Delicious!

by Ruth Reichl

  I hope you had a happy Christmas too.

  Your friend,

  Lulu

  That was the last letter in the “Beekeeping” file, and I began to search for clues to the next letters, thinking over what Anne Milton had said about Bertie. Anne Milton! I’d forgotten all about dinner. I stuffed the letters into my bag and made a dash for the door.

  Mad Bee Jars

  “YOU ARE EXTREMELY TARDY!” SAMMY SOUNDED MIFFED, BUT HIS face was relieved. “Anne Milton has been tarrying for a full fifteen minutes.”

  “But look what I’ve found.… ” I pulled the letters from my bag and waved them in his face.

  He pushed them away. “Not now, not now.” Sammy hurried toward the dining room at something very close to a run, Chinese robes flapping about him. “I fear that the chicken will be dry.”

  Following him, I stopped in the dining room doorway, stunned by the transformation. Sammy had filled the starkly modern room with masses of cherry blossoms. He’d covered the table with his grandmother’s heavy damask cloth, which rippled smoothly to the floor, and covered that with an astonishing quantity of ornate sterling pieces. He’d set candelabra all around the room, creating an effect of old-fashioned luxury.

  The most radiant old woman I’d ever seen was standing by the window. Thin and ramrod straight, Anne Milton was wearing a suit of dusty-rose wool, with a white satin blouse. “Isn’t this lovely?” She took my hand and gave a small gurgle of appreciative laughter that made her seem momentarily young. “It is such a treat not to be eating alone, as I so often do these days. I never miss Bertram quite so much as when I’m at the table.”

  “Sit down, sit down.” Sammy made the introductions as he poured pale Raveneau Chablis into fragile crystal glasses until the fresh scent of the wine filled the room. He picked up a knife and began to carve the bird, slicing into crisply burnished skin.

  “I hope I’m not being rude.… ” I was just so curious.

  Anne flashed me a sympathetic smile. “Not at all, dear. I understand your impatience. You’ll want to know how I met Bertie.”

  She settled into her chair, picked up a spoon, and turned it over, running a finger across the lily-of-the-valley pattern. “It was on V-J Day. I was at Barnard College then, and when the news came, we girls all rushed into the street and started walking to Times Square. It was as if the whole city were trying to get there, pulled by some impulse to be together. Were there bells ringing? I think so, but maybe it just felt that way.

  “We could hardly believe that the war was really over and the boys were going to come home, and … well, you’ve seen the pictures. You know how it is when your feet have been asleep and suddenly the blood comes rushing back? You start sensing parts of your body that you had forgotten were there. It was like that. Everything felt good and clean and possible. If you hadn’t lost anyone, you felt blessed. And if you had, for that moment at least the sacrifice seemed noble; after all, we had saved the world.”

  Sammy passed the vegetables, and Anne stopped to lift a few fat spears of asparagus off the platter.

  “We walked all the way downtown, and when we got to Times Square there was such a throng that I became separated from my friends. I was looking frantically around for them, jostled by all those laughing, happy people, and the strangest thing happened: I turned and found that I was staring at myself. At my twin.”

  I had been entranced by her soft, musical voice and the graceful movements of her elegant hands, but now I remembered what, and whom, she was talking about. “I had no idea who he was, and for a minute I thought I had lost my mind from the sheer joy of the moment. It was so improbable to be in Times Square, in that enormous crowd, and be looking at my double. We were even the same height. He seemed as startled as I was, and then he pulled me toward him and kissed me. Not a passionate kiss—a European kiss, one on each cheek. And then he took my hand and we walked down the street together. It felt like the most natural thing in the world. We had not said a single word—but I knew then that we would be together for the rest of our lives.”

  “You were married?” In my mind I was picturing a man who looked exactly like Anne walking up the aisle in a stark white church, his hand clutching hers.

  “Oh, no,” she said this hurriedly, clearly not wanting to give the wrong impression. The picture faded, and I waited to see what would replace it. “Well, I would have married him.” Her voice moved lower. “I was in love with him, you see. Bertie loved me too, but not in that way. He was not a woman’s man, if you take my meaning.”

  She said this without a trace of embarrassment. If Anne had ever been disappointed or angry, those feelings were long gone. I glanced quickly at Sammy as I readjusted the picture: Anne looking on while the man she loved stared longingly at a masculine stranger off in the distance.

  “But why did he hide the letters?” I blurted out.

  Sammy’s hand came down on the table. Silverware clattered. “Cease these interruptions! Permit Anne to relate her story. We do not yet know that it was Bertie who hid them.”

  “He’d gone to library school,” Anne continued, “and so the army trained him in cryptography in New Jersey. That was where he briefly met Mr. Beard, who impressed him enormously. Like Mr. Beard, Bertie desperately wanted to serve overseas, and he was quite bitter about being sent to Virginia. He always thought that, much as he tried to hide it, the government suspected that he was homosexual, and that was why they refused to send him to the front. In any case, when they finally released him, he came straight to New York. He had just arrived when I met him.”

  “Was he working at Delicious!?”

  “No, not then. When we met he was the librarian at a private school, but it was the wrong job for him. He was in his thirties, and he had no talent for children. When he learned that Delicious! was looking for a librarian, he immediately applied for the job.”

  I looked at Anne, mentally removed forty years, and made her into a man. Bertie would have been very handsome—tall and straight, with those blue eyes, light hair, and rosy cheeks. He would, I realized with a start, have looked a lot like Jake. He must have caused quite a stir among the white-gloved ladies of Delicious!

  “Who did he replace?” I asked.

  “The woman who wrote in black—I never knew her name. He said she had an ordinary mind, but she was the best they could do during the war. She did do one thing he approved of.… ” She stopped to slice off a sliver of chicken. “This is delicious. Not trusting the wartime mail service, she made a copy of every letter before forwarding it on. The magazine had a Verifax machine—they were new at the time—and she was very proud of that. For safety’s sake, she kept the originals at the library, rather than run the risk of having them get lost.”

  Across the table, Sammy gave me a significant look. “Did she continue making copies after the war ended?”

  “Yes, by then it had become second nature to her. But Bertie put a stop to that; he said that copying the letters during the war was a sensible precaution but that copying them afterward was an invasion of privacy.”

  “Did he have knowledge of any other librarians?” Sammy asked, and I put my hand out, irritated, trying to stop him. What did it matter? But Anne’s answer was brief.

  “Bertie never knew the woman who wrote in red, but he admired her. Apparently she died quite suddenly. It seems to be a coincidental hazard of the job: Bertie also died unexpectedly. He was killed in a bicycle accident in 1972, when still quite a young man. Not yet sixty. It was mere chance that he had managed to hide the last of the letters before passing on.”

  “But why? Why did he hide them?” I couldn’t wait any longer to ask.

  “That”—she gave a small snort—“is open to conjecture. I don’t suppose we’ll ever know the truth. What he said was that it was for their own protection.”

  “From what?”

  Anne toyed with her fork as she looked down at the table, weighing her words. “From Old Mr. Pickwick. He wanted to destroy all of M
r. Beard’s letters.”

  “But why?” Sammy and I said it simultaneously.

  Anne Milton sighed. “This happened in the early fifties. Consider what was taking place in this country at the time.” She stared at us, urging us to work it out for ourselves, and I saw that she must have been very comfortable in the classroom. “It was a terrible time, you know—the McCarthy era, a time of witch hunts and suspicion. People all over this country were behaving badly. And Old Mr. Pickwick had very little love for Mr. Beard.”

  “But Pickwick hired him!” The passion of Sammy’s outburst told me that he was one step ahead of me.

  “He fired him too. Or didn’t you know that?”

  “Pickwick fired Beard?” asked Sammy. “They certainly leave that out of the legend of Delicious! What happened?”

  “Who knows the real story? I only know what Bertie told me, and I can’t be sure it’s true. According to him, Mr. Pickwick was having lunch at the Plaza when Mr. Beard came in with a group of friends. After imbibing copious amounts of wine, they grew rather boisterous. Pickwick was an abstemious soul, and he stomped back to the office, shouting that he would not have such a person representing his magazine. Then he called Beard in and told him to pack his things and go.”

  I had never heard that. “Are you sure?”

  “No. I can only tell you what Bertie told me. It may have happened differently; perhaps it was Beard who quit. What I do know is that, after Mr. Beard had gone, Mr. Pickwick ordered the editors to empty out his desk and destroy all his papers. He did not want a single scrap of paper left behind, no evidence that the man had ever been employed by the magazine.”

  “I see.” There was both sadness and resignation in Sammy’s voice. “It was because he was gay.”

  “Bertie certainly thought so.”

  What did she mean by that? That she thought otherwise? “I don’t understand.”

  “Oh, Billie.” Sammy sighed and looked at Anne. “Sometimes I forget how young you are. Just think about it.”

  Anne reached out and patted my hand. “I think it is hard for your generation to understand how different things were back then. McCarthy created paranoia, accused everyone of being a Communist. We forget that he didn’t just go after people because of their politics; he was a hateful man, and he had it in for homosexuals too. It was called the Lavender Scare, and people were hounded out of their jobs. The truth is, I have no idea if that had anything to do with Pickwick firing Mr. Beard; I always thought that Bertie was oversensitive on that score. But it’s certainly true that Mr. Beard’s proclivities were well known, even though he didn’t publicly acknowledge his sexual orientation until quite a bit later. Mr. Pickwick was very conservative, and I don’t imagine that he appreciated having a prominent homosexual representing his magazine. We will probably never know what his reasons were, but we know that he wanted Beard expunged from the record. From that day forward, Beard didn’t mention Delicious!, and Delicious! didn’t mention him. It was all very Orwellian.”

  “They certainly mentioned him later on!” Sammy was indignant.

  “I gather,” Anne said quietly, “that was not until the elder Mr. Pickwick had passed on.”

  “But you don’t think that’s why Bertie hid the letters, do you? You think there’s something else,” I conjectured.

  To my surprise, she blushed. “What a very perceptive young woman you are.” She suddenly looked younger. “You’re right; I once suspected that Bertie might have another reason.”

  Sammy had grown uncharacteristically quiet, and I followed his lead. Whatever was on Anne’s mind was making her skittish. We barely breathed.

  “I don’t like to talk about it, because it’s so … well, so improbable,” she began hesitantly. “Maybe I just made it up because Bertie told so many stories about his stint as a cryptographer. But …” She looked down, fiddling with her napkin, folding and unfolding it. Finally she tucked it into a very careful triangle and set it deliberately next to her plate. “Mr. Beard was also a trained cryptographer, and I always wondered if there wasn’t something hidden in those letters, some kind of code, that Bertie recognized.” Now she raised both her eyes and her voice. “It’s silly, childish even. I’m probably wrong. But Bertie was so determined to protect the letters that I couldn’t help thinking that they might contain more than a correspondence between a young girl and a famous cook. He kept saying that the letters were valuable historical documents, that they were not Mr. Pickwick’s to destroy. On the other hand …” She stopped for a second, considering. “I am also aware that he went out of his way to plant that suspicion in my head, to make the whole thing more important, more mysterious, than perhaps it really was. That would have been like him; as you will have noticed, he had a great flair for the dramatic.”

  “Whatever the reason”—I couldn’t keep myself from saying this—“I don’t understand why he didn’t just take the letters home. If you ask me, he went to a lot of unnecessary trouble.”

  “I could not agree more.” Anne said this with asperity. “That is exactly what I suggested. But Bertie would have none of it. He was not, he said, a thief.”

  “But Pickwick didn’t want the letters!”

  “Precisely.” Her annoyance was still palpable after all these years. “He refused to ‘steal’ the letters, and he would not destroy them, so he spent several ridiculous weeks wringing his hands. He lived in constant fear that someone would discover that the letters were still there.”

  “Poor fellow.” Sammy was apparently feeling much more sympathetic than either Anne or I. “How long did this go on?”

  “After a few weeks of dithering pointlessly about, Bertie stumbled upon the solution. Literally: He found the hidden room that was, by his lights, the perfect place for the fugitive letters.”

  “How did he find it?” asked Sammy.

  “In much the same manner that you did. But there was a difference: Bertie was absolutely unsurprised. He had always suspected that the Timbers Mansion might once have been a station on the Underground Railroad, and now he had his evidence.”

  “The Underground Railroad!” Sammy sounded as surprised as I felt. “It fits. The Timbers Mansion must have been built sometime during the 1830s.”

  “He was so happy when he found it,” Anne continued, as if Sammy had not spoken. “He had found the ideal solution to his problem. He had confirmed an old suspicion about the Timbers Mansion. And he had enhanced his reputation at the magazine. ‘They think I am a magician,’ he told me with great glee. ‘They think I can disappear at will.’ ”

  “Do you mean to say,” I asked as the implication of this sank in, “that he never told anyone else about the secret room?”

  “Not to my knowledge.”

  “But what about the rest of the letters? There are thousands of them. I can understand why Bertie wanted to protect Beard’s letters, but what was the point of putting the others in there too?”

  “Oh,” she tossed this off casually, as if this was of no importance, “that happened much later.” She began to calculate. “Nearly twenty years, I’d guess.”

  “The plot thickens.” Sammy stood up and pushed back his chair. “But before you commence the conclusion of your tale, allow me to fetch the denouement of dinner.”

  He went into the kitchen, reappearing with an antique Chinese bowl laden with strawberries and a crystal cruet filled with thick, ancient balsamic vinegar. He put a plate of dainty, paper-thin langues de chat in front of Anne, who picked one up and took a delicate bite before continuing.

  “We now jump to 1970. Picture the time. Mrs. Van Allen was the editor then, a dragon of a woman who never referred to her employees by anything other than their surnames. She required all females to wear hats, nylons, and white gloves when they appeared in her office. She was appalled by what was happening in America: She considered the antiwar movement an abomination, decried the loss of civility, shuddered at the mere thought of a hippie, and thought that everyone with long hair ought to b
e locked up.”

  As she drew a picture of the time—sixties’ slogans and protest songs—Anne conjured up an entire era, and I saw what a fine lecturer she must have been. I imagined Mrs. Van Allen looking out the windows, wincing as protesters marched past the Timbers Mansion with their signs. “Bertie thought she was a horrid old biddy, but he was a master at concealing his feelings, and she never had the faintest notion. Had she known that he was what she called ‘a fairy,’ she would have been appalled. When the elder Mr. Pickwick passed on, she came running to Bertie, lips trembling, afraid it was the end of an era. He consoled her, but he was privately elated; his hope was that the young Mr. Pickwick would bring in new blood. But when Mr. Pickwick hired an appraiser to take stock of the library, Bertie became anxious himself. The books, he knew, were safe, but he fretted about the letters.”

  In the candlelight, Sammy caught my eye; we had been fearing much the same thing. Anne intercepted the look but misconstrued it. “You have to understand”—she leaned forward—“at the time, few people were interested in food or food history, and I’m sure he was correct in thinking that the letters would have been considered worthless. Bertie was convinced the day would come when Americans would take an interest in their food heritage. ‘It would be criminal to lose them,’ he kept saying. He’d already hidden the Beard letters, and now he thought how easy it would be to move the other letters into the secret room as well.”

  “Was this in the early seventies?” I’d noticed that the letters seemed to stop there.

  “Yes! It was the year he died. I could look up the exact date in my diary, if that would be helpful, because I helped him.”

  I pictured them sneaking around in the dark of night, but when I described this vision, Anne laughed. “Very romantic!” Her eyes twinkled. “But very far from the truth. You see, by then Bertie had been at Delicious! for twenty-five years, and the library was his private domain. We simply came in over the weekend. It was great fun. I remember the moment when we put the last folder on the shelf and I left the hidden room for the last time. As we pushed the bookcase back into place, Bertie began speculating about who would find the letters and when that would be. A cloud crossed his face, and when I asked what was wrong, he was so upset that for a minute he could not speak.”