Cambridge (11 page)

Needless worry. My mother and Vishwa were lounging on the sofa chatting about Brahms while the ice in their bourbon settled with little chinks. Vishwa had forgotten to put his shoes
back on (my father would get mad). One of my mother’s black sling-backs lay sideways, asleep on the floor, and the other dangled from her toes. The combination of the late, pale spring light and the drift of cigarette smoke made the air alive with dust that outlined sunbeams to create a Blakean atmosphere akin to the print that hung in my bedroom of Adam and Eve perpetually being exiled from Paradise, just like me.

For the moment, though, I was in a kind of paradise. The insertion of the novel (Vishwa) into the routine (dinner) was the recipe for a heavenly evening. My mother had dressed up for it—odd I hadn’t noticed when I first saw her. She wasn’t wearing green at all but burnt-orange shantung with an amber necklace of her mother’s. Also, one of the dark perfumes she specialized in, which were bitter and smelled brown in the way a cello sounds brown.

Vishwa stood up and made an obeisance to Frederika, putting his hands together and bending his head over them as if in prayer. My mother had never provoked such a gesture; for her, only a Westernized half-bow. Frederika, standing with her hand extended in a hearty, we’re-all-equals Swedish attitude, looked perplexed. My mother flipped her shoe back on her heel, dug the other one off the floor, and grabbed hold of my arm.

“Let’s go check on dinner,” she said, and hustled me out.

The coq au vin was simmering at the back of the stove. Someone had set the table (my usual job) already. A pot of water was at a low boil and the two-cup measure full of rice stood waiting nearby. The salad was in its teak bowl, and the asparagus, washed and trimmed of its little horns the way my father liked it, lay in a green fan on the counter. There did not seem to be much to check on.

My mother lifted the lid on the chicken. “Smells okay,” she
said. She peeked into the oven, and a waft of cardamom came out. “That smells okay too,” she said. She stuck a fork on the edge of the oven rack and pulled. Then she percussed the top of the cake a few times. “Not quite,” she announced. “Olives?” she asked me.

I didn’t like olives. “No,” I said.

“Olives,” she decided.

There was a black bowl especially for them, because, as my mother had said when she brought it home, the black of the bowl was nearly the same as the black of the olives, but not quite, and that made it nice. My father liked Kalamata olives only. There was a white bowl, half the size of the black bowl, for the pits. And then the pistachios. “Not the red ones!” my mother cautioned as I groped for the bag in the cabinet beside the refrigerator. “They dye your hands. I don’t know why he got them.” “He” (my father) went every other week to the Armenian stores two miles away in Watertown to get olives and pistachios and the huge flat bread we called Syrian bread, though the Armenians surely considered it Armenian, like the Greeks at the Acropolis restaurant on Massachusetts Avenue who bristled when you asked for Turkish coffee. I thought of how nobody had ever heard of English muffins in England.

Waiting for my mother to set up the hors d’oeuvres tray, I began to compile a list of foreign foods that might be nonsensical in their native countries: French toast, Belgian waffles, Danish pastry. I could ask Frederika about that one. Maybe they called it Swedish pastry in Sweden. It was interesting that, aside from Turkish coffee, all these things were bread-based.

“Do they have French toast in France?” I asked.

My mother squinted at me. “What do you care?” she said.

“They didn’t have English muffins in England, see, so I’m trying to figure it out. If they have French toast, do they call
it French toast or do they just call it toast since they’re already French?”

“I really don’t know,” said my mother. “Here. Take this in.” She put the tray in my hands.

Bang, crunch, bang, clunk
. My father was home.

Open the door and bang it into the table in the hall, crunch the doormat somehow (nobody else in the family ever did this) with the bottom edge of the door while closing it, bang the door shut, drop the briefcase with a clunk: a theme with no variations.

“Yum,” said my father, taking an olive as he passed by me on his way down the hall to the kitchen.

I hesitated at the living room threshold. Suppose Frederika and Vishwa were already hugging? I poked my head in to see.

They were not hugging. Vishwa was sitting upright on the sofa (I was relieved to see that he’d put his shoes on again) and Frederika was sitting in the chair my father called the Cat Chair because it had a hole in the back “for the cat’s tail.” Pinch never sat in it. It didn’t have the squishy, forbidden allure of the sofa. Frederika was perched askew, turned toward Vishwa, her legs crossed high and zigzagged with the red rickrack.

“Olives?” I asked in my best hostess manner.

They were not interested in olives. I put the tray on the coffee table and went back to the kitchen.

My father was leaning against the refrigerator drinking his Scotch and telling about his day. My mother was all over the kitchen, decanting things onto platters and into bowls, beating lemon juice with olive oil, while either listening or pretending to listen to my father.

“And so I invited him for dessert,” my father concluded.

“Okay,” said my mother. “Fine.” She banged the oven door shut to show that it was not fine.

“At around eight,” he said.

My mother nodded. She coaxed the cake onto a cooling rack, pushed my father out of her way with her shoulder, and stuck her head into the refrigerator. “Damn,” she said. “No cream.”

“Shall I go get some?” My father looked forlorn and guilty.

“Too late now,” my mother said.

“I could call Jagdeesh and ask him to bring some.”

My mother cocked her head. “That’s a good idea. Tell him to whip it while he’s at it.”

“Really, Annette,” my father said. “It’s not any more work for you, if he comes. Dinner’s made, after all.”

My mother looked at my father, then at me, and said, “Never mind. Just never mind. Let’s relax and have fun.”

I didn’t think that was likely. My mother had got into a huff of some sort, which meant she would pretend to be cheerful and pleasant to everyone except my father, to whom she would speak—if she spoke—with an icy formality. This drove him around the bend. He’d apologize and apologize, but she could stay frozen far longer than he could stay apologetic, so he’d end up angry. That only prolonged her huff. First he’d mistreated her, now he was mad at her too. They could get stuck like this for days.

I backed out into the hall and stood there for a minute. I didn’t want to be in the kitchen, but I didn’t want to go into the living room either. Grownup mysteries surrounded me. I tiptoed to the front door and opened it. There was Pinch, waiting for someone to let her in. I wanted to pick her up and put my face into her speckly back and smell her fresh, outside fur, but she dashed between my feet and scooted upstairs before I could grab her. Nobody loved me.

I stood looking at the street, wondering what to do. I could go to my room and sulk. I could walk up the hill to the Bigelows’
and have goulash with them. I could get on my bike and ride to—where? England? Gray Gardens East, where I could do some al fresco sulking? It was getting dark and had become chilly, for a spring night. They’d be sorry when I froze to death two blocks away, a pathetic little creature with only my bicycle for a friend.

“Hey,” my mother said, startling me. “Shut the door. The cat will get out.”

“She just came in,” I said.

“Dinner’s ready.” She went into the living room. “Come, come,” she said in her icily cheerful, completely phony voice.

My father’s technique for getting to know someone was to conduct an intensive interview. Birthplace, secondary education, undergraduate major, mentors in graduate school, first job: grill, grill, grill. The answers established qualifications, the manner of response established character. Vishwa was an uncooperative subject.

“You are how many years younger than Jagdeesh?”

“Many,” Vishwa said.

“How many?”

“Twelve.”

“And you were brought up in Calcutta?”

“No, no, no,” said Vishwa.

My father waited.

“A child died in between,” said Vishwa. “Most tragic.”

My father wasn’t asking about family tragedy. “You were brought up—where?” he said, his tone suggesting that Vishwa had said where, but that my father hadn’t quite heard him.

“In the country.” Vishwa waved his hand at the hinterlands of India.

My mother pushed the tureen of coq au vin toward Frederika and motioned her to pass it to Vishwa.

“I still have plenty, thank you,” he said.

“More sauce, maybe,” my mother said.

“Where in the country? You went to a country school?” my father asked.

“Well, yes, in a manner of speaking.”

“And why did your father decide to send you to a country school?”

“It might have been your mother who decided,” my mother said to Vishwa. “Right?”

“Shantiniketan,” Vishwa said.

“Excuse me,” my father said.

“It was Tagore’s school,” said Vishwa. “That’s where I went.”

“Socialist,” said my father. “World peace, wasn’t it?”

“Mmm,” said Vishwa.

“Jagdeesh went there too?” My father seemed put out by the idea that Jagdeesh had gone there without letting him know.

“Only a little while. It didn’t suit him.”

“But it suited you.” This was a statement. Vishwa did not contradict it.

“What a marvelous dinner,” he said to my mother. “Delicious.” He turned toward Frederika, who, like the rest of us, had said barely a word since we’d sat down. “And did you also go to a country school when you were a small girl?”

“No, I was always raised in Stockholm,” she said.

My father was refueling, and the ensuing dinner-silence—knives and forks clicking on plates—gave me a moment to consider the wonderful things Frederika said. “I was always raised in Stockholm” was not hard to understand, but it was not anything an English-speaking person would say either.

My father pushed the chicken bones to one side and got going again. “So, you followed Jagdeesh to Cambridge?”

“It did help that someone was established here already,” said Vishwa. “A beachhead,” he added.

“I meant England,” said my father. He was getting addled. “I meant, did you go to Cambridge like Jagdeesh?”

“Oh, no,” said Vishwa.

If my parents had not been having a fight, my mother would have stopped this inquisition by now. Carl, she would have said, Enough already. Because she wasn’t speaking to him, all she could do was try to get the rest of us to talk to one another. But my father was as persistent as a mosquito.

“So where did you go to university?” he asked.

“I didn’t, exactly,” said Vishwa.

My mother got up from the table in protest. “Vishwa,” she said, heading to the kitchen, “wouldn’t you like some more rice?”

“Yes, I would,” said Vishwa.

“What exactly did you do, then?” asked my father.

“I was in Paris,” Vishwa said, rather dreamily. “In Paris.”

My mother could no longer restrain herself. “At the Conservatory,” she said. She put a nice big spoonful of rice on Vishwa’s plate.

The Paris Conservatory was out of my father’s range of knowledge. “Aha,” he said. He didn’t look happy.

“I am envious of you,” Frederika piped up. “I always want to go to Paris, but not yet.”

Vishwa widened his eyes. “I go twice a year,” he said. “We could meet.”

Frederika ducked her head. My mother smiled, a real smile.

“Why?” my father asked. “Why do you go so often?”

“To visit my teacher. He’s very old now, and he’s failing. He
was my father in the West, so it’s important that I visit him. His wife died two years ago. Very sad. Tragic.” Vishwa bowed his head at the sadness of life, the tragedies. This was the second tragedy in half an hour.

“Of course,” he went on, “there isn’t much I can do. I sit with him, and we talk about the good times. We drink some nice wine. I go to concerts and tell him about it.”

“Oh, Paris,” my mother said. Then she said, “That’s so good of you.”

“He was a father,” Vishwa said. “Now, only a few years later, more of a grandfather.”

“But that’s expensive,” my father pointed out. What he meant was, How can you afford to go to Paris on your income, which is how much, exactly?

“Hah, hah,” said Vishwa.

I didn’t understand why he was laughing. Maybe he flew to Paris by flapping his arms, or maybe he’d harnessed sleep-flying so he could do it when he was awake.

“I hop on the freighter,” he said. “I take my scores. I take books. There’s good food—especially on the Swedish freighter.” He nodded at Frederika. “Nice fresh fish.”

My father scowled. “Where do you get this freighter?”

“Sometimes in New Bedford. Sometimes in Gloucester. Once I had to go to New Jersey.”

My mother liked the idea of the freighter. “How did you find out about it?” she asked.

“In
The New York Times
,” Vishwa said. “The
New York Times
is a marvelous newspaper. Every day it lists what ships are arriving all over the East Coast, and where they are going. Then you go to the dock and ask, May I travel with you? Usually they say yes.”

“For free?” My father was astounded.

“How did you get the idea to do that in the first place?” my mother asked.

“You pay a little,” Vishwa told my father. “Maybe about twenty-five dollars. Or you can work. You can be a waiter for dinner. Once I was a deck cleaner. Waiter is better.”

“But how—” my mother repeated.

“It’s the subcontinental pipeline,” said Vishwa. “We have special information. We need a lot of special information because everything is far away and difficult.”

“You’re saying you can take a freighter from America to India for next to nothing,” my father said.

“You have to have a few months to spare for that trip,” Vishwa said. “To Europe, maybe ten days. Maybe less. Depends if they have to make a stop here first. Like New Jersey.” Vishwa pursed his lips. “I did not like New Jersey.”