The Duchess Who Wouldn't Sit Down (19 page)

Tonight, he is untouchable. He is ebullient, in his element. Everyone is here, everyone is together; this is a good family
to be a member of on Thanksgiving. There are friends here, candles, music, comforting food, and sophisticated conversation.
He is surrounded by merry, attractive adults who laugh knowingly at his jokes, who jostle him with affection, and who, he
is sure, trade admiring anecdotes about him and predict his brilliant future as soon as he turns away. If he is good for nothing
else, he knows how to perform for an audience. Most especially, he knows how to perform for his father, the wittiest, most
sophisticated of them all. Everybody loves his father; tonight, they love the boy and his father can see that. There is safety
and simplicity under his father's approving gaze. If the thought of his mother crosses his mind he doesn't acknowledge it,
least of all to himself. This feeling - this confidence, this security, this togetherness - the boy wishes it could last forever,
though he knows it won't. Tomorrow is not Thanksgiving.

Later on the night of Thanksgiving 2001, with guests long gone, the dishes washed and put away, and Judy asleep beside me,
I lay in bed, exhausted but too overwrought to sleep. Nostalgia, of course, is as powerful a stimulant as pornography, and
serves a similar purpose. This was not the first time I had so abused it; as a matter of fact, I had long been aware of the
connection between certain unresolved childhood "issues" and my abiding need to serve and please. But tonight, with the help
of my sisters and father, I had established the intimacy of that connection with stark and startling clarity. It seemed that
I, like my father before me, was something of a tragic scientist: having once accidentally discovered the secret formula for
perfect happiness, and then lost it, I had spent the rest of my days vainly trying to re-create the precise conditions of
the original experiment. If you looked at it that way, it was perfectly clear that I could never, ever hope to succeed, since
the missing ingredient was one that could not be reproduced. If I were Epicurus, I'd have probably figured out by now that
I would be better off seeking to abolish the desire than to fulfill it. Inner turmoil and anxiety was all it had and all it
would ever bring me;
ataraxia
was not in the cards.

With these and similarly uplifting thoughts, I eventually fell asleep. I awoke with a start in the middle of the night. I
had been dreaming about Brussels sprouts. Again.

By the time my mother's illness took a turn for the worse in the early 1970s, my parents were already separated. My father
lived in a series of little flats all over London, while we children stayed with our mother. Almost from the beginning she
was physically unable to take care of us. Within three years, she lost first the ability to walk without a cane, then to walk
without a walker, then to walk at all, and eventually even to rise from bed unassisted. I was barely able to remember what
it was like to have a healthy mother, or the person she had been before the disease robbed her of her patience, good humor,
and dignity.

We children were assisted in her care by a variety of woefully unqualified nannies, who often came with their own pressing
emotional needs and demands. When we were not helping my mother to dress, bathe, eat, and use the toilet, we were largely
left to our own devices. With the exception of little Jenny, who was too young to exercise any meaningful independence, we
all took full advantage of our freedom, while doing our best to act responsibly toward our mother and to conceal the chaos
of our household from our friends. That, at least, is how I remember it.

It must have been sometime in 1974 that my brother, sisters, and I were gathered for supper one evening around the Formica
pedestal table in the kitchen. My mother had joined us, which by then she was not always in a condition to do. She was still
capable of feeding herself at that point, but I imagine that one of us must have cut up her food for her. I do not remember
what we ate that night, but it included Brussels sprouts, steamed or boiled whole. It was a relatively normal evening, unusual
perhaps in that we were all eating together and speaking civilly. But then the talking stopped and we all turned to watch
my mother.

She had raised a Brussels sprout to her mouth with a fork, but had neglected to spear it. This was a mistake, as her hands
trembled badly at all times. Still, it looked as if she was going to make it, but at the last minute, the sprout, hobbling
at the tip of the fork, bounced off and into her face. She managed to wedge it against her cheek with the ball of her thumb
but was unable to grasp it. Her lips strained and twisted to the side in an effort to rendezvous with the sprout as she pushed
it toward her mouth. Instead, the sprout rolled in the opposite direction, down the narrow channel between her cheek and her
forearm. In order to keep the sprout within striking distance, she had to continually raise her arm as it rolled, until it
had rolled down the entire length of her forearm and bicep and came to a halt near her armpit, in which she now buried her
face to retrieve it. We watched, enthralled and horror-stricken. This was some sort of gladiatorial combat for her, a fight
to the death; she had clearly invested her entire will in victory and, having come so far, would settle for nothing less.
But it was not to be. A moment later, she and we watched helplessly as the Brussels sprout broke free, skittered down the
front of her muumuu and disappeared in the gap between the cushion and the armrest of her wheelchair.

I don't know who started laughing first, but soon the four of us were purple-faced with suppressed snickering. My mother brushed
a stray wisp of her mousy hair off her forehead and her eyes filled with tears. Here in England, three thousand miles from
home, there was no one in the world who could stop her children from laughing at her infirmity. "It's not funny," she said
in the half-whisper that had lately become her normal speaking voice. We knew only too well how not funny it was, maybe even
more than she did, so we laughed harder. "It's not FUNNY!" she screamed, strangling on her outrage. She unlocked the brakes
of her chair, wheeled around, and rolled from the room.

It must have been soon after this incident that the decision was made that she could no longer be looked after at home. I
remember very little about those dark times, but her removal, and my father's immediate return home, surely came as a terrible
relief and release. She entered the first of several nursing homes, each abysmal in its own way, and went into a steep decline.
She suffered from bedsores and recurring pneumonia that left her febrile and incoherent for weeks on end. She was in her early
forties, but she looked sixty. When she was able, she continued to smoke, inhaling through a long rubber tube attached to
a cigarette holder soldered to the arm of her wheelchair. The chair was always parked bedside, but was now of little use,
since her garret room was at the end of a long, dimly lit corridor at the top of a series of narrow, dog-legged stairways,
and there was no elevator.

Although it was only a ten-minute walk from school, I found every excuse to avoid visiting her, and because Jenny was reliant
on me, mostly, to take her there, they, too, saw little of one another. Once a week, for half an hour or forty-five minutes,
was about all I could manage, but even that schedule was subject to the other priorities on my busy agenda. Sometimes I went
two weeks without dropping in, and I counted myself lucky that I was allowed to get away with it.

She died of pneumonia on Monday, December 13,1976 - two weeks after Thanksgiving. Marion Claire Browner.

I look back at those hallucinatory years, and I shake my head in amazement. I ask myself: Is it possible - is it even
conceivable -
that we had been celebrating our family togetherness on that Thanksgiving Day while she lay dying, alone and frightened? Had
there really been all that laughter, and good food, and wine, and music, and tender feeling? From my dark bed in New York
City, 2001,1 take another look at those ghosts of 1976, and they look even more remote than before. Yes, there they all were,
laughing and stuffing their faces. There had been no mistake. And there I was, baby-faced imposter, fawning for attention,
ingratiating myself with all and sundry, hungry for love and praise. And eating Brussels sprouts.

And who am I - forty-year-old ghost of 2001, family man, father of two, Lord of Strangers - to judge those long-vanished revelers?
Objectively, it is not all that difficult to understand, if not to justify, why I behaved the way I did. It is only natural,
after all, to seek relief from one's troubles wherever one can find it, especially at the age of fifteen. I'm hardly in a
position to deny that I would do exactly the same in similar circumstances. Is it so terrible, after all, that we honored
the hospitality of Thanksgiving so intensely not in spite of my mother's imminent death, but because of it? Although it may
feel to me now that one was committed, it is not a crime to celebrate life in the face of death. Surely, celebration trumps
commemoration?

And yet, try as I might, I cannot entirely shake the feeling that, if their hospitality was based on a lie, then mine - which
deliberately seeks to recall and revive it — must be too. Try as I might, I can't quite allay the suspicion that the authentic
symbol of Thanksgiving is not a magnificent, twenty-five-pound turkey, brined, herbed, and roasted to golden perfection, but
a humble Brussels sprout, peeled of its tough outer leaves and steamed al dente. And I have grown to enjoy it more and more,
in all its virtuous simplicity, with every passing year.

There is only so much bad news about himself that one person can absorb. He tires of it all, even when he knows it to be true.
The truth is always exhausting, and cloying, which is why we tend to prefer it in small doses. We yearn to be let off the
hook, to find religion, but the antidote to truth is not falsehood, any more than the antidote to overeating is vomiting.
The antidote to truth is forgetfulness.

We live to forget: our lonely childhood, our idyllic childhood, our loneliness, our former happiness, our hunger, our humiliation
at the hands of our own desires, our strangulating covetousness, our cruelties, our pathetic mortalities, our identities.
With every step forward we build a wall between ourselves and the place we had stood a moment before. What wouldn't we choose
to forget, given half the chance? Forgetfulness is a survival mechanism, as necessary as claws, as adrenaline, as the gag
reflex. Whatever it is, it is not a moral issue. Where my father commemorates to remember, I commemorate to forget.

Of what good are our intellect, our passion, our reason, our compassion to us here? How few of us know what we want and, not
knowing, are able to reach for it! And yet, useless as most of us are at succeeding in the least exercise of any importance
- such as the pursuit of happiness - we have been very inventive in the myriad ways we have found to console ourselves. We
can take pride in our achievements - art, religion, love, philosophy - when we are otherwise unable to express our simplest
thought or desire.

And among these, our highest accomplishments, we cannot forget to rank hospitality. Hospitality provides one of the few settings
in life where we can get exactly what we want from each other without having to ask for it. In other words, in which we can
forget that we live in a world where this is otherwise, and tragically, entirely impossible.

When I am a good host, I can order the world precisely as I believe it ought to be. It is a world that I have created in my
mind and in my own image, and it gladdens me profoundly to see it unfold without original sin, without expulsions and floods
and disobedience and illness. When I am a good guest, I have returned to Eden, where everything I need is provided for me,
including companionship and a benevolent deity at my shoulder, serving me
and
protecting me. The concept of paradise may be backward-looking, but the concept of heaven is anticipatory. Perhaps this is
what heaven will be like? A great table of oak worn smooth with age and candle wax; a dimly lit room, a quartet of angels
playing Sarah Vaughan in the corner; this blissful throb of quiet, intelligent conversation; bubbling pots and aromatic stews
that no one seems to have worked to prepare; and you - you have nothing to worry about, not now, not here, not for all eternity.
Leave it all behind at the threshold, forget everything, for here, in heaven, you are my guest.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For her love, generosity, and patience, I thank Judy Clain first of all.

For their support and friendship, I also wish to thank Gail Hochman, Karen Rinaldi, and Gillian Blake; my father, Richard
Browner, and siblings, Jenny, Nancy, and Scott Browner; my poker buddies Guy Yarden, Jim Browne, Eduardo Kaplan, Chris Skutch,
Sam Sarowitz, and Eric Anderson; David Oestreicher; as well as Charlott Card, Hertzie Clain, Nick Clements, Edward Schneider,
and Shelley Sonenberg.

I also thank Rebecca Saletan and Rick Kott for their invaluable advice early in this project.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I am not a professional historian. I have tried, wherever possible, to stick to primary source material, which I have read
with the eye of a novelist, seeking out character and story. Very little of this book's contents represents original research,
and most of my sources will be familiar to anyone with a motivated interest in any particular subject. I have therefore prepared
this bibliography in the spirit of offering a list of recommended further reading, rather than an academic resource.

Introduction

Brillat-Savarin, Jean-Anthelme.
The Physiology of Taste.
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Epicurus,
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and Fragments.
Translated by Eugene Michael O'Connor. New York: Prometheus Books, 1993.

Chapter I

Bacque, James.
Crimes and Mercies: The Fate of German Civilians Under Allied
Occupation, 1944-1950.
Toronto: Little, Brown, 1997.

Barkas, Janet.
The Vegetable Passion: A History of the Vegetarian State of Mind.
London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975.

Bewley, Charles.
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on Family and Official Records.
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Brupbacher-Bircher, Bertha.
Health-giving dishes, compiled by Bertha Brupba-cher-
Bircher, manageress of Dr. Bircher's sanatorium.
London: E.Arnold, 1934.

Butler, Ewan, and Gordon Young.
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Goebbels, Joseph.
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Goebbels, Joseph.
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Gordon, Bertram M. "Fascism, the Neo-Right and Gastronomy." In the
Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food
&
Cookery.
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Gordon, Bertram M., and Lisa Jacobs-McCusker. "One Pot Cookery and Some Comments on Its Iconography." In the
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Goring, Emmy.
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Infield, Glenn B.
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Morell, Theo.
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Morell.
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Mosley, Leonard.
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Schiitz, W. W.
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Steinhoff, Johannes et al.
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(Formulation of menus including pure soya, with recipes).
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Toland, John.
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Visser, Margaret.
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and Meaning of Table Manners.
New York: Penguin, 1991.

Chapter II

Anderson, Sherwood.
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Darroch, Sandra Jabson.
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Flanner, Janet.
Paris Was Yesterday, 1925-1939.
Edited by Irving Drut-man. New York: Viking, 1968.

Holroyd, Michael.
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Huxley, Aldous.
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Lawrence, D. H.
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McAlmon, Robert, and Kay Boyle.
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&
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Morrell, Ottoline.
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Morrell, Ottoline.
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Morrell, Ottoline.
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Putnam, Samuel.
Paris Was Our Mistress.
New York: Viking, 1947.

Russell, Bertrand.
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Sprigge, Elizabeth.
Gertrude Stein: Her Life and Work.
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Stein, Gertrude.
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.
New York: Library of America, 1998.

Toklas, Alice B.
The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook.
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Chapter III

Audubon, John James.
Writings and Drawings.
New York: Library of America, Penguin Putnam, 1999.

Call, Richard Ellsworth. "The Life and Writings of Rafinesque." Paper prepared for the Filson Club and read at its meeting,
Louisville, Ky.,

April 2, 1894. Louisville, Ky.: J. P. Morton, 1895.

Fitzpatrick, T. J.
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Hance, Anthony M. "Rafinesque; the Great Naturalist." Paper read before Bucks County Historical Society, Langhorne, P., April
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Herrick, Francis Hobart.
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Time.
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Jillson, Willard Rouse.
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Jordan, David Starr. "Rafinesque."
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vol. XXIX, 1886.

Rafinesque, C. S.
A Life of Travels and Researches in North America and South
Europe.
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Rafinesque, C. S.
The Pleasures and Duties of Wealth.
Printed for the Eleutherium of Knowledge, Philadelphia, 1840.

Chapter IV

Bernier, Olivier.
Louis XIV: A Royal Life.
New York: Doubleday, 1987.

Brocher, Louis,
A la com de Louis XIV: Le rang et Vetiquette sous Vancien
regime.
Paris: F. Alcan, 1934.

Dangeau, Philippe de Courcillon.
Memoirs of the Court of France, from the
year 1684 to the Year 1720.
Translated by John Davenport. London: H. Colburn, 1825.

Duchene, Jacqueline.
Bussy-Rabutin.
Paris: Fayard, 1992.

Felibien, André.
Relation de la fete du dix-huit juilkt mille six cent soixante-huit;
Les divertissements de Versailles donnespar le Roi a toute sa cour au retour
de la conquete de la Franche-Comte en Vannee mille six cent soixante-quatorze.
Dedale: Maisonneuve et Larose, c. 1994.

Goldsmith, Elizabeth C.
Exclusive Conversations: The Art of Interaction in
Seventeenth-Century France.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988.

Les heures bourguignonnes du comte de Bussy-Rabutin.
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Ojala, Jeanne A., and William T. Ojala.
Madame de Sevigne: A Seventeenth
Century Life.
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Rabutin, Roger de Bussy.
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Paris: Charpentier, 1858-1859.

Rabutin-Chantal, Marie de [Madame de Sevigne].
Selected Letters.
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Saint-Simon, Louis de Rouvroy de,
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Chapter V

Calmette, Joseph.
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Their Courts.
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Huizinga, Johan.
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Payton and Ulrich Mammitzsch. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

La Marche, Oliver de.
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Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1999.

La Marche, Olivier de.
Les memoires de Messire Olivier de la Marche.
In
Nouvelle collection des memoires pour servir a Vhistoire de France depuis le Xllle
siecle jusqu'a la fin du XVUIe.
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Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century.
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Putnam, Ruth.
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Taillevent [Guillaume Tirel].
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Weightman, Christine.
Margaret of York, Duchess of Burgundy, 1446-1503.

New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989.

Chapter VI

Allott, Stephen.
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Asser, John.
Life of King Alfred.
Translated by Simon Keynes. New York: Penguin, 1983.

Bede.
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Beowulf.
Translated by Seamus Heaney. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000.

Caesar, Julius.
Gallic War.
Translated by H. J. Edwards. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997.

Davis, H. W. Carless.
Charlemagne, the Hero of Two Nations.
New York: Putnam, 1899.

Einhard.
The Life of Charlemagne.
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960.

Gregory of Tours.
The History of the Franks.
Translated by Lewis Thorpe. New York: Penguin, 1974.

Jordanes.
Origin and Deeds of the Goths.
Translated by Charles C. Mierow. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1908.

Lacey, Robert, and Danny Danziger.
The Year 1000: What Life Was Like at
the Turn of the First Millennium.
New York: Little, Brown, 1999.

Magennis, Hugh.
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in Old English and Related Literature.
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Monk of Saint Gall [Notker the Stammerer].
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Two Lives
of Charlemagne.
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Nithard.
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University of Michigan Press, 1972.

Royal Frankish Annals.
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Tacitus.
Germania.
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Todd, Malcolm.
The Early Germans.
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Velleius Paterculus.
Historiae Romanae.
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Voragine, Jacobus de.
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Wade-Evans, A. W.
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Whitelock, Dorothy.
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Penguin,
1986.

Chapter VII

Apicius.
De re coquinaria.
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Boethius, Axel.
The Golden House of Nero: Some Aspects of Roman Architecture.
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960.

Corbett, Philip B.
Petronius.
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Iacopi, Irene.
Domus aurea.
Milan: Electa, 1999.

Macrobius.
Saturnalia.
Translated by Percival Vaughan Davies. New York: Columbia University Press, 1969.

Martial.
Epigrams.
Translated by D. R. Shackleton Bailey. Cambridge:

Harvard University Press, 1993.

Petronius.
The Satyricon.
Translated by Paul Dinnage. London: Spearman & Calder, 1953.

Plutarch. "How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend." In
Moralia,
Vol. I.

Translated by Frank C. Babbitt. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1928.

Suetonius.
Lives of the Caesars.
Translated by Catherine Edwards. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Tacitus.
The Annals of Imperial Rome.
Translated by Michael Grant. New York: Penguin, 1980.

Chapter VIII

Athenaeus of Naucratis.
The Deipnosophists.
Translated by Charles Burton Gulick. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993.

Dalby, Andrew.
Siren Feasts: A History of Food and Gastronomy in Greece.
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Homer.
The Iliad.
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Homer.
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Ovid.
Metamorphoses.
Translated by Mary M. Innes. New York: Penguin, 1985.