Charlotte au Chocolat (17 page)

The butcher knife in her hands glinted in the sunlight, and for a brief moment I looked at my mother's hands. Calluses bulged in the centers of her palms and one of her garish pink nails had split in half; she badly needed a manicure, but by now, I suppose, she didn't care. Then, before I could say a word, she hacked the strings in half and two dozen pink balloons bobbed above Harvard Square. They soared above the slate roofs and then were gone.

P
osture is everything.

Or so my mother was forever telling me. I tried to remember this advice on the last night of the Pudding, June 16, 2001. Shoulders back, head held high, I walked up, up the white-painted staircase toward the third floor.

I opened the heavy black doors to the dining room.

Lashes blackened, hair combed and fluffed, I wore a highly stylized, romantic dress out of a Degas painting, a strapless tea-length in lilac tulle. Beneath the skirt there were fragile tinted crinolines, one rose, one green, one pale gold. With this dress I wore a pair of gold kid slippers.

The dining room was full of customers; hardly any tables were empty. This beautiful June night, seats outside on the herb-garden terrace were especially coveted. Conversation spilled through the wide-open French doors. Waiters were carrying martinis on silver trays covered with pink linen napkins. The night air was fragrant with lavender, with thyme. The customers would toast to the last night of the Pudding amidst the ruins of terra-cotta urns and nasturtium vines.

It was only then, imagining the customers outside making toasts to the last night of the Pudding, that I realized that the loss of the Pudding was not only a personal event but a public one. I thought of how whenever a business closed that you used to go to, you missed it, as my father spoke of missing the pastrami sandwiches at Elsie's, my mother the butterscotch sundaes at Bailey's, after they closed. I thought, of course, of the passing of The Tasty, and of how, after Savenor's burned down when I was eleven, my Friday nights with my father were never the same without their roast-beef sandwiches. When a business closed, it meant that no new memories could be made there. So now, come next June, there would still be icy, bracing martinis somewhere in the world, but not on this roof deck, not like this, not here. There would be no place to get my mother's lobster salad with nasturtium blossoms, no way to quench a thirsting for her gazpacho with chive oil and rock shrimp. Such things were the tiny, jewel-like neighborhood rituals that bit by bit compose a world, a life. And by living on in memory, they composed the inner life, too, which maybe, in the end, was the only thing that mattered.

At the threshold of the dining room, various people approached and hugged me. They blew air kisses and exclaimed, “Charlotte! Such a beautiful dress!” Some of these people I recognized, and some of them I didn't. But I pretended I recognized them all. I composed myself, saying, in my best front-room voice, “Hello, hello.”

And somewhere, somewhere across the dining room, my mother also was standing straight and saying, “Hello, hello.” People would believe that she meant it; people would be enfolded in the scent of her Joy perfume, her cleavage a bed of jasmine and roses. “Hello, hello . . .”

And then, I saw her. She was standing in front of the bar, in conversation, in transit. The silver beads frosting her Tiffany blue cashmere sweater caught the light from the chandeliers. She looked soft, my mother.

She did not see me.

I continued to stand in the dining room, taking it all in. Then Mary-Catherine brushed past me, rolling her eyes and saying, “What a night! Would you believe it?” Then she named another restauranteur in the Square and said, “They actually sent their lamb back. Now, you know me, ordinarily I'm Miss Hospitality, I say the customer is always right. But you think people could have a little respect on the last night! Your mother is furious. She says, when to think
our
closing is only going to help
their
business—”

But then somebody came up to Mary-Catherine and hugged her, too, and now there she was, saying, “Hello, hello . . .”

I sat down at A-1. I waited, and as I did, I realized that the experience was reminiscent of how I used to wait for my mother at the end of the night when I was a child. Only it didn't quite feel like nighttime yet, because by now it was the middle of June, and we were coming up on the longest day of the year. The dining room looked, on evenings like this, quite beautiful, its high, beamed ceilings filled with angelic light. The gold threads in the green velvet carpet shimmered and looked, almost, hot to the touch.

All around me, I saw waiters bearing dishes, pink-lit lobsters and lambs, mauve-skinned new potatoes and fat, blushing cranberry beans.

I read the menu. But somehow, nothing quite appealed. What I wanted were all of the things that weren't on the menu anymore and hadn't been in years: the things my father used to make. There was one dish, in particular, I craved. It was an appetizer from the early days of the Pudding: smoked pheasant and Roquefort flan. And then it occurred to me that I didn't even want smoked pheasant and Roquefort flan plated and served as a proper appetizer, but rather, I wanted to eat a pheasant leg, cold, the way I sometimes used to hanging out in the kitchen on hazy summer nights just like this one. Certain foods were best savored like that—all by themselves, without fixings. You could get straight to the purity of their flavors then. My father could have told you that. It was Carla, the old line cook, who used to twist off the dimpled, fatty pheasant legs just for me. But Carla, like so many people who used to work at the Pudding, was gone, and I had no idea whatever had become of her.

I waited and waited, and no one came over to the table to take my order. So, conscious that I was alone and worried that I had nothing to do with my hands, I read the menu again. Of course I understood that the waiters were busy; no doubt the kitchen was in the weeds, too, and even if I got to order, it would take forever for the food to come. It was going to be what my mother called “one of those nights,” which meant off-kilter, awry, no accounting for delays and disasters.

Some time passed, and a waiter came over to my table. I immediately saw that he was out of breath and had no time to talk to me.

“Oh, hey, Charlotte,” he said. “Crazy night tonight. But what can I get you to drink?”

“May I please have a Shirley Temple?”

I hadn't drunk Shirley Temples in years. I was twenty years old, and they had not been my signature beverage for quite some time. But tonight, I was convinced that no other beverage would do. I recalled brandy snifters thick with grenadine, bunches of maraschino cherries queasy-sweet and dripping with dye, that one cool, saving pinch of ginger ale.

As I waited for the waiter to come back with my Shirley Temple, I heard a peal of laughter ring across the dining room. It was my mother's laughter; it was unmistakable. And then I knew. She would never sit down. Never.

The waiter came back with my beverage and placed it in front of me.

“Here you go,” he said. “Enjoy.”

The bartender had served my Shirley Temple—my last Shirley Temple—in a tall, plain glass. The liquid was a tepid red, almost blush, and a lone maraschino cherry bobbed at the top like a bloated goldfish. It looked like the Shirley Temples at other restaurants—a beverage for a stranger. But I drank it, and heard the hollow rasp of the straw sapping the ice cubes dry; they drained from pink to gray and finally crusted the bottom of the glass like splintered rhinestones.

Oh, I had wanted to remember everything. But I couldn't do it; I didn't have the strength for this particular good-bye. All of a sudden, I started to feel faint. The dining room blurred before me, the grassy carpet rolling and the rose-colored lightbulbs melting. Tears welled in my eyes. Soon they would plop onto the tablecloth, and everyone would see. “No crying at the restaurant, Charlotte,” my mother had told me when I was a little girl. “Remember, it's a public place.”

I got up from the table. I went down one flight to the ladies' room, locking myself in the same stall where, earlier that evening, I'd put on the lilac tulle dress and done my makeup. Now I was crying and my mascara was running. I grabbed a tissue and tried to mop up the streaks. Maybe I could pull myself together and go back upstairs and sit down to dinner again. Maybe—

I was standing at the sink, washing my face, when the door to the ladies' room swung open and I heard stilettos striking the tiles. They made a cold sound; they pinged, like ice cubes falling in a glass. I straightened my shoulders, ready for the inevitable confrontation.

“Charlotte.”

My mother's voice was strident now, nothing soft, nothing lambent about it. There in the ladies' room we were offstage and we didn't have to pretend. This was the unyielding voice, the voice of the kitchen and not the front room, the voice that had earned her the name “Patton in Pumps.”

“Charlotte, I heard that you left the dining room in tears. God knows I shouldn't have to be dealing with this tonight, but here I am.”

I burst into tears all over again.

“Charlotte. Open the door.”

I opened the door. My mother stormed into the stall, bolting the door shut behind her. Her teardrop rhinestone earrings glittered in the savage white fluorescent light of the ladies' room, so different from the light we were used to in the dining room, where everything was rose and gold, enchanted and indirect.

“For God's sake. It's my restaurant and it's going out of business. And tomorrow, tomorrow I'm the one who has to figure out the rest of my life. Do you see me crying? Do you? Do you? Have you ever seen me crying? Have you? Do you see Mary-Catherine crying? There's no crying in the dining room.”

My mother had taken her sunglasses off, and I could see, so close to mine, her face, as stylized after its own fashion as a Kabuki mask: the lustrous violet lips, sea-foam powder applied at mysterious, softening angles around her eyes, and the doll-like contrast of arched black eyebrows and teased blond hair. She had put on this face while her stage set—her restaurant—was crumbling right in front of her.

It took me years, years after that night, to understand her attitude. And, later, to even admire it. The style; the verve; the queenly exit strategy; nothing apologetic, nothing wistful, nothing
weak
, about it. Yes, I would leave, I would lose the Pudding, I would grow up. I would know other losses, other defeats, and I would come to realize that my mother's behavior was quite splendid.

I never saw the dining room again. I knew that sitting down to dinner, as though nothing had happened, was out of the question. I had shattered the spell and was cast out from the kingdom.

So with a sweep of black taffeta my mother went back to her court, and I dried my eyes. I left the ladies' room. I walked slowly down the stairs. I felt the weight of my mother's words and I composed myself; I did not scamper, did not run. At the foot of the staircase, one torn gold ribbon sagged off the banister. After I walked through the heavy black double doors to the building, I heard the
thud
when they slammed shut behind me.

Outside, darkness had fallen. I hailed a taxi by the corner of Out of Town News. It was only then, climbing into the car and feeling my bare shoulders stick to the ridged leather seat, that I remembered I had not eaten dinner. I would be hungry later.

Postscript

I
f I had it to do all over again, if I could go back there, under the vaulted green ceiling, the rosy tissue-paper stars, I'd sit right back down at the table and I would order, I would taste once more, my mother's famous roasted-sweet-red-pepper soup. I'd even eat my last supper alone; maybe, now, I'd even prefer it that way, honor it as part of the fine tradition of the solitary childhood that made me who I am. Shoulders back, head up, my mother's daughter, I'd have a grand time of it. I'd drain the beautiful red bowl dry. I'd get up from that table and walk out of that dining room and never look back. I'd perfect the art of the sublime good-bye.

When, not too long after the Pudding closed, my mother and Mary-Catherine opened a new restaurant in Harvard Square, customers who still pined for that soup went in asking for it. My mother put it on the menu for a time, but soon it vanished, never to return. She wasn't in the kitchen anymore and didn't trust the new crop of hot young chefs making it. It was too labor-intensive, the new chefs said. It was too rich. It used too many cunning and delicate varieties of peppers, too many guiltless lashings of heavy cream. We live in a new century now and a whole different world. And now, now that I am thinking about it, I blame the failure of that splendid soup in our contemporary moment on something else. I think, probably, those chefs were simply too young to coax out that fatty, candied thickness, the broken flavors, suave and rustic, sensuous and sad—a winter's soup, a woman's soup. I think they didn't know anything, those chefs. I think they hadn't lived. My mother herself was already in her forties and divorced when she came up with the recipe. When I was a young girl, I didn't appreciate it.

Now I do.

Acknowledgments

Many grateful acknowledgments go to my agent, Emily Forland, and editor, Sarah McGrath; to early readers Edward Hoagland, Dan Hofstadter, Sigrid Nunez, David Semanki, and Kathleen Spivack; to my friends and family; and to all of the wonderful and wacky people who worked at the Pudding over the years, whether my fond memories of you appear in this book or not.