by John Irving
It was December in the city. The festive lights, the decorations, the shoppers were all around. As he stood waiting for the crossing light on Yonge Street to change, it was a mild shock to Dominic to suddenly remember that Ketchum was coming to Toronto for Christmas; while this wasn't a recent phenomenon, the cook couldn't get used to the unnaturalness of the old logger being in the city. It had been fourteen years since the writer Danny Angel and his dad had spent their Christmases in Colorado with Joe. (Ketchum had not made those trips. It was too long a drive from New Hampshire to Colorado, and Ketchum steadfastly refused to fly.)
In those winters when Joe went to the university in Boulder, Daniel had rented a ski house in Winter Park. The road out of Grand Lake, through Rocky Mountain National Park, was closed in the wintertime, so it took about two hours to drive from Boulder--you had to take I-70, and U.S. 40 over Berthoud Pass--but Joe loved the skiing in Winter Park, and his dad had spoiled him. (Or so the cook reflected, as he waited for the long light on Yonge Street to change.)
Those Christmases in Colorado were beautiful, but the house in Winter Park had been too much of a temptation for Joe--especially during the remainder of the ski season, when the young college student's father and grandfather were back in Toronto. Naturally, the boy was going to cut some classes--if not every time there was fresh snow in the ski area. The nearby skiing alone would have tempted any college kid in Boulder, but having a house in Winter Park at his disposal--it was within walking distance of the ski lifts--was almost certainly Joe's undoing. (Oh, Daniel, what were you thinking? Dominic Baciagalupo thought.)
At last, the light changed and the cook limped across Yonge Street, mindful of those harebrained city drivers who were desperate to find a parking place at the Summerhill liquor store or The Beer Store. What had his writer son once called the neighborhood? the cook tried to remember. Oh, yes, Dominic recalled. "Shopping for hedonists," Daniel had said.
There were some fancy markets there; it was true--excellent produce, fresh fish, great sausages and meats, but ridiculously expensive, in the cook's opinion--and now, in the holiday season, it seemed to Dominic that every bad driver in town was buying booze! (He did not fault his beloved Daniel for drinking again; the cook understood his son's reasons.)
The icy wind whipped the long way up Yonge Street from Lake Ontario as Dominic fumbled with his gloves and the key to the restaurant's locked door. The waitstaff and most of the kitchen crew entered the kitchen from Crown's Lane--the alleyway parallel to Yonge Street, behind the restaurant--but the cook had his own key. Turning his back to the wind, he struggled to let himself in the front door.
The winters had been colder in Coos County--and in Windham County, Vermont, too--but the damp, penetrating cold of the wind off the lake reminded Dominic Baciagalupo of how cold he'd been in the North End of Boston. Though he'd had Carmella to keep him warm, the cook was remembering. He missed her--her alone, only Carmella--but Dominic strangely didn't miss having a woman in his life. Not anymore, not at his age.
Why was it that he didn't miss Rosie? the cook caught himself thinking. "Nowadays, Cookie," Ketchum had said, "I sometimes find myself not missing her. Can you imagine that?" Yes, he could, Dominic had to admit. Or was it the tension among the three of them--or Jane's harsh judgment, or keeping Daniel in the dark--that Ketchum and the cook didn't miss?
--
INSIDE THE RESTAURANT, Dominic was greeted by the smell of what Silvestro, the young chef, called "the mother sauces." The veal jus--the mother of all mother sauces--had been started during the dinner service last night. It underwent both a first and a second boil before a final reduction. Silvestro's other mother sauces were a tomato sauce and a bechamel. The cook, as he hung up his coat and scarf--and halfheartedly attempted to rearrange what Joe's favorite ski hat had done to his hair--could somehow smell all the mother sauces at once.
"The old pro," they called him in the kitchen, although Dominic was content with the role of sous chef to the masterful Silvestro, who was the saucier and did all the meats. Kristine and Joyce did the soups and the fish--they were the first women chefs the cook had worked with--and Scott was the bread and dessert guy. Dominic, who was semiretired, was the odd-job man in the kitchen; he did start-up and finish-up jobs from each station, which included spelling Silvestro with the sauces and the meats. "Jack of all trades," they called the cook in the kitchen, too. He was older than any of them, by far--not just Silvestro, their hotshot young chef, whom Dominic adored. Silvestro was like a second son to him, the cook thought--not that he ever would have said so to his beloved Daniel.
Dominic had also been careful not to mention the filial nature of his feelings for young Silvestro to Ketchum--partly because the woodsman was now a veteran and bullying faxer. Ketchum's faxes to the cook and his son were ceaseless and indiscriminate. (You could sometimes read a page or more without knowing who the fax was for!) And Ketchum's faxes arrived at all hours of the day and night; for the sake of a good night's sleep, Danny and his dad had been forced to keep the fax machine in the kitchen of their house on Cluny Drive.
More to the point, Ketchum had issues regarding Silvestro; the young chef's name was too Italian for the old logger's liking. It wouldn't be good if Ketchum knew that his pal Cookie thought of Silvestro as "a second son"--no, Dominic didn't want to receive a slew of faxes from Ketchum complaining about that, too. Ketchum's usual complaints were more than enough.
I THOUGHT THIS WAS A FRENCH PLACE--WHERE YOU WERE WORKING IN YOUR SEMIRETIRED FASHION, COOKIE. YOU WOULDN'T BE THINKING OF CHANGING THE RESTAURANT'S NAME, WOULD YOU? NOT TO ANYTHING ITALIAN, I PRESUME! THAT NEW FELLA, THE YOUNG CHEF YOU SPEAK OF--SILVESTRO? IS THAT HIS NAME? WELL, HE DOESN'T SOUND VERY FRENCH TO ME! THE RESTAURANT IS STILL CALLED PATRICE, RIGHT?
Yes and no, the cook was thinking; there was a reason he hadn't answered Ketchum's most recent fax.
THE OWNER AND maitre d' of the restaurant, Patrice Arnaud, was Daniel's age--fifty-eight. Arnaud had been born in Lyon but grew up in Marseilles--at sixteen, he went to hotel school in Nice. In the kitchen at Patrice, there was an old sepia-toned photograph of Arnaud as a teenager in chef's whites, but Arnaud's future would lie in management; he had impressed the guests in the dining room of a beach club in Bermuda, where he'd met the proprietor of Toronto's venerable Wembley Hotel.
When the cook had first come to Toronto, in '83, Patrice Arnaud was managing Maxim's--a favorite cafe rendezvous in the Bay and Bloor area of the city. At the time, Maxim's was the third transformation of a cafe-restaurant in the tired old Wembley. To Dominic Baciagalupo, who was still quaking from Ketchum's dire warning that he totally detach himself from the world of Italian restaurants, Patrice Arnaud and Maxim's were clearly first-rate--better yet, they were not Italian. In fact, Patrice had enticed his brother, Marcel, to leave Marseilles and become the chef at Maxim's, which was very French.
"Ah, but the ship is sinking, Dominic," Patrice had warned the cook; he meant that Toronto was rapidly changing. The restaurant-goers of the future would want to venture beyond the staid hotel restaurants. (After Arnaud and his brother left Maxim's, the old Wembley Hotel became a parking garage.)
For the next decade, the cook worked with the Arnaud brothers at their own restaurant on Queen Street West--a neighborhood in transition, and somewhat seedy for much of that time, but the restaurant, which Patrice named Bastringue, prospered. They were doing fifty covers at lunch and dinner; Marcel was the master chef then, and Dominic loved learning from him. There was foie gras, there were fresh Fine de Claire oysters from France. (Once again, the cook failed to teach himself desserts; he never mastered Marcel's tarte tatin with Calvados sabayon.)
Bastringue--Parisian argot for a popular dance hall and bar that served food and wine--would even weather the 1990 recession. They put waxed paper over the linen tablecloths and turned the restaurant into a bistro--steak frites, steamed mussels with white wine and leeks--but their lease ran out in '95, after Queen Street West had gone from seedy to
hip to dull mainstream in the space of a decade. (Bastringue became a shoe store; Marcel went back to France.)
The cook and Patrice Arnaud stuck together; they went to work at Avalon for a year, but Arnaud told Dominic that they were "just biding time." Patrice wanted another place of his own, and in '97 he bought what had been a failed restaurant on Yonge Street at Summerhill. As for Silvestro, he originally came from Italy, but he was a Calabrese who'd worked in London and Milan; travel was important to Arnaud. ("It means you can learn new things," Patrice told Dominic, when he decided on young Silvestro as his next master chef.)
As for the new restaurant's name, Patrice--well, what else would Arnaud have called it? "You earned it," Dominic told Patrice. "Don't be embarrassed by your own name."
For the first few years, Patrice--the name and, to a lesser extent, the restaurant--had worked. Arnaud and the cook taught Silvestro some of Marcel's standbys: the lobster with mustard sabayon, the fish soup from Brittany, the duck foie-gras terrine with a spoonful of port jelly, the halibut en papillote, the cote de boeuf for two, the grilled calf's liver with lardons and pearl onions and a balsamic demi-glace. Naturally, Silvestro added his own dishes to the menu--ravioli with snails and garlic-herb butter, veal scallopini with a lemon sauce, house-made tagliatelle with duck confit and porcini mushrooms, rabbit with polenta gnocchi. (Dominic made a few familiar contributions to the menu, too.) The restaurant at 1158 Yonge Street was new, but it wasn't entirely French--nor was it as big a hit in the neighborhood as Arnaud had hoped.
"It's not just the name, but the name sucks, too," Patrice told Dominic and Silvestro. "I have totally misread Rosedale--this neighborhood doesn't need an expensive French restaurant. We need to be easygoing, and cheaper! We want our clientele to come two or three times a week, not every couple of months."
Over the Christmas break, Patrice was normally closed--this year from December 24 until January 2, enough time for the renovations Arnaud had planned. The banquettes would be brightened, completely recovered; the lemon-yellow walls were to be freshly spackled. Posters from the old French Line would be hung. "Le Havre, Southampton, New York--Compagnie Generale transatlantique!" Patrice had announced, and he'd found a couple of Toulouse-Lautrec posters of the Moulin Rouge dancer La Goulue and singer Jane Avril. Fish and chips were going to be added to the menu, and steak tartare with frites; the prices for both food and wine would drop 25 percent. It would be back to bistro, again--like those fabulous recession days at Bastringue--though Patrice wouldn't use the bistro word anymore. ("Bistro is so overused--it has become meaningless!" Arnaud declared.)
Reinvention was the essential game with restaurants, Arnaud knew.
"But what about the name?" Silvestro had asked his boss. The Calabrese had his own candidate, Dominic knew.
"I think Patrice is too French," Patrice had answered. "It's too old-school, too old-money. It has to go." Arnaud was smart and suave; his style was casual but debonair. Dominic loved and admired the man, but the cook had been dreading this part of the changeover--all to accommodate the preening Rosedale snobs.
"You guys know what I think," Silvestro said, with an insincere, insouciant shrug; he was handsome and confident, the way you would want your son to be.
The young chef had been struck by the effect of the frosted glass on the lower half of the restaurant's large front window, facing Yonge Street. Passersby on the street could not see through the clouded glass; the customers, seated at their tables, were not in view from the sidewalk. But the top half of the big pane of glass was clear; diners could see the red maple leaf on the Canadian flag above the Summerhill liquor store, across Yonge Street, and (eventually) those two high-rise condominiums under construction in what would be called Scrivener Square. The lower, frosted portion of the windowpane had the effect of a curtain--such was Silvestro's convoluted reasoning for the restaurant's new name.
"La Tenda," Silvestro said, with feeling. "'The Curtain.'"
"It sounds ominous to me," Dominic had told the young chef. "I wouldn't want to eat in a place with that name."
"I think, Silvestro, you should save this name for the very first restaurant you own--when you become an owner-chef, which you certainly will!" Arnaud said.
"La Tenda," Silvestro repeated, fondly, his warm brown eyes watering with tears.
"It's too Italian," Dominic Baciagalupo told the emotional young man. "This restaurant may not be strictly French, but it's not Italian, either." If the former Patrice were given an Italian name, what would Ketchum say? the cook was thinking, while at the same time he saw the absurdity of his argument--he whose Sicilian meat loaf and penne alla puttanesca would, after the Christmas holiday, be added to the more low-key menu.
The baffled Patrice and the shocked Silvestro stared at the cook in disbelief. They were all at a standstill. Dominic thought: I should ask Daniel to come up with a name--he's the writer! That was when Silvestro broke the silence. "What about your name, Dominic?" the young chef said.
"Not Baciagalupo!" the cook cried, alarmed. (If the cowboy didn't kill him, Dominic knew that Ketchum would!)
"Talk about too Italian!" Arnaud said affectionately.
"I mean what your name means, Dominic," Silvestro said. Patrice Arnaud hadn't guessed Baciagalupo's meaning, though the words were similar in French. "'Kiss of the Wolf,'" Silvestro said slowly--the emphasis equally placed on both the Kiss and the Wolf.
Arnaud shuddered. He was a short, strongly built man with closely cropped gray hair and a sophisticated smile--he wore dark trousers, sharply pressed, and always an elegant but open-necked shirt. He was a man who made ceremony seem natural; at once polite and philosophical, Patrice was a restaurateur who understood what was worthwhile about the old-fashioned while knowing instantly when change was good.
"Ah, well--Kiss of the Wolf!--why didn't you tell me, Dominic?" Arnaud impishly asked his loyal friend. "Now there's a name that is seductive and modern, but it also has an edge!"
Oh, Kiss of the Wolf had an edge, all right, the cook was thinking--though that wouldn't be the most salient response Ketchum might make to the restaurant's new name. Dominic didn't want to imagine what the old logger would say when he heard about it. "Mountains of moose shit!" Ketchum might declare, or something worse.
Wasn't it risky enough that the cook had taken back his real name? In an Internet world, what danger did it present that there was a Dominic Baciagalupo back in action? (At least Ketchum was somewhat relieved to learn that, at the height of her phonetic sensibilities, Nunzi had misspelled the Baciacalupo word!)
But, realistically thinking, how would it be possible for a retired deputy sheriff in Coos County, New Hampshire, to discover that a restaurant called Kiss of the Wolf in Toronto, Ontario, was the English translation of the phonetically made-up name of Baciagalupo? And don't forget, the cook reassured himself--the cowboy is as old as Ketchum, who's eighty-three!
If I'm not safe now, I never will be, Dominic was thinking as he came into the narrow, bustling kitchen of Patrice--soon to be renamed Kiss of the Wolf. Well, it's a world of accidents, isn't it? In such a world, more than the names would keep changing.
DANNY ANGEL WISHED with all his heart that he had never given up the name Daniel Baciagalupo, not because he wanted to be the more innocent boy and young man he'd once been--or even because Daniel Baciagalupo was his one true name, the only one his parents had given him--but because the fifty-eight-year-old novelist believed it was a better name for a writer. And the closer the novelist came to sixty, the less he felt like a Danny or an Angel; that his father had all along insisted on the Daniel name made more and more sense to the son. (Not that it was always easy for a stay-at-home, work-at-home writer, who was almost sixty, to share a house with his seventy-six-year-old dad. They could be a contentious couple.)
Given the disputed presidential election in the United States--"the Florida fiasco," as Ketchum called George W. Bush's "theft" of the presidency from Al Gore, the result of a 5-4 Supreme Court vote along pa
rtisan lines--the faxes from Ketchum were often incendiary. Gore had won the popular vote. The Republicans stole the election, both Danny and his dad believed, but the cook and his son didn't necessarily share Ketchum's more extreme beliefs--namely, that they were "better off being Canadians," and that America, which Ketchum obdurately called an "asshole country," deserved its fate.
WHERE ARE THE ASSASSINS WHEN YOU WANT ONE?
Ketchum had faxed. He didn't mean George W. Bush; Ketchum meant that someone should have killed Ralph Nader. (Gore would have beaten Bush in Florida if Nader hadn't played the spoiler role.) Ketchum believed that Ralph Nader should be bound and gagged--"preferably, in a child's defective car seat"--and sunk in the Androscoggin.
During the second Bush-Gore presidential debate, Bush criticized President Clinton's use of U.S. troops in Somalia and the Balkans. "I don't think our troops ought to be used for what's called nation-building," the future president said.
YOU WANT TO WAIT AND SEE HOW THAT LYING LITTLE FUCKER WILL FIND A WAY TO USE OUR TROOPS? YOU WANT TO BET THAT "NATION-BUILDING" WON'T BE PART OF IT?
Ketchum had faxed.
But Danny didn't relish America's impending disgrace--not from the Canadian perspective, particularly. He and his dad had never wanted to leave their country. To the extent it was possible for an internationally bestselling author to not make a big deal of changing his citizenship, Danny Angel had tried to play down his politics, though this had been harder to do after East of Bangor was published in '84; his abortion novel was certainly political.
The process of Danny and his dad being admitted to Canada as new citizens was a slow one. Danny had applied as self-employed; the immigration lawyer representing him had categorized the writer as "someone who participates at a world-class level in cultural activities." Danny made enough money to support himself and his father. They'd both passed the medical exam. While they were living in Toronto on visitors' visas, it had been necessary for them to cross the border every six months to have their visas validated; also, they'd had to apply for Canadian citizenship at a Canadian consulate in the United States. (Buffalo was the closest American city to Toronto.)