Bang, crunch, bang, clunk. My father was home.
Open the door and bang it into the table in the hall, crunch the doormat somehow (nobody else in the family ever did this) with the bottom edge of the door while closing it, bang the door shut, drop the briefcase with a clunk: a theme with no variations.
“Yum,” said my father, taking an olive as he passed by me on his way down the hall to the kitchen.
I hesitated at the living room threshold. Suppose Frederika and Vishwa were already hugging? I poked my head in to see.
They were not hugging. Vishwa was sitting upright on the sofa (I was relieved to see that he’d put his shoes on again) and Frederika was sitting in the chair my father called the Cat Chair because it had a hole in the back “for the cat’s tail.” Pinch never sat in it. It didn’t have the squishy, forbidden allure of the sofa. Frederika was perched askew, turned toward Vishwa, her legs crossed high and zigzagged with the red rickrack.
“Olives?” I asked in my best hostess manner.
They were not interested in olives. I put the tray on the coffee table and went back to the kitchen.
My father was leaning against the refrigerator drinking his Scotch and telling about his day. My mother was all over the kitchen, decanting things onto platters and into bowls, beating lemon juice with olive oil, while either listening or pretending to listen to my father.
“And so I invited him for dessert,” my father concluded.
“Okay,” said my mother. “Fine.” She banged the oven door shut to show that it was not fine.
“At around eight,” he said.
My mother nodded. She coaxed the cake onto a cooling rack, pushed my father out of her way with her shoulder, and stuck her head into the refrigerator. “Damn,” she said. “No cream.”
“Shall I go get some?” My father looked forlorn and guilty.
“Too late now,” my mother said.
“I could call Jagdeesh and ask him to bring some.”
My mother cocked her head. “That’s a good idea. Tell him to whip it while he’s at it.”
“Really, Annette,” my father said. “It’s not any more work for you, if he comes. Dinner’s made, after all.”
My mother looked at my father, then at me, and said, “Never mind. Just never mind. Let’s relax and have fun.”
I didn’t think that was likely. My mother had got into a huff of some sort, which meant she would pretend to be cheerful and pleasant to everyone except my father, to whom she would speak—if she spoke—with an icy formality. This drove him around the bend. He’d apologize and apologize, but she could stay frozen far longer than he could stay apologetic, so he’d end up angry. That only prolonged her huff. First he’d mistreated her, now he was mad at her too. They could get stuck like this for days.
I backed out into the hall and stood there for a minute. I didn’t want to be in the kitchen, but I didn’t want to go into the living room either. Grownup mysteries surrounded me. I tiptoed to the front door and opened it. There was Pinch, waiting for someone to let her in. I wanted to pick her up and put my face into her speckly back and smell her fresh, outside fur, but she dashed between my feet and scooted upstairs before I could grab her. Nobody loved me.
I stood looking at the street, wondering what to do. I could go to my room and sulk. I could walk up the hill to the Bigelows’ and have goulash with them. I could get on my bike and ride to—where? England? Gray Gardens East, where I could do some al fresco sulking? It was getting dark and had become chilly, for a spring night. They’d be sorry when I froze to death two blocks away, a pathetic little creature with only my bicycle for a friend.
“Hey,” my mother said, startling me. “Shut the door. The cat will get out.”
“She just came in,” I said.
“Dinner’s ready.” She went into the living room. “Come, come,” she said in her icily cheerful, completely phony voice.
My father’s technique for getting to know someone was to conduct an intensive interview. Birthplace, secondary education, undergraduate major, mentors in graduate school, first job: grill, grill, grill. The answers established qualifications, the manner of response established character. Vishwa was an uncooperative subject.
“You are how many years younger than Jagdeesh?”
“Many,” Vishwa said.
“How many?”
“Twelve.”
“And you were brought up in Calcutta?”
“No, no, no,” said Vishwa.
My father waited.
“A child died in between,” said Vishwa. “Most tragic.”
My father wasn’t asking about family tragedy. “You were brought up—where?” he said, his tone suggesting that Vishwa had said where, but that my father hadn’t quite heard him.
“In the country.” Vishwa waved his hand at the hinterlands of India.
My mother pushed the tureen of coq au vin toward Frederika and motioned her to pass it to Vishwa.
“I still have plenty, thank you,” he said.
“More sauce, maybe,” my mother said.
“Where in the country? You went to a country school?” my father asked.
“Well, yes, in a manner of speaking.”
“And why did your father decide to send you to a country school?”
“It might have been your mother who decided,” my mother said to Vishwa. “Right?”
“Shantiniketan,” Vishwa said.
“Excuse me,” my father said.
“It was Tagore’s school,” said Vishwa. “That’s where I went.”
“Socialist,” said my father. “World peace, wasn’t it?”
“Mmm,” said Vishwa.
“Jagdeesh went there too?” My father seemed put out by the idea that Jagdeesh had gone there without letting him know.
“Only a little while. It didn’t suit him.”
“But it suited you.” This was a statement. Vishwa did not contradict it.
“What a marvelous dinner,” he said to my mother. “Delicious.” He turned toward Frederika, who, like the rest of us, had said barely a word since we’d sat down. “And did you also go to a country school when you were a small girl?”
“No, I was always raised in Stockholm,” she said.
My father was refueling, and the ensuing dinner-silence—knives and forks clicking on plates—gave me a moment to consider the wonderful things Frederika said. “I was always raised in Stockholm” was not hard to understand, but it was not anything an English-speaking person would say either.
My father pushed the chicken bones to one side and got going again. “So, you followed Jagdeesh to Cambridge?”
“It did help that someone was established here already,” said Vishwa. “A beachhead,” he added.
“I meant England,” said my father. He was getting addled. “I meant, did you go to Cambridge like Jagdeesh?”
“Oh, no,” said Vishwa.
If my parents had not been having a fight, my mother would have stopped this inquisition by now. Carl, she would have said, Enough already. Because she wasn’t speaking to him, all she could do was try to get the rest of us to talk to one another. But my father was as persistent as a mosquito.
“So where did you go to university?” he asked.
“I didn’t, exactly,” said Vishwa.
My mother got up from the table in protest. “Vishwa,” she said, heading to the kitchen, “wouldn’t you like some more rice?”
“Yes, I would,” said Vishwa.
“What exactly did you do, then?” asked my father.
“I was in Paris,” Vishwa said, rather dreamily. “In Paris.”
My mother could no longer restrain herself. “At the Conservatory,” she said. She put a nice big spoonful of rice on Vishwa’s plate.
The Paris Conservatory was out of my father’s range of knowledge. “Aha,” he said. He didn’t look happy.
“I am envious of you,” Frederika piped up. “I always want to go to Paris, but not yet.”
; Vishwa widened his eyes. “I go twice a year,” he said. “We could meet.”
Frederika ducked her head. My mother smiled, a real smile.
“Why?” my father asked. “Why do you go so often?”
“To visit my teacher. He’s very old now, and he’s failing. He was my father in the West, so it’s important that I visit him. His wife died two years ago. Very sad. Tragic.” Vishwa bowed his head at the sadness of life, the tragedies. This was the second tragedy in half an hour.
“Of course,” he went on, “there isn’t much I can do. I sit with him, and we talk about the good times. We drink some nice wine. I go to concerts and tell him about it.”
“Oh, Paris,” my mother said. Then she said, “That’s so good of you.”
“He was a father,” Vishwa said. “Now, only a few years later, more of a grandfather.”
“But that’s expensive,” my father pointed out. What he meant was, How can you afford to go to Paris on your income, which is how much, exactly?
“Hah, hah,” said Vishwa.
I didn’t understand why he was laughing. Maybe he flew to Paris by flapping his arms, or maybe he’d harnessed sleep-flying so he could do it when he was awake.
“I hop on the freighter,” he said. “I take my scores. I take books. There’s good food—especially on the Swedish freighter.” He nodded at Frederika. “Nice fresh fish.”
My father scowled. “Where do you get this freighter?”
“Sometimes in New Bedford. Sometimes in Gloucester. Once I had to go to New Jersey.”
My mother liked the idea of the freighter. “How did you find out about it?” she asked.
“In The New York Times,” Vishwa said. “The New York Times is a marvelous newspaper. Every day it lists what ships are arriving all over the East Coast, and where they are going. Then you go to the dock and ask, May I travel with you? Usually they say yes.”
“For free?” My father was astounded.
“How did you get the idea to do that in the first place?” my mother asked.
“You pay a little,” Vishwa told my father. “Maybe about twenty-five dollars. Or you can work. You can be a waiter for dinner. Once I was a deck cleaner. Waiter is better.”
“But how—” my mother repeated.
“It’s the subcontinental pipeline,” said Vishwa. “We have special information. We need a lot of special information because everything is far away and difficult.”
“You’re saying you can take a freighter from America to India for next to nothing,” my father said.
“You have to have a few months to spare for that trip,” Vishwa said. “To Europe, maybe ten days. Maybe less. Depends if they have to make a stop here first. Like New Jersey.” Vishwa pursed his lips. “I did not like New Jersey.”
“It smells horrible there,” I said. I was happy to have something to contribute. “The smelly refineries. When we drive past them, I get sick.”
My mother shook her head at me. Not at dinner.
“Like eggs,” Vishwa agreed. “Bad ones.”
“What are they refining?” Frederika asked.
“Eggs!” Vishwa started laughing.
“Petroleum,” my father said.
“And they shoot fire and they look scary,” I went on.
“ ‘Dark Satanic mills,’ ” my father said to me. He turned back to Vishwa. “So you weren’t educated in England at all?”
“I went to Oxford for a little while,” Vishwa admitted. “Have you seen those calling cards—usually it’s Indians who have them—M.A. OXON., FAILED.”
“You didn’t finish your degree?”
“I was accepted at the Conservatory, and that was the important thing. I went there.”
My mother caught my eye. “Salad,” she said.
I got up and began to clear the plates. Vishwa hopped out of his seat too. “Let me help,” he said.
My father’s large hand descended on Vishwa’s arm as it connected to a plate. “No,” my father instructed. Vishwa dropped back into his chair.
Clear from the left, serve from the right. Do not stack dishes at the table. There were a lot of table rules, the most important being No bottles on the table. If there was mustard, the mustard had to be put in a small bowl with a spoon of its own. No bottle of milk, no jar of sour cream, no impregnable red tower of ketchup. Turn the blade of the knife in when you set the places. Do not scrape food from one plate to another (this was a subheading of Do not stack dishes at the table). Napkin rings are déclassé. A cooking vessel must not appear on the table; this rule ensured that every night my mother had to hand-wash either the serving platters or the pots, since she couldn’t fit them all into the dishwasher. Where did he get all these rules? Had he made them up, the way he’d made up the vegetable rules? My father’s one-man dinner cult. Lunch didn’t have rules. It was a weekend free-for-all of salami and mayonnaise and old, buckled waxed-paper packages of lox that my mother wanted to throw away and that my father ate while she said, “You’ll get sick.” But for all his fussing about food, he never got sick from eating. Last week’s rubbery pot roast from the back of the fridge, cheese that smelled diseased, Chinese menu entries that turned out to be turtle or ferret—he had an iron stomach. Later, when he worked at the White House and traveled to strange places on fact-finding missions, he ate monkey, he ate boa constrictor. Anything but a carrot.
I was setting out the salad plates—from the right—when the doorbell rang.
My father scrambled up from the table and down the hall.
“What is it?” Vishwa asked my mother.
“It’s Jagdeesh,” she said.
“Oh, dear.” Vishwa looked at me. “The tie! Where is the tie?”
“In the closet, in the pocket of the jacket.”
“Don’t worry about the tie,” my mother said.
“I don’t care,” said Frederika. “I like you without a tie.”
Vishwa looked at his plate. He seemed to be blushing, but because of his toasty color, I couldn’t be sure.
“Look who I’ve found,” my father said, ushering Jagdeesh into the room.
Jagdeesh was tall and willowy. He had large tipped-up eyes that appeared to be lined with mascara because his lashes were so dark and profuse. His nose was a sculpted beak, big but delicate. The most striking difference between him and Vishwa was his hair. Jagdeesh had movie-star hair, thick, black, swept back to show off his high, shiny forehead. About the only thing he and Vishwa had in common was their creamy caramel skin. He was wearing a blue blazer tailored snugly to his long torso, a blinding white shirt (with cuff links, I noticed during dessert when he reached for seconds), black loafers like the ones my mother had bought my father in Italy, and a dark-purple, glistening, embossed silk scarf wrapped casually (perhaps) around his elegant neck. There were two rings of very yellow gold, one with a red stone, one with a green enameled disc, on his left hand.
I disliked him immediately.
My father, however, was in love with him.
“Sit down, sit down,” he said, pulling the extra chair from the living room to the table. “We’re so happy you could come and join us. We’re eating salad. Would you like some salad?” He gestured to me: Bring a plate. Bring forks and knives and napkins for Jagdeesh!
To demonstrate to Vishwa that I loved him best, I served Jagdeesh from the left.
My mother had seated Vishwa beside me and across from Frederika, “So they can look at each other,” she said in the kitchen before dinner. That left only one spot for Jagdeesh: between my father and Frederika. I wondered if she would be captivated by his Errol Flynn–ish aura. Vishwa seemed to be wondering something along those lines as well. He jiggled in his chair and cleared his throat several times. But Jagdeesh was focused on my mother.
“Your house is beautiful—of course,” he said. “It’s exactly as I imagined it would be. Perfect. I am not surprised. When I met you first—last year, wasn’t it? At the department party? Yes, that’s correct. You wore an Indian shaw
l, do you remember? It was green silk, very fine, embroidered in gold. Most striking on you. And I said to myself, I would expect no less from Carl’s wife.”
My mother did not seem to know what to say to all this.
Jagdeesh looked, briefly, at Frederika. “We must credit you for providing the occasion,” he said.
Frederika nodded.
Swiveling his head back to my mother, Jagdeesh said, “It’s the unusual combination of austerity with comfort. A certain Japanese influence?”
“Not really,” my mother said. She did not sound pleased.
“Ah, you don’t like the Japanese way? In truth, neither do I. It seems to me—how to say it—so minimal as to be almost not there at all. In Calcutta, for instance, there is so much vivacity on display, the colors and shapes and the ferment of the street, which carry on inside as well. My point is that the Far Eastern approach to space and form feels, to this Indian, at any rate, inert. Yes, that’s the word, inert.”
My mother lit a cigarette.
“Salad?” My father offered the bowl to Jagdeesh.
“Perfect,” said Jagdeesh. “But may I?” He turned to Frederika. “You will have some?”
“Go ahead,” she said. She did not seem captivated at all.
“After you,” insisted Jagdeesh.
“Just take some,” my mother said.
Frederika obeyed.
Salad precluded conversation. Heaps of tart watercress required everyone’s full attention for several minutes. Jagdeesh, with his beautiful big white teeth, finished chewing first.
“Am I correct in thinking that you have an ancestor who was a great architect?”
My mother, delayed by her cigarette, was still deep in the watercress. She swallowed. “Ancestor isn’t quite right, since he’s alive. But yes.”
“Talent will out,” said Jagdeesh.
“Not always.” My mother didn’t look at me but I knew she was talking about me.
“For instance,” he continued, “one of our grandfathers was a notable artist of the sitar, and this explains Vishwa, I have always said.”
“But the other grandfather wasn’t a notable economist,” my father said, smiling at his own joke.
Vishwa laughed. Jagdeesh did not.
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