The Sweetest Fruits

by Monique Truong

  Later, when it was time to register a name with the government men, I kept Alethea because I believed that my mother had given it to me, and Foley because I wanted her to be able to find me again. I stayed in Maysville for the same reason. I thought that one day I would see her and she would see me, and we wouldn’t even need to trade our names to know. But once we did, we would have proof.

  I didn’t know how to find paying work in Maysville at first. Who did back then? Work was something that found you. So I did what came easiest to me. I talked. I would tell whoever was listening that I was a cook and list all the dishes that Molly had taught me. I talked until the person walked away. After a couple of days of doing this, I met a very old woman—she looked like a sweet potato left too long in the hot ashes—who told me that I wasn’t a cook, that she was a cook, and that the family called her Sweetie. I called her “Aunt Sweetie” because no one so old should be called something so young. She needed a helper because hers had just left for Cincinnati, in broad daylight with a little skip in her step, like she were headed to a picnic.

  “Can you picture that?” asked the old cook.

  “Yes, I can, Aunt Sweetie,” I replied, though I knew it wasn’t really a question.

  I worked for food in my stomach and a roof over my head, and that wasn’t that different from my life at Salee, as Pat would later say to me. I told him it wasn’t the same. I could leave and find a new roof, and I did. I worked in two other houses in and around Maysville before I too headed for Cincinnati. I wasn’t in any condition to be skipping though, by the time I left.

  The first thing I remembered buying, once I had a few coins in my pockets, was a length of ribbon, the blue of borage flowers. It looked nice in my hair, which was more reddish brown in those days. The color of my hair was what Pat said he’d noticed first about me.

  Yes, I said the color of my hair, Miss.

  Pat wasn’t from here, like I said. His eye was drawn to different things.

  The last house in Maysville where I’d worked belonged to the Anderson family. I was the head cook by then and I—

  No, no relation to the Mr. Anderson who’s helping me with my court case, Miss.

  The Maysville Mr. Anderson came over from Scotland before the war.

  My Mr. Anderson was born in Cincinnati, after the war. He’s light-complected, but he’s a colored man. He owns a printing house on Eighth Street, if you want to write that down. He also owns this house.

  I’ve mentioned that already? Well, I suppose it bears repeating then, Miss.

  Before you leave this morning, maybe Mr. Anderson’s wife can show you the main house. Mrs. Anderson has fine taste, and he does as well, now. He has an entire room only for his books. It’s larger than my kitchen here. I should move my pots and pans into there, I’ve told him.

  No, Miss, I wouldn’t begin to know how old I was when Mr. Anderson was born.

  I know how old I was when I came to Cincinnati, if you want to write that down. Mr. Anderson says that I must have been ten and four.

  Pat’s name for me should have been “Mattie de Cincinnati.” But once his mind was set on something, it was better just to accept it or walk away. His heart was young, but his mind was an old man. I never liked being called Mattie. There was nothing wrong with my given name, and if he wanted to shorten it, I’d told him that some people call me “Thea.” Pat wasn’t some people though. I never understood why he chose Mattie over anything else—

  It was what, Miss? Alliterative. I don’t remember Pat saying that word, but it sounds like one of his.

  When Pat was courting me, I enjoyed hearing his stories. They were queer, like the bell jars that Mrs. Haslam displayed in her parlor. I could look inside their glass domes full of dried flowers, curly twigs, pinned butterflies, and stuffed birds, but I didn’t always know what I was supposed to be seeing. It was the same with Pat’s stories. I heard his words, but I wasn’t always sure what I was meant to understand. I would nod my head at this and that, but more often I would ask questions because Pat’s stories were full of holes.

  No, not like his underthings, Miss. His drawers and under vests were never in such a sorry state, I can tell you that for certain.

  The holes, as I was saying, were in Pat’s stories and often in the places where he had been. When I asked Pat where he was born, for instance, he said it was a place that no longer existed. For a lightning-strike moment, I thought he meant a plantation, which would account for the color of his skin—lighter than mine but far from Irish white, like Mr. Foley or his daughter. Pat could be putting on a lilt. So many of us were starting new after the war. Why not as a “Patrick Hearn”?

  Lifting my chin, I prompted Pat to continue. As he began to tell his story, he lowered his head. That was his habit. He spoke to his lap. He spoke to the floor. He spoke to my back. If I looked at him, even when his eye was downcast, he would redden and stammer.

  No, I can’t describe his left eye for you in detail, Miss. As I said, I didn’t see it.

  No, Pat’s right eye didn’t bulge like a bullfrog’s. I can’t speak to what happened to it after he left Cincinnati.

  No, Pat didn’t have a hunched back or a raised shoulder. He was hale of body when I knew him. Again, I can’t speak to what happened to him after Cincinnati.

  No, Pat wasn’t a dwarf, Miss.

  We were the same height, unless I had on my tan button boots with the heels, which I never did while I was at Mrs. Haslam’s because I didn’t own them then. He was surprised and not pleased when I wore them for the first time, which was on the day we married. That night, he found the boots and hid them from me. As if I wouldn’t notice that my first pair of fabric boots—I bought them secondhand, but Charlotte described them as “angel-worn” because their soles were barely scuffed—had gone missing? That foolishness didn’t last long. How Pat and I laughed and laughed when I found them inside his traveling case with a note tucked inside one of them. He’d drawn a dove flying high above a blackbird—he said it was a raven—and the dove had on a pair of button boots. The raven had a teardrop falling from its right eye.

  You’re right, Miss. Pat did behave like a child. Most grown men do.

  You haven’t finished your coffee, Miss. I brewed that pot right before you got here. You’re not used to the taste? There’s toasted cornmeal mixed with the coffee grounds, like how Molly made it during the blockade. No one does that anymore, especially not on this side of the Ohio, but I still have a taste for it. A tad sweet without even adding sugar, don’t you find?

  “Tastes like war,” Charlotte would say whenever I’d offer her some.

  “Tastes like Freedom brewing,” I’d say right back, which always made Charlotte take another sip.

  “War-coffee” was what Pat called it when we were keeping house. He wasn’t fond of the coffee that I’d served him back at Mrs. Haslam’s either. “Cincinnati-coffee” was what he called that or, sometimes, just “brown water.” He preferred a sludge-like brew or a strong cup of tea. Like I said, Pat wasn’t from here.

  His place of birth, he told me, was an island in the Ionian Sea, but beyond that he had no memory of it. When he was born, it was called Santa Maura, and the island answered now to Lefkada.

  “They named the island after you?” I asked, recalling Pat’s first evening at Mrs. Haslam’s and the odd sounds that Mr. Bean had offered to the boarders.

  Pat smiled, raising his head so that our eyes met—that was when I first saw the ring of moss in the dark brown of his eye—and he replied that he was named after the island.

  “Then your island didn’t go anywhere. You carry it with you,” I said.

  Pat insisted upon his version of the story.

  The island did go somewhere. It went from the United Kingdom, whose hands it was in when he was born, into the hands of a country called Greece, Pat said. He was ten and four when the name changed, and it had
left him feeling lost.

  “But you have no memory of the island,” I reminded him.

  The island of his birth had disappeared from the maps of the world, he said. He was only two when he left its shores with his mother. How could he ever go back now? he asked of his shoes, his voice low and hoarse.

  I could hear that he was in mourning. It made me wonder about his mother and whether she was still alive, but I spoke of other things for a while because his eye was becoming a spiderweb of red.

  “Tell me about the sea,” I said. “I’ve only seen rivers and streams.”

  Pat had me close my eyes and think of the sound of the wind as it sweeps through a field of tall summer corn. I did. He had me sway my shoulders from side to side, as if I were in midsong. I did. Now, imagine the bluest sky, Mattie, but it is above you and underneath you. I did.

  With my eyes still closed, I asked him to tell me the scent of the sea.

  Raw oysters, he replied.

  And there I was. No longer in the dark but in the Ionian.

  Pat reached for my hands. I didn’t pull them away because he had taken me to the sea. That was as far from Cincinnati as I’d ever been.

  Oysters, milk, and butter were the main ingredients for Mrs. Haslam’s favorite dish. I could make an oyster stew now in my sleep, but when I first came to her boardinghouse, I had no idea what an oyster was. Molly had never made a stew or anything else with an oyster, at least not while I was afoot. Nor had Aunt Sweetie, who would have called them the Devil’s rocks, if she’d ever seen their fleshy gray centers. So when Mrs. Haslam first ordered an oyster stew for Saturday’s supper, I spent Friday night in tears. My eyes, the next morning, were so puffed and threaded through with red that Miss Caroline waved me over to her side and whispered—the hard of hearing don’t whisper, so that was when I first knew that her hearing was fine—“Are you brokenhearted, Alethea?”

  Startled by the spinster’s question, I blurted out, “Oysters,” which in turn startled her.

  Miss Caroline’s jaw dropped and a piece of half-chewed biscuit fell onto her plate, followed by a belly laugh that was more a stevedore’s than a spinster’s. She was lucky that none of the other boarders were at the breakfast table yet, as they would have thought that she was having a fit. I didn’t know why Miss Caroline was finding such joy in oysters, but I liked her for it and I liked her from that moment on.

  When Miss Caroline calmed herself, I told her all that I didn’t know about oysters. I didn’t have to tell her that I would be let go, if I couldn’t serve forth an oyster stew that evening. I was sure that she’d seen her fair share of cooks come and go at Mrs. Haslam’s. There were a lot of us in Cincinnati. Every day brought with it another gal from Kentucky, claiming her hot water cornbread was the best, boasting more years in a kitchen than her years on this earth, and every one of them was starving, as I’d been, for Cincinnati.

  Miss Caroline went up to her rooms—she was the only boarder with two, ever since Miss Beryl had left the adjoining one empty and Miss Caroline took it over—and returned with a small sketchbook and a tin box of water paints and brushes. With a few fast strokes, she handed to me what turned out to be two very fine pictures of an oyster, one with its shell closed and the other with it opened wide. She wrote down the number of oysters I would need for a stew for seven boarders and one Mrs. Haslam, in numbers and also in tally marks.

  Take this with you and make sure to ask the sellers to teach you how to “shuck” the oysters, Miss Caroline instructed. Oysters—crates of them, rock-like, sitting atop their beds of ice and salt—arrive in Cincinnati daily, she said, via the trains from New York and Boston and, depending on the month, via the steamboats from New Orleans. Whoever packed them will throw in a tangle of long dark seaweeds, which the sellers will use to festoon their stalls and to announce, without having to say a word, that those creatures are not from here.

  Do not worry, Alethea, I will show you how to prepare the stew, which is misnamed, as it is more of a lively simmer, Miss Caroline assured me. I remember that dish well from my youth, and you know it must be downright simple if even I can prepare it. She gave my free hand a sharp squeeze, as I poured her another cup of coffee with the other. Miss Caroline never once called me anything but “Alethea.” I liked her for that too.

  Years later, when I was leaving Mrs. Haslam’s boardinghouse, I prepared for their last supper an oyster stew in lieu of a soup, not in Mrs. Haslam’s honor but in Miss Caroline’s. Miss Caroline had seconds, which was her way of honoring me. For dessert, I made a stack cake, seven layers thick. Miss Caroline had thirds.

  City fare and country fare, I told Pat, was how I wanted to begin and end that meal—

  I had been at Mrs. Haslam’s for four years, Miss, with Pat under the same roof for much of the last two.

  As I was saying, in all that time, I’d never baked a stack cake for the boarders before, thinking it not fancy enough for city dwellers. Stack cakes were Mr. Salee’s favorite, but he was from the mountains of Kentucky, as was Molly. When I worked with Aunt Sweetie, she baked all kinds of cakes—white cake, pound cake, fruit cake, Robert Lee jelly cake, plum cake—but she claimed that she’d never heard of a stack cake, which told me it wasn’t fit for company.

  The only person in Cincinnati I’d been baking stack cakes for was Charlotte. The only thing that I’d asked in return was her honest opinion. Three layers weren’t nearly enough, she’d informed me. Five layers were about right, she opined. Seven were for weddings and special occasions, she and I agreed. One day of curing the cake layers with the stewed dried-apple filling wasn’t enough. You ended up with a mouthful of dry cake and mushy apples, she complained, while what you wanted was something in between. Two days were better to mellow and marry the two, we concluded. To Molly’s mix of cinnamon and mace—one small spoonful and two blades—I added a pea-sized knob of powdered ginger, which made the stewed apples brighter and a bit sharp on the tongue. I added a dribble of dark rum, and those strong drops woke up the sorghum already in the batter. Together they made that cake hum.

  You’re not writing this down, Miss? Maybe, that’s for the best. No need to give away all my secrets, as Molly would say.

  Mrs. Haslam could hardly breathe as she watched Miss Caroline take bite after bite. Pat couldn’t contain his joy, slapping his knees all the while, when I told him about the sweat beads on Mrs. Haslam’s face, her white-sausage fingers wrapped around the handle of her fork, her grip tighter each time Miss Caroline asked for another serving. Pat was sorry not to have witnessed it all for himself.

  That’s right, Miss. He wasn’t at the table that evening.

  Pat had already left Mrs. Haslam’s and was in a cheaper boardinghouse in order to save money for us. As soon as we married, he wanted to rent a house. He was set on an entire house. He said that he didn’t want to share even one wall with another stranger.

  Pat couldn’t wait for me to give notice at Mrs. Haslam’s, but I’d told him that we both couldn’t leave there at the same time, as eyebrows would raise. He said that he did not care about eyebrows or any other part of the Virgin Mother Hen raising. We would marry and housekeep like any other couple. Her approval was not required. The only kitchen you will be in, Mattie, is your own, Pat promised.

  Yes, I believed him, Miss.

  But I stayed at Mrs. Haslam’s for a while longer because I had to care about eyebrows raising. I couldn’t afford to lose a good reference.

  Believing a man doesn’t mean making a fool of yourself. That was Aunt Sweetie talking. Molly taught me my kitchen skills, but Aunt Sweetie taught me—or she tried to—what I would need to know in the other rooms of the house. She never married, and she told me that made her wiser than most.

  Pat and I, we lived as man and wife, first on Longworth Street, next to where the Adams stables used to be, and then at the corner of Chestnut and John streets.

  The one
who didn’t believe him was Charlotte.

  From the start, the drawing that she’d made for Pat’s laundry bundle was of a scrawny blackbird with its head lowered and its beak opened, midsquawk. I laughed when she first showed it to me, and I asked her how she knew.

  Charlotte had no idea what I meant.

  As soon as I began to call him Pat, he began to leave little folded notes for me, hidden under his coffee cup, tucked into the dip of its saucer. Because I wouldn’t meet his eye when any of the other boarders were at the table, not even when it was Miss Caroline, that was his way of saying Good morning, Mattie! He drew himself as a raven atop a tree branch and I was a dove flying overhead. In the dove’s beak, he placed a crab-apple blossom, a length of fancy lace, a scrap of borage blue ribbon, and other notions that were in my stories. That was how I knew that he’d listened, even with his eye closed.

  “That Irishman”—that was what Charlotte called him then—“he’s a blackbird,” Charlotte said. “Birds fly away, Alethea. That’s what they’re born to do.”

  “Not a sparrow?” I asked. “Or an owl?” I teased.

  “A blackbird,” Charlotte repeated.

  My cheeks grew warm. I knew what she and the boarders at Mrs. Haslam’s saw when they looked at Patrick Hearn. They saw his black suit. He owned two, and they were the same in every way—rubbed thin at the elbows and with pant legs that barely met the tops of his shoes. It was easy for Charlotte to see why. The pants had been brought up to hide their worn-through hems.

  But if it weren’t for the state of those suits, shabby but always clean, I would have gone on washing the dishes. I wouldn’t have paid That Irishman any mind. Just another male boarder with intentions, I would have thought.

  Charlotte must have seen the color rising in my cheeks because she added, sudden as winter, “That Irishman has high taste in underthings.”