by JoeAnn Hart
“Should we do something?” Andrew asked, with a shoulder spasm.
“You’d have thought it was Charles who got hit in the head a couple of weeks ago, and not the goose,” said Neddy, taking a few practice swings.
Gregg wiped his forehead again and put away his handkerchief. “This is insane. Can’t we make him play?” He took out the Rules from his bag.
Andrew rubbed his lower back in contemplation, then took out his cell phone. “Madeline? Andrew here. Look, there seems to be a problem with Charles.”
Chapter Eight
The Sweet Spot
GERARD, acting as maître d’ for the evening, stood by the lectern at the entrance to the chandeliered dining room and surveyed his territory. Originally the ballroom, where Jonathan Curtis had once expected to bring his daughters out to a society of merchant princes, the dining room now sported burgundy damask hanging from gilt-grooved rods and mauve walls encrusted in plaster detail. The chairs were upholstered in the Club’s baby blue tartan, which was featured in the gift shop on everything from bridge books ($12.99) to hair scrunchies ($3.99). Gerard sighed with pleasure as the music of tongues rose around him and the air blossomed with perfume. It was a fine crowd indeed, with the bright, polished looks of indulged people in the summer. That Boston Globe thing would blow over. How could anything so mundane as vinyl eyes and a few fender benders upset these charmed lives for very long?
He looked outside to reassure himself that all was well and free of balls. The three sets of French doors opened onto a wide terrace, where junior members—adult children of members still covered under their parents’ dues—often lingered on the fieldstone wall until late at night.
Last summer, the couple most likely to linger had been Eliot Farnsworth and Nina Rundlett. So much for them. Now he had to worry about the seating of the older Farnsworths and Rundletts, who could not even be in sight of one another. Worse, Roger and Gwen Rundlett were dining with Ellen and Alex Bruner, and seating a foursome that included a pair of lawyers was an exercise in tolerance itself. It took a good long while to negotiate the demands of where they were to be seated, with Ellen Bruner having the gall to suggest that he move people to accommodate their party. Move people already seated! If it was true what the rumor mill said about that woman being pregnant, it was horrific to think of her genes being duplicated.
He flicked something—a little feather?—off his new Armani suit as he watched Luisa approach the Titewater table nearby, then busied himself with picking up an imaginary speck of dirt off the parquet to listen. He hoped to catch her at some substandard delivery of service so he could send her back downstairs. He heard her ask Mrs. Titewater whether she wanted more water. When Luisa returned to the workstation, he was waiting for her.
“Don’t say, ‘Do you want,’” he said. “Say, ‘Would you like.’”
As it was written, so it shall be done. In his Cornell thesis, and later in the ERCC Employee Manual, he codified rigorous standards of etiquette because in this day and age the workers might very well be the only ones who knew what they were. So many people had become afflicted with sudden wealth syndrome in the nineties that correctness had become a cult. There has to be a class that sets the tone, and that responsibility now fell to him and his staff. He dreamed of a Club where everyone, from the youngest caddy to the oldest member, had the manners of a country house butler. The members easily went along, always showing one another to their table. The newer members, especially, looked to him for cues on how to behave, reflecting his every gesture. If only his staff were so compliant.
“Would you like,” Luisa repeated slowly. “Okay. Mr. Farnsworth wants to talk to you about the wine list again.”
“He would like to talk to me,” he corrected.
“He would like to talk to you,” she repeated. “He wants wine.”
Then she turned back to her duties, mumbling something in Spanish that defied translation. Gerard was miffed. He would leave a memo for Vita about this, but he doubted it would do any good. Vita, for some reason, had dug in her heels about Luisa.
He picked up a tasseled wine list from the lectern and arranged his face. As he passed Palmer Stillington, he heard him growl to his wife that one of his shots had skidded on goose grease out on Burningbush, ruining his game. Gerard was sure to hear about this on Monday.
He nodded to the Lamberts as he maneuvered between the tables. The couple was picking listlessly at their food, obviously not wanting to be there. But Gerard knew they had to make an appearance in order to avoid being the sole topic of conversation. What Mr. Lambert had done that morning, dropping out of a game to sit with the geese, sounded ominously like a breakdown. That sort of thing was happening more and more at the Club these days. But Lambert would get over it soon enough. That’s what the Club was for, so men like him could retreat into its warm embrace and find solace among their friends and games, becoming fully restored to go back out into the cold world to grab a buck. He’d be just fine.
At a large round table in the center of the room, the Clays were entertaining a substantial party, all nonmembers. Realtors, most likely, a few of whom were visibly uncomfortable, knowing that in one way or another they were being fattened up for something. Thornton Clay, enormous and easygoing, was smiling broadly and kept the bottles coming. Helen Clay, whose faculty of enjoyment was as large as her husband’s, saluted Gerard and winked one of her big horsey eyes.
Gerard bowed from the waist before veering past the Henry Harcourt and Peter Gibb table. The two men and their wives were leaning across the table toward one another as if concluding some shady business, so he did not intrude. At the next table sat the skinny dowager Arietta Wingate with her two daughters, who seemed even older than their mother, and their two invisible husbands, one of whom had recently taken up the art of English bell-ringing, and that was the subject of conversation. He’d heard that Mrs. Wingate’s husband had died of drink back in the eighties, and who could blame him?
Gerard forced himself to stop at the Clendenning table. They were with the Hollowells, the vice president and his wife, discussing the imperfections of the other members. Brenda Clendenning gestured with arms so thin that the meat appeared to be sucked out of her body, nodding but not smiling at Gerard. It was whispered that her husband’s statement to the reporter had compromised her position on the Scholarship Committee at Nobles, where there could be no whiff of prejudice toward an applicant’s family car.
Clendenning made a small noise from his throat by way of a greeting. His upper lip extended down and beyond his lower lip, like a cod. His blue-green eyes were steady, almost staring because he didn’t blink much, and he had a studied, laconic manner, as if for generations his family had been bored from the effects of wealth. But Gerard knew, as he made it his business to know, that Clendenning was one of those millionaires who made all his money in one day—by marrying it. But the slight rasp in Clendenning’s voice, along with his excessively polite manner, made what he was about to say seem important, and so when he finally uttered, “Hope all is going as it should, Wilton,” Gerard took it to mean he was halfway out the door.
Gerard passed the rest of the tables in a grinning funk but, out of habit, kept his ear on every word. Mostly the talk was about which houses sold for what. The members tended to talk obsessively about real estate, an informal way of talking obsessively about money. But Gerard’s radar was tuned in to the ordering of complicated meals, with their many vetoes and provisos. It was his job to foresee problems. If a husband whispered to his wife that there was a smudge on his fork, Gerard would have the waitstaff place a new service in front of him, anticipating the needs of the members before they themselves knew what they wanted. Or what they would like, he corrected himself. Why, oh why, hadn’t he anticipated the problems with the inflatable eyes?
He greeted Mr. Farnsworth with a flourish of the list. Their guests were from outside the Club that evening and seemed as eager as the waiters to serve their hosts. This attention inspired
Farnsworth to display his wine knowledge more than usual. Gerard had learned wine at Cornell, had been tested extensively on grapes, vintages, methods, buying, and food pairings. He knew trends. He knew values. He could, without fail, pick the perfect wine. But he wore his knowledge lightly. He could not appear to know more than the members, many of whom prided themselves on their private cellars. It was best not to lock horns. Farnsworth’s question: “What dessert wine do you suggest with the zabaglione, Wilton?” was actually just a springboard for Farnsworth to expound upon muscats.
Only Dr. Nicastro, sitting in the corner, getting ready to eat a meal fit for a boa constrictor, truly appreciated Gerard’s expertise, so when Gerard finished steering Farnsworth toward the proper Sauterne, and commended him by saying, “Excellent choice,” he went to say hello. Dr. Nicastro was not married and did not even have a date that evening, but he was with the Fishers. They were new members, not from the area at all, and yet they seemed to be doing remarkably well for themselves in making friends. The Club was hard to penetrate to begin with, and the walls inside could be even higher than the ones out. But Hilary Fisher, with a cheerful, oversized head and the spindly limbs of a marionette, often broke grim silences with a scream of exaggerated amusement, which raised the happiness level in the whole room and reminded them they were all having a good time. Her husband, Carl Fisher, was less lively. Some people even thought him a little simple, and it did sometimes seem that she led him like a tame bear from one event to another, but he was a damn good listener. He sat, trim in his blue blazer and Club tie, hands folded on the table and looking intently at Dr. Nicastro while he spoke, alternately squinting and raising his eyebrows to indicate unwavering attention, smiling and nodding, smiling and nodding. Gerard paused. A flush of recognition swept through him like the avian flu, as if he were looking in a funhouse mirror.
Vita stood with her back to the stove, a line of computer-generated papers waving in front of her face like Buddhist prayer flags. She was simultaneously reading orders and giving orders in an atmosphere of pure rush and panic, but she exuded calm, like the duck who seems to glide without effort on the surface while its feet are madly churning below. It was the life of a cook, her life: the crazy hours, the intensity of the work, the beauty of the product. She thought of her crew—her sous-chef, two prep helpers, dessert woman, five waitstaff, three runners, and busboy—as a single organism fighting for food. The kitchen was a room of hunger and desire, and Vita loved it because she, by and large, was the one person who could satisfy everyone. If only she could make her mother understand with what passion she embraced her job—her mother, who she knew was obediently sitting by the phone at that very moment, waiting until the rush was over so she could call her daughter.
“You do the shrimps,” Vita said to Sloane, her competent but silent sous-chef. “I’ll take care of this.”
Sloane mechanically spooned tomato chutney into two large martini glasses, executing her duty like she was changing a tire for all the food touched her soul. She did her job perfectly, and bloodlessly.
Vita reverently placed a hot squab on a plate, and arranged sage and grapes around it. Ordinarily she didn’t handle appetizers, but this was for Dr. Nicastro, and he noticed every detail. She sent the dish up to the dining room as proudly as if she had hatched the pigeon herself.
Two waitresses argued over whose salmon plates were whose, and a waiter dropped a glass and cursed, and another asked where his veal was. Oops. Now that Vita had sworn off oil spray to freshen up food, she was cooking closer to the bone. She turned her attention to the pan of floured veal medallions on the counter, as scrumptious as powdered baby bottoms. She peeled a latex glove off her hand and gave the cutlets a loving pat, then chose two to throw in the hot pan in front of her. As she added a handful of shallots, she wondered, along with her mother, if she would ever pat the real thing. Children could be a mixed blessing. Phoebe Lambert, for instance. When Vita heard she was back in town, she put Boca burgers back in the snack bar to avoid another scene like last summer, when Phoebe lay covered in ketchup at the pick-up window, lobbying for a beef alternative. Vita flipped the medallions and gave the shallots a stir. And as soon as word got out that veal had been on to-night’s menu, Phoebe was sure to charge, but Vita was ready with a counterattack. This rosy meat had a pedigree even a vegetarian might approve. She turned the meat out on a plate and, with a spattering of hot fat, used Madeira to deglaze the pan. A warm, loving woman in upstate New York raised free-range calves, bringing them up like her own children. The animals lived bucolic, natural lives right up until nine months of age, when the woman, calmly and with compassion, slaughtered them. It was flesh of the highest quality and could be consumed with a clear conscience.
She poured the glaze over the veal and placed a scoop of morel whipped potatoes on the side, not underneath, not being a fan of Viagra towers of food presentation. She wanted her food to be easily seen, and admired, and not to make the members hunt for their starch. The waiter snatched the plate from her hand. Her bare hand. Oops again. Reluctantly, she flipped another latex glove from a box on the counter. Gerard was a bear when it came to Department of Health regulations. It tore her apart to have this artificial barrier between her and her food, but she wore them when Gerard was on duty and to set a good example for the staff, some of whom she wouldn’t want touching her food with naked hands either.
She gave the mussel soup with saffron a quick stir to keep it from settling, then prepared a plate of duck, arranging loganberries at the cut where the leg had joined the body so the member would not be reminded that the bird once walked the earth as he did now, and sent it up. She ripped tendons from an uncooked leg with a flick of her knife to prepare it for the next order. Luisa came down the steps from the dining room holding a glass.
“Spots! Mr. Stillington says spots. He raise it at me!”
Vita motioned to Pedrosa to lift the steaming tray of glasses from the dishwasher. Poor Luisa, to get Mr. Stillington her first night back. Everyone hated to wait on him, since every request came with a storm of abuse. The only comfort was that as hard as he was on the staff, he was even worse to his comembers. He treated everyone badly, as if that were the mark of being well bred. But she’d been around long enough to know that talking about everyone badly while treating them like long-lost siblings was the gold standard of the Club. And yet Gerard had assigned this monster to Luisa, setting her up to get her off the dining floor. Gerard would have to do better than that. She instructed Luisa to grab a spotless glass by its hot stem and place it on a linen-covered tray. Then she selected a split of Bordeaux and placed it next to the crystal.
“We should throw him a couple of Christians, but this might do.” Vita was liberal with wine splits because they smoothed any dining disaster. The richer the customer, the more he liked free things. You just had to know how to tickle the stomach.
Luisa thanked her in a rolling Spanish, and Vita corrected her. “If the members hear you talk like that, they’ll think you’re plotting something. Learn to say thank you in English, and learn to say it often. Like Gerard.”
Luisa muttered, “El sapo,” and laughed her way up the stairs with her offering.
Toad? Vita shrugged and went back to her stove, turning the heat up on the duck. The duck, the squab, and the guinea hen with baby turnips and artichoke puree on the menu that night were all a pitiful excuse for the special game dinner, featuring goose, that she had hoped for. But last Sunday, Luisa’s mother, Mrs. Suarez, had scoffed when Vita showed up with a domestic goose that had already been plucked and gutted so that it was no longer a candidate for hanging. Mrs. Suarez slapped the bird on its pimpled rump. “Goose must live, must love.” And with this she patted her heart. “Taste is from life. Go make friends with your birds. Make them fat and happy, and a week before you want to eat, I bring my boys and we kill them. Yes?”
Kill them? Vita had gotten an uneasy feeling. Every ounce of meat and fish she had ever prepared and served had been k
illed by someone, somewhere, but not at her command.
Or had it? When she ordered the veal through her supplier, was she not asking for the knife to be put to the calf’s throat? How different was this? And it wasn’t like she was going to see it happen. She would have no blood on her hands. The more she thought, the more intense her memory of Mrs. Suarez’s goose became.
She lowered her voice. “How do I fatten them up?”
Mrs. Suarez had smiled and tucked her hands in the sleeves of her black cardigan. “Maiz. Not pale yellow flour you people eat. Dark cornmeal, full of the sun.”
You people. Mrs. Suarez had meant her as well, her Hispanic heritage notwithstanding. Her mother would love to hear those words, her dream of putting distance between her precious daughter and an impoverished Colombia fulfilled. Her parents had never even spoken Spanish at home, for fear little Evita would not learn proper English. She’d had to pick it up from her cousins, like profanity.
Vita flipped the duck leg, splashed in some wine, and covered it. She thought of the wildness she had felt along with her grief over Utah, when the two geese spent the day in the kitchen with her, so primitively dead. Even now, when she entered the walk-in, her eyes went to the space where the Chiquita boxes had been. She wanted the fairway geese. She needed them. She would start to-night, with her bag of coarse cornmeal and her eyes on the Fothergill Cup banquet at the end of the summer.
She heard Luisa pant down the stairs again, going, “Ah, ah, ah,” and wondered what Mr. Stillington found fault with now.
“El cabra,” Luisa shouted, half laughing, not able to catch her breath.
Goat? thought Vita. Had Stillington pinched her? Before she could sort out her thoughts, Gerard came running down after Luisa, grabbed the phone, and stabbed in three digits. Vita moved closer, but he didn’t even look at her. He rested his forehead on the wall.