Mme Proust and the Kosher Kitchen (26 page)

“Signora, I have a surprise for you.” He gestured her over to a prominent display, snatched up a bundle of the pale, thick stalks, and held it high for her inspection.

“Oh.” Sarah almost swooned. “Asparagus. Real asparagus.”

“I thought it would make you happy.”

“Mr. Lombardi.” She paused, stilling a sentimentality that seemed out of place in a greengrocer’s shop. “Where does it come from?”

“From France, only from France. They are flying it in now. You can buy it already in New York. Now, they try Toronto. Maybe… you know why it’s white?”

“Because it grows underground. They pick it before it has a chance to ever see the sun and turn green. And the flavour, the flavour is… I remember…” Sarah could not speak her memories, and brushed them away with a flip of the hand and a smile. “I’ll have three bunches, please.”

“I knew the Signora would understand. People, they don’t know, they are stupid. They have never heard of it, they complain it costs a lot of money.”

Mr. Lombardi carefully selected three of the best-looking bunches and placed them on his countertop, beside the till.

“What else, today, Signora?”

Sarah selected some green beans, a head of lettuce, and a bag of oranges and waited while Mr. Lombardi did up the bill by hand with a stubby pencil on a chit of paper and then rang the total into his cash register.

Sarah could still remember the fruit and vegetables of her childhood, and the street market where her mother had bought them from vendors who also added up their bills with a stubby pencil clasped in a dirty, work-worn hand. In late April or early May, the first asparagus, harvested before it ever appeared above the ground so that its flesh would maintain a delicate pallor, made its debut in the new sunlight of a Paris spring, like some shy debutante at a glittering ball. For two brief marvellous weeks, the vegetable vendors seemed to sell nothing else, trussing a few dozen stalks into a bundle and then building pyramids of these bundles on the tabletops of their makeshift stalls as they cried out,
“Les asperges, les asperges. Regardez mes belles asperges.”
At home, the maid would bring to the table a heaping dish of the stuff bathed in a frothy yellow sauce of egg yolks and lemon juice that Maman had made herself. She always insisted on that. Papa, as he plucked a white stalk from his plate to demonstrate, would once again repeat that the only way to eat asparagus was with the fingers, before he popped it into his mouth, nibbled through the soft tip, and then dragged the more fibrous end back out through his teeth to tackle it again. As it shredded and collapsed in the mouth, each piece revealed joyfully to the tongue that undefinable flavour that one could never quite remember from one spring to the next, an exquisitely delicate bouquet enriched by the molten egg yolks and then suddenly, sharply enlivened by the lemon juice.

In Toronto, as she struggled to cook appealing meals for her new husband, Sarah found produce—that was the grim word they used at the big supermarket down the street—a trial. When she had first arrived in the city, in the midst of the war,
Rachel had served potatoes, cabbage, onions, carrots, turnips, and parsnips all winter and spring. There were always apples, but all other fruit came in cans saturated in a sugar syrup that eclipsed the very flavour it sought to preserve. Briefly, in the late summer and early fall, there were pears and peaches, berries, tomatoes, and a selection of green vegetables grown in the flatlands of Niagara, south of the city, around the lake. Oranges and bananas were a special treat; green peppers were exotic, asparagus came only in cans, and nobody had ever seen an artichoke.

Well, you couldn’t live on such a diet, and sure enough, after the war, the selection started very slowly to grow. Florida oranges and South American bananas could now be eaten every day. Thanks to California, there was plenty of lettuce in the winter. And today, there was white asparagus, flown in all the way from France.

Mr. Lombardi carefully lowered the fruit and vegetables into a paper grocery bag, handed it to Sarah with both hands, and then bowed ever so slightly as she left the shop. She stopped next at the fishmonger, where she settled for some rather expensive sole to accompany the asparagus, remembered her errand at the pharmacy, and then walked slowly home to unpack her few groceries and make herself a light lunch. Tonight she would cook Daniel a dinner fragrant with springtime and hope.

Daniel, meanwhile, was sitting in the reference section of the main branch of the Toronto Public Library, leafing through the
B’s
in the Paris phone book. He occasionally asked his secretary to block out an extra hour at lunch for him, or some time first thing in the morning, so that he could attend to personal business. After eight years of private practice, his business was finally growing. People might distrust a
new face at first, wonder that this boy could possibly be competent even if he was the son of Dr. Segal, the surgeon, down at Mount Sinai, but some of them eventually grew to like a younger doctor. They figured that he was up on things and, at the very least, could be counted on to outlive his patients. The years when Daniel barely had enough patients to fill a day of work, let alone a week, were long gone, but it was still easy enough to find a little gap in his schedule.

He did not tell Sarah about these small absences of his. He was working on this particular project with her permission, to be sure, but not her active participation, and he thought it best not to report too regularly on his activities until he had some results to show. He would even ask Miss Beauséjour, the French girl down the hall in Dr. Whitting’s office, to translate the letters he would write rather than risk building up Sarah’s expectations or stirring her memories.
“Cher monsieur: Je vous écris de la part de ma femme…”

He finished up at the library, returned to the office for a 2:15 patient who was suffering from asthma, and spent the rest of the afternoon with healthy babies of various ages. He left the office in time to catch a northbound subway train at 5:30 and did get home punctually that evening, at ten minutes before six.

“Oh, good, you’re home. Daniel, where’s your jacket?”

Sarah looked startled at the appearance of her husband in shirt sleeves. He looked down at his arms.

“Guess I left it at the office. It’s warm out.”

“It’s not summer yet. You never know at this time of year when it’s going to suddenly get chilly. And what will people think—you’re a doctor, in shirt sleeves. It’s not appropriate.”

“They’ll just think it was a warm evening.”

“What are you going to do tomorrow morning? What will you wear to the office? Oh you know, I had just had it dry cleaned.”

“Well, I can wear the check, and bring the other one home at the end of the day.” Daniel was starting to wonder if he had not left the jacket at the library, and silently began planning how he might retrieve it in the next day or two without Sarah noticing its absence again.

“What’s for supper?” he asked, thinking to distract her.

“Fish, some sole… And a surprise, a treat. Look at this—” Sarah held up one stalk of the white asparagus from the cutting board where she had been carefully whittling the thicker ends with a carrot peeler.

“What is it?”

“Asparagus, real asparagus. The white kind, from France. Mr. Lombardi had it in his shop this morning, and I couldn’t resist. We used to eat it when I was a girl…”

“I’ll set the table,” Daniel replied, and reached for the cutlery.

“Oh, no, use the fish forks,” she said with a trace of irritation, reaching across him to show him the utensils she wanted.

At the table, Sarah tried to drop the subject of the missing suit jacket from her mind while Daniel tried to appreciate the flavour of his special dinner, and they passed the evening companionably enough. But with these smaller worries to distract her, Sarah had forgotten to tell Daniel what was really on her mind. They were lying in bed that night when she remembered.

“Daniel?”

“Hmmm…”

“You know, I’m late this month, three days now.”

After eight years of marriage, Daniel knew better than to get their hopes up.

“We’ll see, darling, we’ll see.” He reached across for her hand, clasped it, released it, and then rolled over towards sleep.

One late-summer afternoon about four months later, Sarah was carefully cutting beefsteak tomatoes into translucent slices with the sharpest knife in her kitchen when the phone rang. It was September and Mr. Lombardi was proudly displaying wicker baskets full of big, local tomatoes. Each one was a perfect globe of deep red, its yearning flesh threatening to erupt from beneath the green button at its crown. Its flavour would perfectly combine acidity and sweetness; its texture would balance a pleasing firmness with a lush softness. Sarah had carefully picked through the baskets that morning, selecting the roundest and ripest specimens for Daniel’s dinner.

Sarah and Mr. Lombardi increasingly agreed on the importance of seasonal produce. As the wonders of California, South America, even South Africa and Europe started to show up at the supermarket, Sarah had at first snatched them up and eagerly popped them into her shopping basket. But she was often disappointed: They didn’t taste quite right. She would never say so to Mr. Lombardi but the asparagus of her memory tasted more fragrant than the ones he had sold her last spring. It was as though their flavour was somehow dissipated by the trans-Atlantic flight. In the supermarket, big Californian strawberries were now available by April, two months before the local ones would appear, but they were watery and bland. Tomatoes could be
had at any time of the year, but they were hard and greenish, and when she tried to ripen them on the kitchen windowsill, Sarah found they only became woody in texture. No one else seemed to notice or care, but Sarah knew better. She had become a connoisseur of the seasons, Mr. Lombardi’s most treasured client, and it was only now, in August and September, that the tomatoes were really worth eating, thinly sliced, with a little salt.

As she cut into the first, however, her mind was not fully on her task. She was busy imagining a phone call from the police.

“Mrs. Segal, Mrs. Daniel Segal?”

She would reply politely in the affirmative.

“I am afraid there has been an accident…”

She would remain calm. Afterwards, people would comment on that, praising her cool-headedness. She would remain calm as she took the news, drove to the hospital, and rushed to his bedside.

It was 6:40 and Daniel was ten minutes late for their appointed supper hour. Sarah was worried. Daniel tried hard never to be late. He knew how much it upset her, gave her opportunity for worry. She always feared the worst. And so, to combat her fears, she sometimes played this little mental game: she really and truly imagined the worst. He had been hit by a car, crossing the street on the way out of his office, and was now lying in a downtown hospital. Or perhaps his subway train had derailed and he had fallen into a tangled mess of passengers as ambulances flocked to the scene.

Sarah had discovered in life that things were never quite as you imagined they would be. She had, for example, rehearsed her wedding day in her mind for a whole year in advance yet found the actual event wholly different, a blur of
light and darkness, cold and heat, pain and joy, quite unlike the serene pageant she had anticipated. Applying this lesson to the sadder or simply the more mundane days on her calendar, she reckoned that if she imagined Daniel’s accident in gruesome detail, there was sure to be some other explanation for his lateness. The game was not always successful, for Sarah had a powerful imagination and sometimes only fuelled her fears by confronting them, but the alternative, an empty, placid mind that would take life as it came—and only when it came—was beyond Sarah’s capability.

On this day, she was doing rather well with her game, embroidering her conversation with the police with what seemed to her a wealth of realistic detail, when the phone really did ring, arousing her so harshly from her reverie that her hand slipped and the knife sliced into the first knuckle of the middle finger of her left hand. She flinched and gasped simultaneously and instinctively raised her finger to her mouth. The taste of the blood was pleasantly metallic, but there was an alarming amount. The phone kept ringing. Sarah turned, unsure what to do, panic rising within her. The phone persisted. Sarah found her mouth filling with blood. The phone rang again. She turned, crossed the kitchen, and with her good right hand took the receiver off the hook.

“Hi. It’s me…”

Sarah, her bleeding finger still jammed in her mouth, moaned into the mouthpiece like a wounded animal.

“Sarah?”

She moaned again, this time dripping blood onto her chin.

“Sarah? Is that you? What’s wrong?”

She removed her finger from her mouth.

“I’m bleeding.” Freed from the suction of her mouth, the wound now started to bleed even more profusely, the blood dripping down onto the telephone table.

“Bleeding? Well, that’s…” Daniel paused a moment, realized he had perhaps misunderstood and backed up. “What do you mean you’re bleeding?”