Charlotte Au Chocolat

by Charlotte Silver

  My mother had insisted that Gus was “honestly a cream puff,” meaning that under the tough exterior he was very tenderhearted. He talked to himself behind the line; once I heard him say, as he pounded Parmesan bread crumbs onto a lamb chop, “Tonight I’m either going to get into a fight or get laid. I’m not very good at either.” He also scanned the menu for typos, exclaiming, “Fennel with one n, can you believe this shit?” His cuisine struck me as delicate, for the Pudding, which had always been known for its delicious but none-too-daring gentleman’s club cuisine, the richer, the better. Gus’s dishes included dabs of steak tartare placed on top of thinly peeled cucumbers and studded with quail eggs; poached sea bass on top of a scoop of asparagus puree; potatoes mousseline whipped so smooth you could not detect even the flecks of pepper.

  Whether Gus had cleaned up from the drugs we never knew, but he was an alcoholic. When he was sober, he tried to drink grenadine straight from the bottle, as I had underneath the bar when I was a little girl, because he thought that all the sugar would reduce his cravings. “No way will I put this in a glass,” he told the bartenders. “Then you’d deck it out with cherries and shit, like one of Shorty’s drinks over there, and I’d think you had funny ideas about me.” But the staff teased him about the deep pink bottles that said ROSE’S GRENADINE in swirly letters, and so he emptied beer bottles and filled them with the grenadine instead. Everyone suspected he guzzled the beer himself, in the bathroom. He left the bottles on the butcher block, and sometimes during the eight o’clock rush a cook tipped one of them over and then the pink liquid would ooze onto the wood.

  But after a three-day bender one weekend, during which no one could find him, my mother fired her latest and most gifted head chef.

  “It was the timing, Gus,” she told him. “No head chef ever bails on a Saturday night.”

  After that, Gus came back to the restaurant sometimes to visit my mother, but only when he was sober. He sat down across from her at A-1, slinging his leather jacket over the gilded back of the chair. “Please stay for lunch,” she said every time. “We’d love, love, love to have you.” The front of the house had to settle for staff lunch and I had to order off the menu, but chefs and former chefs got special samples: thumb-sized dabs of pâté; a new entree, duck breast with fingerling potatoes and artichokes, not yet on the menu; chocolate éclairs whipped up that morning in the pastry station, just for the fun of it. “You’re the real talent, Gus,” my mother said at the end of the meal, smacking one of her Coco Pink kisses on his cheek.

  After a while, Gus didn’t stop by for lunch anymore; he didn’t even come back for the staff Christmas parties in the Club Bar. And it seems to me now that Gus was the last truly colorful figure who worked in the kitchen. It was right around the time he worked at the Pudding that the entire restaurant business at large began to change. Fashionable restaurants with aggressive haute cuisine were springing up in Boston, formerly a baked-beans-and-cod town. Chefs were just starting to get their own television shows, a development that would have been laughable in my childhood, when the chefs I knew were hardly fit to be seen in public, let alone on television. Surveying the new generation of more career-oriented chefs, my mother said, “What a pity. It used to be that one went into the restaurant business to get away from all of the people who wanted to be doctors and lawyers. Now, who knew? All of the people who used to become doctors and lawyers now want to be chefs! It’s spoiling the business, if you ask me.”

  Every spring, my mother gave a special dinner for our investors. The dinners had a reliable rhythm to them, coming to Cambridge once a year like the Head of the Charles and being conducted with some of the same stately seriousness. The menu never varied that much, and, adding to the collegiate flavor of the evening, since so many of our investors were Harvard men, the dinners were held not upstairs in the dining room but downstairs in the Club Bar.

  After the entree had been served, a comfortable hush settled over the room. The investors’ bellies, bloated from my mother’s fava-bean soup with roasted pecans and crème fraîche, strained the fabric of their tuxedos. The wives fared better at the end of these meals, having opted for poached salmon instead of veal chops. The private-party staff cleared away the main courses, and now the men waited—sleeves rolled up and heirloom cuff links tossed on bread plates—for cups of coffee. They gestured to the waiters to fill their wineglasses so they could give toasts.

  We depended on the investors. They had helped to start the restaurant, and they helped to keep it in business. We owed them VIP tables, air kisses, and elaborate desserts. We slipped off the barstools to make room for them, remembered how much horseradish they liked in their Bloody Marys, and patted their arms and assured them that they would love the escargots appetizer, if only they would try it.

  “I want to tell you,” our head investor said now, “none of this wonderful night would have been possible without two women, yes, two wonderful women . . .”

  He paused. Mary-Catherine was there, waiting, but my mother had not yet appeared. Everyone applauded, but my mother did not appear. Then, as the applause petered out, one of the investors raised his wineglass to me, and the burgundy dregs plopped on his matching bow tie. “Charlotte,” he said, “Charlotte, why don’t you stand up for us? Come on, represent your mother.”

  The applause mounted again as I stood up from my seat. “Thank you,” I said. “Thank you all for coming.”

  “What did I tell you? She’s every bit as pretty as her mother.”

  Then the waiters served the dessert: Sicilian lemon pound cake on a bed of lemon ice. Propped on top of each slice were marzipan party hats sprinkled with pink dots, and a lit candle stuck out of each party hat. My mother had hand-squeezed the lemons for the ices, beat the batter for the pound cakes, and hand-molded the party hats. She had been at the restaurant since three o’clock in the morning. Now she was hiding—I suspected—in the rickety, urine-sprayed stall in the kitchen, trying to avoid the toasts. For all that she was such a flamboyant personality, she hated the formality of these evenings; she hated having any kind of tribute paid to her. It was, in part, a question of “front room vs. kitchen.” The kitchen was where she belonged.

  “I hope I don’t get caught,” I could hear her saying to the staff. “I always get caught.”

  In any event, it was a beautiful dessert. Sicilian lemon pound cake had been on the menu when I was a little girl, and I had missed it. Then I looked around the Club Bar at other people’s plates: the cakes had already crumbled, the party hats had split in half, and the candles floated in the yellow puddles. I wished that the party hat were a real party hat. I wished it were made out of paper and sequins instead of marzipan and pink food dye. Then I would slip it in my pink beaded clutch, like I did other keepsakes: menus, dance cards, roses.

  Already I was collecting a trail of bread crumbs that might lead me, one day, back to the Pudding once it was gone. But it was hard to do this. The art of fine dining is a cruelly ephemeral one. What perishes faster than the labors of the kitchen?

  She had tough hands, my mother. Tough enough to withstand labors of the kitchen. In the course of a single day, her hands lifted copper pots, cracked walnut shells, and hollowed out chicken guts. But that was in the kitchen. At home, preparing to go back to the restaurant to hold court in the dining room at night, these same hands dabbed Joy perfume on her temples, behind the wisps of blond hair that were, in marked contrast to her calloused hands, as angelically fine as a baby’s.

  But right around this time, the time of this investor dinner, something had started happening to my mother’s hands—something rather ominous. She was shedding her nails. They snapped, like asparagus tips, one by one. “I’ve used my hands,” she said. “That’s why.” And then, in wonderment, she would survey the cracked tips, the swollen knuckles, in front of her, as if to ask where had all those years of hard work gone, and what did she have to show for them.
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br />   The years when I was a teenager—the mid- to late nineties—happened to coincide with the most vibrant years of business at the Pudding, when the massive dining room was full of customers on any given night. Reservations for holiday dinners, with special menus featuring all of the most decadent ingredients, sold out long in advance. Come the first promise of warm weather, sometime after the ice on the Charles had thawed but before the lilacs were out, my mother started planting her window boxes on the herb-garden terrace. For Easter brunch, there would be hyacinths, pink and white as well as the more famous purple. By Harvard graduation, when the Pudding regularly did four hundred–plus customers, there would be roses—pink, salmon, golden, cream, but never red, for my mother had an aversion to flowers in that brassy, boastful color. She favored the gentle palette and loose, feminine profusion of an English garden, and it was there, in such a setting cradled high above the streets of Harvard Square, where customers dined in large numbers. For a certain era in Cambridge, that terrace was the place to be.

  Of course, by the nineties the Pudding was no longer the only glamorous dining destination in the Square, and Boston at large was beginning to produce its first batch of “celebrity” chefs. One of these, it was rumored, made his employees address him as “Oui, Chef,” even though, my mother was quick to point out, he came from New Jersey. It looked like the restaurant business was turning into the kind of operation where fame could be found and fortunes made. But then at that time, people were making fortunes all over the place and in all different fields. No doubt this allowed them to splurge on meals at restaurants like the Pudding, boosting our business. But this culture of fast fortunes—easy business opportunities—didn’t always change things for the better.

  Harvard Square when I was a child had its share of lovable dumps: Elsie’s and its pastrami sandwiches, Bailey’s and its butterscotch sundaes, and, most famously, The Tasty, which was a neighborhood favorite not so much for food as for the scruffy camaraderie at its dinky yellow linoleum counter. It was at that counter that Harvard professors might mingle with homeless people over fried-egg sandwiches, or maybe a plate of french fries.

  The year I was sixteen, Cambridge Savings Bank, which was the landlord of both The Tasty and the old-time German restaurant the Wursthaus, realized that they could make much more money renting space to chain stores. After a series of fruitless protests from the community, they replaced those two institutions with an Abercrombie & Fitch and a Pacific Sunwear. And so, here in Harvard Square, land of the life of the mind, sprang up enormous soft-porn billboards of ripped young men hawking preripped Abercrombie jeans. Hawaiian shirts and California-dreaming sundresses gleamed out of the windows of what had once been the Wursthaus, where Nabokov in his letters wrote of meeting Edmund Wilson for lunch in the fifties.

  The palette, the palette was the thing; the palette was the difference. The reason I flinched, at once, from the colors of the items in the Pacific Sunwear window was the same reason my mother flinched from red roses: they were too one-note, too bold. Cambridge, being the ultimate preppy town, had always been a place of dim colors and deep textures. Had Cambridge been a fabric, it would have been Shetland wool. Had it been a smell, it would have been one of those old-time pipe tobaccos, as offered at Leavitt & Peirce: Black Coffee or Cherry Cavendish, Dark Honey or Amaretto.

  After The Tasty closed, it wasn’t long before the Coop changed hands, too. Harvard agreed to sell the Coop’s bookstore to Barnes & Noble, provided they didn’t change the name on the sign, and indeed, people still spoke of it as “the Coop.” From the outside it looked the same, but inside I felt the difference, as I could taste the difference between the roasted capons we served at the Pudding and fast-food chicken tenders. The white walls twinkled and the railings of the staircase looked like they were made out of plastic. Tourists did not know that the Coop had been, above all, shabby, that one afternoon in its final days, a high school friend of mine had tried to take a picture of the Square through one of the windows and couldn’t, because of all the dust. “That is one filthy window,” he had said; it had been, once.

  Thirteen

  CABANA BOYS

  Meanwhile, cloistered in the gilded Victorian rooms of 10 Holyoke Street, we went on as though nothing had changed. The same year The Tasty closed, my mother threw me a lavish Sweet Sixteen birthday party downstairs in the Club Bar. The party took place in the middle of a snowstorm, making the gracious red-walled room as cozy as the hot center of a jam tart. There were three cakes (chocolate dacquoise, coconut-lemon cream, and strawberry-mascarpone) all with shapely, fluted, pale green letters pressed into them reading Happy Sweet Sixteen, Charlotte. I myself must have brought to mind a pastry that night, wearing a confection of fluffy almond-colored tulle.

  The dress, whose strapless sweetheart neckline and sweeping skirt recalled, I hoped, the famous white lilac dress Elizabeth Taylor wore in the ballroom of A Place in the Sun, also made me think of something my mother would have worn. Recently, I had found some pictures of my mother wearing a fluffy white dress and lavender-dyed dancing pumps to a ball she and Mary-Catherine had gone to at Harvard, and it surprised me to notice that her taste was rather less flashy now. Her color palette, for one thing, had mellowed. Gone were those rich, saturated parma violets and crocodile greens; now my mother wore subtle sea-foams and terra-cottas, champagnes and silvers. The hourglass silhouette, however, remained intact.

  It was right around the time of my Sweet Sixteen party that I began shopping vintage. When I was in high school, dresses from the romantic era of “the New Look” were still easily available and not nearly as expensive as they are today. In no time, I collected a marvelous assortment of them.

  The first piece of vintage clothing I ever bought was a pink satin cocktail dress starred all over with little gold dots, which, as people often remarked whenever I wore it in the dining room, matched the decor of the restaurant. I think it was only when I first stood in front of the dressing-room mirror in that dress that I realized I had inherited my mother’s figure after all and that it might be fun to show it off. And I did. I loved my waist. I loved my stomach. I loved the dip and curve of it beneath those vintage dresses, and how, although it was probably the most toned part of my body, it was not altogether flat; it had a gentle layer of baby fat as some yogurts have a silken layer of cream on top.

  For me, the experience of wearing vintage dresses was a sexual education of sorts—a heightening of my awareness of my own flesh, long before any man ever actually touched me, beyond the lightest and most courtly of good-night kisses. Putting on that first pink cocktail dress felt sexual as no other article of clothing ever had to me. So did all the other dresses I bought after it: the summertime picnic ones and tennis ones and prim-wool winter-office ones, and the Lolita playsuits and painterly patterned circle skirts and bullet-breasted halter tops. It turned out that for this type of clothing I had the perfect figure—the petite hourglass. Never once in the whole time I wore vintage did I have to take anything to the tailor for alterations, only repairs. I was much fussed over by the owners of certain vintage stores because I could fit into the most outlandishly curved of the 1950s dresses, the ones that were too small in the waist and too full in the bust for most customers to fit into. Fitting into these dresses, that was the ceremony, that was the grand event: the zipping-in often felt more sexual than actually wearing them out in public. I loved the sucking in, the sweet wishy breathlessness; how rusty side-zippers snaked along creamy skin—one wrong swerve and their teeth might nibble my flesh!—and how then in one swift motion they fastened into place.

  Sometimes it seemed to me that these dresses—these same cotton dresses that could look so heartbreakingly innocent crossing the lawn on a summer’s evening, that harkened back to the era of sock hops and glass-bottled Coca-Colas and sherbet-colored Cadillacs—had been designed with a naughty streak in mind. A pair of robin’s-egg blue bloomers peeked out from beneath the gingha
m kick pleats of one of my tennis dresses (not that I ever played tennis). Turn over a rickrack hem and find a threaded ribbon of red lace below. One of the sundresses, also gingham, had little silver snaps located on the insides of the shoulder straps; pull the snaps apart and the dress fell open to the breasts. Sometimes beneath the skirt of a dark tweed dress there would be gnashes in the slippery silk of the lining: a suggestion of ravishment.

  “Can you fit a meal inside of that?” the waiters said, scanning my figure when I entered the dining room, adding, “That is some waist.”

  During these years, I went to an artsy, progressive private school in the suburbs, where my whimsical style was probably an asset and I did, for the first time in my life, have a number of friends my own age. But I was still “the girl whose mother owns the Pudding,” and the restaurant continued to be the main setting of my social life; it was my clubhouse, as it were, my private world to which I allowed other people tantalizing glimpses.

  On school nights, to break up the tedium of homework and commuting and New England winters, my friends and I used to do “dress-up” dinners. Our favorite things to order were red meat and chocolate, although these days, when I meet old friends for lunch in some East Coast city or other, we all seem to order the same beet salads with prickly greens and thin dressings, and it isn’t the same; nothing is the same. But then we all wore vintage dresses, we piled our wrists with bangles and our necks with pop-bead pearls, and drank “Bondage Shirley Temples” trailing lime and lemon peels. We flirted with waiters, gay and straight, though it seems to me now that the gay ones always excited our imaginations more than the straight ones. I don’t think it was just because they were more handsome—although I suppose that some of them must have been—but because we understood from all the old movies we had ever seen and all the novels we had ever read that unrequited love was sexiest.