The Lost Family

by Jenna Blum

  “Want some?” said June, offering Peter a bit of bun containing a yellow disc of egg like a dog’s rubber toy. He demurred and she tossed it to the birds, who immediately started pecking at each other for the privilege.

  “There you go, Mortimer,” said June. She elbowed Peter. “See that big one, with the silver neck? That’s Mortimer.”

  “Ah,” said Peter. He tucked his handkerchief away and subdued a sigh. He was not in the mood for the park today. Washington Square and June’s West Village neighborhood were reliable barometers of his temper; on better days he found them raffish, even charming: the folk singers, the old men playing chess at stone tables, the bag ladies talking to the birds or trees or nobody at all. The peaceniks with their guitars and flowy pajama-like clothes; the mixed-race couples, Negro men holding hands with white women and vice versa—even the trash and drugs, the fellows whispering to Peter and June from the shade as they’d passed, “Smoke? Reefer? Maryjane?”—were all signs of, if not civil disobedience exactly, then a kind of tolerance that comforted Peter, that indicated that what had happened in his homeland would never happen here. After the young President Kennedy had been shot, Peter had feared it might; that had been a bad week, Peter afraid to leave his apartment, but not because he had been watching television like everyone else. He had been waiting for the crackdown, for Johnson, the new president, to implement martial law, for the tanks to start rolling down Lexington Avenue, for armed patrols on every corner. It had taken his own chefs coming to check on him to persuade him that it wouldn’t happen, that the government had not toppled, that although the assassination was a tragedy, democracy was status quo. Blessed America! But on days like today, when Peter felt irritable and uncomfortable in his own skin, he wished for less quirkiness and laxity and a little more peace and quiet.

  “What’s up?” said June. “You’re so restless.”

  “I don’t mean to be. It’s just that I have to get to—”

  “The restaurant!” June sang, with an operatic flourish. The group of folk singers clustered near the fountain looked over, then applauded.

  “You got pipes, girl,” said one of them, a peacenik with a headband and smoked sunglasses. He grinned, his teeth crooked in his long, dark beard. “You wanna join us?”

  June curtsied. She was wearing a pink-and-orange minidress today, patterned with jellybean shapes, and with the advent of warmer weather she had exchanged her boots for platform sandals whose cork heels made her taller than Peter.

  “No thanks,” she called, “but rock on.”

  She sat back down as the peacenik flashed her what Peter still thought of as the V for Victory sign, then fanned herself with her purse.

  “Whew,” she said, “I feel a little dizzy. Does it feel hot to you?”

  “It does, actually.”

  “Some of the girls and photographers are going to DC next week,” she said. “There’s supposed to be a big antiwar rally at the White House.”

  “Are you thinking of joining them?”

  “Me? No. I’m tempted, but I’ve got bookings. Gotta pay the rent. I’m not a kept woman yet.” June put her hand on Peter’s knee and squeezed. “Why, would you?”

  “What,” said Peter, “go? I don’t think so. It’s not for me.”

  June turned her big black movie-star glasses on him. “But you do support the protesters, don’t you?”

  “I do,” Peter said truthfully, although his feelings about it were abstract: he appreciated that American citizens could dissent without being hauled off to prisons and camps; he thought the war in Vietnam was a travesty. Communism—what was so terrible about that, compared to fascism? Other than that, he remained detached; it wasn’t his war. He wiggled his eyebrows at June and tried to sound hip: “It’s not my bag, baby.”

  June laughed. “You’d better stick to the restaurant.”

  “Speaking of which,” said Peter and looked at his watch. “There’s a delivery of tomatoes from a new vendor coming in, and I should really be there.”

  June pursed her lips and looked away at the peaceniks. Poor June—this really was not fair to her. Perhaps this was Peter’s chance to ask her whether she really didn’t want to be among people her own age—the Youthquake!—instead of an older guy like him, set in his ways, wedded to his job. They had seen a revival of My Fair Lady in March, and Peter had been dismayed how much he felt like Rex Harrison’s Professor Higgins. A confirmed old bachelor and likely to remain so. Before June came along, Peter had been quite content with his life the way it was, avoiding romantic obligations, serene in his work. He still had the ring in his pocket; he had not yet dissolved his partnership with Sol. Every time he thought about taking action on either front, he felt the old inertia, the loathed paralysis. It made him so very tired.

  But surely there was some compromise, at least where June was concerned. Peter could propose—he could suggest—that they take a little time away from each other this summer. It was the age of adventure; why shouldn’t June have some, while Peter tended to Masha’s? The restaurant needed some reorganization, and he wouldn’t want to pin her in place, like a beautiful butterfly in a glass box. Not a lot of time apart, just perhaps . . . seeing each other once a week instead of every night; that sounded reasonable, didn’t it? He squared his elbows on his knees and leaned forward.

  “June,” he began.

  She gave a small belch, a new habit she seemed to have recently picked up that Peter found unbecoming.

  “Are you all right?” he asked, irritated.

  June held up her palm like a traffic policeman.

  “Hold the phone,” she said, then jumped up and ran to the wastebasket next to the bench. She threw up into it most violently, gripping its brim and heaving, and then did it again. Peter went to her and held her hair back from her face—it was longer now, swinging over her shoulders. He rubbed her back.

  “June, June,” he said. “I told you not to eat off a cart.”

  “Ugh, don’t talk about it,” she said. Peter handed her his handkerchief and she took it gratefully, using it on her mouth, then turning it inside out and patting under her eyes, where her makeup had smeared from her exertions.

  “Come, rest, sit down,” said Peter, though he felt more impatient than ever. Now he would have to take her home, put her to bed, bring her some crackers and ginger ale from the corner deli; the whole morning, if not the entire day, would be lost. “Would you like something to settle your stomach—a seltzer?”

  He returned to the bench and patted it, but June remained standing, refolding his handkerchief.

  “Pete,” she said, “I’m pregnant.”

  Peter looked up at her. She seemed very tall, a mannequin standing there in the sunlight with her hair adding another few inches to her height, her sunglasses back on, her face a mask. She was quite still, quite calm, but she was folding and unfolding his handkerchief. A breeze brought a gust of chestnuts and marijuana to Peter from across the square.

  “Well?” she said.

  Peter opened his mouth to respond, then shut it again. He wanted to answer, he really did, but something was wrong with him, something was wrong with his mind. His thoughts flashed past at rocket-ship speed while his body locked, a familiar and hated phenomenon. I thought you were on the pill was one option—but it was obvious the little tablets had failed. Is it mine? was another; however, June was faithful, and Peter knew the baby was his. He looked at his hands, curled on the knees of his lightweight gabardine trousers, in the left pocket of which was the ring. Marry me, he could say. June Bouquet, will you be my wife? What was to stop Peter from slipping to one knee right here on the asphalt, stained with pigeon droppings and spit and gum and God knew what? They could laugh about it later, make a funny story out of their beatnik engagement.

  “Say something,” June demanded. Her voice wobbled.

  Peter cleared his throat. He found himself gazing off across the square, through dappled sunlight and shadow at the cars and people passing on Waverly Pl
ace. An old lady in a jeweled turban, pushing a shopping cart. A queenly Indian woman in saffron robes, holding a little girl in a matching gown by the hand. A mother and a daughter.

  “Jesus,” said June. “Pete? Hello? Are you there? Do you have anything to say?”

  The mother and little girl vanished around the corner. Peter forced himself to squint up at June.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  June stood knotting the handkerchief around her fingers for a moment, and then said, very low but clearly, “You bastard.”

  She threw the pocket square at him. It fell limply to the pavement.

  “You goddamned bastard,” she said. “I knew you would do this. I knew it!”

  She backed away, and now she was crying, tears trickling from beneath the big sunglasses.

  “Forget it, okay? Don’t bother yourself. I’ll take care of it. Have a nice life—in your restaurant.”

  She turned, stumbling on her high cork heels but catching herself just in time, then walked rapidly with her head down out of the park, scattering litter and pigeons in her wake.

  * * *

  In every time of trouble in his life, large or small, Peter had gravitated to the kitchen. During his childhood, in flight from his father’s bullying or his mother’s disdain, Peter had sought the large square room in the back of the house where Hilde let him stir soup, roll dough, and—most excitingly, and provided he held the knife just as she showed him—chop vegetables. During his teens, Peter’s sole act of rebellion had been to apply for a job as Adlon commis instead of clerking in the family law firm. He had kept his apprenticeship nights and weekends while attending university, and when the Nazis declared Jews could no longer participate in higher education, Peter had gratefully decamped from the study of law to full-time at the Adlon. In front of his parents and their friends—at least until they disowned him for marrying a gentile—Peter had been careful to pull a long face about his humble employment. How awful, the only son of one of Berlin’s oldest and finest families, forced to work as a kitchen boy! Disgraceful! Hitler would be the ruin of them all. But at the time, promoted to prep chef and newly married, Peter had secretly, stupidly thought that the Nazis coming to power was the best thing that had ever happened to him.

  At Auschwitz, his reassignment to the kitchens had saved his life; in America his first years, tortured by dreams and thick-tongued in his new language, Peter wandered nearly mute through a landscape of misery until the afternoon he walked into the Oyster Bar for a sandwich and came out with a job. After he lost that, his year of traveling: working his way from short-order cook to deli counter boy to prep chef in Chicago, Minneapolis, Atlanta. By the time Peter returned to New York and landed at Giuseppe’s, he had discovered something: no place on this earth was home without Masha and the girls, but at least here there were more Jews—and restaurants. And if cuisine varied from country to country—in America no Spargel or Johannisbeeren but plenty of barbecue sauce, hot dogs, pizza, and the abomination Americans considered mayonnaise—then food itself was essentially the same. Julienning carrots or chiffonading basil was the same in Skokie and Berlin. A rutabaga was a rutabaga. Vegetables, meat, and technique had no language. The kitchen, any kitchen, was Peter’s home.

  In the week after June’s revelation, he went to ground at Masha’s. He opened every morning and closed each night, sleeping on the cot in his office and returning to his apartment only to shower. Although Peter had managed to be at the restaurant and cook most of his shifts even while dating June, he had not eaten, drank, and slept at Masha’s since his opening days. He knew his behavior raised some eyebrows; he could practically feel the staff drawing straws to see who would ask him about the change, making up theories and bets behind his back. But it was a full week before anyone said anything, and then it was Lena—Peter should have known—who came in one morning at six to find Peter already there, surrounded by a glistening mound of sliced cucumbers and shallots, and said, “What is going on?”

  “What does it look like?” Peter said, wiping his eyes on his sleeve—the shallots were pungent. “I’m making pickles.”

  “I see this,” said Lena. “Where is little zhopa Steve? Is his job.”

  “I gave him the week off,” said Peter of their prep chef.

  Lena folded her arms over her chest. “Why you do this?”

  “Because I’m here, and his wife just had another baby.”

  “She should keep legs together,” said Lena. “Tupa blyad.”

  She stood glowering at Peter like an aging traffic policeman—he could feel her gaze on the side of his neck—then huffed and left. Peter packed the vegetables into jars with dill flowers and a pickling mix he had invented himself: cloves, yellow and black mustard seed, anise, fennel, turmeric, red pepper. He funneled salted vinegar into the jars and dropped them into the ferociously boiling twenty-quart vat, then swapped out his cutting boards and began chopping day-old challah and baguettes to toast for croutons. Some of the cooks liked the radio on while they worked; some swore they solved problems in their heads. Peter preferred quiet but for the pockpockpock of his knife and, in this case, the chattering lid of the canning vat. It was only during these times that he was able to stop thinking; when his hands were occupied, his head was at rest.

  Lena returned in whites and clogs, a bandanna hiding her short gray hair. “What is special today?”

  Peter nodded at the chalkboard.

  “Endive salad,” Lena read under her breath. “Chicory, butter lettuce—produce delivery already came?”

  “Five this morning.”

  “And cheesemonger?”

  “I went yesterday,” said Peter. “He had some excellent Roquefort.”

  “Probably stole it off truck,” said Lena, “cocksucker,” but she went to the walk-in for her mise en place and began setting up her station a foot away from Peter’s. The two worked in silence broken only by Lena’s heavy breathing. She was fileting bluefish and Peter was lifting the pickles out of the vat with the rubber-tipped claw when Lena said, “What happen to skinny whore?”

  “Don’t call her that,” Peter said. He set the final jar on a baking sheet and turned off the heat under the pot.

  “Okay,” said Lena agreeably. “Where is stupid whore?”

  Peter took a fresh rag off his stack and wiped his face and neck. “Lena, I’m warning you.”

  Lena shrugged. “Warn if you want. You think I am scared? I snap you over my knee like twig.”

  “I mean it, Lena. I’m in no mood.”

  Peter began tossing the challah and baguettes he had cubed in a mixture of olive oil and rosemary. Lena lowered the bluefish filets into a mustard marinade.

  “I am not in mood either,” she said. “Today on subway man piss on my foot. This fucking city. And Linda out all night again whoring. Next time I see her I break fucking neck.”

  “Ah,” said Peter. Linda was Lena’s girlfriend, who worked as a hostess and sometime dancer in one of the boardwalk clubs on Coney Island.

  “You know what else I am not in mood for?” said Lena. “This,” and she nudged Peter. She put her knife down and used her fingers to pull her eyelids down into a horrible grimace.

  “All this moping,” she said. “Boss who mope around like sick dog. Like dog that get run over. Like dog that get run over after finding out his bitch fucking some other dog.”

  “Yes, I take your point,” Peter said.

  “So?” said Lena. She returned to painting marinade on the filets. “What happen with yebanutaya suka?”

  “Lena,” said Peter—he knew she had just called June a fucked whore. But he also knew it was useless to tell her again to stop. “That woman despises me,” said June, when Peter had asked her to spend more time at the restaurant. “She has a thing for you, Pete, she’s carrying a torch like the Statue of Liberty.” Peter had told June about Lena’s girlfriend by way of assuring June it wasn’t true, but June had not been convinced, and although it wouldn’t have helped the situatio
n to admit it, Peter knew what she meant. Lena had no romantic designs on Peter; she no more wanted to sleep with him than with any other male cocksucker. Lena’s attachment to Peter ran deeper: that of an employee whose boss had given her a chance when nobody else would; that of an almost-partner in a business she cared about more than anything else; that of—if not a friend exactly, then a companion who had worked alongside another in the same pattern for a decade and a half.

  Lena began deboning rabbits. “I have right to know,” she insisted. “First you are all over town like this,” and she lolled out her tongue and crossed her eyes, “running around with skinny whore like lovesick boy. Lena, take charge, you say. Then toshchaya blyad is gone and you are like pathetic dog who—”

  “Yes, all right,” Peter interrupted. “No more about the dog. June is—”

  He stopped speaking, even as he continued shaking sea salt over the croutons, because he wasn’t quite sure how to finish the sentence. June is angry with me? June is gone? June is in the capital, protesting the Vietnam War? June is devastated? So many times that week Peter had intended to call her, had found himself with the office phone receiver in his hand, his finger in the dial, or standing in a phone booth, putting a dime in the slot. But then he—couldn’t. Something came over him, an apathy, an exhaustion like a suit of lead, and he hung up the phone and walked away.

  “She is beremennaya,” said Lena and cupped a hand in the air over her stomach. “Knocked up.”