Chez Cordelia

by Kitty Burns Florey

  My mother came to see me, too, during that time. My parents never came together because someone had to stay with Juliet every minute. They were afraid she was suicidal. She hardly ever ate. The one time she had gorged—actually gorged—on crackers and cheese, my mother had found her in the bathroom trying to make herself throw up. They had begun taking her once a week to a doctor in New York who specialized in her condition.

  “It’s called anorexia,” my mother said. I was astonished that Juliet’s oddities had a name, and specialists. “She and I might need to live in Manhattan during the week for a while so she can see this doctor more often. He’s awfully good.” She sighed.

  “Poor Mom,” I murmured.

  She actually said, then, near tears of tiredness, “You’re my comfort, Cordelia.”

  But she didn’t approve of my plans. “Cooking,” she said in a wan, despairing voice. “You could study cooking in college. That’s the kind of thing I meant, honey. They have all sorts of nonacademic courses like that.”

  “Why should I spend good money to learn to cook in college when I can get paid to learn at the Lambertis? Besides, if you mean those cooking schools, Humphrey told me they aren’t that good.”

  “Oh—Humphrey,” my mother said, waving her hand in dismissal at the very idea of my fat friend in the white hat. My father had told her about the veal and the soup.

  We dropped the subject before we both got mad. She knew my mind was made up, and she wanted to stay on good terms with me. I knew what my mother meant when she called me her comfort. It was only by comparison. Juliet was ill. Miranda, she told me—it was my first inkling of this; it had been kept top secret in the hope that it could be remedied—had left her husband, Gilbert, and was living with three other women in a commune near Boston. And Horatio—my mother looked grieved whenever his name came up. My father had jokingly called him “the international playboy,” my mother spoke sorrowfully about waste. At the moment, with my culinary ambitions, my bank account, my common sense, my stodgy (for all they knew) lifestyle, I was not a bad specimen of a daughter, and my mother’s recognition—however circumstantial—of that fact touched me profoundly.

  I didn’t tell either of them about Danny’s return; they seemed to have forgotten his existence. I certainly didn’t tell them about Paul, or about why I had left Madox Hardware. I told my mother plenty about Juliet’s eating habits, and I told my father about Mr. Oliver’s Pakistani accent and his concern for Juliet.

  “Remember Professor Bhaer and Jo March?” my father said with a twinkle in his eye. “In Little Women?”

  I’d seen the movie on TV, twice. “But Mr. Oliver already has a wife, Daddy. And Juliet is—you know.” Not much like Katherine Hepburn at the moment, I didn’t say.

  “Well,” he said, refusing to relinquish his lovely idea. “You never know.”

  My parents told me, each in turn, about California, my father emphasizing the inspiring beauties of the scenery, my mother the vital and delightful young people the place was packed with. They showed me photographs of beaches, orange groves, Berkeley. The more they said, the less I wanted to go out there.

  “What makes you such a homebody, Cordelia?” my mother asked in half-mock exasperation. “Are you going to stay in Connecticut all your life? I’d suggest sending you to Paris, to learn to cook there yourself, at that school, but I know what you’d say.”

  “I don’t speak French.”

  “Honey, you could learn.”

  She never gave up, my mother. “I don’t want to learn French,” I said. “Except for the food names. Humphrey taught them to me.” I picked them up effortlessly: all the pâtés and salades and potages and cassoulets and patisseries and gateaux I’d learned about at Grand’mère. I began reeling them off to impress my mother. I hoped she would at least compliment me on my accent, but I suppose that was like trying to impress a duck with your backstroke.

  “Man cannot live by bread alone, Cordelia,” my mother said with a sigh, getting up. She had Juliet’s last load of stuff piled by the door, ready to go.

  “Pain,” I said, trying to get her to laugh. “Pain de ménage, petits pains, ficelles, brioches, croissants …”

  She smiled, but then she sighed again, kissed me, and left. I’ll make them a meal, I vowed. When I’ve learned to cook. A meal that’ll knock them on their ears.

  When I’d been in the apartment, alone, for a week, during which Paul made two more decorous visits, Humphrey hired a new salad person, a skinny little guy named Nelson.

  “He may not have salad hands,” Humph said, holding mine, “but he’s got it up here. Salad brains! Not the instinct, but the capacity. Second best,” he hissed so Nelson wouldn’t hear, and treated me to a dinner on the house. When he kissed me good-bye, smelling of fines herbes, we both wept a little.

  I had a last meal with Nina, too. She had quit her job with the Nickel and was going to New York with Archie. Some connection of hers had wangled him an audition with a prestigious piano teacher, and Nina had plans to worm her way into a job on the Village Voice.

  “But for the moment,” she said, with a light in her eye, “my job is to keep him psyched up. This is his big chance. I want to see him at Carnegie Hall. I want him making records, and giving concert tours.”

  We wished each other luck. She gave me a number in New York where she could be reached. “Call me any time, Delia,” she urged. “To get things off your chest, to complain, to gossip—you know. Whatever.” I said I would, and she gave me her reporter’s sharp look. “Are you sure you know what you’re getting into out at that bookshop?” She’d heard, then, from Humphrey or Crystal, about Paul and me holding hands and trading bits of sorbet.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t know at all.”

  “I think you’re crazy, to be frank, Delia. This sort of thing isn’t like you.”

  “It must be,” I said. “Because I’m doing it.”

  I hugged her when we parted, but I felt distanced from Nina. I had thought that my great love for Paul would bind me to her, because of hers for Archie, but I suppose being in love is an isolating state; it makes other people’s emotions, however similar, seem unreal.

  I cleaned the apartment for the last time and packed my meager goods. On my last day there I made a new list in my List Notebook:

  Reasons Why I’m Going There

  1. cooking lessens

  2. save money

  3. dogs, cows, etc.

  4. chez Cordelia

  5. Paul

  Paul

  Paul

  Paul …

  until it went off the page.

  I stared at his name for a long time, and then, for some reason, I turned the page and printed, all by itself, with curlicues, my own name: CORDELIA MILLER. I’m looking at it now, precise and grandiose, with a coffee stain beside it, and I’m remembering the state of mind I was in when I wrote it. I was excited, I know—eager to begin my new life, eager (despite what my mother thought) to learn something. I couldn’t wait to get my hands into dough, to turn out a hollandaise as smooth as cream, to bone chickens with my bare hands.

  I was feeling cautious, too. I wasn’t completely without misgivings about barging in on someone’s marriage, however rotten it had become. It was sturdy enough to hang on all these years, I thought in my rare cynical moments. But I was in love—I have only to turn back a page and look at Paul’s name, scribbled over and over in what I can only describe as an ecstasy, to remember how in love I was.

  And so when Paul came to pick me up, I took his hand and led him into the bedroom, where we made love on the bare striped mattress.

  Then, in yet another rosy sunset, we drove out to the yellow house.

  Chapter Seven

  Lamb House Books

  I would have liked to stop right there, and catch my breath—to spend, maybe, three days on that drive up Route 7 in Paul’s green Volvo, or eight hours snuggled up with him on Juliet’s bare bed while he slept and I thought, or a solitary week in my two
rooms above the bookshop for the purpose of taking stock of my recent past and charting my immediate future. I felt the urge to make another list, though I didn’t know what the items on it might be. I needed time to figure that out.

  But I had no time for reflection. Life ran on quickly, like a movie. The yellow house plucked and chewed and swallowed me at top speed. Within three days it was as if I had been there forever. I knew Ian needed two stuffed bears, a donkey, and Kermit the Frog in bed with him at night or he would cry. I knew Paul couldn’t stand curried food. I knew Albert the dog chased cars if they were going fast enough. I knew Megan’s teacher’s cat’s name. I knew that the cleaning woman’s new car was a lemon. I even learned, after painful confrontation, that when you go toward the cupboard in the kitchen where the wineglasses are kept you have to watch out you don’t get banged in the hip by a corner of the table. And that you have to jiggle the handle on the toilet in the downstairs powder room.

  Also, that moments alone with the master of the house were going to be rare indeed.

  Mostly, those first few overwhelming weeks, I cooked. In her first bloom of enthusiasm, Martha tucked me under her wing and barely let me out of her sight. The night I arrived, flushed and happy from my hour on Juliet’s mattress with Paul, she gave me a volume of Julia Child to look at before bed. I think Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume I, is the only book I’ve ever stayed up reading until dawn. It was a revelation. There it all was: the brain of Humphrey Ebbets, laid out in black and white. I felt the way I know I was supposed to feel, back in school, when I read poetry—inspired, uplifted, joyful, with a sense of new worlds opening up before me—all that. I even had a vision, one that seemed related to my vision in the Frontenacs’ kitchen that day with Snowball years ago. This is it, the vision said to me: this is the way you want it to be. I thought of Humph, white-hatted behind his stove, and the vision said: you could do that, you could have that authority, you could wear that hat. There were those few seconds of complete certainty before the vision faded, leaving me in the middle of my sitting-room floor, on the old rag rug from Martha’s mother’s attic, with Julia Child’s recipe for Apple Charlotte open on my lap and the sun rising out my window.

  In the morning, yawning and bleary, I met Martha in that cavernous, inhospitable kitchen. She handed me a big white apron and said, dubiously, “You don’t look rested, Cordelia.” I could sense her thinking: temperamental hippie nut, stays up all night doing God knows what …

  When I explained about Julia Child, she gave me one of her genuine (as opposed to polite) smiles, studied me the way Humph had when he decided I had salad hands, and pronounced, “I think I can do something with you.” I realized that, however good a cook I became, Martha would claim half the credit and give the rest to Julia Child.

  But that was okay with me. I just wanted to learn. Specifically, I wanted to master the basics as soon as possible so I could fool around in the kitchen on my own. I didn’t think I was going to enjoy being Martha’s protégé.

  But, surprisingly, I did enjoy it. Martha was a superb cook and an inspired teacher. I’d expected her to be dainty, a bit standoffish with food, unwilling to get her hands dirty. But she wasn’t like that at all. She attacked food gaily, scattering flour dust and bits of vegetables all over the brick floor. If anything, I was the more persnickety, carefully scraping peelings into the Dispoz-All while hers flew around haphazardly. All about herself Martha created sublime, carefree messiness, confident that someone would clean it up. And there, indeed, was Mrs. Frutchey, the cleaning woman, patient and black and whistling between her teeth, with broom and mop and Hoover and a neat wire basket on wheels, full of cleaning products, paid to come in six mornings a week and drudge after Martha.

  Martha’s chaos fascinated me. It was more complete than, for example, Juliet’s or Nina’s—not merely lacking in guilt but blessed with total indifference. I suspect it was growing up wealthy, with maids, that turned her into such a slob. I’ve seen her spill red wine on a white wool skirt and dab at it absently with a white linen napkin, continuing her conversation while the pink stains spread and set. In the kitchen, she’d load the dishwasher, if she bothered at all, with bowls and pans thick with batter or crust. Paul once told me that when they were first married she used to blow her nose on the sheets until he made her stop. And yet she was personally fastidious. The dry-cleaning truck was constantly picking up and delivering, she took a shower every morning and night, she never used a towel twice. And the stained white skirt went into the trash.

  After our cooking sessions, she would go upstairs and change and appear at dinner cool and perfect, the dirty pots forgotten. I couldn’t leave them for Mrs. Frutchey—I had been a drudge myself—so I put them through the dishwasher and did the rest of the kitchen cleanup after dinner while Martha poured coffee for the book people who came in.

  “You could leave the dishes for Mrs. Frutchey, Cordelia,” Martha said every night for the first week.

  “I don’t like leaving such a mess.”

  “Well,” she continued, with that thin-nosed look she always got when she was feeling pushed. “I’d really like the kids bathed and in bed by eight-thirty.”

  “They will be,” I said grimly.

  “You could leave all that for Mrs. Frutchey …”

  “I’ll manage.”

  But these small conflicts came after meals—like indigestion. The preparations invariably went smoothly. Martha gave me credit for intelligence, and she never hogged the fun parts to herself, leaving me to chop onions. She knew exactly how much to show, how much to tell, how much just to let me plunge in and do. We were efficient and serious about our work, but we enjoyed ourselves, too. I thought that maybe a good cook’s kitchen must be cheerful, and resolved that mine always would be. And that it would be small and tidy, too, with the kind of floor that, if you dropped egg on it, you could wipe it up, instead of having it sink into the brick forever.

  We began with stock making and soups. For two weeks there was potage every night—all kinds, all delicious, except for a leek-and-potato soup which in my enthusiasm I over-seasoned. After our third version of French onion soup, Paul and the kids began to complain, and we moved on to fricassees.

  “She learns quickly,” Martha said to Paul. “We’ll make a cook of her yet.”

  Paul only nodded and said “Good.” He never talked much, I had learned, when Martha was around, but when she turned her back he directed toward me his fierce, burning-eyed gaze.

  If the kitchen seemed overgrown and inhospitable, I came to enjoy cooking there anyway, and I realized, very soon, that I would have enjoyed cooking anywhere. I can’t explain why it exhilarates me so. It seems such a modest little art: feeding people well. I can see the triviality of first-class cooking, the ultimate pointlessness of the extra time and trouble and expense that go into a really gorgeous meal. I can see the transience of it. And still I love it, the whole routine, from chopping and sautéing and whisking to watching people wolf it down. I should be able to say I cooked for Paul, knowing it was his beloved self I was learning to nourish, but this wouldn’t be quite true. I cooked for the sake of cooking, and I took to it the way Juliet took to Greek.

  Martha and I talked while we cooked. I told her about my family; her estimation of me went up visibly when she found out I was Jeremiah Miller’s daughter. In turn, she reminisced about her childhood on her parents’ Greenwich estate. Her life since then, however plush, had apparently been one long downhill slide. She liked to talk about her mother’s cooks. There had been a Frenchwoman who was so thrifty she devised a dish out of steamed carrot tops and potato peelings. Another had enclosed everything in a pastry crust. “Even our breakfasts,” Martha said. “We had poached eggs in little pastry nests, with sausages en croûte on the side. We kept expecting Wheatena in puff pastry. But she didn’t last long. Mother was always firing her cooks. The odd thing is, she was a terrific cook herself, but she felt that a lady just didn’t do her own cooking. But th
at’s her generation—nowadays there are other reasons,” she added, looking momentarily defensive.

  But Martha was a lady in a sense of the word I hadn’t realized existed outside of those old movies where the footman aspires to love above his station. She didn’t have servants—at least, she never would have called Mrs. Frutchey and me her servants. We were “my cleaning woman” and “my mother’s helper” (or, as I heard her refer to me on the phone once, “the girl who boards with us”). But we were servants, of course, and so were the endless procession of carpenters, handymen, plumbers, and gardeners who came at Martha’s call, in their little vans, with their ladders and toolboxes. She ran her house the way God must run heaven. She was the big enchilada, and for all her graciousness and goodness, none of us was allowed to forget it.

  It didn’t take long for me to see that Paul was under her jurisdiction just as much as Joe Larkin, the gardener, or Mrs. Frutchey or me. He couldn’t make a decision without her help. He couldn’t pay the paperboy or have the hedges pruned or buy a shirt without consulting her. Neither of them seemed to consider this odd.

  During those September weeks, when Paul and I were separated by Martha’s dedication to shaping me into her chef de cuisine, I was able to look at the two of them with some objectivity. The short history of my romance with Paul (sunset/Grand’mère/sofa/Juliet’s bed) was like a dream; what was real was the yellow house, and the marriage that lived in it.

  It interested me to see Paul and Martha together. They were—what’s a good word?—chummy. Comfy. Familiar with each other. I noted this with a sort of detached loneliness. They bickered a little, and in the course of these polite squabbles I sometimes saw hints of unexpressed furies—enough to make me believe that, deep down in their souls, they did hate each other. But I could see these tiny rips in the seams only because I was always looking for them. To an observer with less of a stake in it, I don’t doubt that they seemed an ideal couple, as they had to Nina. They did, after all, live together, and had for fifteen years, in what looked like, not passionate commitment, perhaps, but peaceful friendship, anyway. I suppose that, most of the time, the hate got shelved behind the rest—books, house, kids, groceries, cars, the old photographs and jokes. I suppose it’s the same when you live with someone you love for a long, long time. It’s not on your mind all day, any more than hate is. It’s too wearing, I suppose, and it takes time.