Back Then (28 page)

Optimistic but dense: “the cookery book made Dora's head ache, and the figures made her cry. They wouldn't add up, she said; so she rubbed them out, and drew little nosegays, and likenesses of me and Jip, all over the tablets.”

“This,” Joe said, unwittingly imitating art “is the produce department. That means fresh fruits and vegetables.” I was determined to learn fast—for both our sakes. “This”—he picked up a green ball with leaves—“is a cabbage. And that,” he said, putting down the cabbage and pointing to a similar green ball, “is a head of lettuce.”

He took my hand and led me past pyramids of raw carrots, beans, peas in the pod, squashes, potatoes, and apples, pears, and oranges to a hip-high case of chunks of raw meat wrapped in clear plastic. He explained the difference between two so-called roasts by saying that you cooked one inside the stove and the other in a pot on top of it. “How do you know which is which?”

“You learn the names and remember them. And if you don't remember, you can always look it up in one of our cookbooks.” As a wedding present we'd been given five cookbooks by a second cousin who had correctly guessed the shallowness of my homemaking skills. The books didn't make my head ache, they merely baffled me.

The lessons continued. Still, I felt as if I had been shoved into a chemistry lab with nothing more than a sixth-grade education, and instructed to create an explosion. Who knew what would melt together, burn to a crisp, or implode? I was fearful, not trusting my instincts—for I had none when it came to the kitchen—or my ability to follow the directions in a cookbook. How many cups in a quart? What does
blanch
mean? What's
tbs
;
sauté
;
parboil
;
fold
? I knew
boil
and
stir
and that was about it. My confidence was hardly bolstered when one of Joe's relatives informed me that, were Joe's mother still alive, “she would not have set foot in your kitchen,” meaning I had broken ancient Jewish law and had defiled my house by preparing meat and dairy products in the same vessel. I asked Joe if he thought his nosy cousin was right. “That's silly,” he said. “Honest to God. That bitch.” She had stung me nevertheless and had started me wondering what it would be like to keep a kosher house and to focus on what is forbidden rather than on what I had now, namely an almost endless number of options. “Why does eating shrimp make you a bad Jew?” I asked my husband, who had been raised in a house where shellfish was considered a toxic substance. Joe said that wasn't the point; the point was not the shrimp but obedience to the law. I could understand this but could not take that final step into belief that following an arbitrary law is any better for you—or for the world beyond the front door—than experimenting your way through life.

It didn't take me long to realize that my mother had not done me any favors by advising me to let someone else do the household chores—“that's what they're being paid for.” My mother was both rich and a feminist, which made it possible for her to act on her principles; she was like one of those 1930s American Communists who, on the Q.T., bought cheap land on Cape Cod or the Vineyard, trusting it to increase a hundredfold in value—which it did. If she hadn't been so well off she would have done the scrubbing and cooking, the scut work, whether or not she believed housework to be demeaning. In my case there
was
no one else—except Joe and Georgia Edwards, the woman who had raised him after his mother and father died. Georgia showed up at 303 East Thirty-seventh Street once a week to do some serious cleaning. She also cooked for us when we had people over for dinner. Her repertoire consisted of three meals, which she wisely alternated. One was shrimp creole, one chicken fricassee, and the third pot roast. When she cooked dinner for us she always brought along a package of hermits, chewy squares of ginger and molasses cookie from Horn & Hardhart.

While most housework involves getting rid of something—dust, grease, cobwebs, stains, spills, odors, smears, footprints and handprints, streaks, scum, wrinkles, sand, cat poop, and general disorder—cooking is the opposite. You've got something palpable—and, if you're lucky, even delicious—when you're done. But instead of treating the act of preparing a meal as a lark, a challenge, I was daunted by the idea of turning a chunk of bloody meat and a couple of carrots into a pot roast that tasted like Georgia's.

For the first three or four years of our marriage I trusted myself with preparing only one meal for company, certain that I would spoil, set on fire, or in some other horrible way render anything else inedible. This was an eye round roast, restuffed baked potatoes, “French-style” frozen beans, and a “bought dessert”—ice cream with some kind of gooey topping. The one time I tried a chocolate soufflé it ended up like a piece of blotting paper at the bottom of the casserole. This set me back another couple of years. Quite handy in the kitchen, Joe spent a lot of time there while I stood by his side.

We ate out about once a week; you could get a good meal for two, along with a glass of wine or beer, for around fifteen dollars. There was a steak house we liked on Third Avenue. It had green sawdust spread over the floor—God only knew what was underneath; the house specialty was mutton chops. The Three Crowns was a Swedish restaurant in the east fifties, with a smorgasbord arrayed on a round table that rotated; you selected your herring, cheese, potatoes, smoked eel, etc., as the dish moved toward you and made a grab for it before it whirled away. If you wanted to see friends in publishing, you went to P. J. Clarke's on Third Avenue; there was always at least one person at the bar whom you knew well enough to go up to and start a conversation. The only thing to order at Clarke's was a medium-rare hamburger. Neither Joe nor I liked the kind of restaurant featured in glossy magazines and the food columns of the
Times
, places like “21,” Le Pavillon, Chambord, the Forum of the Twelve Caesars, pricey expense-account eateries favored also by out-of-towners and rich bachelors. Dinner for two—with wine—at one of these classy restaurants could set you back as much as thirty-five or forty dollars.

“Takeout”—with the exception of Chinese restaurants—had not yet embraced the urban imagination or appetite; you either cooked or ate out. One establishment brought precooked meals to the back doors of the rich, who ordered them over the phone. This was Casserole Kitchen, which delivered an entrée in a steaming earthenware container, picking up the empty next day. Casseroles were a streamlined way of getting your meat, vegetables, and starch in the same pot. In 1956 we bought, for $2.95, a cookbook
entitled
Casserole Cookery Complete,
a revised edition of the original 1941 product. Its format was a ring-bound vertical that you stood up, like an easel, the easier to read and keep smear free. In her introduction, the bestselling book's author, Marian Tracy, urged her readers to drink wine with a meal—“the world looks rosier”—and to buy only fresh herbs. Some of her recipes were startlingly original, although you had to be braver than I was to try them. Others in this category suggest wartime shortages. A random sampling includes: no. 125: Brussel Sprouts and Tongue in Cheese Sauce; no. 126: Creamed Tripe with Onions; no. 117: Kidney, Heart and Liver in Soubise Sauce; no. 167: Sweet Potatoes Stuffed with Birds—quail is recommended.

A.B. on Ninth Avenue, 1957.

The most celebrated food guru was Clementine Paddleford, who wrote for the
New York Herald Tribune,
the only newspaper that rivaled the
Times
in clout, style, and substance. In 1960, Ms. Paddleford published
How America Eats,
a book that had taken her twelve years to research and write. “In New York City,” she wrote, “you eat around the clock.” But not, it turns out, all that variously. Paddleford's journey across and through the United States made her appreciate regional cooking, but as for the city, she focused mainly on oysters, soup, lobster, and cheesecake. She also included Waldorf salad. Invented by a self-promoting maître d', known as “Oscar of the Waldorf,” this salad was a medley of sliced apples, walnuts, mayo, and celery. One of Paddleford's more imaginative recipes tells you how to make Leek and Pig Tail Soup—and begins “wash six pig tails.” Her Crown of Lobsters requires the cook to “parboil lobster for three minutes. Cool. Remove meat and run three times through fine grinder.” What you get when you're finished is a kind of lobster mousse. Not one of Paddleford's recipes calls for garlic, sesame seeds, or cilantro; many of them ask you to include generous amounts of cream.

In
1956 Joe and I lived in an apartment at 242 East Nineteenth Street, on the corner of Second Avenue. All the other buildings on the block between Third and Second, both sides of the street, were the homes of Puerto Rican families. These were mostly brownstones, once lovely, now flaking, their stoops askew. For no reason other than strangeness, I was frightened of my neighbors when we first moved there; later, they seemed friendly if somewhat distant as I walked home from work. On Sunday mornings the street would sparkle with the glass of bottles tossed from windows during the night before in a frenzy of celebration.

Along Second Avenue homeless men lay curled up in doorways trying to generate enough strength to get themselves to Bellevue Hospital in order to sell their blood for a few dollars. A common night sound was the wail of an ambulance siren, not quite loud enough to wake you but which penetrated sleep and burrowed into dreams.

Our building had a doorman and an elevator man who delivered the mail every morning; the place was decently but sparely maintained—no frills. Our apartment consisted of a tiny one-and-a-half-person kitchen open at both ends, and a dining room that gave onto an alley. The middle-aged couple across this alley engaged in nightly afterdinner battles during which they screamed imprecations at each other and threw things. Married less than two years, I couldn't imagine what would bring a man and a woman to the point of such rage. The living room was long and thin and had three tall windows overlooking a skimpy garden, more brown than green. In the back was our bedroom, a bathroom, and an extra room Joe had put dibs on for a study. Pregnant with our first child, I figured that sooner or later he'd have to give it over to the baby.

We furnished the place with some of Joe's things but mainly with new pieces we bought on Saturday afternoons with the help of a painter friend, Alvin Ross, who had somehow wangled a pass to decorators' showrooms—an understuffed, hard-edged couch covered in pink velveteen, several Scandinavian chairs, a round, marble-topped table, objects of functional economy; this was our 1950s rejection of superfluous detail and design.

Even though Joe had been touted as a superhost, as a couple we didn't entertain much. Both basically shy people, I suppose that deep down we were afraid that if we sent out invitations no one would show up. We didn't have an event to trigger the party we decided to give at last, not birthday anniversary, holiday, or promotion. It could have been that our impulse to celebrate arose from a sense that, even if neither of us had pulled off a noticeable success at work, at least we weren't going backward; and also the dim awareness that, after the baby came, our partying life would be reduced to a very small item.

We invited our guests, about two dozen of them—among them my Barnard friend Francine du Plessix, editors Jason and Barbara Epstein,
New Yorker
writer Anthony Bailey—by sending out cards—“After 8.” We hired a bartender, laid out a ham we had baked, some cold cuts and cheeses, and worried that no one would show up. On the day of the party, Jean Stein, a woman about my age with whom I had been producing a series of spoken word records for MGM Records, phoned me. Jean was the daughter of Jules Stein, said to be the most powerful entertainment agent on either coast. Jean knew all her father's stellar clients—movie stars, writers, musicians, publishers—but had retained a curiously girlish manner. When she spoke you had to get right up next to her to hear what she was saying, and she often asked questions that suggested a barrier between her and the facts of life. My alliance with Jean was characterized by her dependence on me—specifically for what she believed to be my vast knowledge of books and literature but which was, in fact, only vast compared with hers. I did most of the editing for selections that were read by Carson McCullers and William Faulkner. The other records in this series had Alec Guinness reading from
Gulliver's Travels
and Ralph Richardson doing some Joseph Conrad. The series was too highbrow to sell well; but it had “class” written all over it.

Jean seemed to be in need of basic sex ed. One day when we were having lunch together she said, “I know it sounds stupid but would you please tell me where babies come out.” Without missing a beat, I said: “They come out the same place they went in.”

Over the phone on the day of the party Jean asked if she could bring a friend with her. Of course, I told her. “Do I know him?”