Charlotte au Chocolat (16 page)

At the time, though, my mother was dating a man with a caustic sense of humor and a feisty temper. Word of the incident in the parking lot got round to him, and the next time he saw this man in the building, at the foot of the staircase outside the Members' Lounge, he looked him straight in the eye and called him “a miserable little prick.” The man demanded an apology letter. My mother's boyfriend did just that, adding, “And I think I did a damn fine job.” When I asked why, he said that he referenced the encounter at the foot of the stairs as many times as he could, making sure to include the phrase “miserable little prick” a number of times in the letter.

In the end, staff memos went up all over the restaurant. They read:
DO NOT THROW ANYTHING OFF THE FIRE ESCAPE! THIS IS GROUNDS FOR IMMEDIATE DISMISSAL.
Whenever I saw one, I got a faint little chill, a premonition of forces beyond my control, or even, more alarmingly, beyond my mother's.

At the time of the incident with the man in the alley, I didn't feel anger on my mother's behalf. That came later, when I myself was a grown woman. Then, what I felt was fear. I wanted to appease the man from Harvard Real Estate more than I wanted to rescue my mother. As I saw it, the main thing to be rescued in the situation was not a person, but a place: the Pudding, without which, I knew, the pink lights would be extinguished, and the magic erased for everyone.

Fourteen

THE LAST OF THE SHIRLEY TEMPLES

I
left for college in the fall of 1999, and returned home for Thanksgiving break to find everyone at the Pudding in the midst of elaborate preparations for what promised to be the giddiest holiday season ever.
The Boston Globe
wrote of my mother's New Year's menu: “Splendidly dressed up for a Victorian Christmas, the Pudding's dining room is a classic setting for a refined New Year's. Four- and five-course menus will be served amid the soft sounds of the Dan Fox Trio. Each table will be set with a traditional croquembouche, a grand French cream puff dessert, to be devoured with the finale of chocolate fondue. Homemade gold-leafed fortune cookies, gifts, and dancing await guests of the second seating.”

We rang in the year 2000 in the dining room at the Pudding, under the swaying canopy of pink tissue-paper stars. Champagne glasses were raised in toasts, fortune cookies opened, fortunes read aloud. The cream puffs, laced with curlicues of dripping dark chocolate, sat in the middle of the table.

That night, I wore a strapless lilac tulle dress. Later on, I would wear that same dress under very different circumstances.

Meanwhile, against this backdrop of fin de siècle decadence, the Hasty Pudding Club was going to seed. The finances of the Club had never been all that stable since the early eighties, when changing times had forced them to shut the private dining room and rent the third floor space to the restaurant. And more recently, we would later learn, two of its members had been embezzling money from the Club's bank account, using it to finance extravagant shopping excursions, parties, and trips. The students eventually pleaded guilty to larceny in 2002.

When the Club finally declared bankruptcy, it put the restaurant in exactly the powerless position we had always feared. My mother and Mary-Catherine filed a lawsuit against Harvard Real Estate, trying to build a case to extend our lease. Things got contentious. An item appeared in the
Globe
in which someone from Harvard Real Estate criticized us for occasionally bouncing our rent checks and hosting luncheons for the Hasty Pudding members instead of paying our bills.

In October 2000, Harvard Real Estate ended months of discussion by reaching an agreement with the Club: it would pay off their debts in exchange for acquiring the building. It also agreed to take on the cost—then estimated at ten million dollars—of the repairs and rewiring necessary to improve the state of the building.

That November, my mother and Mary-Catherine lost their lawsuit. Harvard and the restaurant reached a compromise in which legal lawsuits would be dropped and the restaurant would serve patrons until Commencement 2001 had passed.

My mother broke the news to me over the phone, when I was home from college, on the morning of Thanksgiving. It was a holiday and, as always in the restaurant business, the show had to go on. They were expecting more than four hundred customers later that day.

“Do you have a second?” she asked.

Being home on break, I had slept late. I was standing in our kitchen rubbing sleep from my eyes when she said, “I wanted to let you know because it's going to be in the paper and I don't want you to find out that way. Are you listening?”

In the background, I heard the usual sounds of chaos that accompanied my mother when she was at the restaurant—the sounds of the kitchen.

“Uh-huh.”

“Cardamom panna cotta!” my mother was saying. “Cardamom panna cotta, Charlotte? Would you believe that's what these new young pastry chefs think people want to eat on Thanksgiving? People want pecan pie! Baked apples! Charlotte au chocolat!” She laughed. “Well, anyway. I just wanted to let you know that things didn't go so well with Harvard. Wouldn't you know? We lost the lease.”

My mother paused, then went on. “We don't have to close right away. Not till June, not till after graduation. June sixteenth—that's a Saturday—that will be the last night of business.” She paused again, and when I didn't say anything, kept talking. “I don't have a lot of time to spend talking about this now—for God's sake, it's Thanksgiving—but promise me something. Promise you won't cry in the dining room tonight, or anything like that. Oh, that reminds me, what are you going to wear tonight? That green velvet with the low back? I loved that one . . . Oh! Gotta go! Expecting four hundred of our nearest and dearest.”

The next morning, I went into the restaurant to help decorate the Christmas tree for the last time. I felt that this was an important ritual for me to take part in. When I entered the dining room, in the white angora sweater and red velveteen skirt I had chosen for the occasion, I saw that my mother, already standing on the ladder, had left her fur-trimmed holiday mules at home. There were already sprigs of holly in her hair.

“It's a good thing you came,” she said. “We've got to get the tree up before lunch. I need all the help I can get.”

Decorating had begun. My mother already had draped her bead collection over several four-tops in the corner. But it was the pile of cardboard boxes marked
Ornaments
in front of the waiters' station that interested me. I had shown up to see and to treasure for the last time our old ornaments, the ones members of the staff had made for the Christmas parties. Come the move in June, I expected no one would remember to keep the ornaments. When I opened the first box, dust wafted onto my white sweater, and I coughed. Inside, wrapped in tissue paper, I saw the pink glass bulbs and dangling hearts my mother had bought in bulk at Saks Fifth Avenue. The next two boxes revealed the same. In the fourth box, my mother had packed more ropes of beads. I found wads of tissue paper and shards of violet glass in the last box, but none of the old ornaments: the expired Neiman Marcus charge card trimmed in red glitter, the model of the Pudding staircase, the silver-painted rib.

“Where are all the other ornaments?” I asked. “The ones from the Christmas parties?”

“Charlotte, I don't know,” she said, staring down at me from the ladder. “They're
somewhere
. Hang this mistletoe, will you?”

I stood there, biting my nails.

“Listen,” she said, “what does it matter? We still have all our Christmas ornaments at home.”

We had not used our Christmas ornaments at home since we had lost the farmhouse. That was thirteen years ago now. What did
those
ornaments matter?

While my mother was in a flurry of activity decorating the tree, I walked out of the dining room and lay down on the sofa on the second-floor landing, where I hadn't taken a nap in years. One Saturday night, I remembered, an old lady in a black dress and pearls had kicked off her spectator pumps and slept there during the eight o'clock rush. When one of the managers had roused her, fearing she had passed out, she had said, “Oh, no! It's just such a
marvelous
sofa.” It
was
a marvelous sofa: wine-colored in some lights and fudge-colored in others, with deep cushions, big enough for a dozen little girls to have squeezed onto at my birthday parties. The leather had held up beautifully over the past century. Yet the sofa was, of course, old; old like the bottles of Scotch in our investors' liquor cabinets, old like the cashmere sweaters their wives slung over their shoulders on lunch dates, old like their whitewashed beach houses on the Cape. It was old, I realized, like Harvard.

Now, lying by myself on the sofa, I realized that just when I most wanted to despise Harvard for no longer having room for us, I couldn't. I had grown up in this world as no one else had, and if the clunky antiquity of Strawberry Night and the Krokodiloes revealed something about the world itself, it also revealed something about
me
. It had defined my tastes and my sensibilities and, no doubt, my sense of alienation from members of my own generation—a condition which even the experience of leaving home and going to college had not yet broken.

In my childhood, in which we had changed addresses so many times, 10 Holyoke Street had been my only home; I had even used it as my address. Now, with the news of the lease ending, I could no longer delude myself that it had ever been mine at all. We were only renters. It had never really been ours.

T
hat February, I went back to college for the spring semester of my sophomore year, and I turned twenty years old. And that May, I came back to my dorm room to discover that the light on my phone was blinking. I had a message from my mother in which she said to call her back immediately. I called, only to learn that my father had had a heart attack and was now recovering in the hospital.

“Would you believe it,” she said, “it happened right
in the middle of the investor dinner
! That
would
happen to me, the way my life is going. Who am I kidding? It's the way my life has always been. You know these rich people who are always going on safari? Not me! I don't have to go looking for adventure; I get plenty of it in the restaurant business. Well, anyway, the doctor I talked to said he's doing okay, all things considered. He did say that he'd better give up smoking . . . Let me give you the number at the hospital. You can call him if you want.”

During the time since I went away to college, my father, never a dominant figure in our lives, had been drifting away from us and deeper and deeper into the kind of defiant bohemianism that had long since fallen out of fashion in the modern world, seeking, as his hero John Cage once said, “to make poverty elegant.” His most recent madcap scheme was enrolling as a student at the Museum School, because he'd noticed that if you were a student, you got your own studio for free. So my father, with works in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Guggenheim, got a full scholarship to the Museum School as an undergraduate, for he himself, like so many bright, embattled people of his generation, had dropped out of college in the sixties.

I myself was a student at Bennington, where, I had discovered, one could count on hearing the name “John Cage” with some frequency. I often observed the black-clad music students playing his pieces in the romantically run-down, gray stone music building, and I had attended several senior concerts based on his work. But Bennington was, notoriously, a rich kids' school, and I was on scholarship. To me, no poverty was elegant, and least of all my father's.

But he was in the hospital. He had almost died. I pictured him, wheezing, with the paper sheets pulled up to his chin. I wondered where he would go afterward to recuperate. I realized that I didn't even know where he was living at this point.

I got off the phone with my mother and called the number of the hospital where he was recovering. A receptionist transferred me to his extension, where a nurse picked up the phone. I asked if I could speak to Michael Silver.

“Well, that depends. Are you a relative or a friend or what?”

I said I was his daughter.

“Oh,” she said. “Well, sure, you can talk to him. I didn't know he had a daughter.”

My father, on the other line, was laughing—faint, croaking laughs. He had some friends visiting him.

“You know, Char, the food's okay in here,” he said. “As good as some of the yuppie catering joints I've worked at, let me tell you. I'm loving the lime Jell-O! Thinking of photographing it one of these days. Though I always send back the cottage cheese. Can't fucking stand that stuff.”

Then he asked about me, and I mumbled something about the Pudding closing. June sixteenth would be the last night of business, I said.

“Oh, I heard about that,” said my father, coughing. And then, as I had heard him say with the utmost conviction so many times before, “God, am I ever glad I got out of the restaurant business.”

O
ne afternoon that June, a few days before the Pudding closed, a postcard caught my eye while I was browsing in Harvard Book Store. The postcard showed a photograph of the center of the Square, between Out of Town News and The Tasty, before The Tasty had closed. It was winter, and it had just snowed. The photographer must have taken the picture late at night, because no footprints had trampled the snow and Harvard Square looked, under the streetlamps, serene.

In the blistering sunshine outside, Harvard Square looked different than I remembered. The Abercrombie & Fitch loomed over the sidewalks like a shining Buick in a lot of crumbling roadsters; the Hawaiian shirts in the window of Pacific Sunwear looked as bright as a handful of Skittles; white letters stamped the red sign of the brand-new Staples. I had rested, only moments earlier, on a stoop in the Pit (the punks had vanished and the graffiti had faded) and read the words frosted on the Abercrombie window:
SUMMER 2001. SUN YOUR BUNS. HIT THE SURF. FLIRT LIKE CRAZY.

I stared at the postcard; I had been there, once. Sometimes, on winter nights, when the snow had drifted past the fire escapes and the kitchen smelled of brioche and the bar of hot toddies, my mother and I had locked the restaurant after everyone else had gone and stepped outside into the snowbanks. In all of Harvard Square, no one was awake but the two of us. The snowflakes floated down, starred her collar lush with feathers, fizzled on my Mary Janes. We held hands, my mother and I; we walked down the street together.

The day before the last day, I bought two dozen pink balloons, on trade, from Serge the florist and brought them to the Pudding. I had thought we could snip the tassels, my mother and I, and hold hands as the balloons fluttered up to the vaulted ceiling and blurred with the tissue paper stars. But once she saw them, my mother suggested cutting them loose on the terrace instead.

“You take them outside,” she said. “I'll be back in a second.”

Then she scrambled back to the kitchen, and I stepped onto the terrace. The terrace looked like a pink and brown garden now; the flowers had all started to wilt.

“Here we go!” she said, click-clacking across the floor. “If this can cut through the cowboy steak, it can cut through some balloons.”