Cherries in Winter: My Family's Recipe for Hope in Hard Times (11 page)

Frank was crazy about Matilda and desperately wanted to marry her. Unfortunately, his wife back in Germany refused to grant him a divorce. This stalemate opened the door to Matilda accepting an invitation from Charlie to go kayaking from Orchard Beach to Hunters Island one day.

Time passed, the tide rose, and the kayak drifted away, leaving them stranded. Their friend Bruno Hauptmann found the boat and brought it back to them. (A few years later Bruno would be tried and executed for the kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby; Charlie always maintained that his friend had to be innocent.) When Charlie and Tillie, as he called her, got back to Orchard Beach, she told Frank it was over.

“Frank wept hysterically,” Mom says. “He was prone to that. For some reason he remained a friend
of your nana’s, and during the family functions he was invited to, he would either ask Nana to dance and dissolve in tears, or he’d pick me up and cry and say, ‘You should have been mine.’ Your grandpa would turn red in the face but just look at the floor. He felt guilty.”

Tillie and Charlie married, and Chick and Midge, now teenagers, were sent for. Midge arrived with a suitcase full of hand-me-downs from a family that had taken her in more out of obligation than desire. Matilda, who at twenty-one was only a few years older than her new stepdaughter, threw all the old clothes away and immediately took Midge shopping and did her hair. Chick came with some apprehension about this new arrangement, but when he saw how his sister was being treated, he was won over as well.

• • •

NOVEMBER 1970

THE BRONX, NEW YORK

When he was sixty-eight, Charlie once again became a widower caring for a small child: me.

From the time I was a toddler up until I was thirteen years old, I spent every weekend with my grandparents in the Bronx, and whole summers when school was out. At that time, Nana and Grandpa lived in a middle-class neighborhood in a modest, three-family house at the eastern edge of the Bronx. Long Island Sound was in our backyard, so at high tide we could swim or take the dinghy out for a row, and at low tide there was a nice quarter mile of beach to walk on. It was a safe, close-knit neighborhood with lots of kids for me to play with.

Aside from the obvious benefits for a city child like me, the weekend and summer arrangement worked very well for Mom. She was a devoted mother who worked hard during the week, but when the weekend came, she was still a young, beautiful, single woman who wanted to go out. (And dressed to go out my mother was something to behold. This was the late 1960s and early ’70s, so she had the long blond fall cascading around her shoulders, the hot pants, and the boots made more for dancing than for walking.)

After Nana died when I was seven years old, it was just me and Grandpa, and I’d sit on his lap while he wiped tears from his eyes and sang to me:

I was too young to understand the reasons behind his taste for raw potatoes or why he felt the need to save food by any means necessary, and, anyway, he had many more eating habits that met with my approval. He kept big Hershey bars in the fridge, took sweetened condensed milk in his coffee, and always had Entenmann’s Crumb Cake on hand. (I routinely pinched all the crumbs off, which drove him crazy, but he never tried to stop me.) He also provided for me and took care of me in a way that I could understand on a simple, almost primal level.

Grandpa was a big, barrel-chested guy with blue eyes and wavy hair the color of iron. He was robust and strong well into his seventies. Mom gave him a fishing captain’s hat one Father’s Day, and he wore it always, tilted at a rakish angle. My grandfather brought a lawn lounge chair into the living room and parked it by the
windows facing the bay, and from this command post he would scan the waters with his binoculars. When he saw a particular type of churning, he’d shout, “The blues are running!” I never saw him move as fast as when a school of bluefish was coming into our part of the sound. He’d run and grab his fishing rod, go tearing downstairs, shout to his friend and landlord, “Ted! Ted, the blues!” and head around the house, down to the concrete patio at the end of the yard. He’d cast his line before he came to a stop, knowing he didn’t even have to bait the hook—the bluefish, in a vicious feeding frenzy, would bite down on anything. He’d haul up one for me, one for him, maybe another to freeze; if he hooked another fish before the landlord arrived, he’d give it to him on his way back upstairs. Then the churning school would move on, the whole event taking less than five minutes. My grandpa was the Ernest Hemingway of the Bronx.

He also caught flounder, which was less exciting but just as delicious. And when the tide was low, he’d take me clamming with him. His equipment consisted of a pronged clam rake and a laundry basket with an inner tube around it, which he tied to his middle with a rope. My tools were a diving mask and a toy shovel. We’d
wade out until the water was waist-deep on him, which was over my head—I hung on to the floating basket.

“Think this is a good spot, kid?” he’d ask.

“I’m not sure,” I’d say, frowning. “Let me check.” And I’d take a deep breath, dive down in the murky water, and have at the sand with my pink shovel. If I resurfaced with a clam—“Found ’em!”—Grandpa would start digging, putting the mollusks into the plastic basket. He never took too many, about two dozen or so, but they went a long way. After a successful clamming expedition, I knew we’d be having clam fritters, spaghetti with clam sauce (always red, never white), and his variation on Aunt Nettie’s clam chowder recipe. (He wasn’t much on parsnips, and he added a bottle of clam juice to the water for flavor and put the clams in at the last stage to keep them tender. I like the parsnips and keep in all the vegetables, and I add about a quarter of a cup of white wine and some salt and pepper.) But Grandpa would use the clams only after keeping them in the vegetable bins at the bottom of the fridge to clean them out, lugging a bucket of fresh seawater upstairs every day for a week.

When I had nightmares, or woke up crying after having a dream about Nana and remembering she was
gone, Grandpa would bring his command-post lawn chaise into his bedroom, put it next to the bed, and fix it up for me with my pillow and blankets. “Okay, kid, all set. And I’m right here. Did you say your prayers?”

“I don’t know any,” I said.

“
What?”
Even in the dark I could see his eyes pop and practically hear him making a mental note to talk to his heathen daughter. His grandchild didn’t know the Rosary, or even the “Our Father”? Grandpa was what Mom called a Christmas-and-Easter Catholic, but he still thought I should know at least a few of the usual prayers. “Never mind, I’ll teach you. I’ll say a line, and you say it back. Ready?”

“Ready!”

“ ‘Now I lay me down to sleep …’ ”

On Sundays, Mom would come up from the city to get me. First she’d go to Cake Masters and pick up a blackout cake—chocolate cake embedded with cherries and covered with dark chocolate frosting—and a seeded rye, which was put in a big machine that chugged blades down on the bread until it was sliced perfectly. Then she’d take the 6 Train to the end of the line, Pelham Bay in the Bronx, and take a Crosby Cab to the house. We’d all go for a swim or a walk on the
beach, and after dinner Grandpa would send us home with quarts of clam chowder and beef stew.

For a child being raised by a young woman who was herself still growing up, and with both of us going through a dark period of mourning for Nana, Grandpa was pure security: a strong substitute father who doted on me and could literally catch dinner in our backyard. As long as I was with him, I thought, nothing in this unpredictable world could hurt me.

• • •

At home in Manhattan I was a fearful kid. Our apartment was on the Upper East Side in Yorkville, not far from where the Guibes had lived before they moved to the Bronx. The neighborhood was great around 86th Street, okay in the upper eighties, and went from dicey to dangerous the further up you went in the nineties. We lived on 89th Street.

Life was occasionally scary, stable only in its instability. A friend from school had a schizophrenic father, and one day the parents were warned to watch out for him because he’d been seen wandering around armed with a hunting knife and a Bible. Another friend was evicted from the apartment she
lived in with several relatives newly arrived from China. She had to fight off kids we went to school with as they tried to steal her clothes from the piles the landlord threw out on the street. A boy in my third-grade class told me that a neighbor had been murdered during an attempted robbery: “They beat her up and killed her for a lousy dime,” he reported flatly, with none of the childlike glee that would indicate a fib.

On the home front, things were less dramatic but still unsettling. Mom’s salary as a secretary/apprentice perfumer at a fragrance company just didn’t go that far, and when my biological father missed even one of his sixty-dollar-a-week child support payments, my mother’s brow would furrow with worry. The difference between worry and panic was about a hundred and twenty dollars.

One night when I was eight years old, the pin in the old bolt on our door slipped, locking us inside our own apartment. We couldn’t call anyone because we didn’t have enough money to pay the phone bill that month, so the line was dead. We beat on the door and screamed until a neighbor came and called a locksmith.

I had a series of babysitters who watched me after
school until Mom came home from work. I remember a few lovely ones, like Mrs. Wittick, who kept her support hose up on her swollen legs with rubber bands and read the most violent Bible stories to me as many times as I wished. When I was about nine or ten, old enough to spend the afternoons by myself, I didn’t usually play with other kids. I preferred to read or watch Bugs Bunny cartoons while slowly, methodically eating almost an entire Entenmann’s fudge cake, square by square. I always saved one last piece for Mom. By the time she got home from a long day at the office, though, she generally needed something a little stronger than cake.

And on Friday nights, thank God and Nana in heaven, I’d be sent back to the Bronx. Grandpa would pay for a cab to bring me there, but not a Manhattan taxi; he had a Crosby Cab come down from the Bronx to get me. He trusted only that band of men who Mom said handled their cabs like getaway car drivers. They smelled of cigarettes and referred to me as “Chollie’s gran-
dawtah
,” and they were not averse to driving on the sidewalk to cut around a traffic jam. They always got me to Agar Place safely and in record time.

If it had been too cold to fish and get clams, Grandpa
would have beef stew bubbling in the cast-iron pot on the stove, or he’d make hamburgers. He’d get a pound or so of ground meat and roll it out on the cutting board like thick dough and use a tumbler to cut small, perfect burger shapes. He’d serve them with fried onions, two little burgers for each of us, his with a beer. I might even get a shrimp cocktail, the kind that came three to a pack in parfait glasses. We kept those little fancy glasses for my milk, and for my occasional inch of beer.

And the cereal! I had a stash of about five boxes of cereal, which both Nana, when she was alive, and then Grandpa made sure I never ran out of. The idea that there were five boxes of cereal waiting in a cupboard in the Bronx just for me was an incredible comfort.

• • •

DECEMBER 2008

HUDSON COUNTY, NEW JERSEY

One of the most seductive things about my husband-to-be, I remember, was his cupboard.

Nathan had a lot of things going for him: He was handsome, spiritual, intelligent, a great listener, and had a hot yoga body. He seemed like the total package.
After a few weeks of dating, he invited me to his place for dinner. Some men, when having a woman over for the first time, will buy fancy, seductive foods like oysters, pâté, maybe truffles. Nathan wooed me, and won me over, with a stable dinner of salad, pasta, Italian bread, and cookies for dessert.

As I helped him in the kitchen, I took note of his fridge full of eggs, soy milk, yogurt, chicken sausage, cheese, ravioli, and chocolate. He’d get something out of the cupboards and reveal boxes of couscous, many jars of spices, granola, oatmeal, at least seven different kinds of tea … He hadn’t gone shopping that afternoon because I was coming over—the guy had food on hand. One of the sexiest parts of that meal was knowing there was more where that came from, and maybe always would be.

Breakfast the next morning was even better.

As much as Nathan’s full larder reminded me of my grandparents’ comfortably stocked kitchen, he differs from members of my family in one major respect: He throws food away. Not just moldy food either. It’s like when dinner guests stay a little too late, and Nathan will say, “Well, it’s been lovely having you here, and
I hate to say good-bye.” Any food that’s been hanging around our fridge too long is promptly escorted to the garbage can.

This never bothered me before, but today I can feel myself snapping over half a banana. What next—will I start keeping pieces of string because they might come in handy someday?

I sit there and stare at the garbage can for a while, considering whether I should take the banana out, even though it’s been in there long past the five-second rule, but more because I’m wondering how I can get out of this grip of fear. Technically I’ve only lost my job, but I feel like I’m also losing my footing and the sense that, somehow, everything will be all right. The bad economy causes shifts within my industry to accelerate as more print magazines fold and go online, run by a quarter—a young, tech-savvy quarter—of their former staffs. I worry that I won’t be able to make a living as a writer anymore; at forty-five years old, what will be my Plan B? I used to tell my parents they’d never have to worry about their old age, that I would take care of them. Can I say that now?

When I call my mother to say good night, I lie to
her and tell her things are looking up. She’s upset enough watching her own business slowly starving to death; I don’t need to add my misery. It occurs to me that my family has been worrying about money for over a hundred years now. This is one tradition I had hoped I wouldn’t carry on.