Mme Proust and the Kosher Kitchen (23 page)

“My father used to bring us to this place when we were kids.”

“I’ve never been here before… It’s pretty.”

Afterwards they walked along a trail that climbed through the woods towards a hilltop, and talked—or at least Daniel talked, of how the Toronto teaching hospitals still had no place for Jewish interns or residents, of how the door of the club was shut in your face, of how his father, one of the original forty Jewish doctors who had founded Mount Sinai on Yorkville Avenue, had finished his studies in Philadelphia back in the 1920s, of how Daniel had delayed looking in the States, hoping that things had changed. They would have to change, they would change, soon, but in the meantime Daniel had finally found a spot down in Rochester where he would begin work in January. Just another a year, a year away, twelve months of living on a student’s stipend, and then he could come back to Toronto and start a family practice. His father could lend him the capital he would need. He would be ready to settle down. Sarah, who knew these things already, said nothing, not even offering a murmured “yes” or “I see” of encouragement, but Daniel had come to understand her reluctance to please and to admire her pride.

When they reached the top of their climb, they stopped and looked out over the coloured hills. The valley before them was bathed in the clear, pure light of autumn, the sunshine in its turn made golden by the reflection of the flaming leaves. Around them the trees hummed and glowed in this last burst of the season, and they held their faces towards the warmth. The sun, already sinking lower in the sky, was now at a level that blinded them as they looked towards it. Sarah closed her eyes, saw exploding yellow fill her head, and
dwelt there for a little while. Daniel, sensing the setting sun, spoke: “Time to be getting home.”

On the hilltop all was still bright and warm, but there was dark and dampness back in the woods, dewy spots that the increasingly shortened daylight had not reached in weeks. Sarah felt chill now and, in unspoken agreement, she and Daniel set a quicker pace. As they climbed back down the steepest section of the path, her attention fixed on negotiating the stones at her feet, she stepped on a collection of wet leaves, all plastered to each other so that they created a single slippery page of the most beautiful deep purple. Unable to find purchase on this slick surface, Sarah’s right foot shot out from underneath her. Gasping as she fought hard not to fall backwards, the adrenalin flooding her body as though this were some mortal danger, she flung herself awkwardly upwards from this potential fall only to catch her shoe on a rock. Now she pitched straight forward. In front of her, close enough that there was barely room for her to fall without hitting him, Daniel heard her cry out, sensed her sudden movement, and turning rapidly, caught and held her. She hung on for a moment, relying on him to steady her until she found her footing again, and then stepped back.

“All right?”

“Fine. I just slipped on a leaf or something.”

As they started out again he took her hand, holding it firmly as he lead her back downwards the rest of their walk.

Under the
chuppah
, the bride looked as small as a child. At her side, Daniel seemed to tower over her, as though nervousness was enlarging his body whereas it was shrinking hers. He stood slightly apart from her, kept at bay by her protruding
skirt, and they looked, on this day, a rather lopsided pair. Rabbi Cohn smiled encouragingly at Sarah, not the warm, straightforward grin he offered all the brides and grooms in his care, but a more meaningful and loving look. The rabbi very much wanted a happy ending for the girl he had helped settle in Canada fourteen years before. The war was over, it was time to move on, to leave the past in its place.

“You are happy, Sarah,” he had told rather than asked her during his first interview with the newly engaged couple. He had been impressed then with Daniel, and remained so during the wedding preparations—an upright young man and a doctor too. Sarah, he suspected, was in need of healing. He extended his loving look towards Daniel now, bringing them both into his encouraging ambit as behind him the cantor began to sing the blessings.

Daniel’s voice shook and cracked with emotion when it came time to repeat the rabbi’s words—“You are consecrated to me…”—while Sarah, with no words to speak in the ceremony, kept her eyes on her feet. On his first attempt, the glass, carefully packaged up in a dishtowel so that it would not spread shards when it shattered, just popped out from under the slippery leather sole of Daniel’s brand-new shoe, and the guests laughed tightly. On his second try, he succeeded. There was a muffled splintering, Sarah shuddered slightly at the sound, and so, they were married.

Seated side by side at one of the four round tables sandwiched into the Plots’ dining room, Daniel and Sarah barely spoke. They were too busy eating the wedding dinner—the chicken fricassee, so full of subtle flavours and rich titbits you couldn’t begin to distinguish them from each other; the brisket, juicy enough if not quite as tender as what Rachel or Clara might have prepared in their own kitchens;
the carrots and onions that had roasted with the meat until they were sweet and soft; the beans, fresh and crisp; the comforting solidity of the potato kugel—huge helpings because Rachel had instructed the caterer to feed the newlyweds well and now leaned across the table with exhortations to eat. Observing tradition and his mother’s suggestions, Daniel had spent the day fasting, a purification before a new life, while Sarah might as well have been fasting too, she had eaten so little that day. Rachel worried about her health: although her engagement seemed to agree with her, she still had not regained her strength from that grim winter of unspoken loneliness and the springtime bout of measles that had preceded a year and a half of planning and gaiety. Rachel had visions of the bride fainting under the
chuppah
and had urged both breakfast and lunch on her that day, but Sarah felt so nervous all morning and afternoon that she could manage nothing at all. Finally, at Rachel’s insistence, she took a cup of broth only minutes before the rabbi was due to arrive at the house for the signing of the
ketubah
, the contract that would bind her husband to her. She was already dressed by then, so Lisa held a large towel over her to protect her gown from mishap and reapplied Sarah’s lipstick once she had finished. At dinner that evening, Sarah and Daniel were both famished, and happily accepted when the waiter came round to their table with seconds.

As the other guests were cleaning their plates, Sam rose to his feet, cleared his throat, and brought the room to attention. The toasts and speeches began. Sarah tried to relax, to listen to the jokes, the kindness, the expressions of hope and goodwill; she tried to concentrate on Daniel’s words, to remember for years to come that moment when he spoke of his love with naked truthfulness in front of this whole room of people,
but the talk seemed distant, a quiet chatter out somewhere beyond the roaring inside her own head. As the voices rose and fell, the applause and laughter echoed, the unreality of the last few months threatened to engulf her utterly.

Speeches finished, she and Daniel were called on to cut the large white cake that was sitting in one corner of the room. A great high affair with three tiers supported by little plastic columns and decorated with sugar roses, it had been provided by the caterer and was whisked away to the kitchen as soon as the newlyweds had put their knife into it, never to reappear. This formality dispensed with, the guests pushed back their chairs and got up from the tables to chat with each other. Sarah and Daniel found themselves swarmed with well-wishers again, each one demanding a few moments of attention, stopping long enough to offer a
mazel tov
or compliment Sarah on her dress before being elbowed aside to be replaced by the next one. And so it went, seemingly for hours, no proper conversation ever established in the din. Alternately excited and exhausted by more talk, more people, and more attention directed at her than she had ever before experienced, Sarah felt her smile might crack her face.

It had just dawned on her that the crowd seemed thinner now, that there was finally some room to breathe, when Daniel drew her away by the arm. One of his brothers had brought a record player and an extension cord: people were dancing in the backyard. Daniel pulled her through the kitchen, down the back stoop, and out onto the grass where the younger guests had formed a large, laughing circle. Delighted by their own spontaneity and by the appearance of the bride and groom in their midst, they cheered and applauded while someone rushed back into the kitchen for a
pair of chairs. Soon, Sarah found herself hoisted into the air on the shoulders of the groomsmen who had held the little makeshift
chuppah
unwavering that afternoon. Across from her, Daniel was similarly elevated, and as she watched him bobbing about in front of her while she too heaved and rolled, she feared that the muzzy feeling in her head would turn to dizziness. “Let me down,” she pleaded, putting a hand onto one of the shoulders that held her, but she could barely hear her own voice, let alone make a sound that would rise above the music and the laughter.

As the youngsters danced, Rachel and Clara busied themselves in the dining room and kitchen, overseeing the waiters as they cleared away the meal and set up a trestle table in the hallway that ran the length of the ground floor. Clara was checking that it was good and secure when Rachel brought forth a lace tablecloth and, with help from the eager women who now crowded around, laid it out and smoothed it down with a proud hand.

“My grandmother’s… all the way from Russia.”

It had always seemed a miraculous thing to her, this one precious heirloom that her late mother had somehow managed to bring across continents and oceans. “Look at the handiwork,” her cousin Leah cooed, sensing Rachel needed the cloth to be admired.

Pleased, Rachel surveyed the cloth and then beckoned to a waiter to start loading the stacks of plain white china plates onto the table. They were rentals, not as fine as the lace on which they would sit, but she hadn’t enough of her own good dishes to serve this many. Down in the basement, where Rachel had resorted to storing the desserts, Clara was gingerly removing wax paper from trays, readying each one for Rachel, knowing better than to bring anything out to the
table herself. Delicately, gently, with care not to disturb a single cookie, Rachel started to make the little trips up and down the basement steps, bringing out a perfectly iced cake, a lush-looking strudel, or big dish of sliced fruit, placing it on the table, standing back to survey the effect, then returning for another. At ten o’clock, she gave Sam the signal. He went round the guests now scattered about the living room and dining room before heading out to the yard to shepherd the dancers inside. It was time. The dessert table was ready.

Suddenly, Sarah found herself alone under the silent night sky. Through the ceremony, the dinner, and the impromptu dancing, she had felt uncomfortably hot, but now a spring breeze was blowing and she shivered. Wearing a fiercesome girdle and clinging stockings underneath a dress that exposed her chest and shoulders, she could feel both the perspiration running down the inside of her thighs and cool chills passing across her back. All day she had longed to be alone, to be rid of Rachel’s fussing, of the cantor’s singing, of the eager guests pressing to congratulate her, of the wild dancers who lifted up her chair. But now that she was here, she just wanted Daniel. She had not spoken to him all day and, indeed, had barely looked at him, for she had not found the courage to meet his eyes as he had signed the
ketubah
and helped lower the veil over her head, nor the words to share with him as they had sat together at dinner. She started up in awareness that all the rest were gone and hurried back into the house to find him, through the kitchen and the dining room, but she could not see him anywhere. The lights were dim, and to Sarah, hot, cold, exhausted, and still dizzy, the people in these rooms looked increasingly indistinguishable. The more she looked for Daniel, the more impossible it became to recognize any
face at all, the longer she did not see him, the more panicked she became. The bride, queen for the day, had suddenly become a lost child, and as she pushed her way from room to room, excusing herself as she slipped between people who barely seemed to notice her now, there were no more well-wishers or dancing partners, just a mass of bodies amongst which she did not belong.

For the second time in her rush through the house, she reached the dessert table in the hall, and standing there, fought down panic only to find it replaced by awkwardness. To whom should she speak? Where should she move? To cover her uneasiness, to suggest some purpose for this desperate push to the table, for she was no longer hungry in the least but rather felt unpleasantly full, she reached across to the stack of white plates, took one, placed it down on the table in front of her, and began to help herself to the dessert nearest at hand. It was as she sliced into Rachel’s sponge cake, drawing the knife through the delicate waves of white icing, that she saw a shining figure amongst all the grey forms. He was standing down at the other end of the table, squashed out almost to the vestibule by the length of the table, and was looking right back at her, his face transformed by two simultaneous expressions, the one a deep tenderness, the other a wry amusement at their predicament.

And as she looked at him, it was as though Sarah was recognizing Daniel for the first time. During their courtship she had noted his gentleness, appreciated his tact, and felt that he did not demand her to be other than she was, most of all that he did not insist that she be happier than she was. Yet, if she had said yes when he had proposed on that day at the end of their autumn walk, she embraced him more with gratitude than passion, regarding him most of all as a
solution. He was what you might call a compromise, although Rachel and Rabbi Cohn would call him a good husband. Now, alone with his face, Sarah knew the depths of his emotion and felt her own love rise to meet it. He would embrace their partnership as joyous work and expect her to do the same. It would be a union of equals, free of pity and pride, and it would raise her up to the serene place she secretly knew she deserved.