Full of Grace

by Dorothea Benton Frank

  “Hey, you old dog! Want to go hunting truffles with me next month?” he said.

  “Well, look who’s here! Only if I get to bring my own pig!” Hampton said, and literally leaped from his seat to shake his friend’s hand. “Y’all? This is Todd Humphries, one of the finest chefs in America!”

  “Yeah, that’s probably true!” Todd and Hampton laughed and knocked each other in the arm. “Are you folks hungry?”

  “Are you kidding? This is Grace Russo, our team leader.”

  “Hi,” I said, and gave a little wave from the other side of the table.

  “I think she has prearranged a menu for us…” Hampton continued.

  “Forget it,” Todd said. “I’m cooking for you tonight! Come on, you can help!”

  “We used to hunt for truffles in the Hudson Valley years ago when we were just getting started…Honey?” Hampton turned to his wife, Darlene. “I’ll be back…”

  Todd stopped and looked back. “That good-looking woman married you? She must be blind! Let’s go.”

  “Wait! Did you meet Jonathan Aden from Cypress? Jon? Wanna come?”

  “No, you big hot dogs have your reunion! I’ll take care of the ladies!”

  “Hands above the table, okay, Casanova? Darlene?”

  “Go!” Darlene said. “We’re starving!”

  Todd and Hampton disappeared into the kitchen and we were left to shake our heads.

  “They’re like giggling schoolgirls,” Darlene said.

  Steven Hughes and Alan McGregor were going over the wine list.

  “Personally, I’m glad we came to a place that makes martinis,” Alan commented. “I’ll take a good vodka over fermented grapes any day.”

  Steven Hughes turned red. Even his wife, Josie, dropped her jaw. I, along with the others, studied the menu and tried not to make eye contact with Alan or Steven.

  “Well, Alan? One of the reasons we came to Napa was for the wine, wasn’t it?”

  Alan McGregor was a Neanderthal. Steven Hughes was probably his most significant client in the city of Charleston and was considered the area’s leading authority on wine. Pairing food and wine on his tasting menus was his rapture. His ecstasy. This guy Alan was a complete slug of the first order, and so far had contributed nothing to building a convivial ambience. In fact, I could see the Hugheses shift in their seats and could read their minds. How many more days do we have to be with this jerk? How many meals?

  With the two brain cells he had remaining in a corner of his thick skull, it came to McGregor that he had somehow offended Hughes. He reached over and took the wine list from Hughes and said to the sommelier, “Tell you what, pal. Bring us your very best Chardonnay, your very best Pinot Noir and your very best Cabernet Sauvignon. It’s on me, okay?”

  The sommelier, who had no doubt suffered the Alan McGregors of the world for longer than he cared to remember, said with a smooth smile, “The very best, sir?”

  I smiled and immediately ate an entire roll. We were about to be served some outstanding bottles and I knew Alan McGregor had just been snookered in the grand style. It always amazed me that even though people got older, they didn’t necessarily get any smarter.

  Hampton, now in chef’s whites, came and went from the kitchen with tray after tray of mouthwatering food: black truffle mousse with porcini tuiles, chilled golden jubilee soup with poached lobster and lemon verbena, pan-roasted wild striped bass with green tomato ravioli, roasted venison with huckleberry coulis—on and on it went. And with the arrival of each dish, we oohed and aahed while Julie Jennings took several digital photographs. We were out of control with food lust. We applauded. We rolled our eyes and we cleaned each plate.

  And wine—the wine flowed like a river and it was every bit as delicious as each dish. We were in the deep end of the pool by dessert—two bottles of a 1957 Château d’Yquem and goat-cheese soufflés.

  “Mark Jennings, from Charleston magazine, would you care to comment?” I said, holding the empty bottle of red wine in his direction like a microphone.

  “Yes. Yes, I would. If I were headed for the guillotine, I would like to have my last meal prepared by Todd Humphries and Hampton Greene. And I would like Alan McGregor to buy the wine.”

  Julie, Mark’s wife, said, “That goes double for me. I’m thinking I might have a little nap right here on this lovely banquette!”

  When Hampton and Todd returned to the table we gave them such a rousing standing ovation that the entire restaurant stood and clapped as well. Julie took a dozen pictures of them and it was just nuts.

  Until the bill for the wine arrived.

  Without batting an eye, the sommelier delivered it to Alan McGregor, handing the food bill to me. I thought that if McGregor’s eyes bulged another millimeter we would have a medical emergency. He sputtered, turned red, cleared his throat and, with his slightly palsied right hand, slipped his credit card into the leather folder. Every other person at the table knew exactly what had happened. No one acknowledged his distress. Like true Charlestonians, they all spouted their own version of Alan? Thank you so much! The wine made the meal!

  Priceless.

  As the guests gathered up their things I said, “I’m going to just slip outside to make sure Geraldo is there, and I have to make a quick phone call, okay?”

  They nodded and continued talking to one another about the meal, asking for directions to the ladies’ room, the men’s room, a copy of the menu…

  Geraldo was parked at the corner; when he saw me, he pulled up and opened the door. I dialed Michael. He answered on the first ring.

  “Hey!” I said. “How’s it going? Any news?”

  “Yeah. Not good. They got the radiologist’s report today.”

  “And?”

  “There’s a mass on the front left of my brain. They want to biopsy it right away.”

  “What…”

  My mind was racing a thousand miles an hour. What had he said? A mass? A mass of what? The front left? What did that mean? Was Michael telling me he had a brain tumor? What in the world?

  He was talking. I had missed what he said. “Say that again, Michael, I didn’t catch it.”

  “I said, this is not good, Grace.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  ON THE BLUFF

  If you think that I was about to melt down in front of my clients, you couldn’t be more wrong. If Big Al ever taught me anything, it was this—wait until you have all the facts, assess the facts, consider all your options, and then one of two things happen next. One, you go to war with the conviction that you will win. You pull out every trick in your book, you fight with every ounce of strength you have. You never let the enemy sense your fear. And if you don’t win, at the very least, you make sure the enemy is severely injured. If there is no chance of victory, none whatsoever, then you get on your knees and try to cut a deal with God. I wasn’t about to cut a deal with anybody until I had all the facts. Realizing it would be at least a few days until the facts were known, I opted for self-imposed calm and a huge case of denial.

  After all, I was twenty-five hundred miles away and had a pack of hungry and thirsty patrons of Bacchus to contend with. I was a walking zombie, but no one knew it.

  The plan for the day was a visit to four wineries and a tasting of their best offerings, lunch and cooking lessons at the French Laundry, and a late dinner at Auberge du Soleil. I looked at my watch. I was waiting for seven o’clock so that it would be midmorning in Charleston and not too early to call Michael. Understandably, we needed to talk.

  I got up with the birds because I’d had that same nightmare again—falling, falling—I was going to drown and where was Michael? It was just awful to wake up with my heart pounding.

  I was in the Meadowood’s restaurant having some organic granola with homemade yogurt—this was Northern California after all—and reading the newspaper. Julie Jennings, the wife of Mark from Charleston magazine, came in.

  “Good morning!” she said. “Did you rest well?”
/>   “Never better!” I said. Never worse, I thought. “And you?”

  “You know what? I slept like a rock. Mark and I live out on Isle of Palms and in the morning you hear seagulls and smell the ocean. It has been so long since I’ve been out here, I had forgotten what it’s like to wake up to smelling the forest—it’s all kind of loamy and earthy mixed with pine, isn’t it? It smells wonderful.”

  “I hadn’t thought about it, but now that you mention it, yeah, it does. It smells like a wood fire. Want to join me?”

  “Sure. Mark’s still snoozing.”

  The waiter appeared. “Coffee? Juice?”

  “Sure,” Julie said.

  I held out my mug for a refill. They didn’t have enough caffeine in California to make my mind right that morning.

  “The granola is outstanding,” I said. “I saw some waffles go by a few minutes ago. They looked pretty good, too.”

  “Well, Mark and I are really happy that the timing of this trip worked out so well. There are so many new trends coming out of this part of the country—even though it started back in the twenties—this whole biodynamic-farming thing just makes so much more sense now than ever.”

  “What’s biodynamic?”

  “Well, it goes like this.” The waitress handed her a menu, which she didn’t even scan. “I’ll just have the granola, too. Thanks.” The waitress walked away. “You see, the whole vineyard is looked at as one living thing. And biodynamic vineyards are worked in conjunction with the cycles of the moon and the planetary…” She moved her arms in a large circle.

  She yammered on and I nodded as though I understood and was fascinated by what she was saying.

  “So basically they don’t need any synthetic fertilizers or any of those chemicals that pollute the earth. Isn’t that genius?”

  It was a strain to muster some interest. “Yeah, well, that’s the way the future has to be, right?”

  “Oh, yeah, big-time. Or else there just won’t be one. Mother Earth has just about had it with us. Anyway, I think we are going to have enough material for ten feature pieces from this trip.”

  She didn’t look like a tree hugger, but apparently she was something of one.

  It was six-fifteen, nine-fifteen at home. Michael was already at work and I had no cell-phone signal. Within a couple of hours, it would be time to rally the group onto the bus once again. Soon they were gathering in the lobby. Geraldo was there, standing outside by the open door of his minibus.

  “Good morning!” he said.

  “Good morning!”

  “Where’s our first stop?”

  “Sterling,” I said. “May as well start with a big one, right?”

  “Very smart, because they are all a crazy house by the afternoon.”

  It was just before ten when we arrived at the fabulous Sterling Vineyards in Calistoga. Just as they opened I paid everyone’s entrance fee, including a ride on the tram to the top of the hill so they could enjoy the view. I followed the group through the buildings, room to room, watching the videos that chronicled the history of the winery, its particular process and philosophy, ending on a beautiful terrace that overlooked all of Napa Valley.

  The sweeping panorama was truly a sight to behold. Just as the ocean did with its mighty rushing water, surging and receding, the mountains and the valleys had the power to erase your mind with their majestic silence. For as far as you could see in every direction, there were mountains and trees, rolling valleys of every shade of green, a blue sky so bright, it almost hurt to look at it, and the temperature of the air was perfect, probably between sixty-five and seventy. It was too immense, too gorgeous, too powerful to absorb. I stood in awe and stared just as everyone else did. All of us were absolutely astonished by the sheer size of the sprawl and perfection of the area’s natural beauty.

  Julie was clicking away with her camera, and when she stopped she came to stand by me at the edge of the terrace.

  “Whatcha thinking?” she said.

  “I’m thinking…I’m thinking that if all this is possible, anything is possible.” She looked at me and nodded. Indeed, it was a simple but powerful statement. “I gotta call home.”

  “Everything okay?” she said.

  Normally I would have said, Oh, yeah, everything’s fine, but everything wasn’t fine at all and I felt an overpowering urge to tell someone.

  “No, actually, things are really kind of upside down right now. But I’m sure it will work out.” I pulled out my cell phone and checked the signal, which was strong.

  “You don’t look too sure. Want to talk?”

  “Oh, no. Not unless the world comes to an end today, then I’d love a pal. But right now I’m just gonna make two phone calls home and check the temperature of the water.”

  “Just let me know…” she said, and walked away.

  Nice of her to ask, I thought, and dialed Michael’s cell. He answered.

  “Hi, sweetheart,” I said, trying to sound chipper.

  “Hey,” he said, “you’re up early. How’s Napa in the day?”

  “Absolutely beautiful. I have to bring you here.”

  “We’ll see. Bring home some wine.”

  “Okay. Listen, I wanted to ask you something. That test they want you to have?”

  “Yeah?”

  “When is it?”

  “Late Thursday.”

  “Do they put you to sleep for it?”

  “Well, they give you something because they don’t want you jiggling around when they’re trying to stick a needle in your brain.”

  “Jesus, Michael.” I shivered all over at just the thought of it.

  “Sorry.”

  “Listen, I’m going with you. I’m coming home. Okay?”

  There was a little stretch of silence from his end and then he said, “You don’t have to do that.”

  “I know. But I don’t want you to be alone.”

  “Thanks. I love you, Grace.”

  “I love you, too.”

  We hung up. While I had fought off nightmares in my bed last night, I had made the decision that I was going home early. All I had to do was call Bomze to see if he could send a replacement. I was so upset by Michael’s news that I didn’t care if I got fired. I was going to be with him. Who else did he have?

  And who else did I have?

  I dialed my mother’s cell, but she didn’t answer. I dialed the house and she picked up.

  “Hi,” I said, “are you up? I called your cell.”

  “Yes, yes! Grace?”

  “Yeah, it’s me, Ma. Listen, sorry I didn’t call yesterday. I was so busy getting everyone organized and all.”

  “Oh, that’s okay. My cellular telephone is in my purse. Anyway, I know you have your own life.”

  “Right.” I loved the way she referred to her cell as a “cellular,” but I hated the condescension in her voice. “I just wanted to know how Nonna’s move went.” Don’t want to use the cell? Don’t use the cell!

  “Humph. How do you think it went? Terrible! She’s seeing Nonno every five minutes and screaming at the top of her lungs!”

  “Jeesch.” She was probably scaring the staff of the rehab place out of their minds.

  “Yeah, you said it. Jeesch. But she’s in there and your father just went down to see her. He’s got huge bouquets of roses for her and the nurses—you know how he is.”

  “He’ll charm the dickens out of everyone.”

  “Yes, but the problem isn’t the facility, it’s that Nonna really, and I mean really, doesn’t want to do all the exercises.”

  Apparently Mom had taken to calling the nursing and rehabilitation home “the facility.”

  “Well, Mom, she can be a lunatic if she wants, but those rehab nurses and therapists have dealt with her type in the past. I’m sure of it. So I wouldn’t worry too much. Just be glad it’s not you having to make her do them. Can you imagine?”

  “That’s the truth. Yeah, it’s true.”

  “So everything’s okay?”
>
  “Yeah. You?”

  “I’ll be home Thursday.”

  “Your father said Michael isn’t feeling well? What’s going on?”

  Here was my chance. I could tell her and see what she would say. Or I could not tell her and tell myself that she would have had no sympathy if I had told her. I decided that I couldn’t be any more upset than I was anyway, so I told her.

  “Yeah, they want to biopsy his brain. There’s something there that’s not good.”

  There was a long silence and then she said, “Well, he’s young. I’m sure it will all work out fine.”

  Thanks, Mom. Good job in the mother department. Let’s not overdo the sympathy and concern. Glad you’ve got some self-control…

  I said nothing for a few minutes and then: “Right. Well, I have to go now. I’ll call you when I get home, okay? Give Nonna my love.”

  “Sure thing. Marianne made her fudge.”

  “Bully for Marianne. Bye.”

  I was furious. How could she be so cold? If the doctors thought that my father had a brain tumor or something like that, she would have had Frank, Regina, their kids, me, Nicky and the priest all at the house for a vigil with candles, holy water and every statue all lined up on the dining-room table. She would’ve been reading the sorrowful mysteries of the rosary while we waited for a phone call with the results from the pathologist. Of course, Dad would’ve been at a sports bar watching a ball game knocking back beer and chomping on super-spicy buffalo wings with extra blue-cheese dip, but hey, that was merely one of the differences between Big Al and Connie. And Connie was completely baffled for a response when it came to any discussion of my relationship with Michael.

  Okay, she doesn’t want to like him for whatever her crazy reasons are, I thought. I can accept that. But I knew she would give more compassion to a total stranger who told her the same story, someone she met on the checkout line at the Piggly Wiggly, than she just gave to me!

  I thought we had made some mother-daughter progress when I had made my most recent trip to Hilton Head. I had come away from that thinking that if I spent just a little more time with her, time directed at her alone, to talk about things she might like to talk about—her childhood, how she and Dad fell in love, the why of Nonna’s criticism—that if she could get those things off her chest with someone, we might bond in a new way. But we obviously had not come along as far as I had hoped, because for some weird reason, my mother could only bond with me when I was there with her in the flesh. It had to be hormonal.