When my husband, Al, was about to begin shooting
his movie, he suggested we move to the country near Elstree Studio.
The studio maintained a house there - the gate house on a large estate,
a cozy Tudor called Chantry Cottage. They told him there were tulips
in spring, a rock garden where cloud-white alyssum drifted into lavender
phlox, that the house had a view of the sweeping expanse of the great
house where there were formal gardens, and, more potent a lure, that
Stanley Kubrick lived one estate away. It would be a beautiful place
to live, Al said, reminding me that I had always loved English gardens
- leaf bending to leaf, delphiniums rising proudly above all. Just think
of it, Mother and Child, that sacred union, together among the floral
indulgences of the English garden. We made the move, though it was the
circles under his eyes that made the decision.
It wasn't tulip season, it was winter, and
the sky in the country, less benign than that over London, was a rancorous,
unmoving gray. There were no tulips and no delphiniums. We never saw
the formal garden of the great house, in fact, we couldn't even see
the house.
Our Tudor looked charming on the outside,
but the interior had a sullen quality. The ceilings were so low that
they felt like they were attacking. The living room, with small windows
that looked onto a dark, stone, flowerless bank, was furnished with
box-like black and grey tweed armchairs. They squared off around the
room like pugilists with gloves raised, defying you to come near them.
I walked into the room the first day and sprang backward. I would not
use this cheerless room.
The dining room, set beyond the kitchen at
the far end of the house, had been the stable. What was once a row of
horses' troughs had been turned to a sideboard with a sheet of hammered
copper as a covering. It was beautiful. It was also unheated, and through
the whole dark winter, we pretended the room wasn't there. The kitchen
was a large square with a stove, refrigerator, and sink lined up in
a row, begging to be left alone. To the side of the kitchen was a welcoming
back porch, and what it welcomed were cold drafts, ushered into the
house with zeal and regularity.
Only the master bedroom was large and filled
with windows. Carting a straight-backed chair up from the dining room,
I set it next to the bed. As Fredo grew, I put a play pen next to the
straight-backed chair and the bedroom became the play-room, the study
and the place to rest. With punishing twelve hour days, my husband needed
merely to rest. He left early in the morning and returned late at night.
He was never hungry, never able to\ talk of anything but the film. What
he wanted at the end of an arduous day was to crawl under the blanket
of my maternal instinct and be comforted, but that spot was taken. When
Fredo woke, Al jumped as if he had heard an intruder. When I picked
Fredo up, he watched as if he were looking at someone else's life through
a window. He'd watch, then remember the film, and he'd talk faster,
louder, harder. His voice trailed away when I succumbed to the smile
on Fredo's face, or found a dirty diaper to be more relevant than anything
that happened on a movie set.
In his preoccupation with the film, Al had
yet to adjust to the inevitable - that the demands of a helpless child
will always override the longings of an adult. He pulled deeper into
the film which was not going well. Experienced in making thirty, or
sixty second commercials, Al was not prepared for the grind of a feature-length
film, or for the discontinuous method of shooting, where the last scene
was shot together with the first scene. Though I could touch the periphery
of this work, I was excluded from the obsessive center of activity,
merely a passive onlooker, that dire thing known only as someone's wife.
The well-meaning had advised me about life
as a mother. They told me that I would be oh, so busy when I had a baby,
that I would be able to think of nothing else. I don't know what kind
of babies those people had, but mine was asleep half the day. When he
was awake, every small exhalation of breath would fill the room with
happiness; every smile, even those supposedly inspired by gas, would
lure me into willing servitude. I was helpless before the love I felt
for this small, very animate human being, and this was a love like no
other for it could never know contingency, and it could never be betrayed.
But Child would fall asleep and then Mother would wonder what to do,
there in the flowerless countryside under a rancorous gray sky.
At first I read a lot. In a desperate effort
to locate the flora of the English countryside, I read D.H. Lawrence
and Thomas Hardy, but I zipped through the pages quickly. Only James
Joyce could offer enough words and enough perplexing tangles to adequately
fill my time, so I committed myself to a second reading of Joyce's Ulysses,
and when that was done, decided to work up an audition monologue from
Molly Bloom's soliloquy. When I was satisfied with the monologue, I
performed it for the black and white tweed pugilists who were neither
moved by, nor appreciative of my interpretation. I wrote ten page letters
home, a testimony to my Irish blood, spinning a tale complete with dramatic
highlights and denouement out of a trip to the post office. More than
anything, I waited for Fredo to wake and put magic in my life, even
as he offered up dirty diapers. The two of us were as enclosed in stillness
as a medieval painting - Mother and Child gazing only at each other,
locked in time and space - though this classic twosome stared only at
each other because there was no one else to look at.
Once a week I called home to talk with my
mother, thrilling her with conversations that centered on a baby's body
sounds - spit-ups, burps and hiccups. To entice her over for a visit,
I told her about quince preserves. When that didn't work, I put on a
brogue and said, "sure, and it's a fine chin-wag that we'll be
havin' and a nice cup o' tay." When that didn't work, I dared to
tell her I was lonely. "You wanted this, dear," she said.
I never mentioned anything but burps and hiccups again.
I was depressed, and moving through my days
without zeal. As I became aware of my own dullness, I stopped devaluing
women whose lives were wrapped in gossip about casseroles or other people's
activities. Bound by the narrow walls of a house, those women knew each
millimeter of their space intimately, a triumph of life over boredom.One
day Isobel called to ask me how I was doing.
"Okay," I told her. "I've
been catching up on my reading."
"Hmm," she mused, then began to
ask me questions about the baby and my daily routine, but most questions
focussed on what I was cooking. "Cooking?" I laughed a giddy
laugh, defensive and embarrassed. "I have a baby under my feet,
and a husband too tired to eat. There would be a pile of leftovers.
Who'd eat them? There is no other living thing around here."
"Not to worry, love," she said,
"we'll fix that. I shall pick you and the baby up tomorrow. We
are going shopping. You must learn to cook. To really cook. Be ready
early."
She arrived early, and I was ready. Before
heading out, she whizzed through the kitchen, poking through pots and
pans, serving dishes, the Harrod's crock that held utensils. "Skimpy,"
she snorted, determining that I was not having fun because I had no
friendly helpers, but when she saw the accursed room off the back, she
grew quite excited. "Oh, what good luck to have such a chilly room,"
she said. "You have chocolate caraque in your future."
I didn't know what chocolate caraque was,
and wasn't sure that I wanted to find out if it meant going near that
igloo, but I felt a prick of curiosity.
When she had satisfied herself that we needed
a major shopping expedition, I bundled Fredo in my lap and we set out.
We drove into London to go to her butcher where we bought a chicken
because, "poulet a l'estragon is quite easy. You'll do that tonight.
And a lovely quiche. That's ever so easy as well. And we'll get you
into caraque, but not yet." As soon as she turned caraque into
the forbidden fruit, my curiosity bloomed. What was so difficult? Why
couldn't I try it? Isobel explained that caraque is the name of the
shaved chocolate curls on top of a dessert, such as a chocolate mousse
or cake, and that it was easy, but you needed to get the feel of it.
First one was to melt chocolate "...in a double boiler, love, you
never put chocolate over direct heat." When melted, one poured
the chocolate on a marble slab in a chilly room. While it was still
pliable, but beginning to harden, one took a knife and pushed it into
curls. "Easy, once you understand the angle of the knife, but you
must also catch the exact moment - not too soft or too hard." My
eyes brightened with a perceived dare. Isobel raised one thin eyebrow,
noting that challenge aroused me. "Beef Wellington is another one
for much later," she said. "First you must perfect your pâte
feuilletée. That's puff pastry - have to get the feel of that
one, too."
We went first to a bookstore where Isobel
introduced me to cookbooks by Elizabeth David, Jane Grigson and Elizabeth
Ayrton. I bought a second copy of Julia Child swearing I'd never again
leave Julia pining unused on a bookshelf. We went to a cook store where
Isobel insisted I buy a stock pot so large that I wondered about shipping
it home. She would not hear my reluctance, saying that I must have a
good stock pot, and "please, don't ever forget that you absolutely
must brown the bones in the oven before you start. Don't ever, ever
just throw them in the pot." Where had I heard that before? Mrs.
Horowitz had told me the same thing when I was just a child. We bought
flan rings of several sizes, because Isobel insisted I needed to be
prepared for any number of guests since I would soon have people coming
over all the time, an idea that seemed implausible to me. We bought
whisks and a rolling pin, a great slab of marble which I was to put
in the igloo preparing for the caraque that rose in my future. I found
one small copper pot on sale to add to my abandoned collection now gathering
New York City tarnish. Finally we shopped for ingredients for the day's
meal. I was lucky to be introduced to Isobel's greengrocer and her butcher,
both of whom treated me with deference, perhaps thinking they had another
cook as talented as Isobel.
When we returned home, I laid Fredo in his
crib and went to the kitchen with Isobel. As we unpacked, Isobel instructed
me to use the largest flan ring when I made the quiche tonight. When
I asked what I would do with the leftovers, she smiled and said I should
send it to the studio. "Not to worry, they will devour it."
I thanked her even as I set out the butter
to soften a little for the short crust pastry.
"Never be a tepid cook," she said
at the door. Then she was gone.
While Fredo slept I moved his playpen from
the bedroom to the kitchen, piling in all the stuffed animals that he
never bothered to play with, every brightly colored plastic toy that
found its way into his mouth, and the copy of Mother Goose that I read
to him every day. I made the dough which reminded me of the time I had
made it with one of my sisters, the two of us shouting "fraisage,"
and I wished that Fredo was awake so I could shout to him.
When he woke, I changed his diaper. As I
pinned, I lowered my voice to a mock basso: "Fee, fi, fo, fum,
I smell the pastry of a French -a-man. We are baking our pat-a-cake
today, my darling Fredo." He enjoyed my performance and made a
new sound, one that contained both a gurgle and a laugh.
Once I put Fredo in the playpen again, I
opened his book to the page that had Humpty Dumpty, pointed to the illustration
and said, "egg." I put the book in front of him, and picked
up one of the several eggs used in a quiche. "Look, Fredo - egg."
He looked down at the book, up at my hand. Then I went back to the counter,
held one egg aloft over the bowl, and, continuing in the basso voice
range that had elicited his mirth, I intoned, "Humpty Dumpty sat
on a wall. Humpty Dumpty had. . . " I paused, a dramatic pause,
egg ready to be broken, "... a great fall." Crack. Fredo stood
in his playpen, pointing to the bowl, making undecipherable baby noises.
Then I gave him my new copper pot and a wooden
spoon, showed him the rhythmic potential of a good rat-a-tat-tat, and
finished cooking to the accompaniment of an etude for wood on copper.
We were both happy, and when Al returned at dinner Fredo was able to
taste a little of the quiche. It was a particularly savory quiche, and
Al happily, even greedily, took the leftovers to the studio with him
the following day.
After that day, sausage and fennel seed became
ghosts of the past. French cooking was the chic cuisine of the day,
its smooth cream sauces and butter-soaked pastries not yet banished
as hateful to arteries, and I pursued its intricacies fearlessly. Isobel
dangled challenges in front of me, and I responded. After two good quiches,
I confronted the ogre of the oven: that fear-inspiring pastry that stood
at the portals of great cooking, puff pastry. I managed a sweet and
delicate mille feuilles, and then moved into beef Wellington. And while
I was learning to cook, really cook, Fredo was learning his nursery
rhymes. When cooking I would place the Mother Goose book, open, in his
playpen. I would then recite the rhyme of the page, sometimes acting
out a particularly vivid rhyme, such as 'Jack jump over the candlestick'
which had me hopping around the kitchen, or 'the dish ran away with
the spoon," which I found handy when I finally made caraque, because
the dish and spoon kept running to the igloo to check the condition
of the chocolate.
After a few weeks of bringing leftovers to
the studio, Al came home talking about something other than the film.
The crew was loving my food, even said they were jealous that Al had
such food to eat. The lead actor said he was waiting for an invitation
to dinner, the assistant director asked if we ever gave parties. It
didn't take long before Al started inviting people to the house on Sundays,
and when the intense period of shooting stopped, and editing began,
the house was filled with people during the week as well.
They came at my husband's invitation
though they didn't know me. I would listen from the kitchen as they
argued about Fellini versus Bergman. At first I was jealous to be in
a room away from the debates, but then I realized that I was the one
surrounded by the allure of food. I was Circe, Lorelei, the seductress
of all seductresses, because I was in the room that was fragrant with
cooking. Once our guests were ensnared in the aroma of spices and herbs
and found their way to the kitchen, we got to know each other, and I
discovered that some of these film people also loved theater or were
reading the same books I was reading. A community developed around my
kitchen, one that seemed quite sophisticated in the food that was produced,
but was actually filled with sing-song nursery rhymes , and baby's spoon-on-pot
percussion. Isobel and her husband were frequent guests. She wore her
damask reserve on these occasions, but we found one moment in every
evening to wink at each other.
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