Mme Proust and the Kosher Kitchen (49 page)

“He’s working very hard. He wants to stick with research.”

“No daughter-in-law yet?”

“No, not yet.”

The new rabbi came. Really, Sarah should be able to remember his name. He was the one who had replaced Rabbi Vine, who had replaced Rabbi Cohn, now long dead. Sarah thought it was good of this young man to bother since he had never met Rachel. She had never joined their congregation, even if she had kept in touch with Rabbi Cohn over the years. Daniel’s colleague from the new medical building, a dermatologist named Dr. Ritz, dropped by, bringing his wife too. Sarah liked them. She and Daniel had invited them over to dinner a few times and now Laura Ritz suggested an outing some afternoon.

“Soon. When you feel up to it. This time of year, it’s so easy to get stuck indoors.”

Rachel’s cousin Leah from Montreal was there. She had split up with her husband, years ago, and moved to Toronto to get away from her family, or so she said. She must be at
least eighty-five, Sarah reckoned, but she still lived on her own, and was fully mobile, for she boasted to Daniel about her regular gambling sprees, at the casino in Niagara Falls. She took the bus there.

“It’s a hoot, and I never even see the water. Don’t go anywhere near those Falls. Too busy with my chips.”

Sarah looked out over them all, as they came and went, and wondered at them. These were her friends, her family, her community. She supposed, at seventy, that she belonged.

And Clara came daily, settling her large frame into the good leather armchair, while Daniel and Sarah perched on the sofa from which they had, following the tradition, removed all the cushions so that they would sit lower, diminished by their loss. Holding her matronly head of thick white hair high and proud, Clara regarded them and their guests with an appraising look. Lionel had died fifteen years ago, back when Maxime was still in high school, but his ninety-two-year-old widow was utterly undiminished, indeed somewhat enlivened by a recent operation that had successfully removed a cataract from her right eye.

“I brought some cookies, Sarah,” she had announced on the first day as she opened a tin packed with rugelach and brownies. “I wanted to do my share.” Actually, Sarah had baked herself. She had foreseen the eventuality of shivah since the December day when the doctor had said Rachel wouldn’t last, and although she had predicted many contributions from family and friends, she had wanted her own cooking to be served in her home. She had concentrated on sweets, they were comforting, after all, and spent January baking batch after batch of vanilla wafers, thin little almond cookies, and Rachel’s own recipe for sponge cake, all of which she had carefully packaged up in plastic and
stored in the freezer. She had avoided all richer cakes, considered rugelach and rejected it, eschewed anything with chocolate, because she reasoned that only the most delicate, the most tactful of pastries would be acceptable in a house of mourning.

In the living room, as Clara conveyed the rugelach to her mouth, the doorbell rang. Maxime, who was sitting with them, rose.

“I’ll get it,” he said and left the room for the vestibule where he could be heard quietly greeting and helping with coats.

He had been there all week, opening the door, talking with their guests, making the tea and coffee, passing the food. Sarah looked at him in wonder too, and, aside from the odd thank you, did not speak to him.

At first, Sarah had behaved as though the night she made the
pot-au-feu
had never happened. She ignored Maxime’s announcement about his research and all its implications. Some Fridays, he would come to his parents’ house for dinner. He and his father would talk medicine, without ever really discussing Maxime’s work. He would still name friends, male and female, without ever really explaining to his parents what kind of friendships these might be. Sarah, who had spent so much of life anxiously anticipating things that never did happen, now tried to block out something that really had happened, as though her son’s unspoken sexuality was a phase she could wait out. Maxime made no attempt to penetrate this atmosphere of silence and illusion, and as it lengthened he increasingly stayed away. By the time they were sitting shivah, three years after the evening on which he had first spoken, Maxime had not set foot in the house in North Toronto for months and had last seen Sarah and
Daniel in December at the hospital when Rachel first had her stroke.

Now, he reappeared in the living room with some long-time neighbours from down the street, a portly man in a bright-red sweater with a painfully thin little wife hovering silently behind him, her arms full of a large, foil-covered dish.

“Sarah. How are you? Our condolences. A sad occasion, but good to see you all the same. Good to see Max, too,” the man gestured back behind him. “Never see you these days, Max. You should come round more. Neglecting your parents in their dotage, eh?”

“No, no, not all,” Maxime said, attempting to laugh, while accepting the dish from the woman’s outstretched arms.

And so it went for the rest of the afternoon and into the evening until Sarah thankfully shut the door on the last of the friends and relations while Daniel set off in the car to drive Clara home.

Sarah cleared up some teacups and cake plates in the living room and came back into the kitchen to find Maxime stacking the dishes in the wrong dishwasher.

“Laisse-les, laisse-les
. Leave it,” she instructed him. “I’ll do it.”

“I can do it.”

“No, no. Leave it.” She closed in on the dishwasher, making shooing motions with her hands until he moved aside, and then began taking the dishes back out.

“What are you doing?”

“This is meat, this one.”

“Oh, right. I wasn’t thinking. Sorry.”

“It doesn’t matter. I’ll just run it through empty to clean it out.”

“Right, well. I should get going then…”

“You’re not going to stay for some dinner?”

“No, no. I’m stuffed. All those cookies…”

“It’s late, but I was going to make a proper dinner.”

“No, really. I still have some work I should do tonight.”

“Okay. You’ll come Thursday.”

“Yes, Ma. I’ll be there.”

On Thursday, after their shivah was over, all three of them had agreed to visit the Villa Nova, where the manager, a high-energy woman who looked young enough to be Sarah’s daughter and rejoiced in a personality that was part social worker and part hostess, had insisted on some gathering to mark Rachel’s passing.

“This was her home, Mrs. Segal. We are in mourning too, and most of the residents can’t get over to your place. Besides, it’s good for the old people. They need to acknowledge that somebody has left. There is no point hiding death from the elderly.” The manager smiled a powerful smile and Sarah, made to feel she was somehow being selfish and that if she refused it would be all too obvious she was deeply relieved to be free of her weekly obligation to visit the Villa Nova, had been forced to agree. But it was, as she had anticipated, a painful affair filled with awkward pauses as she tried to make conversation with the deaf and the confused, unsure whether they had actually known Rachel at all. Daniel fared better, of course, talking or not talking, smiling or serious, with Maxime at his side to occasionally enliven, prompt, or merely give him some respite. But Sarah felt increasingly distant from her surroundings and, by the time they left at four o’clock, deeply weary.

The weather, which had turned warmer in the days they sat shivah, had changed again and was now sharply cold. The sky was blue and cloudless, still light in the afternoon as the short, dark days were now, with March approaching, suddenly and swiftly replaced by longer, lighter ones. That afternoon the kitchen in the house in North Toronto was frigid but filled with sun. Sarah stood there now with Daniel and Maxime waiting for the kettle to boil for tea, her annoyance that her ever-charitable husband had once again shown her up still fresh upon her, and her estrangement from her son rippling through the chilly air. And it was in this atmosphere of exhaustion and irritation that Daniel made the mistake, prompted by a sigh from Sarah, of offering some thoughtless consolation: “Well, we all have to die some time. She had a good life.”

Sarah turned on him and replied angrily: “Some time, some time. She had her time, ninety-four years of it.” She switched now into sharp and bitter French. “Some were not so lucky, some did not have their time. Some did not live to see their grandchildren grow up, grow up to be what, what…” She gestured contemptuously towards Maxime. He and Daniel stared at her, uncomprehending, as she started to confuse her grievances and sorrows, jumbling them all together, anger flooding into her heart and filling every little cranny of discontentment or disappointment, until she was a shaking mass who could not distinguish between her genuine grief at losing Rachel and her jealousy that this woman had been given the long life her own mother had not, between her incomprehension of her son and her frustration that the kettle seemed to be taking forever to boil. She jerked its cord furiously from the outlet—“Oh, this stupid thing, we might as well give up”—and as she did so, knocked with
her sleeve the china cups sitting on the countertop waiting for the tea.

The sound of the china shattering on the floor seemed to break the last of her reserve: she turned on the shards lying at her feet and hurled the milk jug down to join them. As it fell, its contents spilled all over the trim black wool suit that she wore with Sophie Bensimon’s pearls sitting tidily at the neck. Then she tugged at the cutlery drawer nearest to her and, holding up one end while the other simply fell away, dumped its contents onto the pile. Seized now by a sudden inspiration, she crossed the kitchen to the second cutlery drawer, where the knives and forks for cutting and eating meat were kept, and pulled it out, this time having to fling the cutlery a good distance, to join the stuff already there.

“Is this why they died? So we can live here, in this house, with two sets of dishes?” She turned to the meat cupboard and flung several plates out, before purposely striding across to the milk cupboard and grabbing a bowl that came to hand, hurling it down to join the rest. The little pots in ribbed white porcelain into which she had so often poured crème caramel crashed down to join the dinner plates on which she had served a
boeuf bourguignon
made with oyster mushrooms, pearl onions, and a solid red wine. Shards of the bowls in which Maxime and Daniel had eaten breakfast cereals covered in milk now mixed with chips off the big enamel casserole in which Sarah liked to simmer her famous stews.
Milchik
and
flayshig
, the two sets of dishes came pouring from their cupboards, breaking, shattering, smashing until Sarah stood weeping in a pile of fragments.

Daniel backed away, horrified by an anger he had never seen before, refusing to know that this was the emotion that lay underneath Sarah’s gracious melancholy and fierce anxieties.

It was Maxime who moved gingerly forward, picking his way through the bits of glass and china until he reached his mother.

“Maman.”

He gave her the name of his childhood, and took her in his arms the way he had held patients as they, shaking and crying, faced the results of blood tests.

And as he too began to weep, they stood there together, holding each other in the ruins of the kosher kitchen, finally mourning his grandparents and her grandchildren.

T
HEY SAY WE MONTREALERS
are insular. It isn’t true. We may live on an island, but we know the world. We seek the Florida sun in winter and, French and English alike, we are fascinated by New York. Sometimes, I’ll fly down there for a weekend, treating myself to the museums and shops, pretending the price tags are in Canadian dollars, ignoring reality for a day or two. Wouldn’t it be glorious to be a New Yorker, to speak their hard American English, to know that you ruled the world and lived at its epicentre?

We crave Paris too. I save up for the visit here every few years. My parents have friends who own a studio off the Canal Saint-Martin, and I’ll rent it out when I can afford a longer stay. How luscious to live in French, to speak only one language, and that the most beautiful in the world, to speak it fast, smart, and proud. How glorious to pretend, for a moment, for a week or two, that one is Parisian, that there is only one metropolis, and beyond it merely the provinces.

No, we Montrealers are not insular. When they say that, what they mean is that we never visit Toronto. That’s true. We don’t visit Toronto. Why would we want to? It’s unilingual and monolithic, not in New York’s brash, exciting manner, but in some duller, less colourful way. It doesn’t tempt, as we say in French. Well, in truth, we don’t know much about the place, and perhaps we are a little afraid. It’s a confusing city, hard to pin down, so resolutely anglophone yet so visibly polyglot. On one of the few occasions that I have visited Toronto, I rode a bus downtown from Bloor Street and found myself suddenly in Hong Kong surrounded by Chinese faces, food shops selling bok choy, and restaurants with slabs of meat all plastered in a brilliant-red sauce hanging in the window. That same evening I was taken to dinner in a neighbourhood where the street signs were in Greek.

It’s not that we don’t have our immigrant communities in Montreal, we are francophones, anglophones, and
allophones
. It is our little joke that has become a label. Through a polychrome archway recently erected across a southern section of the Boulevard Saint-Laurent, you’ll find two blocks of Chinatown. In May, there’s a huge Portuguese festival that stops traffic up on the Plateau Mont Royal. But these are contained demonstrations that do not disturb our original dance of English and French. We are surprised and puzzled by Toronto’s reality. What if we were to speak not merely English and French, but Cantonese and Mandarin, Greek, Farsi, and Italian? To a Montrealer the prospect is alarming. In Toronto, they barely seem to care, as if, there, language itself could be taken lightly.

So, one day last winter, I am resentfully picking my way through the slushy streets of Toronto, visiting the city for perhaps the third or fourth time in my life. Since we bumped into each other at the medical conference, Max has called occasionally to chat over the phone. He seems to want to draw me back into his orbit. He urges me to visit.