The Love Children (37 page)

The restaurant was really tacky looking, with its crystal chandeliers, flocked wallpaper, a red flower-patterned carpet, heavy red velvet draperies tied back with gold braid, and Victorian chairs cushioned in crimson velvet.

I knew it would break his heart if I simply tossed everything out. After much thought, I decided to persuade him to renovate the upstairs into a real home for himself, so he could live somewhere other than in his sister's damp basement room. I redesigned the space, five tiny bedrooms and an ancient bathroom, into a sitting room and a bedroom with a big luscious bathroom. When he saw the drawing I had made for his bathroom, I could see that he was thrilled.

I guess poor Artur had completely given up any hope for a personal life. He'd lived with such deprivation earlier in his life that simply eating well was a luxury. He relished being greeted as an important person by the guests who frequented his place and being complimented on his food. But now something new began to ferment in the Artur brain.

We closed for a month in January while the construction work was done, by local workers my father had met when he built his studio and expanded his house. I moved the chandeliers, the Victorian chairs, and the dusty drapes upstairs. Artur hung the chandeliers and the drapes in his sitting room, set some of the chairs around his new round dining table (the rest went to a dealer in fake antiques), and reused the salvageable parts of the downstairs carpeting. He pored over catalogs for his bathroom and with my help chose modern fixtures and a Jacuzzi. When it was finished he was exceedingly pleased.

The work took months, but Artur was not in a hurry, being as wary of the new life he pictured as eager for it. He began to make eyes at a customer from New York who came in from time to time with her brother and his wife, with whom she spent frequent weekends in Brattleboro. She had dyed red hair and was somewhat hefty but shapely. Mildred Hildrein was a widow. She worked as a bookkeeper for an importer of silk flowers and was a trusted employee, earning a good salary, but lonely and afraid of growing old alone. I had long seen that she found Artur attractive,
and I knew that he was drawn to her too. Artur was handsome, though a little heavy, and his manners were polished. He was courtly in the European manner, which American women are starved for. Most of the women patrons adored him. I smiled, watched, and waited.

The money I had invested paid for the restaurant renovation, which I designed. I had the painters steam off the flowered wallpaper and paint the walls a warm pale cocoa and the molding that framed panels of the wall beige. I hung bright brass sconces in the center of each panel and chose a cocoa carpet with a waffle pattern that would disguise dirt. The tablecloths were beige and the napkins cocoa, and I put chocolate-colored candles on each table. I hung pleated beige linen shades at the windows and bought bentwood chairs the color of maple syrup covered in beige. It looked classy.

 

For about a year, once or twice a month, I had been putting Isabelle in the car—she loved to ride around, babbling in her car seat, with a little bottle of water, some toys in hand, and a few cookies in a waxed paper bag—and had been driving to small farms in Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and northern New York.

The technological revolution had brought us tomatoes with thick skins that would not break when transported thousands of miles across the country. Our fruits and vegetables now lasted longer after harvest, making it worthwhile to ship produce raised in warm California to chilly Maine, so everyone could have strawberries in winter and oranges in summer. Pigs were bred to have less fat because people were dieting, and chickens, sheep, and cattle were fed hormones and antibiotics, which kept them healthier and reduced waste and also created a race of giant animals. This revolution was supposed to make the United States the best-fed country in the world, with the cheapest food. That it probably had.

But farms containing ten thousand pigs stank for miles and produced so much pig shit that disposal was a serious problem. And without fat, pork was tough and tasteless. The new vegetables and fruit also had no taste. People like me stopped buying pork and lamb, and did without tomatoes that were not grown locally. We bought meat and produce from local farmers, whose numbers were decreasing. (In the winter, only potatoes, cabbages, and turnips were available locally, so we had to have other options.) Locally raised food tasted much better than the other stuff. A movement had arisen to promote organic food.

By 1979 there were maybe a dozen and a half organic farms in the area that I could reach by car in an afternoon. For the past year, I had been looking at farms that raised foods I would want to serve in my restaurant. One couple in Monterey, Massachusetts, had started a goat farm and cheese-making business, set up in such an organic, sanitary way that they became a model for other aspiring cheese producers across the country. I wanted to buy their products: not many people ate goat cheese at that time, but it was starting to become popular. Inspired by Greek salads, which always contained feta cheese, I introduced goat cheese in the restaurant in a salad of baby greens (also unusual then). People liked it, so later I used goat cheese with scallions and parsley in a risotto, which also was popular. Alice Waters had invented a salad with a baked goat cheese that was delicious.

Then I heard about a chicken farmer in Rhode Island who shunned the antibiotics that other chicken farmers used. He also did not feed his chickens feed made out of chicken parts (which was common). He gave them natural feed and the meat tasted so superior that I served it exclusively. In Vermont, these things mattered: many of the people who lived and visited there cared about things like that. So we continued to thrive, and I continued to seek out better sources of food.

I had earlier pressed Artur to build a solarium out back, behind the kitchen, where I could grow herbs and spices and lettuce all winter. He had put this project off, but in 1979, during the upstairs renovation that winter, I finally got my greenhouse. This made it possible for me to stop planting Dad's meadow, which had become too much work for me. Between taking care of an increasingly demanding Isabelle, searching out natural foods, and trying out new recipes to keep the restaurant fresh, I was overwhelmed.

Kathleen, my assistant, now paid Dad a nominal rent and kept the field going. The following year she rented another field from someone else and organized an organic farm on her own. She was so happy with her project that her marriage improved.

Artur and I got along well; we rarely argued, and working together in the restaurant every day was really a pleasure. With the experience of the commune behind me, I knew how to disagree diplomatically and how to be delicate when I needed to overrule him. He had learned to tell me without shrieking when something mattered strongly to him, which was not often. When something mattered strongly to me—which
was
often—I knew how to ask for agreement without servility, and he would pat my back and say, “Of course, of course, my little Jess.” He adored Isabelle, even after she started talking. Once kids can talk they say things adults don't like, demanding what they want and objecting when they don't get it. This period of childhood loses kids some of their most effusive admirers, but Isabelle did not lose Artur, who, had I not taken him in hand, would have had her fat as a pig, sneaking her bits of bacon, avocado, and chocolate candy.

We were thriving now, and I had a good enough sous-chef that I could take a winter vacation (I could never take one in the summer). I went only as far as Cambridge, to Mom's, where I spent three weeks. After she came back from France she had visited
me in Vermont, staying at a motel again and avoiding Dad's house, but we never saw enough of her. I wanted Isabelle to get to know her better, so we went to her that February. Isabelle and Mom and I went to museums and playgrounds (very sparse on the ground in Vermont) and to Boston Common, with its swan boats, which enchanted Isabelle, as they had me a generation earlier. We ate at restaurants almost every night—Cambridge was now full of wonderful new ethnic places—and Mom got to know her granddaughter.

When in the spring of 1979 I set off on my round of visits to organic farms, I found most of them through word of mouth; there was no register of these farms. I visited a small pig farm in Connecticut that produced pork with some fat and some flavor, and happily signed on a new supplier of chops, roasts, and bacon. Then I wasted my time on a disappointing series of farms whose claims to organic vegetables were exaggerated. I found some potential sources that would have to be visited again in the late summer, one promising organic corn, another tomatoes. The tomato farmers told me about an organic mushroom farm in Vermont, up near Springfield. Many people found mushrooms to be bland, but reading about food constantly, as I did, I had encountered some interesting new ones—shiitake, cremini, and cèpes. I knew that my never having been to Europe was a drawback for a person who specialized in food, and I didn't know when I could possibly take the time to go. This organic farm in Vermont was supposed to grow many kinds of mushrooms, and I decided to visit it.

Springfield, Vermont, is halfway up the state and colder than the area around Brattleboro, where we lived. That May when I drove up, the fields were still brown, only slightly tinged with green. I was almost past Springfield when I saw a small sign reading “Champignons Jacquet” beside a driveway, which led
through masses of trees, still only in bud, to a plain old Victorian house.

I got out of the car and undid Isabelle from her car seat. At three, she was getting heavy, but whenever I picked her up, she would throw her arms around my neck and grapple my body with her little legs. This always sent hot lava pumping through my heart, and I held her close against my body as I walked to the door. A large man with a long, pale face, a broad forehead, and dark hair opened the door. He had the good looks that caught a person's attention, but I kept my face immobile.

“Mr. Jacquet? I'm Jess Leighton. I have an appointment.”

“Hello, come in.” He tilted his head toward the room. I put Isabelle down and led her by the hand inside the house. The front room was an office, with a desk, a typewriter, a telephone and Rolodex, two standing file cabinets, and some charts pinned to the wall. I recognized them as planting charts; I had made similar ones for myself at Pax. There were also a couple of shabby armchairs, but he didn't invite me to sit.

“Artur's, right?” he asked.

I nodded.

“You're getting well-known. The restaurant and you.” He smiled down at Isabelle. “But I don't know this young lady.”

Isabelle bristled. She hated to be called a young lady. It signaled a demand for formal deportment.

I put my hand on her shoulder. “This is Isabelle.”

He bent toward her. “Hello, Isabelle.”

She pressed her face against my leg. “Isabelle would say hello if she weren't hiding,” I said, ruffling her hair.

“She's a beautiful child. Your husband is a lucky man.”

“I have no husband,” I said in a frigid tone.

He flushed. “Sorry. Stupid of me.”

I stood in cold silence. I didn't like the intended compliment.
It sounded as if he were praising some man for owning such fine property as Isabelle and me. I said this aloud.

He changed color again, to white. “Terribly sorry.” But his voice was cold too.

I nodded.

“I was trying to say—actually, I had a pang of envy for whatever man was in your lives. Yours and Isabelle's,” he said.

“No serious harm done,” I said, relenting.

“Just minor harm?” he asked.

“Let's forget it and start over,” I said.

“I can't—I have this need to defend myself. I have to insist, to tell you what I was trying to say: looking at the two of you does give a man pleasure. This man, anyway.”

“Okay,” I said dubiously. “I guess that's different. Thanks.” Then I added, “I guess,” and laughed.

He laughed too. He was standing, arms akimbo, between the door and me and for a moment I felt trapped by him, with him. He was tall, much taller than I, and full bodied. And I had Isabelle. But he moved slightly to one side, waving me before him, and my body eased.

“Shall we go?” he asked.

I tried for a lighter voice. “I want to warn you, I'm totally ignorant about mushrooms. Eager to learn though,” I added.

“Most of us in America don't know about mushrooms,” he said. “We still have a frontier palate, frozen by the Depression; we eat Corn Flakes and beefsteaks, Wonder Bread and Velveeta cheese. We know nothing about wine, cheese, fish, herbs, or vegetables. But I hear you are an herbalist and serve great vegetables. That's your reputation.”

“Oh.” My face became warm; I was afraid I was blushing. But it thrilled me to hear that I had any reputation at all, that people actually talked about me, especially in such a way.

We left the house and walked toward some large sheds. They
were two across and three deep. Around them was open land—room for expansion, I deduced, and beyond that, along the perimeter of the property, deep woods, evergreens that cast their shade across much of the plot and helped to keep the sheds cool.

He continued, “When I was fourteen, I spent a couple of years in France with my grandparents. They lived in the Périgord and would go walking in the countryside, picking mushrooms. They'd take a bottle of wine, a baguette, some
saucisson
, and fruit. We'd meet other people doing the same thing and compare notes. My grandparents knew every type of mushroom they saw, including the poisonous ones, and they taught me as we went. It wasn't like learning in school, it was just conversation, you know? Afterward, we'd go home and make mushroom crêpes or mushroom omelets or mushroom soup or just sauté them. Delicious! We'd have that with great French bread and a hearty red wine for Sunday dinner. It was a happy time for me.”