Corked (15 page)

“Calm down, my Tootsie. You're driving too fast.” The speedometer was vibrating at 145. All at once, my anger shifted over to an overwhelming brew of terror, culpability, guilt. I slowed down the car.

He reached out his arm and squeezed my shoulder. “Sweet, sensitive Tootsie,” he said.

“God, I'm sorry. I'm selfish. You tell me a story about the war and poverty and escaping a bomb, and I do all
this
.” What he'd shown me of his pain hung like a big, basking, late afternoon shadow over my own. Mine felt like a speck, some nothingness, a dried-up crumble of sauce. I brushed it aside—refused to give it credence.

One silly, lone tear dumped out my right eye.

“Do you want to hear a sad and unlucky story? It might make you feel better. You know, it will give you some relativity.”

“How sad and unlucky?” I wondered if I needed more relativity, but he wanted to share.

“
C'est une histoire vraiment déprimante
.”

I let him share.

“Yes. A sad story. Excellent.” I did not want to think about what I'd just said about the accident, about my depression.

“See, your grandfather stayed with OSE until the winter of 1948. We had come back to Paris—it was a different city,
bien sûr
. Decay, destruction, the shadows of war were still hovering over France. In February of 1949, he made a decision for the family. He had a dream—”

“That his children would be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character?” I interrupted.

“Heh. Yes. Any
waaaaay
, his idea was to go to Switzerland. For him, because of his work, it was a land that represented peace, security, and stability. It was the land of his ancestors. He had a connection with it, and he had found an inn on the shore of Lake Geneva, in Vevey. His dream was to buy the property—we would become innkeepers.”

“Do you think that's why you had an interest in hotels?”

“Oh.”

“He liquidated his bank account and put the cash into a briefcase. He booked a night train from Paris to Geneva, a trip he had taken many times. He arrived at the
gare
, located his train, went to his compartment, and dropped off his suitcase and his briefcase on the luggage rack as usual. The night porter arrived and asked to make up his bed as usual. He left his compartment to have a cigarette on the platform as usual. He got back to his compartment a few minutes later.”

“As usual,” I finished.

“Exactly as usual. At some point, he looked up at the luggage rack. His suitcase was there, the briefcase had disappeared. A train thief had come and gone. Did he understand that his life had changed forever once again? The briefcase contained his life savings. He was meeting with a notary in Geneva to purchase the inn. No savings, no meeting, no inn.”

“Fuuuuuuucking hell.”

“Yes, Tou Tou. Fucking hell is right. And there was another surprise waiting for him at home. Mimi was on her way.” Mimi is the nickname of my aunt, Marie-Françoise.

“C'est vrai.”
My father was chuckling.

“But why…I mean, why in the world…like…Jesus! What
possessed
him to leave the briefcase alone?”

“Oh, Tootsen, who knows,
hein?
He was a dreamer, your grandfather. This made him careless, irresponsible sometimes.”

“And how did he tell you guys?”

“I was away, in the Alps. He waited until I got back. I don't remember much, though I
do
remember his calmness. He explained the probable impact on our lives, but that we were not to worry, that we would save face. But if you think about it, there was everything to be worried about. He was 46, he had no money, he had no job, and it was postwar France.”

“So the prospects were not exactly abundant.”

“No. Abundant, I believe, would be the wrong word to describe our prospects.”

“And then?”

“The family had a hard time for two years as France rebuilt. Over those two years, René put together a new dream. He would immigrate to Canada, begin a new life for us, and then send for us when he was set up over there.

He left us in October of 1951. He boarded a plane and landed in Montreal. Then he took a train to Toronto. An old Russian woman named Sorele took him in. Another member of OSE had organized the whole trip and this house where he would stay. Lys was Sorele's great-niece and had been writing to her great-aunt about the arrival of this man, a tall Parisian—not a Jew, but a man of honor. I remember him telling me that on their first evening together, Sorele made an abominable dish of poached carp. He complained about how jellied the fish was. They ate the jellied fish while Sorele spoke to him of childhood memories of the pogroms, the Cossacks, the burning of the old Jewish ghetto. He told her stories of Paris, of our family. He told her about the murder of his friends and colleagues—good people. Undeserving people. They became friends.”

I drove steadily.

“He stayed under Sorele's roof for a little while. Eventually, he had enough money to rent
une chambre minuscule
above a shop on Spadina Avenue, in Toronto's Jewish community. OSE helped him get a job as a floor salesman in a large fabric store.”

“There were no accounting jobs for him.”

“No. It was a pathetic job,” my father said, “for a man who was as much of a salesman as I am a nuclear physicist.”

“When did you guys get there?”

“About 12 months later. We took a boat. Your grandmother was seasick to the point of immobility. I was sexually harassed by a young priest on the ship—”

“Oh Dad,” I cried, uncomfortable.

He continued without pausing, “Right away your grandfather became very sick with emphysema. He was forced to quit his job. Your grandmother had to stay at home with the baby—your aunt Mimi. My parents suspected, I think, that I was an
imbécile
, so they sent me to a nearby trade school. There I went during the day. I was the only boy in my class. I learned how to use a typewriter and cook elementary meat and pasta dishes. When school was
feeneeshed
, I would walk to Bistro One-Two, where I worked at night, scrubbing pots. This was my life for four years.”

I did an audit of my head. I no longer felt terror; I'd become engrossed in his story. He told it so well, with such accuracy. In Rémy Gresser's cellar, he'd been able to shape the wine with his language right away. Gasoline. Perfect. Meanwhile I was all laborious breathing and wine gurgling and word fumbling.
But at least you've begun. Shapes are emerging from your primordial ooze! You are feeling! There is real hope for you!

“Dad, so you told me this story.”

“I did.”

“But how do you feel about all of it?”

“I move on, Tootsie.”

“You just move on.”

“That's right. I just
mooooove
on.”

I wondered if my feelings were stupid.

“Ah, Tootsen, look up,” he said.

I looked up and around; we were in the Alps. The change of scenery caused my eyebrows to twitch.

“The Alps!” Mountains had exploded around us in the last nanosecond, like an earthquake in reverse. I fell silent at the weight of it all.

“No,” my dad said.

“No what?”

“No, these aren't the Alps. These are the
Préalpes
.”

“The
Préalpes
. I did not know there was such a thing.”

It was as if a herd of great mossy stegosauruses had popped up around the road. We drove among the dinosaurs, large and small, for 40 minutes until we were back where we were always arriving: fields filled with grapes. But they did not unravel levelly in front of us, as I was accustomed to. Instead, the scene was a page out of a Dr. Seuss book. We were surrounded by corn-yellow hills, all ascending brazenly at impossible gradations. Clinging to the earth for dear life were rows of vines. Their branches were twisted and wild and seemed to be shouting over the road at the vines on the opposite hill, “Guys, hey, GUYS! Can you freakin' believe this?!!?” And the vines on the opposite hill were all like, “Yeah man, what the
hell
is going on? I'm freakin' Neil Armstrong over here!”

My father seemed to sense my amazement, likely by way of my gaping mouth. I could have swallowed a pumpkin.

“These, Tootsen, is the
Côtes Rôtie
region,” he explained.

“The Roasted Hills.”

“Prized wines are made from the grapes that grow on these roasted hills. The vines face a perfect south-southwest orientation. The sun is amplified by the reflection of the big river.” He pointed hither and thither.

“What's the river?”

“The Rhône River, Tootsie. Come on—think.”

“Right. Côtes du Rhône.”
Ouch
.

“This is the kingdom of Syrah, in the reds, and Viognier, in the whites. It is sun-drenched wine—opulent, rich, voluptuous, velvety.”

I tried harder: “They're like the young beach bums who spend all their time hanging out and soaking up vitamin D. They are grapes with a healthy seaside glow, blond hair, sticky from the ocean. Bouncy, cheerful grapes who are part of the macrobiotic movement and do hot yoga.”

“Yes. Good. Something like that. They stand alone at the top of the northern Rhône hierarchy. They are divided in two sections. Côte Brune, Côte Blonde. The Brune's soil is clay, rich in iron oxide. The Blonde's is lighter in color, mainly chalk,” he said. “I read somewhere the names came from Maugiron, the first lord of Ampuis under Henri III. He had two daughters, one blond, one a brunette.”

“They must be a bitch to harvest. The quads and glutes on the harvesters must be out of this world.” I decided that one of the tasks I would accomplish before my own death was to have some hot times with a Côtes Rôtie harvester.

“Accidents have happened on these hills. All the harvesting is done by hand. Machines cannot deal with these monstrous
terraces
. They're ancient. They date back to Roman times,” he said.

Another hour of snaking through skinny roads and tiny towns and patient fields and we arrived in Sainte Cécile-les-Vignes, a bitty town of 2,000 Frenchmen. I parked in a lush, cobbled courtyard, flipped to the appropriate page of our itinerary, and scanned down the page to find the name of our contact.

“Aubert,” I said aloud.

“What did you say?”

“What did I say about what?”

“The name you said.”

“I said ‘Aubert'.” I repeated, “René Aubert. The owner. Of this. This place.”

“Right.”

“I think that's him there.” A tall, ectomorphic man with spindly arms and legs strode toward the car. He was handsome and spiderlike.

We unpacked ourselves from the car. Immediately, my hair was blown off my shoulders. It whipped into my eyeballs and stuck to my freshly glossed lips. I peeled it back into place with no luck. A lock snapped me again, right in the eye.

“
YEOW!
That wind is
so annoying
.” When I blinked, my right lid felt as if it had been dredged in sand. I gathered up the thrashing mess and tied it back into a ponytail.

“
Salutations!
” Aubert's eyebrow was cocked. He seemed to be sizing us up. I thought of Nudant.
God, I hope he's done with the harvest
. Self-conscious about my windswept appearance, I patted down the natty lumps and smiled with my sticky mouth.

Aubert led us through the showroom and store for his wines,
Domaine de la Présidente
, then through an old, polished door into his office.
What an enclave!
I half expected two servant women to appear, wearing velvet bikinis, ready with tiny spoons heaped with oozing morsels of triple-cream cheeses and platters of grapes they'd peeled with their long, polished nails. It is also possible I was fantasizing about food-bearing hussies because I was starving from fueling my body for the last four hours only with those stinking little plastic cups of gas station Nescafé.

He motioned for us to sit. His smile was broad and sly, his eyes crinkled and slit, his chin pointed up, ready for a bird to come and perch upon it.

He raised a fist then let it fall and bounce off his desk like a judge bringing order to his court.

“
Alors
,” he said, “what it is that you expect from me?”
So direct! He is prince-like. He is a wonderful, witty, cruel, and joyous Renaissance prince
.

My father took a breath, but I cut in before he had a chance to say anything.

“This is our first stop in Côtes du Rhône. We were just talking about the historical origins of the Côte Blonde and Côte Brune. Maugrignon, you know.”

“You mean Maugiron,” Aubert said. My cheeks grew hot. My father's shoulders tightened in the slightest of cringes.

“That's what I said, no?”
Dig dig dig
.

“Permit me to give you the background on the
domaine
.”

“Of course,” I said, so quickly defeated, wishing we were doing a tasting. I was spent from the drive and off my game. I'd seen the operation in Alsace. I wasn't interested in the mechanics of winemaking anymore. I wanted to
feel some feelings
through
wine
and therefore allow myself to metaphorically
stick my hand up my father's nose and feel his strange electric blue glowing brain before time ran out
.

“In 1968, my father, Max, bought the
domaine
. Max was the mayor of Sainte Cécile-les-Vignes, and I was intent on working among the vines from a very young age. We began with 60 hectares. I worked very hard. Now the
domaine
has doubled and….”