The Love Children (41 page)

Philo and I both developed some fame in the food community. I was often mentioned in the same breath as Alice Waters and Chez Panisse in San Francisco, which she founded in 1971. I was asked to be on panels and was written about, and I wrote articles about organic foods and farmers' markets. Philo was famous for his mushrooms. He now had a large farm and several helpers; he no longer made his own deliveries, and he turned over huge sums of money every year. But none of that translated into great personal wealth. We had enough to live on without worrying, that's all. And that's enough. Having too much money ruins your children and spoils you for life. The kids were my deepest source of satisfaction. The kids grew, our house was comfortable, we loved our work, and we felt that was the most people could get from life. It was enough.

It still is enough. I am now fifty-one, still cooking at Artur's, which I now own, poor Artur having succumbed to lung cancer a few years ago. I suppose it was to be expected—he smoked so heavily. He lived into his early seventies. Dad died at fifty-nine, from the same disease, in 1985, right after he left his third wife. He left most of his money and paintings to this woman, who already had everything. Mom was the most distraught person at the funeral. She stayed downstairs; she couldn't stop crying. Yet when he was alive, she'd hated him.

I felt terrible, not because I missed him—I'd hardly seen him in recent years—but because I felt that he had never lived the life he'd wanted. Many people came to his funeral, but none of them knew him at all, really. Only his family knew what he was like. I'm not sure that even he truly knew himself.

He left me the cabin in Vermont, and everything in it, and the three meadows, and the sailboat and the rowboat. Philo and I added rooms onto the cabin so we had four bedrooms and baths, a dining room, and two offices, one for each of us—a far cry from the
old cabin. We put in a huge kitchen and a greenhouse. Dad's paintings and pre-Columbian sculptures were all in places of honor.

Mom died of cancer too, in 1992. I cried, but at least I felt she'd had a full life, had done what she wanted, become who she wanted to be. When she got sick, I stopped smoking and made Philo stop too. I tried to get Artur to stop, but he couldn't. It might not have made any difference—it seems to get you even years afterward. It was hard for me when Artur died; after all, I saw him every day. A lot of customers came to his funeral, which was nice and would have made him happy. His only relatives were his sister and her kids. He and Mildred never married, although they were together for years. She came up for long weekends almost every week, staying in his apartment over the restaurant. They took a cruise together every winter to some warm place where French was spoken. Artur used to say that the last twenty years of his life had more than made up for the first fifty. Mildred wept at his graveside, and so did Philo and I and Isabelle and old Loren Rosenberg from town, who had played chess with him on Monday nights.

 

I had a letter from Dolores around Christmas in 2000. She said she always thought about me at Christmastime. Her practice was really satisfying, she wrote; she felt she was helping so many girls, and she was writing a book about girls who'd been raped by relatives and what they needed to heal. She felt she was of use in life. Maybe that's all there is.

All this looking back caught me in the throat in 2002, when I found out that Sandy had died—the first death in my generation. She had died of breast cancer. Her mother had died of it just a few years after her father's suicide; Rhoda had died of it, and Naomi was in treatment for it. It was as though a massacre had occurred in her family. I kept feeling as though Sandy was sacrificed, but I couldn't get my mind around by what or to whom. I vaguely
blamed the government, which hadn't done enough research on breast cancer, and I vaguely blamed her father. Sandy had never gotten over her father's suicide. It just undercut everything in her life. She seemed to feel that his killing himself had made their lives together as a family meaningless.

I was really down after I heard about Sandy. September 11, 2001 had happened, and now Sandy, cut down in midlife. She who had dedicated herself to helping others, to alleviating poverty, and to other good deeds.

Philo tried to make me feel better. He made me strong tea and put whiskey and sugar in it and made me drink it. He offered to go out and try to find some weed for me. I told him not to bother. I was crying all the time. The kids weren't there, so I could let myself cry openly. Isabelle was in England, doing graduate work in biology, and William was at college in Amherst. Philo and I were alone again after all those years and I had been thinking about writing a cookbook. But not that night.

“It was the war that doomed us,” I cried. “My generation has never gotten over that war—the protest against it, the anger against the protesters, the fear of another one.”

“I think our generation was great,” Philo said. “Greater than our fathers'.” Philo called the so-called “greatest generation”—our parents—the alcoholic generation, the heavy-smoking, heavy-drinking generation, the angry men.

“Look what they did. Sandy spent her life helping poor women get medical care. She didn't try to become famous or rich; she did real good in life. It's hard to do good. You start out wanting to do something good but somewhere along the way your dream twists into something profitable, something that serves your ambitions. But she stuck with it, all her life. She chose that way over a conventional life, over seeking money and status, over being wild and druggy and having fun, over being an artist, over . . . anything else!

“And look at Bishop and Rebecca. She's a pediatrician in a poor neighborhood: what a great thing! Pediatrics is not a branch of medicine that makes you rich, like surgery or dermatology or oncology. It's
good.
And he—what could be better than selling books for children? What a great thing to do! Good people do it.

“And Dolores. She tries to heal girls who've been abused. That's a heartbreaking job, imagine how many failures you must encounter. And there's certainly no money in it.

“You spend your life trying to make people feel good through food that you make sure is as healthy as it can be. You make just enough money to get by, but you foster an ecologically healthy world. I do too in my way.

“Our generation chose these things. A lot of my friends from college who started out working in corporations, the way I did, dropped out, the girls especially. And they started to do things that don't pay a lot, that help other people, that make life better.

“All those things we shouted back then, Make love not war, peace and brotherhood—or sisterhood—whatever. We meant them.”

I sat up. Philo never talked much, and this was extreme eloquence for him. It surprised me.

“You think we produced a generation of saints? Then how come the world is worse than it ever was?”

I sat back and sipped the tea he'd made me. It did make me feel a bit better. I loved what he was saying about Sandy and Bishop and Dolores—and me. I loved thinking about us that way. It's true, we had lived our lives so as to do some kind of good. Even me, just cooking. In articles in fancy cooking magazines they talked about me as if I were some kind of prophet who had brought health back to the American diet. But all we'd done was what we loved doing: we cooked what we loved to eat. It was selfish, after all.

But the world is as terrible a place as ever.

The most famous of any of the people I knew was still my father, who never even thought about doing good or doing anything for anyone else, and who, poor broken soul, hardly even did anything for his own pleasure, much less profit, as far as I could see. He's so famous now that they're talking about building a museum just for his work. The paintings of his I own give me a great sense of security—I know I'll be okay in old age because I can always sell them if I'm in need. And they are there for Isabelle and William. As a chef, I have no retirement plan except my own savings, and they are sparse after putting two kids through college. But I have a dozen of Dad's canvases.

And here we were about to be at war again, bogged down in a country we had no business being in, with no clear way out.
Again
! This time they would take us to war
after
huge protests. The shots of the antiwar marches in London and Berlin and other cities, everywhere in the world, would be the most inspiring photographs I'd ever seen.

I think about the millions of people starving, working for starvation wages, or dying of AIDS in faraway places; I think of millions of people in my own country who work hard but have no place to live, have no health insurance, spend their lives sick with worry. And then I think of my friends and me, and Philo, and poor dead Sandy, and Bishop and Bec and Dolores, and how we found a way to live in contentment, to have the thing I wanted so much when I was a girl: happy lives. And I wonder: Does it matter? Is it important in the scale of things that a few people achieve happy lives? Does it change the balance for the rest? Does it create a usable example? I only know that I want my happy life, I want to keep it, I want it more than anything. And that if I were to live again, fifty times over, that is what I'd want.

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Published in 2009 by the Feminist Press
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Text © 2009 by Marilyn French

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French, Marilyn, 1929-2009 The love children / by Marilyn French. p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-558-61650-9

I. Title.

PS3556.R42L'.54—dc22

2009010439