Cooking for Picasso

by Camille Aubray

  I put Mom’s key in the lock and walked in. It was completely empty. As I entered the foyer I heard my footsteps echo hollowly in the utter silence. Mom’s parlor and dining room looked forlorn without her carefully chosen furniture. No pictures on the walls, no curtains at the window, and the elegant area rugs were gone. She wasn’t even dead yet, but already I could see that she was vanishing.

  Continuing on, I averted my eyes when I passed her bedroom and realized that her bed was gone. Her closet door hung open, gaping, empty. Her vanity table, her little bottles of perfume and makeup, her pretty gold matching mirror, comb and brush set had all disappeared.

  I headed for the laundry room, where the shelves that once held neatly folded towels were now bare. Inside the closet, her cleaning bottles, ironing board and iron had all been heartlessly taken away.

  Not even a mousetrap left behind. If I found nothing in her secret cupboard, how would I know if it had been empty all along, or if the twins already confiscated what she’d hidden there? My heart was beating faster as, steeling myself, I crouched down beneath the washer-and-dryer with its crawl space for the electrical wires and plumbing. I reached around, feeling wires, pipes, dust.

  Then I discovered another solitary plastic zip-it bag like the one she’d kept Grandma’s notebook in, to protect it from the damp. I drew this parcel out. It contained a shiny, thick travel packet with photos printed on the envelope and a line that said, Open immediately. Dated material and itinerary within.

  The packet had already been opened, and judging from the welcome letter, the whole thing had evidently been arranged months ago. Mystified, I examined the rest of its contents: a color brochure, hotel reservation, plane tickets and an itinerary, all for one of those high-end tourist packages.

  This one was a cooking-class trip to the South of France, called The Cuisine of Provence, advertising beautiful rooms in a restored farmhouse with a big shiny modern kitchen, where tour groups could gather to learn cooking from an English chef. The attendees pictured in the brochure all looked proud and pleased, posing in groups in their white aprons.

  “Why would Mom sign up for a French cooking class?” I murmured. “She could probably teach this class herself!” Furthermore, my mother was the kind of woman who seldom went anywhere without her husband, let alone took a vacation from him. I flipped over the envelope and studied it closely.

  Yes, it was definitely sent to Mom, but not to her home address. Instead, beneath her name, the package was addressed in care of Aunt Matilda and had been sent to her house.

  This was now beginning to make sense, in a weird sort of way. Aunt Matilda went on vacation every spring to a new culture spot in Europe. But although she was Mom’s age, she was her polar opposite. Aunt Matilda was outspoken, footloose and fancy-free, financially independent. She would make a good travelling companion for Mom, and might even have helped Mom break the news to Dad that his wife wanted to take a vacation without him. Obviously Mom and Aunt Matilda had conspired to keep it a secret until the last minute. And Mom had hidden this packet here as if it were diamonds.

  I was suddenly certain of one thing. My mother had definitely been planning to return to this house in New York, at the very least to pack a suitcase and meet up with Aunt Matilda to go off to France together. She wasn’t the type of woman to suddenly decide to chuck it all and move to Nevada, nor to give the twins instructions to sell the house and dispose of all its contents for her, as they’d claimed. It wasn’t Mom’s style to let other people, even her own kin, go rifling through her possessions and make hasty decisions about them, especially when the house was holding a secret like this travel packet. She was more methodical and fastidious. And even after Dad died, she’d told me, I’ll see you here when you come back and we’ll do nice things together.

  I put Mom’s envelope in my purse, checked to make sure there was nothing else hidden in the cupboard, and rose to my feet. My instincts told me it was time to get out of here.

  But on the way out, I paused at the kitchen. Somehow, finding this room empty was the worst; seeing it so brutally stripped of all Mom’s well-organized, well-chosen possessions, like her favorite copper pans and cast-iron pots. Even her cookbooks were gone.

  “Cookbooks,” I said aloud. And cooking classes. I fumbled in my bag for Aunt Matilda’s phone number and I called her. She picked up on the third ring.

  “Hello, Céline. How nice to hear from you,” she said rather warily. She still had a smoker’s voice, even though she’d given up the habit years ago. I’d seen her at Dad’s funeral, where conversation had been muted. Now, I told her about what was going on with the house and how Dad had given all the control to Danny. I wasn’t sure where Aunt Matilda’s allegiances lay. After all, Dad was her brother.

  But she sighed and said, “No surprise there. My father did the same thing to my mom and me.”

  “Aunt Matilda, were you and Mom planning to go to France this month?” I asked.

  She hesitated for a moment, then she said, “Yes. But she didn’t tell your father, and she didn’t want the twins to know, either. So there’s no point in blabbing about it now.”

  “Look,” I said, “can I come talk to you, right away?” I waited for excuses. But she surprised me.

  “Sure, come on over,” she said. I hurried out, locking the house behind me. When I heard the latch close it seemed to whisper, Farewell.

  —

  AUNT MATILDA LIVED in an adorable little house on a hill in Connecticut, set apart from her neighbors, on a good-sized corner property where the land rose in ridges around it and formed a natural barricade from stray dogs and curious kids.

  “A spinster’s nest,” my father always called it. But I always thought it resembled an enchanted cottage from a fairy tale or a movie, an iconic hermit’s paradise. As far as I knew, Aunt Matilda had lived here all of her adult life, quietly keeping her own counsel.

  She didn’t even have a doorbell; just an old-fashioned brass knocker. The front yard had a profusion of forsythia already in bloom, and the lawn was dotted here and there with white and purple crocuses. She opened her door still wearing a gardening hat and gloves. She removed them and led me to the back of her house, put a kettle on, and served little tea sandwiches. They were a bit stale, their bread curling up on the ends; and the cucumber, cream cheese and salmon tasted of refrigerator.

  “I bought these today,” she said ruefully. “I can’t cook. That’s why I signed up for this class in France. I’m getting tired of eating overpriced stale take-away that somebody else cooked without love.”

  I gazed at her fondly. Aunt Matilda was tall and thin, with translucent pale, freckled skin, a small button nose, and Irish blue eyes. Because she’d been gardening she was wearing a pair of old wool slacks, but they’d been of good quality and had worn out with dignity. Her men’s-style shirt was striped yellow and white, tucked beneath a yellow cardigan.

  “How is Julie doing?” she asked quietly. I told her what condition Mom was in, and Aunt Matilda was sympathetic; they were both in their mid-seventies. I also told her I didn’t share the twins’ eagerness to mothball Mom. Even before I’d finished, Aunt Matilda was nodding vigorously.

  “You know,” she said thoughtfully, “from what Julie’s told me over the years, I think those twins knew how to manipulate her with guilt. They craved constant proof that she loved them as much as she loved you. But maybe, you were the apple of her eye anyway? And money, you know, doesn’t ever really compensate for love.” She paused, then added with a gleam in her eyes, “But it helps.”

  The kettle whistled. She made tea in a fine English china pot painted with purple flowers and gold trim, served in matching teacups and saucers. We ate at a small table tucked into a kitchen alcove, looking out big windows to her garden where birds flitted around little houses and feeders she’d arranged for them.

  “But why was Dad so angry all the time?” I said in a voice that sounded plaintive even to me.

  She shook her head an
d said, “Never understood that myself; except that some people who bluster a lot are actually kinda fearful inside. To him, every encounter with another human being was a pitched battle—and believe me when I say that he lived in utter dread of ever losing a fight, as if he’d get completely annihilated if he lost even one.”

  “Was it true that Dad once considered becoming a priest?” I asked, mulling this all over.

  “Nah,” Aunt Matilda said. “Oh, he talked about it, but I knew he never would. You see, then he’d have to play second fiddle to God.” She smiled. “So, my pretty. What brings you here, really?”

  “Whose idea was it to go to this cooking class?” I said in response.

  “Your mother’s,” Aunt Matilda said without hesitating. “She read about it in a magazine, and I think she felt safe travelling with me on a pre-arranged trip. Julie had been saving up her own ‘pin money’ for years to be able to do this without having to ask your father to pay for it.”

  As I absorbed this information, I glanced at a little room beside the kitchen which functioned as a small personal library, its walls lined with built-in bookshelves, and many art books stacked on tables, no doubt from her days of teaching art to high school kids.

  “Aunt Matilda,” I said carefully, “do you have any information on Picasso?”

  “Picasso?” she said, her tone as casual as mine. “Anything in particular you want to know?”

  Yes, I want to know if my mother is just dreaming, or if Grandmother Ondine really cooked for him! I thought. But all I said aloud was, “I’d like to know what he was doing in the spring of 1936.” That was the period of time I’d seen for the recipes in Grandma’s notebook.

  Aunt Matilda raised her eyebrows and said, “Well, that’s specific, all right.” She rose and went into her little library, returning with a big book. She set it down and flipped to the back. “The only biographies worth reading are the ones with good indexes. That’s how you separate the men from the boys.” She hummed as she turned the pages. “Do you want to know about his personal life or his art?”

  “Both,” I said, then added, “start with the personal.”

  “Okay. I’d say the 1930s were a big transitional period for Picasso,” she explained, now happily going into her teacher mode. “He had this mistress, Marie-Thérèse, who’d been just a teenager, really, when he picked her up outside the Galeries Lafayette department store in Paris in 1927 and they began their secret trysts. But like a big daddy, he’d also buy her toys and take her to the circus and the amusement park! You see, if you’re a genius, they don’t call you a pervert,” she commented slyly. “Then, in the mid-1930s, she gets pregnant. So, his Russian wife ended their marriage, and Picasso stopped painting, possibly because of the turmoil in his personal life. Here it is,” she said triumphantly.

  “What?” I said eagerly.

  “April 1936. Apparently, in great secrecy, he went off to a town on the Côte d’Azur, called Juan-les-Pins.” I got goosebumps, recognizing the name of the town where Grandmother Ondine lived.

  “It was a very mysterious time for Picasso,” Aunt Matilda continued, scanning the pages. “Nobody really knows what happened to him that spring—some say he was just hanging out with Marie-Thérèse and their baby. But whatever he was doing down there, suddenly, he begins painting again. And within a year, he’d create his greatest masterpiece about the Spanish Civil War—Guernica.”

  She spun the book around so I could see a photograph of Picasso in his Paris atelier during this period. “Not exactly Cary Grant,” Aunt Matilda commented. “Short, with a nose like a fighter. And those scary eyes. But he had charisma, you know?”

  “How old is he in that photo, do you suppose?” I asked.

  “He was born in October of 1881,” Aunt Matilda replied. I did some fast mental arithmetic.

  “He’d have been fifty-four years old in 1936,” I observed.

  “And why, pray tell, is that period so important to you?” Aunt Matilda asked, pouring more tea for us both. Her gestures were casual, but her eyes were alert and birdlike.

  I wasn’t sure I was ready to answer that question, since Mom evidently had chosen not to tell Aunt Matilda about Grandma Ondine and Picasso. So I mumbled, “Well, I studied art before I went into theatre and makeup. I love the 1930s.”

  “You know,” Aunt Matilda said, “it’s the strangest thing. But just after Christmas, your mother came by here to have tea with me. And guess what? She asked me the same questions you asked—about Picasso. When I asked her why, she said, ‘It’s just something I wanted to know—for Céline.’ ”

  For a moment we sat there so quietly that I could hear Aunt Matilda’s old-fashioned wristwatch ticking on her arm. It dawned on me that Mom had wanted an art expert with her on this trip.

  “Are you still planning to go?” I asked. She rose again, went to a kitchen drawer, and brought a matching packet for her tickets and itinerary, laying it on the table before me.

  “Sure,” she said cheerfully. “It’s paid up. I go to Europe every spring. Gotta see all the art and hear all the music before I get too old to walk around. Not to mention the casinos. They sure beat the lottery and the church bingo around here.” I remembered that Aunt Matilda always enjoyed playing cards with us kids whenever she came to visit. She had, I recalled, the soul of a gambler.

  I reached into my purse and pulled out Mom’s matching packet for the trip. “I stole it,” I confessed. “I didn’t want Danny and Deirdre to get their hands on it.”

  There was another brief silence. “It would take a little doing, I suppose,” Aunt Matilda observed with a gleam of mischief in her eyes. “But I bet we could re-arrange it so you could take your mother’s place. You can look around the Riviera. See what you see.”

  I found myself winking away tears in my eyes. “I think I’d like to do that,” I said.

  Because even before Aunt Matilda suggested it, the same idea had been quietly building up inside me. My mother must have summoned a lot of courage to even think of going on a trip without Dad. Perhaps all she’d wanted was to immerse herself back in the culture she’d left behind. Maybe. But on the other hand, it seemed to me that her mission must have had a bit more to it than that.

  What if she was going back to visit Grandmother Ondine’s world in order to take one last look around the café—just in case the painting that Picasso gave Grandma still lurked somewhere in a hiding place that nobody had discovered yet? It was a wild long shot, of course. But if Mom had planned to do this, then maybe she knew something that made her believe there was a distinct possibility she’d find it.

  So now I pictured myself flying to France in her place to recover my grandmother’s lost painting. I could even imagine auctioning it off for the enormous sums of money a Picasso can claim, enabling me to rush back home with wads of cash to wave under my lawyer’s nose. Now let’s go into court and kick ass, I’d say. And I’d get my mother out of that damned nursing home in Nevada.

  It was a crazy dream, but I didn’t care. These days, the things that people called sane were, I thought, often dumber than what I had in mind. “Yes,” I said, more definitely now. “I’d like to go.”

  “Well,” Aunt Matilda said briskly, “then you’d better start calling me Tilda. There are going to be some single gentlemen my age in this class, and I don’t want you running about there calling me Auntie. You got that?”

  “Got it,” I said. We actually shook hands on the deal.

  And within a week, the two of us set out to explore Grandmother Ondine’s world.

  Woman with a Watch, Ondine in 1936

  THE SUN WAS GROWING HOT and strong, its golden gaze making the earth’s breast soft and pliable. Ondine, wearing lighter clothes now, and with her legs becoming stronger from her daily cycling, felt like an Amazon as she practically flew up the hill to cook, and pose, for Picasso.

  She’d gotten her mother’s permission to leave the café earlier in the morning, ostensibly to give her plenty of time to pre
p and cook in Picasso’s kitchen. Ondine had become quite efficient and thus managed to arrive at his house early enough so they could work for hours before she served his lunch.

  She noticed right away that he treated her completely differently, now that she was his model and the focal point of his work, which was clearly sacred to him. Whereas earlier he’d hardly noticed her arrival, now as she pedaled into his driveway she found Picasso waiting for her like an impatient lover, standing there in the doorway, smoking and staring out for the first glimpse he could catch of her.

  On good days he would give her a broad smile and a courteous nod; at other times he would turn wordlessly inside and go upstairs to his studio as if he were engulfed in a brooding dark cloud that felt dangerous. She found herself anxiously searching for a clue as to which mood he was in.

  “Bonjour, Patron,” Ondine said breathlessly today as he held the door open for her so that she could carry her supplies and stow them in his kitchen. He was bare-chested, wearing only black pants, and sandals with thick leather straps. He was amused by her conspiratorial attitude.

  “Sneaked off early again, eh?” he commented, throwing down his cigarette on the stone steps and stubbing it out with his foot. She quickly made a pot of a Provençal herbal tea that he liked, and he carried his first cup upstairs. Pretending to be motivated by courtly chivalry, he always made her go up the steps first, but Ondine suspected that he enjoyed watching her from behind.

  Sometimes while he drank his tea he liked to tell her stories about his youth—how, when he was a sixteen-year-old art student in Madrid, he’d nearly died of fever, but recovered and grew stronger by hiking into the mountains and forests of Spain with a friend, making rice and beans at campfires, sleeping in caves or shepherds’ huts, or just lying on the earth’s bed of scented grass and herbs. At nineteen, he was already struggling to survive in Paris, cooking his own omelettes whenever he could buy eggs, and wedging his paintings in the cracks of the walls to stave off winter’s drafts. But he was always jubilantly inspired by everything he saw on Paris’s streets—from exhibits of ancient African art to the windmills of Montmartre; and the masons who sang as they sawed great sharp-angled blocks of white stone that rose up like a real-life Cubist landscape. Here, among poets and prostitutes and other budding artists, Picasso made his name and found lifelong friends like Matisse.