Chez Cordelia

by Kitty Burns Florey

  “Juliet!” I thought in a panic, but when I went out it was Danny: gone. Relief flowed into me with such force I had to sit down, and then I felt ashamed. What had he done, really, that I should exult in his departure? My husband had returned, dirty and down-and-out and probably unwell, had come home with me and made love to me—could he help it if he was nervous and a little brutal? After ten months, in his condition. I thought of the needle tracks—if they were needle tracks. Maybe they were flea bites. I thought of his tears, his accusations, his boasting, his childish promises, and I would have broken down and wept again, have writhed on the floor in an agony of grief and guilt, if I hadn’t noticed just then my purse hanging open from the doorknob. My wallet stuck out. I opened it. There had been a twenty and a five and some ones and a little change, and all of it was gone, even the pennies.

  Later, in bed (on clean sheets), I would say to myself: he got you where it hurts, Delia—right in the old pocketbook. It was my attempt to make light of the theft, to put it out of my mind. But when I found my wallet empty, I was overwhelmingly angry: at his betrayal of my trust, at the lowness to which he had stooped, and at myself for bringing him home with me and letting him violate my body and my bed and my feelings and my purse.

  What disturbed me more than anything, I think—and it was this that sent me running to the toilet in the middle of that sleepless night to vomit up the pizza and Coke I’d consumed at the fair—was the fact that Danny was a thief. I had been a thief. The fear that we were birds of a feather, that we belonged with each other, and that when he returned for me I’d be ready for him, burned in me for many days.

  When, two days later, Nina called me at work to tell me she had seen in the paper that Malcolm Madox had been shot and killed at the hardware store by an armed robber, I didn’t connect it with Danny.

  “Shot through the heart,” Nina said. “They found the killer sitting in a chair near the body holding a gun.” Must have been the armchair in the back room, I thought, where I used to eat my lunch. “They found a stolen car parked around the corner. The guy wouldn’t give his name, apparently won’t say a word. They sent him up to Connecticut Valley state loony bin for observation. Wow, I wish I could interview him! Can’t you just see it? We’d sit and look at each other. Neither one of us would say a word! I could do a fabulous story on this guy!” She paused, maybe because I’d said nothing. “Hey, Delia? How do you feel about it, anyway? That a creep like Malcolm Madox is dead? I mean, are you … glad about it?”

  That was what I was trying to think about. The Grand’mère kitchen was going full blast at 9:00 A.M., sizzling with cooking sounds. Fat Humph was dancing at his burners (softly singing “I Get a Kick Out of You”), Archie was snapping beans, Ernesto, the busboy and odd-job man, was scrubbing a pot, and I was in the middle of a garlic mayo. I couldn’t think at all. I felt completely stunned, the way you always do when someone you know dies—here one day, and the next … no one, nothing. And I felt awful for Mr. Madox. The light gone out of his life. But I didn’t feel any sorrow on Malcolm’s behalf. I told this to Nina.

  She said, “Frankly, I think you should thank ‘white male, six foot one, age about thirty, brown hair and eyes, slender build’ from the bottom of your heart. Malcolm Madox got what he deserved.”

  On my lunch hour I went out and sent flowers to Mr. Madox, with a note of condolence that was one hundred percent sincere. For, though I hated his wretched son, I had once loved Mr. Madox dearly, and his agonies at Malcolm’s death were not something I could easily contemplate. At least he was spared the string of disappointments a son like Malcolm was bound to inflict. I imagined how poor Mr. Madox would glorify his dead son—shot, probably, in the act of defending the store from an intruder—and I felt sick.

  I never once thought of Danny. He wasn’t thirty, for one thing. He wasn’t brown-haired. And the road from stealing twenty-odd dollars from your wife to murdering for cash was a long one for Danny to travel in just two days. So I sent off the lilies and tried to put the whole thing out of my mind. I couldn’t entirely, of course, but in the days that followed I began to feel curiously free of a misery which I had come to take for granted and which had been manifesting itself in occasional sleepless nights, bad dreams, and the degrading memories that could overtake me out of the blue (like the first time I used the melon baller at Grand’mère—a model that happened to be exactly like my stolen one). I felt cleaner with Malcolm dead—not that I wouldn’t rather feel filthy and defiled again and have Malcolm alive for his father’s sake, but the lifting of that burden was a relief to me, and I can’t deny it.

  It was at about this time that I began to want to get out of New Haven. My heart sank at the prospect of moving again. I was starting to feel like one of those lonesome hobos in a song, a rolling stone who’s gotta travel on down the road, drift along with the tumbling tumbleweed, etc., etc. But I felt vulnerable in the city after Danny’s threat to return. Malcolm’s death had freed me from one foul curse on my life, but I still felt dirty and doomed from my encounter with Danny. If he was my destiny, I’d do my best to outwit it.

  I also faced certain practical problems. Grand’mère, dearly though I loved the place, was one. I didn’t especially love salad making once I’d mastered it. What’s to love? Making the mayo and the marinades was incidental; mainly, I chopped and tore and sliced. But I found I liked cooking very much. The idea had lodged in my mind that Humphrey would teach me how to cook, maybe because he’d shown me the proper way to chop onions that first day. But when I asked him once if he’d teach me some things (like cooking with wine—and sauce making! I longed to master those fragrant brown and white sauces he was forever turning out), he said, “You’re fabulous with salads, Delia. You’re a salad genius. Don’t throw that talent out of whack, kid, and we’ll all get along fine.”

  When I asked him again—more insistently—he said, without a smile and with all the kindness temporarily drained out of his voice, “Don’t lay that trip on me, Delia. I said what I said. Don’t bug me,” and he sizzled butter in a big black pan. I stared helplessly at it as it turned dark yellow and then brown, and wondered what the difference was between brown butter and burned butter, but I knew he would never tell me. Humphrey was king of the kitchen. He’d entrust salads to me, and pastries to his pastry lady (Mrs. Moore, a spry, ancient widow with a light touch and a quick wrist, who turned out our mille-feuilles and jalousies and truffes au chocolat), and certain menial tasks of chopping and whisking to whoever was available, but he was as jealous as a magician of his secrets. He wouldn’t even consider spilling the beans in a cookbook. Nina had once suggested she ghostwrite one with him, and he said, “There’s hundreds of cookbooks in this world, but only one Humphrey Ebbets.”

  I was grateful to Humphrey, and to my summer at Grand’mère, for a number of things. Humphrey had given me a refuge when I sorely needed one. I had found friends there. And I had eaten well—Humphrey’s cooking could fill a void as no other food could. I had been stumbling, and Grand’mère set me on my feet. The very smell of the place got my blood running again and my brain working.

  I know it was mean of me to develop a grudge against Humphrey for not teaching me a few things, but I must record that I did develop one. And once I was convinced that he would teach me nothing, I became obsessed with the idea: to cook. I had always loved food. I felt that all my life I’d been a caterpillar in a cocoon, waiting to emerge as a butterfly in a tall white hat. I felt I needed to cook the way the rest of my family needed to read. But Grand’mère wasn’t the place to learn to do it, and I started to think about giving notice.

  And then, I had to find a place to live. Juliet’s term at Yale was over, and she was due to leave for Greece with Alan on September 15. It was already the first week in September. I couldn’t very well stay on in the apartment—too expensive, unless I blew my savings on rent, and that is not the kind of thing I do. I could have gone to my parents’ place—they’d be back from California later in the mon
th—but I wanted to advance, not to retreat. For this reason, too, I rejected the idea of sponging off my aunt.

  But not only couldn’t I afford to live alone, I wasn’t ready for it either. The idea terrified me. The very thought of it brought back my cold room over the vet in Hoskins, and my lonely agonies there—a chilling reminder of the old oppressions. I would have moved in with Nina. I thought wistfully of getting in on the high drama of her life, of sharing her messy, overstuffed flat. I saw myself moving into the cozy back room where she kept the broken-down antiques she picked up at auctions and intended to fix up some far-off, well-organized day.

  But she never suggested it, and before I could come right out and ask her, the course of my life was altered again. Another niche opened up and I popped into it, as if it had been made for me.

  It was through Nina I found it. She had to do a story on a country bookshop for the Nickel. “Country anything is ultra-super-big right now,” she said, not without scorn. Nina hated the country. “Everybody’s dead outside polluted areas,” she told me, with that air of being my instructor that reminded me of my sisters but in Nina didn’t irritate me. “There must be something in the crud we breathe that keeps us alert.” People who live in the country, according to Nina, go to bed at 8:00 P.M., eat cornmeal mush three times a day, and would rather chop wood than anything. “All the men wear hats with the names of tractor companies on them,” she said. “All the women wear flannel shirts.”

  “We never ate cornmeal mush,” I told her. “My mother wears cashmere sweaters.”

  “Oh Delia, that’s not country, down on the shore. That’s classy suburbia. This bookstore is in the country—wait and see.”

  The drive out there was a fairly long one, and Nina didn’t want to go alone—it was one of her odd, improbable terrors that her car would break down on a lonely rural road where she’d be a prey to Things. So I went with her.

  We left one evening after my salad shift, bringing subs and cans of Tab for dinner on the way. It was only a week or so after I’d seen Danny, and, though I hadn’t meant to, I told Nina everything. She was already familiar with the background. Nina was one of the few people outside the family who knew about Danny’s dawn desertion; in fact, the night she got that bit of information out of me—in the nearly wordless way she adopted for interviews—bit by bit over spanakopeta and a bottle of wine at Basel’s, I realized the true extent of her talents as an investigative reporter.

  Her reaction to Danny’s latest appearance was characteristic. “You’ve got to get away from here, Delia. You’ve got to move!” I had already come to that conclusion, but, as she said it, I was sure it was not only true but urgent, and, miserably, I agreed. But my misery was an automatic association with all my other hopeful, ill-starred moves, and under it was a thin pulse of excitement that both Nina and I were aware of.

  “I feel like doing something”—I breathed quickly in—“different!” I felt giddy, actually discussing my future with a sympathetic soul instead of plotting it alone and unadvised.

  “Your future is at your feet,” Nina said. “Your poor old feet! And all you’ve got to do is step out into it. What a prospect, Delia!”

  We stopped for gas, and Nina told the attendant, as she always did, “Fill it with irregular, please,” before she turned to me with one of her brainstorms. “You ought to divorce him, Delia, to begin with. Now that you’ve found the bastard, get rid of him once and for all.”

  I honestly hadn’t thought of it. Danny and I, it seemed to me, were the sad reverse of a couple who live together in such harmony that a marriage ceremony becomes irrelevant. I felt divorced already.

  “I mean, you’ve dropped his name—right?”

  Of course I had. I’d been Delia Frontenac for so short a time that Delia Miller had returned to me naturally when I was cast adrift. I’d welcomed it as I would have an old childhood toy. But an actual divorce …

  I pondered the idea while the gas pump clicked. It seemed pointless. It sounded expensive. It would bring me into contact with Danny again. And I really had no idea where he was.

  Nina broke into my speculations. “You ought to drop Miller, too,” she said, starting the car. As she spoke, there in the Exxon station, so far from my father’s house, I missed my parents all of a sudden—an emotion so strange it took me a few seconds to identify it. “I mean, you’ve given up your father’s whole shtick. If you don’t play the game, why keep the name? We could think up something really fitting for you.”

  My sweet, unaccustomed, daughterly nostalgia made me stubborn, and I muttered, “I’ll stick with Miller, thanks, Nina.” I felt the way I had when Ray Royal laughed at my father’s beard.

  “Well, it was your critical-formative name,” Nina said peaceably as we drove away—a journalist’s refusal to have a point of view. We drove with the windows open and the radio on, eating our sandwiches and planning my future. Nina devised a string of her wild scenarios: “Little did our heroine know …” but now they thrilled me. I didn’t know when I’d been so happy, as if Route 7 were made of yellow brick, as if at the end of it …

  Well, after all, Lamb House Books was at the end of it: take a right turn at the intersection in the town of Gresham and then a left at the dairy farm. Gresham—all white houses and black shutters and bright red front doors—got Nina off the subject of me and back on her hatred of the country. She said Gresham was no better than a housing development, everything the same. “And no stores. Where do they go? Where do they eat? What do they do?”

  After the town, we barely missed having to stop while the dairy herd crossed the road. They’d just gone by, and went patiently into the barn, flicking their tails in each other’s faces, their udders swaying.

  “Ugh—a barn made of concrete blocks,” Nina said. “I wish you could interview cows—ask them how they like concrete and steel tubing and bright lights.”

  “Cows don’t care,” I said. You could hear faint, happy moos all the way up the road.

  “Sez you,” Nina replied, but I could tell she had already forgotten the cows. She was getting nervous and bitchy, as she always did before she had to interview strangers. “This damn road is hell on my shocks,” she said.

  On a small hill, up the road, was the old red cowbarn, and beyond it a white farmhouse, and then a creek and some trees, and then a huge yellow house with a sign in front that read:

  LAMB HOUSE BOOKS

  P. Lamberti, Prop.

  Nina pulled into the driveway and stopped the car, still bitching. “Picturesque Connecticut. Do you know what it costs to keep up a place like this? To make it look like 1827 or whatever? Plenty of big seventies bucks. P. Lamberti, Prop. God, the phoniness! And it’ll be all antiques inside, all the chairs will be uncomfortable, and in some back room they’ve got a huge color TV hidden away behind an eighteenth-century armoire.”

  “It’s a pretty house, though,” I ventured. It was huge, gabled, freshly painted, with a shine to it. The sun, getting low in the sky, glanced off the house and hung over the barns down the road. “Come on, Nina,” I said. I felt a weird possessiveness about the place, and I didn’t want to hear it criticized. “You wouldn’t mind living this way yourself if it were in town.” Among the junk in her back room was an old Hoosier cupboard that would be perfect for a color TV. “Brush yourself off and quit getting hostile. You’ll write a better story if you like the place.”

  “You’re right. And the guy sounded nice on the phone, for a hick.”

  “I doubt if a rare-book dealer would be exactly a hick, Nina.”

  But she ignored me, got out of the car, and brushed bits of salami and bread from her wide lap onto the clean gravel. “Anything you notice,” she said to me, tucking her notebook under her arm and then her wild, brilliant hair behind her ears. “Anything interesting.”

  “I know,” I said, but I thought that maybe, after Nina got going on the interview, I would wander down the road and look at the cows—just a quick look. I’d never actually seen o
ne of those vast milking operations in action. I liked cows. Maybe I could get taken on there as a milkmaid or a cowhand. I was thinking this as we went up the walk, but before we’d gone far two dogs, exactly alike except that one was huge and one was just big, came bounding around the house and leaped (with fine instinct, sensing Nina’s fear of dogs) on me.

  “I’m going to stay out here and play with the dogs for a while, Nina,” I said, hearing in my voice that inexplicable delight I always feel around animals.

  “Well, keep your eyes open,” she said nervously, and went up to the door. “And your ears.” She pulled the old brass bell, looking around at me. “Any little thing might be useful. Local-color stuff.”

  “I know, I know.” I knelt in the grass hugging the dogs. I suspected they were a mama dog and her puppy. A tag that hung from the mama’s leather collar said “Victoria.” The puppy wouldn’t sit still long enough to show me his tag. He brought me an old yellow tennis ball and waited, rump in the air, until I threw it for him, while his mother sat by salivating approvingly.

  A short man with curly, graying hair opened the door for Nina. She introduced herself, and then she said, “That’s my friend Delia Miller. She wants to play with your dogs.”

  “Well, come in for some iced tea when they get too much for you,” he called, waving his pipe at me. I said okay and waved back politely, but I had no intention of going in. I wasn’t keen on hearing Nina and P. Lamberti talk about rare books, or any kind of books. Booksellers appealed to me about as much as book writers, or book readers. I stayed on the lawn with the dogs; the longer I stayed, the less inclined I was to go in. It was cooler there, under two vast maples. The sun got lower and lower. The dogs were some whiskery, impish breed I’d never seen before. I threw the sloppy tennis ball for the pup, and watching him romp with it filled me with satisfaction. The dogs and the falling sun, and the red barn down the road and the yellow house behind me, and the trees … I suppose it was corny, a calendar picture, but it had the kind of peaceful beauty that makes you homesick for a home you’ve never had. I sat down in the dry grass and thought of absolutely nothing except how nice it all was, hugging Victoria around the neck. She whined and licked my ear, and I giggled with a kind of generalized happiness that didn’t exclude the mysterious future which, whatever it might be, was at my feet.