Charlotte Au Chocolat

by Charlotte Silver

  Time passed, and my courses arrived. On a typical night at the Pudding, I might order an appetizer of shrimp rolled in brown-butter bread crumbs on skewers, so the oil wouldn’t spread on your hands. For an entree: squab with black lentils and bacon, only in the pink light of the dining room the lentils weren’t black, but blue—a deep, inky blue. And for dessert, I might ask for my favorite treat: candied violets on a lace doily. My teeth cracked open each crystalline blossom, and I could smell the sheets of wax paper they came in mingled with the sugar.

  Sometimes, when I was at the Pudding on Saturday afternoons, I would steal candied violets from the cold station when no one was looking. You had to be quick about it, so no one would see. I’d open the tab of one of the little pansy-purple boxes with the French words on it and stick my hand between the sheets of wax paper and pluck a violet or two. But I wouldn’t eat the violets right away. I’d save them and eat them a little later, so I could let the flower shape slacken and the crystals melt on my tongue.

  I got up from the table and walked over to the door in the far corner of the dining room, which had a stairwell leading to the Club Bar. We used the Club Bar for private parties, while the Hasty Pudding Club kids used it for luncheons and other Club events. The staircase had a black banister with white legs. The floor was black-and-white, too, a pattern I had heard my mother call “diamond.” The walls, except for the white wainscoting, were red, and they were sprinkled with more posters like the ones upstairs. A rusted poker leaned against the edge of the fireplace. Ashes collected behind the grate, and pink roses rotted in a vase on top of the mantel.

  On the wall above the fireplace, the Hasty Pudding members had mounted three stuffed crocodiles: two grown ones and a baby. These were the crocodiles that the Krokodiloes were named for. Teddy Roosevelt had shot them on one of his hunting trips. One time I stood on a chair on my tiptoes and tried to touch the crocodiles, to see if they were really dead, if they wouldn’t bite, but when I stroked the crinkled scales of the baby’s tail, I lost my nerve and dropped my hands to my sides. Despite having been dead for almost a hundred years, those crocodiles were still menacing. Their eyes, sunk in the stiff green flesh, glowed dully, and their yellowed teeth showed in their open mouths.

  Looking for something to do to pass the time, I unbuckled the clasps of my Mary Janes. After the last private party, the waitstaff had pushed all the chairs against the walls, and there was plenty of room for me to dance. The velvet of the crimson rugs had thinned over the years, and the gold tassels wiggled when I moved my feet. I wanted to hear music. But the piano, situated against the ivy-trimmed window, was broken. When I touched the keys, dust wafted into my face and quavering chords sounded in the room, then died.

  After dancing, I decided to go upstairs to take a nap underneath the bar. We didn’t have a real bar, just a long oak table in the corner of the room draped with a pink linen tablecloth and covered with glasses and bottles and old-fashioned black-pepper grinders. Underneath were crates of champagne with bundles of linen stuffed between the empty spaces. I scrambled under the flap of the tablecloth and tried to arrange myself on top of the clutter.

  I swaddled myself in some of the tablecloths; a wrapped bundle of linen served as a pillow. Underneath the bar it was dark, and the carpet felt as soft as my holiday muff; I could trace the flecks of gold with my fingers. As ice cubes tinkled and cocktail shakers rattled above me, I rubbed my nose in the linens, breathing in the scent of starch. The sounds of the restaurant faded. I could barely hear the murmur of the customers’ conversations or the scuff of the waiters’ shoes on the carpet, and finally I fell asleep.

  Hours later, my mother stooped down and tapped me on the puffed sleeve of my party dress. I got up from underneath the bar, rubbing my eyes, only to discover that in the time since I had fallen asleep, the dining room had been completely transformed. All of the customers were gone and, as at the end of a play, the lights were on. You could see how shabby the room was now; you could see the chips of paint missing in the wainscoting and the soft, misty cobwebs on the chandeliers. The waiters were undressing now, as they had at the beginning of the evening, before service. They stood around in various states of undress, in boxers or blue jeans and black turtlenecks. Everyone drank beer or ate scoops of mocha ice out of wineglasses. That was a signature dessert of my mother’s, almost as good as charlotte au chocolat. Anyone who was hooked on caffeine and had a sweet tooth couldn’t get enough of it. “This is like crack,” the waitresses would say, cramming another spoonful in their mouths. Meanwhile, there was always one person who was assigned to sit at A-1 and count out the money. I knew better than to bother the person with the money.

  Where did the waiters keep all that money? I wondered, looking at all those rustling green bills. I knew that most of them would spend at least some of it tonight. Restaurant people always get this buzz of fresh energy after a shift. They go out for more drinks, and you might think they’d be so used to fine dining that they’d go to fancy places, but no—they’d go to The Tasty, which was the best option for restaurant people because it was open twenty-four hours a day. And what one craved after a busy night was honest food, cut with grease: life-affirming animal grease. Ending a shift was like coming to earth after waking up with a hangover. My father swore by The Tasty’s fried-egg sandwich.

  “Hits the spot, Char,” he’d say. And then he’d light up another cigarette.

  The whole world, my mother said, was divided into front room people and kitchen people. Kitchen people despised slow nights, smoked, and drank beer. They smoked behind the line, and it was like watching a magic trick, how the ashes trembled above freshly primped plates and yet never landed. A kitchen person could work in the front room, but if they did, they sponged off the martini glasses themselves and checked on the other waiters’ tables, just to give themselves something else to do. Front room people were noted for their ability to put on a good show in public.

  Mary-Catherine was the ultimate front room person. She had a big smile, curly brown hair, and almost always wore the color red, which was her color, just as my mother’s color was pink. On Saturday nights, she wore high-necked cream silk blouses and flowing skirts of black or crimson velvet. Mary-Catherine loved chamber music, croquet, Victorian novels, and tea parties, and so her tastes were perfectly in keeping with the old-world atmosphere of the dining room. Watching her lead the dining room like a conductor leads an orchestra, I marveled at how she could remember so many different customers’ names and their favorite wines and dishes. She was deft at smoothing out difficult situations and erasing hard feelings. Her apology letters—written in response to the occasional complaint letter—were so lushly, artfully apologetic that, my father remarked, “Christ, by the time customers are done reading them, they practically feel like they should write an apology letter to her.”

  If Mary-Catherine was the ultimate front room person, Jake was, to my mind, the ultimate kitchen person. He had worked behind the line since opening night, and I had heard my father tell my mother, “That kid never misses a day’s work, but Jesus Christ, there are days I wish he would.” Jake wore a duct-taped leather jacket and a purple sequined pheasant-foot earring in one ear, and he played in a punk-rock band. His skateboard had stickers of skeletons pasted on it. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” he sometimes said, splitting artichoke hearts open with a scalpel.

  Benjamin was close to Jake, who had taught him how to skateboard. But I was deathly afraid of him.

  One time Jake brought a gun to work. My father said it was because he was high on quaaludes, and he worried that Jake would pull the trigger in the middle of the eight o’clock rush. So my father stuffed a fifty-dollar bill in the pocket of his chef’s pants, walked downstairs to the first floor, knocked on the door of the Members’ Lounge, and bribed one of the Hasty Pudding undergraduates to buy the gun from Jake. “You’ll never believe it,” Jake told the chefs later. “So one of these little Pudding ki
ds wanted my gun . . . I took him for all he was worth.”

  Another time, when the Rockettes performed in the theatre, Jake cornered one of them in the downstairs hallway and asked if she could give him a private show. Soon the whole group accompanied her into the dining room. The Rockettes twirled and kicked their famous legs up in the air while Jake, still in his chef’s whites, perched himself on top of the bar and clapped.

  He also got into fights behind the line. My father had hired a Harvard student, the offspring of one of the richest banking families in the country, who wanted to rebel by working in a kitchen; he had shown up for his interview dressed in head-to-toe chef’s whites and carrying his own set of knives. When the banking heir, idling behind the line, called Jake’s risotto “soggy,” Jake pulled one of the kid’s own butcher knives on him. “Didn’t think you’d ever get these bloody, huh?” he said. “Think again!” And he grabbed him by the collar of his monogrammed chef’s coat before my father separated them.

  Jake dated Sarah, who worked plating my mother’s pastries in the cold station. Sometimes I plopped myself between Sarah and Jake on the butcher block when they drank their beers during breaks. Sarah’s platinum curls stuck to the back of her neck, and a single black bra strap slithered over her tanned shoulder. At the end of the night, they went home together. Jake had a motorcycle he parked against the Dumpster, and Sarah pounced on the back, shaking out her curls, as the bike thundered out of the alley. Neither of them wore a helmet.

  Carla was another kitchen person, but she was a kitchen woman—my mother said that was a very special thing. She stood six feet tall from her charcoal-caked white high-top sneakers to the top of her dark brown buzz cut, and she stored a pack of Marlboro Reds in the olive-green T-shirt she wore every day. The elastic had collapsed around the neck and cuffs, and when she moved behind the line, I could tell she didn’t wear a bra. I thought she didn’t have any manners, either.

  “You,” she said to me, “go out in the dining room and count how many poor suckers are left. I’ll personally drool on their cheese platters if they don’t hurry it up.” When a recipe called for alcohol, she always swigged some from the bottle, and drops of sherry or Chianti splashed on her T-shirt as well as in the pan. “Blood and booze,” she said, stirring the boiling red juices in the pan with her fingers. “Blood and booze, that’s what they pay for.”

  Carla used the back stairs to the building and refused to go in the dining room during service. Every time she used her employee gift certificates, she wore the same mauve housedress with her white high-tops. “I just don’t have any other shoes,” she told me when I visited her at her table. “Do you think it’s okay? You can’t see a thing through all these damn linens.” She dined alone, and she lived alone, too, except for her two dogs, Benny and Sadie. Sadie was a black Doberman, blind, and Benny was a brown one with a bullet in his leg. At staff lunch, she entertained us with the dreams she had had about Benny and Sadie.

  “I had another dream about bridges last night,” she said, while bottles of Chianti popped open around the table. Carla was terrified of heights; even fire escapes scared her. “I was going over the Brooklyn Bridge and Benny and Sadie were with me. Sadie was driving.” Everyone knew that Sadie was the blind one. “And they were talking, but that didn’t make any sense, because Benny was talking, too. Sadie does talk—I mean, she talks to me—but Benny never does.” With this, she downed her Chianti.

  Front room people smoked and drank, too. But they held their cigarettes differently, delicately, and they liked drinks with fancy names. Sometimes, after the customers had left, Patrick opened bottles of a green liquid called Chartreuse, which matched the color of the rhinestones on his cat-eye glasses. He tied paisley scarves around his neck, and he wore a plaid kilt and combat boots to one of the Christmas parties. His guests wore kilts and combat boots, too. “Charlotte, don’t stare,” my mother told me; but I noticed all the kitchen people did.

  Patrick was a hairdresser during the day and a bartender at night. He did not like the way my mother styled my hair, in two balls on the sides of my head that were forever slipping out of their bobby pins, and he told me, “Think glamorous.” During setup, I sat down on a barstool and Patrick yanked a brush through my hair and spread gel through my bangs. The morning of the first-grade Christmas pageant, he did my makeup: silver eye shadow, thick mascara, red lipstick. My teacher told me to wipe it off—shepherds didn’t wear silver eye shadow—and after that, whenever Patrick took out the hairbrush, I scrambled underneath the bar.

  Richard waited tables at night so he could still write poems. People couldn’t write poems, he told me, if they had a real job. I knew what real jobs meant: you got Saturday nights off. I couldn’t picture Richard at a real job, in a suit and tie. He had a curly ponytail that was already graying, and Birkenstocks. “Miss Charlotte,” he called me. “Hello, Miss Charlotte.”

  During setup, and on the slow nights during the summer, Richard told me stories about the Hasty Pudding Theatricals posters. He was tall and could touch the posters, but I squinted whenever he pointed at the illustrations. The posters showed the Lady of Loravia, who capped her raven bob in a gold crown and had sad eyes; a crocodile curled in a ball and flicking his tongue; men in brightly colored tights, stalking around a bonfire and thrusting spears into the air; and, of course, the man with the fangs and the top hat. The paper had crinkled and grayed until it matched the color of his skin, and when Richard said the Pudding ghost lived inside the frame, I believed him.

  “Sometimes he floats out of the frame,” he told me. “He floats all over the dining room and down to the cellar, with the rats. He hides inside the stoves and under the tables and the sofa cushions and in the ice chest. He can fit anywhere he wants—he could even slip under the bar with you.”

  I shuddered. “But no one else can fit underneath the bar,” I said. “Only me.”

  “Ghosts are different,” Richard said. “They change shapes. I should know. I saw him once, out there.”

  He pointed past the windows on the left side of the dining room to the sagging roof where we stored milk crates and barstools and chilled bottles of champagne in the winter. My mother didn’t let me go out there by myself; she said it was dangerous.

  “He didn’t look like a person,” Richard said. “He had turned himself into a candle, moving back and forth in the air. When I saw him, all at once the candle blew out and died.”

  “Everyone else gets to see the Pudding ghost,” I said. “Is it true it pulls the fire alarm on Saturday nights? And does it really make the dishwasher make all those horrible sounds before it breaks?”

  Richard nodded. “And when the lights go off in the dining room—all of a sudden—who do you think is behind that?”

  “My mother says the waiters should stop leaning on the light switch. She says front room people—”

  “No, no,” he said. “She just can’t admit we have a ghost. It would be bad for business.”

  Sometimes, on breaks, Richard took me on errands in the Square. It was his job to pick up the staff take-out orders. We went to the Hong Kong on Mass Ave, where they served drinks called Scorpion Bowls in round, plunging glasses and the sign flashed red at night. I swiped pink-and-green soft-centered mints from a dish on the hostess’s station and stared at the kernels of fried rice and Coca-Cola stains on the dark red carpet while Richard paid for the brown paper bags full of food. My mother told me not to eat that kind of food: “Never buy anything that ends in ninety-nine cents.”

  Richard liked to go to Harvard Book Store after we got the food, if we had time before the customers arrived. He liked the used section, downstairs. The shelves were covered with cutouts of pulp-fiction covers: women with tumbling hair and sticky lips, in bullet bras and stockings whose seams slunk down their legs. The men there carried leather bags with fraying shoulder straps, and tufts of white hair peeked out from their corduroy caps. R
ichard bought thin books of poetry for as little as twenty-five cents. I’d been to lunch at Richard’s apartment, where he served me warmed artichokes and showed me his library of marvelous old books.

  Kitchen people didn’t get takeout at night. My mother said they didn’t have the time. Sometimes, for staff lunch, they sent me down to Elsie’s, the sandwich shop on the corner of Holyoke and Mount Auburn. Elsie’s had no chairs or tables, just some stools at the counter. It always seemed like the fuse for the lights had blown. Grease sopped through the brown paper bags and onto my hands. It came from the pastrami: all the chefs ordered extra-thick pastrami sandwiches. “Best damn thing in the Square, that pastrami,” my father said, ripping off the sheets of paper.

  Kitchen people understood that food didn’t have to be gourmet to taste good, and that sometimes gourmet food didn’t taste good at all. “Kiwis are a soulless fruit,” my mother once said when she saw them in a fruit tart on the Ritz’s dessert tray. “Don’t ever use sun-dried tomatoes,” my father told his staff. “They’ll take away your magic powers.” Even junk food could be better. Once, for Jake’s birthday, the staff laid out his favorite foods—frozen meatballs and Twinkies—on brass serving plates in the dining room. When they sliced the Twinkies horizontally to expose the cream, even my mother admitted they made an attractive dessert.

  At staff Christmas parties we served junk food, too: sour-cream-and-onion potato chips, chicken wings, and hot dogs, and for dessert more Twinkies. The rest of the year I never ate food like that, and by the holidays Cotswold tarts and melon wrapped in prosciutto bored me. In my black velvet party dresses, I gnawed on fried drumsticks, with a napkin stuffed into my lace collars to catch the crumbs. “I’m not whipping up any foie gras for you tonight, kiddo,” said Carla, who, in her olive-green T-shirt and holding a beer, looked the same as she did behind the line. “Fend for yourself.”