The Love Season (3 page)

Once you marry me, all this will be yours
. The castle on Seventy-third Street, the house on Nantucket, the servants, a life of grace and ease. Action would accuse Renata of wanting all this, of finding it impossible to refuse—but what Renata had found impossible to refuse was Cade himself. He was the kindest, fairest person she had ever known; he was principled; he did the right thing; he thought of others; he was a leader in the best sense; he was princely, presidential. A real, true good egg. He adored Renata; he loved her so earnestly and had proposed with such old-fashioned good intentions that Renata overlooked the obvious objections: It was too soon. She was too young.

I’m only nineteen years old
, Renata had said when the ring appeared in her drink. She wasn’t sure how she wanted her life to unfold, though she and Action had spent many nights talking about it in the minutes before they drifted off to sleep. Renata wanted to finish college, travel, visit museums, drink coffee, forge friendships, make connections, select a career path, a city (maybe New York but maybe not)—and then, once the person of Renata Knox was sufficiently cultivated, she would consider a husband and children.

Renata felt strangely cheated by Cade’s proposal. She’d had the misfortune to meet the perfect man at eighteen years of age, and they were to be married. As Renata languished in the guest room bed, she felt surprised that no one in the Driscoll family had seen the shame in this. No one said (as Renata had hoped),
You two should wait a few years. Let your love steep, like tea; let it grow stronger
. However, Renata was certain her father would put his foot down and that all the current celebrating would be for naught.

Renata wandered downstairs in her bathrobe. It was not quite nine, but already everyone in the house was awake and showered and fed. Renata found Nicole in the kitchen doing the breakfast dishes and Suzanne Driscoll in her tennis clothes leaning against the marble countertop, telling Nicole everything that needed to get done that day. There were lobsters being delivered, but Nicole would have to run up to the farm for corn and tomatoes and salad greens.

When Suzanne saw Renata, she stopped. “And here comes Little Miss Sleepyhead!” This was said with enormous affection, the same tone of voice, Renata noted, that Suzanne used with the family’s Siamese cat, Mr. Rogers. Renata heard Action’s voice in her head:
There you go, girl. You’re the new pet
.

On their third date, Cade had taken Renata to meet his parents. The Driscolls lived on the ninth floor of a building on Park Avenue—the entire ninth floor. Renata had tried to talk herself out of being intimidated—she was smart, her high school’s valedictorian; she was worthy of anyone, including Cade—and yet she trembled with inadequacy the whole evening. She had knocked over her glass of wine, staining the tablecloth. Suzanne and Joe had laughed musically, as though nothing could be more charming. Renata got the feeling that it didn’t matter who she was or what she was like; if Cade liked her, loved her, married her, the elder Driscolls liked her, loved her, and would overlook her obvious shortcomings. Renata, who had grown up without a mother, had hoped for a real connection with Suzanne; however, her exchanges with the woman were pleasant but artificial, like a bouquet of silk flowers.

“Good morning,” Renata said. She felt a stab of guilt as Nicole peeled off her rubber gloves in order to fetch Renata a cup of coffee. “Where’s Cade?”

“Sailing with his father,” Suzanne said.

Renata’s heart sank. “When will he be back? We were supposed to go to the beach.”

“Well, you know Joe,” Suzanne said, though, of course, Renata didn’t know Joe Driscolls, not really. She did know that if Cade had abandoned her, it would only have been to please his father. “They were out the door at seven. We’re having lunch at the yacht club at noon. The Robinsons are coming at six for cocktails followed by lobsters on the deck. You do like lobster, don’t you?”

“I like lobster,” Renata said.

Suzanne sighed as if her day had hung in the balance. “Oh,
good
.”

“But I won’t be here for dinner.”

Suzanne stared, nonplussed. Was it a bad sign that already Renata enjoyed stymieing her future mother-in-law?

“I’m having dinner with my godmother,” Renata said. “Marguerite Beale.”

“Of course,” Suzanne said. “Marguerite Beale.” She said this in a quasi-patronizing way, as if Marguerite Beale were an imaginary friend Renata had invented. “You’ve spoken to her, then?”

“Last night,” Renata said. “After you and Joe left the restaurant, I called her.”

“And you’re having dinner?”

“That’s right.”

“Are you going out? Or… you’ll eat at her house?”

“Her house.” Renata sipped her coffee.

“Is she cooking?” Suzanne said. “I hate to sound nosy, but I’ve heard…from friends who have friends who live here year-round, that…”

“That what?”

“That she doesn’t cook anymore.”

Renata set down her coffee cup more forcefully than she meant to and tugged at the sash of her robe. There was a way in which the Driscolls family could not get over themselves. They believed, for example, that they held exclusive rights to the island of Nantucket. And yet how many times had Renata mentioned her own family’s history here? Her uncle Porter had been coming since the fifties; he had been Marguerite’s lover for seventeen years. Renata’s mother, Candace, had worked at the Chamber of Commerce; she and Marguerite had been best friends. Renata’s father, Daniel Knox, had owned the Beach Club down the street; he sold it a few months after Candace died, right around the time that Marguerite closed Les Parapluies. Renata herself had been born here and christened here, but the most important fact about Nantucket within the Knox family history was that Candace had died here. Hit by a car, on the road that led to Madequecham Beach. Somehow, Renata felt this gave her the strongest connection to the island; it trumped everyone else. And yet the only tie Renata could claim anymore was Marguerite. Marguerite, her godmother, whom she had been forbidden from seeing her whole life. There had been letters, checks, a distant paper presence. Renata had studied photographs of Marguerite; she had overheard snatches of the old stories. She had only one memory of the woman—a cold day, snow, a grandfather clock, a cup of tea with honey. The tea had burned Renata’s tongue. She cried, and arms wrapped around her. She sat on a soft, flowered couch.

“She’s cooking,” Renata said, though she had no idea if this were true or not, and quite frankly, she didn’t care. Pizza was fine, or peanut butter toast. Renata just wanted to talk.

Suzanne sniffed, smoothed her tennis skirt. Her face was at once unbelieving and envious.

“Well,” she said. “Aren’t you lucky?”

9:14 A.M.

Marguerite smoked the mussels herself. She debearded them and placed them in a smoker that a fellow chef had sent her for Christmas several years ago. She had never used the smoker and remembered thinking when she unwrapped it that she would never use it. But now she had grown old enough to prove herself wrong.

The smoker required a pan of water and wood chips. Marguerite set the contraption up, got it smoking like a wet campfire, and left it on the patio to do its thing. The clock chimed quarter past the hour. Marguerite looked longingly at her sofa, where a collection of Alice Munro stories beckoned to her like a middle-aged siren. Not today. Marguerite checked her list.

Back in the day, Marguerite had worked from lists all the time. She had made daily pilgrimages to Dusty’s fish shop, and to the Herb Farm for produce; the meat had been delivered. She had prepared stocks, roasted peppers, baked bread, cultivated yogurt, rolled out crusts, whipped
up custards, crushed spices. Les Parapluies was unique in that Marguerite had served one four-course menu—starter, salad, entrée, dessert—that changed each day. Porter was driven mad by the simplicity of it.
People want choices
, he’d said.
They want to come in when they’re hungry. You’re telling the customer what they will eat and when they will eat. You can’t run a business that way, Daisy!

Marguerite triaged her list.
Bread
. If she started it now, the dough would have ten hours to rise. She took a jar of yeast from the fridge and found sugar, salt, and flour in the pantry. The acquaintances Marguerite happened across at the A&P never failed to inspect the contents of her shopping cart—she noticed they did this ever so subtly, skimming their eyes over her groceries the way one ran a white glove over a shelf to check for dust. On any given week, they would find cans of corn, packaged soups, occasionally a hunk of expensive French cheese because the texture pleased her, and basic staples: sugar, salt, flour. But nothing fresh, nothing exotic. There was no pleasure in food for Marguerite anymore. She could taste nothing. She ate only to stay alive.

She missed cooking as profoundly as an amputated limb. It felt odd, sinful, to be back at it; it felt like she was breaking some kind of vow.
Only for her
, she thought. And it was just the one meal. Marguerite bumbled around at first; she moved too fast, wanting to do everything at once. She took three stainless-steel bowls from the cabinet; they clanged together like a primitive musical instrument. The bowls were dusty and needed a rinse, but first, Marguerite thought, she would get warm water for the bread (a hundred degrees, as she’d advised in the column she’d written about bread baking for the Calgary paper). There used to be a rhythm to her process, one step at a time.
Slow down
, she thought.
Think about what you’re doing!
She proofed her yeast in the largest of the bowls; then she mixed in sugar, salt, and a cup of flour until she had something the
consistency of pancake batter. She started adding flour, working it in, adding flour, working it in, until a baby-soft batch of dough formed under her hands. Marguerite added more flour—the dough was still sticky—and she kneaded, thinking,
This feels wonderful; this is like medicine, I am happy
. She thought,
I want music
. She pushed the play button of her stereo, leaving behind a white, floury smudge. When she dusted the smudge away in three or four days, would she remember this happiness? It would have evaporated, of course, transmogrified into another emotion, depending on how the dinner party went. What Marguerite was thriving on this second was the energy of anticipation. She had always loved it—the preparation, getting ready, every night a big night because at Les Parapluies the evenings when the numbers were the smallest had been the best evenings, the most eventful. The locals came, and the regulars; there was gossip flying from table to table; everyone drank too much.

Ella Fitzgerald. Marguerite felt like singing along, but even shuttered inside her own house she was too shy—what if her neighbors heard, or the mailman? Now that it was summer, he came at irregular hours. So instead, Marguerite let her hands do the singing. She covered the bread dough with plastic wrap and put it in the sun, she pulled out her blender and added the ingredients for the
pots de crème:
eggs, sugar, half a cup of her morning coffee, heavy cream, and eight ounces of melted Schraffenberger chocolate. What could be easier? The food editor of the Calgary paper had sent Marguerite the chocolate in February as a gift, a thank-you—Marguerite had written this very recipe into her column for Valentine’s Day and reader response had been enthusiastic. (In the recipe, Marguerite had suggested the reader use “the richest, most decadent block of chocolate available in a fifty-mile radius. Do not—and I repeat
—do not
use Nestlé or Hershey’s!”) Marguerite hit the blender’s
puree button and savored the noise of work. She poured the liquid chocolate into ramekins and placed them in the fridge.

Porter had been wrong about the restaurant, wrong about what people would want or wouldn’t want. What people wanted was for a trained chef, a real authority, to show them how to eat. Marguerite built her clientele course by course, meal by meal: the freshest, ripest seasonal ingredients, a delicate balance of rich and creamy, bold and spicy, crunchy, salty, succulent. Everything from scratch. The occasional exception was made: Marguerite’s attorney, Damian Vix, was allergic to shellfish, one of the selectmen could not abide tomatoes or the spines of romaine lettuce. Vegetarian? Pregnancy cravings? Marguerite catered to many more whims than she liked to admit, and after the first few summers the customers trusted her. They stopped asking for their steaks well-done or mayonnaise on the side. They ate what she served: frog legs, rabbit and white bean stew under flaky pastry, quinoa.

Porter had pressed her to add a seating to double her profits.
Six thirty and nine
, he said.
Everybody’s doing it
.

Yes
, said Marguerite.
And when I left high school all the other girls were becoming teachers or nurses. University was for boys; culinary school was for Europeans. I don’t do what other people do. If people want to eat at Les Parapluies, they will come at seven thirty. In return for this inconvenience, they will get their table for the entire night
.

But the profits
, Porter said.

I will not send Francesca out to breathe down somebody’s neck in the name of profits
, Marguerite said.
This restaurant is not about profits
.

What?
Porter said.

We’re in love
, Marguerite had said, nodding at the dining room filled with empty chairs.
Them and me
.

The song came to an end. The clock chimed the hour. Ten o’clock.
Marguerite retreated to the bedroom to phone the A&P and order the meat. A three-pound tenderloin was the smallest available.