by Julia Glass
“You could hardly have kept a collie in Paris while making pastry from four in the morning till dark.”
“Really, though, it wasn’t that. It was Vee . . . I wouldn’t have said so, but I knew she’d never stand for a dog in our flat—I mean my flat, of course, that I was hoping would be ours.”
“You knew her already back then?” And then I recall that they had married less than a year after Mum’s death—and, in short order, produced a fusillade of children: three within four years.
“Oh, I’d just that month been smitten. Talk about ghastly timing. Mum’s dying hardly seemed the occasion to tell everyone I’d found the woman of my dreams. Though when I was alone with her—Mum—I did tell her. I think it made her happy.” Peeling gingerroot now, never idle for an instant even in reflection, Dennis looks up quickly to see my reaction.
“She never was jealous of our crushes, was she,” I say. Not till she’d been dead a few years did it dawn on me that she’d probably noticed mine, all on schoolmates, desperately though I tried to hide them (chiefly from myself). I can’t shake my bewilderment that Dennis has dreams a woman like Véronique fulfills—unless, and I suppose I could hardly fault him for it, he is overly susceptible to beauty (for beautiful, in that tautly elegant very French way, she is). Why I need Dennis to be infallible, to have no Achilles heel, I don’t know—but I do. I’ve always imagined that his wife must be a siren in bed. There must be a golden prize nestled in all that dramatic selfishness.
“So tell me the menu, maître frère.” I lean across the table to put a grape in Dennis’s mouth before I realize that this is a gesture of inappropriate affection, beyond brotherly, a gesture from my New York life; but he opens up happily and takes it between his teeth.
“Terrific, aren’t they? ‘Grapes, to be worthy, must swoon the palate,’ one of my masters used to say. Alphonse Lavalle, these beauties, first of the season, straight from a vineyard behind our house. I send the children over to do my poaching. If they get caught, they’ll be a lot more easily forgiven than I’d be. I’ll deal with the morality later.”
“Never mind the morality of agricultural goods smuggled across the Channel.”
“Oh, that,” Dennis says dismissively. “I’m an old hand at that.”
Yes, I think, from the days when it was drugs, not food. Of three boys reared in the sixties, Dennis was the only one to push that envelope.
I get up to put away the leftover food. In the scullery, the room off the kitchen where our mother kept the whelping box for her collies, is a stack of crates that stands to my chest; between the slats, I see the sleek pearly shafts and tufted roots of leeks. “Let me guess: vichyssoise.”
“God, am I that routine?”
“I’ve never had your vichyssoise. I’m sure it’s hardly routine.”
“I do it with lots of garlic and nutmeg. Buttermilk in with the cream. Then a tajine of chicken, figs, and ginger—spiced down for the elders. I poke the figs with a fork and soak them in a strong Bordeaux.” He beckons, and I join him again at the table, where he slides a platter off a large bowl; inside is a Dionysian mass of fruit, pickling in a lake of velvety purple. “Then a salad, plain greens, then peaches poached in cassis with lavender. Dried from Vee’s incredible garden! That course I’ve done—Davey hauled an extra fridge over from the clinic and parked it in the garage. He’s nothing if not resourceful.”
Lil’s remark about my being a guest begins to ring true. In the three days it took me to get here, David and Dennis have been planning not so much a funeral as an event, while Lil, who takes care of her husband’s human business, must have spent hours on the clinic’s telephone, delivering the bad news to everyone in Dad’s life beyond our immediate family.
The peaches, Dennis is telling me, are to debut on his menu when he returns to France. “Laurie did most of the peeling. Poor girl thinks she’s an apprentice, but I could probably get locked away for child labor.”
“Dennis, I know too many people who’d pay a small fortune to sign you on as their father—no, mother.” The peaches, I realize, are what I smelled when I walked in the house. The lavender.
He laughs dismissively. “They haven’t witnessed my blundering style of reading bedtime stories. Vee says I read like a caveman with a stammer.” We are standing side by side, and when he looks up, he’s clearly surprised to find me so close. “Oh Fen, we’re not mourning Dad much, are we.”
“We’ll be doing plenty of that,” I say, putting an arm around his shoulders. “Let’s catch up first.”
He closes his eyes for a moment. “Right. But no, first let’s do the lamb.” He instructs me to take the meat from the icebox, and as I turn around from doing so, lifting this leaden platter while realizing my back is no longer young, I very nearly drop it. Across the table, Dennis brandishes an enormous syringe filled with a green potion he’s just sucked up from a jar. “Courtesy of Davey,” he says as I slide the platter onto the table.
With a look of radiant satisfaction, he plunges the hypodermic into the meat and ejects its contents.
“What the hell is that?”
“Essence of spearmint and roasted garlic, reduced in balsamic vinegar,” he answers, businesslike. I turn away as he fills the syringe again, feeling the sugar of the grapes rise in my throat. I should ask about his daughters, I think. But suddenly, and I’m queasily thankful, here they all are—Laurie, Théa, Christine: three, just as we boys were once three—hurling back the kitchen door and surrounding me (my knees, that is) with eager bilingual banter. I’m reminded of how Mum’s collies used to greet me on the lawn when I’d come home from a term away at school. They’d never jump up; they were too well trained. They’d yip and circle me, not the predatory way they circled the sheep but with an inquisitive enthusiasm, waiting for me to roll down in the grass and invite them to lunge, wrestle, and lick me. My parents might have had money, loved each other, loved me and my brothers, but it was the loyalty of those smart beautiful dogs, when I was young, that made my home feel like the safest place in the world.
THE THREE OF US have settled well in our respective fields, in part because of money. Our grandfather had a small publishing empire, but his frugality and capitalist foresight were the key to his wealth (another cliché made flesh, considering he was a Scot). When he died, he left each of his grandchildren a chunk of that ore, to be mined when each of us reached age thirty-one, the same age our grandfather was when he bought out his partner at the Yeoman and married the man’s daughter (oh what a logical world that was). David, three years out of veterinary college and working for some burnt-out practitioner in a dreary old surgery reeking of cat piss, knew immediately that the money could spare him that same fate. Dennis had been drifting from one throwaway job to another since not quite finishing university and, less wisely at first glance, blew a good deal of his share just gallivanting around the Continent. But his extravagance landed him in Paris, pastry school, and, for good or ill, the arms of a woman whose vigilance over his future kept the rest of the inheritance socked away in bonds.
I was the first to achieve this windfall, and at first I treated it as you might a lovely light that’s just too bright to look at directly, half-squinting instead through a lattice of fingers. I’d glance quickly at the regular statements I received of the balance (nicely compounding away in the hands of Edinburgh’s finest investors), then file them in my least accessible drawer. What was my fear? That this hundred thousand pounds or so—admittedly, a laughable sum to even the mezzo-rich of the city where I now lived—would dislodge me from the small-world groove I enjoyed not brilliantly but well enough. Further threatening to dislodge me was my parents’ hope that this inheritance would draw me back to my native soil.
I had passed my orals at Columbia and was well into my dissertation. I worked more slowly than I might have, however, lingering on in New York for the wild life I constantly imagined myself about to embark on. But in the realm of imagination was where this wild life stayed, for the baths were
closing, the clubs growing maudlin, an angry celibacy rearing its gargoyle head. Still, there were plenty of niches for frenzied denial; the bottom line was, politics and epidemiology aside, I never could seem to shake an innate sexual modesty that sabotaged my alter-egotistical longings and may, in the end, have saved my life.
The thought of going back overseas, even to London or some Oxbridgian polonaise of an existence, depressed me. The proximity of my family would have been fine, even desirable (especially had I known my mother would be dead in five years), but my very Britishness—aside from my educated burr, which gave me an alluring edge at the Boy Bar and the Saint—was the part of myself I wanted to uproot and burn like a field of dead thistle. While I’d been busy, as a student, lauding the genius of Dickinson over Keats, of Wharton over Woolf, what I celebrated with far greater awe were the chrome-smooth chests of the Puerto Rican boys in Times Square, the Fourth of July smiles on the sweet blue-eyed queens who visited Mom and Pop twice a year back home, in places with breathy names like Omaha, Tallahassee, Tuskegee Falls. These irrationally contradictory objects of my craving—men who wore chains or, on the other hand, did wholesome, contrivedly daring things like ice-camp and windsurf—were not to be found in my homeland.
So as I salivated reverently over all these visceral pleasures, waiting like some semivirginal debutante for exactly the right moment to plunge, I came of age—fiscally speaking. I had hinted to my parents that I’d be staying on in the States after getting my degree because I felt I could snare a more glamorous teaching post than I might have back home. But the truth was that even if my dissertation was published to the acclaim my mentors assured me it would receive, even if I parlayed my upper-crusty Ivanhoe aura, the best first job I’d be able to hope for would be in a place like Pittsburgh or Oxford (Mississippi—the lynch-mob overtones made me shudder) or Portland (Maine or Oregon, take your pick; equally dull prospects).
My libido had me by the cranial balls; I was in thrall to this city and would rather, at that moment, have washed dishes in a Cuban-Chinese bodega—elbow to sweaty elbow with supple tattoos—than declaim my only slightly less passionate love for Nathaniel Hawthorne in a classroom overlooking the willow-kissed waters of the Concord River itself.
I was rescued from washing dishes by the congruent generosities of my grandfather and a professor who understood my reluctance to leave the center of my chosen cosmos. Ralph Quayle was an author-ity on Melville but lived a most un-Melvillian life. Along with two springer spaniels named Mavis and Druid, amidst flounced hummingbird chintzes, he occupied the attic floor of a narrow brick house on Bank Street. I knew this early on, because he liked to invite seminar students for Sunday teas. I think the custom made him feel like a don at Cambridge, the same yearning reflected, I’m sure, in the special attention he gave me.
Typically, twelve students would show up for an hour or so of academic debate, by the end of which we’d have abandoned Bartleby the Scrivener to talk instead about the bewildering reign of Ronald Reagan, the state of AIDS research, the terrorist threat (all of it discussed with cool-headed, high-minded dispassion). Soon, a predictable attrition would set in. First, the three female students would depart; by twilight, the four straight men would make their excuses—leaving four or five of us to head out for cheap burritos or sesame noodles. Ralph would slum along with us. After dinner, still more of us would split off until, often, only Ralph and I remained. We’d head across Seventh Avenue to Uncle Charlie’s, a bar that welcomed gay society into a setting so civil as to seem, at times, like a tea dance. Unlike the clubs, it was a place where you could meet people without having to gyrate shirtless in a strobe light and shout to be heard. You could, refreshingly, talk.
This was the only place where Ralph spoke of his personal life; where, toward the end of the school year, he told me he owned the building in which he lived. He didn’t like many people to know this, because knowledge of wealth—especially in an older man without heirs—complicated relationships. Since he wasn’t handsome, he said, and since he didn’t have a country place, he could feel confident that all the people who acted as if they liked him really did. But if people knew he had money, how could he tell opportunists from friends?
He chose to tell me this after I told him, in the midst of some rambling solipsistic monologue, about my inheritance and the mixture of comfort and paralysis I felt whenever I thought of it. Like a forest sage from some urban fairy tale (emphasis on fairy), he gave me three admonitions: Don’t spend the money on frivolous travel (at least for another ten years); don’t spend it to captivate a lover (not even if the lover has more money); and, above all, don’t tell anyone about it (as I was now doing).
Ralph was in his midfifties and planned to retire ten years later in style. His building was the least stately on its block—without its cheek-to-cheek neighbors, I imagined, it would lean like the Tower of Pisa—but it made him a killing on rent, since he let the two floors below him as separate flats and, below them, the ground floor and basement as a commercial establishment. His tenant there was a talented young baker whose challahs and tortes sent their tempting, affectionate odors up the stairwell beginning at six every morning. Any remotely classy business in that location, Ralph said, was bound to do well because it was passed at least twice a day by his many extremely affluent, high-living neighbors (by which he meant homosexual professionals with money to spend on puff pastry, orchids, and eau-de-vie in lieu of nursery school, ballet, and braces).
Bleary-eyed by this point in his lecture, I was finding my mentor tedious; why would I care about this trivia? He’d been going on and on about the baker, Armand—how promptly he paid the rent, how thoughtfully quiet he was in the predawn hours, how nicely he’d fixed up the basement for his ovens, how equally splendid his prune tatin and his plain-as-a-penny shortcake. . . . At first I thought Ralph was about to confess an unrequited yen for Armand—worse, I dreaded, ask my advice. For the baker was well beyond Ralph’s reach. He was a tall, Italianate dark-haired young man whom I had glimpsed through the window several times on my way upstairs; of course, the scones and little sandwiches for our Sunday teas came from below, and once I’d stopped in to order a cake for a party of my own. Across the counter, I’d seen how solidly slim those hips seemed under that apron, how stunningly green those eyes. Armand was beyond my reach as well.
“He’s already been in Saint Anthony’s twice for transfusions,” Ralph was saying when my attention lurched back, “and the drugs are demolishing his liver. There are times I wish I didn’t know so much, it’s so impossible knowing what to say, but I suspect he’ll be pulling out soon, that he’ll be too weak to do business and I’ll have to find another tenant.” Ralph looked genuinely heartsick—and I felt sick in my own, more generalized way. This was 1984, when everyone knew someone who was sick but you could still believe the wave would subside, the tide ebb, before your shoes were wet, before anyone who really mattered to you (like you) became ill and, worse, asphyxiated by fear. Back then, I’d known only two people who died of this plague, both just acquaintances, grad students with whom I’d shared nothing more intimate than a library carrel.
I mumbled to Ralph, “That’s awful, how tragic,” or something equally inane. How could I change the subject without seeming callous (which I was) or disrespectful? Just wait for a suitable pause, I decided, and tuned out again until I heard my name: “So you, Fenno, maybe that’s something you’d like to take a gamble on. I’d go in with you on the initial inventory—we’d look for a seller going out of business—and you could probably have the apartment under mine within a few years, they’re a couple bound to progenate any minute and they’ll have to have more space . . . that is, if you wanted to live there as well, and I’d give you a decent rent. Imagine rolling out of bed and there you are at work! . . . Though I will tell you, nice as it is, we all suffer one thing together: the critic across the street and the personal dramas he thinks we should share—drunken flute sonatas and a parrot that likes to sing scales
when it rains. Charming the first two or three times you hear it, but then . . .”
Critic? Parrot? The health and reproductive vitality of Ralph’s tenants? I was hopelessly lost. “What inventory?” I said, groping.
Ralph burst out laughing. “Well, sweetheart, I’ve found out one thing tonight: being suddenly rich doesn’t make you any more riveting.”
“. . . COMPASSIONATE, EXACTING . . . so incredibly decent—decency raised to an artform! . . . so smart and so, so upright in everything he did . . .” Through his raised wineglass, the candlelight casts droplets of wavering pink light onto Dennis’s face as he toasts our father’s virtues. His eyes blur as he struggles for only the most sincere of sentiments. “He loved us so . . . well, without demands—or at least, if he had any, he hid them awfully well. If each of his granddaughters could have just a third of his good nature, oh, well, we’d have a household of little angels.” Dennis offers a sidelong smile to his wife; his free hand rests on her back.
Véronique returns his smile, but I read a touch of boredom there—though, to be fair, this could be the invention of my immovable spite. I’d known her only a few days before she heard or deduced I was gay, and though she did not treat me unkindly, I will never forget what she said to me that New Year’s, happening upon me in the dining room as I looked for a platter. She was copiously pregnant with Laurie, their first, and as she stopped she spread one hand languidly across her anatomical trophy (Mal called it that). She leaned toward me and said quietly, “I am as mo-dairn as zee next citizen, Fenno, but you weel never, please, day-monstrate your preferred intimacies before my children. Can we agree on thees?” Her dainty eyebrows were raised, like little swallows in flight, her pursed Parisian mouth faintly smiling, as if she’d just asked for extra milk in her tea. I raised my eyebrows theatrically in return and said, “I can’t imagine our agreeing on much, but I’ll gladly comply with your papal issues. Ça va?”
