Chez Cordelia

by Kitty Burns Florey

  “I’m going to keep an eye on that girl, let me tell you,” Mrs. Frutchey said to me during our last coffee break. “Time the master of this house settled himself down.” She gave me a meaningful look, and I blushed. We hugged each other and exchanged little gifts—identical calico-cat planters. We’d both bought them at the Gresham Gift Shoppe, and we laughed at the coincidence.

  I wish my leave-taking from Paul could have been as uncomplicated. My aunt came to pick me up, to drive me to St. Dunstan’s. Paul and I had said good-bye the day before while Martha was out.

  “I suppose it’s for the best,” he said, in a voice that had all the emotion frozen out of it. “I hope you’ll be happy, Delia. I hope things work out for you.”

  I was almost glad of the impersonality of it—that that was how I would remember him, as the stiff, passionless Paul instead of my warm and impetuous lover. But then, as I was leaving, and he and Martha stood on the front step saying formal farewells, he suddenly caught me in his arms, in front of everyone, and held me as if he could never let me go. When he did, there were tears in his eyes. I thought of how often I’d seen Paul cry, and how lovable he was, after all.

  I got in the car with my aunt and looked back at the yellow house. I knew I would dream about that place—the cows, Albert, the beautiful furniture, the ribbon of wood smoke that coiled in winter from the bookshop chimney, Paul’s kisses … Paul had gone inside, but Martha stood there waving and smiling, a grand and terrible woman, as my aunt and I drove away.

  Here at St. Dunstan’s, it’s not only the devout and wealthy guests who find peace. For me, it’s a haven of solace from the confusion of the last few years—order out of chaos. I have a room on the third floor which isn’t much bigger than the fabled cell of St. Dunstan. It contains a skinny bed, a desk, a dresser, my coin collection, and my battered bookcase—to which I have given a fresh coat of white paint. My little TV sits on it, as ever. On my bed is a crocheted afghan made for me by Sister Norma (grateful to be freed forever from the cooking). Outside my window is a giant copper beech, and beyond it the blue lake.

  The regularity of the life suits me. I was afraid, at first, that it would be too much—I’m not cut out to live like a nun—but the restrictions on me are very light. The rule of silence and the rule against having men in my room are the only ones I can think of. I am allowed the use of the nuns’ station wagon (the ashtray filled with nickels and dimes for tolls). They welcome me into their private common room, where I play poker sometimes (for dried beans) with Sister Carmelita and Sister Evelyn Margaret. I am permitted wine in my bedroom, in spite of the tendencies of my predecessor.

  I spend my days off with Jimmie Nolan, the poet, who lives upstairs from the Green Horseshoe Café, where he tends bar. He cooks for me up there, hearty feasts on a double hot plate, and rubs my back in his big, sagging bed. I get tired. I work hard at St. Dunstan’s, keeping to the nuns’ high standards. But in return I’m gifted with sound and renewing sleep.

  It may seem odd that the man in my life is a poet, but he never talks about it, and he doesn’t write about me. I suspect Jimmie’s poems aren’t very good. They never get published. He writes about his dog Woolly—a mongrel with a heart of gold—and about the village and the bar and its patrons. I like to hear him read his poems. On the page, his strings of words have a way of sliding out of my grasp, just as my father’s do, or Shakespeare’s. But when they’re read aloud, it’s Jimmie I see, not those painful rows of letters, and it’s Jimmie’s strong, lilting voice I hear, not the beating of the blood in my own brain.

  In the evenings, Jimmie and I sit on his bed and watch TV. Jimmie never laughs with the laugh track—it’s always odd things he finds funny, and his unexpected laugh is always a comfort. So is our lovemaking in the dark.

  In September, Danny was tried in the New Haven County Court House and convicted of felony murder. He was sentenced to life at Sommers State Prison. A month or two later, I began receiving letters from him—atrociously spelled, strange, almost mystical at times. He works in the garden at Sommers, and he seems to have a profound relationship with the plants he tends that I’d never have expected from him. In one letter he called them his children, and he was deeply sad when winter came and he was moved indoors to laundry duty.

  I write back to him, of course. I don’t suppose Danny wants to hear what I have to say. I think he’s lost interest in me as Cordelia. I think I’m mostly an address (Lord knows how he got it) where he can direct his letters. I see how odd it is, though I’ve never pointed it out to him, that he and I communicate now only via the written word, and I think back to the grade-school remedial reading class that brought us together.

  His letters are mostly about his life in prison, the daily round. It sounds like a rough place. The prison isn’t, in fact, far from here, but Danny has never suggested I visit him, and I know I never will. He writes mostly about his chances for parole, and about the appeal his lawyer is working on, on the grounds that Danny was never fit to stand trial in the first place. Now and then, when his letters veer off into incomprehensibility, I am forced to wonder if he was fit—ever. I almost included in one of my letters an apology for not standing by him, not coming forward and testifying in his defense; that failure continues to haunt and confuse me. But I realized the unwisdom of admitting this in print. And I doubt if it would mean anything to Danny. I don’t know if he even reads my letters. I doubt it, and so I write him everything. I send him my lists, and I tell him about the nuns. I even copy out Jimmie’s poems for him (the one about the fishing trip to Canada, the one about Dutch Collins, the town drunk, and all the dog poems) because I hope they’ll brighten his gray prison days.

  These letters Danny and I exchange are important to me—possibly more so than they are to him. I need to keep my connection to Danny, to remind myself of the Cordelia I once was, and of the infinite, unpatterned strangeness of life. Danny’s letters prevent me from becoming too sure of things—or of myself, and the power I fancy I have over my life.

  And I need to keep tabs on him, too. I don’t think anyone else does. His parents, I heard, have remained in Florida through all this, refusing to acknowledge a killer as their son; and to my family he is merely an embarrassing, invisible nobody—Cordelia’s youthful folly, best forgotten. But he’s still my legal husband, and I won’t abandon him entirely. I think of him as a debt to be paid, and I keep his letters in a bundle in my desk, like bills. For Christmas, I sent him a large supply of good stationery, but he doesn’t use it. He writes to me on the cheap, gray prison paper—his way of making clear to me, I think, how unconnected we really are. And yet the letters keep stitching between us, and his watch is still on my wrist. I check the punctual St. Dunstan’s bells by it; it proclaims that I was once, at any rate, Delia, his beloved wife.

  My family likes coming here to visit. My father sees St. Dunstan’s as a new, fertile source of poems; he’s written one called “The Lady of the Lake,” which he says is about me but which I don’t understand at all. When he was interviewed on Sixty Minutes not long ago (“everyone’s troubadour,” they called him) he referred to me as “my youngest daughter, Cordelia, who saves souls through her cooking,” and when Harry Reasoner tried to get him to elaborate he just looked enigmatic and changed the subject to Horatio, who is touring Italy to collect material for a new book he’s working on, called Murders from the Portuguese, starring Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

  Preston Maguire and my Aunt Phoebe spent a weekend here, on retreat, at the end of apple season. Preston played the trumpet after dinner, and when the weekend was over Aunt Phoebe announced that she had searched her soul and was going to marry Preston after all. “I’m so glad I can still surprise myself,” she said gleefully to me.

  Juliet and Mr. Oliver—Ivan—were married at New Year’s. They had a quiet wedding in the chapel at Yale, and then astonished me by throwing a huge, no-holds-barred reception where everyone drank champagne and did Greek dances. Miranda was there, with flowers i
n her hair; Annamay had moved out of her life, and her ballet instructor had moved in, a muscular young man named Charles. When they danced together, people stopped to watch them, and when the music stopped Charles lifted Miranda effortlessly to his shoulder. They stood there, posed like beautiful statues, while everyone applauded.

  “Where do you fit into this family, Delia?” Jimmie asked me, clapping lustily.

  “I don’t,” I said. “Never did.”

  “That can’t be true,” he said, after a little thought. “Or you wouldn’t be so fond of them.”

  “They’re my family, I can’t help it.”

  “It’s more than that,” he said, and smiled. “I’ve got it—they’re the melba toast and caviar dip, and you’re a corned beef sandwich and a beer.”

  “Is that the best you can do, Jimmie?”

  “I think I might get a poem out of it.”

  “Your metaphors are as crazy as my father’s,” I told him, and he accused me of not understanding the poetic mind; that, at any rate, is true.

  I find myself, lately, growing fatter—a little blowsy, Jimmie says. He says I look like a cook. Sometimes he and I make plans to someday buy the Green Horseshoe Café from Art Hodges, Jimmie’s boss, and open our restaurant there, with the sign in lights:

  CHEZ CORDELIA

  HOME COOKING

  But for the moment, I’m contented here. In the mornings I am in the cold, clean kitchen by seven to get things going, and when the others emerge from the chapel at a quarter to eight, the trusty smell of my hot coffee greets them. Lunch is at one o’clock; after a break, I work on dinner most of the afternoon, with one of the nuns by my side to help with chopping and beating. Dinner is at six, and it’s the gastronomical high point of the day—maybe the spiritual high point, too—who knows? Aunt Phoebe is in the process of rejoining the Church, and she speculates that the loaves and fishes may have been the Galilean equivalent of filets de poisson Bercy aux champignons served with a good crisp-crusted bread and a chilled white. And Sister Rita Ann called my watercress soup a miracle.

  The food is what the retreatants pay for here. I don’t mean to belittle the service, but that you can get at any retreat house: masses, sermons, confessions, peace and quiet, nuns, a library full of devotional reading matter, and the group sessions they’ve started adding to the program. Of course, that’s what they come for, but it’s my cooking they pay for: the spinach-stuffed crepes, the baby beef liver soaked in milk and gently sautéed, the goulash and homemade noodles, the avocado soup, the mousses and sorbets and madeleines and coffee cakes. I’m a good cook—not a fancy cook, though I can bone a whole chicken and assemble it again around a duxelles inside of half an hour—but a good, inspired, hard-working cook. Over the stove the plaque from my aunt hangs:

  No matter where I serve my guests,

  They always like my kitchen best.

  I still make lists. The other day, a beautiful windless Sunday (my afternoon off), I sat by the lake with my List Notebook and wrote:

  Things I Need

  1. to cook for people

  2. to love someone

  3. to have money in the bank

  4. to be boss of my life

  5. Chez Cordelia

  I put a star after that last one, and doodled curlicues around the words. I liked the way it sounded, and all the things it meant to me. The list made me happy—it still makes me happy. I read it over often, as the nuns read their prayer books, to remind myself of where I’m going.

  In my spare time, I work on this narrative, the story of my life. I do it to make sense out of things, so I can stand back and get a look at them. And I have done this. But I wrote it for another reason, too, and in that I’ve failed: I wanted to get at the whole truth, but the whole truth isn’t available to me, only my little bit of it. Danny’s story, or Malcolm’s, or Paul’s, or Juliet’s, or my father’s—they’d all be different, just as Alan said. They’d all be true, as true as mine, and as false. Even if they were all put together, in a book as long and complex as life itself, there would still be something missing, some mystery words can’t convey. I don’t know what this is—I can only call it the real truth—but I know when it’s not there.

  Well. I sit here at this desk in my tiny room, looking out at the lake, with a glass of Burgundy before me. I survey my corner of life as captured in the unreliable stack of words I’ve managed to put down, and the only sense I can make out of it is this: direction is laid out in front of me, and though I consider myself a prudent and sensible person, I know I’m never going to get there as the crow flies, in a straight zoom. I’m going to keep being fooled by blind alleys and going down dead ends and crashing into doors and fences. But I’ve got to do it my own way. That’s the stone I’ve been kicking ahead of me all my life, and I can’t stop now.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1980 by Kitty Burns Florey

  ISBN: 978-1-4976-9338-8

  Distributed by Open Road Distribution

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  New York, NY 10014

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