Such presumptive demands and perversely touching out-of-the-blue disclosures, both of which I encounter often in a working day, are two things that have helped me weather the insanities and losses I’ve suffered since moving across the Atlantic. Like air-conditioning, they seem indigenous to these parts.
“I have just the thing,” I said, which is what I say, as a stalling tactic, when I haven’t the faintest idea if I have such a thing at all. I led her downstairs to Detective Stories & Thrillers—not my favorite section, though I respect its devotees—and together we filled a small shopping bag with books that would do what precious little they could to distract her friend from waking up without her breasts. Off and on that day, when I wasn’t thinking of Dad, I was thinking of that anonymous woman and hoping she wasn’t as young as her friend—though would age make it any more acceptable or any less painful, having to go through that ordeal without the promise of true, regenerative healing?
BEFORE I CAN MAKE
the front door, Dennis has me clenched in a garlicky full-body vise-grip. Dennis and David are both noticeably taller than I am, but Dennis stands over me by nearly a head, and the feel of his embrace is inescapably parental, in the very best sense. I am never the first to pull away. “Fenny, Fenny, I can’t believe it, can you? I thought he’d live to ninety, I thought he’d watch me walk wee Laurie down the aisle.”
Sometimes I think Dennis ought to have been an actor or a lounge singer, but then I set myself straight, since he wouldn’t recognize artifice if it were a cricket bat smashing his jaw. All the sweetness, all the loving-kindness in the two sides of our family—present in our parents, certainly, but in neither one to that degree—must have flowed like a sap through our family tree, condensing into the affectionate effervescence of my youngest brother. Dennis is that rare cliché come true: He is a gem, a diamond chiseled well beyond the rough.
If I were to list my own finer attributes, sweetness would be markedly absent. Highest on my list would be patience. (Highest on David’s would be ambition. And each of us has been served quite well by his cardinal strength.)
Dennis wears one of those double-breasted nehru jackets that are the uniform of his trade, and when at last he stands back from me, I can see that it’s splashed with oils and sauces and wine. Reflexively, I look down.
My brother begins brushing at my shirt. “I’m so sorry—I’m trying a balsamic marinade for butterflied lamb—I thought, because you know how Dad loved lamb—and I thought I’d grill it out back—”
“We can’t do leg of lamb for fifty, you’re out of your mind. I thought we decided on chicken something-or-other,” says David.
“Davey, it’s for us, for tonight.” Dennis hears none of the sniping in our brother’s voice. He’s tolerated, and usually honored, David’s edicts and vetoes his entire life. (Sometimes it seems obvious that’s why he chose Véronique—not because David liked her, not at all, but because she has the same imperial confidence. I’ve wondered what might have happened if David had met her before their wedding day, whether he’d have been tactless enough to say what a bitch he thought she was. If he had, that wedding would never have taken place.) Just fifteen minutes younger than David, Dennis adores him, probably more than anyone else now that our mother’s gone. I’ve always been a little jealous of their twinship, even though they look and act so differently.
“Well good, fine. Just please don’t overtax yourself,” says David. “I’ll get Dad out of the boot, and then Lillian has a doctor’s appointment; we’ll be back after that.” I hadn’t realized Dad’s ashes returned in the boot and am about to comment on the disrespect when Dennis cheerfully interrupts me.
“By seven if you like it rare!” Never motionless except at a meal, he takes my bags from me with one hand and pulls me into the house, shouldering open doors.
“Allô! Mes petits poires!”
he calls out.
“Il est là! Onco est arrivé!
“You’ve got your old room, I made sure of that,” he says as he starts up the stairs. “I told Vee I wouldn’t stand seeing you on some lumpy camp bed in the library, you’ve come so far. The girls are all in with us, and Davey’s moved into Mum and Dad’s. Lord of the manor already.”
“Attends! Nous sommes occupées!”
Véronique calls down.
I hold Dennis back. “Just drop that stuff and get me into the kitchen. I’m famished,” I tell him, though hunger and even my aversion to his wife are not my primary motives. The kitchen is where I’ll find Dennis at his happiest and most relaxed, where he in turn will make me as happy and relaxed as I can be under the circumstances.
As always now when he is here, the front hall is filled with extravagant odors. Onions sautéing in butter is a constant, because his training is classic French, but invariably something less predictable will hover just above that bedrock scent: cilantro or coconut or cumin. Today I smell something I can only describe as Provençal, perhaps rosemary or fennel. Because the house never smelled like this when we were small—because our mother, though she made a dependable joint, spent as little time indoors as possible—this has transformed my homecomings for the past several years. Though the furnishings are just as they were when I was ten, the aura is altogether changed by Dennis’s cooking—the pervasive mustiness of Dad’s books overruled at last—so that I feel as if I’m visiting home in a dream, where everything yet nothing is the way it should be, where the best of what you have and what you wish for are briefly, tantalizingly united.
Tealing is a house beamed north from a Thomas Hardy moor: white, many-gabled, and crisscrossed, like a late Mondrian, with dark rough beams. It is charming, not grand. Its steep roof was designed to be thatched—an imported folly of the architect, kept up at great expense for decades but replaced with blue slate before we moved in. Since our mother never fussed with decor and gave not a hoot for modernization (an unusual trait in a postwar bride, and one which I suspect helped win her my father), the kitchen is still a cavernous, utilitarian room. Its chief features are a long stained oak table smack in the center and—a treasure to Dennis, who repeatedly threatens to steal it—a tarantula of a stove that can accommodate ten large pots. Next door stoops a stodgy little cooker our mother used for the plain suppers she made; only Dennis, it seems, knows how to manage the wood-fed stove. He’s even turned a soufflé out of its oven.
He goes straight to the icebox when we enter and, with the habitual speed of a chef, pulls out a plate of pâté and crackers, a whole roast chicken, still trussed, and a glistening cluster of large black grapes. One foot wedged in the door, he lays them on the table, then reaches back deftly again and pulls out a beer. “Chilled expressly for my Amoorican brother.”
I smile, touched by his gesture. “Cultural turncoat that I am.”
He walks around the table, facing me over a cutting board and a dozen heads of garlic. “I remember your friend Mal and his little speech on the stupidity of warm beer. ‘Tepid spirits for a tepid people.’ I’m not sure whether he made an actual convert of you or simply shamed you into it.”
We laugh at the memory of Mal’s Anglophobe diatribe, delivered at this table. I watch Dennis’s hands as he uses a broad knife to pummel apart the cloves, then flatten and flay them, then mince them into pungent snowy mounds. I find myself fascinated by the way he moves, so aggressively yet so gently.
“You must miss him, even that sharp wit.”
“Sharp? Oh, serrated,” I say. “And yes, I still miss them both—him and his high-minded jibes at the world.”
“You still have that bird?”
“Felicity will outlive us all.” I’m moved again by the way my brother remembers these details, without any apparent effort, about my distant life. It’s as if he studied up, yet I know these things are simply right there, within easy mental grasp; it gives me the comforting impression that he thinks of me often. “She keeps Rodgie alive by sheer virtue of her constant badgering. He leaves my couch now only for short walks in the neighborhood. He likes to go to a nearby playground, sit down on the pavement, and watch the children through the fence. I think he thinks they’re sheep, the way they careen about and bleat. Rodgie’s not used to human beings as such relentlessly happy creatures. I’m not sure he even knows it’s happiness he’s seeing.”
“I wish sometimes . . .” Dennis pauses to sweep the minced garlic off the board into an old chipped bowl of our mother’s. “ . . . that I’d taken one of the dogs back then.” Rodgie is one of the last two sheepdogs we own from the line our mother bred and showed. That was her shining skill in life, her special knack. When she died, there were half a dozen dogs left at Tealing; I took Rodgie, the youngest, and David took a pair, one of whom survives to ride about like a dignitary in the back of his pickup.
“You could hardly have kept a collie in Paris while making pastry from four in the morning till dark.”
“Really, though, it wasn’t that. It was Vee . . . I wouldn’t have said so, but I knew she’d never stand for a dog in our flat—I mean
my
flat, of course, that I was
hoping
would be ours.”
“You knew her already back then?” And then I recall that they had married less than a year after Mum’s death—and, in short order, produced a fusillade of children: three within four years.
“Oh, I’d just that month been smitten. Talk about ghastly timing. Mum’s dying hardly seemed the occasion to tell everyone I’d found the woman of my dreams. Though when I was alone with her—Mum—I did tell her. I think it made her happy.” Peeling gingerroot now, never idle for an instant even in reflection, Dennis looks up quickly to see my reaction.
“She never was jealous of our crushes, was she,” I say. Not till she’d been dead a few years did it dawn on me that she’d probably noticed mine, all on schoolmates, desperately though I tried to hide them (chiefly from myself). I can’t shake my bewilderment that Dennis has dreams a woman like Véronique fulfills—unless, and I suppose I could hardly fault him for it, he is overly susceptible to beauty (for beautiful, in that tautly elegant very French way, she is). Why I need Dennis to be infallible, to have no Achilles heel, I don’t know—but I do. I’ve always imagined that his wife must be a siren in bed. There must be a golden prize nestled in all that dramatic selfishness.
“So tell me the menu,
maître frère.
” I lean across the table to put a grape in Dennis’s mouth before I realize that this is a gesture of inappropriate affection, beyond brotherly, a gesture from my New York life; but he opens up happily and takes it between his teeth.
“Terrific, aren’t they? ‘Grapes, to be worthy, must swoon the palate,’ one of my masters used to say. Alphonse Lavalle, these beauties, first of the season, straight from a vineyard behind our house. I send the children over to do my poaching. If they get caught, they’ll be a lot more easily forgiven than I’d be. I’ll deal with the morality later.”
“Never mind the morality of agricultural goods smuggled across the Channel.”
“Oh, that,” Dennis says dismissively. “I’m an old hand at that.”
Yes, I think, from the days when it was drugs, not food. Of three boys reared in the sixties, Dennis was the only one to push that envelope.
I get up to put away the leftover food. In the scullery, the room off the kitchen where our mother kept the whelping box for her collies, is a stack of crates that stands to my chest; between the slats, I see the sleek pearly shafts and tufted roots of leeks. “Let me guess: vichyssoise.”
“God, am I that routine?”
“I’ve never had your vichyssoise. I’m sure it’s hardly routine.”
“I do it with lots of garlic and nutmeg. Buttermilk in with the cream. Then a tajine of chicken, figs, and ginger—spiced down for the elders. I poke the figs with a fork and soak them in a strong Bordeaux.” He beckons, and I join him again at the table, where he slides a platter off a large bowl; inside is a Dionysian mass of fruit, pickling in a lake of velvety purple. “Then a salad, plain greens, then peaches poached in cassis with lavender. Dried from Vee’s incredible garden! That course I’ve done—Davey hauled an extra fridge over from the clinic and parked it in the garage. He’s nothing if not resourceful.”
Lil’s remark about my being a guest begins to ring true. In the three days it took me to get here, David and Dennis have been planning not so much a funeral as an
event,
while Lil, who takes care of her husband’s human business, must have spent hours on the clinic’s telephone, delivering the bad news to everyone in Dad’s life beyond our immediate family.
The peaches, Dennis is telling me, are to debut on his menu when he returns to France. “Laurie did most of the peeling. Poor girl thinks she’s an apprentice, but I could probably get locked away for child labor.”
“Dennis, I know too many people who’d pay a small fortune to sign you on as their father—no, mother.” The peaches, I realize, are what I smelled when I walked in the house. The lavender.
He laughs dismissively. “They haven’t witnessed my blundering style of reading bedtime stories. Vee says I read like a caveman with a stammer.” We are standing side by side, and when he looks up, he’s clearly surprised to find me so close. “Oh Fen, we’re not mourning Dad much, are we.”
“We’ll be doing plenty of that,” I say, putting an arm around his shoulders. “Let’s catch up first.”
He closes his eyes for a moment. “Right. But no, first let’s do the lamb.” He instructs me to take the meat from the icebox, and as I turn around from doing so, lifting this leaden platter while realizing my back is no longer young, I very nearly drop it. Across the table, Dennis brandishes an enormous syringe filled with a green potion he’s just sucked up from a jar. “Courtesy of Davey,” he says as I slide the platter onto the table.
With a look of radiant satisfaction, he plunges the hypodermic into the meat and ejects its contents.
“What the hell is that?”
“Essence of spearmint and roasted garlic, reduced in balsamic vinegar,” he answers, businesslike. I turn away as he fills the syringe again, feeling the sugar of the grapes rise in my throat. I should ask about his daughters, I think. But suddenly, and I’m queasily thankful, here they all are—Laurie, Théa, Christine: three, just as we boys were once three—hurling back the kitchen door and surrounding me (my knees, that is) with eager bilingual banter. I’m reminded of how Mum’s collies used to greet me on the lawn when I’d come home from a term away at school. They’d never jump up; they were too well trained. They’d yip and circle me, not the predatory way they circled the sheep but with an inquisitive enthusiasm, waiting for me to roll down in the grass and invite them to lunge, wrestle, and lick me. My parents might have had money, loved each other, loved me and my brothers, but it was the loyalty of those smart beautiful dogs, when I was young, that made my home feel like the safest place in the world.