Olivia

by Judith Rossner

  “Your restaurant?” I managed to choke out. “The restaurant is yours?”

  “You bet it is. Look at the lease. Look at the contract. Look at anything you want to look at.”

  “How about the kitchen?”

  A pause, then a shrug. “The kitchen is whoever cooks in it.”

  “Whoever cooks in it. It doesn’t matter who it is.”

  “Sure it matters. But there’s plenty of good cooks around. I have a list of cooks who want to work for me.”

  “Mmm. Women.”

  “You bet,” Angelo said emphatically. “That’s who works in my kitchen. Women.”

  I’d gone my limit, and I gave up. But the conversation played over and over in my brain, full of themes I’d avoided hearing until now. Ebrea. He’d shrugged off my being a Jew when it had to have meant something. Maybe it was so important that when he found himself wanting me, the only way to deal with it at all was to dismiss it. The alternative, after all, would have been to lose me and the child he was delighted that I was bearing. Maybe Angelo hadn’t been in love with me any more than I’d been with him. Maybe in his mind I’d been no more than a carrier womb, like the woman I’d read about in one of the magazines my parents sent me from the States. All of which might have been tolerable . . . I had, after all, married him as much because I wanted a baby as for any other reason . . . except that it was turning out that Angelo had a daughter and I did not. Livvy, perhaps encouraged by him, maintained a cool indifference to me. Our estrangement was so keen as to make me feel I’d exaggerated her distance during the time when she’d just loved to be around her father. She’d become averse to so much as a hug and a kiss from me when she left for school in the morning, and always arranged to go to her friends after school when her father was away.

  At nine years Livvy was not the ravishingly beautiful child she’d been, but she was a skinny, pretty little girl with big, dark eyes, shiny, wavy, black hair, and a lovely deep skin tone (kissed by the sun, as Angelo had it). When I claim she was less than ravishingly beautiful, I am saying something I couldn’t have said in front of Angelo, who was fond of telling her that he had talked to God before she was born, describing how she should look, and God had followed his specifications.

  In fact, Angelo’s references to God expanded geometrically in the weeks and months following our fight. Per amor di Dio! became his favorite exclamation and there was often a sort of righteous-holy aura to him, like a priest who’s been forced to hide his own clothes and dress like the cannibals but can no longer conceal his connections to heaven. He began taking Livvy to church Sunday mornings, traditionally the only time the three of us spent together in our apartment. She lost interest in the English she’d been learning, was less eager to answer my parents’ letters, told them she was very busy with her schoolwork, and asked that they write to her in Italian from now on, if they still wanted to write.

  I tried to think of it as a stage she was passing through. I advised myself to get absorbed in something interesting enough so I wouldn’t be brooding over her every moment I wasn’t working. But the only something that engaged me at all was food.

  On a Sunday evening when Livvy had gone to her room to study, Angelo had left the house after kissing her good night, and I was exhausted but too tense to sleep. I roamed around our steel and leather living room looking for something to divert me. Finally I picked up The Classic Cuisine of the Italian Jews.

  “Vesti da turco e mangia da ebreo” is a well-known, ancient Italian adage which advises one to “dress like a Turk and eat like a Jew.” We are thus exhorted by the Italians—who created a cuisine that is the delight of gourmets the world over—to become acquainted with the cuisine of the Italian Jews if we really would like to eat well. . . . Jews modified traditional Italian dishes to make them kosher, often creating delicate and delicious new ones (see Lasagne Verdi; made with tomato sauce instead of meat sauce, it became a dish of great delicacy) . . . eggplant and finocchio (fennel), the quintessence of Italian cooking, were originally used only by Jews. . . . The world-famous carciofi alia giudia . . . consists of very fresh artichokes trimmed in the manner that was devised by the Roman Jews. . . . Many dishes which are traditionally and uniquely Italian-Jewish are seldom, if ever, found in Italian cookbooks. When they are, no mention is made of their Jewish origin except for a very few such as cuscussu all ebraica (Couscous in the Jewish style), carciofi alia giudia (artichokes in the style of the Jews)—which was originally called Carciofi Arrosto by Roman Jews and was changed to alia giudia some fifty years ago . . . original Jewish recipes . . . Concia, Baccala Mantecato, Maritucci Bread, Torzelli and Sfratti come immediately to mind.

  It was fascinating, really. They read like a list of dishes Angelo loved. He adored artichokes. Carciofi alia giudia had been on the menu at Anna’s whenever artichokes were in season. That they were not on our menu I’d attributed to Angelo’s passion for the Sicilian. But there was no dish among the others listed that we mightn’t have served. There were instructions for cooking cardoons, cauliflower, chicory, and other eggplant dishes, as well as escarole and fennel, every one of which Angelo’s mother had made and he adored. The one for torzelli, fried chicory, began with the note that it went well with anything and was reminiscent of carciofi alia giudia, but much less costly and easier to prepare. The recipes for maritucci, a bread lightly sweetened with anise, and for sfratti, a honey- and orange-sweetened pastry, called for numerous ingredients guaranteed to please the Sicilian tastebud.

  Artichokes hadn’t quite come into season, but in a burst of deluded defiance (see if he can get another cook so fast!) I put torzelli alia giudia on the blackboard lunch menu one day that week. Angelo probably wouldn’t show up for lunch, I told myself, and if he did, he probably wouldn’t notice.

  A few people ordered the dish and there were no compliments or complaints, so that I’d forgotten about it, nor had I thought to erase the blackboard, when, as I was preparing the mustica for the dinner antipasto, Angelo stormed into the kitchen, clutching the board with one hand, hitting it with the other.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he shouted, loudly enough so that Benedetta, who had just arrived to help me, froze in her spot.

  The lie I’d prepared in case he complained didn’t come to mind.

  “If you are referring to the chicory dish on the lunch menu, I can’t understand what you’re so excited about. I didn’t have time and there were no nice artichokes.”

  “Since when do you start changing the menu?” he yelled, his face redder than I’d ever seen it. “Since when do you—”

  “I’ve been adding new things here and there for ages,” I lied, my exterior growing calmer as his grew wild. I knew I was passing the point of no return. “I thought you didn’t mind, or at least you didn’t care enough to notice. Anyway, what is it you mind, that it’s new or that it’s Jewish? I mean, your chef’s Jewish, in case you’ve forgotten.”

  Benedetta walked out of the kitchen and wasn’t seen again until dinner. Livvy had stopped in briefly after school, but I hadn’t seen her since. Perhaps thinking of her, Angelo stopped shouting, walked over to me, and grabbed my arm so hard that it was black and blue for a couple of weeks.

  “Are you telling me you’ve been putting Jew stuff on my menu?”

  “I’m telling you,” I said, remembering more of what I’d read than was healthy, cranking it out in spite of a voice telling me above my pain to shut up, “that there’s been Jew stuff on your menu all along. Not just artichokes. The Jews ate fennel before anyone else in Italy did. And eggplant . . .”

  His eyes widened, his grip on me tightened.

  “I have news for you, Angelo, your precious fucking eggplant was discovered, it was the Jews who first—”

  With his free hand he hit me so hard that I crashed out of his other hand to the floor. I was crying but I couldn’t shut up.

  “What I don’t understand is why you wanted to marry me if you hate the Jews so much!”
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br />   “I didn’t want to marry you,” he said, standing over me with clenched teeth. “You were pregnant. Whore.”

  It silenced me. It even dammed up my tears. Its cruelty, its absurdity, its implicit and explicit lies, set it beyond response. Later my brain would go over the words, trying to find a place where I might have heard something he hadn’t actually said. In the meantime, he helped me to my feet, walked me to a chair where I sat down, and left me alone in the kitchen.

  Although life wasn’t lovely, there were few episodes so horrendous as that one, and I held on until Livvy was ten. My parents had bought a summer home in Westport. Not only were they tired of traveling, but Beatrice and Larry now had a son, Max, whom his grandparents adored as they’d once thought they could only adore Livvy, in whom they found those qualities of brilliance and beauty they’d thought unique to her. They still visited us, but the visits were shorter and less frequent, and each time they urged us to come to the States next time. This was not something Angelo was about to do, or permit Livvy to do with me. They would have given me the money to come without her, but I was afraid. At some point I’d come to feel that not only did Angelo face the possibility of my leaving him (and, of course, his daughter) with equanimity, but that once I touched American soil—pavement—I might not be able to make myself leave again. My parents sent me American magazines, from their new subscriptions—Architectural Digest and Better Homes and Gardens—to the old standbys—The New Yorker, The Nation, and various arts magazines. I read about everything American with the fervor I’d once reserved for M. F. K. Fisher’s adventures in Paris or Elizabeth David on southern France.

  I told Angelo that I would love to visit my parents. He said that was fine, he’d buy a ticket for me, one-way or round-trip, but I shouldn’t think for a minute that I was taking Olivia. I just nodded. I had, after all, known it all along.

  That Easter my father, who was speaking at a conference in Frankfurt, took the occasion to visit for a few days. Livvy was unavailable most of the time, uneasy when she did see him. He tried hard to convey to Angelo the sense that they loved their grandchild and would not hold against him what happened between us as husband and wife, that is, they would not side with me in a manner visible to Olivia. When Angelo didn’t even pretend to be interested, my father gave me the name of a good lawyer in Rome, “should the time come” when I required one.

  Angelo worked increasingly hard to make me believe the time had, indeed, come. Whether with his encouragement, or simply because she had become uncomfortable with me, I could never find Livvy when he wasn’t around. When he was, they spoke in a muted, exclusionary way that turned me into an uninvited guest. A light (ha) query as to what they were talking about was always met with “Niente.” Nothing. When I complained once that I might as well not be there, neither protested. Still, I couldn’t let go. My parents would pay for my divorce if Angelo wouldn’t, but they warned that their funds were more limited than they’d been before they bought the house, and they couldn’t promise me money for frequent visits to Rome. I mustn’t leave Livvy until I was ready.

  Whether it had always been in Angelo’s mind (back of or forward) that a civil marriage to a Jew did not have to be taken seriously, or whether he’d decided this only when I became an insufficiently docile wife, he now took steps to ensure that I would leave. He allowed, or, more likely, instructed, Livvy to refer casually to Mirella, the woman in Sicily who’d been his mistress for years, and whom Livvy had apparently come to think of as The Person who was Most Like a Real Mother to her. Mirella began to give me her real name when she called. It was made obvious to me that when Angelo took Livvy to Sicily, they stayed with the other woman.

  For some years I had been extremely careful about birth control, inserting a diaphragm at night as automatically as I washed my face and brushed my teeth. Now the part of me that couldn’t bear to lose my daughter, no matter what, made me careless. It was after a night when Angelo had rolled over on me at around three in the morning and made sex to me, and I’d realized afterward that I hadn’t worn my diaphragm, then lay awake until morning in cold terror at the possibility of becoming pregnant by a man I’d never loved and couldn’t live with anymore, that I understood that, ready or not, I had to proceed. I went to see the lawyer. I became extremely polite to Angelo, a sign he understood for what it was and reacted to in kind.

  It had become my custom, as depression cost me much of my energy, to have a double espresso with my early-evening meal, just before the dinner rush began. Early one evening, as I sat sipping the coffee and looking at an Italian women’s magazine, Angelo entered the trattoria with an extremely attractive girl who might have had on a neon headband reading American. She had long blond hair, worn in a single braid, bright blue eyes, and freckles. Tall and slender, at least when you didn’t see her rear end, she wore a black sweater, blue jeans, and sneakers.

  Angelo introduced her as Polly Smith, told me she had recently finished cooking school with Marcella Hazan and was looking for work as a sous-chef. He thought we should hire her. Right away. Under normal circumstances I might have argued for temperance and trial, but as things were, I readily consented. Whatever vague feelings I had against wanting to be easily replaced were outweighed by the knowledge that if the divorce was to go smoothly, and Olivia was to remain available to me for visits, I had to be helpful.

  This turned out to be easy because Polly was wonderful. Angelo had discovered her working in one of his “friends’ ” restaurants. Now he found it within himself to be flexible in the matter of the menu; the first couple of days she was working with me, Polly cooked only the dishes she’d done with Ms. Hazan. She was a quick learner and amiable, in that way of certain girls who’re rich and pretty and have never come to think of new people as the enemy. The only vengeful thoughts I’d entertained had been of taking my cookbooks and index cards without copying them or giving Angelo the opportunity to do so. Let him find out how unimportant I’d been! But in my last weeks at the restaurant, I instead encouraged Polly to copy all my notes, showed her some of my tricks to make kitchen life easier.

  More painful, of course, were my conversations with Livvy. I told her that I was going home to the United States because her father and I had grown too much apart to live together, and, after her, everyone I felt closest to was there.

  She nodded.

  I told her that if I thought she cared, that she really wanted me to stay, I would remain, no matter how miserable I was. She was silent.

  “Have you ever thought,” I asked hesitantly, “about the possibility . . . that someday you might want to come to the States? If not now, maybe a little later?”

  She appeared startled.

  “I know you wouldn’t want to leave your father. Your Italian life.” Her whole life, except for me. “It’s just that it’s hard for me to imagine not seeing you for . . . for . . .” I couldn’t say it. Weeks? Months? She’d never been away from home for more than three days, and then it was with her father. She seldom slept at another girl’s house. She was there. Here. With me. It wasn’t just my throat that hurt; my jaw felt as though it were trying to pull away from the rest of my face. My daughter hadn’t seemed to be masking feeling but to lack it. Now she appeared alarmed, doubtless at the prospect of my crying. “Your father and I have agreed. . . . I hope you’ll visit me. And want me to visit you.”

  She shrugged, as though I’d suggested something a little bizarre, not worth arguing about. She had Angelo and she had Mirella. Why would she even notice that I was gone?

  The dam burst. I didn’t begin by weeping gently. A howl of anguish escaped me, then was broken by the first tears. She stared at me for a moment, then turned and ran from the room.

  She was ten years old. Maybe she didn’t know what to make of it; I was doing something I wanted to do, why was I so upset? To this day I don’t know when she’d shut down on me, but this was not the time when she was going to open up, and I suppose that if she wasn’t going to do that, runnin
g was her only recourse. During my remaining time in Rome she avoided me more strenuously than she had before.

  With the help of a couple of competent lawyers, the end came quietly and easily, as was appropriate to a marriage that didn’t precisely exist. Angelo gave me a lump sum in lira that came to about five thousand dollars in American money in exchange for my promise not to attempt to get custody of Olivia. (My lawyer went for ten thousand, but Angelo was able to convince him he didn’t have it.) My parents and I would not be prevented from visiting Livvy, and when she wished to come to New York, Angelo would allow her to do so and pay her airfare, up to twice a year. I visited the few friends we had whom I’d thought of as both of ours, told them what appeared to be news to no one except myself. When it was time for Angelo to take me to the airport, Livvy was nowhere to be found. Angelo said she was too upset to come with us. I gave him a letter for her in which I told her that I would write to her every week, call her once a month. For now, she could call me collect at my parents’ anytime she wanted to. Angelo took me to the airport, where, dry-eyed, I kissed him good-bye, boarded the plane, and sat like a zombie for the next eight hours, unresponsive to stewardesses’ questions except about what I wanted to eat (anything; I didn’t notice the taste) or drink (gin with lemon), unwilling to exchange the most basic pleasantries with the nice American businessman sitting next to me.

  I didn’t cry until I laid eyes on my father in the waiting area at Kennedy. Then it took me some weeks to stop.

  In the meantime, I received a note from Polly that began by pointing out her new address in Florence. She had quit the first time Angelo yelled at her, and now that she’d come to understand what I had put up with, she thought I might like to know that she had taken all the notebooks and card files with her.

  I hadn’t expected to be happy but I’d expected to feel relief. My head had been in a vise controlled by Angelo and the vise would be gone. So it was, but along with pain, any sense of purpose had evaporated. My parents had said I must stay with them until I’d “recovered.” The word had sounded strange at the time, but now I understood that not only was it apt, but accomplishing it would be more difficult than I’d dreamed. I’d assured myself I wouldn’t miss Livvy much more than I had when we lived in the same house and she barely spoke to me. I’d lied. At first, I called every Sunday. Angelo always checked, then said she wasn’t there. He sounded strangely sympathetic, and I felt he was really trying to get her to the phone. One day he insisted but she was so cold and abrupt that it was worse than not speaking with her and I didn’t call again.