Tender at the Bone (9 page)

“They are not savages!” said Béatrice. “I’ve been there.” A thrill ran through the class. French girls never offered their own opinions, they simply parroted those of their teachers. And certainly no French girl ever contradicted an adult, which must have been why Madame Cartet seemed more puzzled than angry.

“The Aboriginals are not Christian,” she said firmly, “we will not discuss this any further. Zero for conduct, and this will cost you a Saturday in school.”

My heart sank; I had come to like my lonely pastrami weekends and I did not want Béatrice skulking about. But she seemed unconcerned; she tossed her frizzy blonde mane and said darkly,
“Nous verrons!”
Béatrice ALWAYS went home on weekends.

By Friday I had forgotten Madame Cartet’s threat and after the school emptied out I was startled to hear someone crying downstairs. I followed the sound and found Béatrice facedown on her bed. “
Va t’en!
” she said fiercely. I turned and raced back to the third floor.

I slammed the door behind me, took
The World of Suzie Wong
out of the laundry bag in which I had hidden it, and unearthed some cream puffs from beneath the bed. They were a week old, but I didn’t mind. I was groping for the last one when Béatrice came in.

“Give me that!” she said grabbing the pastry. Her frizzy blonde hair was wild, her eyes red, her pleated blue uniform crumpled. She stuffed the cream puff into her mouth and ate it in a gulp.

“Did your mother send you these?”

I shook my head.

“Where are they from?” she insisted.

“A pastry shop down the road,” I said.

“Take me,” she commanded.

“Now?” I asked. “It’s almost dark. They’ll be furious if we leave at night.”

Béatrice shrugged. “What are they doing to do about it?” she asked. “Call our parents? The Petit will be too scared to let them know she’s lost us. She’ll just wring her hands and look pitiful. Let’s go!”

It was the longest conversation I had ever had in French and I would have taken Béatrice anywhere just to keep her talking. The streetlights came on as we walked down the snowy boulevard, and I told Béatrice about smoked meat sandwiches and the English movie theater. “We’ll go tomorrow,” she said confidently. I didn’t argue.

“I’m so glad you have someone to play with,” said Mademoiselle Petit at breakfast the next morning.

“She sounds like we’re going to run outside and jump rope,” whispered Béatrice. “How much money do you have?”

I was too grateful for her company to ask why we were spending
my
money, but it was enough to eat all day. We started at the deli. I translated. “She’s never had smoked meat before,” I confided to my friend behind the counter.

“Never?” he asked, horrified. His knife flashed as he piled the meat on extra thick. Béatrice shook her head. “Nevaire,” she said in a thick French accent.

“Does she eat as much as you do?” he asked. She did.

Afterward we went next door to the pastry shop, and then down the street to a small Chinese restaurant. Béatrice had never had Chinese food either and I inducted her into the joys of egg rolls, fried rice, and chop suey.
“C’est superbe!”
she cried. “What other strange foods do you know about?”

A girl who had never had an egg roll, I thought, must have been brought up very oddly. I tried to think what other exotica I knew in Montreal, but the only restaurant I’d been to was Moishe’s.

We started walking, happy to be away from the school, happy to be together, not particularly concerned about where we were going or what we would find. In the end we had more smoked meat; every coffee shop in Montreal had its three watery vats of steaming cured beef. We came out, walked a little farther, and bought cones of French fries with malt vinegar. When those ran out we went into a candy store and bought a box of chocolate-covered cherries with stems. After we had polished those off we found a pastry shop. I bought a dozen éclairs; Béatrice, more adventurous, asked for one of everything. “We’ll taste them all and see which is best,” she said. “Then tomorrow we can come back and buy some more.”

I wondered if Béatrice would abandon me when the other girls came back. When they spilled into the school on Sunday night they flashed significant looks in my direction and chorused
“Pauvre toi,”
to Béatrice. But she just looked annoyed and said,
“Pas du tout.”
And then she announced that staying in school was so much fun she intended to do it again the following weekend.

Her parents had other ideas. They wanted her to come home, and when she told them about the poor lonely American at the school they insisted that I come too. And so the following Friday when the other girls left for the station, I was with them.

There were twelve of us on the train to Ottawa; the French ambassador’s daughter, the Haitian ambassador’s girls, and the daughters of lesser people attached to various embassies. We were laughing and calling to each other, making the sort of noise only teenagers can, when a woman at the end of the car turned to her companion and said, “These French …” in a cold, high, disapproving English voice. I froze. I realized that, without even thinking about it, I had actually been speaking their language.

Friendly groups of parents collected their girls with hugs and laughter. There was a chauffeur for us; he touched his hat, said,
“Bonjour, Mesdemoiselles,”
and picked up our luggage. It hit me that I was going to spend the weekend in a millionaire’s house.

The chauffeur took us to a huge gated mansion set in a private park. It was forbidding, but not nearly as forbidding as Béatrice’s mother. Impeccable and elegant, Madame du Croix looked askance at her daughter’s rumpled suit and my frizzy hair. She kissed Béatrice on both cheeks, and shook my hand. But the biggest shock was when Béatrice introduced us. “
Je voudrais vous presenter ma copine Root,”
she said formally. In all the time I knew her, I never once heard her address either of her parents as
tu
.

Béatrice might inhabit the same house as her parents, but they hardly seemed to breathe the same air. They lived in a separate and grown-up world two floors below the children’s quarters. The only time the two worlds intersected was at the table.

“Vôtre père est au travail,”
said Madame du Croix at breakfast. She bent her head and said grace. Then a maid in a black dress, white apron, and frilly cap brought out pitchers of coffee and hot milk. While Madame poured café au lait the maid buttered baguettes and offered fresh tartines. Then she walked around the
table with sparkling bowls of homemade jam. Meanwhile Madame interrogated Béatrice about her week at school. I ached for the meal to be over.

We spent the morning in the yard, forgetting that we were too dignified to play tag and dig in the dirt. It was only when Béatrice said we had to change for lunch that I started to worry about what was coming. I watched her wash her face and hands, clean her fingernails, fuss with her hair. Then she put on a plain white blouse and a pleated blue skirt that looked a lot like our school uniforms. I put on my red corduroy dress and swatted ferociously at the frizz on top of my head. It was hopeless.

Monsieur du Croix sat at the head of the long table. “Papa!” said Béatrice happily. He got up to kiss her and I saw how short he was. Still, with his snowy white hair and sapphire blue eyes he was an imposing figure.

“Asseyez-vous,”
he commanded, picking up a ladle by his plate and dipping it into a terrine of soup. A butler stood before him holding out a bowl, and he slowly splashed it full of a thick orange liquid. Then the butler walked solemnly around the table, distributing bowls by age and rank. The soup was fragrant and steamed invitingly. I sat, tantalized, waiting for Madame du Croix to lift her spoon.

Finally she did. I dipped my own into the thick liquid and brought it to my mouth. With the first sip I knew that I had never really eaten before. The initial taste was pure carrot, followed by cream, butter, a bit of nutmeg. Then I swallowed and my whole mouth and throat filled with the echo of a rich chicken stock. I took another bite and it began all over again. I ate as if in a dream.

The butler set a roast before Béatrice’s father, while the maid removed our empty bowls. Slowly the roast was carved and then the butler moved majestically around the table serving the meat.

It was just a filet of beef. But I had never tasted anything like this sauce, a mixture of red wine, marrow, butter, herbs, and
mushrooms. It was like autumn distilled in a spoon. A shiver went down my back. “This sauce!” I exclaimed involuntarily. The sound echoed through the polite conversation at the table and I put my hand to my mouth. Monsieur du Croix laughed.

“Your friend likes to eat,” he said to Béatrice. He seemed pleased. He held up one of the pommes soufflés that the butler had set on his plate and said, “You will like these, I think.” He told the butler to serve me immediately, out of order.

“Taste!” he commanded. I put the puff of potato in my mouth; it was a magic potato chip, a crisp mouthful of hot air, salt, and flavor. My face must have betrayed me, because Monsieur smiled again. “Incredible, no?” he asked.

“Incredible, yes!” I said.

Monsieur du Croix turned to his wife. “This child likes to eat!” he said for the second time. She gave him a thin, mirthless smile. He winked at me. “You will like dessert, I think,” he said. “A whole wheel of Brie has just arrived from the Île de France. Have you ever tasted a real French Brie?”

I had not. He cut me a large wedge that drooped appealingly across the knife and set it on a plate. He surrounded it with a few grapes (“From Sicily,” he murmured, almost to himself, “not these sad, sour Canadian fruits,”) and told the butler to bring it to me. “Eat it with your fork,” Monsieur commanded, “It would be wasted on bread.”

I dutifully cut a piece, carefully removing the rind the way I had always seen it done. “No, no, no,” said Monsieur du Croix angrily. I jumped. “Eat the skin,” he said. “It is part of the experience. Do you think the cheesemaker aged this ten weeks just to have you throw away half of his effort?”

“Bien sûr,”
I said meekly, scooping up the rind. I felt Monsieur du Croix watching as I ate the strong, slippery cheese. It was so powerful I felt the tips of my ears go pink. The nape of my neck
prickled. I closed my eyes. When I opened them Monsieur du Croix was watching me the way a teacher watches a particularly apt pupil. After two months of Madame Cartet it felt very good.

When we came down to dinner that night the table was again set for four. Béatrice looked startled. Her parents came in and she turned to her mother and asked,
“Vous mangez avec nous ce soir?”

“Monsieur désire dîner avec les enfants,”
said Madame, using the formal term for her husband and making it clear that dining with us was not
her
desire.

Her husband came in rubbing his hands gleefully. “Tonight,” he said, “we have a really extraordinary dinner.” He turned to me. “Have you the experience of foie gras?”

I had not. His eyes crinkled happily as the butler served each of us a plate holding a thick pink square and a smattering of what looked like small, sparkling topazes. The maid followed behind him, offering toast. I had never seen anything like this, but I watched Béatrice carefully and copied everything she did. She picked up her knife and cut a piece off the square. She placed it on the toast, added a couple of the jewels, and took a bite. I did the same and my mouth was flooded with so many sensations I could hardly take them all in at the same time. As the luxurious softness of the liver overwhelmed me I felt my eyes start to tear. I swallowed, speechless, to find Monsieur du Croix watching me with undisguised delight.

“C’est bon, oui?”
he asked. I nodded.

The butler appeared with an entire sole on a platter. “The real thing,” said Monsieur, as the butler began to bone the large, flat fish. “You will see how simple and delicious this is.”

It was not like any fish I had ever tasted. “If all fish were like this,” I said, “I would like fish.” Monsieur laughed. Madame
looked more sour than before, and I wondered what had made her so unhappy. Then the next course arrived and I stopped thinking altogether.

“What is it?” I asked, looking at what appeared to be a giant Venetian paperweight on a platter. It glistened and gleamed, a dome made entirely of vegetables.

“A chartreuse of partridge,” said Monsieur du Croix. “Very few people make it correctly, but our chef is a master.”

“It is so pretty it would be a shame to eat it,” I said, hoping he would not destroy that beautiful still life of carrots, peas, and beans.

“And a crime not to,” said Monsieur du Croix firmly sticking a knife into the dome. “Food is meant to be eaten.”

After the chartreuse there was a simple green salad. “We have a greenhouse just for the lettuces,” said Monsieur as he mixed it. “And we bring the olive oil and vinegar from France. The meat is very good here, but the olive oil is inedible.” He handed the butler a plate of salad to take to his wife.