The Love Children

by Marylin French

  There was an unheated back room in the restaurant holding mainly junk. One Monday when the restaurant was closed, I got rid of the trash. The next day, I went in early and scrubbed down the walls, ceiling, and floor before work. Monday and Tuesday of the next week, Artur painted the room white and bought an electric heater for it. I bought a lined window shade and a white curtain for the window and took in an old bookcase from our house. Artur painted that too, and I used it to store Isabelle’s baby oil, baby powder, diapers, diaper rash cream, safety pins, and suchlike. I bought a covered diaper pail for the stinky things.

  I bought a second baby seat, one of those little bouncy canvas chairs they had then, and sat her in it in the kitchen. She was enchanted by all the activity. The staff adored her, of course; every one of them made a fuss when they passed her, and soon she loved them all, crying out and hurling into the air whatever she had in her hand whenever she spotted them. They helped me puree varied things for her to eat, and eventually she ate like a restaurant critic, sampling pineapple and butternut squash and mango and brook trout and capon and whatever else we had. She turned into a gourmet, with extremely sophisticated tastes, and she stayed that way.

  When I started back to work, I would go in early in the day, leaving Isabelle with Dad for an hour, and plan the menu and order the food. Then I would go back home and take care of her. I would change her, dress her, and drive with her to the restaurant, set her in her bouncy seat, and start cooking. She was deliriously happy, entertained by six staff members plus Artur; sometimes a customer would come back to visit.

  The staff helped me fix her dinner, and they took turns feeding her, fighting for the privilege. After that she would play for a while, then I’d steal a half hour, take her into her little room and clean her up, powder her, and put her in the English carriage Artur had given me, with a bottle of warm milk to keep her company. The carriage was solid and had a brake; it was high enough not to break my back when I bent over to put her in it or pick her up the way the car seat or bouncy chair did. She nestled under her blanket, ecstatic with her bottle, and closed her eyes. The room was chilly even in June, so I would turn on the electric heater. She seemed to be in bliss. She slept better there than she did at home.

  Before I left home every day, I made up a batch of formula. I kept the sterilizer at the restaurant and sterilized the bottles every day. I kept bottles in both refrigerators. When she went to sleep, at naptime or in the evening or late at night, I propped the bottle on a soft little holder next to her. I worried that she would be unhappy at missing my breast, but she didn’t seem to mind and fussed only when she lost the bottle. These days she was feeding well, filling herself up and sleeping well afterward. And with so many people in and out of the kitchen, someone always heard her if she fussed.

  Her only bad time was when I was leaving work late at night and had to bundle her up even more to carry her to the car; she always woke in a rage and would start to cry. But the cool outside air hitting her lungs made her pass out almost instantly—which always made me laugh, which then always made me feel like a monster.

  Artur was humbly, satisfyingly grateful for my return. Business always picked up in the summer, his best time. People thronged to visit their Vermont vacation houses or spend long weekends at local bed and breakfasts. The busy season lasted till the end of October, when people stopped coming to see the leaves, so there was no way I could take Isabelle to Pax in September, as I’d promised Stepan. I called him to apologize. He was nice about it, being busy himself with the harvest and pruning, and came to visit us in November instead, braving Dad’s contempt to see her. I respected that. And in time I came to trust him with her—he had stopped provoking power struggles with her. He fed her sweetly, didn’t try to force her or get annoyed with her slowness at eating. She would hum and look around the room when he fed her, take her time mashing her mouthfuls with her tiny gums and tongue, while she studied the kitchen ceiling and walls and the pots hanging over the stove, the pictures on the walls. He changed her promptly and well, and he picked her up immediately when she started to cry. So for the week he was with us, I left her with him when I went to work.

  Her absence when I was working made me realize what a strain her presence created: it broke my concentration and I didn’t cook as well. But I thought, Hell, so what. It’s more important to take care of the baby than it is to cook perfectly. My next thought was, That’s why men seem more dedicated than women. To art or whatever. They won’t break their concentration for a baby or a child, they’d rather let it scream. Or sit in shit. Like Dad. Their art or their work, or even just television, comes first. But I didn’t want to be like that. No matter what, for me the baby would always come first. When Stepan left, I went back to taking Isabelle to work with me.

  16

  She grew so fast. I could cry with sorrow that Isabelle grew so fast, remembering how adorable she had been crawling around discovering the world of carpets and chair legs, shoe buckles and cigarette packets, especially the cellophane. Then suddenly she was on her feet, running in triumph to our outstretched arms, so proud of herself she couldn’t stop grinning and exploring tabletops and objects she could bang on. She lurched around the rooms, more surely than Marguerite, the Fields’ child, but reminding me of her, and I suddenly understood how Annette and Ted could have loved their little bundle, despite the problems. Isabelle launched herself from table or chair and ran in tiny staggering steps as far as she could before falling or managing to reach some handhold, a chair arm or table, which she would then pound in triumph like a tiny Tarzan. She loved the kitchen and explored it at every opportunity. She would open a cabinet and remove its contents, pot by pot. She’d carry each object across the room and present it to me, then go back for another, with the utmost seriousness of purpose. When the cabinet was empty, she would start on the next; when they were all empty, she would replace the objects, but in such disorder that they didn’t fit. I had to redo the job, but I waited to do that until she’d gone for her nap. She would babble all the while she did this, and in time, the babbling turned into words, though not words I could fathom the meaning of. The satisfaction of utterance made her face beam with complacency. She knew what she was saying.

  By the time she was a year old, I could understand her. Recognizable words—no, poppop (for my father), gone (also usually for my father), car. No mama, not for a long time. But once she mastered those syllables, she was off and running, sentences pouring out of her. She was a fierce little thing, intense whether in a state of joy or enduring the profound tragedies that beset childhood. I tried to understand. I stretched myself as far toward her as I could reach. And she grew into a beautiful child, a good child—all children are good—wanting to be loved, wanting approval.

  By 1979 the restaurant had become a fashionable place in our part of the state; we were completely booked most summer nights and now were in the black even in the winter. Artur was ecstatic. Success was good for him. It made him generous with praise and less subject to panic. Success did for him what it is supposed to do but doesn’t always, put him in a mellow state of mind. At this point I could tell him I wanted to be a partner in the business without fearing a hysterical explosion. He knew I could leave if I was unsatisfied, that Dad would back me in a place of my own if I asked him to. By now Artur loved Isabelle and me; we’d become his family and he couldn’t do without us. I didn’t just cook, I co-managed the restaurant; I ran the kitchen and, with Kathleen’s help, supplied it with fresh organic vegetables and herbs, at least in late summer and early fall. So he agreed, asking that I put some cash into the business. The restaurant badly needed redecorating. I had saved most of my wages, so I could do that.

  The restaurant was really tacky looking, with its crystal chandeliers, flocked wallpaper, a red flower-patterned carpet, heavy red velvet draperies tied back with gold braid, and Victorian chairs cushioned in crimson velvet.

  I knew it would break his heart if I simply tossed everything out. After m
uch thought, I decided to persuade him to renovate the upstairs into a real home for himself, so he could live somewhere other than in his sister’s damp basement room. I redesigned the space, five tiny bedrooms and an ancient bathroom, into a sitting room and a bedroom with a big luscious bathroom. When he saw the drawing I had made for his bathroom, I could see that he was thrilled.

  I guess poor Artur had completely given up any hope for a personal life. He’d lived with such deprivation earlier in his life that simply eating well was a luxury. He relished being greeted as an important person by the guests who frequented his place and being complimented on his food. But now something new began to ferment in the Artur brain.

  We closed for a month in January while the construction work was done, by local workers my father had met when he built his studio and expanded his house. I moved the chandeliers, the Victorian chairs, and the dusty drapes upstairs. Artur hung the chandeliers and the drapes in his sitting room, set some of the chairs around his new round dining table (the rest went to a dealer in fake antiques), and reused the salvageable parts of the downstairs carpeting. He pored over catalogs for his bathroom and with my help chose modern fixtures and a Jacuzzi. When it was finished he was exceedingly pleased.

  The work took months, but Artur was not in a hurry, being as wary of the new life he pictured as eager for it. He began to make eyes at a customer from New York who came in from time to time with her brother and his wife, with whom she spent frequent weekends in Brattleboro. She had dyed red hair and was somewhat hefty but shapely. Mildred Hildrein was a widow. She worked as a bookkeeper for an importer of silk flowers and was a trusted employee, earning a good salary, but lonely and afraid of growing old alone. I had long seen that she found Artur attractive, and I knew that he was drawn to her too. Artur was handsome, though a little heavy, and his manners were polished. He was courtly in the European manner, which American women are starved for. Most of the women patrons adored him. I smiled, watched, and waited.

  The money I had invested paid for the restaurant renovation, which I designed. I had the painters steam off the flowered wallpaper and paint the walls a warm pale cocoa and the molding that framed panels of the wall beige. I hung bright brass sconces in the center of each panel and chose a cocoa carpet with a waffle pattern that would disguise dirt. The tablecloths were beige and the napkins cocoa, and I put chocolate-colored candles on each table. I hung pleated beige linen shades at the windows and bought bentwood chairs the color of maple syrup covered in beige. It looked classy.

  For about a year, once or twice a month, I had been putting Isabelle in the car—she loved to ride around, babbling in her car seat, with a little bottle of water, some toys in hand, and a few cookies in a waxed paper bag—and had been driving to small farms in Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and northern New York.

  The technological revolution had brought us tomatoes with thick skins that would not break when transported thousands of miles across the country. Our fruits and vegetables now lasted longer after harvest, making it worthwhile to ship produce raised in warm California to chilly Maine, so everyone could have strawberries in winter and oranges in summer. Pigs were bred to have less fat because people were dieting, and chickens, sheep, and cattle were fed hormones and antibiotics, which kept them healthier and reduced waste and also created a race of giant animals. This revolution was supposed to make the United States the best-fed country in the world, with the cheapest food. That it probably had.

  But farms containing ten thousand pigs stank for miles and produced so much pig shit that disposal was a serious problem. And without fat, pork was tough and tasteless. The new vegetables and fruit also had no taste. People like me stopped buying pork and lamb, and did without tomatoes that were not grown locally. We bought meat and produce from local farmers, whose numbers were decreasing. (In the winter, only potatoes, cabbages, and turnips were available locally, so we had to have other options.) Locally raised food tasted much better than the other stuff. A movement had arisen to promote organic food.

  By 1979 there were maybe a dozen and a half organic farms in the area that I could reach by car in an afternoon. For the past year, I had been looking at farms that raised foods I would want to serve in my restaurant. One couple in Monterey, Massachusetts, had started a goat farm and cheese-making business, set up in such an organic, sanitary way that they became a model for other aspiring cheese producers across the country. I wanted to buy their products: not many people ate goat cheese at that time, but it was starting to become popular. Inspired by Greek salads, which always contained feta cheese, I introduced goat cheese in the restaurant in a salad of baby greens (also unusual then). People liked it, so later I used goat cheese with scallions and parsley in a risotto, which also was popular. Alice Waters had invented a salad with a baked goat cheese that was delicious.

  Then I heard about a chicken farmer in Rhode Island who shunned the antibiotics that other chicken farmers used. He also did not feed his chickens feed made out of chicken parts (which was common). He gave them natural feed and the meat tasted so superior that I served it exclusively. In Vermont, these things mattered: many of the people who lived and visited there cared about things like that. So we continued to thrive, and I continued to seek out better sources of food.

  I had earlier pressed Artur to build a solarium out back, behind the kitchen, where I could grow herbs and spices and lettuce all winter. He had put this project off, but in 1979, during the upstairs renovation that winter, I finally got my greenhouse. This made it possible for me to stop planting Dad’s meadow, which had become too much work for me. Between taking care of an increasingly demanding Isabelle, searching out natural foods, and trying out new recipes to keep the restaurant fresh, I was overwhelmed.

  Kathleen, my assistant, now paid Dad a nominal rent and kept the field going. The following year she rented another field from someone else and organized an organic farm on her own. She was so happy with her project that her marriage improved.

  Artur and I got along well; we rarely argued, and working together in the restaurant every day was really a pleasure. With the experience of the commune behind me, I knew how to disagree diplomatically and how to be delicate when I needed to overrule him. He had learned to tell me without shrieking when something mattered strongly to him, which was not often. When something mattered strongly to me—which was often—I knew how to ask for agreement without servility, and he would pat my back and say, “Of course, of course, my little Jess.” He adored Isabelle, even after she started talking. Once kids can talk they say things adults don’t like, demanding what they want and objecting when they don’t get it. This period of childhood loses kids some of their most effusive admirers, but Isabelle did not lose Artur, who, had I not taken him in hand, would have had her fat as a pig, sneaking her bits of bacon, avocado, and chocolate candy.

  We were thriving now, and I had a good enough sous-chef that I could take a winter vacation (I could never take one in the summer). I went only as far as Cambridge, to Mom’s, where I spent three weeks. After she came back from France she had visited me in Vermont, staying at a motel again and avoiding Dad’s house, but we never saw enough of her. I wanted Isabelle to get to know her better, so we went to her that February. Isabelle and Mom and I went to museums and playgrounds (very sparse on the ground in Vermont) and to Boston Common, with its swan boats, which enchanted Isabelle, as they had me a generation earlier. We ate at restaurants almost every night—Cambridge was now full of wonderful new ethnic places—and Mom got to know her granddaughter.

  When in the spring of 1979 I set off on my round of visits to organic farms, I found most of them through word of mouth; there was no register of these farms. I visited a small pig farm in Connecticut that produced pork with some fat and some flavor, and happily signed on a new supplier of chops, roasts, and bacon. Then I wasted my time on a disappointing series of farms whose claims to organic vegetables were exaggerated. I found some potential sources that would have to be vi
sited again in the late summer, one promising organic corn, another tomatoes. The tomato farmers told me about an organic mushroom farm in Vermont, up near Springfield. Many people found mushrooms to be bland, but reading about food constantly, as I did, I had encountered some interesting new ones—shiitake, cremini, and cèpes. I knew that my never having been to Europe was a drawback for a person who specialized in food, and I didn’t know when I could possibly take the time to go. This organic farm in Vermont was supposed to grow many kinds of mushrooms, and I decided to visit it.

  Springfield, Vermont, is halfway up the state and colder than the area around Brattleboro, where we lived. That May when I drove up, the fields were still brown, only slightly tinged with green. I was almost past Springfield when I saw a small sign reading “Champignons Jacquet” beside a driveway, which led through masses of trees, still only in bud, to a plain old Victorian house.

  I got out of the car and undid Isabelle from her car seat. At three, she was getting heavy, but whenever I picked her up, she would throw her arms around my neck and grapple my body with her little legs. This always sent hot lava pumping through my heart, and I held her close against my body as I walked to the door. A large man with a long, pale face, a broad forehead, and dark hair opened the door. He had the good looks that caught a person’s attention, but I kept my face immobile.

  “Mr. Jacquet? I’m Jess Leighton. I have an appointment.”

  “Hello, come in.” He tilted his head toward the room. I put Isabelle down and led her by the hand inside the house. The front room was an office, with a desk, a typewriter, a telephone and Rolodex, two standing file cabinets, and some charts pinned to the wall. I recognized them as planting charts; I had made similar ones for myself at Pax. There were also a couple of shabby armchairs, but he didn’t invite me to sit.