The Inn at Lake Devine (29 page)

“A romance with your boyfriend’s brother.”

“Is that so far-fetched?”

“Has he said anything to you?”

“Nelson has the same response that you have to all of my theories: ‘We’re just friends.’ ”

“We
are
friends,” she said softly. “That really is true.”

I asked, after a careful silence, “How ill is your mother?”

“Very.”

“And she wants to see you settled.”

“What she wants,” said Linette, “is to have one more production—one more champagne fountain and one more night with Peter Duchin’s orchestra.”

“Is that what you want?”

“I’m trying to decide.”

I stood up and said, “I have to get something. Save my seat.” I cut across the lawn to the kitchen entrance, retrieved the house keys from my room—still undisturbed by a chambermaid—and returned to the dock. The larger silver one, I explained, is for Mr. Zinler’s back door and the brass one unlocks the room at the top of the stairs.

“What for?”

“More time. Another night.”

Without the argument I expected, she took the keys. She stared straight ahead at the fogged-in shore, releasing and reclamping her largest barrette. “Single or double?” I heard her murmur.

“Double. A Murphy bed. There’s clean sheets in a cardboard box somewhere.”

She continued to stare in what I thought was uncharacteristic, dreamy fashion, until she asked, “Any off-street parking?”

I knew it was as near as she would come to confiding in me, so I said only, “Yes, plenty,” swallowing my urge to advise that Providence, at sunup, would only take an hour.

“I’ll probably rent a car after Nelson drops me off.”

I added, “It’s not just selfishness on my part. I’d be rooting for the rabbi if I thought you loved him.”

Linette put the keys in her coat pocket. “You’ll tell me how to get there,” she said.

B
efore Nelson and Linette left, they walked over to the little white house to say good-bye. Still red-eyed from breakfast, Ingrid
delivered something like a speech, which Linette thought had the sons’ fingerprints all over it. “I hope you know that I never meant to hurt anyone’s feelings,” Ingrid began.

“Do you mean me in particular,” Linette cut in, “or Jews in general? Because you didn’t hurt
my
feelings. On the other hand, I can’t speak for all the Cohens and Goldbergs you turned away.”

Ingrid appealed to Nelson, a look that said, There’s no delicacy left in this world. What purpose has this served other than to humiliate me once again? Now you fix it.

When he only stared back, she said rotely, “I appreciate your being such a good friend to Nelson. You’re always welcome at the Inn. All of my children’s friends are. Anyone who wants to stay here is.”

“Just like you’re always welcome at our little
kokh-aleyn
in the mountains”—Linette threw back without translation.

“Things will work out for Gretel,” Linette continued cheerfully. “She obviously loves this guy, right? Even if he is a jerk. And a baby is good for a hotel.”

Nelson picked up their suitcases and led the way gingerly to the door.

“You’ll be back for the wedding,” his mother said.

“Don’t ask me to,” he replied.

B
ecause it was Mr. Berry and not Ingrid who introduced me in the kitchen as Kris’s little friend who had some ideas about pepping up the menu, Mrs. Crowley barely looked up. She went about her business, grating cheese for the next day’s Welsh rarebit and reconstituting various powders into liquids. “Ever make cakes from scratch?” I asked, as if it were a new trend I’d read about. “Ever try mixing a good oil and a nice vinegar for a salad dressing? I could whisk up a couple of quarts and leave them with you.”

Kris passed through the kitchen every few minutes as he unpacked a liquor delivery, and asked if we two chefs were having a nice time.

“We’re talking recipes,” I lied.

“I don’t have the help to do anything fancy,” said Mrs. Crowley, her upper arms shaking from the friction of desiccated cheese against metal.

“Maybe I can help,” I said. “What needs to be done for tonight?”

“All done,” she said, tight-lipped.

“What are we having?” Kris asked.

“Hot turkey sandwiches and Italian lasagna.”

Kris and I exchanged looks down the length of her chipped, white enamel work table. I continued to watch her as if I were interested
in her craftsmanship. “It’s nice that you take the trouble to grate fresh cheese,” I said.

“I don’t throw anything out,” she said.

“I could make a meat sauce for you, if that would help. For the lasagna.”

“That’s Natalie,” Kris explained. “She thinks cooking is entertainment.”

Mrs. Crowley harrumphed as if to say, She would. “Sauce is made.” She pointed her chin toward the pantry, home of jumbo cans and gallon jars.

“You know what?” I tried again. “What if I made one extra dish, just to entertain myself? A third option.”

“Like what?” she said.

“Mind if I poke around?”

I opened the cooler and saw bricks of margarine, milk crates, egg crates, slabs of bacon, sides of salt pork, a fifty-pound bag of Spanish onions, the requisite bus buckets and stainless-steel pans, cabbages, potatoes, carrots. I asked, trying not to sound judgmental, “Mrs. Crowley? Do you have any other vegetables?”

“Such as?”

I didn’t dare pronounce the first five that defiantly crossed my mind—Belgian endive, watercress,
haricots verts
, celery root, artichokes—so I said, “Maybe spinach? Or broccoli?”

“In the freezer,” she said primly, as if anyone who called herself a cook should know where vegetables came from.

I opened the freezer and poked around among the plastic sacks of lima beans, brussels sprouts, broccoli spears, chopped spinach, rutabaga, crinkle-cut carrots, crinkle-cut french fries, corn Niblets, peas, pearl onions, and mixed vegetables. “You certainly have a great selection,” I said.

She allowed a vain smile. “I have a B.S. in nutrition.”

Underneath the sacks, I spotted small clear bags of something not packaged by Birds Eye—flat, stiff strips of something mousy
brown. I took out one packet, examined it, recognized its contents. “Mushrooms!” I said.

“Oh,” said Mrs. Crowley. “Those are his.”

“Can we use them?”

“I sauté them for him first,” she said, in a tone that implied, He can’t even do that much.

“He usually labels them,” said Kris, turning over a plastic bag. “Here we go: ‘Honey mushrooms, 10/74, behind Loon Cottage.’ ”

“What about a nice mushroom bisque?” I asked.

Mrs. Crowley said, “This crowd doesn’t go much for mushrooms.”

“What if I made a mushroom lasagna? We could write on the chalkboard, ‘Lasagna, red or white.’ ”

Kris was looking dubious: Why bother?

“Nothing too exotic,” I promised. “Noodles, cream, Parmesan, ricotta, mozzarella. I season the mushrooms with lemon, salt, and pepper, and make a béchamel—”

“Fine,” she snapped.

I said, “Not because you need a third entrée. Just because I’m in the mood. I haven’t cooked in weeks—and you know how that gets.”

“It’s how she relaxes,” said Kris.

“I don’t have those cheeses,” said the cook.

“No problem,” said Kris. “I’m going out anyway.”

“Honey mushrooms,” I said, flapping the plastic bags at him. “I even like their name.”

I
called mine Lasagna Bianco con Funghi, and, if I say so myself, it was stunning. I resauteed the mushrooms in butter to disguise the taste of cheap margarine, and because Kris brought me farmer’s cheese instead of ricotta, the ingredients combined to taste miraculously of blintzes. The top layer caramelized to a finish reminiscent of toasted marshmallows, so that even Mrs. Crowley smiled when I brought it forth and set it down next to hers.

Fortunately, it was a slow Monday. Eight guests selected Italian Lasagna with Meat. Fifteen chose Hot Turkey Sańdwich and Dressing with Gravy, Peas, and Cranberry Sauce. Luckily or unluckily, only two diners that Monday night—Natalie Marx and Kristofer Berry—chose the gourmet option.

We ate our squares of creamy white lasagna, pronounced them delicious, drank wine, had a brick each of Neapolitan ice cream, had coffee, felt great, played one game of Nok-Hockey and two games of Ping-Pong in the game room, said conspicuous good nights in front of witnesses, went to our allegedly separate rooms, rendezvoused two hours later at midnight, fell into each other’s arms, kissed each other’s faces and necks and other exposed stretches of hot skin as our clothes came off, and made love as quietly as we could manage in the face of our urgency and ardor. We had a short, drowsy postcoital conversation, in which we speculated on the likely locations of Nelson and Linette, and discussed our plans to leave the next day, together. Soon afterward, Kris tiptoed down the back stairway, out the delivery entrance, and down the path to the little white house.

At or about three
A.M.
, I was seized by the worst stomach pains of my life. Soon after, Kris’s vomiting and groaning woke the Berrys, who suspected food poisoning. Remembering we had eaten identical meals, they rushed over to find me groaning, unable to leave the bathroom, weak, delirious, and begging for water. They called an ambulance and their doctor, who called Poison Control, who located a mushroom expert in the botany department at UVM, who predicted we would—if we survived the acute phase and the honeymoon phase, which was the fingerprint of this poisoning—slip into a coma and die.

Ingrid called my parents. My brother-in-law, the only steady hand, was enlisted to drive the hysterical Marxes north to the community hospital, where we would become doomed medical celebrities. My mother wailed, begged for magic serums, antidotes, transfusions, operations, specialists, and modern medicine. Why
couldn’t I be airlifted to Children’s; no, Beth Israel; to Mass General; to Peter Bent Brigham; to anywhere outside this godforsaken town, with its two G.P.s and no medical schools?—code, for “I want a Jewish doctor.”

The mycologist, a bald, smoothly round, and pale man, who looked like a mushroom himself, came the next day and stayed. It was he who played detective, dissecting and analyzing my casserole, examining the remaining unused Baggie, which he personally rescued from the Dumpster after Mrs. Crowley had purged the freezer, her last act before quitting. It was he who found the single Autumn Skullcap—
Galerina autumnalis
—among the harmless
Armillaria mellea
; he who dressed down the already distraught Mr. Berry, ordering him to avoid all little brown mushrooms, because this is what happens when the picker has not carefully examined each and every spore.

The Vermont expert brought in out-of-state experts, who hovered behind the doctors as they caucused in our separate ICU rooms, moving in to interview the victim-chef, read our charts, muse over test results, feel for coldness of the skin, peer into our jaundiced eyes, lobby for tests of the vital organs that were expected to fail. “If recovery occurs,” I heard them begin, just outside my door and my semiconsciousness. One loudmouth explained in a hallway caucus that autopsies in these cases reveal necrosis of the liver and kidney. His voice carried to my parents, who thought it was the announcement of my death. Their cries boomeranged back down the hall to my bed, and pitched me to my first upright position and my first coherent calls for help.

T
here was nothing the four parents could do but wait and watch and refuse each other’s overtures, everyone hating and blaming whomever their gaze fell upon across the uncarpeted waiting room. Most of all they fell on hapless Mr. Berry, who had, as the Board of Health saw it, gathered the toxic Autumn Skullcaps along with the beautiful brown Honey Mushrooms from the same mossy
log. Half-delirious, I thought our parents and the doctors were lying to me, swearing Kris was alive, while he, down the hall, was daily trying to trick them into admitting I was dead. “Did you go to Natalie’s funeral?” he asked his parents.

“Natalie is
alive
,” they would say to each of his questions. “Why don’t you believe us?”

“Prove it,” he would say.

One night, late, the nicest nurse in the world, a huge muscle man with a gray buzz cut and
SEMPER FI
tattooed on a bicep, carried me—in two johnnies—and my IV pole to the door of Kris’s room.

“See,” he said. “Okay? Do you believe me now?”

I said, “How do I know he’s not in a coma?”

“Look at the tray. He ate two turkey dinners.”

I said, “Please, Hank.”

He carried me across the threshold. “Kris?” I whispered.

“Hey! Berryboy,” said Hank, louder.

Kris opened his eyes.

I said, “Are you alive?”

He said, “I am if you are.”

I cried, “It’s all my fault. I never returned your father’s book.”

He said, looking like a prisoner of war, but sounding like himself, “Baloney!”

I cried into Hank’s thick neck, thrilled, knowing that a dying man would utter something more poetic.

“Can’t she walk?” Kris asked Hank.