Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories (51 page)

First, she wept for shame because she’d spoiled a dish. Next, she wept for joy, to see her son mould the dough. And now she weeps for absence.

But still she sends the grinding boy off for a lobster, for she must and will prepare her autumn ritual, if only as a wake for hope or as the funeral baked meats. And, taking matters into my own hands, I use the quickest method, the dumb waiter, above stairs to make a personal inquiry of this duc as to where his staff might be.

The duc, relaxing before dinner, popping a cork or two, is wrapped up in a velvet quilted smoking jacket much like the coats they put on very well-bred dogs, warming his slippered (Morocco) feet before the blazing fire and singing songs to himself in his native language. And I never saw a fatter man; he’d have given my mother a stone or two and not felt the loss. Round as the “o” in “rotund”. If he’s taken aback by the apparition of this young chef out of the panelling, he’s too much of a gent to show it by a jump or start, asks, what can he do for me? nice as you like and, in my best culinary French, my
petit poi de française,
I stammer out:

“The valet de chambre who accompanied you (garni de) those many years past of your last visit—”

“Ah! Jean-Jacques!” he readily concurs.
“Le pauvre,”
he adds.

He squints lugubriously down his museau.

“Une crise de foie. Hélas, il est mort.”

I blanche like an endive. He, being a perfect gentleman, offers me a restorative snifter of his bubbly, brought as it has been all the way from his own cellars, he don’t trust Sir’s incinerated tastes, and I can feel it put hairs on my chest as it goes eructating down. Primed by another bottle, in which the duc joins me with that easy democratic affability which is the mark of all true aristocrats, I give him an account of what I take to be the circumstances of my conception, how his defunct valet wooed and won my mother in the course of the cooking of a lobster soufflé.

“I well remember that soufflé,” says the duc. “Best I ever eat. Sent my compliments to the chef by way of the concierge, only added the advice of a truly exigeant gourmet to go easy on the cayenne, next time.”

So that was the truth of it! The spiteful housekeeper relaying only half the message!

I then relate the touching story, how, every Grouse Shoot after, my mother puts up a lobster soufflé in (I believe) remembrance of Jean-Jacques, and we share another bottle of bubbly in memory of the departed until the duc, exhibiting all the emotion of a tender sensibility, says through a manly tear:

“Tell you what, me lad, while your maman is once again fixing me up this famous lobster soufflé, I shall myself, as a tribute to my ex-valet, slip down—”

“Oh, sir!” I stammer. “You are too good!”

Forthwith I speed to the kitchen to find my mother just beginning the béchamel. Presently, as the butter melts like the heart of the duc melted when I told him her tale, the kitchen door steals open and in tippytoes Himself. Never a couple better matched for size, I must say. The kitchen battalion all turn their heads away, out of respect for this romantic moment, but I myself, the architect of it, cannot forbear to peep.

He creeps up behind her, his index finger pressed to his lips to signify caution and silence, and extends his arm, and, slowly, slowly, slowly, with infinite delicacy and tact, he lets his hand adventure athwart her flank. It might have been a fly alighting on her bum. She flicks a haunch, like a mare in the field, unmoved, shakes in the flour. The duc himself quivers a bit. An expression as of a baby in a sweetie shop traverses his somewhat Bourbonesque features. He is attempting to peer over her shoulder to see what she is up to with her
batterie de cuisine
but his
embonpoint
gets in the way.

Perhaps it is to shift her over a bit, or else a genuine tribute to her large charms, but now, with immense if gigantic grace, he
gooses
her.

My mother fetches out a sigh, big enough to blow away the beaten egg-whites but, great artist that she is, her hand never trembles, not once, as she folds in the yolks. And when the ducal hands stray higher—not a mite of agitation stirs the spoon.

For it is, you understand, the time for seasoning. And in goes just sufficient cayenne, this time. Not a grain more. Huzzah! This soufflé will be—I flourish the circle I have made with my thumb and forefinger, I simulate a kiss.

The egg-whites topple into the panada; the movements of her spoon are quick and light as those of a bird caught in a trap. She upturns all into the soufflé dish.

He tweaks.

And
then
she cries: “To hell with it!” Departing from the script, my mother wields her wooden spoon like a club, brings it, smack! down onto the duc’s head with considerable force. He drops on to the flags with a low moan.

“Take that,” she bids his prone form. Then she smartly shuts the soufflé in the oven.

“How could you!” I cry.

“Would you have him spoil my soufflé? Wasn’t it touch and go, last time?”

The grinding boy and I get the duc up on the marble slab, slap his face, dab his temples with the oven cloth dipped in chilled chablis, at long last his eyelids flicker, he comes to.

“Quelle femme,”
he murmurs.

My mother, crouching over the range stopwatch in hand, pays him no heed.

“She feared you’d spoil the soufflé,” I explain, overcome with embarrassment.

“What dedication!”

The man seems awestruck. He stares at my mother as if he will never get enough of gazing at her. Bounding off the marble slab as sprightly as a man his size may, he hurls himself across the kitchen, falls on his knees at her feet.

“I beg you, I implore you—”

But my mother has eyes only for the oven.

“Here
you are!” Throwing open the door, she brings forth the veritable queen of all the souffles, that spreads its archangelic wings over the entire kitchen as it leaps upwards from the dish in which the force of gravity alone confines it. All present (some forty-seven in number—the kitchen brigade with the addition of me, plus the duc) applaud and cheer.

The housekeeper is mad as fire when my mother goes off in the closed barouche to the duc’s very own regal and French kitchen but she comforts herself with the notion that now she can persuade Sir and Madam to find her a spanking new chef such as Soyer or Carême to twirl their moustaches in her direction and
gateau Saint-Honoré
her on her birthday and indulge her in not infrequent
babas au rhum.
But—I am the only child of my mother’s kitchen and now I enter into my inheritance; besides, how can the housekeeper complain? Am I not the youngest (Yorkshire born) French chef in all the land?

For am I not the duc’s stepson?

Early in the morning of the fourth of August, 1892, in Fall River, Massachusetts.

Hot, hot, hot … very early in the morning, before the factory whistle, but, even at this hour, everything shimmers and quivers under the attack of white, furious sun already high in the still air.

Its inhabitants have never come to terms with these hot, humid summers—for it is the humidity more than the heat that makes them intolerable; the weather clings like a low fever you cannot shake off. The Indians who lived here first had the sense to take off their buckskins when hot weather came and sit up to their necks in ponds; not so the descendants of the industrious, self-mortifying saints who imported the Protestant ethic wholesale into a country intended for the siesta and are proud, proud! of flying in the face of nature. In most latitudes with summers like these, everything slows down, then. You stay all day in penumbra behind drawn blinds and closed shutters; you wear clothes loose enough to make your own breeze to cool yourself when you infrequently move. But the ultimate decade of the last century finds us at the high point of hard work, here; all will soon be bustle, men will go out into the furnace of the morning well wrapped up in flannel underclothes, linen shirts, vests and coats and trousers of sturdy woollen cloth, and they garrotte themselves with neckties, too, they think it is so virtuous to be uncomfortable.

And today it is the middle of a heat wave; so early in the morning and the mercury has touched the middle eighties, already, and shows no sign of slowing down its headlong ascent.

As far as clothes were concerned, women only appeared to get off more lightly. On this morning, when, after breakfast and the performance of a few household duties, Lizzie Borden will murder her parents, she will, on rising, don a simple cotton frock—but, under that, went a long, starched cotton petticoat; another short, starched cotton petticoat; long drawers; woollen stockings; a chemise; and a whalebone corset that took her viscera in a stern hand and squeezed them very tightly. She also strapped a heavy linen napkin between her legs because she was menstruating.

In all these clothes, out of sorts and nauseous as she was, in this dementing heat, her belly in a vice, she will heat up a flat-iron on a stove and press handkerchiefs with the heated iron until it is time for her to go down to the cellar woodpile to collect the hatchet with which our imagination—“Lizzie Borden with an axe”—always equips her, just as we always visualise St Catherine rolling along her wheel, the emblem of her passion.

Soon, in just as many clothes at Miss Lizzie wears, if less fine, Bridget, the servant girl, will slop kerosene on a sheet of last night’s newspaper crumpled with a stick or two of kindling. When the fire settles down, she will cook breakfast; the fire will keep her suffocating company as she washes up afterwards.

In a serge suit, one look at which would be enough to bring you out in prickly heat, Old Borden will perambulate the perspiring town, truffling for money like a pig until he will return home mid-morning to keep a pressing appointment with destiny.

But nobody here is up and about, yet; it is still early morning, before the factory whistle, the perfect stillness of hot weather, a sky already white, the shadowless light of New England like blows from the eye of God, and the sea, white, and the river, white.

If we have largely forgotten the physical discomforts of the itching, oppressive garments of the past and the corrosive effects of perpetual physical discomfort on the nerves, then we have mercifully forgotten, too, the smells of the past, the domestic odours—ill-washed flesh; infrequently changed underwear; chamber-pots; slop-pails; inadequately plumbed privies; rotting food; unattended teeth; and the streets are no fresher than indoors, the omnipresent acridity of horse piss and dung, drains, sudden stench of old death from butchers’ shops, the amniotic horror of the fishmonger.

You would drench your handkerchief with cologne and press it to your nose. You would splash yourself with parma violet so that the reek of fleshly decay you always carried with you was overlaid by that of the embalming parlour. You would abhor the air you breathed.

Five living creatures are asleep in a house on Second Street, Fall River. They comprise two old men and three women. The first old man owns all the women by either marriage, birth or contract. His house is narrow as a coffin and that was how he made his fortune—he used to be an undertaker but he has recently branched out in several directions and all his branches bear fruit of the most fiscally gratifying kind.

But you would never think, to look at his house, that he is a successful and a prosperous man. His house is cramped, comfortless, small and mean—“unpretentious”, you might say, if you were his sycophant—while Second Street itself saw better days some time ago. The Borden house—see “Andrew J. Borden” in flowing script on the brass plate next to the door—stands by itself with a few scant feet of yard on either side. On the left is a stable, out of use since he sold the horse. In the back lot grow a few pear trees, laden at this season.

On this particular morning, as luck would have it, only one of the two Borden girls sleeps in their father’s house. Emma Lenora, his oldest daughter, has taken herself off to nearby New Bedford for a few days, to catch the ocean breeze, and so she will escape the slaughter.

Few of their social class stay in Fall River in the sweating months of June, July and August but, then, few of their social class live on Second Street, in the low part of town where heat gathers like fog. Lizzie was invited away, too, to a summer house by the sea to join a merry band of girls but, as if on purpose to mortify her flesh, as if important business kept her in the exhausted town, as if a wicked fairy spelled her in Second Street, she did not go.

The other old man is some kind of kin of Borden’s. He doesn’t belong here; he is visiting, passing through, he is a chance bystander, he is irrelevant.

Write him out of the script.

Even though his presence in the doomed house is historically unimpeachable, the colouring of this domestic apocalypse must be crude and the design profoundly simplified for the maximum emblematic effect.

Write John Vinnicum Morse out of the script.

One
old man and two of his women sleep in the house on Second Street.

The City Hall clock whirrs and sputters the prolegomena to the first stroke of six and Bridget’s alarm clock gives a sympathetic skip and click as the minute-hand stutters on the hour; back the little hammer jerks, about to hit the bell on top of her clock, but Bridget’s damp eyelids do not shudder with premonition as she lies in her sticking flannel nightgown under one thin sheet on an iron bedstead, lies on her back, as the good nuns taught her in her Irish girlhood, in case she dies during the night, to make less trouble for the undertaker.

She is a good girl, on the whole, although her temper is sometimes uncertain and then she will talk back to the missus, sometimes, and will be forced to confess the sin of impatience to the priest. Overcome by heat and nausea—for everyone in the house is going to wake up sick today—she will return to this little bed later in the morning. While she snatches a few moments rest, upstairs, all hell will be let loose, downstairs.