Charlotte Au Chocolat

by Charlotte Silver

  The grand event of every winter was meeting the movie stars. Every January, the Hasty Pudding Club elected the Man and Woman of the Year, and in February the two movie stars came to Cambridge to accept the awards. It was, for Harvard, a recent tradition: Woman of the Year dated back to 1951, and Man of the Year started in 1967. Downstairs, on the wall outside the doors to the theatre, the Hasty Pudding Club had mounted two wooden plaques with the names of all the winners in gold cursive, and they looked nearly as old as the FROM THE PUDDING TO THE PRESIDENCY plaque above the sofa. Only when you read the names of twentieth-century celebrities did you discover the truth.

  Everyone swapped stories about the stars. Legend had it that when Elizabeth Taylor had accepted her award in the seventies, she had ditched the Hasty Pudding members and smoked on the back fire escape with the members of the Cambridge Fire Department. Later, when my parents should have failed their safety inspection because they had no emergency exit in the dining room, the head of the fire department passed them, because he forever associated the Hasty Pudding Club with giving him the chance to meet Elizabeth Taylor. My mother was sad that she didn’t get to meet her; it was one of the great joys of her life when one of the bartenders told her she was “just like a blond Liz Taylor.”

  Meanwhile, Benjamin was the envy of all the boys at school when Sylvester Stallone was the Man of the Year in 1986 and he got to pose for photographs with him in front of the bar. The photographs show my brother, aged nine, standing up to Stallone’s shoulder.

  The year my parents opened the restaurant, Ella Fitzgerald was Woman of the Year. One of the chefs’ wives had agreed to help out at the Pudding on her birthday so she could meet her, but after the wife had rolled pasta dough and shelled peas for hours, Ella had still not been introduced, and she flung her apron on the floor and drove home. Just then, Ella Fitzgerald herself swept into the kitchen and asked, “Where’s Pat? I heard it’s her birthday. I wanted to sing her a little song.” Since Pat was a unisex name, her husband raised his hand, and Ella Fitzgerald sang “Happy Birthday” to him behind the line, to the great exasperation of his wife when she later heard the story.

  There were other tales, other movie stars. Cher received a belt made out of rhinestone-studded pheasant feet from one of the line cooks and wore it for the rest of the night; Clint Eastwood wore a three-piece brown suit, which my mother later told reporters was “the most confident fashion statement I’ve ever seen”; Harrison Ford, when asked if he thought any of the Hasty Pudding kids had a future in Hollywood, rubbed his eyes and said, “They’re . . . energetic, I guess”; Meg Ryan chewed gum at the dinner table.

  The Woman of the Year arrived in the afternoon, and every year I skipped school to attend the ceremony. In her honor, the Hasty Pudding Club organized a parade down Holyoke Street, in which one of the boys donned a wig and pretended to pass for the actress, who followed him in the next float. The actress almost always wore an Armani pantsuit in the afternoon and a slinky black dress for dinner. Perhaps because it was Harvard’s version of the Oscars and not Hollywood’s, she would seldom wear jewelry, and never furs. Her black peacoat, which she would toss in the office so nobody would steal it, always had Italian labels and came in too thin a wool for the New England winter.

  The Woman of the Year ate dinner at the Pudding; the Man was taken out to eat at a different place every year (whatever happened to be the most fashionable restaurant of the moment). The menu varied according to the star’s diet (my father dreaded having to cater to vegetarians), but the Club specified that we serve hasty pudding and vanilla ice cream for dessert. “The poor suckers, they swear by that goddamn gruel,” I had heard my father say. “It’s like something the fucking Pilgrims ate.” Hasty pudding, a pudding or porridge of grains cooked in milk or water, was indeed a cheerless dish dating back to sixteenth century England.

  The Man of the Year received his award on Strawberry Night, the opening night of the drag show. Every year I went to Strawberry Night, and every year the usher sniffed at my ticket marked “Upstairs at the Pudding—Comped” and led me to the second-to-last row of seats. The burgundy leather seats were shabby and too small. The theatre always felt hot, even in February. Two undergraduates introduced the movie star, and then forced him, as in a hazing ritual, to strap a bra over his tuxedo. He then grinned when they handed him his Pudding Pot while photographers snapped pictures.

  Like the Krokodiloes’ routines, the drag show never changed. The characters always included a selection of strumpets, an indignant queen who got to wear a hoopskirt, and a nurse who twitched her hips underneath a white pencil skirt; the story took them to the far corners of the globe and involved men in red military jackets with swords; to sing on key did not matter, as long as they enunciated the puns; and the show was long. An hour and a half later, the curtain dropped at intermission.

  For the next half hour, the Man of the Year lounged in the empty dining room, and that was where we finally met him. He seemed, no matter who he was and no matter how buoyant he had appeared onstage, rumpled and vague. He yawned as he signed people’s playbills and autograph books, and asked the nearest staff member if he could use a bathroom. Afterward, the movie star fiddled with the rickety lock of the kitchen bathroom and staggered, as if to the gallows, three flights down to the theatre to watch the rest of the show.

  Every Man and Woman of the Year received a Pudding Pot, a fat, gilt pot with their name and the year of the award carved into it in cursive letters. I wondered what they did with them afterward—if they placed them next to their Oscars, or if, as Michelle Pfeiffer was discovered to have done, they left them behind in their rooms at the Charles Hotel. Sometimes I closed my eyes and tried to imagine the Pudding Pot in a Hollywood home, but in my mind it never made it to the West Coast. It stayed behind, on a pink linen tablecloth at 10 Holyoke Street, Cambridge, in the heart of Harvard Square.

  Two

  FRONT ROOM vs. KITCHEN

  In the beginning, my father was the head chef and my mother made the desserts. Mary-Catherine ran the dining room and greeted customers.

  Until I was six years old, we lived in a rambling white farmhouse in Bedford on a piece of land called Dudley Road. There my mother used to watch my brother and me while making the desserts for the restaurant. In the yellow French country kitchen of the farmhouse, she stood at the table wearing a coarse white apron over her pink-and-green Shetland sweater. The charlottes cooled in their tin molds while she squeezed lemons and crushed strawberries to flavor her Sicilian ices. The juices trickled into the rectangular tins she stored them in. Then she split off a sheet of foil and smoothed it out on top of the tins; the foil crackled beneath her hands.

  Later on, the names of the desserts she made got printed in dark green cursive on the backs of the menus: Raspberry Fool. Queen Mother’s Cake with a Shot of Rum. Mocha Ice Parfait in a Bitter-Chocolate Tuille. And, of course, Charlotte au Chocolat.

  Every day, come late afternoon, we would drive the desserts my mother had made at home to the restaurant. We had to get there by five o’clock at the latest, because the prep staff needed to unload and plate the desserts before customers arrived for their reservations starting at six. My mother carried the desserts out to the car and I carried the decorations, the meringue mushrooms and pouches of coconut shavings. We also made sure to bring a party dress for me to change into later on; little girls could not be seen in the dining room in just anything.

  My mother’s car was always full of too many things. But somehow she arranged it so that all of the desserts would fit. She hurled my party dress, cocooned in a layer of plastic, on top of the desserts. I held her pocketbook in my lap, and between my feet on the floor I gripped bottles of champagne.

  On the ride there, she told me, “Memorize everyone’s name. The waiters, the busboys, the dishwashers, everyone. You don’t say just ‘Thank you,’ you say ‘Thank you’ and then the person’s name. It’s bad man
ners if you don’t.”

  “Yes, Mummy.”

  “And you look into the waiters’ eyes when they’re taking your order,” she went on, “and you thank them when they do anything, even when it’s just refilling your water glass, and even if they’ve already done it a half dozen times that night.”

  I sighed. “Yes, Mummy.”

  My mother had gained weight since having me, but her face was still beautiful, the brows fine and the nose uptilted like a doll’s. Once upon a time, at boarding school, she’d been voted both “Best Manners” and “Prettiest Girl.”

  We got to the city—that meant Harvard Square. Harvard Square had redbrick sidewalks and it smelled like cigarettes. Pedestrians tossed quarters at street performers and homeless people slept on the grates. There were a lot of them in those days. My mother parked in the lot behind the Hasty Pudding Club, where my father had parked his car in the morning. The Dumpster reeked of last night’s red wine and Roquefort flan, and ivy straggled down the back of the redbrick building. The chefs smoked on the fire escape. The chefs in those days were always smoking, always and everywhere. They waved to us, and we both waved back, saying, “Hello, hello,” in voices that people called “chirpy.” My mother propped open the steel door with a milk crate. Then we marched back to the car, lifted the desserts into our arms, and lugged them up the stairs. There were so many desserts to carry that this always took us several trips.

  The stairs leading to the kitchen festered with filth. They stank of eggs and rotted red meat and the cigarette stubs the chefs had mashed into the concrete with the soles of their sneakers. The only light reaching the stairs filtered through the ivy-shaded windows with wrought-iron bars. “Don’t look down,” she said. “Don’t look.” We never said that word: rats. Not even the other word: mice. We were both deathly afraid of rodents.

  The kitchen was large and drafty, and over the last century its white walls had blurred to a sooty gray. Black rubber mats stuck to the linoleum floor. A single butcher block, smudged with flour, ran down the line. Copper pots hung from the rack on the ceiling. Tupperware containers lined the walls and were labeled in red Magic Marker with the poetic names of various herbs, mushrooms, lettuces: CHICORY. TRUMPETS OF DEATH. RADICCHIO. Dust gathered in the corners between the stoves and the refrigerators. Once again, I feared the sight of rodents.

  My father stood at the head of the line—that meant he got to handle the meat. Everyone else did vegetables or pasta, and then there was the prep person, who decorated the entree with flecks of fried sage and who checked to make sure the dollops of sauce hadn’t smeared on the plate. My father’s hands pounded a slab of tenderloin.

  My father was a big man, broad-shouldered, soft-bellied, from German immigrant stock in Chicago. His full head of curly brown hair was already turning gray. But where gray hair gave some men distinction, it gave him a faintly frazzled, electrified quality, an effect heightened by the flecks of ash that were forever falling from his cigarette onto his thin black T-shirt. This was before the days when young chefs just out of culinary school insisted on getting their own chef’s whites. I’d only ever seen my father put on his chef’s jacket when he was photographed for a picture accompanying an article or a review, and then he did not look quite like himself.

  My mother ripped the tinfoil off the desserts, revealing what was underneath. The staff flocked to the cold station, as they always did when we brought the desserts. They shared spoonfuls of melted lemon ice (people in kitchens have no qualms about sharing food—family-style, my mother called this way of eating). But my father stayed behind the line, a cigarette dangling between his lips; he preferred savory foods to sweet.

  When I was a small child, I associated my parents with individual flavors. It was the same way you might filter someone through a prism of color—thinking of some people in blues, other people in reds—but instead of color, the sensation I latched on to was flavor. My mother’s flavors were always those of the desserts she made—suave caramels and milk chocolates and the delicate, utterly feminine accents of crystallized violets or buttery almonds. But my father’s flavors—my father’s flavors were something else altogether. They were subtle and elusive and melted on the tongue only to vanish before you could place them. Dark, adult flavors, and slightly bitter: veal carpaccio, silvery artichokes. And, most of all, mushrooms: chanterelles, chicken of the woods, and—my father’s favorite mushroom of all—trumpets of death.

  “Oh, look,” said my mother, glancing at her watch. “Charlotte, go on, get dressed before the customers come.”

  It was half past five. The “front of the house” had been at the restaurant since three, freshening flower arrangements and changing the pink linens, and now they had to change into their uniforms. I had to change, too, into what was essentially my uniform as a child: a party dress. I pushed open the black-painted double doors of the kitchen and walked out into the dining room. A candle sparkled on every table, and the carpet had just been vacuumed. The ceiling with its white beams sprawled as high and wide as the kitchen’s. The lights from the pewter chandeliers threw shadows on the posters from the Hasty Pudding Club, paintings done in all the rich, dull shades my mother had told me that as blondes we could never wear—crimsons and hunter greens and burnished golds—paintings of court jesters and skulls and crocodiles, and of tufted satin balloons sailing into a night sky.

  I moved fast, because soon the waiters would be undressed. We had only one public bathroom at the Pudding, and it was unisex, but only the waitresses changed there. The waiters used to peel off their clothes in the middle of the dining room. Some men had hair on their chests and some men did not. Some men wore boxers in solid colors, others wore patterns, like apple blossoms against a cream backdrop. (“Why is it the gay guys always have the best boxers?” I’d heard my mother remark, to no one in particular.) And some men didn’t wear boxers at all: they wore plain white briefs.

  The bathroom on the second floor had blue walls, and the stall doors rattled and shook. Mice darted behind the toilets, and to make the toilets flush you jerked a rusty chain in back. The white porcelain sinks were cracked and stained with brown; I’d heard my father say that the members of the Hasty Pudding Club had been vomiting into them for the past hundred years.

  By the time I got there, most of the waitresses had their tops off. Some of them wore black lace bras, which meant they had to change into pastel ones because the black showed through their white shirts. White shirts and black pants: that was the uniform. This was before you ever saw waiters wearing plain black T-shirts instead of white shirts, before bottled still water was offered and not tap, before olive oil and not butter came with every bread basket. At the Pudding, the shirts the waitresses wore varied: blouses that plunged past the breasts and wrapped around the waist; blouses with gathered sleeves and Peter Pan collars; blouses trimmed with black velvet or jazzed up with rhinestone buttons. The waiters all wore the same basic white shirt. For color, they added satin cummerbunds or bow ties.

  “Let me see your dress,” the waitresses said. “Such a pretty dress.” They fastened the hooks and closed the zippers and tied the sashes around my waist. I tightened the straps of my Mary Janes and skittered upstairs, past the overstuffed burgundy leather sofa on the landing where customers sat sipping Scotch-and-sodas before dinner. The waiters were all dressed now. “Let me see your dress,” they said, and I dropped my arms to my sides and stood up straight (as my mother had instructed me, saying “Posture is everything”). “Such a pretty dress.”

  For the rest of the night, I had to figure out how to entertain myself. Everyone else was busy. My father was behind the line and Benjamin was in the kitchen, too, where he liked to hang out with the guys. My mother was fluttering from one point of focus to another, expediting appetizers, plating desserts, solving problems. Mary-Catherine was greeting and soothing customers. So, with all of this activity swirling around me, I had dinner at a table
in the dining room by myself. The dining room at the Pudding was vast, and in those days, before restaurants were so fashionable and before so many people went out to eat, the room was only ever full on Saturday nights.

  I sat at a four-top known as “A-1,” or, occasionally, “Family Table.” The table, the very first one you saw when you walked through the double doors of the dining room, was not considered to be a desirable one for paying customers. Waiters crashed there at the ends of their shifts to talk to me and to nurse a glass of wine. My mother and Mary-Catherine sat there during the daytime to pay the bills, and my father to do the ordering from the vendors. When, on those busy Saturday nights, customers sat there instead, I felt unanchored, adrift without A-1, and would wander around the whole restaurant seeking a steady perch from which to sit back and watch all of the bustle.

  As soon as I sat down at the table, the bartender made my Shirley Temple. The martini glass teetered on the edge of the tray. When my waiter handed me the glass, the darker pink of the liquid splashed onto the lighter pink of the tablecloth. Maraschino cherries rimmed the orange slice floating in the center and the grenadine tinted the ice cubes pink. I swallowed the beverage fast and waited for the waiter to come back to the table so I could ask for another one. Until then, I coiled the cherry stems around my fingers and wondered what to do for the rest of the evening, after all three courses. Maybe I could play the piano in the Club Bar. Or relight the candles for the eight o’clock seating; my mother let me help with that sometimes. Or I could try to chase the Pudding ghost—the staff claimed it lived inside the poster over the waiters’ station, the one of the scowling gray-faced man with the black top hat and red fangs.