Wild Game

by Adrienne Brodeur

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Part I

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Part II

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Part III

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Connect with HMH

  Footnotes

  Copyright © 2019 by Adrienne Brodeur

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permissions@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  hmhbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Brodeur, Adrienne, author.

  Title: Wild game : my mother, her lover, and me / Adrienne Brodeur.

  Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, [2019].

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019004915 (print) | LCCN 2019013400 (ebook) |

  ISBN 9781328519047 (ebook) | ISBN 9781328519030 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780358272670 (PA, Canada edition)

  Subjects: LCSH: Brodeur, Adrienne. | Brodeur, Adrienne—Family. | Hornblower, Malabar. | Mothers and daughters—United States—Biography. |

  Authors, American—Biography.

  Classification: LCC PS3602.R6346 (ebook) | LCC PS3602.R6346 Z46 2019 (print)| DDC 813/.6 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019004915

  Jacket photograph courtesy of the author

  Jacket design by Christopher Moisan

  Author photograph © Julia Cumes Photography

  v1.0919

  “Gott spricht zu jedem . . . / God speaks to each of us . . .” from Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy, translation copyright © 1996 by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy. Used by permission of Riverhead, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

  “The Uses of Sorrow,” from Thirst by Mary Oliver, published by Beacon Press, Boston. Copyright © 2004 by Mary Oliver, used herewith by permission of the Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency, Inc.

  For Tim, Madeleine, and Liam

  and in memory of Alan

  Author’s Note

  Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it.

  —GABRIEL GARCíA MáRQUEZ

  In writing this book, I’ve endeavored to be as factual as possible, turning to journals, letters, scrapbooks, photo albums, report cards, recipes, articles, and other records of my personal and familial history. But in instances where I could not substantiate a physical or emotional detail, I turned to memory, knowing full well that it is revisionist and that each time we remember something, we alter it slightly, massaging our perspective and layering it with new understanding in order to make meaning in the present.

  Wild Game does not pretend to tell the whole story—years have been compressed into sentences, friends and lovers edited out, details scrubbed. Time has scattered particulars. What follows in these pages are recollections, interpretations, and renderings of moments that shaped my life, all subject to perspective, persuasion, and longing. I am aware that others may recall things differently and have their own versions of events. I’ve tried to be careful in telling a story that includes other people who may remember or have experienced things differently.

  I have changed the names of everyone in the book except for my parents, Malabar and Paul, and myself.

  THE USES OF SORROW

  by Mary Oliver

  (In my sleep I dreamed this poem)

  Someone I loved once gave me

  a box full of darkness.

  It took me years to understand

  that this, too, was a gift.

  Prologue

  A buried truth, that’s all a lie really is.

  Cape Cod is a place where buried things surface and disappear again: wooden lobster pots, the vertebrae of humpback whales, chunks of frosted sea glass. One day there’s nothing; the next, the cyclical forces of nature—erosion, wind, and tide—unearth something that has been there all along. A day later, it’s gone.

  A few years ago, my brother discovered the bow of a shipwreck looming from a sandbar. He managed to excavate an ample wedge of hull before the tide came in and thwarted his efforts. The following day, he returned to the same spot at the same tide, but all traces of the ship had vanished. Had he not saved that waterlogged slab of wood, knotted and beautifully gnarled, and left it to dry on his lawn, he might have imagined he’d dreamed the whole thing.

  Blink, and you’ll miss your treasure.

  Blink again, and you’ll realize that the truth you thought was safely hidden has materialized, some ungainly part of it revealed under new conditions. We all know the adage that one lie begets the next. Deception takes commitment, vigilance, and a very good memory. To keep the truth buried, you must tend to it.

  For years and years, my job was to pile on sand—fistfuls, shovelfuls, bucketfuls, whatever the moment necessitated—in an effort to keep my mother’s secret buried.

  Part I

  Oh, what a tangled web we weave.

  —SIR WALTER SCOTT

  One

  Ben Souther pushed through the front door of our Cape Cod beach house on a hot July evening in 1980, greeting our family with his customary, enthusiastic “How do!” In his early sixties at the time, Ben had a full head of thick, white hair and callused hands that broadcast his love of outdoor work. I watched from the hallway as he back-patted my stepfather, Charles Greenwood, with one hand and, with the other, raised high a brown paper grocery bag, its corners softening into damp, dark patches.

  “Let’s see what you can do with these, Malabar,” Ben said to my mother, who stood in the entryway beside her husband. He presented her with the seeping package and gave her a peck on the cheek.

  My mother took the sack into the kitchen and placed it on the butcher-block counter, where she unfolded the top and peeked inside.

  “Squab,” Ben said proudly, rubbing his hands together. “A dozen. Plucked, cleaned, I even took off the heads for you.”

  Ah. So the wetness was blood.

  I glanced at my mother, whose face registered not a trace of revulsion, only delight. She was, no doubt, already doing the math, calculating the temperature and time required to crisp the skin without drying the meat and best coax forward the flavors. My mother came to life in the kitchen—it was her stage and she was the star.

  “Well, I must say, this is quite the hostess gift, Ben,” my mother said, laughing, appraising him with a tilt of her chin. She gave him a long look. Malabar was a tough critic. You had to earn her good opinion, a process that could take years and might not happen at all. Ben Souther, I could tell, had gone up a notch.

  Ben’s wife, Lily, followed close behind, bearing a bouquet of flowers from their garden in Plymouth and a bag of wild watercress, freshly picked from the banks of their stream,
peppery the way Malabar loved it. About a decade older than my mother, Lily was petite and plain-pretty, with graying brown hair and a lined face that spoke of her New England practicality and utter lack of vanity.

  Charles stood on the sidelines smiling broadly. He loved company, delicious meals, and stories from the past, and this weekend with his old friend Ben and Ben’s wife, Lily, promised an abundance of all. I’d known the Southers since I was eight, when my mother married Charles. I knew them in the way that a child knows her parents’ friends, which is to say not well and with indifference.

  I was fourteen.

  The cocktail hour, a sacred ritual in our home, commenced immediately. My mother and Charles each started with their usual, a tumbler of bourbon on the rocks, had a second, and then progressed to their favorite aperitif, which they called the “power pack”: a dry Manhattan with a twist. The Southers followed my parents’ lead, matching them drink for drink. The four of them meandered and chatted, cocktails in hand, from the living room out to the deck and then, later, across the lawn to the wooden stairs that led down to the beach. There they enjoyed the coastal abundance before them: brackish air, a sky glowing pink with sunset, the ambient sounds of seagulls, boats on moorings, and distant waves.

  My older brother, Peter, made his entrance after a long day’s work as a mate on a charter fishing boat out of Wellfleet. He was sixteen, blond, and tan, his lips split from too much salt and sun. He and Ben talked striped bass—what they were eating (sand eels), where they were biting (past the bars but still close to shore). It was understood between them that this type of sport fishing, with its lowbrow chumming and high-test fishing line, was not the real deal. Ben was a fisherman’s fisherman. He tied his own flies and made annual trips to Iceland and Russia to fish the world’s most pristine rivers. He had already caught and released over seven hundred salmon in his lifetime, and his goal was to make it to a thousand. Still, a day on the water was a day on the water, even if it was spent with beer-guzzling tourists.

  “When’s dinner, Mom?” Peter asked. My brother was endlessly ravenous, always impatient.

  That was all it took to get everyone back into the house. We knew what was coming next.

  My mother flicked on the kitchen lights, rinsed her hands, and busied herself unwrapping the headless birds, lining them up on the countertop, and blotting their cavities dry with a fresh dishtowel. The rest of us settled onto the sturdy, high-backed stools, our elbows on the green marble counter, where we could enjoy a clear view of Malabar in action. On the enormous butcher-block island directly in front of us, aromatic herbs—basil, cilantro, thyme, oregano, mint—sprouted from a vase like a floral arrangement. A rectangle of butter had softened into a glistening mound. A giant head of garlic awaited my mother’s knife. Behind us stretched our living room, framed entirely by sliding glass doors that opened onto a panoramic view of Nauset Harbor, where islands of marsh grass and sandbars were visible at low tide. Beyond the harbor was the outer beach, a strip of khaki sand punctuated by dunes that buffered us from the Atlantic Ocean. From time to time, my mother would look up from her mincing or stirring or grating, take it all in, and smile with satisfaction.

  My mother had been coming to this town on Cape Cod since she was a young girl. Orleans is located at the elbow of what from the sky resembles an enormous arm pushing sixty-five miles out into the Atlantic and then flexing back toward the mainland, narrowing all the way to the curled hand of Provincetown. As a child, Malabar lived in Pochet; while married to my father, she owned a tiny cottage in Nauset Heights; and a few years ago, no doubt with some assistance from Charles, she’d bought a couple of acres of waterfront. She’d had a major renovation done when she bought this house, and it was no coincidence that the kitchen was the room with the best views.

  If the idea of a woman in the kitchen calls to mind the image of a sweet homemaker in a ruffled apron or a world-weary mother dutifully fulfilling her obligation to feed her young family, you’re picturing the wrong woman in the wrong kitchen. Here, at the very last house on a winding road to the bay beach, the kitchen was command central and Malabar its five-star general. Long before open kitchens were in vogue, she believed that cooks should be celebrated, not relegated to hot rooms to labor alone behind closed doors. It was in this kitchen where meringues were launched onto seas of crème anglaise, perfectly seared slabs of foie gras were drizzled with fig reductions, and salads of watercress and endive were expertly tossed with olive oil and sea salt.

  My mother rarely followed recipes. She had little use for them. Hardwired to understand the chemistry of food, she needed only her palate, her instincts, and her fingertips. In a single drop of rich sauce placed on her tongue, she could detect the tiniest hint of cardamom, one lone shard of lemon zest, some whiff of a behind-the-scenes ingredient. She had an innate feel for composition and structure and how temperature might change that. She also had a keen awareness of the power of this gift, particularly where men were concerned. Armed with sharp knives, fragrant spices, and fire, my mother could create feasts whose aromas alone would entice ships full of men onto the rocks, where she would delight in watching them plunge into the abyss. I knew about the Sirens from reading Greek mythology and marveled at my mother’s powers.

  Candles were lit, illuminating the room, and the happy creak of corks announced that dinner was ready. Six of us assembled around the table and dug into our first course: steamed, soft-shell clams that my mother and I had plucked from a nearby sandbar at low tide earlier in the day. We pried open the shells, rolled the skin off their elongated necks, dunked the bodies into hot broth and melted butter, and popped them into our mouths. A burst of ocean.

  Then came the pièce de résistance: Ben’s squabs, served family-style on an enormous carving board with grooves that caught their abundant juices. Using long tongs, Malabar scooped up a tiny pigeon for each plate. Roasted to medium rare, the meat was silky and tender, fine-grained and richer than I’d expected. The skin was fatty, like a duck’s, and as crisp as bacon. As accompaniment, my mother had made a savory corn pudding, some collision of kernels and eggs and cream, which she dolloped onto each plate. The flavors were complementary, sweet and salty, with a certain succulence that gave a nod to ferment.

  At her first bite, my mother moaned with satisfaction. She never shied away from enjoying the fruits of her labor.

  “This,” Ben said, closing his eyes, “is perfection.” Seated beside Malabar, he placed an arm around the back of her chair and raised his glass. “To the chef!”

  “To Malabar,” Lily seconded.

  We all clinked glasses. My stepfather beamed and said, “To my sweet.” Charles adored my mother, who was his second wife and nearly fifteen years his junior. They had both been married to other people when they met through friends and fell in love. Charles appreciated that my mother had stuck with him through his protracted divorce and the series of debilitating strokes he’d suffered just before their wedding that had left him partially paralyzed on his right side. He now walked with a shuffle and had learned to write and eat with his left hand.

  Charles and Ben had been boyhood friends, brought together by a shared love of the town of Plymouth where Ben, a direct descendant of the Mayflower Pilgrims, lived and where Charles had spent summers in his youth. They were an unlikely pair—Charles always in his head, Ben so very physical—but the friendship had thrived for decades. They were within six months of each other in age, but intense and magnetic Ben seemed years younger. A hunter, a fisherman, and a conservationist—in addition to being a successful businessman—Ben had an encyclopedic knowledge of the natural world, and he shared it enthusiastically. Over dinner, I hammered him with questions: How do horseshoe crabs mate? What causes the annual spring migration of herring? How do quahogs lay eggs? I tried to stump him but failed. Answering questions about the environment and its inhabitants was his party trick.

  As the six of us devoured our meal, Ben schooled us in pigeons, which he had been raising for m
ore than thirty years.

  “Did you know that the babies are brooded and fed by both parents,” he said, aiming a petite drumstick my way.

  “So these are, like, city pigeons?” I asked, curious if they were the same grimy creatures I knew from New York, where I was born and where my father still lived.

  “Yes and no. Pigeons and doves are from the same family, Columbidae,” Ben said, touching my arm as he spoke. “The birds we raise are white doves.”

  “Oh, the flock is so gorgeous, Rennie,” Lily said. “You’ll have to visit sometime and see for yourself.”

  “I’d love that,” I said and I looked at my mother, who nodded permission.

  “So how do you kill them, exactly?” Peter asked.

  Ben twisted a tiny, invisible neck.

  The evening went on, electric and full of small surprises. Ben was a vigorous man who spoke with his hands and explained things thoroughly but also listened intently to whoever was speaking. I noticed how his gaze kept returning to my mother throughout the meal. My mother seemed to delight in these glances, giving equine tosses of her head and laughing readily. At one point, I watched as she dragged her fork across the dome of her corn pudding. We both looked up to see if Ben was watching. He was. She shot me a furtive smile and poured me a glass of red wine. Then she poured one for Peter. “The Pinot goes perfectly with the squab,” she said to us, as if we regularly paired wine with our meals.

  When I looked surprised, she shrugged, amused. “If we lived in France, you would have had wine with dinner starting when you were eight!”

  Ben chuckled approvingly, and my mother followed his lead with a throaty laugh.

  Charles and Lily, unperturbed by my drinking, unfazed by their spouses’ flirtation, erupted in laughter too.

  On this night, everything was so damn funny.

  At around nine o’clock, I grew restless. Even with the fans on, the dining room was uncomfortably warm, and the backs of my legs were stuck to the chair. I stole glances at the grandfather clock. Where is he? When the rap on the door finally came, I gave my brother a pleading glance. He didn’t budge from his seat.