The Love Children Read online

  “The one facing Beaver Dam Road is the sunniest. And the most manageable for a tractor. Can I use that one?”

  “Of course,” said my suddenly benevolent father. Then his brow clouded. “You don’t expect to make a living raising vegetables, do you?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “It’s a hell of a lot of work.”

  “I know. What I want is to plant some herbs and vegetables and find a job cooking and eventually maybe open my own restaurant. Isn’t that a neat idea?”

  He sat back and blinked. “You always were a good cook. Like your mother.”

  “Yes. I’m better now. I had a lot of experience at the commune.”

  “Really.” He seemed impressed. Funny, because he never acted as if he thought about the taste of what he was eating or could tell good food from bad. And I never thought cooks were people he had respect for. I knew he respected men who worked with their hands building things or putting roofs on houses or laying concrete, but he always acted as if Mom should be able to just rustle up whatever he wanted as if she was dialing a number. He always admitted she was a good cook; he just hadn’t seemed to think there was much to cooking. My father respected only men—men who did manual work, who dealt with real things, material stuff, not ideas. He hated ideas, said they were pernicious. But I could feel, I absolutely knew, that he had suddenly developed respect for me, and it was because I could cook.

  It made me feel terrific.

  I settled in. I had brought all my stuff with me; I’d had to empty my closet for the French professor and his family. I brought whatever clothes still fit me, and some that didn’t, and gave all the rest to Goodwill. I’d brought my books, my favorite pictures, my few pieces of jewelry, and my omelet pan. Dad helped me empty the car and carry everything upstairs, and then he went out to his studio to work. After I put my stuff away—there wasn’t much—I went around my room grabbing the fake flowers and cutesy vases and pretty pink bedspread that Julie had put in there and tossed them in a plastic garbage bag. I rolled up the flowered pink rug she had bought and hauled out my brown and orange Indian rug from the closet and put it down. I stripped the cutesy curtains and left the window bare except for its bamboo blind. The only bright color in the room now was orange—in the globe of my desk lamp, in my Hopi rug, and in a small Aboriginal painting Dad had bought me when I was a girl. So the room was austere once more. It was beautiful. It amazed me that I cared. Maybe living for three years among the shabby remnants of Pax furnishings had honed my taste.

  When I showed the room to Dad he just looked and nodded. “Funny how little it takes to change so much,” he said, standing there admiring it. I had the sense he knew exactly what had been taken away and what had been added. It seemed he did know the difference between cutesy decorating and good taste, yet he hadn’t done anything to stop Julie. I wondered how many things he’d kept silent about over the years, not just with Julie, but also with Mom and me.

  He had changed. He was older—of course, so was Mom. But she still looked good, healthy and full of life. Dad looked yellowish—except when he was drinking, when he became flushed—and his body looked frail. Yet he was only fifty. It seemed to me that he drank less, or maybe he started later in the day. He also went to bed earlier, so perhaps he didn’t imbibe the same quantity in a day. My sense was that he didn’t get as drunk. When I was a kid, I used to think he woke up drunk, as if the residue never left his system and his body was always carrying alcohol from the day before. Something was different now.

  After I fixed up my room, I asked Dad if he minded my redecorating the house.

  “Be my guest,” he said. “It’s a gift shoppe” (he pronounced this shop-pey) “now. A worn-out gift shoppe. Anything would be an improvement.”

  So I went around the house, systematically removing Julie’s embellishments. She had tried to create a home. She had been trying to do a good thing, but I couldn’t stand it. Dad seemed to like what I was doing. He’d come in for lunch looking haggard and see me taking down curtains, removing slipcovers, banishing vases, figurines, artificial flowers, fake plants, and watercolors of children, dogs, flower arrangements, Vermont barns, and birch trees, and he smiled. And when I hung his paintings on the walls and put some of his things on the mantel and on side tables, his chest expanded. Collected over the years on trips with Mom and later with Julie, and stored in bookcases in his studio, they’d been for years haphazardly jumbled together, covered with dust: pieces of pottery and sculpture from Mexico, Venezuela, India, Inuit country, Africa. There were only about a dozen pieces, but they reflected my father’s eye, and they were gorgeous.

  Once I stripped Julie away, the house looked terribly bare. She may have been kitschy, but she was alive and full of love, and without her or her stuff the house was neither. I’d looked down at Julie for her awful taste, but at least she had had some idea of how to decorate a room and I did not. Even with Dad’s paintings hanging in it, his few collected objects placed around it, it didn’t feel like a home. It was just a shabby place whose inhabitants had no idea how to live. The slipcovers had concealed the worn, torn fabric of the old armchairs and sofa, which Mom and Dad had bought used in the first place. Tables, shorn of their ornaments, were scratched and shabby; lamps without their fringed, bedecked lampshades were ugly and bare. I was befuddled; I really didn’t know what to do to fix the damage I’d done. “What should I do?” I wailed to Dad.

  “Go to New York and buy some new furniture,” he said.

  Well, that was simple. He gave me a couple of credit cards and told me not to worry about what I spent. I took them gingerly, having never handled such things before. Credit cards had always been taboo for me, symbols of a way of life I’d rejected.

  With guilty glee, I drove to New York City. And there I, the virtuous nonmaterial girl, the austere pure commune member, proceeded to betray my principles and my past, like the most shameless turncoat.

  I had done some research. I’d called Alyssa to see where I could stay and where I should shop. She’d offered to accompany me, which would make it more fun. I went to town like an army tank mowing down the enemy. Did I enjoy it! I stayed at Alyssa’s apartment, which she’d inherited from her sister (who had moved to France), and which had three bedrooms and five bathrooms. We walked out the front door onto Central Park West, and as she’d told me it would, a cab came cruising along within seconds. At first I cringed inside when I handed my card over to the salesperson, but I was having such a good time that I forgot the joy I’d taken in planning my herb garden or making nettle soup. And best of all, Alyssa’s going with me cheered her up, so I had the illusion I was doing a good deed.

  Most of what I bought was Italian, and we had to wait months for it to be delivered from Milan. The main room was big, so I bought two couches and three armchairs and four table lamps and a standing lamp. In antique shops Alyssa knew that were sprinkled over the city, from Tenth Street to Madison Avenue to lower Broadway to Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, I bought five tables of different sizes, shapes, and nationalities.

  By the time everything arrived, Dad’s Vermont cabin had the same feeling as the house in Cambridge, only more modern. It had an almost Shaker austerity, and I liked it very much. So did Dad. But the process humbled me; I could never again tell myself that I was pure or unmaterialistic. After the first wave of disillusionment wore off, I thought it was probably a good thing, because I had likely been using claims of purity to mask envy. I had been well on my way to becoming a self-righteous hypocrite. Now I could never again feel superior on the grounds of not being materialistic (and I’d probably never again have such a spending spree).

  Dad was only vaguely interested in what I was doing, but he liked the results. All his former bad feelings about me seem to have vanished, as if the poison that had entered his system when I reached thirteen had worked its way through his body and out during the years I was absent from his life. I tried to figure out why he had changed: maybe he’d been lonely since J
ulie left and was happy for company; maybe Mom and Julie both leaving him had crushed his ego and made him humble; maybe having two women leave him made him think about how he acted. Maybe loneliness had made him grateful for acceptance from anyone. Maybe he was getting older and worn out. Maybe, maybe, his life experiences had made him value other people, value love, in a way he hadn’t known to do earlier. Or maybe he was just tired of yelling.

  I didn’t know, but I was grateful, and my old love for Dad began to flow like a long-clogged tap that was suddenly cleared.

  I found a job cooking in a new restaurant called Artur’s, a few miles away on a back road. Its owner, Artur, had escaped from the USSR, from Georgia.

  Fascinated, at first I had asked Artur about his past, but I soon stopped, because he only talked about one thing. You’d never know he came from a country that capriciously arrested people for nothing, that had had a paranoid ruler who had killed millions of his own people, a country that censored newspapers and magazines, film and speech, literature and art and even music, a nation that had lost a vast portion of its population to a revolution, two world wars, and a dictator’s whims. All Artur talked about was the deprivation. He had never been able to get a pair of shoes in his size but had to buy shoes whenever he saw them, whatever size they were, and then go from person to person trying to trade, to get something closer to his size. He talked with agonized recall about queues, shortages, no fruit, no meat, no soap, no washing machines, no paint, no sanitary napkins for his mother and sister, no anything. He told of his mother waiting in three lines to buy half a lemon, and having no vegetables except cabbage and potatoes for whole winters, having only occasionally a bit of sausage. Even in the hotel where he worked, he could not get provisions. Unless political leaders were coming for a meal (when provisions miraculously appeared), they served only chicken or sausage with cucumbers and potatoes. His entire life in the USSR had been, he said, an agony of deprivation. He described how they were forced to steal and to buy on the black market.

  Artur had studied in a cooking school and become a chef in a hotel in Tbilisi, but his cooking did not improve, because he could not get the ingredients he needed.

  Artur got out somehow, a lot of Jews did. I think the Russians let them go out of anti-Semitism. His sister had married an American and lived in Brattleboro, but there was no work for Artur there. He drove a cab in New York City for ten years and saved enough money to buy a run-down restaurant on a back road outside Brattleboro. His sister had passed this restaurant every day and knew that it was in a pretty good location, on a road that connected two major roadways. She took her husband there for dinner and saw that it was poorly run, and she suspected it would fail. When it did, she alerted Artur.

  Buying the restaurant was the high point of Artur’s life. He was elated—a penniless immigrant determined to succeed, who finally gets his dream. But he lacked capital and found himself unable to do things he wanted to do. With his sister’s husband’s help he had enough for the down payment, but carried a high mortgage. He insisted on decorating it in the Russian style—crystal chandeliers, red-flocked wallpaper, Victorian chairs in the dining room. He kept the ovens, sinks, dishwasher, mixer, and other equipment of the previous owner. They were not the most modern or efficient, but what did he know? They were better than what he had been used to in Tbilisi. What gnawed at him was the knowledge that he did not have the capital to hold on for two years if the restaurant did not become popular immediately. He knew that restaurants were the type of business most likely to fail.

  He lived at his sister’s. He planned to live someday in the rooms above the restaurant, but they were dilapidated and he put off renovating them for a while. His sister was kind to him and even slipped him money once in a while, when her husband’s gaze was averted. Artur tried hard, but he did not, despite his ten years in America, understand American taste. The restaurants he’d frequented in New York when he drove his cab served pizza, hot dogs, and Chinese food, so he had learned nothing about what made a good restaurant in those years. What he knew was what he had learned in Tbilisi.

  He developed a faithful following for his stuffed cabbage, beef Stroganoff, veal meatballs, and chicken Tbilisi, but it was not enough. He had been open for eight months and was expecting to have to close soon, when I arrived on his doorstep, led there by instinct, homing in on him after several days of driving around the area looking for restaurants where I might work. I scared him: he did not understand my confidence or the meaning of my experience—three years cooking at a commune? What did that mean? After studying his menu, I told him he needed more American dishes. He knew I was right and hired me on the spot. He was desperate, besides, and I agreed to work for a month for subsistence wages. He wanted to impress on me that he was the boss, the chef, and I the sous-chef, but he admitted his ignorance about American customs and taste and gave me more or less a free hand.

  I understood his defensiveness and forgave it. By now, I understood the form anxiety took in men—men like my father, Brad, and Stepan. With Artur, as with them, image was everything. If I gave him something first, said he was right about something, or told him how delicious his chicken was, I could then offer some modification. If I always pointed out that I was referring only to local taste (he thought Brattleboro locals were all expatriate New Yorkers with tons of money and snobbery to match), I could get him to put almost anything I suggested on the menu. And of course I had to cook it, since it was unfamiliar to him.

  He did his own things well—his borscht was inventive and his chicken delicious: cut in half at the breast, flattened out in a big skillet, weighed down with a brick, and fried in duck fat. It was a frequent main course at the hotel in Tibilisi.

  At first, I added basic dishes that Americans expect: rib or loin lamb chops, pork or veal chops, leg of lamb or a fresh ham, several cuts of steak, a big hamburger—which I called hamburger, refusing to call it Salisbury steak as most restaurants with pretensions (meaning, tablecloths) did in those days. Then I added specials, dishes offered one or two nights only, that I loved to make: pot-au-feu, a navarin of lamb shanks, chicken broth, and mushrooms; Mom’s chicken in broth with angel hair pasta; chicken paprikash from the recipe Philo had stolen from his mother. This last one became so popular, we had standing orders to telephone people when we planned to serve it. People didn’t eat much fish in those days, and I didn’t know much about cooking it, but I added shrimp cocktail and crab cakes as appetizers, and filets of sole, snapper, or salmon, and swordfish or halibut steak as specials.

  I didn’t try to be adventurous at first because we were aiming simply for survival and when I had experimented at the commune, I had sometimes failed. The restaurant gradually became more popular. After six months we were breaking even; after a year, we were making a small profit over my salary, which was still tiny. Artur took almost nothing for himself, just spending money. I was living with Dad, and Artur with his sister, so we were both being subsidized. But both of us were doing what we loved to do; we told each other that was the important thing. Artur was truly happy. He had what he’d dreamed about in Tbilisi.

  After a few years, I had gained a certain fame in the area. When people hear you are successful, they imagine you “hit” overnight, but nothing happens fast; it takes time, and during that time you suffer, worrying, fearing ruin, seeing your empty restaurant and feeling terrified that it will never fill up. And some nights it doesn’t. And when it does, it fills so swiftly that you can’t breathe, and you’re hustling like a madwoman, yelling at the helpers to get this or that done, nervous about burning the roast, and then you turn around and everyone has gone home; the place is empty again. What a business!

  At the end of that August, I had Dad’s meadow mowed for hay and plowed under. It would get weedy over the winter, of course, but I didn’t want to have to do the deep plowing in the spring; I wanted to turn the soil over and plant as soon as the likelihood of frost had passed. My baby was due in early February and I knew I’d hav
e my hands full next spring. It was just about as cold here as in Becket—it was in the same latitude, if lower in altitude. The growing season was equally short.

  Fall was gorgeous in Vermont that October, the leaves especially brilliant in patches of gold and orange and crimson, and for the first time in my life, as I drove around the area, I looked out at the world with pleasure, without anxiety, serenely. I wasn’t in need of anything or in fear of anything. I didn’t even want anything. Even my perennial longing for a soul mate was in abeyance, maybe because of my pregnancy. I was easy in my soul. It was a different way of living, a way I’d started to learn at Pax, but had always fallen a little short of. I was always anxious about my garden, or what the others thought of me, or how Sandy or Stepan or Brad would respond to me. Dad didn’t lean on me at all, and I was grateful. Caring so much about what people think is maybe the worst oppression I know. The only person whose opinion I might worry about was Artur, but I knew how to handle him, and before long, my opinions had as much weight with him as his own.

  I found a gynecologist who felt solid, recommended by Mom and Dad’s old friend Dan Templer. Dr. Bach was youngish and energetic and insisted on monthly checkups. I worked most afternoons and evenings, so Mrs. Thacker, Dad’s housekeeper, still cooked Dad’s dinner and cleaned the house. The restaurant was closed on Mondays, the only night I was home. I would give Mrs. Thacker a night off and cook something special for Dad and serve it in the dining alcove he’d put in near the new kitchen. He came to the table when I called him: there was an intercom between the kitchen and his studio now—and he would be sober. He ate politely and complimented me on the food—always—the old Leighton manners reasserting themselves. After dinner, he would pour his first drink and take it into the living room, where he sat in front of the television set. It didn’t matter what was on, he just sat there watching numbly. Then he’d get sloshed. I worked in Julie’s studio, which I’d turned into my office. On Monday nights I studied seed catalogs, read new recipes and articles on cooking, or took care of my accounts. Mulling over the catalogs gave me pleasure. I greedily picked out flowers and herbs and vegetables for the spring, but had to put a lid on myself when I actually ordered. I knew I had to pay attention to costs, try to be budget-minded, if I was going to make the restaurant profitable. I’d had plenty of experience being provident at the commune. Dad was usually asleep in his chair by the time I went to bed.