The Inn at Lake Devine (30 page)

Hank groaned, pretending to be annoyed, and put me down gently.

I said, “You wouldn’t give us a minute?”

He said, “One minute. But sit in that chair.”

“How about on the bed?”

“When are they letting us out?” Kris asked him.

“You’re wasting your valuable time,” said Hank. “I’d be smooching by now if it was me.”

I tried to sit on the edge of his bed, and when I couldn’t manage the hop, I fell to my knees. “I thought they were lying,” I sobbed.

“About what?”

“About you.”

I felt his hand smoothing my hair. “The Polaroid didn’t help?” he asked.

I wiped my face on his sheet and looked up. I said, “I was scared and delirious. I thought it was a setup, a snapshot they took before you died.”

“Smiling? Giving the peace sign?”

I whimpered.

“The notes didn’t do it, either?”

I said, “They weren’t notarized. I only had my father’s word.”

He smiled, and his eyes shimmered. “You must really love me,” he said.

E
ventually, they let us watch TV and take meals together, and once, with Hank standing guard, we had an illegal fifteen minutes in the shower. My parents’ generalized fury at all things Berry softened as they paced with Ingrid and Karl, waiting—first, for their children to die, and then for them to come back.

They returned to Newton after a three-week vigil, after the doctors announced the danger past, and the famous mycologist said we’d simply ingested too few specimens to die. Everyone kissed and meant it—Ingrid and Eddie, Audrey and Karl, Gretel, doctors, nurses, orderlies, phlebotomists, Hank.

“I’ll visit her every day and call you,” Ingrid promised Audrey.

“Collect,” said my mother.

“If you insist,” said Ingrid.

“You’re not taking Natalie home with you?” Kris asked when my parents went in to say good-bye.

They said, No, not this time. No.

“If the Inn doesn’t reopen, I won’t have a job,” he said.

My mother held up a hand to shush him, imperiously, like the
chairman of a congressional committee. “I used to think that was important,” she said. “Now I’m only interested in things like life and death.”

“I never understood what you did there anyway,” my father said.

T
he cost to the Berrys was the hotel. “Poisonings at the Inn at Lake Devine” went forth from Green Mountain Medical Center and the Vermont Department of Public Health to the streets of Gilbert, to provisioners, to rival innkeepers, to travel agents, to tourists, to subscribers of mycology newsletters, to leaf-peepers, to stringers, to wire services.

Ingrid and Karl had to hold their heads up in Gilbert, had to endure further humiliations, such as hiring an outside caterer and hall for Gretel’s wedding reception. The Inn was also cited for mouse droppings in a pantry drawer and a failure to post an
EMPLOYEES MUST WASH HANDS
sign in the downstairs lav—transgressions that would never have made the papers but for Mr. Berry’s picking little brown mushrooms containing deadly amanitins and my baking them into a near-fatal pie.

We knew that our tiny hospital wedding—with no relatives in attendance, Hank as witness, cake from the cafeteria, flowers from Maternity, and officiating by the mayor, who, unavoidably, had issued the executive order to close the Inn—while not the unwelcome news it once would have been, was the silver lining that would remind the public about the cloud over the hotel.

“Is she pregnant, too?” my mother-in-law of one hour asked when Kris called to tell her our news.

He said, “Let’s start this conversation over: I announce to you, in a tone suggesting that your most floundering and least favorite child has returned from the dead to find true love. What does a mother say to that?”

I could hear her grousing syllables crackling over the wires.

“For
love
, Ma,” he said impatiently. “I love Natalie, and she loves me, and when you feel this strongly, you get married.”

Blotches started on his neck and rose to his face. “Yeah, well … life is short, isn’t it? Some of us learned that this winter.”

I signaled, It’s okay. It doesn’t matter. Say good-bye.

Exasperated, he ran his bony fingers through his dark brown hair, thrilling me with the sight of the gold ring on his bachelor hand. I didn’t ask him to repeat Ingrid’s outburst or condemn it. Inside my own wedding band were the words that counted, a surprise he’d dictated over this same hospital phone to the local jeweler:
Kris & Natalie  ͌ Semper Fi
—all the blessings I needed from a Berry.

We were discharged together, twenty-seven days after the poisonings, and, while Kris technically had a home to go back to, it no longer functioned as an inn.

My mother had kept up my rent on the attic apartment, so Kris and I returned there, to part-time jobs at Marx Fruit and Audrey Marx Properties, respectively, and postponed our honeymoon for the foreseeable future. A check was waiting—five hundred dollars for “consultations rendered” from Mr. Simone. They had read about my mishap and miraculous recovery in the
Boston Herald
, he wrote on his firm’s letterhead. He and Hilda wished me every success in future endeavors, but, there being no formalized agreement with the future Chez Simone, the deal—such as it was—was off.

“They don’t want the mushroom murderess on their payroll,” I said.

“You didn’t want that stupid job anyway.”

“I’m a pariah.”

“It’ll pass,” he said.

“ ‘
NEWTON GIRL BRINGS DOWN THE HOUSE OF BERRY
.’ ”

“Not on purpose,” said the true-blue Kris.

I
resigned myself to a future in real estate, telling myself that few people return from the dead to achieve both professional and personal happiness. Back at my old desk, I took messages, and wrote classified ads; I photographed the interiors and exteriors of houses with my mother’s Polaroid, and then, like an extra-credit project, mounted them on poster board for display in the agency’s dusty front windows. I was particularly unconvincing at sales, which I did only at the unlicensed, telephone level. If a caller asked about the cozy ranch on the dynamic street, I would picture its cramped rooms and the traffic whizzing by. Distaste for the property would creep into my voice. My mother tried to educate me in the ways of real estate diplomacy, explaining that one person’s bad taste was another person’s dream decor, so I should not spit in anyone’s water, because I might have to drink it.

I hated it still. I hated the buyers and the sellers, the competition and the co-brokers, the dress-up clothes required for desk work, the clerks in the courthouse, and the typesetters in Classified. When I confessed to my mother that I didn’t think I could ever be fulfilled in real estate, she said, “I know.”

She paid for me to see a therapist, who pointed out that I couldn’t undo the poisonings by staying out of kitchens. For homework she asked me to write a list of life-affirming things that could happen at a future restaurant of mine. Grudgingly, and not until I was seated in her waiting room the following week, did I scribble: “marriage proposals,” “wedding receptions,” “anniversary & birthday parties,” “bar and bat mitzvahs,” “job offers,” “mergers,” “deals,” and “misc. celebrations.”

I should cook toward that goal, the therapist said, waving my lackluster list: for love and for personal happiness—my own and my future patrons’.

I asked, “What if I make another mistake? I know someone who put peanut butter into her chili, and a customer died of an allergic reaction not an hour later.”

“And where is that cook today?” she asked smartly. “In a penitentiary?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

I admitted what my friend the unindicted chef had learned the hard way: A horrible mistake is not a crime. The customer takes his chances, the restaurant’s attorney had said, when he orders a mélange like chili. Case law regarding fish bones in chowder and a choking plaintiff backed him up.

She asked if I was staying out of kitchens because I was genuinely afraid of poisoning more people, or if I was sentencing myself to life behind the bars of Audrey Marx Properties for my imagined crime.

I said I hadn’t seen it in quite that way.

“Do you find anything fulfilling in the work your mother and sister do?”

I said without a second’s reflection, “Not a thing.”

I
read my short, gaping résumé to Kris as he scrambled eggs for dinner.

“What’s the big hurry?” he asked. “We’re doing okay. I don’t want to deliver baskets for the rest of my life, but it’s only temporary.” He pointed out that I was not back to my fighting weight, and as long as I was still fading in the afternoons, it was best to have the flexibility offered by working for family.

“What if this never passes?” I asked.

He knew I meant my fear of food, not the fatigue. He said, “Doctors lose patients and go back into the O.R. Drivers hit pedestrians and get back behind the wheel. Firefighters reenter burning buildings. Liz Taylor and Richard Burton are heading back down the aisle. You’ll cook again.”

D
istraught over our condition, Linette had enlisted Mr. Feldman and his minions to pray for us. More than one bison-size flower arrangement had arrived at the hospital from “Your friends at the Halseeyon,” followed—when we had been upgraded from serious to fair—by enough
rugalekh
to feed the town of Gilbert.

“Who’s that boy who calls here after he thinks we’re asleep?” her father finally asked.

“Nelson?” Linette said, managing to convey the sheer nerve and wrongheadedness of such a question. “He’s calling with medical bulletins. He’s just a friend.”

“I was young once,” said her father, “no matter what kind of a shnook you take me for. You haven’t been the same since that boy jumped in the pool.”

“Natalie and Kris may die,” she told him.

“I’m watching you,” he warned.

W
hen we didn’t die, when my parents survived the news of my mixed, civil marriage and the world didn’t end, Linette found the courage to call Joel. He listened with unusual, almost suspect, equanimity and said, “Let me think this over. There’s someone I should confer with here. I’ll call you Sunday.”

“I’m sorry,” said Linette. “I never meant to drag this thing out. I didn’t know my own mind.”

“I’m not exactly stunned,” said Joel.

He didn’t wait until Sunday, but called her back that same night. “Here’s what you do,” he advised. “Tell them it’s my decision.”

“Why?”

Joel said, “Tell them I had doubts about your commitment to marrying a rabbi and to being a
rebbetzen
. Tell them I was concerned about the differences in our backgrounds and our values, and in the end I felt it was wrong to uproot you and ask you to give up the hotel.”

“Is this true?”

“Tell them that,” he said. “It’ll make it easier if they hate me instead of you.”

“What a great guy,” I said later, marveling at his civility.

“Please,” Linette sneered. “He’s
shtupping
someone in Cincinnati.”

H
e didn’t sit
shiva
or formally disown her, but Mr. Feldman stopped speaking to Linette as soon as she began collecting corrugated boxes and talking nonsense about a change of scenery. Out of nowhere, he grumbled, she’s interested in Providence. “Who moves to Rhode Island?” he wanted to know.

Linette countered that Providence had much to recommend it: It had ocean, it had Brown, it had history, it had hotels in case she wanted to keep her fingers in that pot. It had been seven years since graduation, and he knew what that meant, didn’t he? A sabbatical. She would audit courses at the Rhode Island School of Design and at Johnson & Wales, where disciplines would accrue to the eventual benefit of the Halseeyon. Hal Feldman believed none of it. There was a boy at the heart of this—in Providence of all places. The wrong kind of boy, he was certain, despite Linette’s denials.

He said cunningly, “It would be one thing if I thought you had a
friend or two there, but leaving your family to go live among strangers …”