“I met a new man yesterday. Right here in Magrit,” Tracy told Irini. They were working with flour blends in the Kitchen. Henry Collins had the ad copy from Bisquick posted to inspire them. “He: You’re a wizard, honey. Boy, look at that biscuit. Mother can’t match that! She: Yes, she can… if she uses BISQUICK! Just think, darling… all you do is add milk or water!” It was the boiled down essence of all Henry’s aspirations. Bisquick was modern, fast, and foolproof. She was happy, He was happy. If only Bisquick hadn’t belonged to one of Margaret Mill’s competitors.
Outside the window the sun blinked the bits of persistent old snow on and off like a neon sign. “He had lunch at the Paree Nuits Supper Club and then he went bowling. He got four strikes,” said Tracy. Bowling had come only recently to Magrit when Norma Baldish had hammered and sanded in a single lane, behind Moodey’s grocery store. You still had to set up your own pins, which was a definite disincentive to knocking any down.
As for the Paree Nuits Supper Club—it was half an hour out of town and most of Magrit gave it a miss. Maggie Collins’s heartfelt and often published belief was that those secret French flavors were produced by not washing the pots between meals. Maggie was a fastidious woman. And Magrit was innocent enough to believe that the food at the Paree Nuits was French. The club stayed in business because of its owners, a Mr. and Mrs. Blount. Mr. Blount was only five feet tall. Mrs. Blount was six foot four. Mr. Blount cooked and Mrs. Blount served. People drove all the way from Chicago just to see them. The food was quite incidental.
“What did he have for lunch?” Irini asked. She was being sarcastic, but Tracy missed it.
“Coq au vin. He once had Hunt Club sandwiches with the Countess de Forceville of New York. He told me. His name is Tommy. He works for the railroads. He was an ensign in the Navy.”
“Thomas Holcrow?” Irini asked.
“A really dreamy guy,” said Tracy. “I can just see him in whites. Like a magazine ad. But I had to back him off a bit. You know what I mean.”
Sometimes Irini was charmed by Tracy’s confidence, sometimes she was irritated. This time she was neither. She was too busy trying to think. He’d been drunk. Had he been young? Had he been dreamy? Like a magazine ad? Not so she noticed. But it would be like her, it would be so like her to beat some really dreamy guy arm-wrestling before she saw how really dreamy he was. “When I met him he was having the vin without the coq,” she said. “I backed him off a bit, too. I backed him way off.” Now Irini was in a bad mood. She put her hands into the bowl to mix. There wasn’t enough flour. Her hands came out in mitts of dough.
“What do you think he’s doing in sleepy old Magrit?” Tracy asked. Tracy was dying to go to Paris, but not the postwar Paris, where no one had enough to eat and the streets were filled with orphans and collaborators. Some Parisian mirage she had gotten out of a radio play or magazine story before the war. Some place where women wore their hair in a curtain over one eye and left the dark red imprint of their lips on their cigarettes. Some place where the women all had pasts and the men loved them helplessly in spite of it. The real Paris.
She would have settled for Detroit. “He doesn’t know a soul. He told me. He’s living in the room over Bumps. He can hardly be on vacation. In April? In Magrit?” Tracy held out her hands. “I gave myself a manicure. Deep purple. What do you think?”
Irini rubbed her own hands together to clean them. “Deep,” she agreed. “Try not to leave any of it in the dough.”
Fanny May, Tracy’s older sister, came into the Kitchen. “Tracy,” she said. “Are you the one who tested the recipe for Rhubarb Grunt?”
“It was requested,” Tracy May said. “A Tuckahoe housewife.”
“Did you put pepper in it? Several teaspoons of cayenne pepper?”
“No one would put pepper in grunt.”
“Sort of a ridiculous name, isn’t it?” said Irini.
“It’s a kind of cobbler,” Tracy told her.
“And that’s a ridiculous name, too. So shoe-ish.”
“Well, it was published with seven teaspoons of cayenne pepper. Can’t you be more careful? Now we’ll have to run a mea culpa for Maggie. You know how he hates that.”
“I don’t think I was the one who made the mistake,” said Tracy. “I very much doubt it.”
“And what do you have on your hands?” Fanny asked Tracy. “You look like you’ve been killing ticks.”
This may have been the beginning of Maggie’s troubles, though Irini didn’t notice at the time or remember it later. Probably it was the innocent misprint it appeared to be.
“Cobble, cobble,” said Irini. “Grunt, grunt.”
4
After work Fanny drove Irini to Collins House, where Ada Collins was giving a small dinner party. Claire Kinser had gotten the day off from the Kitchen to work in the kitchen. When the household had been large, when the children from Henry’s first marriage had still occupied the upstairs bedrooms and later when the grandchildren had come back, Claire’s mother, Rose, had cooked all the Collins’s meals. The Kinsers were an old Upper Magrit family; Rose had braved considerable censure to take the job. But now when Claire was hired on special occasions, it was accepted as an inherited post and no one even thought about it. Irini had been asked to help serve and clean up.
In the summer Irini would have walked and enjoyed walking. This April was too dark, cold, and soggy. She knew, from listening to the radio, that spring had arrived in other places. In Radioland June was busting out all over. But in Magrit, on this particular evening, a fog had risen off the river and rolled over the roads. It was as if Magrit had risen right into the clouds.
Nothing slowed Fanny down. She wiped a small circle on the glass with her mitten and accelerated through a puddle that was just starting its nightly freeze. Ice and mud hit the windshield. Fanny flipped on the wipers, diluting the mud and smearing it around. Irini couldn’t see at all, but there was no one else on the road. In 1947 there were no seat belts to remind her that riding in cars was a dangerous thing to do.
They hit a new spring pothole. “Ouch,” Fanny said, on behalf of the car. “Time for Norma to put away the snowplow and get out here with her little bucket of tar.” Fanny never touched the brakes until she reached the Collins House driveway.
Collins House was in lower Lower Magrit at some distance from the rest of the town and was unlikely to get closer, since Henry owned all the land between. No place else in Magrit was anything like Collins House. It was actually fenced in wrought iron as if it were an estate. On the grounds there were statues of naked cupids with tiny, elegant penises that really pissed, and a goldfish pond Henry always said was shaped like a cereal bowl. Round. Irini let herself in the front gate by lifting the lion’s head handle.
She spoke soothingly to the dogs, who’d come running at the sound of Fanny’s car. There were seven dogs in all, although it seemed like more. They were a pack of orphans, an exultation of dirt, saliva, smells, and noise. They varied in shape and size and color, but matched in temperament; they all had hybrid vigor and they had it in spades. One had an obvious corgi heritage; another, Dane, another, boxer; there was an unearthly Pomerian–Boston terrier mix. Henry had picked them up at the pound for an experiment on the effects of nutrition on learning.
If he’d had his way, there would have been many, many more. The scientific method required large samples and large control groups: any experiment was valueless without them. But Ada was adamant. You could not bring a dog home, spend six months teaching it to beg for grains, and then simply return it. Any dog they took was theirs to keep.
In point of fact none of the dogs had been able to learn to beg. The corgi distracted Irini, while the Dane immobilized her, while the boxer drooled on the toes of her boots. They were all sporting new collars, the very latest thing, collars treated with chemicals to kill fleas. In 1947 people still thought the war against fleas was winnable.
“Very scientific,” Henry had told the girls in the Kitchen the day the
collars arrived. “Very exciting. They actually turn the animal’s blood into a flea-sized dose of poison. Wouldn’t it be something if we could do the same thing for humans vis-à-vis mosquitoes?”
“I don’t want poisonous blood,” Fanny had objected. “I’m so funny that way.”
“Nonsense,” said Henry. “Would you prefer malaria?”
“Are those my choices?”
“It may become a matter of us or them. You put all the people and animals of the world, and I mean the fish, too, the gray whales and the giant squid, put them on one end of a large teeter-totter and all the insects on the other, and the insect side would be heavier. It’s a scientific fact.”
“Has it been done?”
“It’s been done with statistics.”
“I don’t see how,” said Fanny, but quietly, underneath Henry’s hearing. He had a strong need to explain anything anyone didn’t understand. He couldn’t seem to control it; it was almost Pavlovian.
Although Henry insisted the dogs were now flealess, they were still scratching the old bites. Irini was grateful. It prevented them from closing in and finishing her off. The pungency of their collars rose even above the odor of wet fur. She picked her way over the icy gravel toward the house.
Inside more science was running amok. Henry had built an ant farm in an old aquarium so that he could study the effects of nutrition on social organization at the most purified level. He’d kept it in the dining room so that he could observe and take notes while he ate.
Sometime in the night, rather than eat their cereal, the ants had made a ladder of their little bodies so that some could climb over the others and escape into the kitchen. The escapees were in the process of stocking a new home in the pantry wall with sugar granules when Ada got up in the morning. She had mopped and scoured, but this had merely moved the ants around and cleaned them up. “Just try to keep from serving them tonight,” she’d finally told Claire.
Claire was a tall, thin girl with a high forehead, thin, feathery hair, and a pronounced rosiness that flamed across her cheeks when she was embarrassed. “I’m peppering everything lightly,” Claire said to Irini, who was at the sink, washing the traces of dog off her hands and aiming the stream so as to send a few dozen ants down the drain as well. “That should cover us for any small, brown specks in the food. We’re having lamb.” She consulted a stained, handwritten recipe. “Maybe Norma can get out tomorrow and fumigate.”
Irini had smelled the lamb the moment she walked in. Lamb and bacon. Claire was the best cook at the Mill. She was five years older than Irini, had been briefly engaged to a soldier she met in Detroit. One week she was showing everyone her ring—a modest affair with a diamond chip—and his picture—a blond man, about Claire’s age, with an embarrassed smile—and the next week her hand was bare. Fanny took her out for drinks and to talk, because that was Fanny’s role and because you could tell her anything; she was never shocked and she never told anyone else. The rest of them were left to imagine the worst. Broken hearts, previous marriages, terminal illnesses, unsightly wounds, unnatural demands. The world is rich with tragic possibilities. It would have been nice to know.
Irini moved along the stove, lifting lids and looking underneath them. Small boiled potatoes with ham. Carrots in cream and dill. And on the breakfast table a salad, an exotic innovation whose ingredients were imported from California. Irini wasn’t sure when to serve it. She would have to ask Mrs. Ada.
Collins House had the very latest model of gas range. The oven was insulated, ventilated, heat-controlled, and automatic time-controlled. It buzzed to tell Claire the pie was done. She lifted it out and set it to cool on the cutting board. Real mincemeat, made of spiced venison.
Norma Baldish had taken the deer herself, one shot in the head, from a stand of pin oaks by Upper Magrit. She was an enthusiastic hunter. One wall at Bumps was filled with Norma’s antlers.
At Christmas the customers embellished them with tinsel, beer bottles, and Santa hats. It was Irini’s father’s idea. “Camouflage. I’m just hoping the reindeer won’t guess what they are,” he said, finishing off a bottle for purely ornamental reasons. “I’m just hoping no one here was a special friend of Blitzen’s.”
Norma Baldish hated it. She refused to wire them for lights and no one else in Magrit was capable of it. “It makes it look like I killed them all during their Christmas party,” she complained to Irini once. “How sporting is that?”
“Who’re the guests tonight?” Irini asked Claire.
“Guest. Only one. A lady journalist from the Tribune. I think Mrs. Ada went to school with her mother. I saw her arrive. She looked nice.”
This meant nothing, coming from Claire. Claire thought everyone looked nice. To think someone unattractive would have been cruel, and she had the kindest heart imaginable. She was fidgeting over her pots and preparations, and Irini concluded that she was nervous about the lamb. It was surprising that Claire had even attempted it. Everyone knew that Mr. Henry was very fussy about lamb.
Claire cut a small, sickly hothouse tomato into the thinnest slices imaginable and fanned them over the top of the salad. She crumbled bacon onto them. Irini put on an apron embroidered with violets. Radish roses in ice water bloomed at her elbow. Crumbs of dried mint lay on the cutting board next to the pie. She picked them up, looking closely to make sure they were mint, and rubbed them between her palms. She opened her hands and closed her eyes to smell. She had a moment of instinctive contentment brought on by the warmth and the smells and a woman at the stove.
Working all day in the Kitchen made Irini reluctant to cook when she got home. She and her father lived on crackers and canned soups, cold sandwiches, and breakfast cereal. Irini was not a cook herself. But she was something of a connoisseur when it came to kitchens.
Ada entered the room. “Twenty minutes,” she said to Claire. “Henry is just finishing one of his stories. His bear hunting story. Maybe twenty-five minutes. Irini, thank you for coming. Claire, dear, try to keep the lamb warm, but don’t let it dry.” She smoothed her hair, turned to leave. “His mother was just a whiz at lamb,” she reminded them.
In fact, Henry’s mother was the original Margaret Collins. She’d been a superb cook whose recipes no one could duplicate. She cooked by impulse and intuition. “Use a handful,” she might have said when pressed for an amount. If asked to be precise:
“Scoop flour in your hand, palm up. Don’t close your fist.
“A lump of butter the size of a walnut.
“Enough water to moisten, but you don’t want it wet.
“Cook till thick, but don’t overcook, it’ll clot. Reduce the heat if you have to.
“Stir it till it looks right.
“You’ll know when it’s done.” When she died she took the world’s most perfect lamb sauce with her to the grave.
She was Henry’s inspiration. Imagine a world where every woman was able to cook the way his mother had. Imagine his mother, only make her more stylish, beautiful, but in a regal rather than a sexual way. Make her more modern than his mother, certainly. Make her immortal. And maybe just a little bit more forgiving than his mother had been, though what was he thinking? His mother had certainly loved him. Why else cook all those wonderful meals?
It was unclear whether Henry’s mother’s namesake had children or not. “Ask Mr. Henry sometime if Maggie is married,” Fanny May once told Irini. “It puts him in such a spot. He can’t stand to think of her as a spinster, but he can’t imagine a man worthy of her, either. And it makes him jealous. He doesn’t know what to say.”
“Try the mint sauce, Irini,” said Claire. “Tell me if it’s all right.”
Irini put a finger in the sauce and licked it dry. It was delicious—faintly sweet, perfectly fresh. “It’s wonderful,” she said. “Everything looks wonderful. Do you want me to test anything else?”
“Here.” Claire put together a plate for Irini. “Eat. You’ve got thirty minutes, at least, if it’s the bear hunting story, an
d this way you won’t be serving and starving at the same time.”
The sauce was even better on the lamb. The potatoes crumbled invitingly under Irini’s fork. She moved them into the range of the cream and dill. The only things she didn’t eat were the salad, which was too carefully arranged, and the pie, which was too hot.
“They’re going to love everything,” Irini said. She was trying to think of a way to turn the conversation to the new man in town, but really what was there to say? He bowled four strikes and ate coq au vin?
With the end of rationing, what the American palate craved most was meat. Roasted, baked, braised, stewed, fried, gravied, ground, chipped, creamed, sliced onto toast, wrapped in pie crusts, stuffed into peppers, boiled into soups, dipped into horseradish, smothered with caramelized onions, pounded and breaded, but best of all, plain. Meat, with salt. Meat, dripping with butter and blood. Great, glistening slabs of meat. In 1947 Americans ate 155 pounds of meat per person. It was more than a craving. It was a personal best.
So the Collins’s dinner guest, Miss Schaap, was all the more a surprise. “No. Thank you. I don’t eat meat,” she told Irini, who stood to her left, offering the serving platter. “Not since India.” Miss Schaap was a middle-aged woman, plainly dressed, with, contrary to Claire’s description, pinched, ferrety features. Irini had never seen anyone anywhere who looked more carnivorous. Miss Schaap turned to Ada. “Ahimsa,” she said as if this explained something. “It’s one of Mr. Gandhi’s principles. It means no harm. It includes not eating meat.”
“Oh dear,” said Ada. Irini looked over the serving board. Bacon in the salad. Ham in the potatoes. Perhaps the carrots in cream?
“Or dairy,” said Miss Schaap. “No dairy either.”
“Mother’s lamb sauce had a kind of thymy taste. That’s what made it so different. You would have loved it, Miss Schaap,” Henry Collins said. He was being the host, which meant good-humored and avuncular. If not attentive. But let’s be fair. The man had trouble hearing. “Irini, bring that over.”