A Place at the Table: A Novel

by Susan Rebecca White

  “When he answered he sounded so tired, so exhausted, that my anger just dissipated. I could not rant against this exhausted man. ‘I’m just trying to understand your reaction,’ I said. ‘I was so excited to show you this book, and I’m just so hurt.’ I actually started crying, which you know is rare for me.

  “ ‘Oh, Kate,’ he said. ‘Why did you of all people have to become Alice Stone’s editor?’

  “I told him I didn’t understand.

  “ ‘I know her,’ he said. ‘I love her. I’ve followed her career all of these years.’ ”

  “How did he know her?” I ask.

  “I think you should call your father and ask him that yourself,” says Kate. “I don’t think I can say anything more.”

  “So he and Alice were in love?” I ask.

  “Call your father.”

  “Were they having an affair? Is that why Daddy disappeared so often? Is that why they always kept me out of the city when I was little? Because he was having a relationship with Alice? Because he wanted to keep the two worlds separate?”

  “Call your father. I think it’s time he answered these questions.”

  “My God, Kate. How serious was it?”

  “Your father needs to talk to you about this.”

  “But Daddy was so conservative. I can’t imagine him doing anything so bold as to fall in love with a black woman. Not back then.”

  “We all have our hidden sides,” Kate says.

  “God, it sounds mean to Mother, but this actually makes me sort of proud of Daddy.”

  “Sweetie,” Kate says. “I can’t in good conscience tell you more than I have. But I can tell you this: You don’t yet know the full story. I think you should call your father and ask him to tell it to you. Tell him it’s time. Tell him it’s time for you to know.”

  Our server stands above us with our main courses.

  “Who’s having the crab cakes?” she asks.

  “Do you mind if I take them?” I ask Kate. I am hungry again, now that I know there is a story to be told, now that I know the questions to ask when I call my father and demand that he tell it.

  “They’re yours,” she says.

  The crab cakes are golden brown, each topped with a little salad of sliced avocado, green onion, and grapefruit supremes. I fix myself a bite with all of the dish’s components. The sweet crabmeat, the crisp, buttery breading, the citrus and avocado salad, splashed with a fruity vinaigrette—together it’s a perfect combination of flavors.

  “My God, this is good.”

  “Bobby is unbelievably talented. Here, try the potpie.”

  She fixes me a spoonful of the creamy stew, thick with tender chicken and vegetables, topped with crisp, buttery puff pastry.

  “Damn.”

  “Do you want to meet Chef Bobby?” asks Kate. “Or rather, remeet him?”

  I do. She calls the server over and asks if Bobby might come out for a minute. A few minutes later a sober-looking man walks out of the kitchen, his face becoming animated the moment he recognizes Kate.

  “Darling!” he says. God, he is gorgeous. His hair is nearly as curly as mine, though a lighter shade of brown. His eyes are the color of my slate roof in Connecticut. His body is lean, fit. And he’s so young. Even though there are a few streaks of gray in his hair, he looks like a child.

  Kate stands, and he bends toward her so she can kiss him on both cheeks.

  “This is my niece, Amelia. She was just raving about the food.”

  Apparently Kate assumes that Bobby will not remember us once having met.

  “Everything has been absolutely delicious,” I say.

  He smiles, but it’s the smile of someone used to hearing compliments often. “Thank you. You’re so dear. I hope you enjoy.”

  “I’ve actually wanted you and Amelia to meet because I think she might be able to assist you with the book.”

  “Excuse me?” I say.

  “Bobby is writing a book tied to Café Andres, illuminating its storied past and his own contribution to its current revival. And he needs help testing recipes.”

  “I would love that!” I say.

  “Well, maybe we can have coffee and chat about it,” he says. “Now if you’ll forgive me, I’ve got to get back to the kitchen. I’m making rabbit pâté, and you won’t believe how long it takes to debone the bunnies. Amelia, I’m so glad to meet you, and I hope you’ll let me treat you to dessert today.”

  “That would be lovely,” I say.

  Funny how glib fame has made him. But no matter. No matter at all. For surprisingly, I am filled with an unexpected and buoyant optimism. I am in New York with my aunt, the person, other than my girls, whom I love most. And it is clear to me that the life I know is about to change. Something is coming that is even more drastic than Cam moving out, even more drastic than Cam’s announcement of his impending fatherhood. (Do I care, do I even care about that at all? I push on the bruise. Still a little tender, but Cam’s desertion is not going to be the thing that defines me for the rest of my life.)

  Something solid, substantial, and powerful is on its way.

  Suddenly I see a vision of my old life as if it were a Victorian home, once lovely, now decrepit. The floorboards have rotted, there are rats in the walls, the wiring has been chewed through, and the basement is flooded. It’s a mercy, really, that a wrecking ball has been set in motion, the force of which will smash the whole goddamn thing right to the ground.

  18

  Homegrown

  (New York City, 1990)

  After dinner, Kate suggests she drive us to Connecticut in order for me to fetch Sadie and pack a suitcase, so that I can come stay at her apartment for a few days. “Make a vacation of it,” Kate says. It’s a spontaneous plan spurred by the fact that her car is not in the covered garage she pays three hundred dollars a month for on the Upper East Side but is instead parked just down the street from the restaurant, as Kate had to drive deep into Queens that day to visit an invalid author whose work she is editing.

  Kate assures me that the timing is perfect for me to come visit. Jack won’t be back from California until the weekend, so I will have the apartment all to myself during the day, and then she and I can eat together each night “and really catch up.” That’s as explicit as Kate gets regarding our last six months of semi-estrangement. Nor does she mention the most obvious reason for why I should stay with her: so that after I phone my father (first thing tomorrow morning) she and I can fully debrief.

  Without any traffic, it is a short trip to Old Greenwich. Kate waits for me downstairs, sweet Sadie curled on the sofa beside her, while I pack my suitcase. We drag it plus Sadie’s bed and food out to Kate’s Saab, and then we stuff Sadie in the backseat and head back to the city. It occurs to me that such an impromptu trip would never have happened were Cam around. Cam did not like his schedule interrupted.

  It feels right journeying back to Manhattan, dog in tow. I feel oddly calm, though maybe I shouldn’t, not after Kate’s (partial) revelation. I am gathering energy, I suppose, for tomorrow, when I will phone my father in Palo Alto and tell him that Kate says it’s time for him to spill. I try not to think about what all he might tell me, but I find myself working at the knots of my father’s past, sticking the fine point of a needle into the most clenched places, loosening the strings. (What if Daddy and Alice had a child together? What if I have a half-black brother or sister?)

  Kate drops me off in front of her building on East End Avenue—which Jack loves to point out is simply a fancy, uptown name for what is actually Avenue B—and I enlist the night doorman to help me with the dog paraphernalia and luggage. Sadie and I wait in the lobby while Kate takes the car to the garage. Tomorrow I will take Sadie to Carl Schurz Park, the entrance of which is just across the street. For the longest time I mispronounced the park’s name, until one day Kate grabbed the front of her button-down and, holding it taut between her pointer finger and thumb, instructed me to say, “Shirts. Carl Shirts Park.”

/>   Soon Kate returns from the garage and we go up to her apartment. I hear the scratching of her dog Lulu’s nails against the floor as Kate turns the key in the lock. Though Sadie is a good head taller than Kate’s little dog, it is Lulu who barks and growls. Sadie does her submissive magic, flopping on the ground right there in the hallway, rolling over, and showing Lulu she has nothing to fear. Lulu sniffs Sadie’s belly, then turns and clicks her way back through the apartment, and Kate, Sadie, and I all enter.

  The apartment is small but charming, with a place for everything and everything in its place. There is a view of the East River from both the living room and Kate and Jack’s bedroom. Kate puts me in the tiny “maid’s room,” which they use as a guest bedroom, blowing me a kiss at my bedroom door. Exhausted, I kick off my shoes and take off my dress, placing it on an old wire hanger in the closet.

  I pull a pair of flannel pajamas out of my suitcase, put them on, and stretch out on the twin-size bed, telling myself I will get up in a minute, brush my teeth, and wash my face. I look around the room at all of Jack’s vintage Broadway posters tacked to the walls, his boyhood enthusiasms perennially preserved.

  Lying in bed, I think about Kate, how she has always been innocent of others’ expectations. She has never known how to play a role: not as wife nor as woman. Somehow when Kate started working at Palmer, Long and McIntyre in the late 1950s she never got the memo that she was supposed to, well, type memos rather than edit books. Also lost was the memo mandating that if you did make it as a “working girl,” it would be at the expense of a happy home and hearth. But Kate has Jack. Jack who can sometimes be difficult, but who loves his Kate specifically and well. Who leaves a pot of chili on the stove when he knows she has to stay late at the office and will be returning home tired and hungry. Who takes needle and thread to her wallet, re-stitching it once the original threads have worn away (Jack and Kate have a propensity for holding on to things forever). Who is always willing to accompany Kate on an adventure, be it geographical or culinary.

  I often wonder what allows Kate to be so quintessentially herself. It is as if she possesses some gene that precludes her from believing her own bullshit. God, I wish that gene had been passed on to me. I’ve spent my entire adult life—hell, my entire life—creating narratives that describe how I want things to be, rather than how they actually are. Surely one of the reasons I was unable to see the deep holes in my marriage was that doing so would force me to admit its true dynamic: that I was married to a man too invested in surfaces to want to know my core.

  That I was lonely for years and years.

  • • •

  I wake up the next morning, the taste of stale wine in my mouth, unsure of where I am. I turn to my side and there is Sadie, standing on the floor by the bed, her wet nose against my face. I glance at the wall, see a poster for His Girl Friday and another one for The Merry Widow. Right. I’m in the guest room at Kate’s house. I go to the bathroom, brush my teeth—I never did last night—then walk to the kitchen. Kate has left a note, telling me that she’s heading in early so she can swim laps at the gym before going to the office, but to make myself at home, there’s milk and cereal and fruit, and I just need to punch the “on” button on the machine for coffee. She requests that I let Lulu accompany Sadie and me on any walks we might take. Beside the note is the key to Kate’s apartment and to her building.

  I had planned to call Daddy first thing—well, after a cup of coffee—but I forgot that he is on West Coast time, three hours behind New York. I’m positive he’s an early riser, but it’s not quite 8:00 a.m. here, meaning it’s not even 5:00 a.m. in Palo Alto. I take Sadie and Lulu—now perfectly at ease in each other’s company—down to the park so they can pee, fix myself a cup of coffee once I return home, eat a bowl of cereal while reading the Times, shower, blow-dry my hair using the new diffuser my stylist gave me—which keeps the curls intact instead of frizzing up—and crunch in some styling mousse to keep them that way. At 10:00 a.m. I try Daddy’s house in California but only get the answering machine. I hate the answering machine. I leave a quick message telling him to call me at Kate’s, that it’s important.

  God. When was the last time I called Daddy? I skipped my usual Christmas call this year. I was in the Bahamas with the girls, and I just let it slip by. I guess the last time I phoned was on his birthday, his seventy-fifth, during which we had a brief and awkward discussion about the mileage our respective cars got, before I dutifully told him I loved him (“You too,” he replied) and hung up.

  I return to the guest room, make the bed, and then lie down on it again, feeling uncertain of what to do with myself. Feeling suspended until I can talk to my father, I stare at the rickety blue bookcase across from the bed, the top shelf housing board games, including Monopoly and Risk. Seeing those games makes me think of Scruples, of what was revealed when we played that night. (Did the creator of that game know the havoc it would wreak on other people’s marriages?) The rest of the shelves are crammed with—surprise!—books. I stand to look more closely. Just from scanning the titles, I can tell that many of these are favorite novels of Kate’s: All the King’s Men, Kate Vaiden, Portnoy’s Complaint, A Mother and Two Daughters, Their Eyes Were Watching God, A Room with a View, Sophie’s Choice, Sula, Crossing to Safety.

  I inhale. Seeing Crossing to Safety takes me back to that first awful night of Cam’s rages, when I huddled under the covers in my daughter’s room, trying to escape a terrible situation by entering into the imaginary lives of others. I pull the book out and hold it against my chest, feeling profound gratitude toward Wallace Stegner for having written it.

  I’m still on a reading tear, but lately I’ve been dipping into books I read as a child. I don’t need a shrink to tell me I’m trying to regress to simpler times. Not that my childhood was all that simple. Solitary, yes, but not really simple. To Aunt Kate’s house I brought my beloved Harriet the Spy, which is set in this very neighborhood, a lot of it on the playground at Carl Schurz (Shirts!) Park.

  I keep scanning Kate’s books, wondering how many she owns in total—thousands, surely—and where she keeps the ones that are not in this apartment. In her office at PLM, maybe, or perhaps in a storage unit somewhere. And then my eye lands on Homegrown, and with a start I realize that this is Alice Stone’s book, the one Kate edited, the one that made Daddy go apoplectic. I pull the book from the shelf, fingering its textured linen cover, devoid of a dust jacket. God. I don’t even remember seeing this in the bookstore. I guess I was already at Rosemary Hall when it was released, sheltered on my bucolic campus. And Kate didn’t send me a copy like she usually did with her pet projects.

  When I open the book it releases a trapped, musty smell. Usually I avoid old books for this very reason—the mustiness sets off my allergies—but I am too curious about Homegrown to put it down. Just reading the names of the recipes makes me hungry: chicken and dumplings, smothered pork chops, fresh trout stuffed with bread crumbs and lemon. There are little line drawings by each recipe, charming and simple. A note at the front of the book says they were drawn by Alice.

  (Could patrician, distant Daddy, who aerated his wine, who subscribed to the National Review, who never used contractions, really have been in love with the black woman behind these charming, country recipes?)

  I keep flipping through the book, having spontaneously decided to prepare something from it for Aunt Kate tonight, to have dinner waiting when she returns from the office. Old habit, I guess. I always had dinner waiting for Cam. Maybe I’ll go to Rosedale’s, get some really good seafood. Maybe I’ll see if there is a recipe in here for shrimp and grits, which Taffy prepared for me whenever I visited Atlanta, knowing it’s my favorite. Whenever I asked my mother-in-law for the recipe she would smile and say, “Oh, it’s just a little of this and a little of that.”

  Except, no, I wouldn’t be able to find stone-ground grits in the city and would have to put the shrimp over rice instead. Maybe I’ll make the trout stuffed with bread crumbs, shall
ots, and lemon slices, or the chicken and dumplings, which are simply biscuits made with cream, cooked on top of a chicken stew. I keep turning the pages of the book, thinking I might make dessert, too. Something comforting. Rice pudding, or a fruit cobbler. The first dessert listed is called “Juneteenth Cake.” Juneteenth, I read, is a celebration of blacks’ emancipation from slavery. The cake is made from fresh coconuts, both the grated meat and the milk from within. Sounds delicious but laborious.

  On the page facing the recipe for the Juneteenth Cake is a photograph, a family portrait taken at a Juneteenth celebration. The men wear long-sleeved shirts beneath overalls. The women wear long, white dresses, which appear to be made from flour sacks. I look closely and spot Alice Stone, up front, her hair in two braids, tied at the ends with little white pieces of cloth.

  Beside Alice stands a tall boy with something on his shoulder. It takes me a moment to decipher what it is, but then I realize it’s a chicken, staring straight at the camera, as if posing. Funny. I look closely at the boy. He is taller than Alice but looks a great deal like her. Same almond-shaped eyes, same sharp cheekbones, same full mouth. For some reason I am drawn to this boy. There is something so familiar about him. It’s a little like being at a party and spotting someone you know across the room but not being able to remember his or her name and so spending the entire evening awkwardly avoiding that person out of embarrassment.

  Did this boy—Alice’s brother or cousin, surely—grow up to be famous? Is that why he looks so familiar?

  Perspiration springs to my face, a sudden hot flash. What is it? What am I seeing here? My body is reacting to something I don’t yet understand: my heart rate increasing, my mouth going dry. The wild flower of sorrow is growing, reaching toward air, as if on speed release, growing so fast it is coming out of my mouth, pushing itself into the light, pushing itself out of me so that, in order to breathe, in order to breathe at all, I must open my mouth and say aloud the thing my body has already recognized: Daddy.