Everyone in the family, I think, depended on the dogs for this ungrudging love. That peaceful country house was full of tensions (I suppose every house is), and the dogs were one release from them. Martha took them on her runs; Megan romped with them first thing off the school bus; Ian would roll around the yard with them after one of his terrible tantrums, and come in soothed. And Paul loved them. Until I came, they were all he had, he told me. I never really understood Paul’s distance from his children, or what he meant when he said Megan and Ian were all Martha’s. He was stern with them, with a confused affection that he seemed to be able to demonstrate only by tickling: his tickling of the children was a solemn and important ritual, regularly insisted on by both the kids. But his relationship with the dogs was deeper and more meaningful to him.
“They never judge,” he said one day when we had taken them for a run. We were standing, panting a little, in the grove of trees by the creek, and Paul hugged me (riskily) and said, “Neither do you, Delia. I’m so grateful for that. You accept, you just accept.” I felt bad, because it wasn’t really true—I was beginning to judge and to question and to be dissatisfied. When I kissed him and clung to him, in love and remorse, he pulled away and said, “Let’s go upstairs”—thinking of the Blocks down the road, the gardener due any minute. Resentment filled me. When will it end? How will it end? Don’t we love each other? Why don’t you do something about this? The judgmental questions beat in my head as we trudged back to the house and the dogs frisked loyally around us. Well, I can’t help it, I said to myself, watching Paul fondle them. I’m not a dog.
“I love you,” I said, and he turned from the dogs and—drawing me inside—began to fondle me instead. But the questions didn’t go away.
Martha’s mother was invited for Thanksgiving dinner. I was looking forward to meeting her, and to showing off my skills. With Martha’s help, I had boned a whole turkey and was serving it stuffed with chestnuts and raisins and crumbs.
“Cordelia has taken to all this incredibly quickly, Mother,” I had heard Martha say on the phone. “She’s a natural cook.” I grinned to myself with pride until I figured out that, of course, she knew I could hear her and was psyching me up for the big feast. But maybe she meant it.
On the morning of Thanksgiving I was in the kitchen when I heard a car horn honk and the squeal of tires and loud barking. I ran for the door—I knew Ian was outside somewhere—and was just in time to see a car speed away down the road, and a woolly heap in the gravel: Albert, with his skull crushed and his long nose covered with blood.
Paul and Martha weren’t far behind me, and then the kids. I tried to motion them back. “Don’t—don’t,” I said. “He’s dead, he’s done for.” I didn’t want the kids to see, or Paul, and I was untying my apron to put over the body, but Paul ran up and knelt beside it. He put his hand on Albert’s still flank, and then he looked up and down the road for the car that had done it, and then he went to pieces.
He stood up and staggered, weeping, his face distorted. I hardly knew his face, it looked like an old man’s. He went blindly to Martha, and she put her arms around him, motioning to me to take the kids inside. I stood stunned, watching Paul’s shoulders shake and hearing him sob. Megan and Ian turned and ran, crying, toward the house—horrified more by their father’s grief than by the dead dog by the road.
I knelt by Albert and put my apron over him—the blood was already drying on his muzzle, and had settled in clotting pools in the hollows of his broken skull—and then I followed the children. No one paid any attention to Vicky, but her frantic barking, with a little question at the end of each yelp, was all around us.
Inside, I cuddled Megan. I had never before so much as hugged her, and I was astonished at how fragile a bundle she was—a butterfly of a child. “Albert liked me, didn’t he, Delia?” she kept asking, and I kept saying yes. Ian had gone upstairs, after yelling at me to get away from him. After a while, Martha came in.
“Paul’s gone to get a shovel. He’s going to bury him out by the creek,” she said, her face red from holding back tears. I told Martha she’d better see to Ian. There was a crash from above, and she ran to the stairs, wiping her nose on her sleeve.
Megan pulled away from me, and climbed slowly after her mother, and I went back outside. Victoria was still barking beside the body of her puppy. She had nosed the apron off his crushed head. I tried to pull her away and she growled, but when I knelt to pick Albert up she let me; that was what she’d been wanting. He was a big, heavy dog, but, dead, he seemed very light—as if death was nothing, living was all. I carried him easily across the brown grass to the creek, where I could see Paul digging, and Vicky trotted behind. Across the road, in the distance, were the cows as usual. I thought of Albert’s docility with them, and of all the stories I’d told Megan in which a good-hearted puppy was a pivotal character, and tears came to my eyes, blurring the scene.
I set Albert down on the dead leaves by the creek and pulled Vicky to me. “It’s okay, Vic, it’s okay,” I whispered to her. But she sat rigidly, paying no attention, watching Paul.
Paul didn’t look at me until the hole was finished. He started out in a wool jacket, a sweater, and a shirt, but by the time he was done he’d shed everything but the shirt. It took him a while, though the ground wasn’t frozen yet and was particularly soft down by the water. But he dug deep, and I could see that from time to time he was still crying. Vicky and I sat beside Albert’s body and waited. I noticed closely—perhaps Vicky did, too—that the sun coming through the leafless trees made the icy water sparkle, and that the deep, mucky hole looked cold. Finally, Paul scooped out the last shovelful and turned to me.
“Do you want to put him in?”
I hesitated. “Don’t you?”
“Don’t you see I can’t touch him?” His glasses were all wet, but he didn’t bother to dry them, just looked at me hopelessly through his tears.
I gathered Albert up and carried him to his grave, wrapping the bloody apron closer around him. I tried to be gentle, but it was a long way down, and I had to let him drop the last couple of inches. I reached in and smoothed the apron and then, without a word, took the shovel and filled in the hole. It occurred to me that there should have been a ceremony, a velvet-lined box, a hymn, but there was only Vicky whimpering beside me, and Paul turned away with his hands in his pockets, and the mucky dirt.
When I finished, I leaned on the shovel and said, “He must have been chasing it. Damn those people—didn’t even stop.”
Paul had dried off his glasses on his flapping shirttail. “Poor old Albert,” he said unsteadily, and we started back to the house. Vicky hesitated, and began to paw at the grave—just tentatively, as if waiting for instructions—and Paul went over to her. “Come on, old girl,” he said gently. He put out his hand, and she licked it and followed us. As we came out of the trees into the bright, cold sunshine, Paul stopped. “I’m sorry,” he said, and his voice was stretched thin. “I’m sorry to carry on like this. But I loved that dog.” I began an understanding murmur, but he raised a hand to stop me. “And I’m sorry I—I had to hold someone, and I obviously couldn’t go to you.”
“Don’t even think about it, Paul,” I said. “It doesn’t matter.” But the memory of Martha’s arms around him was as strong as the memory of Albert’s dead body, and I think my voice must have lacked conviction, because Paul said, “These things take time, Delia.”
His words were like something out of a movie about some pampered, philandering husband who wants everything and doesn’t have the guts to make choices. They made our relationship look cheap and ordinary, especially after the shock of Albert’s accident, and the tears, and the burial. I hated his excuses. I hated him for talking about it like that—for talking about it at all—and I felt briefly lit up and glowing with rage. I said, “I don’t have all that much time.”
A little snort of bitter laughter out of the same movie. “Delia, you’re twenty-two!”
“There’s a lo
t I want to do, Paul. I’ll be gone from here eventually,” I said brutally. “I can’t stay around forever, taking cooking lessons and being nanny to your kids.”
“Nobody’s talking about forever, Delia.”
“Well, how long, then, Paul?” I immediately realized the question wasn’t fair, but I didn’t take it back.
“I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know,” he said in a low, miserable mumble, staring at the ground. The sun lit up, as always, the silver in his hair. I remember how elderly he had looked to me earlier. Now he looked like himself. If we hadn’t been in full view of the house, and if little lights of rage hadn’t still been flickering inside me, I would have put my arms around him, dragged him down on the hard brown earth …
“I wish I were in that grave with Albert,” he said.
It didn’t soften me. “Stop it, Paul!” I snapped at him. His words struck me as self-indulgent and babyish. I wondered, with a shock, if I could really love him after all, thinking those things about him. “Don’t talk like that,” I said, trying not to sound merely irritable.
“I don’t deserve you, Delia. It’s that simple.”
“Stop it, please. Let’s not talk about it. This is no time. Let’s get this damned day over with, Paul. We can talk another time.” My voice died out wearily. I just didn’t have the energy. I thought: I’ve got that huge dinner ahead of me to cook and serve and clean up after. I thought of all the potatoes I still had to peel, and the limp turkey to stuff, and the green beans to snap, and the artichokes to wrestle with. I started toward the house. Vicky ran ahead, and Paul trailed behind me. We were like some dreary tail end of a parade.
That was a horrible day, that Thanksgiving. The sun went behind a cloud, and a cold wind sprang up and found its way through every crack in that old house. The kids were alternately weepy and rowdy and sulky. Vicky whined and whined, and got underfoot. Martha and I kept crying furtively, at odd moments. Paul seemed all cried out, but he was touchy and withdrawn, watching football games on TV and yelling at the kids to pipe down. By the time Martha’s mother showed up in her Mercedes at 4:00, all anyone wanted was to crawl off somewhere alone and sleep.
But Mrs. Lambert wanted to drink sherry with us—me included, insisting that I sit down, take a break, have a drink. In fact, she paid more attention to me than she did to Paul, whom she treated as a sort of trusted, valuable underfootman, sending false, sparkly smiles in his direction when he took her coat and brought her drink, but hardly ever looking at him directly or speaking to him.
She wanted to talk about “our tragedy,” as she called it. “Have you discussed it with the children, Martha?” she asked, throwing off her mink and patting her snow-white upsweep. She looked exactly like Martha—same eyes, nose, chin, but all slipped down a notch. She wore rings on four out of ten fingers, and she had an expensive, powdery, little-old-lady smell. “Have you had a good, thorough talk about it?”
When Martha said no, they hadn’t really discussed it much, the children hadn’t seemed to want to quite yet Mrs. Lambert said, “Well, don’t you think you should, darling? You can’t just encourage them to repress their feelings.”
It was somehow obvious, from the loud deliberateness of her voice and the tense set of Martha’s shoulders, that this kind of talk was new to Mrs. Lambert, and had been adopted as a harmless way to make herself seem younger and modern. Martha had obviously been brought up to repress her feelings. It also became clear to me why Martha had married the son of an Italian butcher instead of the lawyer or stockbroker her mother would certainly have preferred. (Martha’s long-dead father had, I knew, been a stockbroker, and both her sisters were married to corporation lawyers.) When I met Mrs. Lambert, I felt an immediate increase in sympathy with Martha. In her own way, she had defied her parents just as I had defied mine. Paul was her Danny.
Mrs. Lambert got Megan on her lap and began to talk about what a good dog Albert had been, and how much they would all miss him. She talked about the death of her old dog Roger, a golden retriever, when she had been just Megan’s age, and how she had cried. Megan listened miserably, overflowing with silent tears, and, when she could, she slipped down and ran upstairs. “There,” her grandmother said, resuming the sipping of her sherry. She had apparently given up on Ian, who was in his room listening to records. “I do think it’s better to bring these things out in the open.”
Martha just sat there, tight-lipped, smoothing the skirt of her beige wool dress and tapping her matching shoes together, until Mrs. Lambert changed the subject to the vagaries of her gardener, and Martha joined in gladly, with relief that she could stop disapproving. She liked her mother, I could tell, and would rather please her than fight. At sixty, she would be her exact replica.
I excused myself—though I would have liked to hear their discussion—and returned to the kitchen. The turkey wasn’t getting done fast enough, and I kept basting it and checking the thermometer, and then worrying that all the opening of the oven door was slowing it down. Paul wandered in and out, from football games to family. He had to pass through the kitchen to do so.
“I am sorry, Delia,” he said to me a couple of times, and once he came close to me and whispered, “I need to be alone with you. I need to put my arms around you.” I don’t know if this was part of his apology for crying on Martha. “We’ve got to talk.”
“Well, I don’t really know how we’re going to manage that!” I said in a voice that was probably too loud and certainly too snappish. But I was frazzled. Martha’s elaborate menu had me insecurely tackling things I’d never attempted before. While Martha was sipping sherry and talking about the servant problem with her mother, I was trying to get everything to be done at the same time, and worrying about unmolding the oeufs en gelée—my first aspic—without melting the top and ruining the turkey design I’d made with egg yolk and truffles and pimento and carrot strips. I kept feeling like crying; my head hurt; I thought I might be coming down with something; and I was afraid everything was over between Paul and me.
He retreated from me, looking hurt. I brooded about him, and our conversation that morning, through the rest of my dinner preparations. “These things take time,” he had said. But he had also said it wouldn’t take forever. Where, between time and forever, was the point at which he would leave Martha? I considered giving him an ultimatum. I considered giving Martha notice. I even considered just giving up, and made a short mental list of the two ways of giving up that were open to me:
1. calling off our affair
2. leaving things exactly as they were
At it turned out, I didn’t do any of these things. But all during that dreadful day, I thought I would have to choose one of them, and they whirled in my head. If I could, I would have abandoned the aspic and turkey and potatoes and green beans and artichoke hearts and tarte normande and gone up to Chez Cordelia and made feverish lists. I headed them mentally:
What’s Wrong with This Situation?
What Did I Ever See in Him?
Where Can I Go from Here?
All questions, all uncertainty. And poor Albert dead and in his grave.
Vicky stayed with Paul, following him from room to room and, at dinner, by special dispensation, lying under his chair. Her occasional human-sounding whinnies of pain punctuated our meal—always with that pathetic question mark at the end, as if she hadn’t quite grasped it yet, or still had hope that Albert would return. Every time she did it I had to blink back tears.
The meal, in spite of everything, came out pretty well. The pommes Anna were browned a little too much on top. One corner of the aspic stuck to the mold, but the children clapped their hands at the turkey decoration on top; it seemed to cheer them up. Mrs. Lambert was full of enthusiasm for the food. For a fashionably thin woman, she had an enormous appetite—or perhaps she was trying to set us all a healthy-minded example. Paul was silent, but he ate a lot, endearing himself to me all over again, but not enough for me to send him a smile or a word. Martha and her mot
her did all the talking, discussing in detail this dinner, past dinners, restaurants they’d been to, and restaurants they planned to go to. I heard more stories about Mrs. Lambert’s cooks, and she asked me polite questions about my illustrious parents. She had all my father’s books.
“They must be missing you on a family holiday like Thanksgiving,” Mrs. Lambert said. She had a large smile that always looked ready for the photographer, and her teeth were either false or fabulous.
“Well, I wanted to do the dinner,” I said.
“It’s her midterm exam, Mother,” Martha laughed. “Aminus, Cordelia. You did very nicely.” She had left a little pile of overbrowned potato on her plate, I noticed when I cleaned up.
Over dessert and coffee, the conversation turned to my restaurant ambitions.
“Your own little place, Cordelia!” cried Mrs. Lambert. “Why, what a delightful idea. You remember Elsa Rolfe, Martha. She opened up that place in New York. Oh, it was a wonderful little restaurant, Cordelia. Very, very chic. And her lemon tart with almonds—do you remember that, Martha? Of course, the critics ruined her, by discovering her. She couldn’t handle it, just hordes of people, and terrible pressure on her to expand. So many people …” Mrs. Lambert shuddered, as if people were roaches. “Of course, in New York, what can you expect? And then the overhead. You see, it was a temptation, to give in to the crowds.” That’s the way she told a story, in shreds. “Well, she went under. The critics found her, and then the people found her, and she accommodated herself to the demand, and then the critics came back and decided she’d slipped, and the people went away, and—” She spread out her hands and rolled up her eyes and shrugged, as her French cook probably used to. “Back to Connecticut. And now she’s dead, poor woman.”
I imagined her dying of grief at the failure of her restaurant. “She’s dead?”
Chez Cordelia Page 25