“I couldn’t imagine anything more wonderful for him,” she exclaimed, grateful that she could be so honestly exuberant. “And Mother would love it, I know she would. Do you think there’s any chance at all of their being included?”
He sat down beside her. “Oh, I think it might be arranged.” His voice pretended a doubt that his tongue-in-cheek grin denied. “But you’ll have to make one promise.”
“What?”
“He’s not to know that I had anything to do with it—he, nor your mother, nor anyone else.”
“But that’s not fair!” There was a choke in her throat. “Why won’t you let me tell them what a wonderful person you are?”
The last word was almost lost as the impulse that raced her words won in the split second that still separated her lips from his. She kissed him quick and hard, momentarily embarrassed by the consciousness of her own bold strength until the crush of his arms made it seem, by contrast, such a weak thing that it needed no excusing. The weight of his body carried her down into the leathery softness of the couch and they clung together for that breathless moment before she became aware that the sound she heard was not the beating of her heart but someone rapping on the dining-room door, unimportant until she felt herself suddenly released into aloneness.
Cash was standing, calling an acknowledgement, bringing her to her feet with a tug of his outstretched hands. “Lunch,” he said, “And there’s a very fierce giant downstairs who chops off the heads of bad little girls who insult his masterpieces by being late to the table.”
She made her mockery of terror gayer than laughter. “But even a bad little girl can’t have her head cut off without her nose being powdered.”
“Use my room,” he commanded, whisking her off with a sweep of his hand, then calling after her, “It’s the far door.”
But somehow she knew without being told, her hand on the knob of the right door before he called. Then she was inside, the door closed behind her, and she stood with her back pressed hard against it, her eyes, drinking in the intimate wonder of his bedroom. The faint man-odor was an intoxicating vapor whirling through her brain, Cash’s presence so real that when she returned to the living room there was almost the feeling of having left him behind, strengthened by momentary alarm at finding herself alone.
But the door to the dining room was open and when she stepped to the doorway she saw Cash waiting for her, holding her chair at a candlelit table for two, backgrounded by tightly drawn draperies in a semicircular window bay. The only light was from the candles, vignetting Cash’s face and the table top, sparkling on crystal and silver, painting the scene with an overtone of elegance that she found vaguely disquieting until, as she sat down, Cash leaned over her and whispered, “This is Andrew’s idea of the way a very sophisticated gentleman lures an innocent maiden.”
She threw back her head, looking up into his face. “Are you?”
“Oh, very sophisticated. And you?”
“Very, very innocent.”
He leaned over her, kissing her cheek quickly and lightly, and the sound of an elaborate throat-clearing on the other side of the pantry door seemed a ludicrous entrance cue borrowed from some old farce comedy.
Cash gained the propriety of his own chair in the moment of grace before the door opened, the candlelight dancing in his deep blue eyes as he struggled to suppress an open smile before the old waiter’s entrance. “Miss Austen, this is Andrew,” he introduced her.
She acknowledged the introduction and Andrew bowed silently, stealing a glance at her so fleeting that it made him seem an almost embarrassed conspirator. He served her and she looked down at a beautifully composed arrangement of what she was reasonably certain were slices of some kind of melon interleaved with a mysterious substance, tissue thin and translucently red.
“Jambon d’Ardennes,” Cash whispered, answering the question that she had just told herself she dared not ask.
Her two years of high school French allowed her to translate jambon into ham, but nothing had prepared her for the epicure’s delight that glowed on Cash’s face as he tasted the first paper-thin slice, nodding an acknowledgment to Andrew who withdrew with another conspiratorial glance.
Lory Austen felt herself frightened by inadequacy. She had been aware that Cash lived in an entirely different world than she had ever known but it was not until now, seeing him in a gourmet’s role, that she was alerted to the danger that her own ignorance lay between them as a separating moat, threatening the possibility of a shared life. She knew that there was an esoteric cult that practiced dining as one of the finer arts, but its members had been as remote from her own existence as the morning-coated men and poodle-leading women that she had seen on the pages of Town and Country in the library at Mount Oak. On several occasions her father had taken her to expensive restaurants recommended by admired top executives of big corporations. Usually they were steak houses, but one had been French—so French that the waiter pretended, at first, that he couldn’t even speak English. The food on the tables near them had seemed fascinatingly different and very intriguing, but she had not had the courage to reject her father’s suggestion of a nice well-done filet mignon—he explained that filet mignon was just as French as anything else—or if she wasn’t that hungry, she could have some nice filet of sole, with tartar sauce—filet of sole was French, too—and the waiter assured her father that it could be had without any of that fancy gravy.
At home, her experience had been no more broadening. Her mother’s interest in the affairs of the kitchen had always been confined to keeping Anna happy, and Anna’s happiness depended upon noninterference. Several times over the years, her mother had seen some dish illustrated in a magazine color page interesting enough to risk the suggestion that Anna try it. On rare occasions Anna had agreed to the experiment, but pride in her Pennsylvania Dutch ancestry had always been an ingredient added to the recipe, sullenly calculated to keep the result from throwing the slightest reflection upon the superiority of good plain Berks County cooking. The only victory ever scored over Anna had been Lory’s—the hard-won admission that French dressing might occasionally be used on a fruit salad—but Anna never served it without a pointed reminder that her Aunt Martha’s boiled dressing had been good enough to win a blue ribbon three years straight at the Farm Show. It was not difficult to imagine what Anna’s reaction would be if she were told that the epicurean way to serve honeydew melon was with some kind of French ham that looked like nothing in the world but raw chipped beef.
“Of course, that’s really a misnomer—jambon d’Ardennes,” Cash explained, mildly apologetic. “Actually, it’s Italian prosciutto—but the real Verona, not that Naples stuff—and it’s casaba, too, not Spanish.”
“It looks wonderful,” she said weakly, hopelessly entangled in strange languages and mixed nationalities.
A furtive glance across the table finally revealed the proper technique—you cut off a bit of melon and then, with a dexterous twist of the fork, wrapped it in a flake of ham. Her first attempt was an awkward failure but, fortunately, Cash’s attention was distracted by Andrew who came back now with a bottle of wine, parting its swathing of white linen to expose the label in the manner of a fond mother displaying the face of a sleeping child.
Cash looked at the label and then up at the waiter with a puzzled frown, his whisper so low that his words were more lip-read than heard. “But I’d ordered the chablis that I had—”
Andrew stopped him with the expression of a miserable martyr. “I know, sir, but I had no choice in the matter. You see—”
Cash’s eyes followed Andrew’s self-excusing glance toward the pantry door. “You mean—?”
“That’s it, sir,” Andrew said after sighing his relief at the smile of understanding that came to Cash’s face. “May I serve, sir?”
“Of course, of course,” Cash said hurriedly, waiting until the wine had been poured and Andrew had left the room before he leaned across the table to whisper, “Max has come up
to do our lunch himself. You should be impressed.”
“Oh, I am,” she said too quickly, not realizing for an instant that her only hope was to be honest and throw herself on Cash’s mercy. “—except that I don’t know who Max is.”
“You don’t know Max? Max Nicollet, the famous Continental chef of the Hotel Ivanhoe?”
“I suppose I should, shouldn’t I?”
“You will!” he promised chuckling. “And wait until you see him! He’s a fabulous cook but an even more fabulous man.” He raised his wine glass. “This was supposed to be a very special chablis—but Max disagreed so it isn’t.”
She followed his example and sipped, attempting a properly appreciative expression but handicapped by the dry and puckery taste on her tongue.
“It’s a hock, of course,” he said. “Johannisberger.”
“Of course,” she replied absent-mindedly, confused by the intrusion of still another nationality.
“What do you think of it?” he asked earnestly.
“Wonderful,” she said, hoping that the second sip would be easier.
It was. And she even managed a bite of ham-wrapped melon with Cash watching her. Consciously tasting for the first time, she found the blend of flavors surprisingly pleasant, wanting to say so but uncomfortably aware that she didn’t know the right words. And there was no encouragement to conversation in the rapt expression that came to Cash’s face with every bite and a sip of wine. Anxiously, she repeated names, trying to fix them in her memory … prosciutto … casaba … hock, not chablis … Johannisberger …
Andrew came in to clear the course and the fanning pantry door wafted in a faint cooking odor, rich and buttery, and she noticed that Cash’s head had come up, sniffing the air.
“Whatever that is, it isn’t what I ordered—but of course it never is when Max takes over. I might as well have saved myself the effort of—” He caught himself and flashed a slightly embarrassed smile. “I’m not doing a very good job of pretending that this was all impromptu, am I?”
The need for a reply was eliminated by a rumbling sound from the pantry. The door burst open and Andrew, apparently propelled from the rear by some irresistible force, almost leaped at the table, bearing a smoking platter from which, as if his life depended upon the saving of a single second, he hastily served a low mound of something covered with a faintly golden pink-speckled sauce.
Cash breathed in the dish’s aroma and she tried to follow his example, defeated by self-consciousness when she attempted to imitate the ecstatic expression on his face.
“What in the world is it?” he asked.
Given courage by the realization that she was no more mystified than he, she said, “I don’t know.”
“Looks like an omelette,” he speculated, exploring with a fork tip. “No, it’s more of a soufflé texture.”
He took the first bite and she followed his example, her imitation conscious until, unmatchably, he began to roll his lips as if it were somehow possible to physically separate the subtly blended flavors.
“Truffles in the soufflé, of course—and little river shrimp in the sauce,” he decreed, lifting a tiny specimen with a fork tine to prove his point. He tasted again. “Sherry—thyme—no, I’m wrong about the sherry. It’s marsala, definitely marsala. Agree?”
She laughed her helplessness. “I’m afraid I don’t know very much about—I’m not a gourmet—or whatever the feminine gender of gourmet is, if there is a feminine gender.”
“Max will tell you that I’m not either,” Cash said, a rueful smile breaking through, quickly erased by a look of puzzled concern. “You’re not really talking me seriously, are you? Don’t! I’m only trying to impress you with what a sophisticated fellow I am—and not making out very well. You’re doing a much better job of being the innocent maiden.”
“But I have the advantage,” she laughed. “It isn’t anything I have to try to be—I am. I don’t know anything about food at all. Nor a million other things either.”
There was a beat of hesitation before he said, unsmiling, “There’s a lot of fun to be had in the learning.”
“I’m sure you’re right,” she said. “If this is a sample.”
“Life can’t be all big adventures,” he said. “There have to be some little ones, too. The big ones are too few and far between.”
“In your life? I can’t quite believe that.”
“Why not?”
“Well—this,” she groped, looking around the apartment. “Living here—Aurora—your plane. I can’t imagine your life ever being short of adventures—either kind, big or small.”
His reply was slow in coming. “Yes, I suppose it could look that way to someone else. The truth is that—”
Andrew could not have selected a more unpropitious time to return to the room, serving asparagus from a great silver platter and then tiny rolls from a filigreed basket. He hovered over them, endlessly delayed his exit, and Lory was acutely aware that every lost second was adding to the difficulty of bringing Cash back to whatever it was that he had been about to say to her. There had been the promise of personal revelation and she was intently anxious that it be fulfilled, realizing now that her earlier feeling of complete understanding had been a delusion. The truth was that she knew next to nothing about this man who sat across the table from her and, only by knowing his innermost thoughts, could she hope to come to a sharing of his life. Instinct told her that an opportunity had been lost, that he would talk about himself only in the moment of a rare mood, and now that mood had been broken.
Without too much hope, she attempted to restore it when Andrew finally left the room. “You were about to tell me something.”
There was a half hope in the way he looked at her for a moment, but he said, “I’m sure we can find something more interesting to talk about.”
“I don’t agree. Tell me, please.”
“What?”
“Whatever it was that you were going to say,” she said, forcing gaiety as a last desperate effort.
What little hope still remained was dashed by his abrupt change of subject. “We’ll have to call in Max in a minute or two. Catch him before he goes back downstairs. I want you to meet him.”
“And I want to,” she said, resigned to waiting for Cash to tell her more about himself until some later time when there was no separating table between them. “I’d like to thank him for such a wonderful lunch. Or isn’t that the right thing to do?”
“Oh, very much the right thing to do. And don’t worry about going overboard with your praise. You can’t, not with Max. Modesty is not one of his virtues—nor are most of the other admired attributes of the normal man. Actually, he’s mad as a March hare.”
“Aren’t all great chefs supposed to be a little mad? I’ve read that somewhere.”
“Well, don’t tell Max. If he thought he was supposed to be mad, he’d change. And that would be a tragedy.”
“I take it he’s a nonconformist.”
“One of the last—and we don’t dare lose what few there are left. We need to keep a few individualists—as museum pieces if nothing else.”
“He does sound as if he was one.”
“Oh, he is, make no mistake about that.” He paused, spreading Hollandaise sauce with his fork tip. “Sometimes I think they’re the only really sensible people—the off-beat characters who don’t make sense at all. They create their own world and go on living in it, no matter what anyone else thinks of them. To Max, the edge of his cookstove is the rim of the universe and nothing ever concerns him but what’s happening right in his own saucepan.”
“And he’s happy?”
Cash chuckled affectionately. “You’d never know it to see him—he looks like an ogre and acts as if he were in a perpetual rage—but, yes, I’d say he’s happy. At least, I’m reasonably certain that he’s never lain awake at night asking himself whether he was doing the right thing with his life—and that’s about as good a test for happiness as there is.”
&nbs
p; The timbre of his voice had changed, coming close now to what it had been before Andrew’s interruption, suggesting a return to the mood in which he had been willing to talk about himself. A dozen questions suggested themselves, any one of which might turn him in that direction, but she was kept from speaking by an intuitive awareness that what she wanted most was knowledge that could only come to her unprompted and freely given.
Cash ate in silence, so preoccupied with whatever he was thinking about that she could, with safety, watch him without his knowing that he was being observed. He was eating automatically now, no longer the epicure, no catchlights of pleasure dancing in his eyes. Once they narrowed, as if to hint the return of sight, and she quickly looked down at her plate. But he did not speak and she let her eyes drift up to his face again. It was still expressionless and the small fear grew that his thoughts were hidden for some reason more serious than she had suspected.
“Sorry,” he apologized, speaking so unexpectedly that she had no chance to wash the concern from her face. “I—I was thinking about Max.”
She did not believe him—nor that he expected to be believed—but the way he looked at her now, as if some decision had been met and made, told her that she had been in his thoughts. That was enough to know.
Cash tinkled the silver bell and Andrew appeared to clear the table and serve the dessert, enormous strawberries glazed until they glittered like rubies displayed in a silken puff of glistening spun sugar.
“Please ask Max to come in when he has a chance,” Cash whispered to the old waiter, who nodded at the first word as if it were an anticipated request.
The anticipation must have been shared behind the pantry door because it no sooner closed than it opened again, not narrowly this time to admit Andrew’s sparse figure but flung wide. And every inch of the full doorway was needed. Lory had never seen a human figure that seemed a more improbable apparition, a mountainous bulk of starched white rising to the crest of a high cap, the only color the cherubic pink of bulging cheeks, every line of both body and face drawn with a circle-making compass—except, startlingly, the pen-ruled spikes of a black mustache.
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