The Art of Living (33 page)

Aunt Kate, it turned out, had known all along that he'd gone off to take his own life, though she'd refused to believe it and had therefore told no one. She'd found his clothes that afternoon, just a little after sunset, neatly folded and stacked on the chair beside his bed in the room they let him live in downstairs. He'd left them as a message, my grandmother said: for what they were worth, the world could have them back. (“Now that's enough of that,” my father said sharply.) Aunt Kate had told herself one foolish lie after another, she explained to us, her hands over her eyes, her glasses on the table in front of her. Perhaps he'd found a lady-friend, she'd said to herself, and had gone out and bought himself new clothes, even new socks and shoes.

The following night, when everyone knew Uncle Charley was dead, though no one was admitting it was suicide (they never did admit that), Uncle Ed's livingroom was filled with people. All the chairs were occupied, even the arms of them, where boys or young women sat, most of them cousins, and there were people on the chairs my father had brought in from the diningroom and kitchen, too. The people were all talking in low voices and sniffling, their eyes wet and red. I sat on one of my father's legs, watching.

They talked of the singer Uncle Charley had been; the festivals would never be the same without him. They spoke of what a shame it was that he'd never had a wife and children; it would have made all the difference. Then for a while, since sad talk made them ill at ease, they talked about other things—crops and the weather, marriages, politics. Sometimes they talked now in groups of three or four, sometimes all as one group. Aunt Kate served tea. Some of the men had whiskey with them, which Aunt Kate didn't approve of, but she looked at the carpet and said nothing. The clock on the mahogany desk ticked on and on, but neither in the darkness outside nor in the dimly lit livingroom was anything changing. People stirred a little, now and then, shifting position, moving just an arm or a foot, sometimes blowing their noses, but no one got up yet, no one left for home. Slowly the whole conversation died out like embers in a fireplace, and as the stillness deepened, settling in like winter or an old magic spell, it began to seem that the silence was unbreakable, our final say.

Then an old farmer named Sy Thomas, sitting in the corner with his hands folded, twine around his pants cuffs, cleared his throat, pushed his chin out, face reddening, eyes evasive, and began to sing. Tentatively, then more boldly, others joined in with him. Aunt Kate, with an expression half timid, half cunning, went to the piano and, after a minute, sat down, took off her glasses, and began to play. They were singing in parts now, their heads slightly lifted. On the carpet, one after another, as if coming to life, their shoes began to move.

THE ART
OF LIVING

There used to be a cook in our town, a “chef” he was called in the restaurant where he worked—one of those big, dark Italian places with red fake-leather seat cushions, fake paintings on the walls, and on every table a Chianti bottle with a candle in it—but he preferred to think of himself as simply a cook, since he'd never been comfortable with high-falutin pretense, or so he claimed, though heaven knew the world was full of it, and since, whereas he knew what cooking was, all he knew for sure about chefs, he said, was that they wore those big, obscene-looking hats, which he himself wouldn't be caught dead in. In all this he was a little disingenuous, not to mention out of date, since everybody knew that, in the second-floor apartment over Custus's Sweet Shop, Newsstand, & Drugstore, where he and his family lived, he had hundreds of books and magazines about cooking, as well as books and magazines about everything else, even a couple of those San Francisco comic books, and all his talk about being an ordinary cook, not a chef, was just another pretense, in this case low-falutin, an attempt to seem what he would never be in a hundred years, just one of the folks. His talk about chefs' hats was just empty chatter, maybe something he'd thought up years ago and had never thought better of. He did a lot of empty chattering, especially after his son died in the war. He could get all emotional about things not even locked-up crazy people cared about. At the time of this story there weren't many chefs' hats in the town where I lived, up in the northern part of New York State, but they were standard garb in the pancake houses, hamburger islands, and diners of the larger cities, like Rome or Utica. The cook's name, I forgot to mention, was Arnold Deller.

Cooks are notoriously cranky people, but Arnold was an exception. Why he should have been so even-tempered seems a mystery, now that I think about it—especially given his fondness for rant and given the fact that, as we all found out, he was as full of pent-up violence as anybody else at that time. Nevertheless, even-tempered he was. Sometimes when certain kinds of subjects came up, his eyes would fill with tears; but he never swore, or hardly ever, never hit anybody, never quit his job in a huff.

He had it easy, I suppose, in some ways at least. He'd worked in the same place for twenty-some years, almost one of the family, and the working conditions weren't bad, as such things go. The place was respectable. If you got out a joint, just held it between your fingers, the next thing you knew you were out in the alley on your back, looking up at garbage cans and waste bins. And the kitchen he worked in was large and sufficiently well designed that he didn't have to run his fat legs off all the time. He'd gotten them to copy it from a restaurant he'd seen in San Francisco or someplace, some convention he'd gone to on saving the endangered species. He and his daughters were big on things like that, also politics and the Threat of Drug Abuse, the same things everybody else was into, except that Arnold and his daughters were more serious. When people wore fur coats, Arnold's daughters would practically cry. Arnold's wife mostly slept and watched TV. After their son's death, she hardly ever left the apartment.

As I say, it was a good job for Arnold. He had a helper, part cook, part dishwasher, a half-Indian, half-Italian kid named Ellis. And all across one wall of the kitchen there were windows, which Arnold and Ellis could open if they wanted to, summer or winter, so the heat was only slightly worse than elsewhere. But above all, the job was ideal for a person of Arnold's inclination and temperament because the owner, an old man named Frank Dellapicallo—a gray-headed, gloomy man we hardly ever saw—would let Arnold cook anything he wanted, so long as the ingredients could be found and weren't wildly expensive and the customers would eat it so the old man, Dellapicallo himself, didn't have to. All he ever ate was spaghetti.

Granting Arnold Deller this freedom was no big risk on Dellapicallo's part. Though he could talk like a congressman or a holy-roller preacher, Arnold was never outrageous when it came to cuisine—or anyway almost never. It had all started a long time ago, when he'd gone to Paris as a soldier at the end of World War II—he was an army cook—and had eaten in a couple of relatively fancy restaurants (considering the times), which he'd enjoyed a good deal and could still talk about in tiresome detail to anyone who'd listen. Since then, of course, he'd visited other good restaurants. It wasn't that, discovering fine food, he'd lost all perspective. The first times, in Paris, had taught him that food could be “art,” a fact he never tired of mentioning; but it hadn't turned his heart to exotic dishes, in spite of what you may think when I come to the event this story must eventually lead to. What he'd ordered in Paris, both times, was steak, which turned out to be
bifteck au poivre,
and it had taught him that food should be wonderful, not necessarily outlandish. Both times, he said, he'd praised the food, the waiter, and the chef so lavishly that in the end they'd insisted he had to be Canadian. That too was a revelation, that food made peace between nations.

So now, every other week or so, Arnold would come up with a new “Friday night chef's special”—Peking duck, beef Wellington, rack of lamb, salmon mousse—which always ran out before the evening was half over and which gradually made Dellapicallo's restaurant somewhat famous in and around our town, so that if somebody came home from Viet Nam, or cousins came in from Syracuse or somewhere, or a bunch of old ladies wanted a nice place to go, Dellapicallo's was the first place they thought of.

I know now, looking back, that the food was more or less ordinary, at least by big-city standards. But our town, in those days, had only twenty thousand people, give or take a few thousand, depending on the weather and conditions on the lake, and so it didn't really seem to us pretentious or deep-down stupid when Arnold began to describe himself as “an artist.” For one thing, it came on him gradually, so that none of us really noticed, except in passing. And for another, Arnold had a bookish way of speaking—he read a lot, as I've said; not just cookbooks but anything that fell into his hands. Any kind of print that came in front of his steel-rimmed spectacles he would read—license plates, the numbers on wallpaper seams—and a lot of times with a person like that, especially if the Beatles or the Jefferson Airplane are wailing in the background, you don't really notice when what the person is saying has gotten odder. Anyway, the “we” I'm talking about now is the Scavengers gang, motorcycle hoods, or so we liked to think, really just a bunch of greaser kids in second-hand black jackets, fighting pimples, hanging around, waiting to get drafted and shot at. We weren't exactly unaware that that was how it stood with us. Some of the kids in our town enlisted, ran out and joined up as quick as they could with the United States Marines; others went to college and tried to get out of it. We were the poor stupid animals in between: too smart to enlist, too dumb to run and hide in the revolution. “A pox on all your houses!” was our motto, or would have been if the phrase were one we'd ever heard. Our bikes bore no peace signs, no American flags, no LSD rainbows, Nazi swastikas or iron crosses. Their only symbolism was their dull black paint. For Romantic despair, invisibility. We drove third- or fourth-hand Harleys, mostly old flatheads with the pipes opened up—drove them or, more often, pushed them. Nonetheless Kings of the Road we were, with muscular grins. For the most part, whatever our anarchist dreams, we had to be good honest laboring citizens to keep our hogs rolling.

Usually it was sometime in the early afternoon that we'd drop in to rap with old Arnold. “Hey, let's go rap with old Arnold,” one of us would say, maybe Tony Petrillo, making a kind of joke of it. The last thing anyone in the gang would have admitted was that it was actually interesting to hear Arnold talk. So far as I remember, nobody even admitted that it was interesting to sit in the terrible proximity of old Dellapicallo's granddaughter Angelina. In the early afternoon Arnold the cook had nothing much to do. He'd have a pot or two simmering, things he'd go back into the kitchen to check on, from time to time; but at that time of day there was nothing urgent, nothing Ellis couldn't have handled fine if Arnold had temporarily dropped dead. So Arnold would settle himself at one of the dark, round tables near the bar (the restaurant was separate) where Joe Dellapicallo, the owner's son, was bartender and where sometimes, if we were lucky, Joe's daughter Angelina worked as waitress. Arnold drank sherry; he'd pick up the glass with just his thumb and first finger and let the others sort of float. He allowed himself only one large glass all afternoon, though it was said that after work, when he went home, around midnight, he often got smashed, reading books and sipping whiskey while his wife and three daughters snored. It was dark in the bar, blurry with TV noise and the music of the juke that was fixed so it never shut off. We'd get ourselves draught beers and go to his table, turn the chairs around, and sit.

“Hey, Arnold.”

“ 'Lo, boys.” He spoke with what he no doubt intended to seem dignified reserve, voice from the mountaintop, like Lyndon Baines Johnson when he talked on TV about controlled response; but Arnold's voice never quite made it. He was fat and pink, the steel-rimmed glasses on his nose slightly steamy, the eyes behind them tiny and light blue, and even here, where it was dark and cool, his forehead and throat always glistened with a thin wash of sweat. The smell that came off him, if you sat downwind, was awesome. His hair was light reddish-brown, partly gray, and cut short, old-time army-style but with longish golden sideburns, which made him an anomaly at Dellapicallo's, where just about everybody—at least until the dinner crowd arrived—was Italian. I too was, to some extent, exceptional: half-Irish.

“How's the stock market?” one of us would say, maybe Benny Russo; years later he'd become a computer expert. Or maybe one of us would say, “Hey, what's the secret of happiness, Arnold?” That would be Lenny the Shadow. He was into sensation—mired in it, I guess. In Viet Nam, he'd learn about drugs, and he'd be wasted from an overdose at twenty. It didn't much matter what you said, it would get Arnold Deller rolling. Whatever we asked him, he always assumed we were more or less serious. Hippy sincerity was in, in those days, at least in certain circles, and that was more or less the tone we took, with just sufficient ironic edge that nobody could really pin us down, prove we actually existed.

“Ha, you punklets,” Arnold would say, just lifting the corners of his mouth and eyebrows, as if drawing his head back in disdain were too much work; but it wasn't unfriendly. He knew us. Everybody knew us. Most of the people in town even liked us, I learned years later, though they hated the damn noise. “Listen, kid,” he said the afternoon this story begins. His eyes were narrowed more than usual and his voice was edgy. “Listen, kid, you're talking to an artist, see? What does an artist know about a thing like that? You know what's the matter with the world today? People are always asking the wrong people the big important questions. Like a football player, they want him to tell 'em about politics. Or a famous minister like Billy Graham, they want him to predict who'll win the Super Bowl.” He shook his head, as if the whole thing depressed him more than words could say. “You kids had any brains, you'd ask me what to do with oregano. Educate yourself, learn a good honest trade, or, rather, art.” He smiled, big-chinned. His chin was like a big pink softball with two or three whiskers. “But I'll tell you one thing. Better to ask
me
these grandiose questions than ask somebody thinks he knows the answers.” He looked over at Joe at the bar, as if that was who he meant.