at the Table (26 page)

Studying Daddy in conversation with Kate at the dinner table, I knew he would have been a happier man had he married someone like her, someone with whom he could discuss recipes, New York opera, gardening. Jack listened, bemused, as Kate and Daddy bantered,
playing a verbal game of tennis. Mother listened, too, though I don’t think she heard much of anything. Her listening was a performance: She widened her eyes in exaggerated effect, clutched the arm of whoever was seated next to her, threw her head back to laugh at the only mildly funny thing someone said.

When forced to socialize with anyone but Jack and Kate, Daddy would usually rise to the occasion, but like Mother, he was always performing. I never learned anything new about Daddy from any of the stories he shared at the infrequent parties he and Mother hosted for their Connecticut neighbors; instead he trotted out the same half-dozen anecdotes again and again. He was affable but scripted. And then as the guests departed, he retracted his gregariousness, folding his charm up inside himself, the way Mother could shrink the dining room table by removing the extra leaf and pushing together the two ends.

•  •  •

I think Daddy loves me. I am almost sure he does. But he is so cerebral, so private; he does not know how to show it. Growing up I experienced his love through eating his food. Every Sunday Daddy baked, so that we would have bread for the upcoming week. I longed to bake with him, for us to stand side by side in our kitchen, me on a step stool so I could reach the counter as we pressed the springy dough in our hands, exchanging shy smiles while Mother was banished to some far-off room. But for Daddy, baking was a solitary endeavor. He would put on classical music and shut the door to the kitchen. Except in the very coldest months, he would tend his garden while the dough rose, then return inside for a drink and more Beethoven as he kneaded the dough and let it rise again. A monk in his chambers, he was not to be disturbed, no matter how fervently I wished he would invite me in.

I imagine that over the years many women have longed for him in a similarly achy manner, even though, technically, he and Mother
are still married, never having secured a legal divorce. I imagine that even when Daddy was still living in Connecticut he had affairs. He was—still is, surely, though it has been years since I last saw him—handsome and brilliant, a Yale-educated MD who studies genetics. He devoted his life to his research lab, a place that remained as distant and mysterious to me as Manhattan, which was only two and a half hours away from Roxboro but could have been in another solar system for all I knew of it as a child. Until Aunt Kate moved to the city after college and insisted I visit her, I was never, ever taken there. Not to see the Rockettes at Christmas, not to ice-skate at Rockefeller Center, not to see the dinosaur bones at the Museum of Natural History. When I pushed on Mother for an explanation she replied that we lived in the country for a reason and it was the same reason we stayed out of New York.

“But you once lived in Manhattan!” I said. “At the Barbizon Hotel.”

“Well, that was enough to teach me that the city isn’t a place for little girls,” Mother replied. End of conversation. She was only slightly less reserved on the subject of how she and Daddy first met, though I begged her to tell me all about it, desperate to imagine that my parents had once been in love.

“We happened to both be on the Metro-North,” she would say. “Leaving Grand Central Station. That was back when I was a working girl in the city and your father was in medical school. I stayed with my parents in Roxboro over the weekends, and your father was heading back to Yale. He sat by me, and we got to talking. And I guess I was just so interested in what he had to say that I missed my transfer. Had to take the train all the way to New Haven, where your father bought me a cup of coffee, then drove me back to Mummy and Dad’s, over an hour away. From that moment on, I knew he was a gentleman.”

Except he wasn’t. At least not by the standards of Mother’s
hoity-toity clan. Daddy, the orphaned child of Italian emigrants, was an upstart. Daddy’s parents entered the country through Ellis Island, but instead of remaining in the city, they made their way across America, having heard rumors of vineyards in California, owned and run by other Italians. And indeed, when they first arrived in the Central Valley they found steady work at a vineyard, but by the time Daddy was a young man the Depression had sunk the country and he and his parents could only find migrant work in the fruit trees. When Daddy was sixteen, his father died of pneumonia. His mother, heartbroken, died shortly after. Daddy, orphaned and alone, decided to hell with California and train-hopped across the country, finally arriving in Manhattan, where he was soon taken in by an Italian family who helped him secure a series of jobs, including working as a busboy at a trattoria in the West Village while he started college at NYU. When the Americans entered the Second World War, Daddy enlisted. When he returned home, he finished college on the GI Bill, then began medical school at Yale.

Impressive, yes, but according to my grandmother, whose New England lineage began with the
Mayflower
, not “our kind of people.”

But neither was Mother, not anymore. This was not something Mother liked to talk about, but between her and Aunt Kate I had learned the story of Mother’s other life, her life before Daddy. Three days after graduating from high school, Mother married her high school sweetheart. Soon, he was shipped overseas (also to fight the Germans), but not before she became pregnant. The baby, Timmy, was perfect. Mother, living in her parents’ home while her husband was away, called Timmy her big, fat, country baby.

I knew from an early age that Timmy died of meningitis when he was six months old and that a week later Mother received a telegraph from overseas stating that her husband had died in combat. But it wasn’t until I was in college that I learned the details around Timmy’s death. Kate, grim and determined, told me the story one
weekend when I was visiting her in Manhattan. I was furious at Mother over something and had declared my hatred of her to Kate.

“Susan drives me crazy, too,” Kate said. “But believe me, outward appearances to the contrary, life dealt her a tough hand.”

On that day Kate told me the secret shame of Timmy’s death, that he had died while Mother was on a picnic at Doolittle Lake with a friend from high school, a male friend kept out of the war for unknown reasons. They were just friends, Kate assured me; in fact, there were rumors that the man was a homosexual. Mother had left the baby with her parents’ housekeeper; her own parents were away, at a house party in Litchfield. Mother said she would be back by that afternoon, but it was past dark when she returned. The panicked housekeeper met her at the door. The baby was inconsolable. He wouldn’t eat, he had a high fever and a rash, and there was a bulge in his little fontanelle. The housekeeper had waited for Mother’s return to take Timmy to the hospital. By the time they got there, it was too late. Timmy died that night.

“Let me tell you,” said Kate, “our friends and neighbors did not look too kindly on a woman whose baby died while she was out picnicking with a man other than her husband, innocent though it was. And then for her own husband to die so soon afterward, it was almost as if people thought Susan had conjured the tragedy. So Dad got Susan the position at PLM—he knew one of the founding editors, a connection he used again when I was job hunting—and he secured a room for her at the Barbizon. Dad said he needed to get her out of Connecticut, out of the gossip mill. Plus he thought having a job might distract your mother from her grief. But it didn’t. She was so depressed. And then your father appeared on the scene, and it seemed that Susan had a second chance at life. Honestly, we were all so grateful that he came along.”

As a girl, I would study the photo Mother kept of herself and Timmy. In the photo, he is fat and rosy cheeked, dressed in a long
white baptismal gown, sitting on Mother’s lap. Mother looks different than I’ve ever seen her. Happy. In the photo, Mother glows. I remember studying that picture and fantasizing that Timmy had not died, that he was strong and nimble and fun, always ready with a laugh to talk Mother out of her rigidity. I would compare the picture of Timmy and Mother to the one of Mother and me, taken on the day of
my
Baptism. Mother looks angry behind her smile. Throughout my childhood, much as I tried to appease her, to bring her snacks, to make her laugh, to just be quiet so she could nap, Mother was often angry. Her girl child, born to a man she did not love, had survived, while her fat, cooing baby boy, born to her childhood sweetheart, had not.

•  •  •

Thank God I was headed to boarding school by the time Daddy and Kate had their big falling-out, because I don’t think I could have survived my childhood without Kate’s presence. All of these years later, I still don’t really understand what happened between Daddy and my aunt, except that a cookbook had something to do with the dissolution of their relationship. Yes, a cookbook. How ridiculous. It was one Kate was editing. It hadn’t even been released, but Kate had already told me all about the project. At fourteen, I loved getting the “inside scoop” on the publishing world, and I suppose Kate wanted to encourage any career aspirations I might have had, knowing that Mother’s sole advice regarding my future was “that it’s just as easy to fall in love with a rich man as it is to fall in love with a poor one.”

The book was written by Alice Stone, a “Negro woman” (that was the polite term back then) who grew up on a farm in rural North Carolina. Alice went on to be the chef at an eastside café where Kate liked to take authors to lunch, as the restaurant itself had a storied literary past and continued to attract a bohemian clientele.
(“Well, fancy bohemians,” Kate clarified.) Kate also loved the food at the café and had become curious about the chef’s story. After all, it was the early 1960s. For a Negro to be a chef at all was anomalous, let alone a black woman. And so, in typical straightforward fashion, Kate arrived at the café midafternoon, asked if Alice Stone was there, and set up an appointment to talk with her the following week, on Alice’s day off. Alice surprised Kate by inviting her to her Riverside apartment for the interview. Kate had been warned that Alice was exceptionally private, but there she was, inviting Kate to her home. When Kate arrived, Alice offered her breakfast: strong coffee, coffee cake made from a sweet yeast dough, and bacon baked on a cookie sheet in the oven. When they finished eating, Alice handed Kate a black-and-white-speckled notebook filled with details about her childhood in North Carolina.

With growing interest Kate read about the gentle slope of land upon which Alice’s family built their farm and how in the mornings the dew looked like steam rising from the grass. She read about the pigs Alice’s family raised, how they were finished on acorns, making their meat unbelievably silky. Kate read about Alice’s mother’s cooking, how she could turn the humblest ingredients into something magical: creamy chess pies, tender squirrel stew, butter nut cookies at Christmas time that were both salty and sweet.

Kate was captivated by Alice’s story and at that point was high enough on the Palmer, Long and McIntyre totem pole that she was able to get a little bit of advance money for Alice so that she could turn her notes into a book. But when Kate told Alice the good news, that PML was going to publish Alice’s memoirs, Alice balked. She did not want just anyone reading about her life. She had wanted to share her story with Kate, specifically. She felt an affinity toward Kate and thought she would appreciate hearing about Emancipation Township. Kate told Alice that a lot of people would appreciate hearing about Emancipation Township, but Alice remained wary. It wasn’t
until Kate assured Alice that no dirty laundry need be aired that Alice grew enthusiastic, excited to share memories of a simpler time when people relied on the land and closely followed the four seasons. And recipes. There would be lots and lots of recipes, and Kate would help Alice discern which to use. It would be a project they would take on together—the cooking part, at least. Kate was happy to work with Alice in her kitchen, and Alice, whose husband was out of the country, enjoyed the company.

Kate was so proud of how the manuscript came together; she brought it to Connecticut to show off to Mother and Daddy. To Daddy, really. Kate wanted the two of them to cook our Saturday evening meal from it. When she and Jack arrived that Friday evening, after cocktails were poured, Kate pulled the galley out of her L.L.Bean canvas bag. She had wrapped it in one of Jack’s clean undershirts to ensure no errant sand or dirt, trapped at the bottom of the bag, got in its pages. She unwrapped the T-shirt from around the book and handed it first to Mother, to be polite, though I’m sure it was Daddy whom she wanted to show it to. He was the intellectual. He was the cook. Plus, Mother was perennially dulled by alcohol.

“I didn’t realize she was colored,” said Mother. “Do you think that might hurt the book’s chances?”

“Oh for God’s sake, Susan,” said Kate. “In the first place, it’s a great American story. And in the second place, I don’t really care about its ‘chances.’ I just love this book.”

Daddy was quiet during this exchange. He sat next to Mother on the chintz sofa, reading from Alice’s introduction. When he looked up his eyes were glassy.

“It’s great, isn’t it?” said Kate, smiling shyly.

Daddy looked at her, then rubbed his eyes with his thumb and index finger. He breathed in deeply, the sides of his nose flattening with the great intake of air.

“I don’t know what to say.”

“Say it’s great.”

“I don’t think it’s appropriate that you are publishing this.”

“Excuse me?”

“It seems opportunistic. You’re idealizing what was clearly a hardscrabble existence. You’re publishing this for a largely white audience who will read the book and say, ‘Oh, things weren’t so bad in the South for Negroes. Look at this. This woman grew up on a lovely farm cooking lovely meals.’ ”

“We should only publish books about oppression? Alice can’t celebrate where she came from? That privilege is only granted to white people? Is that what you’re saying?”