Secret Ingredients

by David Remnick

  Eva’s two boys, Franz and Louis, did not like Tante. Delphine could see that. Not that she knew all that much about children. She had not been around them often. But as these boys belonged to Eva, she was interested in who they were.

  At fourteen, Franz was strong and athletic, with one of those proud, easygoing American temperaments that are simultaneously transparent and opaque. His inner thoughts and feelings were either nonevident or nonexistent; she couldn’t tell which. He always smiled at her and said hello, with only the faintest of German accents. He played football and was, in fact, a local hero. The second boy was more reclusive. Louis had a philosophical bent and a monkish nature, though he’d play with tough abandon when he could. His grades were perfect for one year, and abysmal the next, according to his interests. He had inherited his mother’s long hands, her floss of red-gold hair, her thin cheeks, and eyes that looked out sometimes with a sad curiosity and amusement, as if to say, What an idiotic spectacle. Louis was polite, though more restrained than his brother. He anxiously accomplished errands for his father, but he clearly doted on his mother. Eva often stroked his hair, so like her own, with its curls clipped. When she held him close and kissed him, he pulled away, as boys had to, but did it gently, to show that he didn’t want to hurt her feelings.

  Nineteen thirty-six was a year of extremes. That winter, Minnesota had endured a bout of intense cold. Now it sucked in its breath and wilted in a brutal heat. As the heat wave wore on, cleaning became more difficult. Eva Waldvogel, who prided herself on triumphing over anything that circumstance brought her way, could not keep the shop functioning with the efficiency she usually demanded. Now that Delphine was around Eva from the early morning on, she could see how her friend suffered. Eva’s face was pale with the daily effort and sometimes she announced that she had to lie down, just for a minute, and rest. When Delphine checked on her, she often found Eva in such a sunken dead shock of slumber that she didn’t have the heart to wake her. After an hour or two, Eva woke anyway, in a frenzy of energy, and pushed herself again.

  They mopped down the floors of the slaughter room with bleach every single day. The meat cases were run on full cold, yet they were lukewarm and the meat within had to be checked constantly for rot. They bought only the smallest amount of milk to sell because it often soured during the drive to the store. They kept little butter or lard. The heat kept getting worse. The boys slept outside on the roof in just their under-shorts. Eva dragged a mattress and sheets up there, too, and slept with them while Fidelis stayed downstairs, near his gun, for fear of a break-in.

  When Delphine walked to work, just an hour after sunrise, the air was already stiff and metallic. If it broke, it would break violently, Fidelis said, to no one in particular. As he systematically sharpened the blades of his knives and saws, his back turned, he started singing, and Delphine realized, with a strange shock, that his voice was very beautiful. The heat made her flustered, and his voice dismayed her, so pure in a room that was slippery with blood. Sharply, she banged a ham down on the metal counter, and he went silent. It was a relief not to have to listen.

  The sky went dark, the leaves turned brown, and nothing happened. Rain hung painfully nearby in an iron-gray sheet that stretched across the sky, but nothing moved. No breeze. No air. Delphine washed her face and donned the limp apron by the door. Late in the day, she stripped the wax off the linoleum in order to apply a new coat. The floor was already dry when she flipped the cardboard sign in the entry window from OPEN to CLOSED. Now, in a special bucket, she mixed the wax and with a long brush painted the floor, back to front, in perfect swipes. She painted herself right up to the counter, put a box in the doorway so that the boys would not ruin the drying surface. She retreated. Hung up her apron, said a quick goodbye, and went home to swelter. Early the next morning, before the store opened, she’d return and apply another coat. Let it dry while she drank her morning coffee with Eva. Then, between customers, she’d polish that linoleum to a mighty finish with a buffing rag and elbow grease. That’s what she had planned, anyway, and all that she had planned did occur, but over weeks and under radically different circumstances.

  The next morning, while Delphine sat in the kitchen, the heat pushed at the walls. The strong black coffee sent her into a sweat. She drank from a pitcher of water that Eva had set on the table.

  “Listen.” Eva had been awake most of the night, doing her weekly baking in the thread of cool air. “I don’t feel so good.”

  She said this in such an offhand way that Delphine hardly registered the words, but then she repeated herself as though she did not remember having said it. “I don’t feel so good,” Eva whispered. She put her elbows on the table and her hands curled around her china cup.

  “What do you mean you don’t feel so good?”

  “It’s my stomach. I get pains. I’m all lumped up.” Beads of sweat trembled on her upper lip. “They come and go.” Eva drew a deep breath and held it, then let it out. There. She pressed a dish towel to her face, blotted away the sweat. “Like a cramp, but I’m never quite over the monthly…. That comes and goes, too.”

  “Maybe you’re just stopping early?”

  “I think so,” Eva said. “My mother…” But then she shook her head and smiled, spoke in a high, thin voice. “Don’t you hate a whiner?”

  She jumped up awkwardly, banging herself against the counter, but then she bustled to the oven, moved swiftly through the kitchen, as though motion would cure whatever it was that had gripped her. Within moments, she seemed to have turned back into the unworried, capable Eva.

  “I’m going out front to start polishing the floor,” Delphine said. “By now, in this heat, it’s surely dry.”

  “That’s good,” Eva said, but as Delphine passed her to put her coffee cup in the gray soapstone sink, the butcher’s wife took one of Delphine’s hands in hers. Lightly, her voice a shade too careless, she said the words that even in the heat chilled her friend.

  “Take me to the doctor.”

  Then she smiled as though this were a great joke, lay down on the floor, closed her eyes, and did not move.

  Fidelis had left early on a delivery, and he could not be found. He wasn’t home, either, when Delphine returned from the doctor’s. By then, she had Eva drugged with morphine in the backseat, and a sheaf of instructions telling her whom to seek. What could possibly be done. Old Dr. Heech was telephoning the clinic to tell a surgeon he knew there to prepare for a patient named Eva Waldvogel.

  Delphine found Louis and gave him a note for Fidelis. Louis dropped it, picked it up, his lithe boy’s fingers for once clumsy with fright. He ran straight out to the car and climbed into the backseat, which was where Delphine found him, holding Eva as she sighed in the fervent relief of the drug. She was so serene that Louis was reassured and Delphine was able to lead him carefully away, terrified that Eva would suddenly wake, in front of the boy, and recognize her pain. From what Delphine had gathered so far, Eva must have been suffering for many months now. Her illness was remarkably advanced, and Heech in his alarm, as well as his fondness for Eva, scolded her with the violent despair of a doctor who knows he is helpless.

  As Delphine led Louis back to the house, she tried to stroke his hair. He jerked away in terror at the unfamiliar tenderness. It was, of course, a sign to him that something was really wrong with Eva.

  “Fidelis,” Delphine had written in the note, “I have taken Eva to the clinic to the south called the Mayo, where Heech says emergency help will be found. She passed out this morning. It is a cancer. You can talk to Heech.”

  It was on the drive down to the Mayo Clinic that Delphine first really listened to the butcher’s singing; only this time it was in her mind. She replayed it like a comforting record on a phonograph as she kept her foot calmly on the gas pedal of Dr. Heech’s DeSoto and the speedometer hovered near eighty miles an hour. The world blurred. Fields turned like spoked wheels. She caught the flash of houses, cows, horses, barns. Then there was the long stop-and-go
of the city. All through the drive, she replayed the song that Fidelis had sung just the morning before, in the concrete of the slaughter room, when she had been too crushed by the heat to marvel at the buoyant mildness of his tenor. “Die Gedanken sind frei,” he had sung, and the walls had spun each note higher, as if he were singing beneath the dome of a beautiful church. Who would think that a slaughterhouse would have the acoustics of a cathedral?

  The song wheeled in her thoughts as she drove, and using what ragtag German she knew, Delphine made out the words: “Die Gedanken sind frei, / Wer kann sie erraten, / Sie fliehen vorbei, / Wie nächtliche Schatten”—“Thoughts are free…they fly around like shadows of the night.” The dead crops turned, row by row, in the fields, the vent blew the hot air hotter, and the wind boomed into the open windows. Even when it finally started to rain, Delphine did not roll the windows back up. The car was moving so fast that the drops stung like BBs on the side of her face and kept her alert. Occasionally, behind her, Eva made sounds. Perhaps the morphine, as well as dulling her pain, had loosened her self-control, for in the wet crackle of the wind Delphine heard a moan that could have come from Eva. A growling, as though her pain were an animal she had wrestled to earth.

  The first treatment after Eva’s surgery consisted of inserting into her uterus several hollow metal bombs, cast of German silver, containing radium. During the weeks that Eva spent in the hospital, the tubes were taken out, refilled, and reinserted several times. By the time she was sent home, she smelled like a blackened pot roast.

  “I smell burned,” she said, “like bad cooking. Get some lilac at the drugstore.” Delphine bought a great purple bottle of flower water to wash her with, but it didn’t help. For weeks, Eva passed charcoal and blood, and the smell lingered. The cancer spread. Next, Dr. Heech gave her monthly treatments of radium via long twenty-four-karat-gold needles, tipped with iridium, that he pushed into the new tumor with forceps so as not to burn his fingers. She took those treatments in his office, strapped to a table, dosed with ether for the insertion, then, after she woke, with a hypodermic of morphine. Delphine sat with her, for the needles had to stay in place for six hours.

  “I’m a damn pincushion now,” Eva said once, rousing slightly. Then she dropped back into her restless dream. Delphine tried to read, but shooting pains stabbed her own stomach when the needles went in; she even had a sympathetic morphine sweat. But she kept on going, and as she approached the house each day she said the prayer to God that she’d selected as the most appropriate to the situation: “Spit in your eye.” The curse wasn’t much, it didn’t register the depth of her feeling, but at least she was not a hypocrite. Why should she even pretend to pray? That was Tante’s field.

  Tante had mustered a host of pious Lutheran ladies, and they came around every few afternoons to try to convert Eva, who was Catholic. Once Eva became too weak to chase them off, Delphine did whatever she could think of to keep them from crowding around the bed like a flock of turkey vultures in a gloating prayer circle. Feeding them was her best strategy, for they filed out quickly enough when they knew that there was grub in the kitchen. After they’d gorged on Eva’s pain and her signature linzer torte, the recipe for which she’d given to Delphine, Tante would lead them away one small step at a time.

  Delphine bleached the bloody aprons. She scrubbed the grimy socks. The boys’ stained drawers and their one-strap overalls. She took their good suits out of mothballs and aired and pressed them. She sprinkled Fidelis’s thick white cotton shirts with starch and every morning she ironed one for him, just as Eva had done. She took on the sheets, the sweat, the shit, and the blood, always blood. The towels and the tablecloths. Doing this laundry was a kind of goodbye gift. For once Eva left, Delphine would be leaving, too. Fidelis had others to help him. Tante, Delphine was sure, would find stepping in to care for the boys and her brother a perfect showcase for her pieties.

  For all that he was a truly unbearable souse, no one in town disliked Roy Watzka. There were several reasons for this. First, his gross slide into abandon had been triggered by loss. That he had loved to the point of self-destruction fed a certain reflex feature in many a female heart, and he got handouts easily when strapped. Women made him sandwiches of pork or cold beans, and wrapped them carefully for him to eat when coming off a binge. Another reason was that Roy Watzka, during those short, rare times when he was sober, had a capacity for intense bouts of hard labor. He could work phenomenally. Plus, he told a good tale. He was not a mean drunk or a rampager, and it was well known that, although she certainly put up with more than a daughter should ever have to, he did love Delphine.

  Eva liked him, or felt sorry for him, anyway, and she was one of those who had always given him a meal. Now that she was in trouble, Roy showed up for a different purpose. He came to the shop almost every afternoon, sometimes stinking of schnapps. But, once there, he’d do anything. He’d move the outhouse, shovel guts. Before he left, he’d sit with Eva and tell her crazy stories about the things that had happened to him as a young man: the pet hog he’d trained to read, how to extract the venom from a rattlesnake, the actual wolf-man he’d once known who taught him words in the Lycanthropian language, or the Latin names of flowers and where they came from. Listening sometimes, Delphine was both glad of Roy’s adept distractions and resentful. Where had he learned these things? In bars, he said. She’d cleaned up after him all her life and never had he talked to her like this.

  Delphine and Eva sat together on broken chairs in Eva’s garden, each with a bottle of Fidelis’s earth-dark, home-brewed beer held tight between their feet. They were protected from the mosquitoes by citronella burning in a bucket and sprigs of basil which Eva snapped off and thrust into their hair. Delphine wore a wash dress and an apron and a pair of low green pumps. Eva wore a nightgown and a light woolen shawl, with her feet bare in Japanese thongs. The slugs were naked. Antlered and feeble, they lived in the thickness of hay and the shredded newspapers that Eva had put down for mulch. They had already eaten many of the new seedlings from the topmost leaves down to the ground, and Eva had vowed to destroy them.

  “Their last feast,” she said, gesturing at her bean plants as she poured a little beer into a pie plate. “Now they are doomed.”

  The beer was chilled from the glass refrigerator case in the store, newly installed. It seemed a shame to waste it on slugs. The two women sipped it slowly as the sun slanted through the margins of the stock pens.

  “Maybe we should simply have shriveled them with salt,” Delphine said. But then she had a thought: we are close to Eva’s own death, and can afford to make death easy on the helpless. She said nothing.

  Eva’s garden, Delphine had decided, reflected the dark underside of her organizational genius. It was everything raw and wild that Eva was not. It had grown rich on junk. Pot scrapings, tea leaves, and cucumber peelings all went into the dirt, buried haphazardly, sometimes just piled. Everything rotted down beneath the blistering Minnesota sun. Eva’s method was to have no method. Give nature its head. She had apple trees that grew from cores. Rosebushes, bristling near the runner that collected steer’s blood, were covered with blooms so fat and hearty that they looked sinister. The boys’ dog dug up old bones that some former dog had buried and refused to rebury them. It would be awful in the spring, Delphine thought, when the snow melted away, to see the litter of femurs and clavicles, the knobs and knuckles. As if the scattered dead, rising to meet the Judgment, had had to change and swap their parts to fit.

  Delphine had always had a tendency to think about fate, but she did so more often now that Eva’s sickness put her constantly in mind of mortality, and also made her marvel at how anyone managed to live at all. Life was a precious feat of daring, she saw, improbable, as strange as a feast of slugs.

  Eva bent over, flipped out a small pocket of earth with her trowel, and tamped in her quarter-full beer bottle as a trap. “Die happy,” she encouraged. Delphine handed over her own three-quarters-drunk bottle, too. This one Eva
planted by a hill of squash that would overpower the rest of the garden by fall, though she would not be there to see it. She settled back against the crisscrossed canvas webbing of her chair and forked open another bottle. It was a good day, a very good day for her.

  “I’m going,” Delphine said, but she continued to sit with Eva through sunset and on into the rising dark. It was as if they knew that no moment of the weeks to come would be this peaceful and that they would both, in fearful nights, remember these hours. How the air turned blue around them and the moths came out, invisible and sightless, flapping against the shuttered lamp at the other end of the yard.

  Delphine shut her eyes, and her mind grew alert. All around her, she felt how quickly things formed and were consumed. It was going on beyond the wall of her sight, out of her control. She felt as though she could drift away like a boat of skin, never to return, leaving only her crumpled dress and worn green shoes.

  She heard Eva’s voice.

  “I wish it were true, what I read—that the mind stays intact. The brain. The eyes to read with.”

  Delphine had sometimes thought that her friend didn’t care if she became an animal or a plant, if all this thinking and figuring and selling of pork and blood meal were wasted effort. She treated her death with scorn or ridicule. But with that statement Eva revealed a certain fear she’d never shown before. Or a wistfulness.

  “Your mind stays itself,” Delphine said, as lightly as she could. “There you’ll be, strumming on your harp, looking down on all the foolish crap people do.”

  “I could never play the harp,” Eva said. “I think they’ll give me a kazoo.”

  “Save me a cloud and I’ll play a tune with you,” Delphine said.

  It wasn’t very funny, so they laughed all the harder, laughed until tears started in their eyes, then they gasped and fell utterly silent.