Claudia Silver to the Rescue (9780547985602) (9 page)

“Just fine,” Claudia dutifully replied, noticing that the older woman's eyeliner and mascara were an earnest navy blue.

“Wonderful,” Annie replied briskly, giving Claudia's hand what seemed like a grateful squeeze for having delivered a manageable answer. Claudia's heart quickened as she presented her hostess with the string bag. “What's this?” Annie asked.

“Thanks so much for having us, Annie.”

“Don't be ridiculous,” the hostess scoffed. “We love filling the house with strays during the holidays.” She opened the string handles of the bag and peeked inside. “Is that
Silver
Shred marmalade from Claudia
Silver?
” The hopeful girl nodded. “Have you seen
Six Degrees of Separation
?” Claudia shook her head. “There's just the most marvelous speech where the black—I mean the
African American
—boy talks about giving pots of jam to rich people.” She circled her long, slim arm around Claudia's shoulder. “Not that we're either,” she added. “Come. I want to show you the most beautiful thing in the whole world.”

The tiled bones of the Tate's long, narrow kitchen had gone untouched since the 1930s. The entire suite of rooms, including a small laundry, pantry, and maid's quarters, were Annie's sentimental territory. She had refused Paul's many offers over the years to gut the space and install a kitchen island and a wine fridge. Instead, she'd decorated every available surface with paper ephemera. Snapshot collages of Martha's Vineyard holidays had been assembled on a row of bulletin boards, with felt banners from the various schools and summer camps the girls had attended draped above them like bunting. There were holiday cards and finger-painted masterpieces from Martha and Bronwyn's Brick Church School days—Agnes, swiftly expelled for painting a swastika on the shell of a live turtle, having been exiled to a pilot nursery-school program at Teachers College. There were yoga schedules and a recipe card for cornbread from a Cape Cod grist mill. Marching around the upper seam of the rooms, where the tile met plaster, was a large collection of watercolors painted by Annie in a former life and preserved in Lucite box frames. Swans beneath willow, gourds in a bowl, still life with Ball jar and ball of twine: domestic snippets and cooperative wildlife in the vein of a particularly innocuous
New Yorker
cover.

Annie beckoned Claudia to the perfectly good, very old refrigerator. Pressing her finger to her lips as though a newborn might be napping inside, she tugged on its wide metal handle.

“Have you ever seen anything so gorgeous?” she asked Claudia, revealing an artful trompe-l'oeil log fashioned from sponge cake and butter cream. Chocolate twigs jutted from the cake at realistic angles, and meringue mushrooms, dusted with cocoa-powder dirt, sprung up in clumps from loamy chocolate curls. “Bûche de Noël,” Annie said reverently. “Payard Pâtisserie. I ordered it before Thanksgiving.”

Because all of this,
Annie wanted to add,
is what I do now.

Claudia had seen cakes like this before in the bright windows of pastry shops. Glancing upward at the framed gallery, she recognized there was even a watercolor of a cake just like it tilted above the laundry-room doorway. But Claudia hadn't known what you
called
a cake like this, or what it had to do with Christmas. Unsettled, she glimpsed her string bag, now collapsed forlornly around her meager offerings in the forgotten corner where Annie had dropped it. The berries needed water. “It's so pretty,” she said. “It's a shame to eat it.”

“But you see,” Annie marveled, “that's the whole
point.
That's why it's my favorite Christmas tradition. It reminds me that before Santa there was Jesus, and before Jesus there were trees. It's both pagan and exquisite.” Annie had majored in classics at Radcliffe, and Claudia had assumed, until this very moment, that she'd replaced her intellect with motherhood. Annie slid her vodka rocks in its collectible Scooby-Doo Welch's grape-jelly glass from where she'd tucked it, and swallowed a cold mouthful. “Bûche de Noël is just like life, Claudia,” she said. “Too heartbreaking to be eaten but it
must
be eaten. That's what it's there for.”

 

The assembled found their place cards, surrounded by the vast population of books lining the dining room in built-in cases. Annie had sent the party helpers on their way, having learned after twenty years of hosting that she needed extra hands for prep and cocktails, but preferred autonomy for serving the meal itself. In this way, Annie was able to approximate the feeling of actually attending her own party. She'd engineered the seating to encourage everybody's best qualities, suppress their worst, and develop dormant potential where possible, counting on the steady flow of cold Veuve to help things along. Paul, who now emerged from the kitchen to great applause, bore the largest turkey they'd had at Ottomanelli's. He took his place at the head of the table and began to carve.

Paul had made partner years ago. He'd nearly won countless charitable 5K races, been a capable steward of major purchases and projects, and took on pro bono cases both at work and at home. At many a midnight Annie had discovered him deep in counsel at the kitchen table, his chin propped on his clasped hands, listening with utter focus and sympathy to an anguished daughter, a daughter's pregnant friend, a Lebanese law student desperate to stay in New York to live as a gay man, all the while churning capably with answers and solutions. Pretty images could stir the actual soul, of
course,
they could—that's how Rockwell sold all those magazines. Somehow, it was from twelve feet away, watching Paul announce that they'd say grace, that Annie felt closest to her husband.

“God,” Paul was now saying, clasping Claudia's and Joel's hands respectively and bowing his head, “or, if you prefer, the Creative Source of the Universe that's also the engine of your life, otherwise known as your instinct . . .”

At this, Claudia opened her eyes to consider her host. Throaty Aunt Toni's eyes, also open, caught hers across the table. Aunt Toni winked, and Claudia quickly fled to the darkness behind her eyelids. “We acknowledge this moment, this table, this company,” Paul continued. “Christmas dinner is a symbol of the abundance and richness of our lives and of our choices. And it's also an actual feast we're fortunate to enjoy, so we give thanks for it. There's a prayer my grandfather used to say—”

“Back when we were Jewish,” Agnes interjected darkly.

“Aggie,” Annie warned.

In three generations the Tarnows had become the Tates, traveling from steerage to first class, from the Meseritz Shul to Ethical Culture, from City College to Harvard. Paul dusted off this notable fact a few times a year, in intimate settings like this one, where his family's successful assimilation could be couched as a well-executed PBS documentary. But Agnes, who pitted herself against whatever she could, and who, as a young teenager, had received novel offers of bat mitzvah tutoring and Israel teen tours with nothing short of disgust, could be counted on to rail against Paul's slightly proud, slightly guilty sentiment. Agnes was her father's emotional Dorian Gray. Her reliable distress allowed him to remain serene.
“Baruch a'tah adonai, elohanu melech ha'olam
. . .
”
Paul began plainly, even as eyes along the table blinked wildly, loose shutters anticipating a growing squall.

Claudia waited until the coast was clear and slowly opened her eyes again. Scanning the table and confirming that everyone else had settled into darkness, she let herself consider the side of Paul's handsome face, his trim jaw and throbbing temple vein, the movement of his mouth, as he continued to say grace.
“She-hecheyanu, v'key he'manu, v'hig-heyanu l'azman ha'zeh.”
In all the time she'd spent with the Tates, this was the first glimpse she'd ever had of Paul's distant Mosaic past. That Paul Tate would know a Hebrew prayer by heart, that he would trot it out on Christmas Eve, that this household had something deeply in common with her own, boggled Claudia's perceptions. Yet Paul's secular confidence transformed the familiar prayer. Edith's
she-hecheyanu
was anxious and lisped; Paul's was “Amazing Grace” as sung by James Taylor at a private party. “We thank the universe for bringing us to this moment. Let us all be here now. Amen,” he concluded.

Claudia suddenly noticed her hand in Paul's, and stared at their entwined fingers. She considered the smooth hollow beneath Paul's ear, the freshly laundered and pressed turn of his collar.

Paul gave Claudia's and Joel's hands brief, businesslike squeezes as the rest of the table stirred.

“Praise the Lord and pass the gravy,” Aunt Toni declared as she tucked her cloth napkin into the neckline of her caftan.

“Wait,” said Paul. “Now that the God stuff is out of the way, let's raise a glass to the goddess.” He smiled down the table at his wife. “Annie, we are all thankful to you for making a beautiful Christmas Eve with all the trimmings and then some.”

“It's my great pleasure to have all of you here. Merry Christmas!” Annie said graciously, beaming around the table as she remembered both the dinner rolls and the jelly glass of vodka she'd left behind in the kitchen.

 

After dinner, the Tates and their guests gathered at the baby grand for the customary sing-along with Throaty Aunt Toni. Annie bustled between the kitchen and the dining room, setting up the dessert buffet.

“Can I help you with anything?” Claudia offered, as the bûche de Noël emerged on its porcelain platter to take its place of honor.

“Would you like to lead the group in a Hanukah song of some sort?” Annie suggested distractedly.

“That would be a resounding
no.
”

“In which case,” Annie said, emptying the last of the Veuve into Claudia's glass, “you just have a marvelous time and enjoy.” She tucked the empty under her arm. “I'm sending you girls home with plenty of leftovers.” Annie retreated, leaving Claudia with the unpleasant reminder that there was less of the evening ahead of her than behind. Claudia took a deep breath, considered her options, and soon found herself venturing into the deep, unchartered territory of the apartment.

She wandered the length of the long central hall, lined in framed family photos, and found herself in the doorway of Paul and Annie's master bedroom. Quietly, she turned the cut-glass knob and entered her hosts' private quarters.

A stretch of windows along the far wall of the enormous bedroom overlooked Central Park. The windows continued around the corner of the room, offering an unbroken northbound view of Central Park West.

Her body drifting slightly from the champagne, Claudia placed her palm against the glass. She thought her breath would fog the cold window and leave a wet print, but the substantial double pane ignored her touch. Outside, the gentle, persistent snow sugared the trees and muffled the midnight traffic, making the taxis into darting yellow fish going about their business under the softly frozen skin of a wintry stream.

Claudia moved to the large bed and sank down at its edge. She ran her hand over the block-printed coverlet folded at its foot. Chagrined and determined, she vowed that if she ever had a master bedroom and a husband to put in it, she would have a bed like this one, high off the floor, and a rug like this one, faded and extravagant, and a dresser like this one, tall, glossy, inherited from someone, topped with a lacquered tray and bottles of scent, and Paul's wallet, an old Gucci with an elastic band striped red and green, its rich, burnished leather evoking Paul's own skin, his forearms vaguely tanned even months after summer due to his weekly doubles at the Ninety-Fourth Street courts with his law-school roommates.

Claudia rose from the bed.

Paul's wallet pulled her close, then closer.

Her racing heart yammered in her ears, startling her from her champagne trance. She told herself she just wanted to see what was
in
there. What pictures, if any, he carried with him. She quickly devised a simple game to explain the motion of her hands, which were moving faster than her conscience. She hoped to find outdated school photos of the girls, a decade or more older, that would prove Paul was as detached as the next corporate father. Then Paul would be pushed safely back into the fog of parenthood.

Claudia slid the elastic from its grip and opened the wallet.

She could hear Aunt Toni's voice, belting out over the jolly chorus of dinner guests:
“I have no gifts for you pa-RUM-pah-pah PUM . 
.
 .”

Inside the wallet, credit cards peeked from their slots. Five one-hundred-dollar bills, crisp and facing the same direction, were tucked neatly into its main compartment. In between the two halves of the wallet, Claudia discovered a thick strip of folded paper. It was a photo booth triptych of Paul and Bronwyn, laughing and tan, probably taken on the Vineyard, not long ago. She stared at the lively image and heard footsteps in the hall. The looming threat of being caught in Paul's wallet might have caused her to desist, but instead it urged her forward, past the point of choice.

She plucked a hundred dollar bill from Paul's wallet and shoved it deep into the pocket of her one good pair of black wool trousers.

She secured the elastic band.

She glided over the rug and found herself gazing contemplatively at the snow as Paul entered his room.

“There you are,” he said. Claudia heard only mild surprise in his voice, tempered by pleasure. “Annie's about to serve dessert and she requests your presence for the cutting of the ever-loving bûche.”

“Okay,” said Claudia, not moving as Paul crossed to the dresser. In her mind, nothing had happened, so much so, that nothing had happened.

Paul disregarded his wallet as he opened the top drawer and removed a slim silver case. He cracked the window that was right behind Claudia, letting in a puff of soft, snowy air as he folded his frame into the deep sill and rested one foot, still in its loafer, on the upholstered bench that ran the length of the windows. Paul snapped the silver lid open, offering Claudia a smoke as he selected one for himself. She shook her head.