by Jenna Blum
Dedication
To my parents and their New York
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Directory to Dining
Masha’s Fall 1965
I: Peter, 1965 1: Masha’s
2: Carnegie Hall
3: Larchmont, 1965
4: Christmas 1965
Masha’s Spring 1966
5: The Bubkes
6: Peter and the Wolf
II: June, 1975 7: Tennis Lessons
8: Larchmont, 1975
9: Brigadoon
10: The Fun House
11: The American Dream
III: Elsbeth, 1985 12: Synesthesia
13: The Shoot
14: The Hamptons
15: Quelle Horreur
16: Shameless
17: ED
Epilogue: Peter, April 1986
Acknowledgments
An Excerpt from Those Who Save Us 1: Anna and Max, Weimar, 1939–1940
About the Author
Also by Jenna Blum
Copyright
About the Publisher
Directory to Dining
Directory to Dining
Masha’s, 1705 Second Avenue, REgent 4–1143. Menu items memorialize the owner/chef’s wife, who died in Europe during WW2. If you aren’t plotzing over the story, come for schmaltz: the sumptuously decadent Continental and Jewish dishes, including Brisket Wellington and chocolate “Masha Torte,” will make even jaded diners weep. Entrees from $7.95. Cocktails and wine. Lunch and dinner; closed Monday. Reservations recommended.
—Craig Claiborne, New York Times, September 1964
Masha’s Fall 1965
Appetizers
Warm Brussels Sprout Salad with Toasted Pecans, Bleu Cheese, Lardons & Black Truffle Mustard Vinaigrette
Cream of Mushroom Soup with House-Made Croutons, Crème Fraîche, Brandy & Chives
Chicken in a Blanket: Chicken Liver Pâté en Croute, Served with Mustard & Horseradish Crème Fraîche Dipping Sauces
Blue Point Oysters Baked in Crème Sauce with Bread-Crumb & Butter Crust
“Little Polish Doves”: Miniature Cabbage Rolls with Mustard & Sweet & Sour Dipping Sauces
Entrees
Breast of Duck with Kirsch-Flambéed Cherries and Oranges in a Nest of Sautéed Cabbage, Accompanied by Pommes Frites
Brisket Wellington, Accompanied by Horseradish Mashed Potatoes & Vegetable du Jour
Pan-Fried Flounder with Parmesan & Bread-Crumb Crust, Accompanied by Roast Fingerling Potatoes & Green Beans Amandine
Stuffed Roast Chicken with Beach Plum & Cranberry Conserve, Accompanied by Diner’s Choice of Tzimmes or Mashed Potatoes & Brussels Sprouts
Hamburger Walter: Ground Chuck au Poivre & Flambéed in Brandy, Accompanied by Pommes Frites & No Vegetables At All
Sides
Mushrooms in Burgundy Sauce
Green Beans Amandine
Creamed Spinach with a Garlic & Parmesan Crust
Roast Fingerling Potatoes
Pommes Frites (French Fried Potatoes)
Latkes (Potato Pancakes with Applesauce)
Tzimmes (Casserole of Sweet Potato, Citrus Zests, & Currants)
Pickled Beets with Horseradish Crème Fraîche
Dish of House-Made Pickles
Spätzle
Just Desserts
Honeycrisp Apple Crumble with Brown-Sugar Crust & Vanilla Ice Cream
Masha Torte: Inside-Out German Chocolate Cake with Cherries Flambé
Plum Tart with Roasted Walnut Crust & Kirsch-Infused Whipped Cream
“Little Clouds”: Cream Puffs Filled with Vanilla Ice Cream, Accompanied by Mini Chocolate Fondue for Dipping
Pumpkin, Honey, and Vanilla Ice Cream in Chocolate Cups (Available as Trio or Individual)
Assortment of Chocolate, Walnut-Currant, & Apricot Rugelach
1705 2nd Ave. New York, NY 10128 / RE 4–1143 * Reservations If You Please!
I
Peter, 1965
Well, what if Peter hadn’t caught the wolf? What then, eh?
—Sergei Prokofiev
1
Masha’s
The first time Peter saw the girl was during the dinner seating at Masha’s. She was sitting at the center table beneath the chandelier, her face spangled with light. It was what Peter’s staff called the death seat because of what would happen to whoever was unfortunate enough to be occupying it if the chandelier, a two-hundred-pound fountain of dripping Venetian crystal, ever decided to fall. The girl—the young woman—was looking around the restaurant as if bored by her dining companion, a silver-haired fellow with thick horn-rimmed glasses and a head as square as a sugar cube, who was at least twice her age and was, at the moment Peter first noticed her, leaning in to whisper something in her ear. The girl wrinkled her nose and pushed her suitor, if that was what he was, away—and then, upon spying Peter, grinned in a way that was completely transformative, changing her expression from the somewhat sulky ennui of the New York girl-about-town, been there, done that already, into something altogether more sunny and sweet. Peter raised his eyebrows in return. The girl’s light hair was short as a boy’s—not a style Peter was fond of; she wore a white shift with fur at the collar and cuffs and red high-heeled boots whose tops disappeared beneath the tablecloth. Her eyes were outlined in thick curls of black. Peter was not, as a rule, a fan of these new fashion trends—although like every other man in Manhattan, he would have thanked God, had he believed in Him, for the miniskirt. Yet this girl held Peter transfixed.
He went about the business of making the rounds, as he did once a seating, clapping a shoulder here, lighting a woman’s cigarette there. There was always a preponderance of pretty women at Masha’s—more so during lunch, when tables were almost completely occupied by wistful bachelorettes and their determined mothers. This had been the case since the Times review came out the year before. The ladies praised the salads, but they were there for the single owner with the sad story. The dinner crowd consisted more of regulars, residents of this Upper East Side neighborhood on their way down to, or returning from, the city’s events, theater and orchestra and opera and ballet. Still, there were enough romantic hopefuls mixed in that Peter had become wary and immune. Or so he had thought. Why this particular young woman had caught his interest now, he wasn’t sure. He stole glances at her as he made conversation with the Lynns, who had concluded their evening with nightcaps at Masha’s ever since it had opened; as he ignored the way old Mrs. Allison, holding court at Table 14, kept slipping her palsied hand beneath the table to feed scraps to her poodle, Lucius, who the staff routinely pretended wasn’t there. Peter wasn’t playing the game again—was he? Looking for people who were long gone? A fruitless exercise, he reminded himself severely. And cruel. And yet . . . The young woman in the death seat looked to be younger than forty, the age Masha would have been, and older than twenty—not by much, but enough.
Peter was about to make his way over and give the girl a special welcome to Masha’s when there was the discreet stir at tables nearest the front door that meant Mr. Cronkite had arrived, that the hostess was taking his trench coat and leading him to his habitual table, the second banquette with its high red leather walls. Mr. Cronkite was alone, as he usually was when he dined at Masha’s—en route from the CBS studio to his apartment on East Ninety-Fourth Street, on a night when his wife, Betty, wasn’t there to share a meal with him. Peter held up one finger at Maurice, the waiter on Mr. Cronkite’s station, to indicate he would bring the newscaster’s bourbon over himself.
“How are you this evening, Mr. Cronkite?” he asked, setting the drink down—it always startled Peter, no matter how he thought he had grown used to it, to see how blue
the man’s eyes were, since on the television screen they appeared gray.
“Very well, and you, Mr. Rashkin?” said Mr. Cronkite.
“I can’t complain,” said Peter.
Mr. Cronkite favored Peter with the famous twinkle. “That makes you quite unlike much of our viewing audience,” he said. “Tumultuous times, Mr. Rashkin. Tumultuous times. But we are no stranger to those, are we?” He toasted Peter with his highball glass. “A salute,” he said.
“To your health,” Peter responded. “May I bring you a menu? Or your favorite?”
“How could I pass up a Hamburger Walter?” said Mr. Cronkite, of the dish Peter had invented specially for him—ground chuck seasoned au poivre and cooked in brandy, with, as the menu said, No Vegetables At All. Mr. Cronkite gave Peter a wink. “One of the small sorry perks of bachelorhood, eh, Mr. Rashkin? Don’t have to eat the peas.”
“Indeed,” said Peter. It was a little joke between them, the long and happily married Mr. Cronkite not being a bachelor and Peter being considered one of the city’s more eligible—much to his dismay.
“I’ll have Maurice bring that right out for you,” he said to Mr. Cronkite and knocked a knuckle against the tablecloth in farewell.
Having ascertained that everything front of house was running exactly as it should, Peter headed toward the kitchen to supervise the plating of that evening’s special, a Cornish hen served with horseradish mashed potatoes and cherries flambé—Peter had not been surprised that his customers loved food being set on fire tableside, since Americans tended to be pleased by potentially explosive things, but he had been startled to find how much he himself enjoyed it. He glanced again at the center table, the death seat. What was it about this young woman? Did she remind him of someone after all? Perhaps Twiggy; yes, with her close-cropped ashy blond hair, her almost skeletal slenderness, she did resemble the British model who sometimes came in with her entourage. This girl, too, was probably a model—her dinner, the warm Brussels sprout salad with Roquefort, was untouched. Perhaps Peter had seen her face in the subway, sliding past on a wall. The girl’s dining companion had his arm around her now; he had hitched his chair closer, and as Peter watched, he offered her a sip of his Rusty Nail, holding his highball glass up toward the girl’s mouth. Once again Peter considered going over, introducing himself, perhaps offering a complimentary dessert—but wasn’t one suitor twice her age enough for the poor girl? She didn’t need another. And Peter wasn’t looking for entanglement. He stepped through the portholed door to his kitchen.
* * *
The kitchen at Masha’s was tiny, not much bigger than a sailboat’s galley, its cramped confines made all the more so by its inhabitants: Peter’s sauté/grill chef, his prep chef, his sous-chef Lena, the dishwasher. In the early mornings, the pastry chef was sometimes there as well. Tonight the air was thick with the smells of poultry, fish, cabbage, potatoes, and the sounds of sizzling, running water, roaring ovens, the dishwasher churning, and the cooks yelling shorthand to each other—“Flounder up! Twelve needs potatoes. Eighty-six the chicken. Already? Fuck me.” It was Peter’s favorite place in the world. All his life he had felt safest in kitchens. He was the owner of Masha’s, a restaurateur as well as a chef, yet it might have surprised his patrons and even some of his staff to know how hard it was for him to play the role—what an effort to circulate among the tables in his suit, making small talk. It was precisely because this didn’t come easily to Peter that he was good at it; as his childhood speech tutor in Berlin had scolded him, Peter, you must project! He did—except now, instead of his voice, he amplified his personality. Still, it was a joy to him, the moment he looked forward to above all others, when he could exchange his suit for chef’s whites and fall into the rhythm of chopping, sautéing, assembling, and sending food he had prepared, dishes he had created, out into the world.
So it was a surprise to Peter that tonight, as he hung his suit coat on the back of his office door, pulled on his white jacket, and took his usual spot next to Lena, he felt something was amiss. It was the light—the good overhead fluorescents, strong white bulbs in ceiling ice-cube-tray grids, seemed dim. Peter felt himself start to sweat. He blotted his forehead with a towel from the top of his stack and unrolled the satchel containing his knife. The prep chef had already set out Peter’s mise en place; little bowls of shallots and parsley and garlic confit and lemon zest and kosher salt ringed his cutting board. But why was Peter having a hard time seeing them?
“Catch me up,” he said to Lena.
“Twenty-two covers done,” said Lena, breathing like a vacuum cleaner—she was a large lady, taller than Peter’s six feet and wider than the stove; a refugee, like Peter, but from Leningrad. “Chicken is finished. Mushroom Burgundy kaput. Flounder is moving. Five hen left.”
“Thanks,” said Peter. “What’s open?” he called.
“Eight tickets, boss!”
Peter squinted toward the slips of paper hanging from the magnetized rail. Was it his imagination, or was the room growing darker still?
“Lena,” he started to say, “take charge, I’m not well—”
But she shouted over him, “Who fuck with fuse box? Is darker than Stalin’s zhopa in here!” and Peter realized, with relief, that it wasn’t just him—Lena was having trouble seeing too, and the rest of his staff were exclaiming perplexities in the coffee-colored air.
Lena turned on Rodrigo, the dishwasher. “I know you do this, toshchiy blyudok,” she said. “I see you in storage closet earlier.”
The dishwasher responded in rapid Spanish. Peter’s English and German, even his Russian, were better than his Spanish, but after thirty years of kitchen work he knew Lena had called Rodrigo a skinny little bastard and the dishwasher had called her a sow.
“Lena,” Peter said, “stop. Rodrigo, turn up your radio, please.”
Everybody strained to listen except the sauté chef, who kept prodding and flipping now-invisible meat. Over a murmur from the dining room and the hiss of the grill, they could hear the battery-powered radio, tuned to 1010 WINS: “The electrical blackout is citywide, although the full scope has yet to be determined. Mayor Wagner has asked all New Yorkers to stay inside. The subways are not operational, but extra buses . . .”
“Somebody fuck with whole city’s fuse box,” said Lena, not without satisfaction. “Will be looting. Fires. Probably killings too.”
“That will do, thank you,” said Peter—although that had been his first instinct as well. He was all too familiar with what happened to civility when a city’s lights went out.
He organized his thoughts, then issued a stream of orders. Get flashlights for the kitchen and extra candles for the dining room. Tell the headwaiter to lock the front door and open it only to let people leave—nobody in. The kitchen staff would close out their tickets and take no more orders. Peter would comp the patrons a round of drinks. To himself he added a footnote to give Mrs. Allison an extra meal in her doggie bag; that way, if the power remained out the next day, she would have something to eat. A waiter should escort her home, as well.
“And for God’s sake open the walk-in as little as possible,” he finished. “I’ll go make an announcement.”
He stepped to the door of the dining room again—tonight his patrons would have the unusual experience of seeing him in his whites. Many of them were gathered at the front window, peering out, trying to ascertain what was happening. The waiters and hostess were lighting extra candles on every table, setting the red-lacquered walls aglow and sparking the crystal chandelier to life. Mr. Cronkite, Peter saw, was gone—probably back to the newsroom, in case the power returned and CBS could address the crisis on air. The square-headed silver-haired man was still at the center table, scowling into his half-empty drink. But the young woman? Peter scanned the room, the knot of people at the window. She was nowhere to be seen.
He walked to the bar and tinked a spoon against a wineglass.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “your attention pl
ease.”
* * *
After everyone had left—after the patrons had been let out, old Mrs. Allison escorted by the headwaiter; after he had locked the night’s receipts in the safe, to be gone over in the morning, when there was more light; after he had dismissed his staff—Peter poured himself a brandy and began his rounds. He did this every night after closing, ensuring that Masha’s was secure; the only difference tonight was that he was using a flashlight. The beam was weak, after so much exercise in the kitchen earlier, but it was sufficient for Peter to sweep around the coat closet, the dining room, the kitchen, the walk-in refrigerator, his office, and the cellar—now even more dungeon-like without the illumination of the ceiling bulb. He checked the wine racks, the dry-storage bins and barrels, and the rat traps, thankful that the latter were empty. He made inventory notes in the little spiral-bound notepad he always carried in his back pocket: “onions, olive oil, paprika, matchbooks. New rubber mat for kitch.” He went back upstairs, set his brandy down, and went to check the restrooms.
He had long since turned the radio off—he preferred silence, and if he hadn’t thought the staff would mutiny, he would have banned music in the kitchen—but he was mindful of the news he’d heard earlier. Lena’s predictions had been right: in addition to reports of long lines of people at phone booths, ferries, and buses, desperate to escape the stricken city, there were lootings and fires, some as close as Harlem. Since Masha’s wasn’t very far south, between Eighty-Ninth and Ninetieth Streets on Second Avenue, Peter wondered whether he should take extra precautions. Sleep in his office, perhaps. It wouldn’t be the first time. In 1955, when Masha’s opened, Peter had practically lived at the restaurant, returning to his apartment on East Ninety-Sixth Street only to shower and change clothes. He gave the men’s room a scan and made a notation to order more paper towels—he’d ask Sol, his cousin and partner, whether they could try a cheaper service Peter had found in the Bronx or whether they had to keep using Sol’s supplier. The flashlight went out.
