Stuffed (17 page)

Two years later, on June twenty-third, they got married. “He never had a chance of escaping,” Mom says.

Now I’m getting married, and the only thing I’ve ever made is chocolate pudding.

“Mom,” I say, “what’ll I do? I don’t know how to cook.”

“There’s nothing to it, darling.” She gets up from the table and comes back with a cookbook written by a local woman who teaches cooking in adult ed:
The Menu-Cookbook for Entertaining
by Libby Hillman. “All you have to do is follow a recipe. Here. Just open the book. Any page.”

I open the book. Mom takes it from my hands.

“Breast of Chicken in Madeira,” she reads.

“I can’t do this, Mom.”

“See where it says ingredients? You buy them. See where it says six halves of chicken breasts, boned? You don’t have to do that yourself. Ask the butcher. And then you just do everything the recipe says in that order.”

For the next year, anytime anyone comes to dinner, they get Breast of Chicken in Madeira. I get pretty good at Breast of Chicken in Madeira. I get so good, when I take the cookbook out, it automatically opens to page 96. When I’ve mastered Breast of Chicken in Madeira, I invite my parents. I look through Libby Hillman for more recipes and pick out the things that sound the most delicious: Grilled Shrimp in Cream Sauce for an appetizer, and to go with the Breast of Chicken in Madeira, Tossed Salad with Creamy Cheese Dressing, Mushrooms in Port and Cream, Brussels Sprouts with Heavy Sweet Cream, Cauliflower Pie with Grated Cheese and Sour Cream, and for dessert, Chocolate Mousse.

I want the meal to be memorable. It is.

I speak a language with my mother I share with no one else. It is the language of clothes. It recognizes and respects the power of white piqué and navy to signal spring. It honors what a good coat can do for you in the world. It appreciates the whimsy of Moschino and the darts of Armani and the humor in a gray wool sweater with a “fur” collar made of gray wool loops like the one we recently saw in the Boca Loehmann’s. The sweater is on display. It is the last one.

“Isn’t it wonderful!” I say.

“Yes,” Mom agrees.

The saleswoman takes it down. It’s the wrong size. Here my mother and I part company. I buy it anyway.

Bengaline, organza, faille, peplum, toque, tattersall, Dupioni, moiré,
paillette, ottoman, ruche, pavé, crepe de chine, plissé, revers, bouclé, blouson, bombazine. Lamé. Bolero, Eton, mandarin.
I love to say these words aloud, words I use only with my mother. We describe clothes with exquisite economy: “It was a midnight-blue peau de soie djellabah with Alice blue passementerie and raglan sleeves,” the language of clothes being every bit as exotic and operatic as the language of food:
Praline, persillade, caul. Carrageen, clafouti,
capelli d’angelo. Bain-marie, friandise, rouille. Evasée, risotto, chinois.
Sautier, demiglace, Parmigiano-Reggiano.

Flipping through the racks at Loehmann’s with my mother, I feel like a shark nosing out the kill. No, I feel like the shark’s
baby
who learns by watching its mother. Mom is still the best-dressed woman in the room. She’s still the prettiest girl there, wherever there is.

Aunt Honey’s twin grandsons are being bar mitzvahed in California. I go with Mom for a fitting. She’s bought a German-designed black evening suit. It’s off the shoulders, but not décolleté, a twelve-inch cuff exposes her down to just above the start of her cleavage. It’s cut straight over delicately flared pants. The effect is like a bust of my mother on top of a black column. (It helps to be a hipless size 6.) Mom likes the outfit, but she wants the top to taper slightly then flare. She thinks the pants will look better if the inseam has a touch less fabric.

I sit in a chair at the boutique while three people wait for my mother to emerge from the dressing room: The saleswoman, the dressmaker, and the owner of the store. Mom steps up on the platform in front of the three-sided mirror. I am plunged back into my youth, my mother studying herself critically in the mirror, pointing where she thinks the pins should go. She knows what she wants. That’s something she radiates.

“A little here . . . a little here . . . Um-hmmm . . . No . . . Umhmm. What about this?”

The store people hover. They fret. They move pins and look at my mother looking at herself as she dips and turns.

After half an hour I start wandering around the boutique. There isn’t one thing I’d wear. The only thing I like from this store is what my mother has on. Did she find the one good thing? Or does it just look so gorgeous because she’s wearing it?

There’s a mini-conference going on about the length of the pants. Finally Mom’s ready to go. The saleswoman, the dressmaker, and the owner of the store seem anxious but pleased. A job well done. Or so we think. The next day the phone rings. The owner needs Mom to come back. She thinks there may have been an error. Something with the pinning may not be 100 percent right. She needs another opinion. The best dressmaker they have is coming in today and she’d like her to check my mother before they actually cut fabric.

We go back. Mom gets repinned. Then we head for the Boca jewelry exchange. Mom needs a necklace to go with the outfit. Joel, her Florida jeweler, has just the thing—a gold and diamond sunburst. My mother’s head is the sun, the sun’s rays are graduated diamonds beaming out of her neck. The necklace needs nothing. It is perfect.

Audrey Morgen Volk and her darling brother, Robert Irwin Morgen. No flowers were allowed in the apartment while he was overseas.

MALLOMARS

Conventional wisdom is evanescent. It’s true, but only as long as it’s true. Conventional wisdom lasts as long as a haircut. It’s truth for the time being. For three years my family lined up for fish-oil pills every morning because the Inuit, whose diet is largely fish, were reported to have the lowest rate of heart attacks. For three years we had fish-oil breath. Now it turns out it’s low stress that makes Inuits live longer.

Tofu has fat in it.

Yogurt causes cataracts in rats.

If you wait long enough, anything that’s bad for you gets good for you. And anything that’s good for you gets bad. This got me angry until I learned people who scored high on the Hostility Scale were at greater risk for mortality than smokers. Then the Mayo Clinic announced there’s no link between hostility and health. So when I think of Uncle Bob’s childhood and the beatings he took from my grandfather, I have to remember that conventional wisdom from biblical times through the forties was, “Spare the rod, spoil the child.” Today we have Dr. Fitzhugh— “You can’t spoil children, you can only spoil fruit”—Dodson. Today my grandfather would get hard time.

“A home wasn’t run the way it is now,” my mother says. “It wasn’t a democracy. We had no voice unless we took an action.”

“What do you mean?”

“Like when my father went to hit Bob when he was fourteen, and Bob grabbed his arm and said, ‘If you do it, I’m going to hit you back,’ and that was the end. My brother never got hit again. But he used to get beatings—terrible beatings—with a strap.”

Aunt Barbara comes in from Arizona, and we meet at Bergdorf’s for the Gotham salad. I call Aunt Barbara Tanta Barbara because she came from a religious family, and sometimes because she was so loyal to Uncle Bob, Tonto.

“Did you love Poppy?” I ask her.

“Your grandfather was a great man.”

“Yes, but did you love him?”

“Yes.”

“How could you? He was cruel to Uncle Bob.”

“He was remarkable, your grandfather. He was a genius. He was your uncle Bob’s father.”

“That’s why you loved him?”

“Your grandfather was a great man.”

World War II is over. I am meeting Uncle Bob for the first time. I know three things about him.

Uncle Bob is my mother’s brother.

My grandmother refuses to have flowers in her apartment. How can you enjoy beauty while your boy is overseas?

My grandfather has sold three restaurants and retired from the business because it is un-American to deal in black-market meat and there is no legal way for a restaurant man to get enough.

But now the war is over. My grandfather is opening a new store on West Thirty-eighth Street in the garment center, four blocks from Madison Square Garden and in the shadow of the old Metropolitan Opera. A built-in customer base for lunch and dinner. Uncle Bob and my father will join him.

I ask for the Mallomars. Mattie gives me a plate. The doorbell rings. My sister and I race to open it. Uncle Bob is slim and almost as tall as Dad. He wears a uniform and a matching hat with a polished visor. We stare up at him. He is stunningly handsome. We have ourselves a real-life hero.

“Would you like some Dentyne?” Uncle Bob says.

He gives us each a stick.

In the living room he sits on a green upholstered chair and lets us try his hat on. I take the Mallomar plate off the coffee table.

“Would you like a Mallomar?”

“Thank you, darling.” He opens his mouth, puts a whole one on his tongue, and closes his mouth around it. His lips don’t move as he chews. We eat Mallomars in licked layers. We have contests to see how long a Mallomar can last. I ask him the thing I want to know: “Did you ever see a dead person?”

“Yes,” he says.

“What did he look like?”

Uncle Bob takes his time answering. “Like he was sleeping, darling.”

“Was he bleeding?”

“Let’s talk about something else.”

“Would you like another Mallomar?”

Love for Uncle Bob was steeped in sadness: my grandfather’s abuse, getting sent off to Kyle Academy when he was nine, then the New York Military Academy when he was thirteen. He was happiest playing the clarinet, solo or accompanying Benny Goodman on a seventy-eight. Originally Uncle Bob studied saxophone. But when he shipped out to Pearl Harbor, my grandmother mailed him a clarinet because it was easier to tote around a war. He never went back to the sax.

At Thursday night dinners, sometimes Uncle Bob could be persuaded to take his clarinet out of my grandmother’s hall closet and play. He’d snap the black leather case open and lift the four sections of his silver-keyed “licorice stick” from their fitted purple velvet compartments. He’d screw the mouth and the bell to the body parts. He’d study the reed and scrape it with a knife. He’d lick and suck it. Then he’d take a deep breath, go limp, and the sound would come. Sometimes it shrieked. Sometimes it crooned. When he played it low and throaty, it snarled. He played with his eyes closed, eyebrows clenching when the sound came out and unclenching when he gaped the mouthpiece for air. His cheeks ballooned. His knees folded, and his body swayed. The family sat quiet around the table while he swelled and contracted. Uncle Bob was transported. For ten minutes he’s not thinking about the war, I would think. For ten minutes he’s not thinking what a disappointment he is to his father.

There in our midst, in our family, was an artist. Watching him, I knew if I had any hope for happiness, I’d better find work I loved.

Between songs we’d rave. We’d fan our hearts.

“Aw, c’mon.” Uncle Bob would look down.

“Encore! Encore!” We’d clap. “ ‘Moonlight Serenade’!”

“No.” He’d start taking the clarinet apart. “That’s it.”

“My brother was gifted,” Mom says. “He would have had a better life if he’d been a jazz musician.”

In the store there was no music. Who would have heard it? There was too much laughter. Too much meeting and greeting. The night of the 1965 New York blackout, even with no electricity, it was a party, more so than usual. Why go home? Elevators weren’t working, and who wants to climb twenty flights to sit alone in the dark? Dad put candles on the tables. The stove was gas, the food kept coming. The goal at Morgen’s was beyond good food. Everyone should have a good time.

Behind the swinging doors was another story. My grandfather threw plates at his son. They raged. They cursed. China sailed above the sauté station and crashed against the prep table. Line cooks ducked. Dishwashers trembled. In the steaming, sizzling, manic, yellow-tiled airless kitchen, where every day was the stateroom scene from the Marx Brothers’
Night at the Opera,
they exploded. Uncle Bob managed the kitchen, but there was nothing he could do that pleased my grandfather. In his sixties he went to the doctor to get a fish bone removed from his throat. He needed an endoscopy. Like his father, Uncle Bob refused anesthesia. Then he winced. “I’m sorry.” He apologized to the surgeon. “My father never would have done that.”

“He would hit the wall to stop himself from hitting your grandfather,” Aunt Barbara says. “I’d know they were fighting when I’d see the bookkeeper moving pictures off the wall.”

It’s occurred to me that my grandfather was so hard on his son because my grandmother loved Bob so much. She had prodigious love, more than enough to go around. She loved Yeatsianstyle, “overmuch.” But when Bob was born, my grandfather must have understood that no matter how much love my grandmother had, he would have to share what had once been all his. And for the rest of her life my grandmother would negotiate uneasy teary truces between the two of them. It could be that, or it could be my grandfather couldn’t forgive Uncle Bob for not being like him. He couldn’t respect his son’s singularity. Maybe it’s both.

I loved Uncle Bob the delicate way you love someone you think lives with tragedy. I asked him questions so he’d talk about himself. I kissed him up. Like his father, Uncle Bob didn’t say good-bye when he hung up the phone. He said, “Love you, darling,”
then
slammed it down.

Uncle Bob made it to corporal during the war but got busted back to private first class for refusing to wear shoes. When he came home, my grandparents introduced him to Barbara Krass, daughter of their card-playing cronies Faye and Lou. There’s a picture of Aunt Barbara around this time in a scoop-necked blouse. A black velvet ribbon threads through eyelet at the neck and ties in a slender bow. The picture is airbrushed into an oval vignette, like a cameo. Wallets and frames came with movie stars’ pictures like this at the five-and-ten. (Calling Woolworth’s a five-and
-dime
was one of the countless ways people revealed their lack of gentility.) Aunt Barbara was a movie star. Heroic Uncle Bob and gorgeous Aunt Barbara, our very own family romance. As their wedding drew close, Mom had matching white organdy dresses made. We got new Mary Janes at Indian Walk. We were given our first white gloves. We were going to be flower girls at The Ritz-Carlton and carry lily-of-the-valley bouquets that matched the lily-of-the-valley embroidery on our dresses.

I luffed around in a romantic haze. Finally the big day came. My sister woke up flushed. She didn’t feel well. Mom read the thermometer. She had 102.

“You have to stay home with your sister,” Mom said.

“No, I don’t.”

“Yes, you do.”

“But I was invited! I got an invitation!”

“If she can’t go, you can’t go.”

“Yes, I can.”

“You can’t. And that’s final.”

I cried. I begged. I went back to the bedroom where my sister was reading the Classics Illustrated No. 42,
The Swiss Family Robinson.
I grabbed it out of her hands and sailed it out the window.

“I’m gonna kill you,” she said, throwing off her covers.

“You’re not allowed out of bed.” I backed away. “I’m telling.”

“You’re dead,” she said, grabbing a hairbrush.

“Go ahead. Kill me. I’ll die happy knowing you’ll spend the rest of your life in jail. Come on. Come on. I hope you fry.”

She swung her feet back under the covers and turned on the radio. Later I made her chocolate pudding.

I’m in college when one day, out of the blue, my mother says, “I can’t imagine why I didn’t let you go to Uncle Bob’s wedding.”

Then, ten years after that, when I’m married with kids of my own, we’re washing dishes together, and suddenly she says, “You know why I didn’t let you go to Uncle Bob’s wedding?”

“Why?”

“It must have been because you were sniffling. I must have been afraid you were coming down with something too. What other reason could there be?”

Ten years after that, when she’s studying for her master’s in family counseling, she tells me she knows exactly why she didn’t let me go.

“You didn’t want to go to Uncle Bob’s wedding,” she says. “You didn’t feel comfortable going without your sister. You wanted to stay home with her.”

“Is that how it was, Ma?”

“Don’t you remember? You wanted to stay home. Otherwise I would have let you go.”

“Oh,” I say.

“You don’t believe me?”

“It’s been so long, Ma. Thirty years.”

“Well, that was it,” my mother says. “It has to be.”

“It doesn’t matter anymore,” I say. “I never think about it.”

“Well, that’s what happened.”

When Uncle Bob was inducted into the army, he was supposed to be in for six months or a year. Then the war came. He peeled “mountains of potatoes.” He hated KP. The kitchen job he didn’t mind was scrambling eggs. They used powdered eggs for the enlisted men, but Uncle Bob figured out how to make them seem real. “For every gallon of powdered eggs, I’d crack one real egg in, shell and all. If you have to pick a little piece of shell off your tongue, you think you’re eating real eggs.”

When the war was over, Uncle Bob was shipped from Saipan to California. Then his unit took a train to the discharge center in New Jersey. He called his parents and said he was on his way home.

“We’ll be right there!” they said.

“No,” Uncle Bob said. “Don’t come. If I’m held up, I’ll lose my place, and they’ll put me back at the end of the line, and it’ll take me another few days to get home.”

“Okay,” they said. “We won’t come.”

But that night my grandfather shot up in bed and said, “We’re going.”

The next day Bob was discharged. When he got to New York, his parents were in New Jersey. Uncle Bob went downtown to Robert’s Bake Shop on Eighteenth and Sixth, a place he’d never seen. He went to find my father, who was saving half the profits from the store for Bob. Dad thought that was fair. Why should Bob be penalized for money he could have earned if he wasn’t serving his country? Why should Dad keep it all when Uncle Bob got $18.75 a month from Uncle Sam?

In 1960 Uncle Bob fell off a ladder in the restaurant and fractured his skull. He was on the critical list for eight days. In the end, the only residual damage was to his olfactory nerve. He lost his sense of smell and his sense of taste. Always a lean man, Uncle Bob began to eat. He kept eating and eating, getting bigger and bigger. He was a restaurant man who couldn’t taste. He spent the rest of his life trying. Salty things like pickles, sweet things like caramel, anything steeped in vinegar, extremes of sweet, salt, sour, bitter. They felt different in his mouth. They produced, if not a taste, a sensation.

“He never smelled or tasted anything again?” I ask my father.

“If you quickly opened a bottle of ammonia and held it under his nose, he could smell that.”

Uncle Bob and Aunt Barbara spent years building their dream house in Scottsdale, Arizona. They’d unroll the floor plans as if they were opening a Christmas present. The house was ingenious. Aunt Barbara had a bad knee, so they built it knowing someday she’d have trouble. It had ramps instead of steps. Wall sockets were waist high. Pool access was graded.

By the time the Morgen’s East lease was up, the Arizona house was ready. They packed up and sold their place in New Rochelle. Aunt Barbara had a garage sale. Of the things no one bought, she gave me a music box and a pair of long white doeskin gloves made by Elsa Schaparelli. The stitches were invisible, the leather light as Kleenex. But the gloves were so narrow they wouldn’t fit my five-year-old. I donated them to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the name of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Morgen. I tried to strike a deal with the curator in the Costume Institute. In exchange for the gloves, I wanted tickets for a sold-out lecture being given by Rosamond Bernier. The curator thanked me for the gloves but turned down my request. I couldn’t bear missing that lecture. It was going to be about Miss Bernier’s early days in Paris, meeting Picasso and starting L’Oeil. I wrote her a letter and told her the story. “How could I resist such a plea?” Miss Bernier wrote back. She mailed me two house seats for the going rate.