Charlotte au Chocolat (11 page)

Nine

THE DEAD PARENTS CLUB

S
ensitive? Sensitive? I haven't been sensitive since 1967.”

One afternoon, I was sitting at A-1 when my mother slammed the receiver down on the tabletop. The dial tone sounded in the dining room, and she hung up the phone properly. Then she hacked the greens of her Caesar salad in half and shoveled her croutons onto my bread plate as usual.

“So this pastry chef—this ex-pastry chef—that was her on the phone. ‘You don't run a very sensitive kitchen,' she told me. And I said—”

“I heard you, Mummy. I heard.”

“She's one of those culinary-school types,” she said. “Wants to wear a monogrammed coat and flounce around and never get dirty. She calls this her
career
. It's a job. You get up and you go and . . .” She glanced at my plate. “What's the matter? Something wrong with your salmon?”

Something
was
wrong with the salmon: it was mediocre. It was a bumpy time at the Pudding.
The Boston Globe
had given us a three-and-a-half-star review—our first one under four since the restaurant had opened—and the critic compared the dining experience to “stepping into the third installment of
Brideshead Revisited
.” “That is
not
a compliment, Charlotte,” my mother told me, even though I myself was a big fan of the book. She attributed the problem to the staff in the kitchen, not the front room. “The front room is always a drag,” she said. “The kitchen is what changes.”

Just recently, my mother and Mary-Catherine had journeyed to Vermont, where a friend of theirs had recommended that they hire a chef from a restaurant called Smoke Jack's who was said to be interested in leaving Vermont and moving to Boston. My mother, desperate to find someone, hired the chef against her better judgment. Things didn't work out, resulting in what my mother referred to as “one of those little conversations,” which was her euphemism for firing people. (Her euphemism for substance abuse was “that little problem with which we're so familiar.”) Afterward, she remarked to Mary-Catherine, “What the hell was the matter with us, going all the way up to Vermont like idiots, looking for talent at someplace called Smoke Jack's?” My mother shuddered at the memory. “Smoke Jack's! If that doesn't show absolute failure of judgment, then I don't know what does.”

During this time, my mother started hiring more and more people from the homeless shelter, the Pine Street Inn, in downtown Boston. They worked fourteen-hour days five days a week, and then sometimes, after they received their paychecks on Friday afternoon, they didn't show for Saturday prep. On Monday morning they appeared at seven o'clock sharp and explained to my mother that there had been a sudden death in the family. “It was always a great-aunt,” she said. “And her name was always Aunt Eulalie or Aunt Delilah, and they were always taking buses to South Carolina or Georgia, and expecting me to believe they'd made it there and back by Monday morning.” In response, she founded the Dead Parents Club. This was more of a policy than a club, and it meant that for a period she only hired people whose immediate relatives had died.

Despite the Dead Parents Club, and my mother's warning “Call in sick or call in dead,” employees still missed their shifts. You could lose a waiter or even a chef, she said, but never a dishwasher. If such an emergency occurred, she stalked over to the Pit, the Harvard Square gathering place for punks and delinquents between Out of Town News and the subway station, and called out, “Want to make money? Come wash dishes with me.” Anyone who happened to be hanging out there was welcome, she said, except the boy who kept the white rat on a chain.

Finally, it was the Colombian immigrants and not the delinquents who saved the kitchen. The Colombians worked hard, and their complaints, if they had any, were not in English. My mother learned only one Spanish word—
¡pronto!
meaning
hurry!
—and claimed she needed no others to communicate to the prep cooks, who julienned
vegetables as well as the culinary-school graduates. The Colombians brought over their brothers and cousins and got them jobs at the Pudding, too. Soon the “family meals” at the Pudding featured not pastrami sandwiches from Elsie's but shrimp tacos and rice and beans.

My mother loved the Colombians, and she spent more time with them, she herself admitted, than she ever had with me. The prep cooks arrived at six o'clock in the morning, and after two hours alone, kneading dough in the drafty kitchen, she must have craved their company. They ate breakfast together on the milk crates on the fire escape; they scrambled the eggs and she sliced the pancetta. Their work ethic resembled her own. “It's a wonder I'm not an immigrant,” she told me, “the way I hustle.”

As more and more South Americans joined the staff, both in the kitchen and the front room, Harvard Real Estate wrote a letter to my mother asking the help to use the back door to the building. It didn't look proper, they said. Too many people hung about the entrance. Actually, it was mostly Hasty Pudding Club members in their telltale khakis and blue blazers who hung about there. The staff simply climbed the stairs and went to work. “Men in suits,” my mother said, and although she kept most scraps of paper in a pile at the bottom of her pocketbook, she tossed this letter in the trash.

Whenever my mother saw a representative from Harvard Real Estate come into the dining room, her shoulders stiffened and, all of a sudden, she looked very small. I would remember that she was only five feet one; usually, because of her high heels and the extravagance of her personality, I forgot. These visits from Harvard Real Estate startled me every time. I looked at the “men in suits” and then at the dining room and knew that they could take it all away from us; they had that power. They just sat there with their clipboards, waiting for my mother to go over and talk business. I never knew about what exactly. Maybe they were there to raise the rent, or to negotiate a new lease. Or to express their displeasure with us as tenants, in some capacity or another.

Meanwhile, the Hasty Pudding kids had the run of the building. The annual Leather and Lace party was the highlight of their social season, second only to the excitement of the Man and Woman of the Year celebrations every February. That night if I happened to go into the building, it was not unusual to pass strapping members of the Harvard crew team strutting around in leather chaps and studded collars.

Mary-Catherine was always more fond of the Hasty Pudding kids than my mother ever was. The romantic sort, she had a soft spot for young men with nice manners who wore bow ties, whereas they exasperated my mother. A phrase my mother used with relish, when describing the tension in the building between the club and the restaurant, was
class warfare
.

“Oh, Deborah,” Mary-Catherine would say, not buying it.

“Oh, Mary-Catherine,”
my mother said right back at her. “I can never get over how apolitical you are. Your idea of a political platform is
What is the candidate's position on the arts? What have they done lately for the good of classical music?”

“Well, and why not? It's through the arts that a civilization—”

“Honest to God! Sometimes I think you didn't even
live
through the sixties.”

I
n the very beginning, the Pudding had been open only for dinner. Later, to get more business, we opened for lunch six days a week, and eventually, around when I was nine, for Sunday brunch, too. The Pudding being open for business earlier in the day meant that I no longer ever had the dining room to myself.

Even the Club Bar, where before I had danced on the diamonds and blown dust off the barstools for whole afternoons, was off-limits. At the suggestion of Harvard Real Estate, we locked it now, and only my mother, Mary-Catherine, and the managers had keys. We held weddings there, and bat mitzvahs and Christmas parties and business luncheons, and sometimes the managers gave people tours of the Club Bar, as if it were a condominium on the market, while they cooed over the red walls and the crocodiles. Every Thursday, the Hasty Pudding members ate lunch there, and sometimes the Krokodiloes practiced in front of the fireplace.

But beyond that, the dining room itself had changed. My mother, who long ago had replaced her cashmere kilts with black taffeta circle skirts, had similarly transformed the decor of the Pudding dining room by repainting the white wainscoting with red and gold stripes and placing leopard-print lamps at the bar. When the fire department banned candles in restaurants, she strung pink Christmas lights from the ceiling and attached pink crystal hearts to tissue stars. Glamorous—the restaurant looked glamorous now, but I missed the old dining room, where patches of oak had shown through the white wainscoting and where the pewter chandeliers had cast the brightest light.

“If only I could get rid of these heavy green walls,” she said. “Imagine these walls pink, Charlotte. The perfect, soft, smudged pink.” She also thought the posters could use gold frames instead of oak, but Harvard insisted the walls and the posters remain the same. The color pink, they told her, did not reflect the history of the Hasty Pudding Club. “That's what they think,” she said. “Every other man who walks into this building is a pansy.”

And the bar—it had changed, too. We had replaced the bottles of soda with a machine, which required the bartender to push red buttons labeled
GINGER ALE
or
COKE
so the liquid would spurt into the glasses. Instead of scooping ice out of the ancient ice machine in the Club Bar, which rumbled when it turned on and off, we dumped bags of ice into a red plastic cooler. I remembered the miniature bottles of maraschino cherries I had hoarded during my childhood, with the glossy red tops that had left my wrists sore after I twisted them off. But now we bought large bottles and stored the cherries, along with the lime wedges and orange twists, in shallow plastic trays where the bartender could reach them easily. The bar was more efficient now, everybody said.

My mother had also convinced our investors to finance the addition of an herb-garden terrace. Business had always lagged in the summer, but she thought customers would flock to any restaurant where they could dine outside. She was right: the addition of the terrace, located to the left of the dining room on the roof where we used to store milk crates and chill bottles of champagne, turned the summer months into the busiest of the year. She hand-painted the planks of the floor periwinkle blue, hung a violet silk canopy from the beams to block out the sunlight during lunch, grew only pink flowers, and wound pink Christmas lights through the leaves of the topiary trees. A green-stemmed stone fountain trickled in the corner, and white marble cherubs peeked out of flowerpots.
Romantic
was how people described the terrace.

Now, in the summertime, customers who never would have dined at the Pudding at all came to sit on the terrace. “We'd like a table for two,” they told the hostess,
“on the terrace.”
If they got seated in the dining room instead, they slumped into their ballroom chairs as if they had been banished from first class to coach. As for me, I never felt the same affection for the terrace that I felt for the dining room. The waitstaff crammed the tables close together, pigeons swooped over the plates, and the sounds of the kitchen—the clanks of pots and pans and the hiss of the dishwasher and curses and snatches of Spanish—swelled through the walls and spilled onto the deck. I dined on the terrace only on Saturday nights in the fall, when customers preferred the dining room to the cold, and by dessert I had to slip a tablecloth over my shoulders. And although the terrace had improved business, the Pudding was still losing money—the money just went. It went other places.

We also installed, due to disability-rights laws, an elevator. “We didn't have handicapped access before the elevator,” my mother said, “and, believe me, we don't have it now, either.” It was the cheapest model that could pass the safety inspection, and if someone wanted to use it, the hostess had to arrange for it to land on the right floor. It was also small, and the walls and ceiling were painted a scorching red. In the summer, the heat steamed up from beneath the carpet and left the passengers faint. The elevator occasionally broke down with people in it, and once my mother got stuck between the second and third floors with six crates of red snapper and two waiters. In spite of the smell of the fish, “It was the
waiters
I minded,” she said. “The whole time they were whining for their cigarettes.”

Even our logo was different. Instead of the dark green staircase with balloons floating over it, our menus and business cards showed a cartoon crocodile, modeled after the ones Teddy Roosevelt had shot, sitting at a table covered with pink linen. That crocodile also lounged on love seats, sipped Kir Royales, and blew out birthday candles. Pink stars, like the ones swinging from the dining room ceiling, sprinkled the background of every illustration. But I missed the dark green cursive on the old menus, missed filling in the balloons with the pink highlighters I had stolen from the desk drawers in the office. And I missed our old T-shirts, the green ones with the white staircases on the back. The white ones with pink letters looked, like the leopard lampshades, too new.

A
s business increased at the Pudding, the rules tightened. Health inspectors, who had shown up once a year causing panic, now paid regular visits, and my mother removed all steak tartare and carpaccio from the menu because she feared the possibility of citations of contamination. As for cigarettes behind the line, the city of Cambridge had passed a no-smoking law for restaurants. The chefs now smoked in the parking lot behind the alley, slumped on top of milk crates, gobbling Bolognese out of coffee cups.

I remembered the staff lunches of my childhood when everyone in the kitchen, from the dishwashers to my parents, had lounged in the front room, swilling Chianti and eating pastrami sandwiches from Elsie's. But Elsie's was now a chain called The Wrap that served sandwiches in sheaths of tinfoil stamped with typewritten labels and smoothies called Berry Blast and Banana Bliss. Now no one sent me out for sandwiches of any kind, and it seemed I had not seen anyone but customers drink red wine in years.