Mme Proust and the Kosher Kitchen (20 page)

“Surely, in this day and age, with fridges and everything, it doesn’t matter as much,” she said to Sam the next day.

“We still don’t eat pork,” Sam replied. “You can’t ask people to abandon their traditions.”

“I am not asking them to abandon their traditions, just to be a little bit more flexible for one day,” Rachel said, feeling an unusual anger that made her heart beat a little faster. “I’ve promised I wouldn’t use any dairy.”

In the end, the two women hammered out a compromise between themselves. Rachel would clean her kitchen under Clara’s supervision and borrow Clara’s mixing bowls and utensils. She would use no butter or milk in her baking; no animal fat in her pastry. Her desserts would be pareveh, or neutral, and so could safely be eaten after the caterer’s kosher meat.

“It’s not as though I ever bake with lard,” Rachel muttered to herself as she closed the door on Clara after that meeting, hurt at the mere suggestion that she might be in the habit of using tallow of unknown origins. She swallowed her disgruntlement and started leafing through her recipe books and planning her menu.

Clara was also unhappy with their arrangement, suspicious that Rachel, even once her kitchen had been cleaned, would not be as diligent in the preparation of her baking as she, Clara, would have been. And while she doubted whether Rachel could be trusted not to pull out one of her own mixing spoons or muddle up the dishtowels, she could certainly be counted on for an impressive spread that might even rival the fancy sweets the caterer would have provided. Rachel had served some very pretty cakes at their recent encounters,
delicacies that Clara had sampled out of politeness before it became apparent she was going to have to take a stand on the issue of Rachel’s baking. Folks do love their sweets and Rachel was going to get a lot of compliments on the big day. Everyone would be amazed she had managed the desserts herself. Rather than a disaster, the dessert table might actually prove a triumph. Somehow that annoyed Clara although she wouldn’t have been able to say why. She too had noticed the economic gap between the families, and was resigned to the Plots and whatever wedding they could muster. Her son had been uncharacteristically fierce in his final insistence that their wishes were to be respected, had eventually pointed out to his mother that when Sarah had no real family of her own it would be tactless to overwhelm her few connections with the Segals’ many friends and relations. So, Clara had accepted Sarah, the Plots, and the small wedding, but Rachel’s dubious dessert table didn’t fit within her notion of their place.

As the weeks went by and she felt more and more aggravated by the whole plan, she decided she had better make some of the desserts herself. She hadn’t wanted to, had not volunteered at the outset, because now that her vision of the wedding had been rebuffed, she felt clear in her mind that the whole thing was the responsibility of the bride’s parents and she refused to be manipulated into extra work by Rachel’s ridiculous insistence that the dessert table not be catered. Still, Rachel was going ahead anyway and now Clara itched to step in. She called Rachel and suggested she would provide some cookies.

“Oh, no, don’t trouble yourself.”

“No, really, it’s no bother at all. I’d like to.”

“No, but you’re already doing so much, lending me all the utensils…”

“Oh, that’s nothing. Really, I’ll just make a few cookies. It’ll be fun.”

As the wedding drew nearer and Clara’s family heard of her plight, the few cookies multiplied again and again. In her own carefully segregated kitchen, her sister Rose could make an apple strudel with a paper-thin pastry that required nothing but flour, water, and a little oil so that it could be safely eaten at the end of any meal, while their cousin Lily could, also without resorting to either dairy or meat, create the most exquisite petits fours, those little squares of white cake iced so smoothly in pink they almost look too perfect to be edible. And as for Clara’s contribution, of course, her luscious-looking, oversized meringues, round things about as big as an onion and sharing the same pointed top, as well as her fluffy little coconut macaroons, would be very acceptable, for eggs are considered to be
pareveh
. She might even make a sponge cake too. Rachel could hardly take offence at their generosity.

So, on the eve of the wedding, Clara arranged all these sweets on two of the largest trays in her kitchen and asked Lionel to drive her to the Plots’ house where Rachel was assembling the desserts in plenty of time for the next day.

Putting the wax paper back in place over one tray, Clara moved away from the kitchen table, where five cakes and three large plates of cookies were also assembled, and turned to the counter to inspect the last of Rachel’s work.

“Not a butter icing?” she asked anxiously, as she peered at the frothy blob now disfiguring the edge of the cake plate.

Sarah sensed there was tension between her surrogate mother and her future mother-in-law. She guessed that Rachel, always
kind and uncomplaining, was not receiving the consideration she deserved and wanted to speak to her, to thank her for her generosity and her patience, to express her great relief that the Plots had managed to keep the wedding small, but she was too nervous and distracted to find the words or the moment. If Sarah had, in her twenty-five years, shown both a good measure of quiet courage and the occasional flash of initiative, she increasingly relied on Daniel to direct her through life. He had found her, singled her out from all the other girls at the university, asked her to dances and picnics, proposed marriage, bought a ring, and now even found an apartment. She marvelled at his ease with all practical arrangements and, like many a bride-to-be, was living the days leading up to her wedding in something of a haze. And when it came to areas in which a young man could not be expected to have any knowledge or authority, that is, when it came to the food and the dress, Sarah was entirely in the hands of the women and simply did as she was told. Rachel and Clara saw to the dessert table while her friend Lisa, an old classmate from the university who would stand at the ceremony as her matron of honour, took her to Eaton’s bridal salon to pick out her dress.

It was a large gown if not a long one. The bodice was tight, with long fitted sleeves and a neckline that traced two arcs above Sarah’s small breasts before dipping to a sharp point in between them. From its narrow waist, a big bold skirt shot outwards rather than downwards and required a crinoline to keep it in place. This petticoat was an extra expense Sarah had anticipated, but she had not properly budgeted for the gloves, the shoes, and the little pillbox hat that would secure her large veil. Lisa enthusiastically pointed to pictures in magazines, telling Sarah that everyone in
Europe was wearing this look. Indeed they were, for rationing had ended, and with fabric no longer scarce, the Parisian designers were celebrating by using as much as they could. The women in the pictures were taller than Sarah, and leant slightly backwards as they stood in a very ladylike way with their ankles crossed, a pose that exaggerated their height. They also had long, swanlike necks and held their heads so high that their pillbox hats crowned their smooth hairdos with glory. In this big dress with its large veil awkwardly secured by the little hat, Sarah, who was barely five feet tall, looked pretty, but she did not look beautiful. She was a woman who should have been married in lace, a dress of a simple shape made from threads as delicate as her own small body. No matter. If Sarah sensed that all was not right with the preparations for the dessert table, she was perfectly happy with Lisa’s choice of dress, even if she had to dip into her savings to afford it. On the afternoon of her wedding, she marvelled at her own reflection in the mirror as she hung Sophie Bensimon’s pearls about her neck.

Sarah had not expected to marry. Not that marriage was unlooked for or unwanted. On the contrary, she longed for it, dreaming of the man who would make everything whole, happy, and real. Rachel and Sam were also fervently hoping for a nice boy, inquiring tactfully but regularly about her dates. During her years at the university, she still lodged with the Plots while a small scholarship covered her tuition and her part-time job at the library paid for a few clothes, books, and the occasional evening at the movies. Neither Sam nor Rachel had asked her how she intended to support herself after that, but without any profession on the horizon, they
saw marriage as the obvious solution. Sarah, meanwhile, was too proud to acknowledge the question, to confess to them that she too wanted something for the future, but she knew exactly what lay behind their little inquiries about Saturday night or Sunday afternoon. No, Sarah knew full well what was expected of girls, and what girls could expect, after university.

It was just that if her whole life in Canada seemed unreal to her, a temporary state that would somehow end one day when school was finished or girlhood complete and she would pass into the adulthood she might have dreamt of in the years before 1942, then marriage here in Toronto seemed impossibly concrete.

For Sarah, men appeared as distant albeit prosaic creatures, and she was always a bit surprised when one took a romantic interest. Usually, when a boy in one of her classes or the brother of a friend, attracted by her dainty looks and intrigued by her shy dignity, bothered to chat and question, he gave up soon enough without proffering any invitation to a dance or movie. He had quickly discovered that what he had taken for a ladylike docility was actually a kind of quiet hardness the like of which he had never encountered amongst the simpler and friendlier girls to whom he was accustomed. He did not dislike Sarah, but he was puzzled, stymied even, by a demeanour that seemed so gentle yet a character behind it that seemed so closed to him, so free of need. Indeed, it was just this kind of misunderstanding that was underway the night that Sarah met Daniel.

Coaxed to a dance by Lisa, who was eager to enjoy one last hurrah before the girls began studying for their final exams, Sarah sat at a table by herself while her friend was busy on the dance floor. Well, she was not entirely alone, for Lisa had made sure to leave her some companionship in the
form of Boxer Walker before she hurried joyously off on the arm of his friend Michael Smithson, a young man whom she had secretly hoped would be there. It was uphill work for Boxer, struggling against both Sarah’s reticence and the volume of music played by a jazz band at the front of the room. He was getting a bit desperate at the situation and a bit annoyed at this resolutely serious young woman, and found himself starting to babble. He stopped firmly but blurted out:

“Aren’t you having fun? Smile, smile!”

Sarah had few ideas of how to live life, but she was intelligent enough that she could not oblige the brash young men who offered her instructions on what to do with it. She secretly detested what she saw as the Canadian habit of happiness, an insistence that everyone be always enjoying themselves as though seriousness, let alone sorrow, were an admission of failure. Her face, until now a mask of quiet grace, was looking increasingly stony. It was Daniel who rescued her.

“Boxer, hello.” A short man with broad shoulders, an open face, and a head full of black curls, who had been watching Sarah from the other side of the room, had spotted his chance, and was cheerfully greeting an old classmate of his cousin’s whom he had met only a few times before.

“Daniel, right?”

“That’s right. How are you?”

“Fine, fine. I’d like you to meet, this is…”

“Sarah,” she said firmly, and extended her hand without smiling. “My name is Sarah Simon.”

Daniel grinned at her with such genuine warmth that her encroaching sullenness fell away, and she smiled gently back.

“I am Daniel Segal.”

“Refills? Refills? Another Coke, Sarah?” Boxer hurried away to get soft drinks. By the time he returned, Sarah and Daniel were deep in conversation and he was glad to put the glasses on the table and melt back into the crowd with some mumbled excuse about finding Michael.

Daniel had seen something in Sarah. Like a scene from one of the romantic movies to which the girls would sometimes treat themselves, he had looked across a crowded room and recognized a total stranger. That quality he had perceived in Sarah, a mix of frailty and resilience, fine intelligence and stupid pride, that he would never fully define for himself in fifty-five years of marriage, was somehow telegraphed to him that night through the chatter, the cigarette smoke, and the jazz. His reaction was immediate and urgent: excited and nervous, trying to dampen his own ridiculously premature hopes but not succeeding in the slightest, he had made his way to her side.

He spent the rest of the evening there, chatting about nothing at all, until the band stopped playing, someone threw a switch, and the sudden, hard light recalled the dancers to themselves. Lisa, only now guiltily remembering Sarah, came back to the table with Michael’s offer to drive them both home. Her face flushed with the delight of her own conquest and the surprise of finding Sarah so intensely occupied, she garbled some introductions and explanations. For a brief moment the four stood in an embarrassed silence as they wondered how they should part, and then Daniel said a quiet good night and left, knowing that Boxer would surely be able to secure for him Sarah’s telephone number by calling Michael.

One evening in June, after exams were well over, he arrived at the house on Gladstone Avenue. It was one of the
plainer dwellings on the street, an elongated Victorian row house, attached to neighbours on both sides, with two full storeys marked by slim bay windows and a narrow attic squeezed behind a peaked dormer. Daniel puzzled over the neighbourhood, sized up the red-brick facade—middle-class but just barely—and mounted the wooden steps onto the front porch. That was how it was done: you did not meet a woman at a restaurant or downtown at the movie house, but went to her home in plenty of time for her father to inspect you while the girl and her mother, safely hidden away in some pink bedroom upstairs, put the finishing touches on the hairdo. At least, it was a scenario of that kind Daniel was expecting. In reality, Sarah’s back bedroom on the second floor had always been painted a fresh shade of yellow, it had been several years since Rachel had ventured into it, and on the night Daniel called, Sam was out visiting, so when he rang the bell Rachel was sitting alone in the living room, pretending to read a book. Sarah opened the door and invited him in to meet her.