Charlotte Au Chocolat

by Charlotte Silver

  I looked, and there, as promised, was the enormous Elmo mounted on top of the Children’s Museum, his shaggy red fur waving just slightly in the breeze, black button eyes dilated. My father got it absolutely right: demonic.

  My father laughed, his deep belly laugh.

  “You know what Veronica says about the Children’s Museum?”

  “What, Char?”

  “She says, ‘If I were a child today, I feel confident that I would hate being taken to the Children’s Museum.’”

  My father and I howled, for it went without saying that I hated things like going to the Children’s Museum, too. I had only ever gone there on field trips, which were lonesome for me; I always sat next to the teacher on the bus. Actually, it was on one of these field trips—the day my sixth grade class went to an ice-skating rink—that I, sitting by myself on the bench and watching my peers glide by on the ice, had one of those melancholy forebodings people have sometimes that ring of absolute truth: all of the grown-ups are going to die. And for a split second, I had a vague, shivery premonition of just how lonely my twenties would be.

  We left the studio and went out to eat in Chinatown with a friend of my father’s. I could always count on him to produce new people, new characters. This time it was a beautiful, coltish young woman with long, dark, Victorian hair and something tragic in her eyes, and I figured my father must have been photographing her. We ordered plenty of food, my father trying to convince the waiter to get us some of the more alluring dishes he saw the Chinese families eating. His last girlfriend was Chinese and a real asset whenever we ordered food in Chinatown. My father, without her, was desperate not to miss out on some nameless treasure. Somehow, without a word of Chinese, he always succeeded in winning over the waiter—not by being pushy, for he was not a pushy man, but just by being respectful and curious, by conveying a warm and casual appreciation of the cuisine and the culture.

  The food arrived, sizzling full-flavored dish after sizzling full-flavored dish. We all dug in, without the slightest self-consciousness. The conversation flitted over a number of subjects, only to land on the avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage. One time, in New York City, my father took me to see a film of his about what happened to dead people’s body parts.

  “Oh, God,” I said, remembering; images from the film, buried for years, had come back to me. “That movie was gross.”

  “There was nothing gross about it, Char,” said my father, “but have it your way; I can’t stop you. I thought it was so interesting getting to see all the things that might happen to your body after you’re gone. You should become an organ donor, Char, when you get your license. I am; that’s just about the one thing I believe in.” My father took another helping of bird’s nest soup, a big smile on his face. “I’m telling you, Char. I can’t wait until I’m dead.”

  Around this time I found, while rooting through milk crates during our latest move, a stack of reviews and articles about the Pudding from back when my father was still the head chef. I was careful not to rip the crackly paper, and I read the words in faded ink. In one of the articles, the reporter mentioned my father bringing Dover sole home for me at the end of the night. “My daughter is going to love this.” I tried to picture my father standing over my high chair, scooping pieces of Dover sole onto my pink tin tray, but the image felt remote to me by now. It was all so long ago.

  Since leaving Dudley Road, we had lived in a number of different apartments, almost always near the Cambridge-Somerville line, for years. We always rented, and would move when leases ran out, or when, as was so often the case, the rent was raised. But then one afternoon my mother came home from the restaurant and told me as she was pulling off her apron, “We’re moving. Next month.”

  “Oh.”

  “But it’s different now: we’re buying.”

  “Where? Did you find a house?”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “Just upstairs.”

  My mother, it turned out, had toured a condo on the third floor of the building where we were living at the time, decided that the sunshine would be marvelous for her pink geraniums, and agreed to buy it. We moved on schedule a month later, just the two of us. Benjamin was at this point living in Northern California. “Why bother with movers,” she said, “when it’s only upstairs?” The building was a redbrick Victorian schoolhouse that had been converted into condominiums, and the ceilings were high and the oak staircase broad and seemingly endless. For two days, we lugged everything we owned up the stairs to our new home. At night, I fell asleep to the sound of my mother hammering hooks to hang the plates on the wall.

  She devoted herself to the decoration of the condo. Every morning, she clawed the carpet out with her bare hands, bit by bit, before she went into the restaurant. Then she hired a painter to dapple pink peonies and silver-leaf polka dots on the floor and ribbons on the walls. She put lavender porcelain doorknobs on my armoire, even though I said the old knobs suited me just fine, and painted the armoire itself a gray called Kid Glove and the walls of my bedroom a pink called Degas. There was not a splotch of white paint anywhere in the condo. Some mornings I awoke to the sounds of hammers pounding and ladders scraping. Once I drifted into the living room in my flannel nightgown only to see a bare-chested stranger standing on a ladder, paintbrush in hand.

  “Charlotte,” my mother said, click-clacking out of the kitchen on her stilettos, “meet my friend Danny.”

  “Hello, Danny,” I said in my little-girl voice, stifling a yawn.

  “Danny is my friend. And he’s going to paint the walls Maiden Sunrise. What do you think?”

  “Wonderful,” I said, rubbing my eyes.

  Then she rooted through the boxes tumbled on the floor till she found the one she was looking for. “Aren’t these cunning?” she said, taking mother-of-pearl forks out of sheets of tissue paper. “Won’t they be perfect for shrimp cocktail?”

  “That would make a good appetizer,” I told her. “I think people would order it.”

  “At home!” she said. “I’m going to make shrimp cocktail at home, just you wait.”

  A couple of years after we had moved into the condo, when the living-room walls had become Maiden Sunrise and Confetti and Amethyst Phlox and Macaroon, an editor from Boston Magazine asked my mother if they could photograph the condo for their upcoming style-at-home issue. “I’m sorry, Charlotte,” she told me, weaving between the empty paint cans in the hallway. “It’s going to be a little bit chaotic here until we finish with this photo shoot.”

  It was then before Christmas. On Christmas morning, when I opened my presents underneath the topiary tree my mother had decked with her costume jewelry, she told me, “Now, about the bathrobe. Oh, it’s beautiful cotton, isn’t it? But I really only bought it for the photo shoot.” It was white terry cloth embroidered with pink satin hearts around the collar. I loved it, but my mother took it away in case the photographer wanted to feature it in the photo shoot.

  She wanted to hang the bathrobe off the porcelain hooks she planned to drill into my wall, if only she had the time: “You can’t imagine the pressure I’m under.”

  One day after school, I stepped into the condo and heard tinkling female voices in the living room. My mother had gotten all the ladders out of the hallway and flicked on the rose-shaded lamps. I smelled something in the kitchen—something rich and lingering. It must have been food.

  “Charlotte,” my mother called from the living room, “help yourself to some of the chicken soup I made. It’s delicious.”

  “Absolutely delicious,” the other woman said.

  “Charlotte, come meet my friend Emily.”

  Emily, the Features editor for Boston Magazine, had come to the condo to interview my mother. “Wonderful,” she said, shaking my hand. “Now I can ask you questions, too.”

  I sat down on one of the white wrought-iron chairs. My mother had broug
ht out one of our cake stands, the pink-check porcelain one, and piled the tiers with chocolate-dipped strawberries and pistachio biscotti.

  “So,” Emily said, “I take it you like pink, too.”

  “Pink lightbulbs are terrible for your eyes,” I said, reaching for a biscotto, “but they’re wonderful for the complexion.”

  Emily laughed. Then she said, “So tell me. Which table do you guys eat dinner at? I was wondering about that.”

  A-1, I wanted to say, thinking of the table at the Pudding where we ate so many of our meals.

  “Oh,” I said after a pause. “The truth is, Emily, we’re very fond of all the tables.”

  The magazine came out that April. Our condo looked magnificent: the black-and-white floors sparkled, the vases of peonies delivered by Serge the florist lined the windows, and the pink lightbulbs made the living room glow like the inside of a bottle of grenadine. “In Cambridge, Hughes became a serial renter,” Emily wrote, “moving a dozen times in eight years.” It was then that I realized I had never kept track of the number myself.

  Years later, when I went away to college, my mother ended up selling that condo. We moved again, this time to the house my mother lives in now. For months and months, the condo languished on the market, its candy-slicked painted surfaces and gold-leaf embellishments too extreme a statement for most people’s tastes. Then, one day just as she was beginning to despair that she’d have to whitewash the condo in order to sell it, my mother at long last found a buyer. The catch? The buyer was color-blind. All colors read to him, he assured the Realtor, as one color only: “a soft,” he said, “gentle gray.”

  But my mother’s dream house would not have been that condo, or even the house she went on to buy later on; it would have been, always and forever, the farmhouse she’d left behind on Dudley Road. Sometimes, never in the dead of the winter, but in the spring and the summer when green things were growing and memories stirring, my mother and I would drive out to Bedford, to the site where the farmhouse had been before the developer bought up the land. The first time we finally saw it after all of those years, I remember thinking that the cluster of condominiums looked like a housing complex named “Fern Court” or “Ivy Circle.” It might have been anywhere in the entire country, not necessarily New England. Bulldozers had long since smashed several of our neighbors’ homes to the ground, and in their place we saw one-sized houses with fresh coats of tan paint and fuzzy welcoming mats on the stone stoops underneath the doors.

  We went and toured our old house, the only one still standing. Since it was now the information center for prospective buyers, a row of shelves in my former bedroom displayed swatches of carpeting and wallpaper for people to choose from. Someone had whitewashed the raspberry walls and replaced the mint green floors with wall-to-wall carpeting.

  “I hate wallpaper,” my mother whispered to me. “And carpeting. What is that color, anyway, taupe? Natural?”

  In the bathroom, she sniffed the cluster of poppies in a white plastic vase on the sink.

  “Fake,” she said. “Thought so.”

  After we left, I tried to picture the farmhouse, what it had been like when I was a little girl. I remembered the rickety swing set and the rose and blue wax drizzled on the dining-room table, the pink tin tray my mother had served me poached eggs on when I was sick. I remembered, suddenly, the pink-and-green Shetland sweater she used to wear underneath her aprons every day.

  But I remembered also my father’s darkroom, and how, getting home from the Pudding, he would disappear into its private, silvery depths. I remembered the stench of the photo chemicals floating out of that darkroom, and how they tinged with something bitter and metallic the more tender smells I associated with the yellow kitchen: those of bubbling chocolate and cinnamon, brioche and bacon.

  In the end, my brother and I will inherit boxes of my father’s photographs—one box labeled in my father’s elegant hand Benjamin and the other Charlotte. I will brush the dust off the lid; open the box. In it, I will find some of the oldest of my father’s photographs, most of them taken at Dudley Road and showing one unifying obsession—brooms. Brooms, enrobed, held captive in gelatin molds of translucent silver light. Brooms printed not only on rice paper but on the backs of chewing-gum wrappers and on the papers of packages of Camel cigarettes. Brooms tickling the floor, brooms afloat in the air. Brooms dipped in silver leaf, brooms without silver leaf. Brooms, brooms, brooms.

  Are they all that remain, these lonesome brooms, of my father’s hours in that darkroom; of Dudley Road itself; of our childhoods?

  Now, back in the car, I looked at my mother sitting next to me in the driver’s seat, the violet frames of her sunglasses casting shadows on her face at the voluptuous end of a summer’s afternoon.

  And then she said, “I forgot, we never went to the pond.”

  A pond, down the road from the farmhouse, came back to me. We had walked there in the winter, my mother and Benjamin and I, after the cups of cocoa that were always so delicious and made velvety with heavy cream.

  “I tried to teach you to ice-skate once, remember?”

  The pond blurred to blue and white. It might have been any pond, anywhere. I remembered so many different things, but I did not remember ice skates.

  “I guess.”

  We drove on, the farm stands and the country roads receding from view.

  I have just remembered what I had forgotten: that the first time I went back to Dudley Road was not in the company of my mother but my father. He drove me out there one day. I think it must have been a Sunday; I think, I imagine, it must have been the month of May. I could only have been seven or eight years old at the time. We walked and walked, my father and I, deep into the thickening woods. My father had with him a fragile straw basket. He was prowling the crannies of the woods for mushrooms, trumpets of death. But instead of mushrooms we found a lady’s slipper. Just one, that day, ravished at the husk of a great big tree. Pink and wet, dangerous and endangered, unlike the more modest, less troubling British flowers that used to be in my mother’s garden, unlike any flower I had ever seen.

  Lady’s slippers were then thought to be extinct, and in Massachusetts in those days it was illegal to pick them. My father, whose mind was encyclopedic, knew this; my father knew everything.

  But, “Oh, the hell with that, Char,” he said, and now, now I can think back through the years and picture my father’s body, shrouded in black, bent at the pink wings of the lady’s slipper, lifting her sleepy green stem out of the earth, handing her to me, a beautiful, poisoned apple.

  My father had long, deft fingers, an artist’s hands; she would not have suffered.

  I took the lady’s slipper back to my father’s studio that day. Then I took her home with me and she was mine until she died.

  Twelve

  ON LEMON ICE

  I don’t know why I hired him,” my mother said. “It must have been the tattoo.”

  Gus was our latest head chef. He was six feet five, and my mother said he was as wide as the cold room. Beneath his shaved head, a tattoo was printed on the nape of his neck. CAN’T STOP WON’T STOP it read in thick black letters.

  “It seemed like a good idea at the time,” she said. “With a message like that tattooed on his flesh, I didn’t think he’d dare take any sick days.”

  By the time Gus worked at the Pudding, I spent hardly any time in the kitchen anymore. I only stepped through the black-painted double doors to grab a brownie the kitchen had set out for staff lunch or, more often, to thank the chefs for dinner at the end of the night. In my gold lamé slippers and pert pink cocktail dresses, I would peer over the metal shelf at the chefs behind the line, in their blood-spotted whites and dank, dripping bandannas. Chefs still wore bandannas then, when I was in my teens, although I cannot recall if they still smoked behind the line, or if the ban on smoking in restaurants had alrea
dy happened.

  Before he had arrived at the Pudding, it was rumored that Gus had spent some time in a New York state prison. My mother assumed the charges had involved drugs, or gangs, or both; in any case, he could do wonders with red snapper, and she said he was the most talented head chef we had employed since my father had left the restaurant, and us, years ago. Gus was the one who started calling my mother “Patton in Pumps,” because she had no illusions about life behind the line: it was a battle, and you had to lead your troops.

  The rest of the Pudding mystified him. He called the waiters “Tinkerbells,” as in “Flounce back to your table, Tinkerbell, and tell the poor suckers everything has salt.” Once, watching the Krokodiloes perform one of their fifties doo-wop numbers during Sunday brunch, he said, “Man, they really take the rock out of rock and roll.” He despised above all the Hasty Pudding Club members, who mixed martinis with a deathly seriousness over the pool table in the first-floor Members’ Lounge and had first names like Chip and Grayson and Bridge. “Love to run into one of them in a jail cell,” he said.

  I liked Gus as I had liked few of the recent chefs; he reminded me of the fringy, dissolute, yet somehow endearing kitchen personalities of my childhood. “Hey, Shorty,” he asked me, “what’s your deal, anyway? Did you get beat up a lot on the playground? Did fags used to pack sprigs of parsley in your lunch box?” Sometimes when he passed my table, he glanced at my plate and said, “Foie gras. Foie gras on a fucking school night.” But he approved of my pink wardrobe, and one time he tried on my pink rain slicker with the rhinestone buttons; it fit him more like a bolero. He wore it out on the streets of Harvard Square. “This isn’t campy, Shorty, you know that,” he told me. “It’s just that this is one cool look.”