Charlotte au Chocolat (4 page)

Kitchen people didn't get takeout at night. My mother said they didn't have the time. Sometimes, for staff lunch, they sent me down to Elsie's, the sandwich shop on the corner of Holyoke and Mount Auburn. Elsie's had no chairs or tables, just some stools at the counter. It always seemed like the fuse for the lights had blown. Grease sopped through the brown paper bags and onto my hands. It came from the pastrami: all the chefs ordered extra-thick pastrami sandwiches. “Best damn thing in the Square, that pastrami,” my father said, ripping off the sheets of paper.

Kitchen people understood that food didn't have to be gourmet to taste good, and that sometimes gourmet food didn't taste good at all. “Kiwis are a soulless fruit,” my mother once said when she saw them in a fruit tart on the Ritz's dessert tray. “Don't ever use sun-dried tomatoes,” my father told his staff. “They'll take away your magic powers.” Even junk food could be better. Once, for Jake's birthday, the staff laid out his favorite foods—frozen meatballs and Twinkies—on brass serving plates in the dining room. When they sliced the Twinkies horizontally to expose the cream, even my mother admitted they made an attractive dessert.

At staff Christmas parties we served junk food, too: sour-cream-and-onion potato chips, chicken wings, and hot dogs, and for dessert more Twinkies. The rest of the year I never ate food like that, and by the holidays Cotswold tarts and melon wrapped in prosciutto bored me. In my black velvet party dresses, I gnawed on fried drumsticks, with a napkin stuffed into my lace collars to catch the crumbs. “I'm not whipping up any foie gras for you tonight, kiddo,” said Carla, who, in her olive-green T-shirt and holding a beer, looked the same as she did behind the line. “Fend for yourself.”

The whole staff decorated the tree together. The restaurant owned few ornaments—some violet glass bulbs in various sizes, beaded cranberry sprigs, and a platinum-blond angel to pin on top—so every year the staff brought ornaments they had made themselves. One year Lydia, the line cook, outlined her expired Neiman Marcus charge card in red glitter; another year a waitress constructed a model of the Pudding staircase, complete with green velvet carpet, and the next year a model of a table with a pink linen tablecloth. There were rubber crocodiles dangling from strings, ropes of pop-bead pearls to loop around the branches, and a clean-picked cow rib spray-painted silver and dangling from a rhinestone hook. I decorated the lower half of the tree, the only part I could reach, while the adults decorated the top.

I don't remember Benjamin decorating the tree with me, or hanging out in the dining room at that party, although he must have been there, just as he doesn't figure into many of my memories of the Pudding. I expect he was in the kitchen, or maybe on the fire escape. My mother got it right after all: the world
was
divided into front room and kitchen people. I was the former and Benjamin was the latter. His memories of the Pudding from those early days probably would be of the rhythms and flavors of the kitchen, whereas mine were of the velvety dining room. Unlike me, Benjamin was a rugged and physical child, always building forts and climbing trees at our farmhouse and happy to help with shelling peas and rolling pasta at the Pudding. There is a black-and-white photograph my father must have taken of Benjamin and a cousin of ours stirring a pot of chocolate sauce in the kitchen of our farmhouse. No doubt that chocolate sauce was later drizzled over some exquisite dessert and served to a customer at the Pudding who never suspected that two young boys had played any part in its invention.

Three

SKINNED PEARS
&
DEAD DUCKS

M
y parents were getting dressed to go to court. They stood at the foot of their bed at the farmhouse. It was a rare sight, seeing both of them home at the same time; my father worked such long days at the restaurant. My mother tossed an old tweed blazer on the bed while my father, who never wore anything but kitchen clothes, stood there with his hands in his pockets, looking deeply unhappy.

“This one,” my mother said, gesturing to the blazer. “It's the only one.”

My father sighed, and he could really
sigh
when he wanted to let you know he was fed up with something.

“What?” My mother threw up her hands. “It's
Harvard
. They'll all be wearing tweed.”

So, I thought, that explained it. They were going to court with Harvard.

I think I was about six then, and it was the first time I ever heard the words
the lease
. Evidently, Harvard Real Estate was after possession of the building. They were battling with my parents about their right to extend their lease.

Eventually, my father put on the tweed blazer and my parents and Mary-Catherine went to court. They won the case. But I never did forget those words:
the lease
.

Meanwhile, on Dudley Road, stalks of rhubarb grew behind the blue-painted shed and roses bloomed on a bush above the cellar window. The swing set creaked. The stones in the garden path wobbled underneath my feet and there were pink sprigged cushions on the white wicker chairs on the porch. Inside, everything was pink and green, green and pink: the walls in my bedroom the color of the center of a raspberry thumbprint cookie, the floors the color of the sliver of green in after-dinner mints; the floor in my parents' bedroom the same, and the walls a smudged baby pink.

Something was always broken at the farmhouse, just as something was always broken at the restaurant. When you turned on the faucets, either the cold water or the hot water refused to flow. We hardly ever had enough hot water to fill the bathtub. During downpours, water flooded the basement, and when it snowed, chunks of snow slid off the roof and thudded to the ground, making the whole house rumble. We had no overhead lights, just lamps with rickety stems and rose-tinted shades, and often the electricity went out. My mother lit candles then—pink candles, the same color as our living-room walls, and blue candles, the same blue as our kitchen sink with the cracks in the porcelain.

No one ever cleaned up. Even during the summer, my parents did not scoop out the ashes from behind the grate in the fireplace. The cashmere throws on the floor smelled of smoke, both from the ashes and from my father's cigarettes. The grease of bacon fat crusted the white rags my mother flung on the counters. There were cooking tools everywhere: paring knives for boning quails, truffle cutters, butcher knives to hack through cubes of dark chocolate, pans thick with grime.

My father always came home from the restaurant late; sometimes I was still awake and sometimes I was not. He brought home food—all the things in the cold room that would go bad if left until tomorrow—stalks of salsify my mother sauteed in lemon juice and sage; blackberries so ripe they verged on moldy; scraps of Dover sole wrapped in wax paper. Sometimes my mother served me the Dover sole on saltines, but my father didn't eat anything. He had eaten at the restaurant, he said. Then he lit a cigarette and locked the door to his darkroom where he printed and developed photographs all night long.

That was his other interest besides cooking: photography. He did platinum prints, which everyone said were very hard to do but made these magical melting shadows of silver on thin sheets of paper. There was one broom he took photographs of all the time: the same broom, again, and again, and again. And also one young woman who worked in the cold station at the restaurant plating desserts, who couldn't have been more than twenty or twenty-one and bore a striking resemblance to my mother. Whenever I came across a portrait of this young woman posing in profile, her fine, floaty blond hair grazing a bare shoulder, I would do a double take to convince myself that it was not my mother, who years ago had posed for him in the same ethereal style.

Sometimes, if it snowed, my parents closed the restaurant and my father stayed home. Then they cooked together—brioche was their favorite food to make: brioche doughnuts, brioche with bacon, brioche slathered in sweet butter and stuffed with fried oysters. But then the snow ceased, my father went back to the restaurant, and my mother and I stayed behind in the farmhouse, eating the loaves of brioche as long as they'd last.

I
t was a Saturday night; I was six years old. My mother and I sat at our usual table, A-1. Our entrees arrived: crab vicar for me, osso bucco for my mother. Crab vicar was actually an appetizer—crabmeat thick with hollandaise and rice and served on a bed of sea salt on top of a hollowed-out scallop shell. That and smoked pheasant with Roquefort flan were my favorite dishes on the menu. I ate my crabmeat and hoped that my mother would scoop out some of the marrow onto my bread plate; we usually shared food. But my mother, who had appeared in the dining room in her pink-and-green Shetland sweater and black “kitchen” pants, was not eating. She only peeled off the petals of the Roman artichokes with her fork, she who had taught me that playing with your food was bad manners. I opened my mouth to ask about the marrow when our waiter approached the table.

“Would you care for anything else?” he asked.

“No,” my mother said, and I noticed she didn't add
thank you
. “We're done for tonight.”

The waiter cleared our plates. I still held a forkful of crab vicar in my hand. It plopped onto the tablecloth. The rice scattered and the hollandaise stained the pink linen yellow. My mother toyed with a loose thread in her sweater.

“Go thank your father for dinner,” she said. “Go, go behind the line.”

I always thanked the chefs for dinner; that was good manners. “Go thank the kitchen,” my mother had told me over and over again.
The kitchen,
she had said, but never
your father
. My parents raised me to believe that the help was more important than they themselves were.

I got up from the table and slipped into the kitchen. It was the end of the night; only the cold station was busy with people plating desserts, and I made my way to the head of the line, where my father usually stood. A hunk of prime rib still smoldered in a black pan. Cigarette ashes dappled the butcher block. But my father, my father wasn't
there
.

The next morning, I saw my mother crying in our kitchen at home. Her blond hair needed highlights and had tumbled out of its tortoiseshell combs. Flour had spilled onto the wood floor; I smelled lemon squares baking in the oven. Nobody had said the word
divorce
, but I knew. As I stared at my mother's body, rocking with sobs, I knew my father had gone.

“Come on,” she said, rising and opening the door of the oven. “Time to take in the desserts to the restaurant.” And then she said, “It's mine now.”

Everyone had come to an agreement. From here on out, Mary-Catherine would continue to manage the dining room and my mother would take my father's place in the kitchen.

I watched my mother dress the night she took over the restaurant. She stood in her bedroom, struggling with the clasp of a caramel silk swing skirt. It didn't fit. She slipped the skirt off her hips and fumbled around in her closet until she settled on the navy circle skirt she had been wearing almost every day. It had three different hooks, she explained; she could still manage the loosest one.

She sighed. “I've got to,” she said, as if to herself. “I've got to get my waist back, that's all there is to it.”

That night, Benjamin and I stayed home with a babysitter. I tried to picture my mother at the head of the line, where my father had stood. But somehow, I couldn't.

The “head of the line” was then in my mind an exclusively male domain. Of course, this was true in most kitchens at the time, although I wouldn't necessarily have known that as a child. I only knew that I associated the position with my father, with meat and ashes and dodging the flames. My mother I associated with the softer, smoother flavors of the desserts she made, and with the landscape of our farmhouse—especially with the garden she loved, the pink and lavender candy-land of geraniums, peonies, and sweet peas.

But there was never to be another garden on Dudley Road. My parents' marriage had been deteriorating over the long winter, and by the time the spring came and the stalks of rhubarb were growing, I learned that we were going to lose the farmhouse. A developer had bought up the land surrounding Dudley Road, with plans to build condominiums on the property. Some of the other beautiful old houses were going to be bulldozed, but ours was going to be spared. Once we moved out of the house, it would be given a new paint job, new bathrooms, and new kitchen, and converted into an information center for prospective tenants.

It has always seemed to me, in memory, that my father up and left, vanished from our lives, that night at the Pudding when my mother told me to go say thank you to him and I couldn't find him behind the line. All I remember: the hunk of prime rib smoldering in a black pan. But that can't be right, or not entirely right. I think, now, that he must have come back sometime, if only to get his stuff—his cameras and platinum prints—from the farmhouse. And then there is this story I heard about the day we left Dudley Road. My father and a family friend of ours were ready to leave, thinking they'd taken care of everything, when the friend said, “Michael, what about the basement? Is there anything we should go get from down there?”

My father laughed and rolled his eyes. “Trust me,” he said, “no way do you want to go
down to the basement
. Let's get out of this place.”

For my father, a talented butcher, used to hang deer and other animals up to dry on our porch, and some of that meat, long forgotten, was stored in the basement of the farmhouse. They left; whatever game-meat delicacies that had been left to rot in the basement were discovered, presumably, when the renovations began.

My mother explained to me that my father didn't want to be a chef anymore. He'd lost interest in cooking, she said; he wanted to be an artist now.

After leaving us, he got a studio on the third floor of an old redbrick industrial building overlooking the commuter-rail tracks in Waltham. The first time I visited the building, he said to me, “There
is
an elevator, Char. But I wouldn't use it, if you know what I mean.”

That whole building, I felt, was fragile, unstable. The steps trembled underneath my feet as we climbed the stairs, and the planks in the ceilings looked loose, as if flakes of sawdust would fall between the cracks. When we reached the third floor, my father told me, “Don't worry too much about the mice, Char. All of the lady painters have cats, wouldn't you know it?”

My father's studio was one vast room, with a ceiling almost as high as the one in the dining room at the Pudding. He had painted the walls silver leaf from top to bottom. His negatives dripped from a clothesline in the center of the room, and he had propped a moose head, drizzled with more silver leaf, on the wall. The moose's name, my father told me with a chuckle, was Ralph.

Taxidermy, later on when I was a grown-up, became quite fashionable in certain circles. You would walk into chic restaurants and see animal heads mounted against a backdrop of carefully selected Victorian wallpaper. But it wasn't fashionable then. And I thought that this moose, Ralph, was absolutely ridiculous and absolutely terrifying. I thought
Ralph
was a stupid name, too. I glanced up at him, a child's judgment in my eyes.

My father's studio was cold. A mean wind whipped in through the holes in the windows, several of which, I noticed, were broken.

“That's because of the bar next door,” my father said. “I think the customers get drunk and throw pebbles through the windows. I might patch those up with duct tape, one of these days.”

I asked where the bathroom was.

“Oh, down the hall,” he said. “We all share it. And hey, Char, check out the futon down there. If you want to sleep over, we can just drag it down the hall.”

I walked down the hall. It felt windy in the bathroom, too. The walls were painted cornflower blue, and blobs of lavender wax stuck to the floor. The only block of soap on the sink was so soft and runny, it crumbled in my hands. I didn't see any towels.

Walking back to the studio, I stopped and looked at the futon outside of the stall. It was smothered in dust, and I saw a smattering of stains from what looked like red wine. I didn't want to sleep there, or on the floor where the mice could get me. And if the mice did get me, I realized, it was unlikely that my father could be counted on to care.

But later that night, we ate herring on toast and marrons glacés in pools of heavy cream. And I curled up after all on that futon at the foot of my father's bed and drifted off to sleep.

W
hat, for the record, did my father take photographs of? Chairs. Brooms. More chairs and brooms: hundreds of these, over the years. A skinned pear drowning in a puddle of silver leaf. Pigs' hooves, tipped with dried blood. In some photographs, the pigs' feet are arranged in almost coquettish poses, bringing to mind fractured female body parts. And then, he sometimes took pictures of his shoes. I remember one photograph of those old black slippers he used to wear, crisscrossed with duct tape. A dead duck, the crackly copper kind you sometimes see hanging by a string in the windows of Chinatown, is stuffed inside the shoe. Its head is flung back, and it looks like it's dying all over again.

W
hile the divorce was being finalized, we moved, for a year, to a rented Victorian house in another suburb. All that year, my mother ran the restaurant while also driving me to and from my private elementary school in Concord, and my brother to and from his school in Newton. But then because we could no longer afford the rent, we had to take in boarders, and then when we could no longer afford paying what we owed the private schools (even though we were both, at least partially, on scholarships), it was decided that we would move to Cambridge and both go to public school.