Chez Cordelia (39 page)

Paul didn't comment one way or another about my proposal to leave. He was pretending to be unaware of it, averting his eyes if he saw me with the
Courant
, and concentrating fiercely on the television if Martha or I mentioned it in the evenings. He and I hardly ever spoke. I got my driver's license at the beginning of May, so the car no longer drew us together. Even our sexual encounters were becoming less frequent, though when we did meet it was more explosive and strange than ever. After lovemaking, we used to stare in anguish at each other, just for a second or two, and then one of us would mumble an excuse—bread in the oven, school bus expected—and make a speedy exit. The rest of the time, we avoided each other.

As the weeks went by, this bothered me more and more. I became driven by the need to talk to him, but I didn't know how to go about it. I was desperately unhappy, and I knew he was, too, though all around us that May there was a feeling of great joy. Megan had a best friend from school named Jennifer. They were constantly at each other's houses, and the friendship made Megan blossom. Even Ian was getting on better without Megan's teasing. And it also made Martha happy. “It's such a relief,” I heard her confess to Mrs. Lambert on the phone. “I thought she was on her way to being
odd.
” Megan became, in a matter of weeks, a vastly more pleasant child; in awe, I watched this happen and rejoiced in the power of love, for that was what it was—Megan's first great love. I missed our beautiful-princess stories, though; she lost interest in them. Now, Megan told me, what she and Jennifer liked to do was go up to her room after school, shut the door, and act the stories out. “I play the princess,” she explained. “And Jennifer is the wicked queen, and Vicky is the puppy.” I could hear them up there, after school, while I cooked in the kitchen, and I felt oddly jealous. “Aren't they just dear?” Martha would say if she was home.

In the midst of the family bliss, Paul and I generated moroseness the way we had, before, generated passionate rapture. One afternoon, when we were in my bed, I decided I'd had enough of the silence between us. I pinned him down on the mattress and said, “Paul, we're just not going to end up together, are we? Let's admit it to each other. It's just not going to work out, is it?”

“You don't seem to think so,” he said. He had his glasses off, and his eyes were larger and wet-looking without them. “You're planning to leave here, aren't you?”

Nobody's talking about forever
—both of them said it, but neither one meant it, and I began to feel locked into a prison just as surely as Danny was. “What does my leaving here have to do with it, Paul? The point is for
you
to leave here.”

He was silent. I could tell he wished he had his pipe, but he was too cautious ever to smoke it up in Chez Cordelia. He lay there on my bed looking pensive and miserable and so beautiful to me I could have gathered him into my arms and held him there forever. But I just sat and waited.

“Delia,” he said at last, in a whisper. He closed his eyes.

“What, Paul?” I said gently.

“I don't know if I can ever leave here,” he said, nearly inaudibly. “She owns me—this place—it's all her money, it's all hers. I don't know if I could manage any other life but this one.”

“What do you mean, she owns you?”

His voice rose. “I was a nothing when I met Martha. All I knew was I didn't want to be a butcher. I was a wanderer, I didn't know where I was going. What I was doing. The money changed all that. I can't tell you how important it is.”

“The money.”

“I know it's wrong, I know it's weak and disgusting. She bought all this for me, when I decided I had to get out of the city. But it's hers, all of it.”

“What about moving to Portland, Oregon?” I persisted. “What about going into business with that guy out there?”

“I don't have a business to contribute, Delia,” Paul said. “The business belongs to Martha, along with everything else. I told you, she owns me. I can't leave. I can't give it up, I'd have nothing. You wanted me to tell you the truth. That's the truth. I thought I could do it, when I met you. But I can't, I can't, I can't.”

We got out of my bed and got dressed, with our backs to each other, and I knew we'd never get in it again together. What he told me seemed so horrible that I tried to think of a way to get out of believing it, but I couldn't. I even saw glimmers of further truths: I felt sure that it had happened before, Paul had had a previous affair, and that to preserve her respectability Martha had topped her rival's bid as she had topped mine. The more I examined the idea the more it convinced me. Of course there had been another Cordelia, maybe more than one, and Martha had outbid them all.

I began to watch Martha. The knowledge of her limitless strength astonished me; I was impressed by it, but I couldn't see it as a virtue. It was more like a dread disease; her background and upbringing were in her like an inoperable tumor, and she suffered from it. She suffered from the necessity of keeping her shaky, rotting marriage propped up by her iron will and her money. The maintenance of the illusion of harmonious family life was the eternal, painful task of her life. What made it, I suppose, unimaginably worse was the fact that she'd been raised on old-fashioned Yankee honesty—to tell the truth, admit her mistakes, and rectify them if possible. And her whole life was a lie.

During my last weeks at Lamb House Books, when I studied the situation there and looked for a new job and cooked furiously, an interesting fact pushed itself up before me: I could have succeeded with Paul. We could be together now, with the kids visiting every other weekend and Martha remarried to a nice corporation lawyer and Paul sitting beside me as I write. If I had only insisted a little harder. If I had been more like Martha—more like her than she was herself, for it would have been my will opposing hers (and all the Lamberts behind her, pushing) and winning. Paul was there for the taking, available to the toughest customer. But I couldn't welcome it, that tumor of deceit that Martha seemed to thrive on, I had had too much of it, and I dropped out of the contest.

I was there from September to May, long enough to have had a baby if I'd been inclined to. Long enough, anyway, to learn to drive a car, to have a birthday, to spend a memorable Christmas and begin a new year. I fell passionately in love and then climbed, painfully, out. There was time for all that, and for three seasons to pass, and for Albert to die, and for my puff pastry to become as light as a butterfly wing. I look at those nine months from here and it's like remembering a long and vivid dream; they have no reality for me. All I have to show for them is my competence in the kitchen. For nine months, Lamb House Books was my life—now, it's nothing, just ten million memories, as if that space of time was a person, or a dog, and it died.

Chapter Eight

St. Dunstan's

I found St. Dunstan's Retreat House through my aunt. She heard from Preston Maguire, who was a Catholic, that they needed a cook. Preston had seen the ad in a Catholic weekly magazine, and my aunt sent it to me:

Skilled, experienced cook wanted for small private institution. Beautiful setting. Live-in. Reliable, stable, intelligent individual preferred.

“You're reliable, stable, and intelligent,” my aunt said. “And you can certainly cook. If you need a reference, Preston could write six pages on your apple-cider pie alone.”

I wrote to the address given and got a prompt letter back from St. Dunstan's, asking me to come for an interview. At the head of the sheet of notepaper was a cross entwined with flowers, and it was signed “Sister Rita Ann, Director.” I studied it for a long time, the black cross and the yellow flowers, the heavy engraved paper and Sister Rita Ann's florid capitals and winged commas. Her handwriting was large and fluent, the writing, I imagined, of someone who liked to eat. I stared at the paper, trying to read a future for myself in it, until the cross blurred out and I could see only the flowers—primroses, they appeared to be, or buttercups. I decided to go for the interview.

I made a batch of cheese-and-mushroom tartelettes, and then some fresh-strawberry ones (I was proud of my pastry), and a fish mousse, and a nice ratatouille, and a batch of oatmeal-raisin cookies. I packed them into a basket, with a linen cloth, and I set the basket inside a styrofoam picnic cooler. With a sigh, Martha said I could take the car—she was already interviewing possible cook-housekeepers—and I drove the thirty-five miles northeast on a beautiful early June day.

On the way, I tried to imagine the place, and as it turned out, I was pretty accurate. St. Dunstan's was a massive house on a hill, with a long drive in front and the hill sloping down in back to a lake, the lake bordered by flower beds. Off in the distance I could see a large vegetable garden. The house and the grounds and the nuns were peaceful and immaculate.

They had set a table outside for tea, with cookies on a flowered plate, and we sat in the sun by the lake, Sister Rita Ann, Sister Carmelita, and I. They belonged to a conservative order that still wore habits—long black skirts, full sleeves, and complicated white headdresses that covered their heads closely and then sailed into the air like birds.

“St. Dunstan is the patron saint of naughty children,” Sister Rita Ann told me, with a twinkle in her eye. She was just like her handwriting, large and handsome. “From the tenth century. Schoolchildren used to pray to him as their masters approached to give them a flogging. St. Dunstan put the teachers into a trance, and their canes fell to the floor. He lived in a room that was only the length of his body when he curled up to sleep, and as wide as his outstretched arms.”

“About four by five?” I asked.

The two nuns inspected me sharply for flippancy, but I didn't intend any, and, seeing this, they smiled. “You have a sincere desire, Cordelia, to know the truth of all things,” Sister Rita Ann observed. “Is that right?”

“I suppose it is,” I said with humility.

St. Dunstan's Retreat House, they explained, was a place where Roman Catholics could get away from it all and confront their souls. “We believe in the total experience, however,” said Sister Rita Ann. “We feel that this pastoral setting is a part of the peace one can find here. We also have chamber music in the evenings—several of the nuns are gifted musicians. And now and then we have a guest who is well known in the world as an artist.” She smiled. “A number of singers come to us regularly, for instance—particularly coloratura sopranos, I don't know why—perhaps the demands on the voice also put extraordinary demands on the soul … You don't sing, by any chance, Cordelia? Or play an instrument? Well. Our greatest need is for a cook. We believe in feeding the body as well as the soul.”

The nuns ate several tartelettes each, both kinds, and they spooned ratatouille onto their saucers and finished it up. They smacked their lips over the fish mousse. “We must save a bit of this for Sister Norma,” they said. They ate slowly and steadily, not forgetting to offer me more tea and one of the butterscotch cookies they had provided.

“Eat one,” Sister Carmelita urged. “Just to see what dire straits we're in.” Sister Norma had been doing the job—and none too well, was the delicate implication. The cookies were made from a mix, they admitted, looking in distress at each other as I bit into one. They tasted like the ones I used to make for Danny and me—Slice 'n' Bake.

“Fortunately, it has been hot,” said Sister Rita Ann. Her large, calm hand lingered over the oatmeal cookies, shamelessly seeking the biggest. “We have been able to get by with chops and cold platters and simple salads. But our guests have come to expect the extraordinary.” She chose a cookie and raised it to her lips, paused. “Not the exotic, I don't mean that. But care, and judgment, and attention to detail. An attitude toward work we might adopt from the Shakers.” She took a bite, nodded, and smiled.

A bell rang, and Sister Carmelita—a tiny, frog-faced nun with teeth stained yellow as if she chewed tobacco—excused herself and tripped toward the house, holding her long skirts off the ground; something was about to go on in the chapel. “We feel very fortunate here,” Sister Rita Ann told me. “We have every heavenly blessing and most earthly ones. All we lack is a cook.”

Their last cook, a fine man but a drinker (she told me frankly), had fallen into the lake and drowned. “Not on our property,” she hastened to add as I looked toward the lake. “At the south end, in the village. He fell over a rail. We hope he didn't die by his own hand. We're having a month of masses said for his soul.” Her uneasy face smoothed out a little, but she remained silent for a few moments while we both looked at the lake. The water was brilliant with reflected sun, and a flock of ducks was swimming across, leaving intersecting triangular wakes. Sister Rita Ann shook her head and crossed herself.

(A few months later Jimmie Nolan, the bartender in the village, told me more about the cook. They were drinking buddies. Michael, the cook, had been a small, dapper man who made up limericks about the nuns and who had a passion for fine wines, though he would settle for whiskey—or, indeed, for anything. He had left a tab of fifty-five dollars at the Green Horseshoe Café when he died, and Jimmie paid it. Jimmie is quite sure that Michael fell drunk into the lake by accident, though he pretended to insist, for a long time, that Sister Rita Ann pushed him.)

Sister Rita Ann explained the rule of silence—lifted in the common room and in the kitchen, so that was all right. She assured me I needn't go to services, and that my free time was my own. We discussed salary requirements, and she smilingly offered a pittance over the minimum wage. “And of course you'll have all this as well,” she said as we turned back, before going inside, to look at the lake again. (
And
, she said—not
but
. I admired her assurance.) The ducks were gone, and the lake was smooth as aspic.