Charlotte au Chocolat (10 page)

There was no hostess at the top of the stairs, and when I opened the door to the dining room and saw the rows and rows of full tables, I remembered that everyone in the restaurant business hated Easter, as they hated most holidays. Everyone already hated brunch, and this was brunch with old people and children. Looking around the dining room, I saw only families: blue-haired grandmothers peering at the menu through thick glasses, grandfathers in navy blazers with gold buttons, mothers and fathers sitting next to each other and sharing menus, little boys in wool shorts that buttoned on the side. I also saw other little girls whose dresses, I was certain, were not as stylish as mine.

These children, I noticed, had a hard time sitting still at the table with the grown-ups. They spit out maraschino cherries onto their bread plates and tapped their feet against the carpet while the adults read the menu to them and buttered their scones. Then a group of children scuttled past me, giggling and sprinkling jelly beans onto the carpet. I moved out of their way, like I moved out of the waiters' way during the eight o'clock crunch on Saturday nights, and the children glanced at me as if I were just another object in the dining room: a champagne bucket or a vase.

At the four-top next to me, the mother was talking to the waiter and pointing to the plate of pasta in front of her child. The pasta was all white, except for some cheese grated on top. We did not offer plain pasta on the menu.

“It's just Parmesan,” I heard the waiter say. “I think the chefs just add it out of habit—”

“I'm sorry. It's just, she'll only eat plain noodles.”

“I'll get you another plate, then.”

Then another waiter darted past me, receipts in hand. “Separate checks,” I heard him say. “They
would
ask for separate checks.” He paused when he saw me. “Hey,” he said, “do you know if your mother is coming back in today?”

“She's not home,” I said. “She's in the kitchen.”

“No, she left just a little—” He squinted at the numbers printed out on one of the receipts. “Honestly, she was here all night. Hand-molding all these stupid dark-chocolate bunnies.”

I had wanted one of the dark-chocolate bunnies for dessert. Then I pictured my mother's apron, sooty with Valrhona, tangled at the foot of her bed. She would be running the tub now. She would want to be alone. I could hear her voice: “Charlotte, I am
not
the Entertainment Committee.”

I followed the waiter into the office, where he swiped credit cards through the machine. “Pretty dress,” he said finally. “Are you going somewhere or something? The dining room's full today.”

He whizzed out of the office. I sank into a chair and picked up the phone; maybe my father was home. I dialed the number and hoped he would answer. Sometimes he didn't answer—sometimes he paced the creaking floors of his studio for days and days, mixing chemicals and snapping close-ups of a favorite object until he ran out of film.

“Hello,” he said. His voice, as always, wheezed, and was followed by a cough. Recently, people had begun saying to me, “Charlotte! Your father's voice.” What they meant was that he should stop smoking, though I knew he never would.

“It's me,” I said. “I thought maybe we could get together today, if you aren't busy.”

“Oh, sure, Char,” he said. “You at the restaurant?”

“Yeah, it's Easter brunch, and there are all these families in the dining room. No place to sit down.”

“Oh, Christ, holidays in the restaurant business! I'm so glad I don't have to work them anymore. Though is there lamb on the menu, for Easter? I do make a hell of a rack of lamb. Well, anyway. I'll go and get you, Char.”

My father showed up, and he took me and my party dress to lunch at The Tasty. Always one of his favorites, it was where he used to go late at night, after he locked up the Pudding.

We sat down at the counter. My father ordered a fried-egg sandwich and a Coke; I ordered pumpernickel toast and a glass of ice water. The toast was prebuttered and came with tiny packages of grape jelly. It struck me as exotic and delightful, the way that package after package of those tiny grape jellies were all identical. So different from the food at the Pudding, which was so subject to the individual hand of the chef behind the line that night; and my father's hand, everybody still said, had been the lightest and most deft of all. “Your father . . . ,” my mother would say, recalling a dish of his. And then she would sigh.

Maybe he noticed me staring at the package of grape jelly, because he said, “You know, Fiona”—naming a friend of his whom I thought very glamorous, a white-skinned, flame-haired, lapsed Irish Catholic, a fellow artist and chain-smoker with a penchant for fishnet stockings and flasks of whiskey—“loves airplane food, did she ever tell you that? She says it's so exciting, the way you have to unwrap all those little mystery packages. She says it's like opening jewelry!”

“That sounds just like Fiona,” I said. The last time I had seen her, at an open studio of my father's, she had regaled me with the tale of having to leave the Catholic Church as soon as she hit puberty, for sex, she could tell, was going to be her great temptation. I was fascinated by her silver lipstick, rather corpselike, I thought, and in keeping with the haunted feeling of my father's photographs.

“Doesn't it, though?” said my father, and he laughed. Fiona was exactly the kind of “character” he liked to keep around. “Hey, think I'll get another sandwich. And more coffee. Rainy days are so great for sitting around and drinking bad diner coffee. There's a certain kind of day where
bad
coffee actually hits the spot more than
good
coffee, you know?”

When the sandwich arrived, he bit into it and said, “These are some damn good sandwiches. Better than anything we ever served at the Pudding, if you ask me.”

And so we sat there, safe inside The Tasty, as outside the rain crashed down.

W
ith my father, there was never any shortage of food opportunities, and sometimes on Friday nights we went to Savenor's together. He would pick me up at our apartment building and we would go across the street to get cold cuts. Jack Savenor, the owner, had taught both my parents how to butcher in their Peasant Stock days, and he never complained when the Pudding had overdue bills. When we went into the store, he gave us samples from the back: artichoke petals scattered in olive oil, clumps of Boursin in brown paper napkins, and, when it was available, freshly cut slices of smoked pheasant, because my father had told him that was my favorite. My favorite appetizer of my father's, back when he was still the chef at the Pudding, was smoked pheasant and Roquefort flan.

“Thank you, Mr. Savenor,” I said, standing at the foot of the glass counter. The blackboard loomed above me. It said, in orange chalk:
OSTRICH. TURTLE. BOAR.

“This daughter of yours is too damn polite,” he said to my father, wiping a film of spit off his chin. “Tell her to call me Jack already.”

Jack,
I feared, was too friendly. I didn't want to give him the wrong idea. When we ran into him on the street, he squeezed my mother's waist and kissed her smack on the mouth. She laughed and kissed him back, but what if he kissed
me
? He was very old and very red—was it the flush on his face or the blood? Blood was everywhere: it seeped through his white coat and smeared his thick fingertips. He liked to tell my father filthy stories, like the one about the time when he was butchering skirt steak and the knife had slipped and, he claimed, pierced his testicles.

“Cock and balls,” he said. “Now you just picture
that
. Made prime rib juices look like lemon vinaigrette, you following me?”

Mrs. Savenor, his mother, was even older. She was also immense. Before she had immigrated to America and opened the store, she used to smuggle cigarettes over the Russian border, and she had kept her business know-how to this day. She glowered behind the cash register, scooping smoked herring out of a jar and talking to customers as the fishy juices trickled down her chin so they would panic and leave their change on the counter. It was rumored that she bought a new car every year with the change customers had left behind. Even Jack feared her. My father said that he carried a thousand dollars cash in the pocket of his butcher's coat at all times, because he was convinced she would swindle him out of his wages.

Only customers got swindled. Jack was called “the man with the golden thumb,” because he always put his finger on the scale to up the price. Suburban housewives, who had read that Julia Child used Jack as her butcher, flocked to Savenor's to buy meat for their dinner parties. Afterward, when Jack had given them a tour of the back and kissed their hands, “they would pay for bologna as if it were ostrich,” my father said. But we did not get swindled, and sometimes Mrs. Savenor slipped lollipops in strange flavors—cherry cola or piña colada or maple—into our grocery bags.

When we got to my father's studio, we ate dinner at a small wooden table, one of the only pieces of furniture in the whole room. “That Jack Savenor,” my father said, ripping open the tissue paper around our slices of rare roast beef, “is the best goddamn butcher in the world.”

Afterward, we ate root beer floats and watched old movies. We watched
L'Avventura
or
Cries and Whispers
or
Bicycle Thieves
. And when the movie was over and my father went back to his artwork again, squinting with a rapt, hungry expression at a negative drying on a string, I entertained myself by exploring his collection of antique cameras. His most prized possession was a twenty-by-twenty-four-feet Robertson process camera, so big it could fill a small-sized room. I used to hide underneath its black velvet crinkles and folds, letting the weight of the material enfold me.

My father during this period was feverishly artistically productive. In 1990 he had a show at the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard. In his artist's statement he wrote, “I wanted to see what it was like to live inside a painting . . . I painted every day.” In a sense, he succeeded in doing just that: transforming the walls of his studio into a perpetually changing canvas. He loved painting them different colors. Every month, portions of the walls of his studio turned from silver to Chinese red, pitch-black to Prussian blue. That silver, though, was his favorite color. He returned to it again and again. But when I called it “silver,” he insisted on calling it “invisible.”

“There's no such thing as invisible,” I said. And then, anxious to differentiate myself from him, “
My
favorite color is pink.”

“Well, everybody already knows
that
, Char,” my father said, laughing. “I'm not that big on pink, myself.”

“There's no such thing as invisible. Invisible means you can't see it.”

“Oh, yes there is,” said my father. “It's one hell of a color, Char. You ought to see it one of these days.”

My father was friends with the avant-garde composer John Cage, whose theories didn't make much sense to me, either. Sometimes John came to lunch at the studio, where my father was doing a series of portraits of him. All I remember of him was that he was very old and, though my father said he was very famous, not at all fancy. He wore a denim work outfit and spoke few words. We sat at the table eating herrings in cream. The conversation at the table bored me, and I used to get up in the middle of the meal and spin around the studio, a thing I liked to do in those days. That studio was a marvelous open space for spinning. While I spun, I always talked to myself under my breath, making up stories, but neither my father nor John Cage minded: that was the nice thing about them.

W
hen I was eleven years old, Savenor's burned to the ground.

The night of the fire, I awoke smelling smoke from outside my window. It thickened and swirled on our balcony, and when I slid open the door and stepped outside, I saw flames across the street. Trucks thundered down the street, sirens screeched, and customers from the bar next door thronged the sidewalks. I was beginning to cough, and then I spotted a drift of white chiffon that blended with the smoke. My mother had put on a white chiffon cape earlier that evening, when she had left for a cocktail party, and now she was on her way home. She watched, along with the rest of the crowd, as the store where, once upon a time, she and my father had learned to butcher collapsed in flames.

Later that night, I heard my mother's sobs as she peeled off her cocktail dress, but the next morning when I got up to go to school she had already left for work. I packed my cinnamon-raisin bagel in a paper bag and walked outside. So it had not been a nightmare. Across the street where Savenor's had still stood only the night before was a mountain of ashes.

After the fire, the neighborhood changed. New businesses sprang up: a trendy bakery, an upscale catering company, a noodle joint. Now when he picked me up on Friday nights, my father would survey the site where Savenor's had once been and mutter, taking a mournful drag of his cigarette, “I tell you what, Char: I
do
miss that roast beef.”

I missed Savenor's, too. I missed the food opportunities, the pieces of pheasant and Boursin in brown paper towels and piña colada lollipops. I missed the comforting routine of the produce trucks pulling up, same as they did every day on Holyoke Street, across from our apartment building. I even missed Jack Savenor himself, strutting down the street in his blood-soaked coat, though the Savenors, from all accounts, recovered after the fire and opened another store on Beacon Hill.

It seems to me now that the end of Savenor's was also the end of those Friday nights with my father. We still saw each other sometimes; we went other places, ate other food. But there was never the same sense of ritual—the sacredness of sharing food opportunities, father and daughter, together—now that Savenor's was no more.