“I don’t know, Thelma. God might not mind, but I’m pretty sure Henry Van Elkind would. He and Rita were quite particular. Like with the appetizers. They didn’t want the smoked fishes, because they think sturgeon is an endangered species. Piroshki with wild mushrooms was too Russian. They couldn’t have beef, but somehow veal was just fine.”
Thelma had shifted focus to berry picking. Her fingers quickly purpled as they moved from place to place, snatching only the ripest of fruit. “Taste one,” she said. A thumb-sized berry at eye level tauntingly begged to be picked. I popped it into my mouth. The flavor was intense, sweet and rich, almost alcoholic in intensity. “Careful, now,” warned Thelma, “don’t get your clothes caught on these briars.”
“How can we leave these raspberries until tomorrow? They need to be eaten today. They’re perfect.”
“They’ll wait. Believe me. Just serve them to those rich folk. They’ll think they died and gone to heaven. Trust me on this. They take what you give them, just as long as you make them think they’ve gotten their way. It’s up to you to know what you’re willing to give them.
“I have a great raspberry cobbler I could make with these, or maybe a cream pie. What do you think about that, Wally? We’ll put a nice vanilla custard down as the base, made with whole milk and a little cream, so it’s nice and smooth and rich. Then we’ll mix these raspberries with fresh whipped cream and a little vanilla and sugar and pile it high over the custard.”
“Henry has a cholesterol problem,” I pointed out.
“So we’ll add a little more cream to the custard,” Thelma suggested with a wicked guffaw.
“Maybe we could put a little melted white chocolate into the whipped cream?” I suggested.
Thelma sighed. “Can’t leave things simple, now can you? Always having to go too far to show how special you are.”
“Thelma,” I said in my best cafe-owner way. “The white chocolate will add texture and firmness to the whipped cream topping. That will make it easier to assemble it ahead, plus it will add an undercurrent of flavor to complement the ripeness of these raspberries. Remember, these are snobs who think they’re sophisticated, and their original request was for a white chocolate mousse. We’ll just change it to a white chocolate mousse with raspberries, served with a Wisconsin cream custard.”
The sparkle was back in Thelma’s eyes. “Just keep it rich, Wally, they’ll love it. But you better start picking and stop talking. We still have to get to Timberton to pick up your veal chops.”
Thelma was moving into the tangle of shoots and vines, nearly half-hidden in the raspberries thicket. “Shouldn’t you stay at the edge?” I asked.
“If you want good berries, you gotta risk a few scratches,” she shouted back.
“I wanted to serve lake trout at the party,” I said loudly so she could hear, “but Henry warned me the kitchen was small. So I figured they wouldn’t have enough broiler space. Henry probably wouldn’t have agreed to it, so it’s just as well. He wanted real meat, even though Rita vetoed beef. I’m giving them veal chops baked in parchment paper. God, I hope that order of veal came into the butcher shop, or I’m in deep trouble. It would be so much simpler if we could depend on getting these things through Red’s grocery store.” I looked up from my berry picking but I could no longer see Thelma. I started walking toward some motion in the thicket ahead.
“I’m surprised they think they can get away with veal and not sturgeon. Won’t their environmental friends be as concerned about the mistreatment of poor little calves as endangered fish? Thelma, can’t you answer me once in a while.”
A black snout broke through the raspberry bracket, exactly in the spot where I had expected to see Thelma. There emerged an adult black bear, several hundred pounds at least. It waddled by to plod ahead one paw at a time, then rambled through the ditch and onto the roadway. It looked back for a second as though to see just what it had passed by.
“Thelma,” I whispered, frozen where I stood.
The bear stopped, cocking its head back with a quizzical look. A reddish purplish stain encircled its snout, like lipstick on a smiling clown.
“Speak up,” Thelma shouted. The bear, now startled broke into a gallop, racing into the woods. Thelma came out of the berry patch and looked at me with concern. “Did you see a ghost?”
“No, a bear. A black bear. A big bear. A gigantic bear.”
“Is that all? Where are you from, boy? Nothing to worry about a bear during berry season. She’s fat and happy. If she’s got cubs, then they’re already big enough that any old she-bear is already letting down her guard now and again to worry about better things to do, like get fat for the winter.”
“That may be,“ I said trying to prove my reasonableness and not take offense, “but a bear is still a bear. Caution sometimes is a sensible thing.”
Thelma set her pail into the grass and lowered herself to sit on an old stump. “Indeed it is,” she agreed. “And you should have more of it. Listen to Thelma: Watch out for the people in this town and stop worrying about the bears. People are harder to predict than bears. You think everyone in this town is a hick and a quaint hick at that.”
Thelma held up her hand, seeing I was about to protest. “We all see this. We like you, Wally, but you’ve been gone too long in that big city. You think we’re like some cute television show. But it ain’t that way. Watch out for the people in this town. It’s not just Hank and the other summer folk. It’s all of us. Every one wants something. We’re all after some thing or some one. Look out for Red. He’s still his father’s son, you better believe it. He couldn’t have grown up with that old miser and not learn a few of the old man’s tricks. I know he holds a second mortgage on your place. That was the only way you could swing the cafe after the way he gouged you on the price. And don’t think Bromley didn’t help him do it. And that Indian kid, Frozen Bear, you be careful there too. He don’t care that the Truehearts are the ones who lied to him about the liquor license. He blames you because you’re the one who ended up with it.”
“Thelma, has the sun has gotten to you? I’ve not seen Chip Frozen Bear in my restaurant except that day I hired you.”
“It doesn’t mean he isn’t talking.”
“Talking about what?” I demanded. “Never mind. And don’t bother telling me what you’re after. I don’t want to know. Just let me make peach pie and a raspberry cobbler in the same day if I want to. Just let me be happy.”
We drove the half hour to Timberton in silence. Thelma was wrong about me condescending to the people of Thread. Maybe I was that way while I lived in Manhattan. I threw fabulous parties in my old life. I knew how to regale my guests with stories of life in Thread: the characters, the small scandals, the outlandish events. I nurtured each story until it had grown into some strange shadow of what had really occurred. I could pause at just the right places to elicit that chuckle. But I never thought of these townspeople as quaint hicks. How did Thelma get such a loony idea?
Thelma turned her car left, back onto 17, looking ahead, still driving in silence. We were a few miles south of the main intersection in Timberton. Old wood frame houses built at the turn of the century lined the highway. Each stood closely to the next, with barely room for sidewalks between them. Ninety years ago, Timberton had been a boomtown and the speculators had laid it out with expectations of growing into a major city. There was no land to spare in their greed. Each lot had been a tiny forty feet by eighty feet. The original settlers could only build up, at least two stories, if not three, capping each house with Victorian accouterments, now all badly weathered and in need of paint.
“Did this town ever look healthy?” I asked Thelma.
Thelma cast a glance at me, as though deciding to a truce. Her eyes turned back to the road, but she allowed one hand to move from the steering wheel and gesture as she answered. “My grandma always said it was a magnificent city when she moved here. That was back in the 1890s. There were at least four times as many people as today
. The woods were still being cut, and the iron and copper mines had just opened. There was money to be made.
“Grandma came on tour with Sarah Bernhardt. Yes, that Sarah Bernhardt. She played at the old Alcazar Theater on Silver Street. Grandma had been Sarah’s personal maid, but she fell in love with an old Swede, got swept right off her feet, and forgot all about the theater and Sarah so she could stay with Ole. She became a cook for a while at the Penokee House in its heyday. I wonder what she would think if she knew her kin came around full circle. A cook again.”
“But not at the Penokee House.” I pointed out.
“Thank God for that. The Penokee has a reputation it don’t deserve. Back during the Depression it was rotting hulk traded for a million used stamps, worthless boxes of canceled stamps on envelopes. Not worth the cost to burn them probably. It only took some licked stamps to buy a place that cost $100,000 to build back in my grandma’s day. But the hotel was just a white elephant. Who needs a wooden-frame hotel covering a whole block when no one comes to town? No one wanted it. When I was a girl, only tramps stayed there, and they didn’t appreciate the Honduran mahogany walls. And then it stood empty until the late Fifties.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“Some New York art dealer who vacationed over to Emeryville heard about it. Anyway he went on a Sunday drive one summer and saw this run-down building, bought it on a whim, and spent his entire fortune in restoring it. There’s a hospital down in Emeryville that was fit to be tied when the old man died, because while his will left all the money to them, there wasn’t a penny left. It had all gone into this hotel. So the hospital got stuck with the hotel. Took them four years to find anyone willing to buy it, and then they didn’t get very much for it. So if you get sick, don’t go to the Emeryville Hospital.”
“The hotel sure looks beautiful today.”
“But it’s still just a white elephant. If city folk hadn’t started skiing up here in these hills, it’d be a derelict again. And the food . . . expensive junk. People are paying outrageous prices because they’re in this great old building, or because they’re too stupid to drive thirty minutes and have our food at the Loon Town Cafe. I guess you’re not the only fool in these north woods.”
I let Thelma rant about the unwarranted cost of meals at the Penokee House, but personally I would have liked to see more of Timberton restored to the same state as the historic hotel. Timberton’s famous Silver Street, once known throughout the nation for its wildness and nightlife, was a discouraging hodgepodge of turn-of-the-century brick store fronts interspersed with cheap steel-pole construction buildings with plate glass fronts and parking lots at the side – much like Red’s Piggly Wiggly back in Thread. Where was the architectural consistency?
By air, the Timberton airport was only an hour from Detroit, Chicago, Minneapolis, or Milwaukee. The town could have easily been a weekend trendy getaway if the city’s fathers hadn’t allowed its past to rot away.
“Let’s just get to the butcher and to the fish market, and then head home,” I said.
“Don’t think I’m criticizing you,” began Thelma, off on a new train of thought. “I’m trying to warn you. There’s no one who don’t like you. But this ain’t New York. Don’t trust people to mean what they say. Television makes people think small towns are somehow different. We’re only different in that we ain’t ever surprised by what happens. Maybe we pretend we don’t know what’s going on with each other, but we know—even when we don’t talk about it. How can we not know? And how can we pretend that people aren’t complex beings, with some good and some bad thrown in? Sometimes we like the mixture more than other times. But unless we’re willing to be hermits, we know we gotta accept one another. But live and let live don’t mean that you don’t keep your eyes open.
“I knew there might be a bear in those berries. Knew it probably wouldn’t bother us. So I picked some berries, and I let you pick some berries. Always danger in the world, you know. For every pleasure, there’s something you gotta watch out for.
“It ain’t just raspberries and the bears. Picking wild strawberries for Claire last month in the ditches to the highway was just as bad. I could have found myself in the way of one of those 18-wheelers that come barreling up 17. Or next month, when the blueberries ripen in the bogs, I could make a false step and find myself in an unexpected pool of water, maybe even get tangled up in a submerged branch, unable to pull free, stuck in the woods, with no one knowing what you’re up to. Few days go by and it’s fodder for the coyotes.
“But I still go and pick the berries. I still crouch for hours in the ditches picking those tiny little wild strawberries. Then, I spend hours more, huddled over the kitchen table cleaning out all the bits of grass and leaves and twigs, because when you’re done with it all, there’s nothing more flavorful than a bowl of wild strawberries or a little bit of frozen wild strawberry jam spread with fresh butter on good white bread fresh from the oven. Claire ain’t the only one who likes wild strawberry jam.”
“Thelma,” I interrupted. “I don’t know what you’re trying to say.”
“I’m saying this. I’ve seen Red and Chip Frozen Bear together, talking about liquor licenses, and your name came up. And I’ve seen Red and that rich Hank Van Elkind huddling together, talking big dreams. They’re all up to something. And Bromley trying to get in on it. I’m not saying to stop enjoying berry picking. Pick some raspberries. Eat wild strawberries. Make some jam for Claire. But we gotta keep an eye out for the trucks. They can come from nowhere damn fast, and if you don’t jump out of their way, you ain’t getting to taste no more wild strawberries no matter how good they are.”
“That all?” I asked.
“Ain’t that enough, Wally?” she answered.
“Turn here. Onto Clearwater Road,” Danny said, pointing at the blacktopped road that wended its way beneath arching white birch. “You know, that’s the way the G-men went by mistake when Cynthia’s Grandpa rented the cabin to Dillinger.”
“So what was that story all about,” I asked Danny. “Why did Cynthia get so upset?”
Danny was smiling and for once seemed relaxed and free of worry out here in the middle of the woods. “Everyone says her grandpa gave the cops the wrong directions on purpose, you know how everyone thinks Big John was connected to gangsters and ran liquor down from Canada during Prohibition. They say he was just protecting Dillinger. But the cops didn’t know they had been sent to the wrong cabin. So they staked out this regular fishing cabin and ended up killing three business guys from Chicago. Cynthia doesn’t want to think anyone ever did anything wrong. Didn’t you ever hear that story before?”
I hadn’t, but I was beginning to understand that there were lots of stories in town still to hear. It was late afternoon. Danny and I were on our way in a fully loaded car to set up the catering for the big dinner. I would be meeting Rita Van Elkind for the first time. The Van Elkinds, given no choice, had agreed to a slightly improved menu. The raspberries had proven too perfect to not use.
The narrow wood lane widened into an avenue bordered by maples, stretching tall and evenly spaced, obviously planted after the first cut off of white pine a hundred years earlier.
“Is this the Van Elkind place?” Danny asked. “I’ve never been down this road before.” Some nervousness has crept into his voice.
This was clearly a private road, because nothing so grand and so well maintained could have been the responsibility of Bromley’s town road department. It led to a gatehouse and two imposing, but open, iron gates. Past the gates, the stately maples retreated from the roadside, creating a broad parkway. Rose bushes, resplendent with midsummer blooms, sat between the pavement and the forest on both sides.
“My Dad told me this place was built by some lumber baron in the nineteenth century. He owned all the land up here, practically ran it like his own kingdom, using it as a hunting camp. Dad says the first place burned down sometime around World War I, but was rebuilt grander than ever. Mom always
wanted to come out here and see it, but Dad said it wasn’t ours to show off. She never got to see it.” Danny grew quiet.
I had only heard of the camp before today. My Dad, who often went fishing on Clearwater Lake, had described the place to me because he had a favorite fishing spot that was a hundred yards off the Van Elkind dock. Neither his descriptions nor my long-distance glimpses had prepared me for its grandeur.
This northwoods summer palace was no more a camp than the mansions of Newport, Rhode Island, were cottages. The drive crossed a field-sized lawn of carefully mown grass. In the middle sat an oversized wonder, an English half-timbered Shakespearean manor built of life-sized Lincoln Logs. Its three stories were topped by steeply pitched roofs pierced with dormers. The house rambled this way and that as it moved towards the woods, back toward the lake and then again toward the road. Ivy clamped the logs to the earth. Small clumps of shaking aspen were planted here and there on the lawn. And roses were everywhere.
“Man, this is bigger than the high school,” Danny whispered.
So it was. But the high school, which also contained classrooms for the middle and elementary schools of Thread, only housed 200 students in total. Even a modest mansion could eclipse it in size. But this place must have encompassed 20,000 square feet.
“Dad told me once that the property taxes from this place is how Thread can afford to keep the school open.” Danny sat upright in the car gazing forward.
My own father’s stories had not prepared me for this estate. It must take a small staff just to maintain the grounds. By the time you finished mowing the lawn on one side you would have to start over on the other side. Looking at all the leaded glass windows scattered higgledy-piggledy within the stacked round logs—I didn’t even want to imagine the effort in keeping them washed.
Tales From The Loon Town Cafe Page 8
