Dinner with Edward (5 page)

6

Stuffed Baby Squid “Lisbon Style”

Salad with Homemade Vinaigrette

Cantaloupe, Coffee Ice Cream

Sauvignon Blanc

D
on't tell Valerie,” said Edward, passing me a steaming plate of squid, bubbling in a delicately spiced tomato sauce and stuffed with rice, celery, thyme, and . . . I couldn't place the other ingredient.

“Leeks?” I asked, after the first bite.

“No, scallions,” he said.

I complimented him on the squid and told him that my mother was the only other person I knew who had made squid in a similar way. I had assumed that it was an old family recipe, passed down to my mother from my grandmother. But Edward's execution of the dish, even holding the bulging stuffed squid bodies in place with toothpicks at either end, took me back to my childhood.

Like Edward's Paula, my mother had recently passed away and I felt her loss keenly. On some days, I made a mental note to call her, only to realize seconds later that she wouldn't be picking up the phone.

“Where did you get the recipe?” I asked in astonishment.

He brushed off the question. “Oh, Is-­a-­bel . . .” he smiled. He enunciated each syllable when he wanted to convey something that should have been obvious to me or to suggest that he really had no intention of giving me an answer. In moments such as these, I felt my mother's presence in an elemental embrace. Maybe it was the intimacy it signaled. On some level, Edward had taken over the parenting that I was now missing.

Focusing on the odd coincidence of the squid, I almost forgot what Edward had said about Valerie. “Don't tell Valerie” was a phrase he repeated often, especially when he was embarking on what might be considered a foolhardy venture, something he was convinced his younger daughter, my friend, simply wouldn't understand.

This time he didn't want Valerie to know about the poetry he submitted to the literary journals. Edward was certain his work would never be published, anyway. But perhaps he held out a faint hope that someday someone besides his family might appreciate the sentiment, the artistry of what he labored over at his little wooden desk and the dining room table on the nights that he desperately ached for Paula. Even though Valerie typed his poems for him, I'm sure she never imagined that he was submitting them for publication.

Usually when he received the typed verses, he couldn't deal with seeing his words so neatly printed and divided into precise columns on the page. He told me that the poems, in their conservative font on bright white paper, suddenly looked sterile to him. So he made photocopies of the typed poems, cut out each line, and then reassembled them like a puzzle, gluing them onto a piece of paper, until he was satisfied that the indentations were right, that the spacing was a signal to breathe in the right places.

He wrote his poetry to be read aloud, with just the right pauses and inflection, and he practiced often. Edward confessed that he sometimes fell asleep reciting the poetry, practicing the rhythm, experimenting with intonation. When sleep completely eluded him, though, he got up in the wee hours to write letters to Paula.

He encouraged me to do the same, to write letters to the dead, in my case my mother, telling her how I was really feeling about life without her. One afternoon, when I was particularly upset, I took Edward's advice and was startled by the result. When I sat down to write to my mother in a notebook, sadness spilled out of me. And once it was out in the open, I could no longer keep it under wraps.

“I never imagined that I would feel your loss so profoundly,” I wrote to my dead mother. “I have never felt so alone.”

My mother died shortly before I moved to New York, while I was spending some time in Brazil researching a book. A week before she died, she had called me and seemed very animated, asking how my research was progressing and delighted that eight-year-­old Hannah, whom I had brought along, was picking up some Portuguese. I handed the phone to Hannah so that she could speak to her grandmother. Shortly after she hung up, Hannah broke into hysterical sobs.

“Nana's going to die,” she said, inconsolable.

“Of course she's not going to die,” I said, to reassure her. “She was so happy on the phone.”

A week later, my mother had a stroke and went into a coma. She never recovered and I never could fathom why my daughter had had such a startling premonition. Perhaps my mother was the one who had had the premonition and that call, made while she was still full of life, was her way of saying goodbye to both of us.

In many ways, Edward reminded me of my mother. They both faced life with a cheerful equanimity. It took a lot to dispel their even tempers, although I saw them both get angry when they felt I was being threatened or taken advantage of. Edward and my mother were alike in other regards, too. They proved extremely well organized about cooking and death.

My mother pressed jars of her homemade vegetable soup on my brother and me when we were living on our own. She organized family feasts at Christmas and on our birthdays. She froze stock and the almond biscotti and lemon pound cakes she made from scratch. And, like Paula, she quilted pillows and bedspreads from the fabric remnants of old clothes.

I am ashamed to admit that I often balked at the soup jars and the packages of parchment-­wrapped frozen cake (“You can have it later,” she would say), seeing them as parental interference when I was trying so hard to be independent. And I had little patience when later in her life she insisted on telling me about the plans for her own death. A devoted Catholic, she did not fear death. “I've lived a very good life,” she said, when she turned eighty. Two months later she was gone.

A few years before my mother died, she and my father bought a plot under an oak tree in a park-­like cemetery in central Toronto. On one of my visits home, she took me on a tour of where she would be laid to rest. The funeral mass would be at St. Mary's, the church she first attended with my father when they arrived from Portugal in the 1950s, she told me. It made her happy knowing that my brother and I would never have to worry about arranging a funeral.

When I told Edward the story of my mother's end-­of-­life preparations, he completely understood and related to me his own plans, even though he was now fulfilling his final promise to Paula and was no longer in a hurry to die.

Edward had divided Paula's ashes into three vases. He gave two of them to his daughters. He keeps his share of the ashes in an elegant Tiffany vase in his bedroom. He has told me that when he dies, he doesn't want a funeral. He wants to be cremated, his ashes mixed with Paula's in a Bloomingdale's brown shopping bag, and sprinkled throughout Central Park, which was their favorite place in the world. It's against the law to spread human remains in New York City parks, but Edward is sure he has that technicality covered. That's where the Bloomingdale's bag comes in. Who would ever suspect what the brown bag actually contained? Edward is an atheist, but he had no problem believing that he would be reunited with Paula and revisiting their favorite haunts—their ashes flying across the Great Lawn, up the turrets of Belvedere Castle and over the Reservoir and the manicured gardens of the East Side.

While he was not shy about broadcasting his own plans for death, he swore me to secrecy about his poetry. He also wanted to make sure that I hadn't told anyone about our shopping trip to Saks. It was only months later, when Valerie saw me applying a coat of particularly red lipstick on one of her trips to New York, that I really understood Edward's furtiveness.

“I'm going to wash that right off,” said Valerie. I'm not sure she would like it if I told her I might be turning into something of a femme fatale—and at the direction of her father. She thought her father's views on women were anachronistic, mired in a 1950s suburban utopia that saw women as stay-­at-­home moms.

“He can be rather controlling,” she had said about Edward. I had no idea what she meant. But of course we all view our parents through our own particular lenses. I can remember being incredibly surprised when my friends told me that I had progressive parents. It's never how I would have described them. I saw them as conservative and strict with my brother and me.

Edward controlling? I felt Valerie's father was one of the most remarkable and evolved men I knew.

And Valerie was one of the most accomplished women I knew. She was brilliant and practical and extremely determined. She launched her career in publishing, after graduating from college in the late 1960s, by knocking on just about every publisher's door in Manhattan and boldly asking for a job. When I met her, she was already well established in her own firm. She gave me my first job when I was barely out of high school.

She still likes to tell the story of our initial meeting. She and her business partner gave me a typing test as part of my interview for an internship in her office, which was located above an ice-­cream parlor on a downtown street in Toronto. They escorted me over creaking floorboards to a back room, where there was a desk, chair, and an IBM Selectric typewriter. According to Valerie, I sat in the room for forty-­five minutes before walking out, my footsteps loud on the old hardwood floors of the office. Valerie and her business partner looked up at me from the page proofs they were poring over.

“Um, how do you turn on the typewriter?” I asked.

I have only a vague, embarrassed recollection of the event, but Valerie says it was a decisive moment. “You're hired!” she says she said on the spot, although I think she must have given me the news in a phone call a few days later.

I spent my summer proofreading and was thrilled when I caught a mistake that the much more experienced copy editors had missed. “Desiccated has two
c
s!” I wrote triumphantly on a Post-­it note one afternoon. I also read the piles of fat, unsolicited manuscripts that arrived in manila envelopes and were relegated to the slush pile. I went through each submission carefully and at first felt horrible about sending them back in the self-­addressed stamped envelopes. But I soon grew adept at writing the perfect rejection letter, striking just the right balance between firmness and only slight encouragement on future endeavors. “Thank you very much for your submission . . . Unfortunately, your manuscript does not fit with our publishing program . . . Best of luck with your book . . .”

I worked two summers for Valerie. During that second summer she mentioned that her parents were visiting from New York City. She was marveling that her father was bringing her his Scotch broth. As a nineteen-­year-­old, I must have found the gesture both charming and bold because, decades later, I still remember it as something special.
What kind of person does this?
I thought.
He brought soup? How did he transport it from New York to Toronto? In a thermos?
It would be another twenty-­five years before I would meet this somewhat peculiar and definitely wonderful man who transported soup over international borders.

Valerie, like her father, was a tremendous cook. When she retired from publishing, she bought a home in the country and grew her own vegetables and herbs. She cooked with edible flowers, made her own sorbet, experimenting with lavender, rosemary, and rose essence long before it was fashionable to do so. Years later, when I told her I was growing my own Swiss chard but didn't know how to cook it, she immediately suggested steaming it and then covering it in heavy cream, mixed with a teaspoon of Dijon and grated pecorino, before baking it in a hot oven. She suggested serving it over polenta, which I do now pretty much every time I have Swiss chard.

But while they shared many attributes, Valerie and Edward had many diametrically opposing views, especially when it came to women. Valerie had her mother's chestnut hair and confidence, her father's height and artistry. She wore elegant Armani suits, but she would not have reacted well to Edward's position on “feminine enhancement.” After all, she seemed appalled by my Dior lipstick.

I wasn't about to tell Valerie about the shopping trip to Saks, nor about Edward's poetry submissions. In return, I believed we had an unspoken agreement: Edward was supposed to keep everything that was happening to me after I moved to Roosevelt Island to himself.

These were promises neither of us would be able to keep.

7

Bourbon

No ice

No tonic

No lime

Just neat

O
ne Sunday afternoon, I showed up at Edward's apartment with a pound of raw squid from my favorite fish market in Newark. We both knew it was a pretext to visit him, and the tears started soon after I crossed the threshold.

He didn't seem at all surprised. “I wish there was something I could do to help you, darling,” he said. “But if I interfere, it will just be worse for you.”

“Friction, competition, confrontation, impatience, and distraction.” It was the first sentence of my horoscope for that weekend. The rest: “For the next few days you will have a shock. You are very sensitive in your relationships and everything will result in irritation. For this reason, it would be good to avoid complicated negotiations.”

It was a Sunday morning, my husband and I were fighting, and in order to avoid “complicated negotiations” I had taken New Jersey Transit to the Ironbound section of Newark, the Portuguese neighborhood where I went regularly to buy salted cod and olive oil—the foods from childhood that made me feel grounded. I often took my daughter to a seedy barbecue joint on Ferry Street, the kind of place frequented by muscled cops and construction workers, that grilled chicken and ribs on charcoal. We would leave with our clothes infused with the smell of barbecue but satisfied with our meal of tender chicken, mounds of french fries, and a vinegary salad of lettuce, tomatoes, and bold slices of raw onion.

On this day I felt better after eating chicken at the Formica table of Ferry Street Barbecue and wandering the aisles of the nearby Portuguese supermarket, sampling olives, goat cheeses, and buying chorizo, but I knew I couldn't stay away forever. When I returned home the fighting started again. That's when I escaped to Edward's with my pound of squid.

Edward took the mollusks and stashed them in his refrigerator. Then he offered me a seat on his sofa, walked over to the hutch in his living room and divided the last of his Kentucky bourbon evenly between two glasses. He didn't bother with ice, or tonic or pastis, or even a squeeze of lime. He limped over to the sofa, shrugged his shoulders, smiled, and handed me my glass.

“How about a bourbon?”

He needn't have asked. I inhaled the soothing liquid heat and soon after that everything came pouring out of me. I told Edward about the horrible arguments, dishes crashing on the floor, a family dinner that became so bitter and nasty, my daughter left the table in tears and hid herself in her room.

“I'll never forget this dinner as long as I live,” she cried. Nor, I thought, would I. But now on Edward's sofa I could no longer recall what had been so terrible that it resulted in platters laden with food being hurled across the dining room table and red wine splashed violently against a white wall, an appropriate abstract rendering of my marital discord that I hadn't bothered to clean up.

Perhaps it was a sign that our dysfunction was now alarmingly visible. The “melancholia,” to borrow a nineteenth-­century phrase the
New York Times
used to describe the maladies of patients shuttered in the asylum where we now lived, had been let loose within the confines of those walls. It was now sure to spill over to the outside world. Maybe friends had already noticed the sharp tones we used to address each other. At work, Melissa probably suspected. Why else was she so respectfully silent during my very uncomfortable phone calls home—conversations (could I even call them that?) that involved screaming on the other end and me trying unsuccessfully—in the middle of the newsroom—to calm the drama du jour in strained sotto voce.

In some ways, I identified with Nellie Bly, the investigative reporter who went undercover at my madhouse in 1887 and wrote a series of exposés for Joseph Pulitzer's
New York World.
After ten days at the psychiatric hospital, she documented forced meals of spoiled food and ice-­cold baths where prisoners were required to stand in long lines and wash themselves in the dirty water left by their fellow inmates.

Bly wrote about how prisoners from the nearby penitentiary even doubled as orderlies, keeping inmates in check through savage beatings. Among Bly's observations, recorded in her book
Ten Days in a Mad-­House
, which I had recently read, “From the moment I entered the insane ward on the island, I made no attempt to keep up the assumed role of insanity. I talked and acted just as I do in ordinary life. Yet strange to say, the more sanely I talked and acted the crazier I was thought to be.”

Well, maybe things weren't as bad as all that but, like Bly, I was an investigative reporter who had also entered The Octagon undercover—when we moved in I was pretending that everything was all right with my life. But as soon as I began to get a grip on reality and reclaim myself, “the crazier I was thought to be.” When I brought up divorce with my husband, I was taken aback by his response. Was I mentally ill, menopausal? Had I had my thyroid checked lately? Perhaps I needed a psychiatrist, antidepressants? What about yoga? Bly's statement ricocheted through my brain.

I'm not sure I did a good job explaining any of this to Edward. On that fateful Sunday afternoon I spent a lot of time crying my way through the bourbon, sounding incoherent even to myself. Edward listened and, at one point, rose to refill our glasses, having forgotten that we had already consumed the last of the bottle. I looked out his living room windows at the lights in the buildings across the water. It was already dark and I knew it was time to go home. Even in my leave-­taking, though, there was something comforting. I guess I knew that after the drama, Edward would always be there. As he escorted me to the elevator, holding the door open with his outstretched cane, he said, “Let's have dinner soon, OK?”

A couple of days later, I received a phone call from Valerie. Edward had told her everything about my crisis. She told me he was distraught, mostly because he felt there was nothing he could do to help me. As I listened, I became upset with myself for having put Edward under so much stress. “He's very worried about you,” said Valerie.

But Edward never conveyed his worries to me. He never dwelt on my situation, rarely offered any specific marriage advice, never interfered. On occasion, he would sigh and shake his head. “It's a bloody shame,” he would say, knowing that I was the only one who could solve my problems.