Chez Cordelia (35 page)

Juliet was frail and hungry-looking in black. Her hair was growing out messily. She seemed just as glum but less petulant than she had been when I saw her last, and no fatter. She gave me her thin, thin fingers to squeeze; her nails were bitten to the quick, exposing plump cushions of fingertips, the only fat on her. Mr. Oliver got down on his knees to pull her boots off, and she sat passively while he did so, like a doll being undressed. Mr. Oliver had changed, too, since his divorce. His hair was growing, like Juliet's—it fell softly from his bald spot to his collar—and he was wearing a spiffy-looking suit. I assumed this was Juliet's influence, although it was hard to imagine her throwing her weight around, there was so little of it.

Mr. Oliver gave me one of his black-dot cartoons: myself in a chef's hat on a rare 1913 Liberty Head nickel. Juliet handed me a package wrapped in silver paper, made her remark about my dress, and melted into a chair, leaning on Mr. Oliver, whom everyone was calling Ivan with a nonchalance I admired; I couldn't bring myself to do it. “Meg and Beth didn't call Professor Bhaer Fritz,” I said to Miranda.

“But isn't he sweet?” Miranda asked, and hugged me, her goodwill spilling all over the place.
Sweet
, I thought, severely understated Mr. Oliver's virtue in the face of Juliet's formidable problems. I wondered if he ever longed for his drab, chubby, emotionally stable ex-wife.

Aunt Phoebe and Preston Maguire arrived while my father, wearing a knitted vest sent him by one of his admirers, was still standing in the doorway booming out a poem he had written for the occasion. My aunt and I hugged each other a little tearfully; she sniffled when she introduced Preston. He was a large, youngish man with melting brown eyes and a stutter, and he played the trombone with the New Haven Symphony. He turned out to be very silent, maybe because of the stutter, but he had a huge, toothy grin that made you want to grin back. He handed me a bottle of brandy. My aunt gave me a present, unwrapped—a wooden plaque that read:

No matter where I serve my guests,

They always like my kitchen best.

“Oh God, Auntie P.,” said Horatio.

“I love it,” I said. “I'm going to hang it over my bed.”

“André Soltner has his over the stove,” said Horatio.

I imagined Martha's reaction if I hung my plaque on the Delft tiles over her stove. “I'll have to wait till I get my own kitchen.”

We all exchanged presents. I gave my aunt a pottery bank that was just like her hound dog, Bounce, and I gave Juliet and Miranda matching silver-plated ring caddies shaped like cats—you slip your rings over their tails. For my father, I got a sweatshirt with a picture of Shakespeare on the front, and one for Horatio with Sherlock Holmes. I gave my mother a teapot, painted with violets. It played “Tea for Two” when you poured; I demonstrated it for her, and she was delighted.

My father gave me a copy of
Tristram Shandy
, but everyone else gave me practical gifts—down booties and cookbooks and copper pans. Martha had left a gift for me, my own copy of
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
. Inside Volume One, it said, in Martha's handwriting, “To Cordelia, with our best love, Martha and Paul Lamberti.” (The final
i
in Lamberti, as always in Martha's signature, trailed off in a wobble, significantly undotted.) Megan had drawn—at Martha's instigation, I suspected—a picture of Vicky and herself, both smiling, with “We love Cordeelea” printed at the bottom.

“How do you like it here, Cordelia?” Miranda asked me, eyeing these tokens of affection. “Being the beloved
au pair?
”

“I'm a cook,” I said firmly. “And I like it fine.”

“But don't you miss the sea?” Juliet asked with sudden intensity. She always called it the sea—all of them did—never the Sound. “Way up here in the corner of the state?”

I said no, I really didn't, but as the conversation went on around me I pondered it: to me, the sea meant fishing with Danny off Billy Arp's dock, and when I thought of that gray-green shimmer of water it wasn't the sea I missed, it was a whole complex of outdated emotions that brought a lump into my throat.

My siblings and I sat together, the three of them—even, languidly, Juliet—talking in the special, facetious, allusive language that had been going over my head for years. They were talking about what failures they all were as writers and academics, and how the family gifts hadn't held up in their generation. There was a shrill anxiety in their laughter at themselves. I sat and studied each of their faces in turn: Horatio with his beard, Miranda blooming, Juliet like an elf. How young they all look, I thought, and then, immediately after: how irresponsible they all are—a judgment that may seem obvious but which to me came as a shock. I was used to looking up to them as older, smarter, more confident people than I, and when they forced me to perceive them, over the sherry and cheese and crackers, as slightly pathetic children—whiz kids whose promise had come to nothing—I was overcome with a sentimental love for them. I gravitate toward people like that, I realized. Their weaknesses touch my heart. And then I thought, almost for the first time that day,
Paul
…

A lot of sherry was drunk before dinner—by everyone except Juliet, who had brought a six-pack of Perrier. My ruddy-faced father became ruddier, and aggressively paternal, and made Juliet and Miranda and me stand together by the fire so he could snap our picture. “These are my jewels,” he intoned, kissing us each in turn. In the picture, Miranda and I flank Juliet, looking like her healthy keepers.

My aunt accompanied me to the kitchen when I went to check the turkey, and told me Preston Maguire wanted to marry her.

“Do you want to marry him?”

She looked at me in surprise. “I don't want to marry anyone. Delia, I thought you knew that.”

“But he seems so nice.”

“Well, he
is
nice. But that's no reason to marry him.”

She asked me, hesitantly, about my own status. When was I going to divorce Danny? What was I doing with myself? I was almost twenty-three years old, saddled with a useless marriage to a—She hesitated, not wanting, after our past conflicts about it, to call Danny a rotter, a cad, a rat. She could have called him any of those things, of course, and I'd no longer be able to defend him.

“To a man who deserted you,” she finished lamely, and when I said nothing she persisted, “Are you seeing anyone else? I hate to pry, Delia, but I have such a special affection for you, and I want you to be happy.”

“Yes, I'm seeing someone,” I said reluctantly.

“And are you happy?”

“I'm ninety-nine point nine percent happy,” I replied with a smile. I wondered if I should allot to Martha more than one tenth of one percent.

“Such precision!” my aunt exclaimed. “Well, I'm glad to hear it, and I promise I'll drop the subject. Let's talk about dinner.”

She told me everything looked delicious. “Perfectly simple, simply perfect,” she crooned, bending over the turkey. It did look good, like a nice plump baby, but I was a little worried, now that we were actually going to sit down and eat. I wasn't very experienced at devising menus. I didn't know if onion tarte would be overpowered by the turkey's sausage stuffing. Was the tarte really necessary? Were green beans enough of a vegetable? Should I have searched out some baby carrots? Or done artichoke hearts again?

“Don't be so nervous,” my aunt said to me. “That's your family in there, honey, not Craig and Julia.”

“That's the trouble,” I said, but as it turned out I needn't have worried. Most of them were slightly tipsy, and it was Christmas; they would have forgiven anything, eaten anything. They raved about the dinner, and the only problem with the beans and the tarte was that there wasn't enough of either. Miranda said, “Cordelia, I haven't had a bean like this since I was in Paris.”

Preston said, “I've never had food like this, Cordelia,” stumbling on the C and smiling.

Their faces looked like the faces of the people I used to observe dining at Grand'mère: satisfied, contented, good-humored. This is the way people should look, I thought. This is why I want to cook.

We drank every drop of Horatio's rare white Burgundy, and the conversation at the table became jolly. Even when the talk turned to Horatio's abandoned career, and Miranda's, the old anxieties and rivalries smoothed out, and everyone was mellow and loving.

“I may move to California,” Horatio said over coffee and Preston's brandy. “Maybe to Monterey. Or the south of France. I want to enjoy life for a while. Fleet the time carelessly and all that.” No one pointed out that he'd been doing just that for a couple of years now. My parents looked at him benignly, just as if, a week ago, they hadn't been complaining to me about Horatio's waste of his gifts. “I'm all dried up,” he said, almost with pride, scraping at the label on the brandy bottle with his thumbnail. “All written out.”

“Typical child prodigy,” Miranda said. “Over the hill at thirty.” But she smiled at Horatio and added, “Just like me, kiddo. I'd hate to tell you what a mess my new novel is.” The sympathetic gazes swiveled down the table to Miranda. She shrugged. “I can write, that's no problem. But I have nothing to say.”

“Oh, Miranda,” said Annamay, putting her head on Miranda's shoulder. Miranda laid her cheek against it, and everyone smiled at them, the way they might smile at kittens.

“Well, Dad's still got plenty to say,” Horatio said, and they began to talk about my father's new book,
East from the Sea
. It was a very melancholy book, my aunt had told me—an old man's book.

“What did you think of it, Cordelia?” Miranda asked me, with a small gleam of mischief but no malice.

“Well,” I said, and stopped. A chorus of “You haven't read it” echoed down the table, and they all grinned and hooted. It took me by surprise, this fond, playful tolerance.

“You don't need to read my poems, Cordelia,” my father said. “You inspire them.” He raised his glass of brandy to me.

“Oh, Daddy,” I protested. “You hardly ever even see me.”

“I have my memories,” he said, suddenly serious. “I have wonderful children,” he added, turning to Preston. “Couldn't ask for a better bunch of kids.”

I looked at the faces around the table, over the coffee cups and dirty plates, and I recalled how I used to feel crowded out by them, and by the vast numbers of words they generated. In my winy haze, all that ancient resentment seemed pointless, and I felt truly kin to my family, maybe for the first time ever.

“Then there's Cordelia,” said Horatio. He had drunk more wine than anyone, and I became wary again, half expecting belligerence, but he spoke my name affectionately.

“Oh, Cordelia's the real writer in the family,” Aunt Phoebe said. “I've always maintained that. She's the observer, the one with the sharp eye who stands back and watches.”

“The writer who doesn't write,” Horatio said smartly.

“She may,” my father said, with more goodwill than conviction. “Sometime.”

“No, thanks,” I said, and began briskly to stir sugar into my coffee. “Unless I write a cookbook.”

There were various encouraging noises, more compliments on the meal, a discreet belch from Horatio. Juliet had become more and more silent, regarding the scanty plate of food Mr. Oliver had fixed for her as if it were swarming with maggots. The plate was still there, and she hadn't eaten one crumb that I could see. All of a sudden she sat up in her chair and began to talk, and everyone else stopped to listen; it was as if the pewter coffeepot had come to life.

“Ivan and I saw Luciano Pavarotti being interviewed on television,” she said, with compelling irrelevance. Her voice was small and cold, but oddly husky, perhaps from disuse. “He said, ‘I was blessed by God with the ability to enjoy life, and I thank Him for that every day.' He said it so simply, with such serenity in his face, I began to cry and cry, I felt so left out and lost, because I was born with just the opposite, the inability to enjoy anything, the ability—the fantastic ability—to hate myself and my life and everything in it. I hate this food and I hate this table and these plates, and I hate turkey and horrible stuffing and beans and pie. I hate forks and spoons and coffee cups, and I hate you all.”

She began throwing her silverware around, and I think she would have begun on her pristine plate of food if Mr. Oliver hadn't taken her by the shoulders and held her. She collapsed into long, gasping, helpless sobs. The rest of us sat stunned and unmoving, as if she had put us under a spell, but what had really happened was that she had broken the spell. We were no longer a contented, bantering family group, bemused by food and wine and love. We broke up into a bunch of separate worriers, burdened with our private cares, gazing at Juliet in horror.

I was overtaken by a primitive rage at her. I hadn't realized how much I'd wanted to impress my family, and she had spoiled everything, cooling the warmth my dinner had created with her bratty explosion. I didn't forget, either, that she was the Miller with the dramatic gift; I admired her timing—the way she put in her two cents right at the end, so we'd be left with the taste of her troubles instead of my cooking.

Mr. Oliver said, apologetically, as if she were his wife or his daughter, or as if her behavior were his personal failure, “I'll just—let me—” He led her into the living room.

There was a depressed silence. “Poor old Jule,” Miranda said, and Annamay shook her head, looking tragic, but inwardly thankful, I imagined, that she didn't have a sister like Juliet.

Horatio said, in his old cynical voice, “You can't help but wonder how many people secretly feel the same way but would never admit it.”

I stood up, tottering slightly. I had to speak; a statement had been building up in me all day, and Juliet's speech had made it imperative. “Well, I don't feel that way,” I said. Their faces all turned up at me, but their expressions were various: surprise, amusement, brow-furrowing concern, apprehension. I was too angry to feel foolish, and I plunged on. “I love turkey and pie and wine and everything, I love you all.” I began, horribly, to cry before I could stop myself. “I love every person in this house,” I blubbered—something like that. I can't imagine now what it was I said, but when I stopped and sat back down, abruptly, everyone murmured in support.