Chocolates for Breakfast

Chocolates for Breakfast

Pamela Moore

Contents

Foreword

This is the very best kind of story—a tale of imagined sophistication, of New York City apartments, of Hollywood has-beens, of family tragedy, of beatnik intellectuals, of private school crushes, of time traversed through fiction.
Chocolates for Breakfast
is an incredible novel, but the story of how it comes to exist in this form, to be held in your hands, is equally noteworthy. I'll start at the point when the novel entered my world, fifty-plus years after its initial publication in 1956, and then we'll work our way forward and backward as necessary.

A few years ago, a small press crowd-funded a story of mine by promising readers that I would write them a love letter if they bought the story in advance. The love letters were my idea—who doesn't enjoy getting mail, after all?—and I happily wrote hundreds of them. The letters to strangers were the easiest: I just made something up based on their home address, something along the lines of “You are the most beautiful girl in Virginia Beach.” Letters to people I knew were more straightforward thank-you notes, with a few exceptions. What
does one say, for example, to the very nice French and Latin teacher from seventh grade, the one with a pack of contraband cigarettes in his shirt pocket and gorgeous wavy hair? I decided to tell this teacher, whom I refused to call by his first name, exactly how dreamy he'd always been. When the teacher (fine, fine—Kevin, I can call him Kevin) showed up at a reading of mine some time later, I was surprised and flattered. That night he mentioned that his mother had also been a writer, and did I know that? I didn't. He gave me a copy of her first novel,
Chocolates for Breakfast
, and I slipped it into my bag, not thinking too much about it.

The book was written when Kevin's mother, Pamela Moore, was only eighteen years old. It proudly said so on the cover. And that she was to be our American answer to Françoise Sagan: sexy and bold and teenaged! The novel had been out of print for years, and Kevin had been buying up pulpy paperbacks wherever he could. The book he gave me had yellowed pages and an illustrated cover. Kevin hadn't told me anything about his mother, and so I went into the book blind. All I knew was that the title was electric—what could be more delicious than chocolates for breakfast?

The novel is catnip—delicious and intoxicating. It opens in a boarding-school dorm room, with fifteen-year-old Courtney Farrell and her roommate, Janet Parker, lazing around teasing each other about whether Courtney has gotten too close to her English tutor, Miss Rosen. We also learn in that first scene about Courtney's family: the girls are just back from vacation, during which Courtney spent a few days marooned at school because each of her parents (her publisher father off on an island, her actress mother off in California) thought the other one was taking care of her.

Written in the kind of voice that an older writer would have needed a medium to channel,
Chocolates for Breakfast
still feels fresh and current—Moore's narrative is often hilarious with a soupçon of melancholy, the exact recipe for a teenage girl of any era. While things were very different for a teenage girl in the 1950s, some things never change. Her scenes of prep-school boys and grand, empty apartments are precursers to
Gossip Girl
, complete with morning martinis and endless cigarettes. Once Courtney is summoned to Los Angeles to live with her mother, the action moves to the hazy apartments at the Garden of Allah, F. Scott Fitzgerald's former home. Characters are in and out of sanitariums. At sixteen, Courtney loses her virginity to a homosexual actor who can't be bothered even to buy her breakfast. She drinks Cokes at the counter at Schwab's drugstore.

I fell in love with the book immediately. I felt, as I do about only half a dozen other novels on the planet, that it had been delivered to me at precisely the right moment. I was writing a book about a Hollywood star, and in went he Garden of Allah. I grew up on Manhattan's Upper West Side (a far cry across the park from the Upper East Side, the only New York neighborhood that matters in
Chocolates for Breakfast
, but much has changed in the last few decades) and recognized the way my friends and I played at being sophisticated until it became habit, until it became an actual part of our personalities. I quickly passed my copy of the book onto my agent, telling her what I am telling you now: it was a crime for this wonderful book to be out of print. I also told my agent we were going to change that.

What delights me most about
Chocolates for Breakfast
being back in print is the idea of seeing girls—teenage girls, former teenage girls, teenage girls hidden deep inside the bodies of grown-up people of either gender—clutching copies of the book on the subway, rapt. All readers, regardless of gender, will pass it on to each other, having underlined passages of note. (One of my underlined passages is this: “Courtney was like her mother. If she were drowning, she would wave off the rescuers, in a last gesture of defiance, because they were fisherman in a rowboat and she wanted to be saved by a yacht.”) I now have a 1964 edition of the book, and the largest blurb on the back calls it “appallingly frank,” which I'm not sure is a compliment. Even so,
Chocolates for Breakfast
stands out for being ahead of the curve and for its witty, knife-sharp tone. Readers who love
The Bell Jar
,
Perks of Being a Wallflower
,
The Catcher in the Rye
, and
The Dud Avocado
will swoon. The book is as refreshing as a tall glass of vodka and grapefruit juice, like an early morning swim when everyone else is still sleeping off last night's party.

As I mentioned, I read the novel without knowing the whole story, without knowing how Moore's own story ended. There is more material about her in the back of this edition, so I won't include much of it here except to say that Pamela Moore killed herself in 1964, at twenty-six years old, some eight years after this book was published. There are several suicide attempts in the book, and as in
The Bell Jar
, the real-life struggles of its author cast a pall over the proceedings. It's hard to read the novel now and not diagnose Courtney, fearing for Pamela's life, but the book is a novel, and Courtney survives.

I spoke to Kevin recently, both of us giddy with excitement over the book's re-release. We started talking about the wonderful lightning-bolt title, and how no one actually eats chocolate for breakfast in the book. There are eggs, there are Bloody Marys, there are cigarettes and Champagne, but never so much as a pain au chocolat. Kevin said that he thought the word “chocolates” stood in for everything else, for the drinking, the sex, and the perfect teenage misery that would have had the book censored left and right. It sounds like a confection,
Chocolates for Breakfast
, like a treat given to an adolescent on her birthday. Let's hope it is, over and over again, with all of life's complicated magnificence tucked safely inside.

—Emma Straub

Chapter 1

S
pring at Scaisbrooke Hall was clearly the most beautiful time of year. All the alumnae said so as they remembered the apple blossoms in the quadrangle, and the grass growing long and fresh beside the brook, where illegal Cokes were placed to keep them cool for clandestine drinks before the evening study hall. In spring the sweaters that were always too big and the matching blue skirts and the sturdy Oxfords were shipped home, to be replaced by the blue dresses and the saddle shoes of the spring uniform. Scaisbrooke had been founded sixty years ago on the pattern of English public schools, and its high-beamed halls were dark and heavy with tradition. This was the time of year when the students exchanged the winter pallor of studies and indoor basketball for early sun tans, and they looked scrubbed and healthy as they walked about the grounds and laughed in groups in the shadowed courtyards.

The windows of Courtney Farrell's room were opened to the lush Connecticut spring, and her roommate, Janet Parker, was lying with her clothes off in a patch of sun across her bed. Courtney was a slim, dark-haired girl of fifteen, with the pale skin and high coloring of the Irish. Her eyes were almost green, and deepened under the sunlight. They were large, rebellious eyes, with a coldness that a girl of fifteen should not have known. Her face had already lost most of its childish roundness, and as she puzzled over her translation of Caesar her strongly molded chin was thrust forward in characteristic defiance and determination.

The soft afternoon crept in through the window and curled about her on the bed, and she sighed deeply as the season got the better of her studies. Courtney put down the textbook and closed the Latin dictionary. She took a banana from the tin box beside her bed and threw it to Janet, and peeled herself another.

“I feel so relaxed,” Courtney said. “I never appreciate school so much as after a vacation.”

“I don't appreciate school any time,” Janet said. “Especially after a vacation. I really had a ball this spring,” she said reflectively. She turned to her roommate. “You had a pretty good vacation too, didn't you? I mean, staying with your mother at the Plaza and all?” She grinned. “Even though the vacation was delayed a couple of days.”

“Oh, I didn't mind that,” Courtney said with a mouthful of banana. “Mummy was awfully upset, and blamed the whole thing on Daddy—she said she assumed Daddy was coming back from the Virgin Islands in time for my vacation. Of course, Daddy wrote me a long letter saying that he had assumed Mummy knew he still had a week of his vacation to go—you know, all about how he was up to his ears in his publishing work even on vacation, and how he needed the rest. But Mummy wasn't working on any picture, so the studio let her come in from the Coast right away. She was awfully upset that I had to stay at school two days of the vacation, but I didn't mind.”

“I don't know what you're complaining about, then. You seemed to be living well when I saw you—the Plaza is certainly an improvement over Scaisbrooke.”

“Well,” said Courtney, “it's just such a strain. You know, Mummy and I used to be so close, and now we aren't, of course, but I have to pretend we are.” She turned suddenly to Janet. “Tell me—why do we have to pretend to the parents?”

“Hell, I don't know. Self-defense, I guess. I know if my father knew that I made out with boys and occasionally got tight and all he'd kill me. I guess that we just get into the habit of pretending so that we don't upset them. I don't know. You ask the damndest questions.”

Courtney let the answer suffice and they were quiet again.

“Oh, by the way,” Janet broke in, “I forgot to tell you that Miss Rosen came by while you were sun-bathing. She wanted to see you about something.”

Courtney looked up, suddenly interested.

“Did she say what it was?”

“I didn't ask her.”

Janet threw the banana peel across the room into the waste-basket. She picked up a mirror and began to pluck her eyebrows. Janet was sixteen, spontaneous, gay, attractive if usually too heavily made up, and loathed by women of any age. At Scaisbrooke, where lipstick and fur coats were prohibited, she made a fetish of looking unattractive, in a wrinkled uniform and shoes barely clean enough to pass morning inspection. She had just come from New York and a round of sub-deb parties and night clubs, however, and she plucked her eyebrows by inadvertence.

“I don't dig this
thing
that you two have,” she went on. “You know, I was up in Alberts and Clarke's room before lunch, and they were talking about you and Miss Rosen. I've been meaning to talk to you for a long time about her. I've gotta stretch first, though. Arm yourself with another banana or something.”

Courtney looked over at her roommate as she stretched languorously in the spring sun, wrapping her arms around the pillow behind her, twisting her legs and contracting and releasing her body, deriving a relaxation that only the very young can get from such a simple action. She had a lovely young woman's body, athletic and lightly tanned around the bathing-suit marks.

“Put a cover over yourself or something,” Courtney said.

Janet grinned. “What's the matter, do I get you oversexed?”

“All right, all right. Go ahead and talk.”

“Well, granted everybody in these psycho boarding schools has a crush on some older girl or staff member. It's a kind of idolizing, okay. But you've gone overboard, so that you've cut yourself off from the rest of the girls and bound most of your life here up in Miss Rosen. The girls resent it, you know. They feel that you're snubbing them.”

“I am.”

“But, sweetie, if you were like me and had men and social life separate from school, it would be okay. But all you have is your mother and her friends. You ought to try to make a life here, because whether you admit it to yourself or not, offices and all that crap and acceptance by the clique mean a lot to you, because you haven't anything outside of school. I know that you want to be editor of the
Lit
Review
, and you ought to be because you can write circles around everybody here. But you know that offices aren't awarded by merit. They're kind of badges of social approval. So you ought to admit to yourself that you want to be accepted and stop escaping into this relationship with Miss Rosen. If you don't watch out, sweetie, you're going to find yourself kind of queer. Alberts says that you're in love with Rosen.”

“What business is this of theirs, anyway? Sure, she has even told me that she loves me, but she loves all her friends. I mean, she uses the word in the Biblical sense.”

“Oh, sweetie, don't pay any attention to this social-worker crap that she picked up in the University of Chicago. From all you've told me, she sounds queer as hell to me. All this bit about you going over there every night to talk about literature or something.”

“What do you think we do!”

“You don't need to get so mad. I don't think you make love or anything. I don't even think you know how.”

“You're making something grubby out of this.” Courtney lay back and put her arms around her head. “She's a tutor. She knows that the English bores the hell out of me, so she gives me books like
Finnegans Wake
and T. S. Eliot poetry and stimulating reading that I don't get ordinarily, and in the evenings we discuss them in a kind of a bull-session, that's all.”

“She's more than an English teacher, and you know it. I've never seen such a change as what's happened to you this year. In the beginning of the year you were moody and selfish and bitchy once in a while like everybody else, but now you've got some idea that you've got to be the modern saint, and love the masses and all that University of Chicago crap that she's filled you with. You've become all drawn into yourself so you don't get mad any more, but bury it somewhere, and you've become critical and superior as hell. You know, you're not like that, and you can't possibly escape into her world, absorb her nature. You are two entirely different people, from different social and intellectual backgrounds.”

“Oh, dammit, Parker, you don't understand at all. I didn't like myself, do you get that? And then I met this new teacher, who had a kind of calmness and seemed to like herself, and I had never known many people like that. So one day at lunch we got to talking about some book, and she offered to lend me another book that she figured I'd like. So we talked about that book then, and I got to know her, and I started to talk to her about some things in my own life, because she had a good mind and I could somehow talk to her.”

“Look, Court, you don't need to get so belligerent. I'm only trying to help you because I am a year older than you, even though we're in the same class, and I can see that you're throwing away your life here, to invest it in this escape. That's all it is. Remember, there are a couple of things I've learned in a year that you don't know.”

Courtney took an orange from the box and threw it across the room. It splattered on the wall with a very satisfying effect.

“Court,” said Janet patiently, “sometimes I remember that you're only fifteen. That was my orange, too.”

“Here we go with the Mama Parker routine. I'm going for a walk. Save me a seat at dinner.”

Janet sighed and resumed plucking her eyebrows.

In the hall, Courtney passed the headmistress.

“Hello, Farrell.”

“Hello, Mrs. Reese.”

“I heard that you got another conduct for having an unpermissioned book,” she remarked.

“Yes, Mrs. Reese. It was a James Joyce book,
Finnegans Wake
, and I assumed that Joyce was on the list of permissioned authors, so I didn't bother to get it okayed by anyone.”

“You can't assume,” she said coldly, “you should know.”

“I realize that, Mrs. Reese.” How she hated to be polite and prostrate herself before staff members! “I realize that I was wrong.”

“Well, you'll be more careful next time,” she said more warmly. Self-abnegation always made staff members warmer. “For a bright girl, Farrell, you get too many penalties. I had hoped that you would help straighten out your roommate this year, but instead the two of you get into trouble.”

“Yes, Mrs. Reese.”

With relief Courtney walked out to the quadrangle, and as soon as she was outside she began to run because she was fifteen and it was a wonderful spring day. She ran across the hockey field and jumped across the little brook on the far side, where hockey balls always landed. As she cleared the brook, she fell into the long grass from her effort, and she laughed at herself and got up. She ran up the little hill onto the cinder track that skirted the tennis courts, the track that she ran around before breakfast as a part of hockey training. When she got to the second hockey field she stopped, because that was as far as she could go without entering Mrs. Reese's grounds, which were out of bounds except for seniors when they went to her house for tea. She was out of breath and she fell on the grass, which had just been cut and smelled very fresh and young. Grass smelled hot and wet in the summer, but in the spring it smelled properly young, which was a relief from the old and dead smell of Scaisbrooke's corridors.

She turned on her back and smiled at herself and looked up at the sky. The sky was terribly vast. In the summer she sometimes floated on her back in the Pacific and tried to convince herself that the sky was really shapeless and she was on the edge of a round world. The
Rubaiyat
said that it was a “great inverted bowl,” and secretly she agreed with it. Scientists try awfully hard, she mused, to convince us that things which are obviously so really aren't, and try to convince us of the minuteness of marvelously big things like the sky and mountains by breaking them down into little atoms. She had never seen an atom and never wanted to, because the idea of mountains and people being just different arrangements of things of the same shape was disagreeable to her.

The sound of the warning bell for dinner carried very softly across the hockey fields and interrupted her thoughts. She had to hurry because she had to change into her dinner uniform and there was a penalty for every minute of lateness.

All through dinner Courtney looked forward to seeing Miss Rosen. Courtney always felt comfortable and secure when she was in Miss Rosen's room, and it was a nice walk through the courtyards to get to the faculty house. After she passed through the two courtyards she went along a walk beside the chapel, a walk that was flanked by tall trees in spring green and some which had blossoms on them. The evening was early yet, and the chapel was silhouetted against the light sky. Sometimes she would go into the chapel, and though she was Catholic and it held little religious significance for her, it was a quiet and shadowy place where she could think, and pretend that she was in Hollywood.

But tonight she passed the chapel, because she was looking forward to talking to Miss Rosen. Under her arm was the copy of
Finnegans Wake
, which she really didn't understand although she puzzled over every abstruse paragraph, and whose possession had cost her three hours' work and two weeks of being campused. She climbed the dingy stairs and at the top of the second flight turned left. The door was a little open, and she could hear that Miss Rosen had her Bach records on. Somehow Bach was always playing in her room, and the solidity and sureness of his music was as closely connected in her mind with Miss Rosen as her shelves of wonderful books. Years later, when Courtney heard that music, the picture of that room and the warm feeling that she had when she was in it would come back as strongly as though she were again climbing those stairs which she knew so well.

Miss Rosen was a tall woman in her early twenties, short-waisted and somewhat round-shouldered. Her eyes were large and brown and intense. She was not an attractive woman, yet she had an intensity and a warmth which caused people to overlook the defects in her face and body when they had spent a few minutes with her. She was engaged to a scholarly young man whom she had met at the University of Chicago and who was now an instructor in philosophy at Harvard.