Tender at the Bone (5 page)

“I bet they never ate anything
this
good in Paris,” I said.

Alice smiled. “Hortense always said your father was a man who appreciated meat and potatoes,” she said with a smile that showed how much she liked my father.

“How did she die?” I asked, trying to sound casual. Alice just stopped and stared at me. “What makes you think she’s dead?” she replied.

“Isn’t she?” I asked.

“Might as well be,” said Alice. “Are you sure all that spinach is really clean?”

The dinner was a big success. Aunt Birdie opened a narrow green bottle of wine and my parents drank it all. My mother gave Aunt Birdie a cashmere sweater. My father devoured the creamed spinach, gave Alice a silk shawl, and told her that she could still make a better meal than any restaurant in Paris.

That reminded me of what Alice had said. As my father carried me down to the taxi cab I murmured into his neck, “What happened to Hortense?”

“I’ll tell you in the morning,” he said. But by morning he had changed his mind. I decided she must have done something really terrible. Maybe she had killed someone. Maybe she was in jail.

It was years before I found out the truth. By then I was in college and Aunt Birdie, through dint of sheer longevity, had unexpectedly become an heiress. When she was in her late nineties the last of Uncle Perry’s seven bachelor brothers died, leaving his considerable fortune to her.

The first thing Aunt Birdie did was move into a good neighborhood. The second was buy Alice a house in Barbados.

“Wouldn’t Alice rather come live here with you?” I asked. Aunt Birdie seemed to think the question was ridiculous. “She’s always wanted to go home,” she said. Still, every time I went to visit Aunt Birdie the first thing she asked was, “Have you heard from Alice?”

I had. I could tell from the tone of her letters that she was disappointed with the dream that had finally come true. I think she missed Aunt Birdie. I know Aunt Birdie missed her. But neither of them could admit it.

“Take good care of your Aunt Birdie,” Alice wrote, sending me the recipe for her apple dumplings. And she told me, finally, where Hortense had been all those years: in a mental institution.

“That’s it?” I asked my father. “That’s the mystery? That’s all there is to it? She’s in a mental institution?”

“Yes,” he said slowly. “Silly, isn’t it?”

“But why wouldn’t anybody talk about her?” I asked.

He looked down at me and said simply, “They were ashamed.” He looked sad and added, “There was something else too. They thought it was their fault that she was so frightened. As her illness progressed she became unable to touch anything that had ever been touched by another person and they felt that they had somehow done something wrong.”

I looked back, picturing that warm, crowded apartment, trying to imagine how those two sweet ladies could have hurt anyone. I pictured the three of us in the kitchen. And I heard Alice saying, once again, “He married two of them.” Suddenly I understood: crazy women.

“Do
you
think they were to blame for her illness?” I asked.

“Well,” he answered slowly, “they certainly didn’t prepare her for the real world.”

MRS. PEAVEY

My mother had lots of energy and education and not a lot to do. “If only my parents had let me be a doctor,” she often wailed as she paced the apartment like a caged tiger. She tried one job and then another, but they never lasted. “Nobody has any vision!” she announced after being politely fired as the chief editor of the
Homemaker’s Encyclopedia
. “I really thought that an essay on English queens and their homemaking skills was a brilliant idea.”

Her next inspiration was a magazine called
Lends You
. Mom was baffled when that went nowhere. “You’d think,” she said, bemused, “that people would be entranced by the idea of having Leonard Bernstein lend you his conducting skills and Diana Vreeland lend you her fashion sense. I just don’t understand why they aren’t!”

Next she worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, giving slide lectures to various groups around the city. Her specialty was the private lives of artists in the museum’s special exhibitions. This was her own clever idea, but it ended her career.

“I was only telling the truth,” she protested, when informed that her services were no longer needed. Nevertheless, her risqué lecture on Picasso was too much for the administration and Mom decided to use her considerable energies trying to enhance our lives. She entertained, she decorated, she arranged culturally enriching trips. These efforts were not always appreciated.

“What now?” my father asked, when he arrived home one day to find a tree being hauled up the side of our apartment building. He knew right away that it was destined for the eleventh floor. Sure enough, my mother greeted him with the news that she had just purchased a dead birch tree to brighten up our home. “Isn’t it wonderful!” she asked breathlessly, showing off an object that was at least twice as big as the available space. “We can cut it down to size and hang seasonal decorations on it.”

“Wonderful,” he agreed with the appropriate mixture of pride and skepticism.

“And such a bargain!” she added.

Dad wisely refrained from asking how much.

They were always bargains, these things my mother dragged home from her peregrinations around New York City. Or curiosities: whenever my mother came upon some new food she had never seen before, she bought it.

This meant that I was the first person in my class to taste mussels, cactus fruit, sea urchins, and lychee nuts. Mom was also a master of thinking up new uses for familiar foods. Once when I was driving back to college she handed me a can of white asparagus saying, “Take these for the road. You won’t have to stop as often: they’re very thirst-quenching.”

Fortunately we were only sporadically dependent upon my mother for sustenance. The cooking usually fell to me and whichever maid we happened to have. There was a parade of them; most didn’t last more than a few months. And then we met Mrs. Peavey, who came to live with us when I was eight.

She was the world’s most improbable maid, a large woman in her sixties with white-blue hair and a patrician manner. She spoke three languages fluently and would occasionally drop startling little tidbits like “When we stayed with the Rockefellers, tea was always served promptly at four.”

My mother and Mrs. Peavey argued constantly about the proper way to set a table for a party. Mrs. Peavey usually won; she had so much more experience. She proved her mettle the day she tripped coming through the kitchen door, dropping the beef Wellington two feet from where my mother stood waiting to serve it. “I’ll just go and get the other one, Mrs. Reichl,” she said as she scooped up the ruined food and made an exit. My mother nodded miserably.

One minute later Mrs. Peavey reappeared, bearing a new beef Wellington. My mother was dumbfounded. Where had it come from? I watched from behind the kitchen door, holding my breath as my mother dished out the new food. I hoped she would be smart enough not to serve the uncooked pastry Mrs. Peavey had used to patch the broken places.

“Always make extra pastry,” Mrs. Peavey said, patting the new pastry over the bare spots and hiding them with some little ornamental doodads. “You never know what surprises life is going to serve up.”

And it was Mrs. Peavey who taught me how to make my father’s favorite dish. Every time I make wiener schnitzel Mrs. Peavey is by my side, reminding me to pound the veal until it’s thin.

WIENER SCHNITZEL

1½ pounds veal cutlets

½ cup flour

1 egg, beaten

1 cup finely ground bread crumbs

Salt and pepper

6 tablespoons butter

1 lemon

Pound each cutlet thin between two pieces of waxed paper
.

Place flour in a flat dish or plate large enough to hold cutlet. Place beaten egg in another dish, bread crumbs in a third. Season each with salt and pepper
.

Dredge cutlets in flour. Dip into beaten egg. Dip into bread crumbs until thinly but thoroughly coated. Place on waxed-paper-covered platter and place in refrigerator for about an hour
.

Melt 4 tablespoons butter in large skillet. When sizzling, brown cutlets quickly on each side until golden. Remove to platter
.

Melt remaining two tablespoons butter in the same pan. Squeeze lemon juice into butter, stir, and pour over cutlets
.

Serves 4
.

Mrs. Peavey went downstairs every night carrying a huge silver goblet of ice water. The moisture pearled and beaded on the outside of the sterling, which she set on the tile floor next to her bed. My mother, in one of her Ozzie and Harriet moments, had put red and green ticktacktoe linoleum on the basement floor of our summer house; after that she insisted on calling it the rec room. When Mrs. Peavey came to live with us, the rec room became her bedroom, and she always set the goblet right in the middle of the center square.

Unlike Louvinia or Winnie, who preceded her as the family maid, Mrs. Peavey was never called by her first name. And unlike them, my mother did not refer to her as “the girl.”

My mother loved telling Mrs. Peavey stories, even the ones that showed her off to disadvantage. Like the time she asked Mrs. Peavey to make a sweet-potato casserole topped with marshmallows for Thanksgiving dinner and Mrs. Peavey replied that she wouldn’t dream of it. “A horrid middle-class concoction,” she said firmly.

Once Mrs. Peavey insisted on ironing the sheets when my grandmother came to visit. “But we don’t iron our sheets!” my mother protested. “Just because we live like animals,” Mrs. Peavey replied, implacably moving the iron across the smooth white cotton, “is no reason for us to impose our habits on others. A guest is a guest!”

And of course my mother loved complaining about Mrs. Peavey’s habit of turning her day off into a week. Mom’s voice always went down to a whisper when she talked about that. She’d glance in my direction and put a finger to her lips; I understood that whatever Mrs. Peavey did, it was terrible. I couldn’t imagine what it might
be. The next time my mother’s voice became audible she was always saying, “And of course that’s why she’s reduced to being a maid.” And then she’d laugh a little bitterly and add, “And my maid at that. Who else would put up with it?”

But the most famous story didn’t involve my mother at all; it was about the time Mrs. Peavey’s three sons came to visit in a chauffeured limousine. It was summer and we were in the country when the long black car came gliding up our driveway. “She knew right away who it was!” my mother always told her rapt audience. “And she asked Ruthie to go out and tell them to go away!”

I saw my reflection in the shiny window of the car, a serious eight-year-old with brown eyes, dirt on both cheeks, clutching a scrawny orange kitten. There was a big square patch on one knee where I had scraped it falling off my bike, and my curly hair was wild. I could see my pot belly sticking out beneath my torn “Singing Oaks” T-shirt and I sucked in my breath as the window silently disappeared.