A DECADE BEFORE I was born, my grandparents built a house on Mount Desert Island in Maine. They positioned it on the pink granite rocks at the entrance to Northeast Harbor, making it a beacon to anyone who was traveling by in a boat; and in Maine in the summer that means everyone. Even if you looked the other way, you couldn’t miss it; the sun bounced off the Belgian hand-rolled picture windows like a paparazzi flash off a Harry Winston sparkler. Natives, tourists, and summer residents gawked as they passed by, and commented freely on the design, the artistic delusion, and the obvious moral depravity of both architect and owner.
When the sea was calm, you could hear the shrewd observations of the lobstermen:
“Jeez, Bert. Thing looks like it got skwashed by a rawk.”
“Ayeh.”
“Why’s your house so weird?” the towheaded heirs and heiresses in my sailing class would ask when we had to tack in front of the house all the magazines had labeled Trendsetting! Original! The Last Word! “I don’t know,” I’d say, waving my hand dismissively like I didn’t care, “my GPs are weird.”
Summer people on Mount Desert traditionally own “cottages.” This is a coy name for the brooding shingled fortresses that populate the island, both the genuine old dinosaurs and the hulking new fabrications that exude the venerable trust fund look parvenus strive for. My grandparents were done with that look; they were hell-bent on the avant-garde. I guess that’s one of the only problems with old money—you get bored with it.
Positioned as we were at the mouth of the harbor, and within shouting distance of a picturesque island replete with calendar-worthy lighthouses, tour boats passed by our house all day long. They teemed with sightseers—all cameras and binoculars and lobster T-shirts—who paid to ogle the moneyed piles lining the shore. You could hear the collective intake of breath when they putt-putted round the headland to confront the shock of the new.
“Now this heeah is what we call one of our Down East un-attractions, folks!” the smart-ass tour guide would boom on his PA system. “Had the fella that did the Yoo-nited Nations Building in New Yawk do it for him. Godfrey mighty, if they ain’t got his ’n’ her privies with a hole in the wall above the soap so’s they can talk to each other through the wahl when they’re takin’ a bath!”
Click, click, click would go all the Polaroids.
“Ayeh—slick as a smelt, this one is. Drives a cah can take you to Ellsworth and back in an hour, and that’s the truth.”
On cue, my brother Will and I would rush out and wag our butts, dancing around for the tourists like the predictably demented offspring of a wealthy eccentric.
On the morning of the day my grandparents’ chef bit me, I hurried down the gravel path from the cottage my brothers and me and our governess, Henrietta, slept in. The sun scattered diamonds across the ocean in a path to the rocky beach that circled our point. I was halfway to the kitchen when—THWACK!—a seagull smacked into the colossal living room window. “Number Fourteen,” I noted aloud, and ran back outside. By the time the screen door slammed behind me, this one was dead, a tiny smudge on the thick glass and a drifting feather the only signs of recent mortality. I picked the bird up, and it felt as weighty and warm and limp as the newborn baby someone had once mistakenly tried to get me to hold. Breakfast could wait; I hopped off the terrace onto the immaculate lawn that ran between the beach and the west side of the main house, and, skirting the wall but scrupulously avoiding the panoramic windows of my grandparents’ bedroom, I ran to the kitchen garden. At the far end I had a little summer project going.
Along with snooping, collecting is another of my genetically coded destinies. My cousin Carter Burden spoke for the entire family when he said, Collecting is in my blood. It never stops. It just keeps getting more expensive. My grandparents were into modern art and French wines and first edition novels and Schlumberger jewelry (and sleeping masks and prescribed barbiturates). My mother was into tans acquired in different parts of the world, and anything shaped like a turtle. Uncle Ham-Uncle Ham hoarded Nazi relics. Uncle Ordway had already amassed an exhaustive stockpile of pornographic literature and would go on to curate the authoritative collection of Brooke Shields memorabilia. My initial foray into this family arena had been eraser rubbings. The summer after kindergarten, I went through a case of Eberhard HBs to get about a quart’s worth of shredded pink filings. This summer I was concentrating on a dead bird collection. To be specific, I was chronicling (meticulously) mortification of the flesh—specifically, seagull flesh. I had my own little morgue going behind the English cucumbers, which, owing to the latitude of Northeast Harbor, no one had as yet gotten wind of.
Ten minutes later I was in the kitchen (hands washed) sitting on the red Formica counter and banging my sneakers against the white painted cabinets below. Three perfect circles of batter sizzled on the griddle of the massive black range, awaiting consummation by yours truly. A plate stacked high with flat, crispy bacon was keeping warm on the shelf above, and I stole a piece, cramming it into my mouth like a stick of Juicy Fruit.
“You know, I don ’ave all the day to cook for you.” Arturo, the new chef, winked as he flipped the pancakes over. We were at the zenith of the houseguest season (plane met at Bar Harbor airport twenty-six times, sheets in the guest cottages changed forty-nine times, signature lobster dinner prepared and served nineteen times). He turned back to his preparations on the worktable: an elaborate picnic lunch he and one of the kitchen girls were in the process of assembling and packing into creaky wicker suitcases. Gloria, a sluggish native with a showcase bosom and bountiful rear, simpered at him. Arturo was the most exotic piece of Mediterranean manhood she had ever seen outside of the Bar Harbor Criterion movie theater. Arturo rewarded her with a grin and a clack of his long white chops, something he was unfortunately prone to doing. A drop of oil slid down the forelock he vainly positioned each morning to escape the hold of his toque.
It had taken a leap of faith for my grandfather to hire a non-Gaul, and it never would have happened but for the publication of Elizabeth David’s Italian Food. Arturo had exploded onto our domestic scene only a few months earlier, all springing black hair and ion-charged machismo.
“I think they’re ready,” I announced to him, jumping down from the counter to see what was more important than my blueberry pancakes.
Arturo turned the pancakes onto a warm plate and left me to get the butter and syrup myself.
“I gotta get the peek-neek ready so you must do for youself,” he said, pouring a stream of smooth red gazpacho into a steel thermos. He wedged it into one of the baskets, beside a corpulent slice of Brie and a stack of cream-colored Bakelite cups. “’Ay! Not so theeck!” He admonished Gloria, who was slathering sandwich bread with egg salad. Arturo politely moved her aside. He added some chervil and a stick of soft butter to the bowl, and then demonstrated to his devotee how to smooth a thin layer of the mixture onto the pieces of brown and white bread; and how to cut off the crusts just so, and then the square into triangles, so what you were left with was an elegant little sandwich with the caloric testosterone of a Big Mac. “You finish this, then you do the ros bif. And theen, theen, theen! Not fat like your kine a san-wich!” Gloria’s response was to bat her chalky blue eyelids and squeeze her elbows together so that her breasts struggled to leap out from her pink uniform.
As the summer progressed, the menus my grandfather planned became increasingly elaborate as more and more houseguests arrived on the shuttle from Boston. He began each day by ringing his secretary in New York.
“Miss Pou,” he would pronounce into the telephone, lying in his bed with a crackling morning fire, gazing out the window at yachts and sailboats and Boston Whalers coming through the Western Way.
The William A. M. Burden Company was at Rockefeller Center, where the titanic bronze Atlas struggled under planet Earth at the entrance to the building, and upstairs, on the thirty-second floor, Miss Pou struggled under my grandfather. She had been hired during his ambassadorship to Belgium and would remain until his death, which she would fervently wish for throughout the last ten years of his life. The offices took up the whole of the floor and had killer views from every window of the modern, hard-edged space. The carpeting was a shocking yellow, the leather chairs and sofas black, and the built-in desks smooth white Formica. Workers moved discreetly past paintings and sculptures by Léger and Arp and Diebenkorn and Warhol and Brancusi.
There were only two people on my grandfather’s payroll to whom my mother was civil, and one of them was his secretary. Miss Pou’s first name was Mildred, which cracked Will and me up almost as much as her pee-you last, and her daily recommended vitamin C intake came from whiskey sours, which is probably the biggest reason my mother liked her. She was from Shreveport, Louisiana, and had once dated Elvis (“Nothin’ but a wet kisser, darlin’ ”). She changed her hair color once a month, but my favorite thing about her was that she had no belly button because the surgeon had forgotten to put it back after her tummy tuck.
“Miss Pou, the president of M.I.T. is arriving tomorrow at three and I would like to serve grouse for dinner.”
“Certainly, sir. Though I believe it may be a bit early—”
“Miss Pou. My food calendar states that mid- August is the season for grouse, so I am certain you’ll find a resource.”
“Yes, Mr. Burden. I suppose I can call Scotland.”
“Marvelous. Bring twelve. Catch the eight-thirty flight. Good-bye.”
After dressing for his ten o’clock doubles game at the Harbor Club, my grandfather held a morning consultation with Arturo in the living room, seated beside the floor-to-ceiling window that faced the ocean, in his favorite bright yellow Eero Saarinen chair, a Chesterfield smoldering in the ashtray beside him and a pencil poised above his customary brown spiral notebook. “Arturo,” he would begin, adjusting his steel-rimmed glasses and signaling with his long fingers for the chef to take a seat. “This Wednesday I’m hosting a luncheon for some important people from Washington . . .”
My grandfather was a devotee of chaudfroid. This is the culinary technique whereby ordinary foodstuffs such as poultry and fish are transformed into gleaming, elaborately decorated objets that seem hardly edible. A lot of white sauce and rubbery aspic is involved, fortified to cementing capability with abundant amounts of gelatin. It stands to reason that chaudfroid has gone the way of pillbox hats and employing leeches to bring down a fever.
Arturo was also excessively fond of chaudfroid. His kitchen could produce a buffet worthy of depiction by Tiepolo. He was Bob Mackie with a stewing hen; tied up and into the pot she went, and out that bird came to be placed on a jittery stage of aspic, enrobed in gelatinous ivory sateen with intricately stenciled truffles and greenery running up and down her showgirl breasts. Arturo knew how to please the ladies. For my grandmother, a Kon-Tiki enthusiast, he fashioned Tahitian cucumber outriggers with little oars carved out of carrots, filling them with composed salads of lobster or crab or tiny diced vegetables, bound with copious amounts of mayonnaise, aka French luncheon glue. These vessels were set to sail on the table between the dishes of glorified poultry, fish, and pastry-wrapped terrines. “Oh, Arturo!” my grandmother would exclaim. “You are so very talented.” And she’d hum a snatch of “E Le Ka Lei Lei” as she helped herself to one.
After I’d polished off my pancakes and a dozen strips of bacon, which my mother would have been horrified to witness (Jesus, Toots! How fat do you want to be?), and after I’d checked on my birds, and been forced to bury two of them due to mortification of the flesh so extreme that if left unchecked might lead to olfactory discovery, I returned to the kitchen because I had nothing better to do until we set sail for the picnic later in the morning.
Arturo and his sous-chef were making tortellini. They were shaping and sealing the delicate spinach dough with the economy of assembly line workers. Arturo asked me if I would like to make one, and he showed me how to do it with unexpected patience. I watched as he caught up a spoonful of the filling, a pink and green mixture of raw veal and fresh herbs, and plopped it on the square of dough. He brushed the edges with water; then deftly folded the square diagonally, then into a sort of croissant shape, sealing the tips together with a tender little pinch. He might have been diapering a baby.
After a couple of village idiot efforts, I shaped one perfectly. In recognition of my accomplishment, Arturo clapped his hands, threw me up in the air over his head, and soundly bit me on the ass.
Well, what do you think I did?
Wailing like a fire engine, I ran from the kitchen, leaving the bewildered chef standing there with his arms stretched out and a ma? on his lips, and ran straight to my grandparents’ bedroom. They were getting changed after their morning tennis game and were, as was their habit, walking around in their underwear, oblivious to anyone who entered the room.
“Hello, dearie,” said my grandmother. “You’re just in time to hook me up, isn’t she, girls?” The poodles stared blankly from the nest of expensive French linen they had clawed around themselves at the foot of the bed. I began fumbling with my grandmother’s long-line bra/panty/girdle contraption, halting along the way to tuck in the ripples of her soft back.
“Arturo BIT me,” I told her, exhibiting the spot on my butt and pointedly wiping tears from my face with the hand that was fastening her up.
“Well, I’m sure he didn’t mean it. Brothers can be like that!”
“Arturo. The CHEF,” I said.
“Oh, well that’s different. Thank you, dearie.” She got up with a small brfftt and padded back to her dressing room, humming “All Things Bright and Beautiful.”
I turned to my grandfather, not my usual ally, but my impatience got the better of me.
My grandfather was a big man. Once slim, he now had a paunch that cantilevered impressively over his British Y-fronts and the long stick legs below. He looked like an Edward Lear drawing of old secretary bird wading around in a marsh. There was a vulnerability to him when he was seminude, making him look almost cozy.
I blubbed my story out to him in a stream of snot and vituperative barbs. He stood in front of me idly scratching his white-haired chest as he listened with a bland expression. Midway, I became distracted by the pointy look of his underpants and the consequent thought of his hoary old penis, which caused me to splutter to an end far less intelligently than I would have liked.
“I feel certain you’ll recover,” said my grandfather with a bemused smile. “Good chefs are hard to find.”
His tone of voice suggested that it would be more likely for the Cold War to end than for him to let a chef go at the height of the season.
All I could think of to say was “ERRRAGHH!” as I ran from the room and headed back to our cabin.
Edward was sitting in the middle of our living room, surrounded by a wall of blocks and basking in his achievement. Henrietta was in the tiny kitchen, out of range, so I knocked the wall over and headed for the telephone next to the stone fireplace. My mother wasn’t home so I didn’t have to lose face with her too. I slammed out the cabin and headed for the dock.
It was considered déclassé to have a pretentious yacht if you were a summertime Downeaster. Ours was a pumped-up version of a lobster boat. Her name was Spindrift, and she was comfortably broad, with an ample rear for entertaining, a large but simple galley, and enough sleeping bunks below to overnight six. Due to my grandfather’s love of speed, she had a big BMW engine and could make thirty knots in a following sea.
Captain Closson was the ex-navy man who ran my grandfather’s boats in summer. Every day during the summer season, Captain drove over from Southwest Harbor, rowed a dinghy out to where our boat was moored in Northeast Harbor, and brought her over to tie up at our dock and await orders. You could be as sure of finding him down there at nine o’clock, dressed in his khaki uniform, black knit tie, and thick-soled black lace-up shoes, as you could of waking up in the morning.
Captain was a big man with a face the color of the salt pork he liked to use in his chowders. He parted his thinning gray hair with a twenty-nine-cent comb and a handful of Vitalis, and you could see his freckled scalp through the furrows the teeth made. His arms and hands were scarred from bear traps, knives, and fishhooks, and he could catch anything in the sea—cod, bluefish, mackerel, flounder, stripers, haddock, shark, pollack, and even the odd lobster. He had the strength to pull a forty-pound cod up on a deep-sea line with one hand, while holding your feet and dunking your bratty little head in the ocean with the other.
When Captain was in the war, he caught two bullets from the Japs. One went through his throat, which gave him a weird dent there, and the other lodged in his privates, or so it was said. He talked about the war when he took us cruising a couple of times each summer. It would be five or six completely torquedup kids and him. We’d moor up Somes Sound by Treasure Island, or in Burnt Cove Harbor next to Swan’s, and in the morning we’d wake up and there he’d be at the stove in the galley, frying up bacon and sausages, unshaven and groggy from staying up all night telling dirty jokes and ghost stories.
Confidant, prankster, philosopher, Captain was the patriarchal pinch hitter. I’d adored him since before I could speak. When I was at camp earlier in the summer, about an hour away from my grandparents’ place, Captain would come visit every couple of weeks. He’d arrive in his station wagon, a seagoing vessel itself, and after a half hour joking and giggling with all the girls in my cabin, he would take me out for lunch at the local Tastee Freez. On the way back he liked to pull to the side of the road to “cuddle.” He’d slide me over beside him on the front bench seat and start kissing me on the lips. I’d try to wriggle away with an “Oh my God I’m going to be late,” but he’d say, “Let’s just sit here a little longer.” Then he’d drive me back to camp.
This is how stupid I was: I tried to talk to my mother about it. As for a lot of eight-year-olds, it was excruciatingly awkward for me to discuss anything sexual with an adult, but she really helped me deal with it.
“Honestly, Toots,” she laughed, “I don’t know why you’re having such a cow over it. Let an old man have some fun! Anyway, he got his nuts shot off in the war, so it’s not like he can really do anything.”
I forgave him. Anything to keep the family together.
Forward, in between the bow and the anchor storage, there was a rumble seat cut into the deck of the Spindrift, which was where my brother and I sat on the way to the picnic, bumping up and down with the waves, the saline wind whipping through our hair when we popped our heads up to scan the ocean for dolphins. I had given myself a singularly unattractive haircut at camp earlier that summer, the kind of blunt bob that is too short to contain and too long to stay out of your eyes. My hair was lacerating my eyeballs and my head looked like a whipped-up bale of straw, so I huddled back down against the warm red leather seat and curled my bare toes over the lip of the deck.
We began playing the Would You Rather? game. Or rather, Will did. He loved the game, and it was about the only time he broke out of his monosyllabic pattern. I was still seething from the morning’s crime, and preoccupied with planning revenge.
“Would you rather sneeze dog shit or vomit rubber cement?” Will asked.
“Neither.”
“Okay, would you rather go to the bathroom through your eyeballs or smell stuff with your butt.”
“Quit. I don’t want to play,” I told him sharply. I needed to concentrate. I was thinking rat poison in the Wild Turkey bottle. More interesting than the old liquid-nicotine-in-the-aftershave trick, it would provide a cripplingly painful death. Any self-respecting soul sister of Wednesday Addams knew the effects of rat poison on a person. According to the encyclopedia of poisons I’d found on the bomb shelter bookshelf, all it would take was one gram of barium chloride; that was a fatal dose.
But how to do Arturo . . .
“All right, all right,” said Will, “would you rather have to listen to Petula Clark sing ‘Downtown’ all day long for the rest of your life or leave a trail of calamine lotion wherever you go?”
As Captain Closson slowed the boat to pass into the cove of Placentia Island, where we would go ashore for the picnic, snatches of conversation floated forward from the stern.
“. . . And if LBJ even thinks about backing down from those slit-eyed pinkos—”
“. . . Honestly, darling, Paris is overrun with the things!”
“A ha ha ha! You don’t mean he sold it at a dollar ten a share, the muddleheaded bastard . . .”
They were the tones of self-confident, self-satisfied, unabashedly tipsy grown-ups. Getting them to shore for a picnic would be tricky.
The first rowboat carried precious cargo: the bar and, even more essential, the shaker of drinks—the butler. Adolphe wore formal attire even when presiding over an al fresco event such as this. Adolphe had never learned to swim. Still, he maintained the dignity of a wrongly sentenced monarch as he suffered himself to be transported, sitting stiffly upright like a pasha in the bow of the dinghy. When Captain plowed its nose into the sand and leapt out, painter in hand, Adolphe scampered with surprising agility ashore and onto higher ground to take up his critical station, shaking up martinis and daiquiris and sours.
Will and I leapt off the boat and swam like maniacs through the icy water to shore. We lingered over the beach, ripe with the pleasant stink of things washed up from the sea, and popped seaweed pustules at each other. As they arrived, the grown-ups made their way to the picnic spot with varying degrees of dexterity. I prayed my grandfather would trip over a granite boulder and break his head open, but he made it okay despite practically needing a walker. By the time everyone gathered, a smoky drift-wood fire was ablaze, keeping the mosquitoes at bay, and the picnic hampers had been opened. The party perched on logs and boulders while the help passed out cups of chilled gazpacho and vichyssoise, glasses of cold white Burgundy (as if they needed it), and plates piled with the sandwiches made by the slut and the pedophile that morning. (Which I did not touch.)
I was working my way through each ruffly papered compartment of the assortment box of Pepperidge Farm cookies, envisioning Arturo lashed to one of the buoys out the Western Way (the ones that have dead men clinging to them below the water-line, in various stages of decomposition), when my grandmother came up to me. Her hairnet was escaping off to one side, and her piped wool blazer sported a smear of Brie.
“Here, dearie,” she said with alcohol-sweet breath as she pressed a packet of Wash’n Dri on me. “Are you feeling all right? You’re unusually quiet today.”
My sweet grandmother. She tried so hard to make everything right, even without the tools. She purposefully had no memory of what I’d told her this morning. She was wasted, and it would take Captain and his mate to get her back to the rowboat and then up the ladder onto the Sprindrift,where she could hopefully snooze it off in a deck chair all the way home, in time for a nice bath before getting dressed for the cocktail hour at six.
I was the first off the boat when we tied up to our dock, pleading an urgent desire for my own john. In truth I needed to check on Number Twelve, who had that morning begun to exhibit a major larva infestation that needed further documentation.
I ran smack into Arturo. He was bouncing down the back path from the dock where he often went fishing during his break. His toque was in place, wobbling away on top of his oily head. His sleeves were rolled up over his Popeye forearms, and the double-breasted jacket of his kitchen whites was unbuttoned at the top so that a flap hung down to one side, revealing a lurid hedge of the thick dark hair that undoubtedly covered all unseen parts of his body. A small ray hung on the end of his line; its white belly caught the light as it slowly spun, like a dead man on a rope. I tried to scurry past, but Arturo blocked my path. Clacking like a windup set of dentures, he gestured at me, including me in his merry game. He held out the ray. From his jacket he took a knife and dropped it, blade first, into the ray’s pocket of a mouth.
“Sick,” I said.
I suppose he was trying to get me to laugh, maybe in some sort of completely weird expression of regret for the morning’s wrongdoing. When it didn’t work, Arturo shrugged his shoulders skyward and trotted off to the kitchen, proudly holding out the grotesque nature morte for all to see.
That evening Will and I were allowed to sit with our grandparents and their guests before they had dinner. We drank Coca-Colas with crushed ice that the maids, in their formal black-and-white uniforms, so at odds with the primal rock and sea, offered us from a silver tray. Relaxing a little, I inhaled the scent of ocean and lilies and mold.
The living-dining area was a curved, open-plan space that was divided by a strip of earth planted with baby spruce trees and neon green moss. Normally, Will and I spent the cocktail hour leaping through the trees, from the elevated dining area down to the living room and back up again. When we tired of that, and when our grandparents were focused on Walter Cronkite, we climbed to the top of the bookcases that rose fifteen feet above the length of the built-in sofa, and plopped repeatedly down on to the feathered cushions below. But now I was being momentarily held hostage by a florid man wearing a yellow ascot with crabs on it. He was interrogating me about the upcoming fourth-grade syllabus when Obadiah shambled in. His timing always was impeccable.
Obadiah was the adorable puppy with Dumbo ears that my mother had snatched out of a pet shop window, only to have him grow up to be a basset hound. Animal lover though she was, every chance she got she packed him off with us to visit our grandparents. He was fat, engulfed in his own saliva, and endearingly bent on parasuicide. En vacances in Maine he was fond of casting himself into the ocean, typically between the boat and the dock so that he could be crushed between them as he drowned. You’d think this would be a safe bet; as each wave passed by, Obadiah would get sucked under and slammed against the struts of the float and the wooden hull. Slightly less dramatic were his attempts to run away from home. I’m pretty sure the idea was to either starve or get run over by at least one automobile along the way. As he set off at a snail’s plod, you could almost see the miniature hobo sack swaying on a pole over his shoulder.
The main reason Obadiah never succeeded in completing his mission was that he required an audience. He would lumber down and heave himself off the dock only when there was a crowd of people to watch. Invariably someone dragged him out by his collar, usually falling in as well from the sodden effort of the recovery. Likewise, when Obadiah decamped for parts unknown, he would alert everyone by standing at the top of the driveway for about an hour, staring at the house for a misty-eyed final look. Sighing heavily, he would eventually set off. The way out to the world at large was half a mile long. Whoever saw him during the two hours it took Obadiah to reach the main road would alert a rescue squad, who in turn had plenty of time to repot a dozen begonias, read The New Yorker cover to cover, or prepare a Baked Alaska before hopping in the car to go pick him up.
I’m convinced Obadiah was welcomed into my grandparents’ house not because they were particularly fond of him but because he looked remarkably chic licking his privates under the Milton Avery landscapes or snoring on his back on the Bertoia furniture. Obadiah was photographed frequently beneath the boomerang-shaped Noguchi dining table, a layered inverted pyramid of honey-colored maple that might have come from a scrapped NASA project. In many of the pictures he is caught gazing balefully into the camera lens with an empty Baccarat goblet next to his elephantine splayed feet. As clumsy as the dog was, he knew how to treat the stemware with respect.
Now Obadiah traveled slowly across the living room to pose beside my grandfather, who was conversing with a deeply tanned West Coast sort who leaned toward him attentively, popping macadamia nuts in his mouth every two seconds from the hors d’oeuvres tray. Obadiah fixed his runny eyes on the trajectory between the man’s mouth and the tray. Freed from my cross-examination, I was studying my grandfather as he talked, as he smiled his dry smile and emphasized his points with languid gestures. He recrossed his legs with the help of his hands and, draining his glass, signaled Adolphe for another. Telepathically I signaled to him that he had one last chance to apologize, and to fire Arturo so that we could get on with the rest of the summer. I gave him exactly seven minutes, while I sipped my Coke, pretending to leaf through Paris Match. During those seven minutes, my grandfather and Mr. Hollywood covered the topics of post-World War Two Brazilian aeronautics, the disappointing fledgling ’63 California vintage, and the shocking trend of Harvard’s anticipated diversification, but my grandfather did not apologize.
Adolphe whispered to my grandmother that dinner was served, and the grown-ups went up the low stairs beside the fir trees to the table. Will and I remained behind, lying across the huge cushions on the sofa, sucking on the sugary crushed ice at the bottom of our Coke glasses, he reading the funnies from the Ellsworth Times and I one of the vintage Vault of Horror comic books that I kept stashed behind the American Heritage series on the fifth shelf. I watched as the butler pulled out my grandmother’s chair for her, and she carefully set her drink down beside a trio of wineglasses before half falling onto the slippery, modern plywood seat. Gathered around the table, the grown-ups looked like crazed surgeons in a slasher film, their faces flushed above the silly bibs they’d tied around their necks, and sharp instruments for torturing crustaceans lying menacingly alongside their place mats.
An enormous bowl of steamed clams was borne in. Adolphe stood unflinchingly beside my grandmother as she tussled with them, then he continued round the table as if he had the entire summer left to serve just this course. He reappeared to pour Taittinger champagne into the oversized V-shaped Steuben glasses, each so heavy you needed two hands to lift it. A skinned white peach was wedged into the point at each base; as the meal progressed the fruit flavored the champagne and the wine macerated the fruit.
That left Selma with the lobster. She stumbled a little under the weight of the scarlet carapaces, her old-fashioned spectacles opaque from the steam. Anna trailed with a bowl of buttered peas from the garden. Next out the swinging door of the kitchen would come corn on the cob, and then the golden ballooning popovers, and then a refill of champagne. I knew the drill like I knew bedtime followed brushing your teeth, and maggots followed flies on the decomposing body of a seagull.
Obadiah had singled out a woman at the north corner of the table, though she was as yet unaware. At dinner parties, he liked to position himself exactly in the middle of the diners and, from this advantageous position, choose a patsy. Plonking himself down at the victim’s feet, under the table, in line with his or her crotch, he would gaze steadfastly up, the deep red pockets of his eyes sparkling with eye goo. If pressed, Obadiah might even moan a little. Should the victim need more encouragement, he’d give his or her ankle a lick. During summer, most of these ankles were tanned and unsheathed, and the startling effect of Obadiah’s long, hot, dripping wet tongue usually resulted in something being thrown at him. If it happened to be food, he scarfed it down with the speed of a raptor. Obadiah had flashes of real intelligence.
Back on the sofa, I’d moved on to a moldy issue of Chamber of Chills. A grisly pictorial of zombies ransacking a kitchen afforded me a sudden brainstorm.
“Hey, Will,” I said to Will, nudging him with the toe of my sneaker.
“Mmm.”
“I just got an idea and it’s a really good one.”
“Uh huh.” My dyslexic brother was laboring through Mandrake the Magician. I kicked him.
“What!”
“Listen—when everyone’s asleep after lunch—”
“Ayeeeee!” cried Obadiah’s quarry, upsetting her champagne glass and elbowing her popover to the floor. Obadiah snatched it up and waddled briskly off through the fir trees and out the screen door.
Will and I slunk out the other way; he was, after all, our dog.
A fog had crept in during dinner, rolling silently off the ocean to hang in droplets from the needles of the pine trees and the thorns and blossoms of the wild rosebushes that grew at the top of the seawall. It clung to my hair and stood out in tiny wet granules on the thick wool of my sweater as we walked up the gravel path from the main house to our cottage. Obadiah clambered to the top of the stairs ahead of us. As I let him in, light spilled out onto the red painted steps, and the welcoming bulk of Henrietta spilled out after it. Edward was on her hip, sucking on a block, and he glared at me. I told him I was sorry for wrecking his wall, and he broke into a smile. “Bedtime,” said Henrietta, hugging us with one arm, and exhaling the smoke from her Winston over our heads. That suited me fine. I had a night of planning to do.
The following day we waited until it was the quiet hour when the adults were sleeping off the effects of a morning in the sun and a boozy lunch, and the help watched soap operas behind their bedroom doors or dozed in green wicker rocking chairs on the porch overlooking the vegetable garden.
Will and I started with the walk-in refrigerator. Silently, we picked up a massive blue enamel pot of bouillabaisse, and last night’s tin-foiled lobster carcasses, destined for tomorrow’s stew. Then we filled a laundry hamper with brown paper bundles of beef tenderloin and stewing chickens, and the waxed packages of smoked salmon and sturgeon from Zabar’s in the City. We moved on to netted sacks of grapefruit and oranges, bundles of leeks and carrots, wooden crates of Bibb lettuce and spinach and corn, and newspaper-wrapped cones of arugula, and mâche and frisée picked in the garden that morning. I pricked my fingers grappling with the artichokes, and broke more than a few of the quail eggs when I threw them on top of everything in the hamper. Working as a team, Will and I emptied the room systematically, transporting everything with buckets and a pulley system to where we cached it behind the three massive chimneys on the dead-flat roof.
Nothing was spared. We loaded up packages of bacon, a bunch of bananas, the four mackerel my brother had caught off the dock yesterday, a bundle of Italian parsley, half a crème caramel, and all the stinky cheeses flown in from France. We took the basket of local chanterelle mushrooms, and the bags of mussels, the barnacles on them scratching us through the burlap as we hoisted them to the roof. Up went a white enamel tray of lavender-colored squab (neatly dressed and lined up like the dead of battle), matchstick bundles of haricots verts, wooden pints of raspberries from the garden and fraises du bois from the woods, and cartons of tiny blueberries handpicked by my brother and me at ten hard-earned cents an hour. We stacked the remains of our grandfather’s black-and-white striped birthday cake (inscribed “TO POP WITH OP”) on top of some crates of Coca-Cola and ginger ale, and lugged it all up, only breaking a few of the bottles in the process. We left Arturo’s ray.
When we’d cleaned out the walk-in, we emptied the kitchen and pantry refrigerators, taking all the milk and cream, the cottage cheese and ham and mustards and mayonnaise and jams and jellies, and the pitchers of iced Constant Comment tea and the orange juice squeezed that morning, plus about a hundred eggs, and fifteen pounds of Land O’Lakes butter (salted and unsalted), and every kind of Pepperidge Farm bread they made back then (whole wheat, sandwich, very thin, and toasting white), and the twelve packs of Thomas’ English muffins that my family went through in a week—with at least ten of the one-pound packets of the (salted) butter.
We took a short breather before clearing out all of the drawers, cupboards, and bins. Flour, sugar, chunks of Belgian baking chocolate, cornstarch, rolled oats, tins of anchovies and StarKist tuna, tomato paste and Campbell’s chicken noodle soup, baking soda and candied violets and vinegars and Tabasco, Grape-Nuts and Corn Flakes and Cap’n Crunch. We left nothing—with the exception of my grandmother’s essential All-Bran (out of respect). By the time we’d packed the hamper with Triscuits and Finn Crisps and Martinson coffee and Fauchon tea, dried prunes and Fizzies, and boxes and boxes of Pepperidge Farm cookies (Assorted, Bordeaux, Lido, Milano, Pirouettes, and shortbread), and macadamia nuts (twelve jars) and After Eight dinner mints and Lay’s potato chips, which I ate while I worked, we were dead tired. We tossed a couple cans of Alpo and a box of Milk-Bones on top and lugged the final load up to the roof. Back in the kitchen we sat panting on the cool gray linoleum floor, and realized that we’d overlooked the freezer, but it was perilously close to teatime. As a compromise, we wound it up with a roll of duct tape. After a quick check on the progress/decay of Number Four and Number Nine, Will and I hopped on our bikes and rode into town for ice cream.
Seated on the glittery stools at the soda fountain, we giggled a little at each other while we waited for the ice cream to be dipped and then packed into the sugar cones.
“Boy are they ever gonna get a surprise when they go to start making dinner,” I said, swinging my legs nervously. It had been a bold reprisal. “Maybe Granddaddy’ll have a heart attack when he finds out and I won’t have to do the rat poison thing.”
“Yeah,” said Will.
“I hope Arturo has to go back to stupid Italy. Maybe they’ll fire Gloria too—wouldn’t that be great.”
“I guess.”
Will was looking a little pale—and more than a little uncertain, the pansy.
I said, “You know I was never really going to poison Granddaddy.” And I wouldn’t have. It was just that I like to plot big.
The euphoria of our delinquent deed was beginning to sour. In our unfolding awareness, I found I’d lost my appetite, even for a double-scoop cone of fudge ripple. We were like a couple of terriers that had gutted a herd of goats in a blood orgy and, now that the adrenaline was subsiding, were thinking, Holy shit—why did we do that? Our master is going to kill us.
We charged the melting ice cream to our grandparents’ account and coasted silently home.