Mme Proust and the Kosher Kitchen (42 page)

She was also a favourite customer at the fish shop a few doors down from the greengrocer, and if the fishmonger did not understand why she politely refused all his beautiful shellfish, he worked to find for her fresher and finer catches than the slabs of cod and bluefish that might satisfy most of his clientele.

Fish was crucial to Sarah’s project, for as long as she could coax Daniel and Maxime to eat it, cooking up the flour-dredged sole
meunière
in sparkling butter while ignoring their demands for meat, she could serve not only an orange crème or chocolate éclair for dessert but also cheese at the end of the meal, picking up a melting piece of the increasingly acceptable Bries available at a new gourmet shop that had opened over on Mount Pleasant. She came to recognize that quenelles, with their delicate flavour and airy texture, were a kind of gefilte fish: you blend together the fish with eggs into a smooth paste that is formed into little sausage-like shapes and poached in boiling water. In France, the dish is served in a lobster sauce, but Sarah discovered that a creamy tomato sauce or one made with smoked salmon was equally acceptable. And the day she realized that a mousse made with pure bitter chocolate and egg whites contained no milk, and so was the perfect dessert to follow a roast, steak, or stew, marked a little victory.

Other women might wonder at her; they might, seeing her popping into the corner store on Saturday morning or passing Daniel raking the leaves the same afternoon, point out that the Segals were not particularly observant in other areas of life. Rachel might consider the expanding kitchen in North Toronto an unnecessary fuss created under the influence of Sarah’s ostentatious in-laws; Clara might suspect that her own cooking was being upstaged by her daughter-in-law. Daniel might scratch his head sometimes, only to conclude that anything that kept his wife happily occupied was a gift. But Sarah did not care what others might think and pursued her project further. Assiduously working butter into the flour, she spent Fridays making croissants that dissolved in the mouth on Saturday morning before
shul
. The kosher kitchen became for Sarah a place of reconciliation.

At six-thirty, hunger winning out over injured feelings, Maxime appeared and asked, in French, “What’s for dinner?”

“I’m making quenelles. And there’s crème caramel for dessert.”

“What’s that?”

“You remember, those little fish things, in sauce.”

“Fish, again.” Maxime lapsed querulously back into English.

It was increasingly this way between them. She sensed that he resented her very presence, not only in the outside world but even within the house. He chafed against any of the more
pronounced manifestations of her character, her history, her religion, her cooking, and most of all her language, the phrases she had so lovingly imparted to him since babyhood. They had spoken French together as though it were their own private dialect so that he was amazed, on entering high school and encountering for the first time a teacher for whom this was also a mother tongue, that these precious syllables could be spoken with fluency anywhere outside his own home. Yet now he refused them: once introduced to the larger world, Maxime could not return to the microcosm of his mother’s culture with the same ease, and adolescence sat awkwardly upon him.

Whether it embarrassed her son or not, Sarah made no apologies for who she was, indeed she made few efforts to fit into the larger Anglo-Saxon environment in which she lived. As she grew into middle age, her accent, barely perceptible as a young woman, seemed to strengthen rather than diminish, so that she could see Maxime shrinking when she spoke to strangers, pestering a repairman about his muddy boots or questioning the department-store attendant as to the location of boys’ underwear, in tones that increasingly hinted at the outrageous Parisians, the Mimis and Maurices, from the old movies his father so loved. And to Maxime himself, she spoke in French all the time as she had always done: no matter how much he might mumble or reply in English, he could not impart to her, when it came to their conversations, any sense of awkwardness in her own language nor ease in the other. He had heard his father speak Sarah’s language only on one or two uncomfortable occasions, but Daniel understood it perfectly well, for she often extended her French conversation with Maxime out towards her husband, so that much of the talk in their home was in her language and under her control.

No more did Sarah hide her history. To Daniel’s earnest yet abstract lectures on the events of the war, she added her own story, delivered with less emotion because it contained more pain, uncovered cautiously lest it explode yet resolutely that it never be a secret from her son. And here too, he seemed ashamed to accept the heritage she tried to offer him without shame, and if he was willing to define himself within the rich and cultivated circles of North American Jews, he did not see himself as a grandchild of the Shoah.

To him, growing up without privation of any kind, Rachel and Sam and all the smells of the house on Gladstone Avenue offered a pleasant exoticism easier to grasp and to cherish than the confused image in his mind’s eye, inspired by old photographs and movies, of a glamorous young Parisian wife boarding a train that eventually led to Auschwitz, with her small black hat on a cocky angle and the seams on her stockings running in two perfectly straight lines down the backs of her legs. The memory of his grandfather, the food exploding his shrunken belly, he put from his mind.

“More?” Sarah picked up the serving spoon and reached into the dish of quenelles as she turned to Daniel, speaking in English. He was still finishing the last mouthful of his first helping, and indicated with a hand that he was satisfied. “Maxime?” She turned to her son.

“No thanks.”

“Oh, you are not going to leave me with leftovers, are you? Maxime, there are just two left.” She had switched to French.

“No. Can we have dessert now.”

“Maxime!”

Daniel then interrupted in English, maintaining the bilingual rally that often marked their dinner-table conversation: “Well, maybe I’ll change my mind. Just one more. They are so good.”

Sarah spooned a single quenelle onto her husband’s plate before scraping the very end of the dish onto her own, leaving the casserole empty but for a few creamy pink smears of tomato sauce.

“I went over to the building on Yonge today…” The landlord in Daniel’s medical building was raising the rent, and he was investigating alternatives. “You know, it’s nice. There’s a big office and good reception area, and they’ve proper soundproofing between the reception and the surgery. But he wants over a thousand…”

“Can we have dessert now?”

Daniel stopped speaking, and looked across at his son with some annoyance: “What is eating you? Can’t we have a normal family dinner any more?”

“It’s all right, dear. We’ll talk about it with coffee.” Sarah rose and cleared their plates. “I’ll get the salad.” She considered a green salad a poor excuse for an appetizer and always served it at the end of the meal, in the French fashion. But in a concession to Maxime’s impatience, she also picked up a tray on which she had placed the three little pots containing their dessert and held it in one hand while clutching the wooden salad bowl in the other and pushing back through the swinging door that separated kitchen from dining room with the weight of her body. She put the dessert on the sideboard, so when they had finished the salad she had barely to rise from her chair to reach it.

Now that she thought of it, the crème caramel was too rich a dessert to follow the quenelles, both saucy in texture.
She would have been better to serve a fruit salad or apple compote, with a little whipped cream since it was permitted after the fish, or perhaps the featherweight anise cake, rich in eggs and butter, delicately flavoured with licorice, which was a speciality of hers she had not made in months. At least the green salad had provided an acidic break between creamy courses, but she resolved to consider these issues more carefully in the future. Perhaps she overestimated her audience’s powers of discrimination, for Daniel and Maxime now dug their spoons into the crème caramel without hesitation, but these niceties did matter to the cook herself.

Maxime had hurriedly eaten about three mouthfuls of the custard, barely registering its velvet smoothness and soft vanilla flavour, when his mother leaned towards him and inquired coyly, “Find anything?”

Just as she said the words, he spied in the pale-yellow cream the minuscule red veins of colour, like threads of saffron in a dish of rice. Prodding with his spoon, he unearthed a maraschino cherry.

“A surprise,” he said, in a dull voice in which sarcasm hovered just underneath his evident boredom.

“A surprise,” laughed Sarah and, leaning forward, ruffled Maxime’s long black curls with her hand.

This was a treat she had prepared for him since childhood, when he had giggled with fresh delight every time his spoon found the colourful cherry. She had discovered the tall bottle of maraschino cherries on one of the lengthy trips to the supermarket during which she scrutinized the labels on any number of cans and jars. She wondered to what use she could put this permissible treat, and perhaps unconsciously recalling from her prolonged reading of cookbooks the English habit of telling guests’ fortunes with silver charms
secreted in the Christmas pudding or the French custom of hiding a bean in the flat almond cake served at Epiphany to determine which child shall be king for the day, she placed a single red cherry at the bottom of Maxime’s custard.

“A surprise, a surprise!” Sarah felt her great love for her son running in her veins, rising up towards her heart and her head, and she smiled at this sulky seventeen-year-old with such affection that he could no longer maintain his disdainful pose and he grinned back at her happy face.

When they had finished the meal, Maxime ran upstairs while his parents retreated to the kitchen where Daniel loaded the dishwasher and Sarah prepared coffee. This was her favourite time with her husband, the moment at the end of the day when they would sit in the living room together, carefully sip their coffee, and weigh their joys and their cares; measure their achievements and make their decisions—should Daniel move his office?; would they finally visit Israel next year?—or, if lacking topics for conversation, turn to books or a favourite television program for entertainment. They were emerging from the kitchen, both carrying mugs of coffee, when Maxime bounded back down the stairs and headed for the front door. Sarah carefully placed her mug on a side table and darted towards the front hall. “Where are you going?”

“Out.”

“What do you mean ‘out’?”

“Just going out for a bit. I won’t be late.”

“What about your homework.”

“I did it.”

“All of it?”

“Yes, all of it. I only had a chemistry lab. I worked on it with Roger at lunch and then I wrote up the results before dinner.”

“That school. Your teachers do not give you enough homework. Exams are next month and you should be working hard now, at this time of year. How will be ready for university if you do not learn to work? On a Tuesday night, you should have studying to do. I should speak to Mr. Saunders.”

“Okay. I am off now. Bye.”

“No. You are not going until you tell me where.”

“Ma…”

“We still have a right to know where you are going. You could be out doing drugs or…”

“Ma, I am not doing drugs.” Maxime’s tone was one of infinite patience finally worn down by persistent stupidity. “I am just going down to the park to meet Roger for a bit.”

“The park! You know there are all those druggies now in the park, and the police patrol there all the time. They might stop you, you never know with the police, they always distrust young men, and then who knows…”

“Yeah, yeah, I am going to get arrested by the Gestapo.”

She did not reply. In the silence, mother and son savoured their respective hurts. Daniel, who had been sitting in the living room listening to this exchange in French but not intervening, now quickly rose from his chair to join them.

“Max. Home at ten. No later. Say hi to Roger for us.”

“Thanks.” Max hurried out, banging the door in his haste to be gone.

“I don’t know what we are going to do.” As they returned to their chairs, Sarah was grudgingly acknowledging defeat by grumbling about it first. “You know, he is not going to get into U of T if he keeps this up. He doesn’t have
proper study habits. It may not make any difference now, but next year is Grade 13. He has to get good marks next year. He is going to wind up at Western or Windsor or somewhere, and from there he will be lucky to get into any medical school, let alone U of T. I know they favour students from their own science programs. It makes sense. And if he doesn’t go to med school here, we will never see him. He will be off for years, miles away…” Sarah, who had been gesticulating with increasing fervour as she built her complaint into real fear, now let her hands fall to her sides in hopelessness as her words trailed off.

“Sarah.” Daniel’s tone was gentle. “You worry too much.”

It was true; she knew it. As Maxime became a Toronto teenager, making friendships with the English-speaking Jews and Gentiles who peopled his school life, she often felt annoyed at him for being someone different and apart from her, so distant from the cherished baby who had seemed to share her soul. His integration was inevitable, but she felt it as a betrayal nonetheless. There was, however, one fault that she acknowledged as her own: Yes, she worried too much.

When Maxime was a baby, these were common enough fears—that his temperature was too high one day or his weight too low for a month, that his acceptance of solid food seemed belated, that it was past time for him to speak, that his winter cold was dragging on, or that his tiny feet were not warm enough. But as Maxime grew from babyhood to childhood, and from childhood to adolescence, the source of Sarah’s anxieties was not some external inadequacy over which she could exercise, at the very least, vigilance if not outright control. As he took a public bus to high school, ventured downtown on a weekday after classes, insisted that he
be allowed to attend a party on a Saturday night, and eagerly anticipated the fast-approaching day when he would learn to drive, her worries were his actual creations, new hurts he forced upon her. She knew she should not rise to the bait, and yet, inevitably, she did. She would watch him, on a February morning, getting ready to go out the door to school without a hat on his head and only thin gloves on his hands. She would be unable to bite her tongue, knowing full well what annoyance and petulance would greet her remarks, and she would persist: “It’s twenty below this morning. You must wear a hat.”