My Mother's Kitchen

by Peter Gethers

  What I did instead was start whining that I was really coming out to see Cindy—inadvertently torpedoing my whole “I’m dying to see you” strategy that got me the plane ticket in the first place. My dad countered with, “Then stay at her place.”

  I had to admit that I couldn’t because … um … she lived with her mother.

  He took that as a triumphant end to the conversation and hung up. My mom lingered long enough for me to whine another minute or two and for her to say, somewhat sympathetically, “You know your father.”

  I did indeed. But despite that knowledge, somewhere around three in the morning, after a night of boilermakers and more than a few tokes, I sprawled on my perpetually damp and chilly waterbed sheets and wrote the most pretentious, arrogant, annoying letter in the history of father/son relationships.

  I pointed out, in long-winded and very specific detail, his hypocrisy—his recently divorced friend Edward was, as I scribbled, staying in my parents’ house with his new, much younger girlfriend!—as well as his nineteenth-century values and fake morality, and, in a particularly nice vein of attack, how out of touch he was with real life because he was so old.

  I was so pumped up, I finished the letter in twenty minutes or so, stuck it in an envelope, went out into the predawn, late-autumn Village streets, and, with a satisfied and smug smile, shoved the letter into a stumpy corner mailbox.

  As the paper left my fingertips, the smug satisfaction instantly turned into genuine panic. Reality set in with the subtle impact of a shiv in my shoulder blades. An angry father equaled no airfare. No airfare equaled no Cindy for Christmas. No Cindy for Christmas, in my suddenly addled brain, equaled a lonely, female-free, sexless future for the rest of my downtrodden, miserable life. What had I been thinking? I grabbed wildly for the letter but could only feel the air as the envelope floated downward and nestled into the heap of other less self-destructive letters left by other less desperate sons.

  Gathering myself as best I could, I ran back to my rat hole and called my brother in L.A. (we were still on good and close terms). Waking him up, I said, “Okay, don’t ask questions. I need you to go to Mom and Dad’s tomorrow, camp out by their mailbox at the end of the driveway, and wait there until you see a letter from me.”

  “What?”

  “When you see the letter, take it out, don’t read it, burn it. Totally destroy it. Immediately.”

  “Who is this?”

  “Seriously, you have to make sure Dad doesn’t see it.”

  “I’m going back to sleep now.”

  “Really. Eric, I’m serious. Name your price!”

  “Bye-bye now.”

  “Oh, come on…”

  “Byyyyyyye.”

  This was the kind of situation my brother loved and it was hard to blame him. I was the one who, for a change, had done the totally moronic thing. I was the one about to face the wrath of God or, in this instance, our father, which was way worse because I actually believed in the wrath of our father.

  Starting that morning, I called my parents every day from work. The first three days, all was fine. The usual chitchat. On day four, my dad answered and when I said, “Hey,” there was a pause of about one one-hundredth of a second before he said, “I’ll put your mother on the phone.” His voice was so icy, I was surprised the telephone wires didn’t freeze from coast to coast.

  Moments later, my mom picked up. “So,” I said, as nonchalantly as I could manage, “did Dad get my letter?”

  “He did.”

  “So … um … what did he think?”

  “He’s already mailed you his response.”

  “Do you want to give me a hint?”

  “You’ll get it when you read what he sent.”

  “Can I talk to him?”

  “He doesn’t want to talk.”

  “Are you still paying for me to come out there?”

  “You’ll have to read his note.”

  “Mom, seriously, can’t you just—”

  But she couldn’t just do anything. I sensed that my dear, dear mother, who always took my side and always offered total support, was enjoying this. I’d made a major blunder and I could visualize the same smile on her face that she used to have when I was a teenager and it was raining and she’d tell me to take an umbrella but I’d refuse, telling her I hated umbrellas. She wouldn’t argue, she let me go out and get drenched. The smile would come the next day when I would wake up with a cold and she’d tell me that perhaps I’d learned my lesson—but since it was my own stupidity that led to my sneezing and runny nose, I had to get up out of my warm, comfy bed and go to school. Now!

  It took three more days for my dad’s letter to arrive. My hands were trembling just a tad and my stomach was churning as I tore open the envelope. Inside, to my relief, was the check so I could buy my plane ticket. Along with the check was this note, which I have saved and framed and still have hanging on a wall of my apartment:

  It’s putting it mildly to say I felt like the biggest shmuck in the world.

  I called home. My mom picked up and heard me say a downtrodden “hello” and then ask to speak to my dad.

  “I’m an idiot,” I said when he got on.

  “Yup,” he agreed. He didn’t gloat; he simply savored my resignation.

  “That was an excellent response.”

  “I’m a writer. I have a way with words.”

  I didn’t really have anything else to say. I’d lost, outboxed by a master.

  “Do you want a real answer?” he asked. And when I mumbled a clever assent along the lines of, “Okay,” he said, “It’s my house. I’m too old to be uncomfortable in my house. It’s not a question of morality or judging what you’re doing. I’ll feel uncomfortable if my son is sleeping here with some young woman I’ve never met. You can stay somewhere else and you’re welcome to come here for breakfast, lunch, and dinner or any other time except sleeping. Or what you’ll most likely be doing instead of sleeping.”

  I managed to get out the words: “That seems fair.”

  “Good. I’m looking forward to seeing you and meeting her. And, by the way, a lot of work went into tracing my hand. I hope you appreciate the effort.”

  A couple of weeks later, I was in L.A., staying at my best friend Paul’s house, about a mile from my parents’ home. Paul’s mother had died when we were seniors in college and he and his dad had been playing Felix and Oscar, living together since then. But the dad had recently met a woman and had just gotten remarried, moving into the new wife’s place, so Paul had the run of his parents’ house until it was sold. Cindy and I got to use one of Paul’s now-married sisters’ bedrooms while Paul and his brand-new girlfriend, Laurie, stayed in his old bedroom, the one in which he and I used to race slot cars when we were ten years old.

  Cindy and I got the parent test out of the way quickly and Cindy passed with flying colors (despite a fairly severe attack of nerves when I made the mistake of telling her the story about my dad and the letter). One night we had a lovely, trauma-free dinner with them at the forbidden house and, over dessert, my mom said that she wanted to take Cindy and me out to lunch the next day.

  That turned out to be my mom’s LC Day—Life-Changing Day.

  My dad, being a serious restaurant guy, loved going out to hot new places and this place, my mom said, was their new favorite. They’d been going two or three times a week. My dad liked it because it was becoming a big show business hangout. My mom loved it, she said, because the food was incredible. When she spoke about eating there, I noticed that something new and interesting flashed across her face. I wasn’t sure exactly what it was, although I was able to put a name to it later: passion.

  The restaurant, she told me, was called Ma Maison. And there was a new baby chef who she thought was brilliant. His name, she said, was Wolfgang Puck.

  So the next day, my mom picked Cindy and me up—the proximity of Paul’s house to mine was convenient when we were childhood buds and just as convenient now, since my parents h
ad forbidden any carnal acts in my old room (when I actually lived there as a teenager, they never had to—the size of my Adam’s apple and Jewfro pretty much took care of that all by themselves).

  The restaurant was at the corner of Melrose and La Cienega in West Hollywood. On the surface, it wasn’t anything special. There was an outdoor patio with cheesy-looking plastic chairs and an ugly plastic tarp that could be pulled over the roof to protect patrons from too much L.A. sun or the dreaded and greatly feared L.A. rain. Inside there were several rooms, all of which were so casually decorated, the restaurant had the feel of being in someone’s long-lived-in house (thus the name, Ma Maison, I suppose). There was an upstairs room with a fireplace and a downstairs room that featured a beautiful bar. The atmosphere as well as the service felt informal and friendly and remarkably new. The crowd as well as the staff were young; a good time was being had by all. I suspect that everyone—from the owner, Patrick Terrail, to the young chef, Wolfgang, to the various sous-chefs, to the goofy, charming waiters—was stunned that they were at the epicenter of the hippest, most successful, most talked about restaurant on the West Coast of the United States.

  We sat out on the patio—that was the place to sit, despite all the plastic—surrounded by Orson Welles (I’m trying very hard not to say that he would have surrounded us if he’d been there all by himself), Ed McMahon (who conceivably and depressingly was more famous than Orson Welles in 1975; I later learned from the inside guys at Ma Maison that Johnny Carson’s sidekick used to have private parties at the restaurant and get them to pour cheap wine into empty expensive wine bottles so his guests would be impressed but he didn’t have to fork over the money for the actual good stuff), Sammy Davis Jr., and a bunch of people who, judging by the white belts and sweaters expertly and offhandedly strung around their necks, I assumed ran TV networks, movie studios, talent agencies, and record companies.

  The beautiful Ma Maison menu

  Forty years later I remember exactly what I ate: fish soup was my starter, followed by warm lobster salad. Those were the two most glamorous things on the menu, in my mind. Fish soup was something I thought was only available in France, the country I most fantasized about living in. The first taste of that soup was so potent and fragrant and thick and fine, it instantly transported me to the Left Bank of Paris and a tiny divey restaurant where I’d first spooned the stuff into my mouth when I’d gone there at the age of seventeen.

  Ordering the lobster was a less complicated choice; that simply was, to me, the fanciest, most expensive food on the planet Earth. Mixing a warm, expensive thing in a cool mélange of lettuce and onions and tomatoes and vinaigrette seemed unimaginably creative to me, as well as deeply satisfying. I don’t remember being transported by that dish but I do recall with great precision the chewy texture and the trace of vinaigrette lingering on the lobster meat as it slid down my throat. I’m reasonably certain that my mother had Wolf’s legendary Poulet à la Moutarde, which was deglazed with port, had a bit of cream, and was finished off with mustard, and I absolutely do recall that I begged Cindy to get the Croque-Monsieur, because that was also so French and exotic (how a grilled cheese sandwich can be made to seem exotic I didn’t and to this day don’t understand, but it was and still is). She obliged and was knocked out by it. Going purely French all the way, I ended with the Crepes Surprise, which I’m pretty sure had chocolate and some form of chestnut puree. Two espressos were the sublime finishing touch. I could have had a double but the dainty, tiny cups also seemed the more sophisticated way to go in my unsophisticated vision of coffee drinking, so I downed one, then another, rather than just taking the same thing in a larger, less interesting vessel.

  The food was mind-blowing, but what happened during the crepe eating and the espresso sipping was the game changer.

  Patrick Terrail, the owner—with slicked-back, Pat Riley–ish hair pre–Pat Riley, a fleshy but handsome face, and a manner that emanated a strange combination of welcoming, eager-to-please host and distancing, I-don’t-have-to-please-anyone-because-my-joint-is-so-successful arrogance—came over to join us because my mom was such a regular customer. He pulled up a chair, sat, and began chatting. After a few minutes, my mother touched his arm and said, “I’d like to become a good French cook. What do you think I should do?”

  I believe my mother had something short-term and fairly dilettantish in mind, as in going to France for a few weeks and taking some cooking lessons. Instead, without missing a beat, Patrick said, “Come to work in our kitchen three times a week. We won’t pay you and you’ll basically be our slave, but after a year you’ll be a real French cook.”

  I remember thinking, Yeah, right, that’ll really happen, but I didn’t have a chance to say anything because my mom responded instantly.

  “Okay,” she said. And that was all she said. Just: “Okay.”

  I still remember her inflection on that one word. Her voice trailed upward, as if surprised that the word had come out of her mouth. The lilt in her voice carried a definite sense of jubilation.

  I smiled and said something eloquent along the lines of, “Wow, this is very cool.” I didn’t want to get too excited. I figured her jubilation wouldn’t last much past the moment when she told my dad she was going to work.

  I could not have been more wrong.

  My father’s response was instant and unwavering: he thought it was a wonderful idea.

  My dad, as I’ve said, was a fantastic guy and I loved him dearly. But he was used to being catered to. Everyone was surprised how quickly he acquiesced to this new situation. My sense is that if he had said no, my mother would have stayed home. I’m not positive about that—and she’s not sure, even to this day, if that’s true—but I suspect I’m right. He didn’t just say yes, however; he was wildly enthusiastic. And as my mother’s love for her new world and her satisfaction in her success in that world grew in leaps and bounds, he was even more wildly proud. And boastful. At some point, two or three years later, the food world in L.A., at Wolfgang’s instigation, began calling him “Mr. Judy Gethers.” His face lit up every time those words were uttered. Before too long, we’d show up for dinner at a restaurant, my dad would go up to the host and say, “Mr. Judy Gethers for four,” and we’d be led to our seats. Eventually, Wolf and his then-girlfriend, later wife, still later ex-wife, Barbara Lazaroff, gave my dad a birthday present: a chef’s apron on which was printed, in large block letters, MR. JUDY GETHERS.

  I recently told my mom how everyone was surprised that he was so instantly supportive. “I know,” she said. I asked if she’d been surprised. “Oh yes!” was her answer. “I was shocked.”

  We shouldn’t have been so startled. My dad was wise enough to see what no one else could see about my mother at that time, including my mother: she was restless. She was ready to evolve. It was time, at the age of fifty-three, for her to become a different person. My dad loved the person she’d been for her first fifty-three years. He was secure enough, comfortable enough in his own skin, and confident enough in my mother that he knew he would also love whoever she became for the rest of their time together. And that the new Judy would love him right back.

  My mother went to work at Ma Maison as soon as the New Year began. She cooked two nights—late nights—and one full day per week. It quickly became an all-consuming passion and her life soon revolved around crème caramels and salmon mousse and various foods en croute, and she had a new family, comprised of chefs (well, mostly Wolf, with whom she quickly developed a mother/son–like bond), sous-chefs, waiters, busboys, and just about anyone who spent time in the back of the restaurant.

  There was, unquestionably, a new kind of exhilaration to my mother’s life. She had, in a sense, been set free. Every day was a new learning experience, either technically in the kitchen or in the way she was now dealing with her new family of restaurant workers. She was suddenly the go-to person when wisdom needed dispensing. She could discuss the ups and downs of marriage from the role of observer as well as participa
nt. My father had always been the storyteller and teacher in our family, but now, with relative strangers, my mom assumed that role. And the lessons she conveyed were not always the same as her beloved husband’s. She would recount a tale from their past and realize that she had her own completely separate interpretation and perspective.

  She liked coming home (or calling me in New York or going out to lunch with a new friend) and discussing her own experiences instead of having to listen and comment upon the experiences of others. For the first time in her life, she became the center of attention and she was surprised as well as delighted when she realized that she was worthy of that attention. At the same time, she remained remarkably without ego and never minded not being the center of attention. She could empathize with almost anyone’s hurt or confusion but she also developed enough confidence in her point of view that she was now able to say to people, “You’re wrong.” Those two words coming from my mother were never said harshly, nor were they meant to stop someone in his or her tracks. They were spoken with kindness, and my mother’s intention was always to help someone evaluate the path being taken before that path became irreversible.

  In the kitchen, she was learning from experts (in the case of Wolf, an actual genius) and it thrilled her. As an extra bonus, I think my mother’s new career probably gave my dad the courage—or at least the impetus—to move to a new level in his own work world. He started directing—two-hour TV movies and miniseries—and went back to his first love: playwriting.

  Many years of being the calm center of many family storms stood my mom in good stead in the midst of the insanity and turmoil in one of the hottest kitchens in the country. There were divorces, feuds, and rampant jealousy (both personal and professional). There was even a murder (Dominick Dunne’s daughter, Dominique, was strangled by one of the sous-chefs in the Ma Maison kitchen!).