Charlotte au Chocolat (14 page)

“Fake,” she said. “Thought so.”

After we left, I tried to picture the farmhouse, what it had been like when I was a little girl. I remembered the rickety swing set and the rose and blue wax drizzled on the dining-room table, the pink tin tray my mother had served me poached eggs on when I was sick. I remembered, suddenly, the pink-and-green Shetland sweater she used to wear underneath her aprons every day.

But I remembered also my father's darkroom, and how, getting home from the Pudding, he would disappear into its private, silvery depths. I remembered the stench of the photo chemicals floating out of that darkroom, and how they tinged with something bitter and metallic the more tender smells I associated with the yellow kitchen: those of bubbling chocolate and cinnamon, brioche and bacon.

In the end, my brother and I will inherit boxes of my father's photographs—one box labeled in my father's elegant hand
Benjamin
and the other
Charlotte
. I will brush the dust off the lid; open the box. In it, I will find some of the oldest of my father's photographs, most of them taken at Dudley Road and showing one unifying obsession—brooms. Brooms, enrobed, held captive in gelatin molds of translucent silver light. Brooms printed not only on rice paper but on the backs of chewing-gum wrappers and on the papers of packages of Camel cigarettes. Brooms tickling the floor, brooms afloat in the air. Brooms dipped in silver leaf, brooms without silver leaf. Brooms, brooms, brooms.

Are they all that remain, these lonesome brooms, of my father's hours in that darkroom; of Dudley Road itself; of our childhoods?

Now, back in the car, I looked at my mother sitting next to me in the driver's seat, the violet frames of her sunglasses casting shadows on her face at the voluptuous end of a summer's afternoon.

And then she said, “I forgot, we never went to the pond.”

A pond, down the road from the farmhouse, came back to me. We had walked there in the winter, my mother and Benjamin and I, after the cups of cocoa that were always so delicious and made velvety with heavy cream.

“I tried to teach you to ice-skate once, remember?”

The pond blurred to blue and white. It might have been any pond, anywhere. I remembered so many different things, but I did not remember ice skates.

“I
guess
.”

We drove on, the farm stands and the country roads receding from view.

I
have just remembered what I had forgotten: that the first time I went back to Dudley Road was not in the company of my mother but my father. He drove me out there one day. I think it must have been a Sunday; I think,
I imagine,
it must have been the month of May. I could only have been seven or eight years old at the time. We walked and walked, my father and I, deep into the thickening woods. My father had with him a fragile straw basket. He was prowling the crannies of the woods for mushrooms, trumpets of death. But instead of mushrooms we found a lady's slipper. Just one, that day, ravished at the husk of a great big tree. Pink and wet, dangerous and endangered, unlike the more modest, less troubling British flowers that used to be in my mother's garden, unlike any flower I had ever seen.

Lady's slippers were then thought to be extinct, and in Massachusetts in those days it was illegal to pick them. My father, whose mind was encyclopedic, knew this; my father knew everything.

But, “Oh, the hell with that, Char,” he said, and now, now I can think back through the years and picture my father's body, shrouded in black, bent at the pink wings of the lady's slipper, lifting her sleepy green stem out of the earth, handing her to me, a beautiful, poisoned apple.

My father had long, deft fingers, an artist's hands; she would not have suffered.

I took the lady's slipper back to my father's studio that day. Then I took her home with me and she was mine until she died.

Twelve

ON LEMON ICE

I
don't know why I hired him,” my mother said. “It must have been the tattoo.”

Gus was our latest head chef. He was six feet five, and my mother said he was as wide as the cold room. Beneath his shaved head, a tattoo was printed on the nape of his neck.
CAN'T STOP WON'T STOP
it read in thick black letters.

“It seemed like a good idea at the time,” she said. “With a message like that tattooed on his flesh, I didn't think he'd dare take any sick days.”

By the time Gus worked at the Pudding, I spent hardly any time in the kitchen anymore. I only stepped through the black-painted double doors to grab a brownie the kitchen had set out for staff lunch or, more often, to thank the chefs for dinner at the end of the night. In my gold lamé slippers and pert pink cocktail dresses, I would peer over the metal shelf at the chefs behind the line, in their blood-spotted whites and dank, dripping bandannas. Chefs still wore bandannas then, when I was in my teens, although I cannot recall if they still smoked behind the line, or if the ban on smoking in restaurants had already happened.

Before he had arrived at the Pudding, it was rumored that Gus had spent some time in a New York state prison. My mother assumed the charges had involved drugs, or gangs, or both; in any case, he could do wonders with red snapper, and she said he was the most talented head chef we had employed since my father had left the restaurant, and us, years ago. Gus was the one who started calling my mother “Patton in Pumps,” because she had no illusions about life behind the line: it was a battle, and you had to lead your troops.

The rest of the Pudding mystified him. He called the waiters “Tinkerbells,” as in “Flounce back to your table, Tinkerbell, and tell the poor suckers
everything
has salt.” Once, watching the Krokodiloes perform one of their fifties doo-wop numbers during Sunday brunch, he said, “Man, they really take the rock
out
of rock and roll.” He despised above all the Hasty Pudding Club members, who mixed martinis with a deathly seriousness over the pool table in the first-floor Members' Lounge and had first names like Chip and Grayson and Bridge. “Love to run into one of
them
in a jail cell,” he said.

I liked Gus as I had liked few of the recent chefs; he reminded me of the fringy, dissolute, yet somehow endearing kitchen personalities of my childhood. “Hey, Shorty,” he asked me, “what's your deal, anyway? Did you get beat up a lot on the playground? Did fags used to pack sprigs of parsley in your lunch box?” Sometimes when he passed my table, he glanced at my plate and said, “Foie gras. Foie gras on a fucking school night.” But he approved of my pink wardrobe, and one time he tried on my pink rain slicker with the rhinestone buttons; it fit him more like a bolero. He wore it out on the streets of Harvard Square. “This isn't campy, Shorty, you know that,” he told me. “It's just that this is one cool look.”

My mother had insisted that Gus was “honestly a cream puff,” meaning that under the tough exterior he was very tenderhearted. He talked to himself behind the line; once I heard him say, as he pounded Parmesan bread crumbs onto a lamb chop, “Tonight I'm either going to get into a fight or get laid. I'm not very good at either.” He also scanned the menu for typos, exclaiming, “
Fennel
with one
n
, can you believe this shit?” His cuisine struck me as delicate, for the Pudding, which had always been known for its delicious but none-too-daring gentleman's club cuisine, the richer, the better. Gus's dishes included dabs of steak tartare placed on top of thinly peeled cucumbers and studded with quail eggs; poached sea bass on top of a scoop of asparagus puree; potatoes mousseline whipped so smooth you could not detect even the flecks of pepper.

Whether Gus had cleaned up from the drugs we never knew, but he was an alcoholic. When he was sober, he tried to drink grenadine straight from the bottle, as I had underneath the bar when I was a little girl, because he thought that all the sugar would reduce his cravings. “No way will I put this in a glass,” he told the bartenders. “Then you'd deck it out with cherries and shit, like one of Shorty's drinks over there, and I'd think you had funny ideas about me.” But the staff teased him about the deep pink bottles that said
ROSE'S GRENADINE
in swirly letters, and so he emptied beer bottles and filled them with the grenadine instead. Everyone suspected he guzzled the beer himself, in the bathroom. He left the bottles on the butcher block, and sometimes during the eight o'clock rush a cook tipped one of them over and then the pink liquid would ooze onto the wood.

But after a three-day bender one weekend, during which no one could find him, my mother fired her latest and most gifted head chef.

“It was the timing, Gus,” she told him. “No head chef ever bails on a Saturday night.”

After that, Gus came back to the restaurant sometimes to visit my mother, but only when he was sober. He sat down across from her at A-1, slinging his leather jacket over the gilded back of the chair. “Please stay for lunch,” she said every time. “We'd love, love, love to have you.” The front of the house had to settle for staff lunch and I had to order off the menu, but chefs and former chefs got special samples: thumb-sized dabs of pâté; a new entree, duck breast with fingerling potatoes and artichokes, not yet on the menu; chocolate éclairs whipped up that morning in the pastry station, just for the fun of it. “You're the real talent, Gus,” my mother said at the end of the meal, smacking one of her Coco Pink kisses on his cheek.

After a while, Gus didn't stop by for lunch anymore; he didn't even come back for the staff Christmas parties in the Club Bar. And it seems to me now that Gus was the last truly colorful figure who worked in the kitchen. It was right around the time he worked at the Pudding that the entire restaurant business at large began to change. Fashionable restaurants with aggressive haute cuisine were springing up in Boston, formerly a baked-beans-and-cod town. Chefs were just starting to get their own television shows, a development that would have been laughable in my childhood, when the chefs I knew were hardly fit to be seen in public, let alone on television. Surveying the new generation of more career-oriented chefs, my mother said, “What a pity. It used to be that one went into the restaurant business to get away from all of the people who wanted to be doctors and lawyers. Now, who knew? All of the people who used to become doctors and lawyers now want to be chefs! It's spoiling the business, if you ask me.”

E
very spring, my mother gave a special dinner for our investors. The dinners had a reliable rhythm to them, coming to Cambridge once a year like the Head of the Charles and being conducted with some of the same stately seriousness. The menu never varied that much, and, adding to the collegiate flavor of the evening, since so many of our investors were Harvard men, the dinners were held not upstairs in the dining room but downstairs in the Club Bar.

After the entree had been served, a comfortable hush settled over the room. The investors' bellies, bloated from my mother's fava-bean soup with roasted pecans and crème fraîche, strained the fabric of their tuxedos. The wives fared better at the end of these meals, having opted for poached salmon instead of veal chops. The private-party staff cleared away the main courses, and now the men waited—sleeves rolled up and heirloom cuff links tossed on bread plates—for cups of coffee. They gestured to the waiters to fill their wineglasses so they could give toasts.

We depended on the investors. They had helped to start the restaurant, and they helped to keep it in business. We owed them VIP tables, air kisses, and elaborate desserts. We slipped off the barstools to make room for them, remembered how much horseradish they liked in their Bloody Marys, and patted their arms and assured them that they would
love
the escargots appetizer, if only they would try it.

“I want to tell you,” our head investor said now, “none of this wonderful night would have been possible without two women, yes, two wonderful women . . .”

He paused. Mary-Catherine was there, waiting, but my mother had not yet appeared. Everyone applauded, but my mother did not appear. Then, as the applause petered out, one of the investors raised his wineglass to me, and the burgundy dregs plopped on his matching bow tie. “Charlotte,” he said, “Charlotte, why don't you stand up for us? Come on, represent your mother.”

The applause mounted again as I stood up from my seat. “Thank you,” I said. “Thank you all for coming.”

“What did I tell you? She's every bit as pretty as her mother.”

Then the waiters served the dessert: Sicilian lemon pound cake on a bed of lemon ice. Propped on top of each slice were marzipan party hats sprinkled with pink dots, and a lit candle stuck out of each party hat. My mother had hand-squeezed the lemons for the ices, beat the batter for the pound cakes, and hand-molded the party hats. She had been at the restaurant since three o'clock in the morning. Now she was hiding—I suspected—in the rickety, urine-sprayed stall in the kitchen, trying to avoid the toasts. For all that she was such a flamboyant personality, she hated the formality of these evenings; she hated having any kind of tribute paid to her. It was, in part, a question of “front room vs. kitchen.” The kitchen was where she belonged.

“I hope I don't get caught,” I could hear her saying to the staff. “I always get caught.”

In any event, it was a beautiful dessert. Sicilian lemon pound cake had been on the menu when I was a little girl, and I had missed it. Then I looked around the Club Bar at other people's plates: the cakes had already crumbled, the party hats had split in half, and the candles floated in the yellow puddles. I wished that the party hat were a real party hat. I wished it were made out of paper and sequins instead of marzipan and pink food dye. Then I would slip it in my pink beaded clutch, like I did other keepsakes: menus, dance cards, roses.

Already I was collecting a trail of bread crumbs that might lead me, one day, back to the Pudding once it was gone. But it was hard to do this. The art of fine dining is a cruelly ephemeral one. What perishes faster than the labors of the kitchen?

She had tough hands, my mother. Tough enough to withstand labors of the kitchen. In the course of a single day, her hands lifted copper pots, cracked walnut shells, and hollowed out chicken guts. But that was in the kitchen. At home, preparing to go back to the restaurant to hold court in the dining room at night, these same hands dabbed Joy perfume on her temples, behind the wisps of blond hair that were, in marked contrast to her calloused hands, as angelically fine as a baby's.

But right around this time, the time of this investor dinner, something had started happening to my mother's hands—something rather ominous. She was shedding her nails. They snapped, like asparagus tips, one by one. “I've used my hands,” she said. “That's why.” And then, in wonderment, she would survey the cracked tips, the swollen knuckles, in front of her, as if to ask where had all those years of hard work gone, and what did she have to show for them.

T
he years when I was a teenager—the mid- to late nineties—happened to coincide with the most vibrant years of business at the Pudding, when the massive dining room was full of customers on any given night. Reservations for holiday dinners, with special menus featuring all of the most decadent ingredients, sold out long in advance. Come the first promise of warm weather, sometime after the ice on the Charles had thawed but before the lilacs were out, my mother started planting her window boxes on the herb-garden terrace. For Easter brunch, there would be hyacinths, pink and white as well as the more famous purple. By Harvard graduation, when the Pudding regularly did four hundred–plus customers, there would be roses—pink, salmon, golden, cream, but never red, for my mother had an aversion to flowers in that brassy, boastful color. She favored the gentle palette and loose, feminine profusion of an English garden, and it was there, in such a setting cradled high above the streets of Harvard Square, where customers dined in large numbers. For a certain era in Cambridge, that terrace was
the
place to be.

Of course, by the nineties the Pudding was no longer the only glamorous dining destination in the Square, and Boston at large was beginning to produce its first batch of “celebrity” chefs. One of these, it was rumored, made his employees address him as “Oui, Chef,” even though, my mother was quick to point out, he came from New Jersey. It looked like the restaurant business was turning into the kind of operation where fame could be found and fortunes made. But then at that time, people were making fortunes all over the place and in all different fields. No doubt this allowed them to splurge on meals at restaurants like the Pudding, boosting our business. But this culture of fast fortunes—easy business opportunities—didn't always change things for the better.

Harvard Square when I was a child had its share of lovable dumps: Elsie's and its pastrami sandwiches, Bailey's and its butterscotch sundaes, and, most famously, The Tasty, which was a neighborhood favorite not so much for food as for the scruffy camaraderie at its dinky yellow linoleum counter. It was at that counter that Harvard professors might mingle with homeless people over fried-egg sandwiches, or maybe a plate of french fries.

The year I was sixteen, Cambridge Savings Bank, which was the landlord of both The Tasty and the old-time German restaurant the Wursthaus, realized that they could make much more money renting space to chain stores. After a series of fruitless protests from the community, they replaced those two institutions with an Abercrombie & Fitch and a Pacific Sunwear. And so, here in Harvard Square, land of the life of the mind, sprang up enormous soft-porn billboards of ripped young men hawking preripped Abercrombie jeans. Hawaiian shirts and California-dreaming sundresses gleamed out of the windows of what had once been the Wursthaus, where Nabokov in his letters wrote of meeting Edmund Wilson for lunch in the fifties.