A Place at the Table (35 page)

Alice says that for a while after Daddy left Emancipation Township she had a sense of him, that he was alive, that he was safe, and that he was lonely. And then she lost him, abruptly, as if he had deliberately cut off the signal. Months later, Alice’s mother received a letter with no return address. It was from James. It said everyone should forget about him, should pretend James Stone had never been born.

Impossible. At sixteen, still yearning, Alice headed to Manhattan in hopes of finding her brother, even though many of her cousins had moved to D.C., where they had settled in quickly with relatives who had learned to live off the farm. (Emancipation Township did not survive the Depression. After their grandfather died, after the land was liened because of the overdue tax bill, after yet another year of bad crops, everyone left, scattered to crowded cities, where they lived in apartment buildings, where their feet no longer touched the warm, fertile ground.) In New York, Alice was always on the lookout for James. She was most alert at jazz clubs, in Harlem, at services at Abyssinian Baptist, which she attended not because of any strong religious convictions but because she thought James might show up there.

And then years later, after the soldiers returned home victorious from the Second World War, but before she and Gus opened the café, she saw James, in Manhattan, walking down Fifth Avenue, hand in hand with a pretty, pregnant white woman. Alice was in the middle of helping Gus decorate a store window at Saks, but upon seeing James she walked off the job, told Gus an emergency had come up and that she had to go. She followed Daddy down the street, calling after him, “James! James! It’s Alice. Turn around.”

He did not turn, but instead walked faster. She, too, picked up her pace. At the next intersection, where James and the pregnant white woman were stopped at a light, Alice caught up with her brother. Tugged at the cuff of his sleeve. He gave her a withering look, still refusing to speak. “If I’d have died on the spot he would have been glad,” Alice said.

Alice, wounded and in shock, slunk away. Told herself she was mistaken, that the man she saw walking down Fifth Avenue, hand in hand with a pregnant white woman, was not her brother. Told herself her brother had died a long time ago. Started mixing up the face of the lynched boy she had seen as a girl with the face of her brother. Told herself James was lynched. At first she knew she was making up a story, relying on an untruth to help her move past the pain of her brother’s rejection. But eventually she told herself the story of her brother’s lynching so many times that she came to believe it as fact. Eventually she came to believe her own lie.

When Alice told me this, I sympathized. Born into the lie of Daddy’s fictitious heritage, I continued the family tradition, building my hearth and home around untruths—that Cam and I were happy together, for one—until Cam finally struck a match and burned it all down. I am at a place now where I can say thank God. Thank God it burned to the ground.

I am even beginning to feel grateful Cam left. We both needed out. Our lives have irrevocably split, two vines twisted around our
girls, but otherwise growing in opposite directions. I have no claim on his life from this point on, but neither do I feel malice.

•  •  •

Bobby and Alice and I did not linger around the table for too long, talking solemnly. Bobby had a cookbook to put out, and Alice and I helped him test the recipes, to make sure they translated well from restaurant to home kitchen. We did a good job, the essays he wrote to accompany the recipes were dear, and we had a lovely little launch party for it at the café, which Gus decided should double as his farewell party, saying he was tired of being a restaurateur and was ready to close shop.

“It’s time for my second act,” Gus said, this from an octogenarian. But he made good on his declaration, shutting the restaurant down permanently the week after the launch and purchasing around-the-world airline tickets for himself, Randy, and a young male companion who, Gus said, would be there “to help with the luggage.”

The imminent closing of the restaurant certainly made for a teary book launch. Teary and boozy, with everyone concerned about what Bobby would do once the restaurant closed. Bobby assured us that he would be fine, that he was talking to several people about starting his own place, but that he might take some time off before he did, that he needed to figure out if being a chef was what he wanted to do for the rest of his life.

Both of my daughters came to the launch, and Kate and Jack and many others from PML, along with my best friend from boarding school, Sarah. And a whole slew of café regulars, including a group of formidable ladies who lunched back in the 40s, 50s, and early 60s who wore their antiquated—and yellowing—white gloves to wave farewell to their memories of a more elegant time, long since passed but revived for that night. Martinis and Champagne were passed, along with a selection of Bobby’s best hors d’oeuvres: potato
pillows dotted with crème fraîche and caviar, crawfish spread served in toast cups, miniature crab cakes topped with rémoulade, tiny tuna burgers with fresh grated ginger, served on homemade brioche (Alice’s recipe, which I discovered was virtually indistinguishable from what my father used to bake for our family). There were all sorts of desserts, too, mostly southern. But the hit of the evening was, as always, Bobby’s banana pudding, made with pound cake instead of Nilla wafers. For the party Bobby fixed individual puddings, served in shot glasses, topped with whipped cream instead of meringue.

The evening had the feel of wedding receptions Cam and I used to attend in the South, back in our twenties, when everyone was getting married and it seemed every other weekend involved a flight down to Atlanta. At those southern receptions, buffets were favored over seated dinners so the guests could mingle. There was lots of mingling at the launch party, plenty of air kisses and bellowing laughter and exclamations of, “My God, it’s been ages!” All the while Alice sat like a queen at the far corner table, watched over by one of Gus’s alabaster statues while she sipped from a flute of Champagne, observing. I could not read Alice’s facial expression, and concerned that she was feeling left out, I went to sit with her. But as soon as I got to her table she flashed me one of her radiant smiles.

“Wonderful, isn’t it?” she said. “Takes me back to when I cooked here as a young woman. I used to peek through the kitchen door just to watch the expressions on the customers’ faces as they ate my food. Taking delight in their delight.”

And then Alice grabbed my forearm, squeezing it as she directed my gaze to a couple just walking in, looking distinctly out of place. It wasn’t their style so much as their innocence, a sort of wide-eyed blinkiness, docile as cows in a roomful of foxes. The woman was small boned and petite. In style and physical features she reminded me of none other than Nancy Reagan. She wore a bright red jacket with gold buttons atop a black crepe-wool skirt, black tights, and
little black patent-leather loafers, a hard plastic bow decorating each toe. Her hair was short and curly, her blue eyes so bright and twinkly I noticed them from across the restaurant. Beside her was a tall, broad-shouldered man with snowy white hair, wearing a blue blazer, also with brass buttons. Bobby was over by the bar, laughing at something with Kate. Alice and I watched as his eyes darted and he noticed the couple. His laughing mouth froze in place so it looked as if he were making an “O.” And suddenly I knew what Alice had already recognized. Bobby’s parents had arrived.

Bobby stood and walked to them and I could tell that he was holding himself back from running. I could see the little boy inside him just dying to fling himself upon these people. But instead he was measured, polite. I watched as he shook his father’s hand; I watched as he bent down to kiss his mother’s rouged cheek. She gave the side of his face a pat.

“Well it’s about damn time,” said Alice. “Though I hate that it took a good book review in the
New York Times
to get those two to show up for Bobby.”

“You don’t know that,” I said. “Maybe they would have come anyway. It’s not the first good review the
Times
has bestowed upon him. Maybe they are finally ready.”

“Maybe,” said Alice.

•  •  •

And what of myself, a recently divorced woman who discovered at age forty-four that her father was a black man (mixed, actually) passing as white? I think it is fair to say that I no longer have a clear sense of who I am. I think it is fair to say that I have become more interested in observing the world, rather than judging it. I have a lemon-yellow 8-speed bike, an “apartment-warming” present from Bobby, given to me when I first moved into the city, after my divorce was finalized and the Connecticut house had been sold. Weather willing,
most days after work I bike the trails through Central Park, just for the fun of it. (A woman my age, biking just for fun.) When I cross town to go swim at the Y or eat dinner with Aunt Kate and Jack, I usually bike there, too. I like passing through the city this way. It’s faster than walking but still close to the ground, which is more and more where I feel at home these days.

The eighteen months of alimony I received, plus my share of the profits from the sale of the Connecticut home, make for a small nest egg that won’t last long. Finding a full-time job was a necessity, and once again Aunt Kate stepped in, securing a place for me as a junior editor at PML, with a focus on what Kate calls literary cookbooks. Not just recipes, but the stories that go along with them. Like the story that accompanies Bobby’s recipe for his grandmother’s pound cake, how she sold ten a week for years, tithing the profits and saving the rest, which she eventually gave to Bobby, so he could move to New York and try to be free.

I am lucky to have the job. I enjoy the work. I wish I were paid more.

•  •  •

I think of what Daddy said, in his rueful way, about winning the prestigious award for advances he made in genetic research. That all it cost was everything. I think of how his words apply to me. How there has been a steady burning away of all I once knew: my marriage, my financial stability, even my whiteness. I am no longer white, exactly, but what of being black can I claim? What of being black can my daughters claim? What of being black do we really know? What is it to be black if you were raised white in Connecticut? And yet a part of me always knew. A part of me always knew that something didn’t quite add up in our family, that something was off. But the adults all around me whispered, “Shhh, shhh, shhh. Everything is fine.” All the while Daddy smeared zinc oxide on me all summer,
insisted I wear long-sleeved shirts at the beach. All the while my hair curled and kinked, and a small cut on my arm blossomed into a raised scar, which I now know is a keloid, common to African-Americans, one of the reasons black girls’ ears are often pierced early, since keloid scarring is much less likely to occur before puberty.

My own body knew my identity long before I ever did.

•  •  •

I have started going to church with Bobby. Cradle Baptist that he is, he has not been able to give up God completely, which is a blessing for me, as he is watering the small seed of faith that sprouted after my divorce. We attend a small Episcopal church in my upper Upper West Side neighborhood, near the Hungarian Pastry Shop, where we often go after services for coffee and strudel. The priest at Church of the Epiphany, Father Cappey, is an old hippie who still wears his hair in a ponytail, even though it is now completely gray and he has a bald spot on the back of his head. Bobby would prefer we went to the more refined services at St. John the Divine, the grand cathedral only a few blocks away. But I begged for us to commit to this small, raggedy church, and Bobby tolerates it because he likes my company and the bread served at communion—offered to whoever wants to take of it—is homemade and sweet.

I think I might have a little crush on Father Cappey, despite the ponytail. I love his exuberance, love how he will spontaneously shout, “Rejoice!” from the pulpit, in response to nothing more than being alive. How he is out on the streets nearly every morning, talking to the homeless, buying them cups of coffee, handing out sandwiches, directing them to shelters. There is nothing academic or removed about Father Cappey’s work, and yet his sermons are intellectually engaging. My favorite was his sermon on living in New York. How living in this teeming city, a city of a multitude of cultures, a city that is constantly shifting in its identity, provides us with a profound
opportunity to embrace impermanence. How those of us who are renters are perhaps in a better position to recognize that our time here on earth is a borrowed gift. That it’s not ours to own, though it is ours to relish. That it’s still worth beautifying, even though it’s temporary. So paint the walls, plant tomatoes in pots on the fire escape, but don’t cling. Because eventually we will all be asked to move on.

Today Bobby and I arrive late, slipping into a back pew during the first Scripture reading. Bobby and I are both a little hungover, having attended a dinner last night at Aunt Kate’s, which included multiple courses and multiple wine pairings. Jack had invited a friend of his to the dinner, a veteran war photographer, rugged and masculine, though twenty years my senior. Kate thought he might be a good match for me. I enjoyed his company but felt no romantic spark. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t linger through the evening, letting my wineglass be refilled again and again.

And so this morning I have a dull headache and am fighting feelings of nausea. It is no small feat that Bobby and I made it to church at all, but somehow, attending services once a week has become a touchstone for me. It’s not about belief exactly. It’s about the ritual, the hymns, the communion. I lean my head back on the pew, shut my eyes. And then I notice a particular smell, almost like wet fur. It started drizzling as we arrived at the church. Perhaps Bobby’s sports jacket has wool in it and that is what I am smelling. Eyes still closed, I hear a fast panting, almost grotesque in its rapidity. I glance at Bobby, trying to figure out if the panting is coming from him. His eyes are also closed, head leaned back against the pew. He is hungover for sure, but breathing regularly.