Charlotte Au Chocolat

by Charlotte Silver

  There was one colorful young man I had something of a crush on in those years. His name was Drew.

  He was such a dandy that he once told my mother, “I’ll quit if you don’t write bow tie privileges into my contract.”

  The Pudding, alas, had a dress code for the staff now. It wasn’t like the old days, when the waitresses wore different white blouses and the waiters wore jewel-toned cummerbunds. Now both waiters and waitresses wore black pants and starched white shirts issued from our linen supplier, with black shoes that the managers were supposed to check for scuffs and holes. But Drew—and I admired him for this—would have none of it. He told me that he suspected that our latest general manager, himself a flamboyant dresser, had made up the dress code because he feared competition from the staff. When Drew told my mother that he suffered from a shortage of closet space and had had to put portable clothing racks in his bedroom, as she herself had, she made an exception in his case. Anyone who loved clothes as much as she did didn’t need to follow the dress code.

  Drew had a shaved head. “Imagine,” my mother said, “how high maintenance it would be to keep up that shaved head. I can barely keep up my highlights.”

  Some of the line cooks had shaved heads, too, but Drew’s was different. No one had ever seen a speck of hair on it, and the skin looked as pristine as the shell of a peppermint candy. Drew drank three brandy snifters full of whole milk a day. He carried an old-fashioned doctor’s bag full of packages of vanilla wafers with him at all times. His collection of bow ties rivaled my mother’s collection of high heels in quantity, and they were very beautiful: I remember in particular a rich blue velvet one. He also wore top hats, which he propped on the oversized bottles of champagne behind the bar. Sometimes I didn’t notice the top hats, because they fit in with the rest of the antiquated clutter in the dining room. As Drew himself said, “I go with this restaurant.”

  Drew’s appearance won him presents as well as attention. At the Bastille Day festival on Holyoke Street—a sweaty affair in which the Pudding, along with other restaurants in the Square, was forced to set up a booth and sell beignets and sausages to tourists—he got free sticks of cotton candy because they went so well with his straw hat and seersucker suit. One of the waitresses, who also worked as a first grade teacher, had her students scamper around the classroom, collecting feathers and rhinestones so they could make Drew an Easter bonnet to wear at brunch.

  But it was Mariness Dewitt III, one of our regular customers, who gave the most extravagant gift. Every year, Mariness celebrated his birthday alone on the terrace with a glass of sherry and a slice of coconut cake, and every year he would stand up to blow out the candles while the other customers applauded. One afternoon he dropped off a beribboned package for “that delightful bartender.” It was an antique top hat, heavy with smoke blue plumes and reeking of moths. “I do want to wear it,” Drew said, “but I couldn’t feel . . . clean.”

  Whenever Drew worked, I ate dinner at the bar and felt like a little girl again, even though by now I was a teenager. He gave me some of his vanilla wafers—a treat, because I ate at the Pudding so much, I sometimes got bored of all the desserts on the menu—and milk mixed with ice cubes in a sterling-silver cocktail shaker so that it tasted like the frostiest, purest milk in the world.

  It was hot the summer I was seventeen. On the terrace, little old ladies broiled in the sun, clutching Bloody Marys in their wrinkled hands. Whenever I ate outside, I heard the chefs cursing and grunting through the screen of the kitchen. I heard the hiss of the dishwasher and smelled, along with the roses and honeysuckle, bacon frying and blueberries bubbling on the stove in a pot of sugar. Inside, I shed golden hairs on the backs of the red velvet chairs. One afternoon, during lunch, we went through every martini glass in the restaurant—the dishwasher could not scrub them fast enough to keep up with the demand—and for several nights in a row the expediter peeled down to only his boxers in the middle of the line, because he could no longer bear the heat.

  Now that I was a teenager, summertime meant boys, the college boys who waited tables in the summer. They came to work in pale Oxford shirts and flip-flops, and stood bare-chested in the beating sun as they arranged umbrellas and lifted crates of San Pellegrino on the terrace. I could see their muscles, the waistbands of their blue gingham boxers below their tanned midriffs. They smoothed napkins on my lap, brought me thick wedges of coconut cake and slices of grapefruit on ice, and hugged me, at the end of the night, too long and too hard. “The cabana boys,” I called them. “My cabana boys.”

  That summer, I kissed one of the cabana boys. I kissed him nearly every afternoon on the fire escape off the terrace all summer long. He had broad shoulders and put lemon-scented gel in his blond hair, but I liked the back of his neck the best: the line of clean-clipped blond against the tanned flesh. I traced it, softly, with my fingertips.

  Some afternoons it was too hot to eat. Then the ice cubes in the mint juleps the cabana boy made me melted before I could take my first sip and the strawberry ices dissolved to pink puddles. Those days, he brought me finger bowls: violets and nasturtiums bobbing in soapy water. He rubbed lily of the valley talcum powder onto my shoulders, and the flecks fell through the cracks in the fire escape and landed like snowflakes on the sizzling red bricks of the sidewalks below. Afterward, he pressed his lips to my shoulder and smeared the powder, like powdered sugar on a petit four after you take your first bite.

  When he went to check on his tables, I lay back on the fire escape, the rails digging through my cotton dresses, my head throbbing from booze. I gazed at the slate roofs against the blue sky and waited for him to return.

  He vanished, of course, at the end of the summer; all the cabana boys did. Out of everyone in the restaurant business, only they kept a reliable schedule.

  But I dreamed about those boys, the cabana boys, and wondered if they ever dreamed about me after they had gone. Once, late at night in an ice-cream parlor, I ran into the blond one; he had a girl on his arm. As I stood there under the fluorescent lights, I realized just what an enchanted environment the Pudding could be. In the real world, it was unlikely that many of these cabana boys ever would have given me a second look. But at the Pudding, what had worked in my favor? Did they want to break the rules and flirt with the boss’s daughter? Or was it something else—something drowsy and sensual in the air on those empty summer afternoons, the red velvet chairs baking in the thick golden light? In any case, I attributed their attraction to me to the romance of the atmosphere, and not to any budding sexuality of my own.

  Just before I left for college my mother had an unfortunate incident with a representative from Harvard Real Estate.

  Now that the restaurant was getting so busy, there was too much garbage to fit into the Dumpsters in the alley at the end of the night. This looked untidy, and it attracted rats as well, which already menaced that parking lot. Harvard Real Estate complained to my mother, insisting that she find a way to reduce the amount of garbage.

  In the old days, the dishwashers used to hurl the bags of garbage off of the fire escape, aiming for the Dumpster. In most cases, they landed there. But one night, a bag fell on the roof of the car of a representative from Harvard Real Estate just as he was stepping into the parking lot. Some people might have had a sense of humor about this (we did), but not this man. He was livid, and stormed back into the building, where after much commotion he found my mother and demanded that she pick up the spilled garbage herself. It was raining that day and there were scraps of wilted produce in the mud at the foot of the Dumpster. I saw my mother kneeling on the ground and holding a radish peel in her hands. The man from Harvard Real Estate, in a sleekly tailored navy suit, was standing over her and watching.

  At the time, though, my mother was dating a man with a caustic sense of humor and a feisty temper. Word of the incident in the parking lot got round to him, and the next time he saw this man in the building,
at the foot of the staircase outside the Members’ Lounge, he looked him straight in the eye and called him “a miserable little prick.” The man demanded an apology letter. My mother’s boyfriend did just that, adding, “And I think I did a damn fine job.” When I asked why, he said that he referenced the encounter at the foot of the stairs as many times as he could, making sure to include the phrase “miserable little prick” a number of times in the letter.

  In the end, staff memos went up all over the restaurant. They read: DO NOT THROW ANYTHING OFF THE FIRE ESCAPE! THIS IS GROUNDS FOR IMMEDIATE DISMISSAL. Whenever I saw one, I got a faint little chill, a premonition of forces beyond my control, or even, more alarmingly, beyond my mother’s.

  At the time of the incident with the man in the alley, I didn’t feel anger on my mother’s behalf. That came later, when I myself was a grown woman. Then, what I felt was fear. I wanted to appease the man from Harvard Real Estate more than I wanted to rescue my mother. As I saw it, the main thing to be rescued in the situation was not a person, but a place: the Pudding, without which, I knew, the pink lights would be extinguished, and the magic erased for everyone.

  Fourteen

  THE LAST OF THE SHIRLEY TEMPLES

  I left for college in the fall of 1999, and returned home for Thanksgiving break to find everyone at the Pudding in the midst of elaborate preparations for what promised to be the giddiest holiday season ever. The Boston Globe wrote of my mother’s New Year’s menu: “Splendidly dressed up for a Victorian Christmas, the Pudding’s dining room is a classic setting for a refined New Year’s. Four- and five-course menus will be served amid the soft sounds of the Dan Fox Trio. Each table will be set with a traditional croquembouche, a grand French cream puff dessert, to be devoured with the finale of chocolate fondue. Homemade gold-leafed fortune cookies, gifts, and dancing await guests of the second seating.”

  We rang in the year 2000 in the dining room at the Pudding, under the swaying canopy of pink tissue-paper stars. Champagne glasses were raised in toasts, fortune cookies opened, fortunes read aloud. The cream puffs, laced with curlicues of dripping dark chocolate, sat in the middle of the table.

  That night, I wore a strapless lilac tulle dress. Later on, I would wear that same dress under very different circumstances.

  Meanwhile, against this backdrop of fin de siècle decadence, the Hasty Pudding Club was going to seed. The finances of the Club had never been all that stable since the early eighties, when changing times had forced them to shut the private dining room and rent the third floor space to the restaurant. And more recently, we would later learn, two of its members had been embezzling money from the Club’s bank account, using it to finance extravagant shopping excursions, parties, and trips. The students eventually pleaded guilty to larceny in 2002.

  When the Club finally declared bankruptcy, it put the restaurant in exactly the powerless position we had always feared. My mother and Mary-Catherine filed a lawsuit against Harvard Real Estate, trying to build a case to extend our lease. Things got contentious. An item appeared in the Globe in which someone from Harvard Real Estate criticized us for occasionally bouncing our rent checks and hosting luncheons for the Hasty Pudding members instead of paying our bills.

  In October 2000, Harvard Real Estate ended months of discussion by reaching an agreement with the Club: it would pay off their debts in exchange for acquiring the building. It also agreed to take on the cost—then estimated at ten million dollars—of the repairs and rewiring necessary to improve the state of the building.

  That November, my mother and Mary-Catherine lost their lawsuit. Harvard and the restaurant reached a compromise in which legal lawsuits would be dropped and the restaurant would serve patrons until Commencement 2001 had passed.

  My mother broke the news to me over the phone, when I was home from college, on the morning of Thanksgiving. It was a holiday and, as always in the restaurant business, the show had to go on. They were expecting more than four hundred customers later that day.

  “Do you have a second?” she asked.

  Being home on break, I had slept late. I was standing in our kitchen rubbing sleep from my eyes when she said, “I wanted to let you know because it’s going to be in the paper and I don’t want you to find out that way. Are you listening?”

  In the background, I heard the usual sounds of chaos that accompanied my mother when she was at the restaurant—the sounds of the kitchen.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Cardamom panna cotta!” my mother was saying. “Cardamom panna cotta, Charlotte? Would you believe that’s what these new young pastry chefs think people want to eat on Thanksgiving? People want pecan pie! Baked apples! Charlotte au chocolat!” She laughed. “Well, anyway. I just wanted to let you know that things didn’t go so well with Harvard. Wouldn’t you know? We lost the lease.”

  My mother paused, then went on. “We don’t have to close right away. Not till June, not till after graduation. June sixteenth—that’s a Saturday—that will be the last night of business.” She paused again, and when I didn’t say anything, kept talking. “I don’t have a lot of time to spend talking about this now—for God’s sake, it’s Thanksgiving—but promise me something. Promise you won’t cry in the dining room tonight, or anything like that. Oh, that reminds me, what are you going to wear tonight? That green velvet with the low back? I loved that one . . . Oh! Gotta go! Expecting four hundred of our nearest and dearest.”

  The next morning, I went into the restaurant to help decorate the Christmas tree for the last time. I felt that this was an important ritual for me to take part in. When I entered the dining room, in the white angora sweater and red velveteen skirt I had chosen for the occasion, I saw that my mother, already standing on the ladder, had left her fur-trimmed holiday mules at home. There were already sprigs of holly in her hair.

  “It’s a good thing you came,” she said. “We’ve got to get the tree up before lunch. I need all the help I can get.”

  Decorating had begun. My mother already had draped her bead collection over several four-tops in the corner. But it was the pile of cardboard boxes marked Ornaments in front of the waiters’ station that interested me. I had shown up to see and to treasure for the last time our old ornaments, the ones members of the staff had made for the Christmas parties. Come the move in June, I expected no one would remember to keep the ornaments. When I opened the first box, dust wafted onto my white sweater, and I coughed. Inside, wrapped in tissue paper, I saw the pink glass bulbs and dangling hearts my mother had bought in bulk at Saks Fifth Avenue. The next two boxes revealed the same. In the fourth box, my mother had packed more ropes of beads. I found wads of tissue paper and shards of violet glass in the last box, but none of the old ornaments: the expired Neiman Marcus charge card trimmed in red glitter, the model of the Pudding staircase, the silver-painted rib.

  “Where are all the other ornaments?” I asked. “The ones from the Christmas parties?”

  “Charlotte, I don’t know,” she said, staring down at me from the ladder. “They’re somewhere. Hang this mistletoe, will you?”

  I stood there, biting my nails.

  “Listen,” she said, “what does it matter? We still have all our Christmas ornaments at home.”

  We had not used our Christmas ornaments at home since we had lost the farmhouse. That was thirteen years ago now. What did those ornaments matter?

  While my mother was in a flurry of activity decorating the tree, I walked out of the dining room and lay down on the sofa on the second-floor landing, where I hadn’t taken a nap in years. One Saturday night, I remembered, an old lady in a black dress and pearls had kicked off her spectator pumps and slept there during the eight o’clock rush. When one of the managers had roused her, fearing she had passed out, she had said, “Oh, no! It’s just such a marvelous sofa.” It was a marvelous sofa: wine-colored in some lights and fudge-colored in others, with deep cushion
s, big enough for a dozen little girls to have squeezed onto at my birthday parties. The leather had held up beautifully over the past century. Yet the sofa was, of course, old; old like the bottles of Scotch in our investors’ liquor cabinets, old like the cashmere sweaters their wives slung over their shoulders on lunch dates, old like their whitewashed beach houses on the Cape. It was old, I realized, like Harvard.

  Now, lying by myself on the sofa, I realized that just when I most wanted to despise Harvard for no longer having room for us, I couldn’t. I had grown up in this world as no one else had, and if the clunky antiquity of Strawberry Night and the Krokodiloes revealed something about the world itself, it also revealed something about me. It had defined my tastes and my sensibilities and, no doubt, my sense of alienation from members of my own generation—a condition which even the experience of leaving home and going to college had not yet broken.

  In my childhood, in which we had changed addresses so many times, 10 Holyoke Street had been my only home; I had even used it as my address. Now, with the news of the lease ending, I could no longer delude myself that it had ever been mine at all. We were only renters. It had never really been ours.

  That February, I went back to college for the spring semester of my sophomore year, and I turned twenty years old. And that May, I came back to my dorm room to discover that the light on my phone was blinking. I had a message from my mother in which she said to call her back immediately. I called, only to learn that my father had had a heart attack and was now recovering in the hospital.

  “Would you believe it,” she said, “it happened right in the middle of the investor dinner! That would happen to me, the way my life is going. Who am I kidding? It’s the way my life has always been. You know these rich people who are always going on safari? Not me! I don’t have to go looking for adventure; I get plenty of it in the restaurant business. Well, anyway, the doctor I talked to said he’s doing okay, all things considered. He did say that he’d better give up smoking . . . Let me give you the number at the hospital. You can call him if you want.”