His mother turned everything she did into a game—with rules, of course. The rules of the Rocky Port kitchen were that every recipe had to come out of Fannie Farmer, had to be made entirely at home from fresh—or dried or salted—ingredients, and had to be, insofar as possible, an invention of the New World. Pennsylvania Dutch dishes were permitted, but gnocchi, they sadly agreed, although in Fannie Farmer, did not get under the wire. Noodles but not spaghetti. A dish, his mother decided, did not have its citizenship papers if it had been cooked in America for less than a hundred years—discriminatory legislation, Peter commented.
In case of dispute, Peter was assigned to go to the library after school and look up, for instance, when the Portuguese had first come to America, not counting Magellan: late nineteenth century, imported as cheap labor to work in the cotton mills of New Bedford and the North Atlantic fishing industry. His mother thought she was opposed to progressive education, but in fact she was a natural progressive educator. Because of this cooking bee, he learned about the Irish potato famine, and the ’48 revolutions in Germany, and the depressed price of wheat in Sweden in 1886—a peak year of Swedish immigration into Wisconsin and Minnesota. German Jews had begun coming in large numbers after ’48, so that on the length-of-resident principle, as he slyly remarked to his mother, she should be marking gefüllte fish and matzoth balls. Those dishes, she quickly replied, were not in Fannie Farmer, which proved they had not been assimilated, unlike Irish stew—chauvinism, said Peter, getting a rise.
Mixes, obviously, were out, as well as frozen foods. Canned tomatoes were allowed, because housewives had “always” put them up, and an unexplained exception was made for canned bouillon. Portuguese bread was allowed, because, his mother said, it belonged to the locality, and it would be stupid to eat store bread under the circumstances. She would make French toast but not “French” pancakes. Lunches did not count. Peter could have tuna fish with store mayonnaise and Campbell’s vegetable soup with the alphabet in it and salami and yoghurt—whatever he wanted. For lunch, his mother usually had bouillon, an apple, and milk.
The game was not as easy as it sounded, since the Rocky Port market leaned heavily on its frozen-food chests, and there were few fresh vegetables to be had, even in the supermarket in the neighboring town. They had onions and carrots and potatoes and cabbage, red and white, in various forms and leeks and broccoli (which Peter questioned) and beets and squash and spinach (though not the bag kind) and fried and scalloped tomatoes. His mother rang the changes on apples and pears and quinces and dried prunes and apricots; she made ambrosia, using fresh coconut, and “snows” and soufflés and puddings and cobblers. They had nuts and what the grocer called rat cheese. There was a lobster pound on a wharf just down the street, and Peter learned to boil the lobsters himself; his mother would not hear of his bisecting them alive for broiling, though he guaranteed her that was a more merciful death.
Getting fresh fish was a problem, despite the fishing fleet. It was easier for a gull. Finally his mother found a fisherman who sold her striped bass and mackerel and bluefish and codfish and smelts; she waited outside the back door of his house to get it, like contraband, which reminded her of her father’s stories of Prohibition and the moonshiners who had stills in the woods and came up before him as a judge in federal court. In the grocery store, she bought salt codfish in funny wooden boxes with a sliding cover that Peter used afterward for his stone and shell collections. “When I was a girl, I kept buttons in them,” she remembered.
This made her think of the artistic button collections housewives used to show at county fairs when she was a girl, and this, in turn, made her think of the oil paintings done on cigarbox covers—views of the Rhine—German farmers gave her great-grandfather, a country doctor. “In those days, Peter, nobody threw anything away. They tried to think of what they could do with it or make of it. Waste was considered a crime. ‘It’s a crime to throw that away,’ my grandmother always said. What that really meant was that you were stupid if you couldn’t find a use for something. Like burying fishbones in corn hills when you were planting, the way the Indians used to do. Or making potpourri of old flower petals. Or patchwork quilts. People were conservationists, like Nature.”
Peter could not imagine, she said, what America had been like in those days, at least for the comfortable classes, which included carpenters and house-painters and streetcar conductors. Already it had been changing when she was a girl. It had only been in the summers, when she and her sister went to their grandmother’s farm, after their mother had died, that she had really seen the old America, which she connected with the speckled foxglove in her grandmother’s yard. In the winters, in Marietta, where she had grown up and gone to college, it had not been so different from now. Just the difference between radio and television and between short-play and long-play records. She smiled at Peter for idealizing the days of radio.
But in the war years, she said, America had become more pastoral, more the way it had been in the farmland. That was because of the scarcities. Nobody could get help; the girls were all working in the war plants. You had to do things yourself. Rationing made you economize. People walked again because of the gasoline shortage. Old wood-and coal-stoves came out on account of the lack of fuel oil. Meat and canned goods were going to the Army. She had liked the war years. Peter thought maybe because that was her youth and she had got away from home. She and her sister came to New York in ’42 to study at the Mannes School; that same year, she started with Landowska. Peter, who kept relentless tabs on her birthdays, knew that she had been twenty-one then. They had had what she called a dumbbell apartment—two big rooms with a narrow connecting passage. Back home, their stepmother had planted a Victory Garden, and every week in the summertime huge boxes of vegetables, packed in damp newspapers, arrived by Railway Express—their stepmother was too patriotic to waste fertilizer on flowers, which did not help the war effort. His aunt was impatient with these shipments and wanted to dump them in the garbage. But the fair Rosamund distributed string beans and cucumbers and squashes to everyone they knew; she studied cookbooks and stayed up late in the warm summer nights (that was before air conditioning) pickling and preserving in big crocks and Mason jars. She gave the results as presents or bartered them for sugar coupons. They hitchhiked to the seashore, where they dug clams and gathered mussels. A painter on Fire Island taught her to mushroom in the pine woods. Her grandfather, the minister, kept bees in the parsonage yard and he sent them fresh honey. Peter was sorry he had not been alive then. The way his mother described it, the war sounded like an idyll. He filed the thought away in the Two-Sides-to-Every-Question compartment.
Excited by her sessions in the Rocky Port kitchen, she told Peter tales of her girlhood, of phosphorescent wood and fireflies and prodigious snowmen. He heard about her ancestors and the old Northwest Territory, which had been organized in Marietta, the first settlement in the state. He was glad to know that the Ohio Company had prohibited slavery in the territory way back in the eighteenth century. She promised to take him, some day, to Marietta, where he had not been since he was a baby; it had been an Enlightenment capital, full of educators. The streets had been given classical names, such as Sacra Via, which had greatly pleased the babbo, who in a fit of enthusiasm had wanted to have Peter christened by his great-grandfather. But his mother said no; a Jew could not do that in the year 1945. Peter was surprised to hear that the old parts of Marietta were in a Classic Revival style that looked in fact a lot like Rocky Port. He had imagined Ohio as an inland California.
His mother—like many musicians, she said—had a remarkable memory, and she never repeated a story, except as an encore, just as, this fall in the kitchen, she never repeated a dish. Peter was keeping score. She had not yet had a failure despite inadequate equipment, which led her to swear sometimes, especially when she was making a piecrust, using a wine bottle for a rolling-pin. “The poor workman blames his tools, Mother,” he would tease her, leaning against the kitchen door.
They often discussed why they felt so at home in New England. It could not be just the Doric columns and peristyles and pediments, in his mother’s case, or the fact that Peter had been born in South Hadley, Massachusetts—his father had been teaching at Mount Holyoke then. Could there be such a thing as racial memory? But if so, why was that memory selective? Why “remember” New England rather than Florence or Palestine, neither of which drew Peter at all? Maybe there was a collective American memory of white meeting-houses and village greens that you acquired at birth or naturalization. New England was the promised land, even for those who had left it behind or who had never seen it, except in the movies. His mother said that was because New England looked like the ideal America that you studied in civics; it looked republican, with a small r.
Going to school every day, Peter was well aware that he had not left Berkeley and the Radiation Laboratory totally behind. It did not need Preparedness Drill to tell him that. He had only to look at his classmates, many of whom would leave school at the statutory age of sixteen to go to work in the plastics factory or at the nearby submarine base. But his mother had more illusions to shatter. Since she seldom talked with anyone except an elderly storekeeper, she could believe she was living in the past. It was a storekeeper who delivered the blow. The village hardware store did not carry bean pots.
“How extraordinary, Peter! The man says they don’t make them any more. Do you think that can be true?” She was always asking him wide-eyed, troubled questions like that one, to which he could not possibly, at his age, know the answer; it was a kind of flattery, applied to the male ego. The only bean pot Peter was familiar with was pictured on a can. But he saw that for his mother this was a truly upsetting discovery, tantamount to finding that the American Eagle was extinct. She was even more ruffled when she returned from her weekly shopping trip with the report that the two hardware stores in the neighboring town did not carry bean pots either. “Don’t get any call for them,” one shopkeeper had told her. The other said, “Try the antique store, lady. Two doors down.” “Can you imagine that, Peter? How do you explain it? Why, when we left your father—how long ago was it?” “Eight years.” “Eight years. That isn’t such a long time, is it? Well, eight years ago, every hardware store in New England had bean pots galore. Just the way they had seeds and onion sets and tomato plants in the springtime. Do you suppose that if I took the train to Providence …? I could go to the Brown Music Library while I was there. …”
“Can’t you use a casserole, Mother?” Peter was trying to be helpful, but his mother looked at him in horror, as if he were a changeling. “What a question!” she said. He did not blame his mother for caring about things like bean pots in the face of a general indifference; indeed, he loved her for that. On the other hand, he could not share her sense of shock and loss, just as he could not respond, except lamely, when she told him someone he had never known had died. In the end, Mrs. Curtis gave them her bean pot, which she had been using as a vase for a bouquet of dried grasses. “You can keep it, my dear. I haven’t baked a bean in twenty years. How nice that you’re going to do it for Peter!”
Mrs. Curtis herself, an eldritch old person, ate most of her meals in the Portuguese diner; Peter had often seen her there when he stopped by for a hamburger. “We must do something for her, Peter,” his mother repeated. He guessed what was coming: Thanksgiving. The two of them could not eat a whole turkey between them; they would have to have guests or do without. Peter was torn between gluttony and his reluctance to have company. His mother, he suspected, would not be satisfied to have just Mrs. Curtis. She would want to ask all her descendants too. He had nothing personal against Mrs. Curtis’ descendants; one of her grandchildren, a girl, he talked to at school occasionally. Nevertheless, his heart hardened. Mrs. Curtis would be bound to ask them back. She had already been telling Peter about “a few friends” in Rocky Port who were dying to meet his mother. He foresaw a series of musical evenings.
On the other hand, he was familiar with his mother’s attachment to Thanksgiving as a day of bounty. In Berkeley, every year she had rounded up all the lonely hearts available on the campus—plus a wheel or two (the fair Rosamund was transparent), so that no one would suddenly glance around the groaning board and ask himself what they all had in common. As long as he could remember, wherever he and his mother lived, there had been company present when she struck up the hymn “We GATHER TOGETHER to ASK the Lord’s BLESSing,” which she said was an old Dutch resistance tune from the time of William the Silent. Adjuring himself not to be selfish, Peter hit on a compromise. “Why don’t we ask Aunt Millie to come up from New York with her brood?”
His mother was touched by the suggestion; she knew that Peter did not particularly care for her sister. Her delight made Peter ashamed. Was she all that lonely? Maybe she was just eager to show their new household to somebody; women were like that. He found that he himself was rather looking forward to taking his cousins for a walk in the sanctuary and showing them the cormorants on their piles. “ ‘It is not good that man should be alone,’ ” Mrs. Curtis had hissed at him the other day in the library.
Nature rewarded Peter for thinking of his mother. Two days before Thanksgiving, an apple tree in the yard across the street uncannily burst into bloom. Although a confirmed atheist, he could not help seeing this as a blessing conferred especially on their household; the Lord was making a covenant with Peter the Levite. The blossoming tree was Aaron’s Rod—what else?—the sign that the Lord had picked Aaron to be high priest of Israel and set him apart, with the tribe of Levi, from the others. Aaron’s Rod, if Peter recalled right, had put out almond blossoms overnight; the Lord was a craftsman who worked with local materials—almonds in the desert, apples here. It occurred to Peter that this was only the latest of a series of rather broad hints that he and his mother had been led to Rocky Port to work out a special destiny. He was too modest to suppose that he was the Messiah, but he might be a precursor, a sort of pilot-project in the wilderness. He did not confide the thought in his mother, who, after all, was a Gentile and outside the Law. But he knew that she was marveling too.
The house across the street was boarded up for the winter, like the other shuttered houses on the water; out of season, no one passed this way except the mailman and the newsboy on his bicycle, delivering the morning paper, and now it was barely light when the folded paper was pitched onto the porch. So that the mystery of the flowering apple tree, like that of the owl and the cormorants, was being enacted just for the two of them, in Nature’s private code. The mailman, when he passed—bringing a Thanksgiving card with a turkey on it from Hans to Peter—could offer no explanation. He had never heard tell of an apple tree in these parts blooming at Thanksgiving; he guessed it was a Freak of Nature. “Radio says snow,” he added, and, sure enough, on Thanksgiving Day, while they were all at table, with Millicent’s husband carving, the promised snow came. The whole family rushed to the window. Across the way, snowflakes were gently falling on the tender green leaves, rose-red buds and pink-and-white shivering blossoms. “Quite a production,” said Millie in her ironical tones.
“Hey, kids,” she ordered, “go and get your cameras. Did you put in color film?” Peter groaned to himself. He watched with savage hate while his cousins stole the apple tree with their clicking Kodaks. “Have you got it?” said his aunt. His cousins had it in their little black boxes. The graceless meal resumed. Peter’s uncle put a drumstick on Peter’s plate. With her eyes, his mother warned him not to say he preferred white meat. Later that afternoon, just before dusk, someone tapped Hello on the window. It was Mrs. Curtis and all her family come to see the apple tree. His mother had shared the secret. The fire was burning in the hearth; outside, it was still snowing. “Ask them in,” commanded Millie. “Peter, go open the door.”
In a minute, the little house was full of windbreakers, scarves, and galoshes. Millie’s husband was in the kitchen, mixing drinks. Peter’s Coca-Cola supply was decimated. He was
sent upstairs for his Monopoly set. His chess set, where he had been working out a chess problem, was commandeered by his uncle to play with Mrs. Curtis’ son-in-law, who did not know any better than to open with the King’s Rook’s pawn. Peter’s fire was re-laid, with the logs placed upward, teepee style. And his mother stood smiling on the scene, murmuring with her sister, whom an evil day—which answered to the name of Peter Levi—had brought to Rocky Port.
His aunt, who was older than his mother, took pride in her ability to “size up” situations; she had the brusque, brutal air of a person detailed to cut Gordian knots. All through the day, she had been interrogating Peter about himself, his mother, and their relations with the Rocky Port community. She had established that Hans still wrote to his mother and that his mother probably answered. Her dry blue eye had inventoried the house, checking off the chessmen, the prism that hung in Peter’s window, Handel’s Messiah on the phonograph, the bird book, the star book, the tree book, the bean pot, the music on his mother’s clavichord, the clothes in his mother’s closet. At table she had noted the home-made cranberry jelly molded in the shape of a heart (there were duplicate tin hearts in Berkeley and in the babbo’s kitchen in Wellesley), the corn bread and walnut stuffing, the green tomato pickle, the mincemeat tarts with home-made vanilla ice cream that Peter had been stirring every half hour in the refrigerator trays. She had learned that the turkey was a fresh-killed local bird and how much his mother had paid for it. She had taken stock of the cormorants and assessed the woodpile. It was as though these separate items “hung together” in some derisory pattern, like a stitched sampler—Rosamund’s folly.
Birds of America Page 4
