Cynthia flung her sponge at me. I ducked. It flew over my head. Suddenly it was thrown back against the window and landed on the sidewalk with a puddle of grey water ebbing out.
“Such a welcome, throwing sponges at me,” snickered Kip Van Elkind. “I guess you got a thing for me, huh, Cynthia?”
Cynthia simply stared back. Her look of disdain for the kid was clear.
Across the Square, Henry Van Elkind had just driven up and was locking the door of his beige Mercedes, and noticed his son smirking at the girl. Henry crossed the Square. He glared at Kip, ‘What are you doing in town? You’re supposed to be with your grandmother. But now, stay here until I get through with Wally.”
He then indicated with a furtive gesture that he wanted us to go inside the cafe. “Leave the children outside to play. I have a business proposition.”
Cynthia shot me a look imploring me to stay. Danny seemed to shrink inward while at the same he bristled. Mr. Packer moved in between Kip and my teenagers as though to take up my lookout post. I turned to follow Henry in.
“Sit, Wally,” he commanded. The cafe was nearly empty as usual on weekday afternoons. Outside the window, Mr. Packer had taken up talking to Cynthia, keeping an eye on a smoldering Danny who seemed incensed by the lolling Kip. Kip was making suggestive comments, not loudly enough to be heard through the thick plate glass windows, but obvious by the way they rankled Danny. Cynthia was pointedly ignoring whatever Kip said, and a gallant Mr. Packer was helping her maintain the charade. Mr. Packer’s lanky body blocked Kip from seeing Cynthia clearly without swaying to and fro.
“Pay attention, Wally, what I’m about to say is important,” Van Elkind demanded.
“Another dinner?” I asked. I had learned one lesson already in dealing with the rich. Insist on cash up front. It had taken two weeks to get full payment from Henry after the catered affair at his camp, and then the check had bounced. “A misunderstanding,” he claimed. The fact remained that I still had to pay the butcher in Timberton, Danny, Thelma and others. Patrice who had once worked on Cape Cod always joked with me, “Never take a check from a Kennedy.” I thought it had just been his Republican-born nature bubbling up. Now I knew that the rich really were different. They didn’t know that money mattered.
“That was a great meal, wasn’t it?” Yes it was, I thought to myself, but I never saw your friends come into the cafe for more of a good thing. “The Senator talks about it every time I see him. Even Rita admits you were the right choice. Now she insists we will use you for everything we cater at the camp. But this is not about the camp. I need a less personal setting for a more private business event.”
Suddenly, Van Elkind bolted up and walked rapidly to the window. The late afternoon sun was flooding through. It caused four distinct shadows: the window-washing silhouette of Danny which even in the distortion of shadows showed off his trimness; a ball-like shadow of Cynthia as she crouched near the ground, apparently wiping dry a corner of the just-washed window; the lanky one-armed shadow of Mr. Packer; and then there was the interior shadow of Van Elkind going into a St. Vitus dance of anger. “Where the fuck is that boy? I told him to stay right here until I was done.”
“What’s the worry? Kip’s what? Seventeen? Eighteen? I’m sure he can take care of himself,” I offered. I was just glad he had run off, and I looked forward to the day he headed back to Chicago.
“That’s not the fucking point. I tell him to do something. I expect him to do it. I give the orders. He takes them. That is the agreement. I told him to stay in the square so we could leave together. This disobedience comes from his school, filled with nothing but bad influences. Crummy friends. Drugs.”
“Imprison him in Thread,” I joked. “No bad influences here. The only trouble he can get into is death by boredom.”
Van Elkind sat back down. “We’ve already thought of that. Rita and I have decided that Kip will stay in Thread this school year. He and Rita’s mother can all stay at the camp this winter with Stephen. The old woman and Rita don’t get along anyway. This way we’ll avoid the battlefields that leave us all bloody. Besides Mother Regina loves the northwoods and her gardens. She will be happier here. And Kip staying with her will stabilize her, give her something to worry about. Avoid interfering with us.
“Kip did so badly at school last year that he failed almost all of his courses. He can’t get into any college without returning to high school for a year to build up a better record. We can’t let him go back to La Salle academy. That would be too humiliating, and he is a Van Elkind after all. A hole in the wall place like this would be a better setting.”
I had two hopes. One was that Henry would soon rethink this plan. The second was that that Cynthia never learned I had even jokingly suggested it.
“But back to business. Here’s the deal. I want to rent your back room for a private business dinner. Actually, I want you to close the whole restaurant for the night so we have the place to ourselves. Naturally, I would fully pay you for whatever it might cost.”
“If you want the whole cafe, then we can set up your party in the dining room. It would be much more comfortable and pleasant than that backroom,” I pointed out.
“Don’t quibble Wally. I know what I want. I want both privacy and quality. And I don’t want that at home or perched up against walls of glass. If we sat in the front we might as well put ourselves on a pedestal in the Town Square and light fireworks in the sky. We would be as much of a tourist attraction as that ridiculous Reverend Willy.
“I just want a quiet place with a good dinner where four of my colleagues and I can have a very private business meal. Your back room is perfect. That way my guests can enter through the alley. How about Monday? You’d be closed anyway. It’s a small group, so you can handle all of it. Leave Danny, Cynthia, and that loud-mouthed Thelma out of it. It will be your party. No one else need know.”
“Henry,” I protested. “I keep the restaurant closed on Mondays because I need some time off.” I was flattered at his request. He really did like my restaurant.
“There is a thousand dollars in it for you.” He opened his wallet, and counted out ten one-hundred dollar bills. “I knew you would want the cash up front after our small mix up last time. Wally, I’m an honorable man. You do not have to worry about getting paid. It is all on the up and up. In fact, I’d like you to sit in on the whole thing if you will. In fact, I insist you do just that. Your input could be valuable. So, is it a deal?”
Who could say no? I always was a sucker for the rich. At least someone in this town sought me out.
We shook hands and walked to the front door together. Cynthia and Danny were just finishing their window washing. Mr. Packer was walking on to his next event. Van Elkind did a quick scan of the square. “I’m leaving without that fucking kid. Let him find his own way back to the camp.” He got into this Mercedes and left with a squeal of the tires.
“How’dya like him for a father?” Danny muttered as he walked in.
“The only thing worse would be to have Kip for a brother,” Cynthia said, “I can’t wait for the whole bunch of them to return to Chicago. That’ll be the best thing about the end of summer—seeing the last of Kip”
I kept my silence.
The best of the summer’s produce was available to me as I thought about the Elkind dinner. I planned to create a memorable meal. I only had to pick and choose from the freshest of product to blend something that would please the Chicago gourmands. Normally, I turned to Thelma for advice, as she was a good check on my overreaching ambitions. More than once she vetoed a menu that surely would have undone me with its complexity.
But Van Elkind had been adamant that I involve no one else in his catered dinner. The customer is always right. So I sat alone in the kitchen on the following Monday afternoon, surrounded by the splendor of my larder, unable to decide what to make.
Each course I thought of seemed momentarily perfect, and then transformed into a dish either untrue to the season or simply a pretentious fant
asy. The dinner should be simple. He asked me to join the meeting—whatever the meeting was about. I would not be able to do that if the meal was so complicated that it kept me in the kitchen every minute.
I had to start with the tomatoes. My lovely red Big Boys and golden heirloom tomatoes were so different from the usual commercial tomatoes. Just walking by the windowsill where they sat in a row, each growing still riper in the heat and light of the summer sun, you caught the odor of true tomato essence, hinting of what a tomato sauce could be. There was a reason why Europeans first thought these fruits were aphrodisiacs.
Keep it simple. I repeated my mantra. Slice the biggest tomatoes into thick slices that drip with ripeness. Alternate the red and gold in a semicircle of rounds. Drizzle the slices with fine olive oil, freshly ground pepper and sea salt, and sprinkle with minced basil from my back yard garden. Then take thin slices of Thelma’s French bread, drizzle with the same oil, and top with freshly grated Parmesan cheese. Lightly broil the bread as toast, and arrange the rounds in a second semicircle. Top the presentation with a sprig of basil atop a small pile of fresh Colby cheese curds, milder than any mozzarella, so young, made just that morning by the Thread cheese factory, that there has been no chance to age, the essence of milk captured as solid, so fresh that it squeaks as you eat each curd.
And the main course would be roast chicken—those beautiful spring chickens now four months old and range fed by Danny’s father Toivo. I had convinced him to sell me a dozen of his birds. The richness of their flavor was almost wild, so unlike the timidity of commercial chicken. Some oil and wine, some fresh herbs like parsley and rosemary, a spoonful of good Wisconsin ground mustard, some cloves of garlic. I’d throw it all together in a blender until it became a fluid paste. Then I could use a spoon to go in and under the tender yellow skin of the young chicken, loosening it from the firm flesh, creating a pocket just underneath into which I could insert that fragrant paste. Roast the bird for 40 or 50 minutes at a high temperature, the fluid causing the bird to self baste in fresh herbs, causing the skin to crackle into a crisp brown papery covering that kept in the steam of the moist meat.
And what about vegetables? New potatoes boiled with some cut-up baby turnips, riced to remove all lumps, and then mashed with lots of butter, heavy cream, and no stinting on the garlic roasted in the oven. Aromatic and flavorful potatoes bathed in rich yellow gravy blended from the roast chicken drippings. With some fresh green beans cooked slowly with bacon, the southern style, not so they’re crisp, but so they have full flavor and richness.
It would be simple and easy and I could do it.
That only left dessert. With a bushel of the seasons’s early apples sitting in the larder, the choice was an obvious one. A deep-dish apple pie with a Pennsylvania Dutch brown sugar streusel topping, and freshly made brown sugar and buttermilk ice cream. Van Elkind’s guests would forget about their business when they ate all of this. They surely would elevate me to a culinary genius.
Later that evening, just past seven, with the evening light still bright, a car stole up behind my alley entrance. Henry Van Elkind got out of the passenger’s side carrying a large circular container, the kind that contains architectural plans. Three others also stepped out of the late model black Cadillac. Two of the three I had never seen before. The third was the handsome and always brooding Chip Frozen Bear. I opened the door for the group.
“Wait for Red Trueheart to show up, then lock the door and join us in the back room. I’ll show these three where we’re meeting and begin pouring the wine. You do have the wine out?” Van Elkind asked without awaiting a reply.
I looked back into the alley and saw Red walking toward me, still wearing the white apron that he normally wore when he worked in his store. “Good evening,” he said to me as though reciting a secret code. “Strange to see you working on your night off. Mind if I come in for a cup of coffee.”
I let him in, then locked the door behind. “Who do you think would be spying on you?” I asked of Red. “The others are already in the back room. You can join them there. I’ll bring in the first course.”
When I came in with tomatoes, they were already seated, chatting about the weather. They ignored me as I placed the plates in front of them “Wally,” said Van Elkind. “We have decided we will eat first and then get into business when dessert is served. So plan to join us then. Just keep the food coming and the wine flowing.” Without saying a word, I left a serving of the tomatoes at the place setting that was intended for me.
No one seemed to relish the delicate ripeness of my carefully chosen tomatoes. Red looked questioning at the curds of cheese on his plate. Wait for the chicken, I thought, then I’ll hear some sighs of satisfaction.
There were none. Yet their mothers would have been happy, since they cleaned their plates and asked for seconds. But no one complimented me. I started the coffee and heated up the pie in the microwave.
I set out the desserts, poured the coffee, and was about to leave. “Wally, I told you to stay for dessert,” Van Elkind said. “Sit. We’re about to review our plans and I want you to hear them. I think you could be useful.
“First, the introductions. I’m sure you know Red and Chip. So let me turn to the two new faces. This is Jonathan Webber Oxford. His great-grandfather helped tame these woods, even built the camp that I live in now. Jonathan has broad business interests, access to great amounts of capital, and is not too fond of these woods that made his family fortune.”
“But it wasn’t these woods that my great-grandfather cleared,” Oxford said in a squeaky voice that seemed at odds with his heavy face. “When he was here, this was all virgin timber, massive woods just waiting to build America. It’s nothing but crap wood now, not even good for high quality paper.”
“Whose fault is that?” Chip Frozen Bear leaned across the table. “Who clear cut these woods and never replanted them? Who hunted the bear and the moose and the lynx to extinction after you had already destroyed most of their habitat? You and your fellow robber barons—none of whom hold legal right to this land. It belonged to the Lattigo. Your families stole it and destroyed it.” Chip caught my eye and winked.
Oxford stood up rapidly. The dishes on the table rattled, coffee spilled into the saucers. Oxford’s own fatty rolls jiggled as much as the dishes. His blue eyes flashed with anger. “Henry, you assured me when I agreed to come to this meeting that I would not be subjected to remonstrances such as these. My family no longer has anything to do with mining or lumbering these woods. We simply have land investments retained from earlier days. I do not care if this ill-educated, ill-mannered young man thinks my great-grandfather was a villain. He no doubt was and he no doubt deserved the untimely death he met. None of that has anything to do with me, and I do not care to be insulted by Mr. Frozen Bear, especially when he seeks to be my partner.”
“Let’s just be clear,” Chip broke in. “I don’t want to be your partner. I am just keeping watch, preventing you from raping my tribe. Your land investments, as you so lightly put it, cover fifty thousand acres of undeveloped second growth woods, and you control the mineral rights to another fifty thousand acres. With your family’s various trust funds, corporations, and legal monkeyworks, you control half this county.
“And what you don’t control Red does. Leaving my people stuck in a swamp.” Frozen Bear sat down and dipped into his ice cream. “Hey, this is good,” he said, “just like the whole meal was. Wally, your restaurant’s really quite fine. It deserves better than the people you’re serving.”
I smiled in satisfaction. Van Elkind sighed and motioned for Oxford to continue with dessert. “Wally, as you can see, we have a delicate situation, but one that holds great promise. Let me also introduce Mr. Tesla Haligent.” He motioned toward the man who had been silent through much of the meal. “I don’t know if you have ever met him, but he is the president of the holding company that controls both the local bank and the window factory. Tes is very interested in the future of this regio
n, even though admittedly most of his company’s holdings are outside the region.”
“I’m always interested in new business opportunities,” Mr. Haligent said, “especially when I can get an early play.” He was short and thin, slightly balding, although he appeared not much older than I. Throughout dinner he had held a bemused smile, seldom talking, but fully connected with the conversation. “This country is quite beautiful. I think it would attract many, if they only had an inkling of what it could offer.”
An odd collection. What brought together these five individuals: Red Trueheart, the town’s official power broker who so many thought owned most of the township; Jonathan Oxford, the man who I now learned actually owned most of the place; Tesla Haligent, the absentee owner of the bank that held my mortgage, a man whose name I had heard from time to time since he was known to run the company that owned the bank and factory, but as far as I had heard, had never visited either; Henry Van Elkind, the ostentatious vacationing millionaire who was just another of the summer folk who passed through town; and finally, the most unlikely of all, Chip Frozen Bear, an MBA-wielding native American who could have made a fortune on Wall Street but had come home to be angry.
“I think it’s time we told young Wally here what this is all about. We are the primary stockholders in a new land development and entertainment company, soon to transform this corner of the world through a great re-creation of Penokee County.” Henry unrolled a large poster that he had brought in with him. “Introducing American Seasons – an amusement park par excellence and resort for the entire family.
“There’s Winter, home to fast-paced snowy fun such as tobogganing and thrill rides like the Avalanche.
“There’s Spring, with Mardi Gras in New Orleans and Spring Break on the Seasons Lagoon.
“There’s Summer with a white water ride through the natural wilds of our native lands.
“And there’s Fall—where the state fair meets the horrors of Halloween.
“Put it all together with a convention center, resort hotels, fine restaurants, new shopping centers and four intertwined amusements parks that will put Disney World to shame. It’s American Seasons.” I thought Van Elkind would drown the room with his enthusiasm.
Tales From The Loon Town Cafe Page 12
