Charlotte Au Chocolat

by Charlotte Silver

  A Sunday night in April when I was twelve years old: it was still cold and not yet spring. Walking down Holyoke Street, I passed the restaurant, but didn’t go in; I kept on walking because I had always liked this kind of weather, when a light mist fizzed in the air and the forsythia, just beginning to come out, formed ghostly yellow shapes against the gray. It was that time of year when my mother’s fava-bean soup had just appeared on the menu; soon there would be fiddlehead ferns and strawberry ices. I stopped in front of the window of the Andover Shop, the men’s clothing store at 22 Holyoke. I liked to look at the coral and lemon-drop cashmeres, the duck-handled umbrellas, the camel’s-hair blazers, and the lushly fringed tartan scarves.

  But tonight, tonight was different. Tonight I looked at these things and thought, One day I will have a man in my life. One day I will buy things like this for him.

  It never occurred to me to buy such things for my father. He shopped at a clothing warehouse called Dollar-a-Pound and gave the impression that he preferred it over all other options, expense aside. “You’ve got to see it, Char,” he would say. “It’s great. They throw all the clothes on the floor, and then you just go for it. None of that department-store bullshit.”

  The mist felt wonderful on my skin. Underneath my raincoat I was wearing a black velvet dress, my first grown-up dress; that is, the first dress of mine that came from the grown-ups’ department and not the children’s.

  I turned and walked down Holyoke Street back toward the restaurant. Stepping into the building, I heard music rolling dreamily out of the doors of the Club Bar and down to the landing. It was Cabaret Night, another one of the new developments at the Pudding. My mother had gotten the idea to turn the Club Bar into a supper club with live music on Sunday nights in the wintertime. The Cabaret Night menu offered the swanky signature dishes of another era, things like oysters Rockefeller and shrimp cocktail with remoulade and chicken hash on toast points. The names of the drinks on the special cocktail menu were almost painterly: Golden Cadillacs, Pink Ladies, Blue Dreams, Lillet Blondes.

  I can’t give you anything but love, baby, the singer that night was singing. She stood in front of the fireplace at the end of the room, underneath the famous crocodiles Teddy Roosevelt shot, wearing a long shimmery gown. That’s the only thing I’ve plenty of . . .

  At the bar I ordered a Brandy Alexander and a glass of vino. The singer crooned, Gee, I’d like to see you looking swell, baby. Diamond bracelets Woolworth doesn’t sell, baby . . .

  The Brandy Alexander was for me; the wine for Veronica, a dear family friend—my parents had known her as far back as the Peasant Stock days—who worked as a coat-check girl at the Pudding on Cabaret Nights. Sunday was now my favorite night of the week because I got to visit with her.

  I had a thing for Brandy Alexanders because my friends Henry and Alex used to let me have sips of theirs, nursing alcohol through rivers of heavy cream. Veronica preferred red wine, which she always called, in the Italian fashion, vino. I copied her.

  Veronica, a former Mademoiselle cover girl and Avedon model, was keen on all things Italian: wines, men, and tailoring. She got all of her Italian clothing on deep, thrilling discount at the old Filene’s Basement, where my mother used to get a lot of her designer clothing, too. I went with her sometimes; we prowled the racks. I can still see Veronica, eyes flashing, elbows akimbo, in the cramped and dingy aisles. She’d emerge out of the chaos triumphant with midnight blue suits with peplums, black velvet evening gowns out of a Sargent painting.

  Veronica was a tall brunette with cut-glass bone structure who looked, as somebody once remarked to me, “like a cross between an angel and a witch.” My father used to photograph her sometimes, her spiky, rather scary beauty a fitting subject for his platinum prints.

  My father was a little bit in love with Veronica, in love with her bones, but then, all men were in love with Veronica. Old beaux of hers used to drop by the coatroom, visiting us, paying Veronica tribute, which she received, not in the least impressed, as only her due.

  “Vino!” squealed Veronica, reaching for the glass with a long, languid arm. “Charlotte, it’s about time!”

  Veronica’s voice—oh, Veronica’s voice held the kind of accent that could be heard only in Boston and nowhere else in America. When I was a child, I used to pretend it was British, though of course I had it wrong. Veronica was a Bostonian, Radcliffe class of ’63.

  In the coatroom there were two chairs behind the podium, one for Veronica and one for me. I sat down and we got to work on our latest project, which was renaming Marlon Brando’s numerous legitimate and illegitimate children. There were eleven of them, or maybe fourteen, depending on what source you read.

  I’d fallen in love with Marlon Brando—if love is not too elevated a word—after Veronica had taken me to see A Streetcar Named Desire at the Brattle Theatre. There he was in moody black-and-white close-up, peeling off his bowling jacket and moistening his lips, his face alluringly angelic and childlike above the husky build below.

  I understood, immediately, that Marlon Brando was not the kind of man for whom you would buy a cashmere sweater from the Andover Shop; Marlon Brando was for other things.

  We left the theatre and Veronica, whirling across Brattle Street with her light, lovely steps, more a young girl’s steps than an older woman’s, exclaimed, “My God, but I’d forgotten. Marlon is glorious, no? Such divine animal brutishness!” Then, in an altogether different tone of voice, she added, “This is a quality in short supply in the men of Cambridge, Mass.”

  Coming up with new names for people was nothing new for Veronica and me. I was “Cordelia” and my mother “Celeste.” Veronica gave herself an Italian name: “Rafaella.” Giving people fake names came in handy, because it meant that we could sit out in the open in Harvard Square—splitting a chocolate-apricot layer cake at the Window Shop, drinking vino in the olive-green leather banquettes at Harvest—gossiping about people and no one would guess who we were talking about.

  We wrote out the new fake names of Marlon Brando’s children in a red felt pen on the back of one of the menus. Isaac Vendetta Brando. Romeo Paradiso Brando. Gina Valentina Brando. Veronica had extraordinary handwriting—strong and slashing, like a sword. Among her friends, she was famous for her letters, which she wrote out on French stationery, and in which she spared the recipient no candid word.

  After we came up with the names, we gave the children identities.

  “Giulietta Brando,” I said. “What’s her backstory? I say he had her before Streetcar.”

  “Yes,” said Veronica. “The mother worked in a used bookstore in the Village, I think. Brunette pageboy, cat-eye glasses . . .”

  “But of course. Marlon only ever went for brunettes.” I sighed.

  Jotting notes on the back of another menu, Veronica continued. “He went into the bookstore looking for books on acting, on Stanislavski, you understand. It was love at first sight.”

  “For him or for her?”

  “For her. She said, ‘I’m not going to have an abortion. I’m going to have your baby, Marlon. I’m going to raise this baby, Giulietta, in the Village.’ It was a beatnik childhood. Marlon went off to LA, he sold out to the movies, he never visited.”

  Sometimes customers helped us name the Brando children. One night, we agreed that one of the daughters should be named Theodora, but we couldn’t come up with the right middle name. A couple, reeling down the staircase and obviously in love, came and got their coats. Veronica sized them up by saying, “Buona sera! And what did you two drink for dinner?”

  “Cassis,” answered the man without the slightest hesitation. “Cassis and soda.”

  “With raspberries on top,” added the woman as Veronica helped her into her coat.

  “Cassis!” Veronica exclaimed. “Cassis, Charlotte—I mean, Cordelia—write that down immediately, don’t you dare forget it.�
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  “What?”

  “Cordelia, now you are usually much more swift on the uptake. Cassis! Write it down. Theodora Cassis! That’s it. Theodora Cassis Brando. Divine, perfect, finished, done, who wouldn’t want to be named Theodora Cassis?” Veronica turned on the woman—she and her husband were just standing there staring at us. “Wouldn’t you like to be named Theodora Cassis?”

  “We’re renaming Marlon Brando’s children,” I said by way of casual explanation.

  “We’ve been at it for months,” said Veronica. “Come back next year this time, why don’t you? We might still be at it, whittled down to the bone, quite obliterated by all our hard work, the two of us.”

  This was when we had those divine Parmesan-fried lamb chops on the menu, and on Sunday nights in the coatroom with Veronica I always ordered them. Veronica, preferring, on the whole, vino to food, didn’t eat things like lamb chops. I never saw her order an entree. But she did like my mother’s roasted-sweet-red-pepper soup, which all the grown-ups adored and was even the favorite dish of Julia Child whenever she dined at the Pudding.

  I didn’t quite see what the fuss was about that soup, myself. I preferred tastes that were obvious and offered up their pleasures without complication: red meat, milk chocolate. But I did note the fact that even Veronica, usually so indifferent to food, couldn’t resist this particular soup. Could it be that its deep flavors—the bitter under-taste of the red peppers—held some voluptuous secret that only the grown-ups could appreciate?

  Many of the waiters and bartenders on the staff shared our Marlon Brando obsession. Veronica and I used to keep a ragged copy of Streetcar in the coatroom, and the sight of Brando bare-chested on the cover produced such giddiness in the staff (“Charlotte, my dear! What ever are you reading? Oh, Streetcar. My favorite!”) that Veronica finally wrote on a sticky note This is a yellow T-shirt and put it on Brando’s chest.

  There was even one waiter who, at the end of the night after the customers had gone, would change out of his uniform and stand there in his boxer shorts only to quote Blanche DuBois from memory. “And I’ll be buried at sea sewn up in a clean white sack and dropped overboard—at noon—in the blaze of summer—and into an ocean as blue as my first lover’s eyes!”

  I would play along; I would snap my fingers and say, “From eating an unwashed grape!”

  “Exactly,” said the waiter, impressed by my youthful knowledge. “Oh, Stella, Stella for star!”

  “Do runway,” commanded Veronica, and when Veronica commanded something, you listened. She combined the severity of a governess with the liquid glamour of a movie star. “Do runway” meant that she wanted the waiter to try on a piece of her clothing. In this case, it was a black velvet brocade opera coat, which, in spite of its being Italian, Veronica had decided was too big for her. She bought things purely on impulse at Filene’s Basement and that was the fun of it. She gave the waiter the coat; he shimmied around in it, doing Blanche, stalking the long corridor that ran from the restrooms to the coatroom, for all the world as if it were a real runway.

  “Calma, calma!” said Veronica, taking the coat away from him; Veronica would indulge people but only up to a point. Even with the gay guys, she was a flirt, deft in the feminine arts of delight and withdrawal. All winter long I watched her, her and her black velvet dresses, the long rhinestone earrings that brushed her swan’s neck, the neck that could only belong to an Avedon model. She had a new lover that winter and was wearing a new perfume. It was vanilla, she told me, but unlike anything so sweet as the flavor I identified in my mother’s desserts. It was vanilla, but dangerous. Maybe on Veronica it was more like the Italian word for vanilla, darker, dreamier: vaniglia.

  During this period, a man named Giancarlo was the wine steward. Actually, his real name wasn’t Giancarlo, it was John, but Veronica called him Giancarlo to his face, and I imitated her. He was a small, plump-bellied man with a petulant expression, who, no matter what he was wearing, always looked like he should have been stuffed into a red velvet smoking jacket. It was with Giancarlo’s histrionic tantrums in mind that my mother had threatened to post a sign in the kitchen reading PLEASE DON’T SPEAK TO THE WAITERS UNTIL THEY HAVE TAKEN THEIR MEDICATIONS.

  One night, Giancarlo propped his chin on the podium of the coatroom and said, “Let me tell you a little anecdote about Ayn Rand. I think it may shed some light on this great hungry longing of yours for dear Marlon.”

  “Go ahead,” I said.

  “All right. Some journalist once asked Ayn Rand, ‘Why is the sex in your books so violent?’ and what do you think she said?”

  “What?”

  “Wishful thinking.”

  When I used to do the coatroom with Veronica, the prospect of the lightening days at the end of the winter was for me tinged with sorrow. Because when the warm weather came and people were no longer wearing heavy coats, the solace of our Sunday night routine—the enchanted intimacy between us—would be broken. And also, I could never count on Veronica to stay in Cambridge for long. She was a world traveler. She’d jet off to Rome or Budapest or London, leaving behind cryptic messages on her answering machine: “Buongiorno. Be warned: I’m not returning calls these days. Leave a message if you must.” Or sometimes she simply sang into the machine before it beeped, old folky-type songs in a sweetly wavering soprano.

  And so now, walking down Holyoke Street alone, I passed seersucker, not tweed, in the windows of the Andover Shop. The lilacs were out on Brattle Street again, and fiddlehead ferns appeared on the menu for their brief, sweet, green spell before vanishing altogether for another whole year.

  By this time, when I was in the seventh grade, I should have been wearing a bra. But somehow, I wasn’t. My mother, whose succulent Joy-perfumed cleavage was a great part of her feminine identity in the world, never mentioned the subject to me. Certainly we never had, were never going to have, the talk.

  That spring I had a favorite dress, bought from a store on Mass Ave that sold children’s fashions imported from Paris. It was black poplin scattered with a pattern of tight little cherries, barely ripe, and had a Peter Pan collar, dirndl skirt, and a row of plastic buttons in the shape of cherries down the front. Painted cherries and plastic cherries, cherries and more cherries—my beloved cherry dress. But then month by month, week by week, bit by bit, the buttons stretched across my budding chest: it looked as if I was going to inherit my mother’s extravagant figure after all.

  Then one day at recess, a luminous spring afternoon, I raised my arms, and rip! Two of the buttons burst, the ones right across my chest. My breasts emerged out of shaken cherries and hung unsheathed, two lonesome white bells in April air.

  That was the last of the cherry dress. And I did, after that, get a bra. (And soon after that, highlights, restoring my ashy hair to its childhood gold.) But in the dressing room, being fitted for one by some strange woman snapping open a tape measure at my untouched skin, I cried. I cried with my whole body, and in a way I would go on to cry on several other occasions in my life, when you know that you are leaving someone, or something, forever.

  That was in the spring. And by the time it was winter and Veronica was back in Cambridge doing the coatroom on Sunday nights again, all of my dresses, not just that black velvet one, came from the grown-ups’ department.

  Eleven

  DOVER SOLE

  When I was fourteen, my father lost his longtime studio above the train tracks in Waltham. Over the years, I had noticed that the building itself was changing. The landlord had raised the rent, forcing many of the artists to move out. Now it was only subsidized housewives who could afford the rent, painting fruit still lifes in the afternoon before they picked up their children from school. They turned the drafty building where mice had scurried in the hallways and dust had hung thick from the rafters into a civilized place. They kept bottles of peppermint soap and rolls of paper towels in the bathroom,
swept the floor, and called the exterminator to report mouse sightings. Sometimes they knocked on my father’s door, asking if he wanted to try some pâté they had picked up at the grocery store. My father would taste the pâté, but he disliked what they had done to the building; and soon he, too, could no longer afford the rent and had to find someplace else to go.

  For a time, after getting kicked out of a girlfriend’s house, he lived in a studio in downtown Boston, not far from Chinatown. He shared it with a number of other artists, but he was the only one who slept there, on a rust-colored sleeping bag with a busted zipper flung on the dusty floor. When I visited him there, I could see holes in the wall, and I wondered if rats lurked behind the cobwebs.

  “What do you think of that sofa?” my father asked me, pointing. “Isn’t it great? It’s called a fainting couch.”

  I did like the sofa: moss green velvet, curved low to the ground. I liked the name, too: a fainting couch. It was the only piece of furniture in the room, and made a very dramatic statement.

  “Hey, Luu-Luu, cut it out.”

  A Persian cat was scratching the fainting couch. Rips already ran up and down the sides.

  “If you see another cat around here, that’s Nixon,” he said. “At least he catches the mice sometimes. She’s just useless.”

  Luu-Luu clawed the couch as my father lit another cigarette.

  “I like it here,” he said. Then, his face brightening up as if he had a secret, “Hey, Char, you know what you can see from the window?”

  “What?”

  My father pointed out the long window. This was during the years of the Big Dig construction project, and much of the city of Boston was torn up and in chaos. But in the distance, my father had something he wanted to show me.

  “Elmo!” he announced.

  “Elmo?”

  “Oh, I forgot, we never made you watch Sesame Street or any of that crap. Look, Char, see that big red monster on top of the Children’s Museum? Parents think that thing is wholesome? Christ. I think it’s demonic. When it’s windy out, it moves, and I always say, ‘Look! Elmo’s drunk again!’”