Dinner with Edward (3 page)

I would eventually learn to follow Edward's recipes with a heightened degree of precision, whether they were instructions for the preparation of food or for life. His assertions never veered too far from certain fundamental themes—he spoke about recognizing “the stranger in all of us” and achieving what he liked to call “a resting place of the soul,” by which I now realize he meant self-­assurance and being happy in your own skin. Or as he put it, “a place in your head where you are at peace with your life, with your decisions.”

3

Scrod, in San Marzano Tomato Sauce

Orange Zest Salad

Apple Galette, Vanilla Ice Cream

Pinot Grigio

I
n the nineteenth century Roosevelt Island, then known as Blackwell's Island, was crowded with more than a dozen prisons, a smallpox hospital, workhouses, and even a home for “wayward girls.” Municipal leaders in the growing metropolis across the river decided that Blackwell's Island would be the perfect place to lock away the criminal, the indigent, and the insane, convinced that “the pleasant and glad surroundings would be conducive to both physical and mental rehabilitation.” In 1828, New York City purchased the island for $32,000 and, four years later, the Blackwell's Island penitentiary and hospital opened.

When I moved to the island in 2010, nearly fourteen thousand people—many of them UN bureaucrats and émigrés from the former Yugoslavia—lived among the remnants of that sad history. There are still the ghostly skeletons of abandoned hospitals, and even the modern residential buildings, most of them completed in the 1970s, resemble correctional facilities, minus bars and barbed wire fencing. Inside, the stained carpets in the hallways smell of cigarette smoke and stale cabbage. By contrast, Edward's building is one of the more elegant and well maintained, with a small army of solicitous doormen.

During the year I lived on Roosevelt Island, there were few restaurants and only a Starbucks and a supermarket that residents referred to as the “antique store” because many of the products were past their “best before” dates. The island, which is about eight hundred feet wide at its widest point, turns into a ghost town after dark. When I invited an eighty-­year-­old friend who had lived in Manhattan for most of her life to visit me, she looked suspiciously around a deserted Main Street at night, and tentatively asked where she might find the wine store.

“Astoria,” I said.

Returning to Manhattan on the tram, a fellow rider mistook her for a tourist and asked where she was from.

“Manhattan,” she deadpanned.

We had rented an apartment in a sprawling housing complex right past the Good Shepherd Church and the Roosevelt Island Garden Club, with its odd, labyrinthine plots, crowded in summer with a lush tangle of tomato vines, all manner of flowering shrubs, and a jumble of dusty lawn ornaments.

But where my husband at least at first saw paradise, I began to focus on something entirely different, and I started to pine for the bustling, vibrant streets of Manhattan. There was something about Roosevelt Island that seemed to mirror my own sadness. A legless beggar on a hospital gurney regularly greeted commuters with a tin can when they emerged from the subway station. I was soon to discover that he was part of the community of amputees who were residents of the two rehabilitation hospitals that were somber reminders of the island's grim past.

We lived in The Octagon, the site of the former New York City Lunatic Asylum. The apartments were massive, with stunning views of the Manhattan skyline. The building had a tennis court, an outdoor pool, an art gallery, and even a little shuttle bus that ferried residents to the subway and tram stations. In 2006, a Manhattan developer had transformed The Octagon into a luxury rental building, unusual for the island, complete with marble countertops, high ceilings, and designer fixtures in “the dramatic setting of an urban waterfront park.”

But the brochures said nothing about 888 Main Street's dark history as one of the most notorious institutions in nineteenth-­century New York—a place that even Charles Dickens found too creepy to spend much time at. “Everything had a lounging, listless, madhouse air, which was very painful,” Dickens writes in
American Notes for General Circulation
, after a truncated tour in 1842. “The moping idiot, cowering down with long dishevelled hair; the gibbering maniac, with his hideous laugh and pointed finger; the vacant eye, the fierce wild face, the gloomy picking of the hands and lips, and munching of the nails: there they were all, without disguise, in naked ugliness and horror.”

More than forty years later, the
New York Times
reported on thirty-­five-­year-­old Ellen Drum, a patient who suffered from “melancholia” and had been at the lunatic asylum for nearly two years. She had left the asylum dressed in “only a calico dress and undergarments and stockings” and was presumed drowned in the river. Her body was never found. There was something chilling about the eerie silences that descended on The Octagon at night. In retrospect, it was probably the most appropriate place in New York City for a breakdown, which I was soon to have. “I feel a deep emptiness—like nothing I have ever known,” I wrote in my journal, shortly after arriving at the island. “I have to do something drastic to end this.”

The sadness stemmed from loneliness. Despite our moving to Roosevelt Island at his request, my husband still hated New York so much that every school holiday and summer vacation became excuses to leave town with Hannah. Sometimes he didn't even need the excuse and left on his own. When his mother became ill in Canada, I tried to be sympathetic but he was gone for increasingly long periods. We had spent most of our savings moving to New York; my husband didn't have a green card, so I had no choice but to work to support all of us. In the mornings, I took the subway to my midtown office, and came home late at night to a cold, too-­big apartment, overlooking the lights of Manhattan.

I began to count on dinner with Edward as a much-­needed respite. His apartment became a sanctuary. One day, as I walked off the elevator on Edward's floor, I immediately inhaled cinnamon, sugar, and baked apples and I felt a rush of happiness. Edward had made his famous apple galette. I zeroed in on it as soon as I walked into his kitchen, where it sat cooling on a piece of oven-­browned parchment.

Before meeting Edward, I had baked apple pies only with Crisco crusts or strudels made with sheets of frozen filo dough that were too fussy to work with. His galette was wonderfully rustic—a hearty-­looking apple tart, the pastry roughly folded over at the sides like an envelope, the buttery apple slices flecked with cinnamon and oozing caramelized fruit, generously dusted with confectioners' sugar.

Edward topped it with a dollop of cream or vanilla ice cream, so that the tartness of the apple was bathed in a melting sweet, white puddle on the plate. It was so good that I could barely remember what else we had for dinner on the night I first tried it. I believe it was some kind of fish, maybe scrod in a delicate sauce of plump San Marzano tomatoes—the only kind he ever used—and a salad with long pieces of orange zest in a light vinaigrette. Whatever we ate clearly paled in my memory.

“You need to send me the recipe!” I said.

Edward demurred and poured me the rest of the pinot grigio. He went to the refrigerator to retrieve another bottle of wine and when he returned he said he would try to put something together for me. He had never written it down, he said. But a few days after that first bite, I received handwritten instructions on a white piece of paper, labeled simply “Pastry.” It included the following directions:

3 ice cubes—crushed in heavy plastic bag with mallet

2 tbs frozen lard (optional but excellent addition)

There were copious notes about the importance of keeping the butter, the lard, and even the mixing bowl as cold as possible. It was imperative that I put everything—the mixing bowl, the flour, and any baking tools I was planning to use—in the freezer before proceeding with the recipe. He also insisted that I use a cheese grater to grate a frozen stick of butter into the flour mixture.

I could deal with the grated butter and the frozen bowl, but later, when I tried to duplicate Edward's pastry, I would find it almost impossible to work the crushed ice into the pastry dough. The ice simply wouldn't hold the flour and butter together. Maybe it needed to be turned into slush? After several attempts, I despaired. I didn't own a food processor (“How can you live without one, darling?” asked Edward), so I used my hands. Half the dough seemed to stick to my fingers, and the rest was too stiff and powdery to work with. Why couldn't he just use ice water? It was good enough for Julia Child, after all.

But Edward was adamant that the secret to the perfect galette pastry was crushed ice. And, of course, the apples. Edward preferred a Cortland or a Macoun over a Macintosh for a galette. The Cortland had a firmer texture, he said, so it wouldn't dissolve into mush when you sautéed it in butter, lemon juice, and sugar and then baked it in a hot oven. The Macintosh was too porous, absorbed too much water, and usually fell apart, he said.

Indeed, the apples in Edward's galettes were always firm and tart with just the right hint of sweetness. He bought the apples at the Mennonite farmers' market under the Roosevelt Island Bridge underpass on Saturday mornings, and always baked galettes for Thanksgiving dinner, which he still celebrated with his friends who lived just up Main Street.

THE TRUTH IS
I
didn't tackle Edward's galette until much, much later. At this time I was so lonely that I often didn't feel like cooking, especially when my husband and daughter were away. Cooking for myself in our huge kitchen, with its showroom stainless steel appliances and cold, sleek countertops, seemed daunting. My worn pots looked threadbare against this backdrop of sterile opulence, so I rarely ate anything I had to spend any time preparing. And because I stopped going grocery shopping when my family was away, there was often no food in the refrigerator anyway. On Friday nights, after working late, I often sat in front of the TV watching a documentary on, say, the Holocaust and eating from a can of sardines.

“Oh, will you stop with the pity party,” Melissa often said, when I described to her my typical Friday evening. But it wasn't exactly a pity party. The sardines were always the best I could find—in olive oil, wild-caught from the cold waters off the coast of Galicia in Spain. Melissa encouraged me to order in or go out to eat. But going out for dinner by myself seemed unlikely. Shortly after moving to Manhattan, my husband and I had passed a smartly dressed young woman in a restaurant, sitting at a table set for one, reading a book and sipping a glass of white wine.

“That's the problem with women here; they're all lonely,” said my husband. “I don't want my daughter turning into that.”

But although I nodded my agreement, I secretly admired the diner's cozy solitude—she was sitting, reading, savoring the wine and her own company. Years later, I read the extraordinary food writer M. F. K. Fisher's own experiences of dining as a single woman in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

“More often than not people who see me on trains and in ships, or in restaurants, feel a kind of resentment of me since I taught myself to enjoy being alone,” she wrote in 1938. After the death of her husband, Fisher confessed to her readers that “sometimes I would go to the best restaurant I knew about, and order dishes and good wines as if I were a guest of myself, to be treated with infinite courtesy.”

I longed to be a guest of myself, but I was far from articulating that desire and I had not yet discovered M. F. K. Fisher, or Julia Child for that matter. When I finally read Fisher's essays about her life and food in
The Gastronomical Me
, I came to understand that sense of peace that eluded me and that I had so admired in the Manhattan tableau of the woman at the restaurant table set for one. This was surely part of what Edward was talking about when he spoke about the “resting place of the soul.”

I, on the other hand, still suffered from an agonized soul, and on Roosevelt Island, the ghosts of the asylum haunted me. I was not at peace, and the specter of disrupting my daughter or spending the rest of my life alone stifled my will to fight. I set about trying to placate everyone around me, pondering how to make others happy. I realize now it was wrongheaded and simply added to my own misery. On the day after my birthday—February 5, 2011—all I wrote in my journal was, “In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three in the morning, day after day.” It was F. Scott Fitzgerald's line about depression, and I felt it keenly.

At night, I lay awake ruminating. How could I fix life in New York for my unhappy spouse so that he would spend more time in the city with me? Perhaps we could move somewhere else, to a house in Queens with a garage? Long Island? What about marriage counseling? Didn't we owe it to our daughter to try to make this work? But what could I do about the other things he complained about—the car horns, the people who walked too fast, the rush-­hour subway crowds?

I knew that it wasn't so much New York that he hated. New York was just an excuse, an external manifestation of his chronic restlessness. In our nine years together, we had moved from an apartment in Toronto, to a house in Miami, back to Toronto and a grand Victorian house that we renovated. But as soon as that renovation project was completed, he sought out another one, and we moved again, and then again. After the third renovation, we were off again, this time to Rio de Janeiro, where we spent three years, the longest we had ever spent in one place. I worked on a book project in Rio, and he took mournful black-­and-­white pictures of Carnival. I suspect the stark images of these pre-­Lenten revelers in their feathers and glitter and disguises were metaphors for his own sense of displacement.