Slice and Dice (10 page)

M:
So, as far as you know, it was just an innocent relationship that turned romantic because Wayne s wife was essentially absent from his life.

Boland:
I guess that about covers it.

M:
Constance didn’t lay a trap for Wayne? Seduce him? Ply him with food and wine to get him in the sack?

Boland:
(Shrugs) Maybe. But he never would have married her unless he loved her. And I really believe that was the case. Connie had been taking care of baby Paul for almost two years by then. They’d become inseparable. When Pepper died, I think it was normal for Wayne to turn to the one person he’d become close to during that awful time.

M:
In other words, this young, penniless woman just got lucky. She was at the right place at the right time.

Boland:
I suppose you could put it that way.

M:
Sounds like a fairy tale to me.

Boland:
Yes, it does. (Smiles pleasantly.)

M:
I don’t believe in fairy tales, Mr. Boland. Let’s move on to their marriage.

Boland:
Here’s where my information gets even more spotty. My wife and the kids and I moved to Chicago in ‘65. It was a year after Wayne and Connie were married. Little Emily didn’t come along until ‘66.

M:
So Emily is the only natural child of Wayne and Constance.

Boland:
Right. Paul was seven by then and Nathan was practically a teenager. Our families still saw each other once or twice a year, but it wasn’t like it was back in the old days. All I remember is, Wayne finally seemed to be content. The kids were thriving and he and Connie traveled a lot together. Wayne had a bunch of overseas accounts to visit, and Connie always went along. Little by little, she got the education she’d missed earlier in her life. If you ask me, the only thing she was really interested in was food. She couldn’t learn about it fast enough. Really, she’d become this incredible hostess, throwing dinner party after dinner party for Wayne and his current and potential business associates. Getting invited to one of her soirees was a sign that you’d made it socially.

M:
Did the Buckridges still employ a cook?

Boland:
Yes, but the dinner parties were special. Connie did it all. By then, she’d kicked out the staff and made the third floor, where the staff quarters had been, into a playroom for the kids. They still had a maid, a gardener, and a cook, but none of them lived in. Connie limited when they could be at the house because she didn’t like nonfamily members around in the evenings or on weekends. Just a different approach, I guess.

M:
And everybody seemed happy?

Boland:
As far as I could tell. As I said, I wasn’t around as much. Wayne and I drifted apart during those years. Too bad, but then I suppose it couldn’t be helped.

M:
Tell me about his death.

Boland:
Again, I wasn’t there when it happened, so this is secondhand information from Connie. Let me back up a minute so that I can put this into some sort of context. In ‘71 or ‘72 — you’d have to check with Connie to get the exact dates — she was asked to do a couple guest spots on a local TV show. They wanted her to talk about appetizers or some such thing — what she served at her famous dinner parties. In a matter of weeks, she’d become a household name in the Cities. She way offered more spots, then a weekly segment on the show. Eventually, she was offered her own show. And from there anybody could see there was no stopping her. That was around ‘73. Wayne
way
in his fifties by then and was totally out ofshape. He was a good hundred pounds overweight, his blood pressure was through the roof, and he’d had one small heart attack His doctors were telling him to slow down and lose weight. He did neither. Nobody told Wayne Buckridge what to do. I think Connie s brother, Arthur, had come to live with them that same year. He’d applied to graduate school at the U of M and had been accepted. Kind of an odd man, if I recall correctly. I know Wayne didn’t like him, but he put up with him because Connie wanted him around. Then early in January of ‘74,1 got a call from her. Wayne had suffered another heart attack She was in the house when it happened, but she was busy down in her study. The TV or the radio was on and she never heard him call for help. I guess when she went upstairs later, she found him on the floor in the bathmom. She called the paramedics, but it was too late.

M:
I suppose she was devastated by his death.

Boland:
Yes, she was. It was a very hard time for her. Her career was taking off, but when her husband died so unexpectedly, her world was thrown into chaos. I think she almost had a nervous breakdown.

M:
But she didn’t.

Boland:
No, she pulled it together. Connie is a very strong woman. I really admire her.

M:
Thanks for your time, Mr. Boland. If I have further questions, would you mind talking to me again?

Boland:
Not at all. Say, give my best to Connie. I haven’t seen or talked to her in years. I assume you’ve already interviewed her.

M:
Not yet.

Boland:
Well, just tell her Oscar says hi. She’s a peach of a woman. Tops in my book You can quote me on that.

Journal Note

I E-mailed this interview to Pluto shortly after midnight. Can’t help but wonder what response I’ll get from him, if any.

Constance rose early on Sunday morning. In the living room of her suite, she sat behind a desk in her robe and slippers, drinking a cup of strong black coffee, absorbed by the notes she’d made last night for this afternoon’s speech at the Women’s Club in downtown Minneapolis. She wanted to talk about
Cuisine America,
the theme of her latest cookbook. There would be lots of reporters in attendance this afternoon, all eager to take down her words and print them in local newspaper and magazine articles. It seemed that people couldn’t get enough discussion these days about food.

She planned to quote Brillat-Savarin today: “Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are.” In Constance’s opinion, food was a highly personal, emotionally charged issue. In the nearly thirty years she’d been working in the food industry, she’d seen the country’s interest in wine and fine cuisine move from mild curiosity to national obsession. The Television Food Network, which she helped to start in 1993, had become the third-fastest-growing cable network in the land. Constance still couldn’t believe her luck. She’d actually caught a star as it was rising.

Not that her life had started out with much promise.

Abusive, alcoholic parents. Pregnant at fifteen. Even so, she’d felt certain that Nathan’s birth was the first of many blessings. She’d wanted so much to make her life work, to have a family that made sense. She’d loved Nathan’s father, and she’d thought that love would be enough to get her through any problem. But she’d been naive. The fact was, she’d had no money and no skills. Her past wasn’t something she was proud of, and therefore she wasn’t eager to talk about it. She and Nathan had survived, but at a terrible cost After she married Wayne Buckridge and her life took a public turn, the requests for interviews made her feel deeply threatened. But as time went on, she realized her fears were only a paper tiger. She caught on eventually that interviews were nothing but shallow little dances. The interviewers were all looking for quick soundbites or a quote or two that would translate well on the printed page. Constance had become a master at giving them just what they wanted: a little content a little sizzle. When die questions waxed too personal, they were easily deflected. She learned from politicians that you never needed to answer a question you didn’t want to; you simply talked about something else.

It was odd being a celebrity. Since Constance had moved into that netherworld, everyone assumed they knew her. She was available. On TV On the covers of national magazines. On talk shows. She appeared on the
Today Show
regularly and had even been coaxed into doing a couple of commercials. Since she was familiar, she was known, almost an old friend. And that assumption was very easy to hide behind. She’d refused offers by several prominent writers to authorize a biography. Other requests for background information were easily handled by a standard bio sheet she and Arthur had put together years ago. No one had ever really pressed the issue — until now.

Looking up, Constance saw Arthur pad out of the far bedroom, stretching his arms high above his head. He was wearing a striped robe over his silk pajamas, his white hair tousled in a boyish way.

“Morning, Connie. You’re up early.” When he finally focused his eyes on her, his expression sobered. “Something wrong?”

There was a knock at the door.

“Get that will you?” she asked, a tight edge to her voice.

“It should be Kenny.” Kenneth Merlin, her daughter’s husband, was her legal muscle. This morning she hoped he could work a small miracle.

In die seven years Kenny had been married to Emily, Constance couldn’t think of a time when he hadn’t been wearing a suit. This morning was no different. She half suspected he slept in one. Kenny was fourteen years older than her daughter, an obvious father figure replacing the one she’d lost. Emily had been hurt the most by Wayne’s death, something Constance regretted. She and her daughter had been close before he died, but afterward Emily had grown distant. It was almost as if she blamed Constance for her father’s heart attack. Unlike Paul, Emily wanted no part in the growing family fame. She had little interest in food, and as soon as she graduated from Macalester, she’d headed east to New York, mainly to get away from “Mother.”

Emily had somehow wrangled herself a job on one of the ABC soap operas. The Buckridge name probably hadn’t hurt. Constance assumed the job paid pretty well because Emily never wrote home for money. Backstage, she took care of the actors’ costumes, ensuring that everyone’s dress or sweater or suit was available when needed, clean and in perfect condition. She also signed up to take photography classes at night. Cameras and lenses and darkrooms interested Emily. She wrote her brother Paul that if she was going to be the black sheep of the family, she might as well shoot a photodocumentary of her demise.

Emily’s life had been running along pretty smoothly when one of the resident divas on the soap accused her of stealing a black sequined evening gown. Constance heard about Emily’s arrest only after die fact, but it didn’t really come as a surprise. That old adage about falling apples and trees seemed appropriate. Constance knew she was capable of doing almost anything to get what she wanted and suspected Emily had inherited that same ruthless determination.

It came out later that Emily had been stealing clothes all along and selling them to a small boutique in the Village for a nice profit Constance assumed that her only daughter wasn’t used to scraping by on crummy wages, and since she was too pigheaded to ask her mother for help, she found her own way to fund her lifestyle in the Big Apple. And that’s how fate brought Emily and Kenny together.

Up until then Kenneth Merlin — tall, dark, and not very good looking — was just a name in her little black book. They’d met at a bar one night, had a couple of drinks together, and exchanged phone numbers. When the bartender mentioned to Kenny weeks later that the pretty blue-eyed blonde with the Minnesoo-ta accent was in legal trouble, he roared in on his white horse — a red BMW — and offered to help. Thanks to his knowledge of the New York City legal system and the fact that it was Emily’s first offense, she got off with paying a fine and doing some community service. She lost her job, of course, but she got Kenny in the bargain, a reasonably well-to-do New York attorney. From then on, they were inseparable.

Constance recognized Kenny for what he was the first time they met. He registered dollar signs in his eyes every time he smiled at her, but since he apparently made Emily happy, Constance didn’t interfere. They were married less than a year later.

Once Kenny was an official member of the family, he started doing little favors for Constance. Checking out a contract here, writing a letter there. Emily made it clear that she didn’t like it one bit. Her mother’s culinary biz was strictly off limits, but as time went on she mellowed. It was hard work staying mad at everyone, especially since she loved her brothers and hated being estranged from them.

In time, Emily even seemed to melt a little toward Constance, mostly due to the birth of her twin boys. Emily doted on them and so did Constance. It was a passion they could finally share, and in a way it facilitated a certain rapprochement. Emily had even consented to take the photographs for Constance’s last cookbook, something she would never have considered during her photojournalism period. So, as much as Constance saw Kenny for what he was — a hustler in an expensive suit — she put up with him because he seemed to be good for Emily. And somehow, over the years, he’d become invaluable to Constance as well. As he so often pointed out, “Everyone needs a Kenneth Merlin in their life.”

“Come in and pour yourself some coffee,” said Constance, waving him inside.

Kenny nodded to Arthur but declined the offer, saying that he and Emily had just had breakfast.