Dead at Breakfast (3 page)

Hope said, “Did you know that after all that fuss over the trout last night, he demanded that the chef come out so he could congratulate her?”

“You're kidding.”

“No. But Sarah was so mad she wouldn't go. She sent Oliver out to say she'd gone to bed.”

Clarence was a bloodhound. It wasn't a popular breed, nor a very beautiful one. The bloodhound has a wrinkled face as if his skull was once about twice as big as it is now, and no one thought to have the skin resized when the skull shrank. He has droopy eyes and jowls that don't quite seal even when his mouth is closed, so drool is more or less a constant. Back in the day when hunting large game on horseback was a sport of kings, the bloodhound was useless as a member of the pack, though he was quite good at locating the scent of quarry in the first place. One can picture him standing, fecklessly drooling, with his big feet splayed out, watching as the hounds gave tongue and sped off with joyous zeal after deer or elk, and the riders galloped after them. The bloodhound's work was done at that point and he was ready for lunch and a nap.

The only thing a bloodhound is really good at is finding and following a scent, even a cold and not very fresh one, even over water. Particularly human scent. So when Cherry tried to take Clarence for a walk around the lake, he weighing a hundred pounds and she about ninety, it was not a very great pleasure for either one of them. Cherry was not from a background that valued recreational exercise, and she had already been up and down the mountain once today. She was now dressed in her hotel uniform and wearing high heels, which hurt her feet. Clarence did not care much for recre
ational exercise either. He wanted to go back to the hotel and track Mr. Rexroth to wherever they had taken him.

But Cherry battled onward, hauling on the leash. Cherry had had a checkered employment history and she could not fail here. She had been on the vocational track in high school and hoped to work in a hair salon. She had done well in her apprenticeship at Upper Cuts, a beauty shop in Ainsley. She was the shampoo girl, and was learning to do color. It was sort of like magic, the way the color developed on the hair. She didn't even mind the smell. But Mrs. Pease had told her she had two rules that no one was allowed to break. One was don't smoke in the shop, and the other one was don't talk politics with the customers. Cherry explained at length to a woman from New York how wrong it was for people in the cities to keep people like her father, who was a hunter, he hunted for
food,
from being able to buy the guns he needed. And also he had a gun repair business, and selling parts of a gun to a friend who needed them was really a public service. The customer spoke to Mrs. Pease about it. When Mrs. Pease asked her what part of rule number two she didn't understand, Cherry stood mute and sullen. She couldn't say out loud that she didn't know guns counted as politics.

Her father was a hunter. And a volunteer firefighter. He worked as a house painter sometimes, but hated it. He wasn't too good at anything where he wasn't his own boss. He and her mother were divorced. Or maybe never married, anyway she lived with her mother. Her mother used to cook at the elementary school, plain cooking. Mac and cheese, franks and beans. Chowder. Now her mother worked for Chef Sarah at the hotel, and it was the best job she'd ever had. She did prep work and cleanup, but when they had time Sarah showed her how to make things she'd heard about on television. At home now she watched cooking shows. She had health insurance. She had promised Gabriel that Cherry was a good worker. She wanted Cherry to rise in the world.

The cooking class spent the afternoon in the kitchen with Oliver, the sous-chef, and Chef Sarah. One group made a black bean soup with ginger and apples. Maggie and Hope, working with Albie, made an apple confit with caramelized onion threads. Albie sliced the onions tissue-thin with a mandoline he'd been taught to use. His absorption in his task was rather touching, Maggie thought. The confit was to form a bed for chops from local fresh-killed young pork. Albie had perked up and asked if Sarah ever taught a class in butchering, and she said she'd be glad to if there was interest. Glory said she was a vegetarian and this conversation made her want to hurl. Oliver asked if Glory ate fish and would she like salmon instead of pork at dinner, and she asked if it was wild and line-caught. Glory, Lisa, and Mr. Kleinkramer were making kohlrabi salad and curried sweet potato oven fries. The last group was making a classic apple pie with heritage apples and homemade cinnamon ice cream.

Hope and Maggie invited Albie to join them for a drink before dinner, and to their surprise, he accepted. The evening was warm for the season, and they settled themselves outside on the west veranda where they could watch the sunset over the lake.

“They live on the same beach as I do,” Albie suddenly said. “We all see each other at the farm stand and the post office. Here I am right down the hall from them and they don't even recognize me.”

“Who?” asked Hope.

“Where?” asked Maggie.

“Those bitches,” said Albie, and the bitterness of his tone took both women by surprise. “In Southampton. They tore down a beautiful shingle-style house on the beach and built a thing that would be gaudy on Rodeo Drive, let alone in a potato field. They speed in and out in huge black cars with tinted windows. They don't know the neighbors. They don't join the community. I don't even think they know where they are.”

“We had neighbors like that in our building in New York,” said
Hope. “They renovated their apartment three different times in four years. Imagine the dirt and noise. They put in a steam room that leaked through to the apartment below and the super couldn't get in to fix it because they wouldn't give him a key. The people below them had to live in a hotel an entire year while the damage was repaired.”

“I hope someone had them murdered,” said Albie.

“We didn't have to, we had an act of god. Right after their third renovation, Hurricane Sandy blew in their fancy new French windows and the whole place was wrecked. They put it on the market and moved to Santa Fe.”

“Well that story makes me feel all warm and fuzzy,” said Maggie.

“Southampton was my wife's place,” said Albie. “She inherited the house from her parents. Spent all her summers there as a child. Our children did too, they loved it. There's something about the light . . . My wife was a painter. Mostly landscapes, some portraits. A very delicate colorist.” He got out his cell phone and fooled with it for a long minute, then passed it to Hope, to show her a lovely watercolor of herring gulls on a beach. Hope swiped through and looked at more pictures, then handed the phone to Maggie.

“Beautiful,” said Hope.

“Yes,” he answered. “She worked in pastels too. I don't know what I'm going to do with all her . . . there's a chest this high, filled with different shades of blues, greens, pinks. Yellows. I never thought about how many yellows there are in the world. Give it to a school, I guess, but . . . and the brushes and sketchbooks and her smocks . . .”

“How many children do you have?”

“Two. Al and Selena. Nothing's been right since Ruth got sick. The children aren't speaking to me.”

Hope reached across and gave his hand a pat. “These things happen after a hard death. They pass.” Albie looked at her, grateful.

He said, “When she finished chemo, I moved her out to the beach full-time. My daughter was upset about it; she said it was too far from the hospital and too far from
her
. She was always needy. Selena. But Ruth could see the ocean from our bedroom window, and to her, it was medicine. We knew there was no hope. You see. But she seemed to feed herself through her eyes, with that light, and the changing colors of the sea.”

After a pause, Maggie said, “I'm so sorry.”

“Were you there for the hurricane?” Hope asked after silence.

Albie nodded.

“The storm hit hard out there.”

He gestured with his hands, as if to say there were worse kinds of damage. “Not bad. Power went out, but we had oil lamps and candles and a fireplace in the bedroom. We stayed for two days, then our son came and made us go home with him to Oyster Bay till the power came back on. During those two days we kept to that bedroom, wrapped in blankets, sitting over the fire, and I read to her while she watched the sea out the window.”

“What did you read?” Maggie asked.

“
Middlemarch.
Ruth loved that book.”

“Yes,” said Maggie, agreeing with Ruth.

“And she loved the storm. I was afraid a tree would come down onto the roof, but she seemed thrilled. By the power of it, the huge seas, the rain lashing. It was raining sideways.” Albie seemed back in the memory of the wild rampaging disaster inside his wife's body, the disaster going on outside the house. “As if for that period of time, it was all one thing, and not evil, but majestic.”

“Did it damage your beach?”

Albie seemed not to hear at first. Then he refocused.

“Yes. That was on her mind. That the beaches were washing away and there would be no place for our grandchildren, or their children to . . . that there wouldn't be the future we always pictured.
There were town meetings. The first few were at our house, once we moved back; people came to us so Ruth could be part of it. Then
those
people started building their own seawall to protect “their” beach.” He made quotation marks with his fingers. “Of course it isn't their beach. It's everyone's beach below the high-water mark. We had hired engineers, we were going to act together so that . . . Oh never mind.” He threw back the last of his drink.

“No. Finish,” said Hope.

“The point is if just one little piece of beach is protected, the damage is twice as bad for the people around it. With the next storm, and the next and the next, the sand along the outsides of that seawall drain away . . . our dunes began to collapse, and she couldn't stand to watch it. She died in a downstairs room at the front of the house, with her back to the ocean. Watching that beach degrade was like watching her own body leaving her.”

Finally he added, “She was a very visual person.”

The cooking class ate dinner together in a private dining room, all except for Glory and Lisa, who were eating with Alexander the Great, as Glory called her brother-in-law. Chef Sarah joined the class. She was looking a little pinched, Maggie thought, but this dinner with her was part of the program they'd signed up for, and she was a woman who hit her marks, they were learning. Maggie knew all too well about having to carry out the schedule, no matter what the state of your heart or your health, and admired her style.

They had apple wine with the pork, and Martin Maynard proclaimed it not at all bad. In fact, quite good. In fact they had to call for several more bottles. By dessert, a rumor went around the table that Chef Sarah had once been a professional singer.

“Will you sing ‘Every Time We Say Good-bye?'” Margaux Kleinkramer called down the table. “I worship Cole Porter.”

“Growing up means the death of many talents,” Sarah said, and
went back to her conversation with Teddy Bledsoe about San Francisco.

“Where
did
you grow up?” Teddy asked Sarah.

“Western Pennsylvania.”

“Did you really?” Maggie chimed in. “I'm from Ambridge!”

“You were from the big city,” said Sarah, and they both laughed. Ambridge was a smallish blue-collar steel town down the river from Pittsburgh. “I came from farm country in Washington County.”

“Do you remember the roller rink in Moon Township?”

“I had my tenth birthday party there!” said Sarah. “And how about Kennywood?”

“Kennywood! Countryman!” cried Maggie, and she and Sarah slapped each others' hands.

“How did you learn to cook like this in Washington County?” Maggie asked, but Margaux Kleinkramer had begun to sing “Every Time We Say Good-bye,” and people were joining in. They had forgotten some of the words but at the far end of the table Nina Maynard and Homer Kleinkramer suddenly swung into the Michigan fight song, having just discovered that they were both Wolverines.

“You know it's been a good party when people start singing fight songs,” said Maggie.

“I wonder what fight songs Glory and Lisa know,” said Teddy.

“Why don't we invite them all in here?” asked Margaux, reaching for the wine.

“Why don't we not,” said Sarah sharply.

“Of all the gin joints in the world, they have to walk into this one,” said Albie, and he looked at Hope and Maggie.

“Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, they walk into mine,” Sarah corrected.

“My favorite movie of all time,” cried Margaux. “Let's sing the ‘Marseillaise'!” Some version of that happened. Maggie was near enough to pick out Sarah's contralto, and it was gorgeous, rich, and
velvety. Before the song ended the kitchen door opened and several of the cooks came to listen.

“What is going
on
in here?” one of them asked, looking delighted.

“I'm going to bed, is what,” said Sarah, and left them.

“Fight songs,” said Maggie.

“Did your parents really name you Marg-ox?” Albie asked Margaux.

“Of course not,” said Margaux. “But a little self-invention is good for the soul.”

Martin said to Maggie, “Were you married to Paul Detweiler?”

Maggie, who had been about to go to bed herself, turned to look at him. “I was. What made you ask?”

“It just occurred to me. He was a very big deal in our community.”

“Did you know him?”

“Met him once. I'm sorry about what happened.”

“Thank you,” said Maggie. “I am too.”

On their way to their rooms, Hope asked, “What did he mean about Paul, ‘a big deal in
our
community'? What community?”