Charlotte Au Chocolat

by Charlotte Silver

  Besides, my mother said, we wouldn’t stay here for long. She wanted to buy a house, if only she could ever save enough money.

  My new Cambridge public elementary school was located about a five-minute walk from Harvard Square, where the Pudding was. It was also in walking distance of our new apartment. Every morning I got up and dealt with the usual drudgery that is the lot of any child in a school setting. Gym class was the worst. Not being athletic to begin with, I did not help matters by insisting on wearing dresses and patent leather Mary Janes to school. I spent recess sitting on a bench and reading novels, first romantic girls’ books like The Secret Garden and Anne of Green Gables, and not long after that, things by the Brontës and Dickens and Henry James. Having spent so much time around grown-ups at the Pudding, I held in contempt things that were deemed age-appropriate. I never for a moment envied the lives of my peers—lives of dodgeball, dioramas, “activities.” I knew that my life, by which I meant my life at the Pudding, existed on an elevated plane.

  I had only a couple of friends my own age, and I suppose it didn’t help that Benjamin—who was four years older than I was—was always much more popular. And after my father left the restaurant, Benjamin seemed to lose interest in it; there were few people left in the kitchen whom he remembered. He no longer helped shell peas or roll pasta, and within time he left the world of the Pudding for the world of his peers, eating dinner there only on occasion. For me, it would take years to leave the Pudding behind.

  One of my mother’s signature sayings was “Charlotte, I am not the Entertainment Committee.” She despised arts and crafts, despised anything shoddy, lumpy, without style. “Please,” she begged me, “do not give me a pot holder for Christmas.” She would never have hung a drawing by me on the wall when she could hang an exquisite antique botanical print instead. She discouraged me from watching PG and PG-13 movies, fearing that they would be wholesome and feel-good, qualities she never held in high esteem.

  I think it was around this time, when we moved to the first of our dismal apartments, when I started to realize that I only ever felt truly comfortable in the dining room of the Pudding. If our new apartment was a temporary arrangement, the Pudding, which had been there since I was born, was the only constant I had ever known, and it was only natural that it became my romance, my shimmering, sensuous center, the only place in which I was ever fully present. The rest of life was just waiting, waiting to go back to the Pudding. It was as if the lights were always on at the Pudding and off everywhere else.

  But those lights were soft, and the gentle, impressionistic shadows they shed on the dining room were always in the most delicate palette of peach, rose, and pinkish cream.

  Four

  ANYTHING CAN ABSORB CHAMPAGNE

  In my bedroom at this time, there was a small round window, so high up I had to stand on a chair to reach it, that overlooked the building in which my parents, long ago in another era, another life, had met. It had been a restaurant called Peasant Stock, and they had both worked there. Like their marriage, though, Peasant Stock was no more.

  What did my mother feel, I wondered, finding herself a divorced woman with two young children to support in the exact same neighborhood where, so many years before, she had fallen in love?

  Sometimes at night, when my mother was still at the restaurant and I was home alone, I’d stare out of that window. I’d look down and try to imagine that building with my parents and their friends from when they were young. In my head, the scene at Peasant Stock was always a fine midsummer evening. Blue cheese and champagne grapes on a rustic cutting board, grappa flowing, everybody eating family-style. And my parents were still together.

  It was my father I had to thank for these details—the grappa, the blue cheese, and so on—those tiny touches that could flicker a vanished world back to life in a child’s imagination, for my father and never my mother used to tell me tales of Peasant Stock. My mother seldom spoke of the past, admonishing me once, “Charlotte, I’m getting to be the age where I ought to be thinking about the past. You’re at the age where you ought to think a little more about the future.”

  Sometimes on summer evenings, my father would pick me up at the stoop in front of our apartment building and we would wander around the neighborhood, gazing at what remained of the haunts of my parents’ youth. We always started at the Wine & Cheese Cask, a dusky, creaking-floored room where olives floated in fragrant buckets of oil, the men behind the counter smoked cigars, and, for a time, my mother had worked behind the counter slicing cheese. Then we went to Savenor’s, the specialty food shop and butcher that delivered meat to all the fancy restaurants. Their most famous customer was Julia Child, who lived a couple of blocks away on Irving Street in the big gray Victorian, where she also filmed her television show.

  My father told me, “I used to see her husband, Paul, all around the neighborhood. He always wore a black beret and these little wool shorts. Oh! He loved the pickles they used to have. Used to wrap them in wax paper and put them in this very small, very chic French string bag. I think this was when L’eggs panty hose had just come out, and we’d see him buying them for Julia at the corner drugstore.”

  At Savenor’s, my father and I always got the same thing: roast beef and Boursin sandwiches with tomatoes on soft brown bread. All of the butchers who still worked there remembered my father from back when he’d worked in the neighborhood. Sometimes they’d give us tours of the back room, beyond the cold-cuts counter. My father, an expert butcher himself, admired the pigs’ knuckles and the ribbony cuts of skirt steak. “Cornish game hens!” he’d exclaim, stroking a fat-bellied golden bird on a string, a rapt look in his eyes. “Beautiful, beautiful.”

  Then we stopped at the ice truck, located next to Savenor’s in a bleak lot sprinkled with pebbles; for a dollar’s worth of quarters, you could get a bag of ice twenty-four hours a day. No one was on hand operating the machine, but somehow it magically worked anyway. My father put the quarters in the slot and out clinked the bag of ice. As the sun set beyond the blue slate roofs of the neighborhood, we sucked on the ice cubes and I ran my hand over the hood of the ice truck, soft with shavings, dreaming of snow.

  Here in this very lot on summer nights like this one, my father said, the staff at Peasant Stock would sit on milk crates and swill warm red wine after close. Meanwhile, I sat on the edge of the curb, hugging my bare knees to my chest. I hoped that when I grew up I would find a place like Peasant Stock. I would stay up late and drink red wine and, like my parents, I would fall in love.

  “I’m telling you, Char,” my father said, ripping off the wrapper of his roast beef and Boursin sandwich, “if only we had some pickles. That’s what makes one hell of a sandwich.”

  And then he described the pickles they used to sell at Savenor’s in the old days. They came in a barrel. You had to reach in with a pair of blackened tongs to get them, and sometimes you had to reach pretty deep. They sold out right away, those pickles, that’s how good they were. The best pickles in the whole world, my father said. And hearing this, I felt a faint pang of exclusion, because I’d never tasted those pickles. I’d been born too late for them and, it seemed, so many other wonderful things.

  Being a bookish, solitary child, these stories of grown-ups—my parents’ peers—made up the population in my head. Back when my parents were still together, there used to be a rather baroque-looking black sofa covered with cabbage roses in the living room of our farmhouse. It had passed from person to person at Peasant Stock before ending up with my parents. I once heard my mother remark, when she thought I wasn’t listening, “Now there’s a sofa that could tell you stories.” And for a long time after that I was fascinated by that sofa, as though I, Charlotte, could will it to life to tell me these stories simply by gazing at it.

  Once upon a time, my father told me, fine dining meant baked lobster and cocktails. Not all restaurants could be counted on to have win
e lists. But at Peasant Stock, they made osso bucco and cassoulet, and for dessert things like macaroon soufflé with apricot-brandy sauce. They never served ice cream, plain ice cream, but some far more fascinating item called granita, in potent infusions of espresso or huckleberry or blood orange. And they always served fresh vegetables—this in the days, according to my father, when even the Ritz-Carlton served canned peas. Everything, everything was fresh.

  “We used to call it Caesar’s Palace,” my father said of Peasant Stock. “That’s because every time someone ordered a Caesar salad, we’d coddle the egg for the dressing right then and there. Our fingers were always eggy, and they ached a hell of a lot, too.”

  My mother, who baked the desserts, used Blue Mountain coffee in the coffee-flavored granita. It was spectacularly expensive, but food costs did not much enter into the equation. Food costs was, for that matter, perhaps not even a term people had started to use. This was long before restaurants had consultants and chefs were celebrities. I’d heard her say, “Peasant Stock was the first place I ever tasted grappa.” The very word grappa, in my mother’s voice, seemed to signify sensuality, pleasure, discovery—happiness itself. Through the years, she would order it off and on, whenever she wanted to feel festive. I recall her once saying to me about Peasant Stock, “The cheeses were always so soft,” as though all cheeses since had hardened for her, spoiled.

  Peasant Stock was a truly democratic place, where everyone shared the chores; my father recalled Harvard professors wandering into the kitchen and drying dishes for an evening. It was the kind of place, my father went on, “where everyone had a PhD and drove a cab on the side. Oh! That reminds me. Remember Alyce? She used to drive a cab, back in the day.” Alyce had worked, briefly, behind the line at the Pudding in my father’s time, and was a rather curious figure in a kitchen, being for one thing an older woman and for another a well-educated Southern belle, via New Orleans and Radcliffe. In honor of her birthday, my father used to cook her a grand Southern meal, featuring turtle soup, creamed oysters, and strawberry layer cake.

  “She did?” I exclaimed, unable to picture this fine-boned woman who I always thought of as wearing long, swishy Marimekko dresses sitting behind the wheel of a taxi. Alyce had always taken an interest in me, and when she and her husband, Philip, used to come visit our farmhouse, she always brought me the most luxurious picture books.

  “Oh, yeah, just to make a buck. I think maybe it was just something for her to do between marriages. Anyway, it was the seventies! Things were different then. You know she had an affair with Updike? She was at Radcliffe the same time he was at Harvard. She was always talking about him. Updike, Updike, Updike. I used to get sick of the name!”

  “Oh my God,” I said, “so that explains it. The last time I saw her”—she and Philip had come in for dinner at the Pudding—“she was asking me what I was reading these days, and had I read Updike yet? There was this look in her eyes when she said the name.”

  “Yup,” said my father, and laughed. And I, filling in the pieces of the narrative, marveled at the succulence of detail, the beautiful banquet of grown-up life. I couldn’t wait till I grew up and worked at someplace like Peasant Stock myself.

  “Actually, between you and me, Char, Philip used to kind of drive the staff nuts. His big thing was collecting old stamps and rare coins. Coins and stamps! Fucking kill me already.” My father rolled his eyes. “You know me, Char, I can be interested in almost anything, but not that crap. He used to come into Peasant Stock and go through the register looking for coins. And there we were, like, trying to run a restaurant! Getting the food out of the kitchen and feeding the customers and everything. We used to call him ‘Stamps’ sometimes behind his back.”

  My father and I walked and walked down Kirkland Street, the sun beginning to set. Even in summertime, the light slanting down was a thin, dim yellow, not a rich, happy yellow. Cambridge was a melancholy town. Its color palette was faded. We passed Sanders Theatre, a looming, fairy-tale structure that seemed to belong more to England than anywhere in America. And right across from Sanders Theatre was Sparks House, home of the Reverend Peter J. Gomes, longtime minister of the Memorial Church and one of the well-known local characters. Everybody could see him coming, a rotund yet suave figure turned out with dandyish precision in elaborate three-piece suits. His watch fob—always seen hanging from his breast pocket—seemed to my child’s eye like some magical toy, which, if you tugged its long golden chain, might rocket you, Alice in Wonderland–style, to another kingdom. Reverend Gomes often ate at the Pudding, and every spring my mother and Mary-Catherine went to the lavish garden party he held on the lawn of Sparks House, lilacs wildly feathering the hedges that kept the prying eyes of strangers out. In season—but only in season, he stressed—he wore a straw boater hat. That hat signified the turning of the season in Cambridge the same way the lilacs did: a hopeful emblem of balmy weather.

  “Oh, Peter Gomes!” exclaimed my father. “That guy. You know who works for him?” My father named the former owner of Peasant Stock. “I think he does catering for him. Christ! I don’t think I’d wish the likes of catering for Peter Gomes on my worst enemy. Imagine it: tea parties for Harvard choirboys and all that WASP-y crap. I bet you’d have to serve tea sandwiches!” My father shook his head. He didn’t care for tea sandwiches, or for miniature food generally. He was from Chicago; he liked a hot dog with all the fixings, a Reuben with plenty of Russian dressing, the works.

  By then we were also near Julia Child’s house, just a couple of blocks down Irving Street. I often passed her in the mornings on my walk to school. You couldn’t miss her; she was so tall! I asked my father, “Did Julia Child ever come in to Peasant Stock?”

  “One night, there I was, making stuffing,” my father recalled. “Corn bread stuffing with oysters and bacon. You know the one, Char. Your mother still makes it. Anyway, in comes Julia, you can’t miss her, that height, that voice, and I’m just making my stuffing and then I look over at her as she’s trying to open a champagne bottle with the side of a cleaver—that’s an old kitchen trick. And then pop! The champagne spills all over my stuffing. Julia turns to me and says, “‘Now, now. Don’t you worry. Anything can absorb champagne.’”

  Anything can absorb champagne—not bad words to live by, I think, and words that my mother and Mary-Catherine, taking over the Pudding after my father left, certainly took to heart. For they continued to run the restaurant in the shadow of Julia Child’s effusive spirit, wanting dining there to be like going to a friend’s fabulous dinner party every night.

  My father had been living with someone else—someone else from the Peasant Stock crowd—when he fell in love with my mother. The feeling, apparently, was mutual, for my mother also was living with someone else at the time, and immediately left him to be with my father.

  I heard that my father walked out on the other woman one afternoon, wordlessly and quite without warning, while she was standing at the kitchen counter chopping carrot sticks. The only thing he bothered to take with him was the English sheepdog, Benjy, who went on to live with my parents and was still around in my earliest childhood, before he died, run over by a snow tractor on Dudley Road.

  I have only heard tell of the incident of the carrot sticks and have only the vaguest memories of the bloody chaos surrounding Benjy’s death, so all of this is only speculation on my part; all of it relies on my imagination, the same thing I use to summon up the soft cheeses, the granitas, at Peasant Stock. Was there a warning in the event in this other woman’s kitchen of just how easily my father could pick up and leave? This scene—simple, elegant, and darkly comic—expressed a great deal about my father’s understated style: no explanations, no regrets. As did the fact that he took none of his possessions with him (not for nothing did I often hear people refer to my father as “the last of the bohemians”—this was years, years after other people from Peasant Stock had gone on to make money and buy fancy r
eal estate, leaving the lifestyle, if not, they supposed, the values of the sixties behind them). And then there was his bothering to take the dog: also a foreshadowing of events to come, because my father was fond of animals and had a weakness for collecting them, although a number of their lives ended, like Benjy’s, in macabre deaths.

  My mother was already pregnant with Benjamin when my parents were married in a simple ceremony befitting that less materialistic time. They spent their honeymoon in Vermont, a conventional enough choice, I suppose, except that for some reason Mary-Catherine went along with them. In fact, Mary-Catherine met my father before my mother did, and, compelled by his moody, cerebral magnetism, had even had a crush on him. No matter. It was my understanding, even as a child, that Peasant Stock had abounded in many love triangles far less innocent than this one, which went on to fuse friendship and business. And many years later, when I was all grown up and my father was dead, too young, of his third and final heart attack, my mother and I sat down to a breakfast of English muffins and blueberry preserves at a fancy resort in Woodstock, Vermont, on a radiant midsummer morning. My mother sighed and mentioned coming to Vermont for her honeymoon; an unusual nostalgic detour for her, for she still doesn’t talk that much of the past. Then she said, “Mary-Catherine Deibel came with us on our honeymoon, did I ever tell you that?” My mother laughed. Then, surveying the wreckage—but also the delicious richness—of her life: “Oh, well. I guess I always figured I’d end up with one or the other of them. And so I did.”

  As for Peasant Stock, it served its last glass of grappa in 1987, when I was six years old and, incidentally, just around the time my parents’ marriage was cracking up on Dudley Road.