One of my hobbies is randomly reading bits from the massive one-volume Columbia Encyclopedia. Lately I’ve been finding entries I think would make successful Broadway musicals now that Hamilton has made historical musicals popular again.
*
Entry #1: Salomon, Haym 1740-85
American Revolutionary financier. A Jewish emigrant from Poland, he was
imprisoned in 1778 by the British in New York City for aiding the
Revolutionaries and was condemned to death, but he escaped to Philadelphia.
There he started a successful brokerage business. He aided Robert Morris in
obtaining loans from France and pledged his own fortune to the new government
to maintain its credit. Salomon was never recompensed and he died impoverished.
*
That little blurb verges on untruth
given how much it understates Salomon’s role in financing the American war
effort against the British, and how in the last two decisive battles of the
Revolutionary War, Salomon provided huge sums of money to compensate the French
troops who fought on the American side, and
pay for the supplies needed by the American fighters. Throughout the
Revolutionary War he was the go-to
guy for funding the war effort.
And then he was not recompensed and
died in poverty.
One wonders (not really) why Haym’s story isn’t widely taught in American schools, though my brother tells me his Fifth Grade teacher imparted some information about Salomon to my brother’s class. My brother also suggested Salomon’s story would make a musical a la Hamilton, and the first title that came to me was Fiddler on the Roof of the American Revolution. (Needs work) Oh the pathos!
Songs from the musical include: Escape to Philadelphia, The Go-To Guy, the
heartbreaking Never Recompensed, and
the mega-hit Revolutionary Financier.
I’m a revolutionary financier
I lend money to the rebels without
fear
With my money they buy ammo and beer
I’m a revolutionary financier
*
Entry #2: McAllister, Ward 1827-95, American society leader, b. Savannah, Georgia. He was a wealthy San Francisco lawyer who moved (1852) to New York City and married (1853) a millionaire’s daughter. He established a second residence at Newport, Rhode Island and soon became arbiter of the New York and Newport social set. McAllister chose (1872) the “patriarchs”, a group of leaders from prominent New York families, and sifted out (1892) the Four Hundred – people whom he deemed members of “true” New York society. It was McAllister who groomed the famous Mrs. William Astor for her role as queen of New York society. He wrote Society As I Have Found It (1890).
*
Further research into McAllister reveals he was the undisputed king of the elite set in New York until he published his book Society As I Have Found It, and the revelations therein so displeased the Four Hundred he died in disgrace.
*
One wonders how McAllister became the arbiter of anything, and why so many people cared so much about his opinions. In the Broadway musical The Four Hundred, the songs will be in the talking/singing style of later Stephen Sondheim tunes, and the plot will hang on a series of creepy kinky scenes showing how McAllister gained his power over so many rich people. The play will climax with a gala ball at the Vanderbilt mansion, after which McAllister brings out his book and becomes a pariah. Oh the pathos!
Song include: A Millionaire’s Daughter, Arbiter of the Social Set, The Patriarchs,
Queen of New York, Died in Disgrace,
and the show’s big hit Who Gets In.
You’re in, you’re out, you’re a Yes, you’re a No.
Why? Because I say so.
And why you may ask do I get to decide?
Oh wouldn’t you like to know?
*
Entry #3: Noyes, John Humphrey,
1811-86 American reformer, founder of the ONEIDA COMMUNITY b. Brattleboro,
Vermont. He studied theology at Yale but lost his license to preach because of
his “perfectionist” doctrine. This took its name from Mat. 5.48 and was based
on the belief that man’s innate sinlessness could be regained through communion
with Christ. At Putney, Vermont, he formed (1839) a society of Bible
communists, later called Perfectionists. In 1846 they began the practice of
complex marriage, a form of polygamy, but this so aroused their neighbors that
Noyes was forced to flee. In 1848 he established another community at Oneida,
N.Y. (and later a branch at Wallingford, Conn.) where he developed his
religious and social experiments in communal living. By 1879 internal
dissension had arisen and outside hostility became so strong that Noyes went to
Canada where he spent the rest of his life.
Oneida Community: a religious
society of Perfectionists established (1848) by John Humphrey NOYES. Members of
the sect held all property in common and practiced complex marriage and common
care of the children. The community prospered by making steel traps and
silverware. In 1881 it was reorganized as a joint stock company, and the social
experiments were abandoned.
*
Okay. This has got everything successful
musicals require. Religion, idealism, polygamy, raising children in common, and
the manufacture of steel traps, climaxing with our hero and a few of his complex
marriage partners fleeing to Canada. The music for The Perfectionists will feature a mix of heavy metal ballads and
tantric sitar solos with sexy choreography featuring scantily clad polygamists.
Oh the bathos!
Songs include: Bible Commies, Perfectionism, Children In Common, Complex Marriage,
Escape to Canada, and the mega-hit Neighbors
Aroused.
In a blog entry from 2010, I wrote: Mrs. Davenport, my Third Grade teacher at Las Lomitas Elementary School, was from Oklahoma and proudly one-eighth Cherokee. She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen in all my eight mortal years. She was astute, funny, musical, athletic, and she enjoyed using words somewhat beyond the official Third Grade vocabulary. We loved Mrs. Davenport because she loved us and had great empathy for our collective predicament: being eight-year-olds.
Today I will add to that description and say she was tall and slender with raven black hair usually worn in a bun, her lipstick ruby red. She was the first teacher I ever had a crush on, despite her being married, if we were to believe the Mrs., which of course we did. She wore glasses, and when she took them off to clean them she was beyond beautiful to me. And every once in great while, she would let her black hair down to redo her bun, and in those moments she was a full-blooded Cherokee goddess.
Mrs. Davenport liked me, and
in contrast to my First and Second Grade teachers did not often punish me for
speaking out of turn or talking to other kids during class. She understood the phenomenal
energy of little kids, and when I and others would become restless from too
much confinement and the mental strain of sitting quietly and listening, she
would say, “Todd, Jody, Wendy, Diana, and anybody else with ants in your pants,
run to the oak tree and back. Right now. Go.”
We would walk out into the
day knowing not to run until we were beyond the wing of classrooms, and then we
would dash across the concrete playground and the grassy playing field to the
largest oak tree in the world, as far as eight-year-old Todd was concerned, the
round trip a good quarter-of-a-mile. One lap usually sufficed to calm us down
for another half-hour of confinement and study, unless Mrs. Davenport discerned
any lingering restlessness in us, in which case she would send those of us in
need on another run to the oak and back.
As far as I know, Mrs.
Davenport was the only teacher at our school to employ this most effective
therapeutic technique, which rendered Attention Deficit Disorder a non-issue
for those of us under her care, though I know
had I been born twenty years later I would have been the poster child for that
popular psychological disorder of today and made to take the requisite drugs.
I never had homework until
Third Grade and it seemed to me that confinement from eight in the morning
until three in the afternoon was enough to ask of us. Why should we sacrifice more hours of our precious lives working
math problems and writing definitions of words? Thus I did not do homework
except sometimes a little right
before school in the morning, which usually sufficed.
Mrs. Davenport did not give
us much homework, but the one assignment she was adamant we work on at home every
day was undeniably worthwhile, yet abhorrent to me. Every day she would write
five words on the blackboard and we were to copy these words into special
binders full of lined paper she’d given us, each word to be printed, then
written in cursive, then looked up in the dictionary, the definition written down,
and the word used properly in a
sentence. As Mrs. Davenport told us time and again with her mild Oklahoma
accent, “If you do five words a night, you’ll have three hundred words done in
three months and be very glad you did.”
A week after our class
began this massive vocabulary-building undertaking, Mrs. Davenport checked our
special binders to see how we were doing. The pages in my special binder were
still pristine. Mrs. Davenport looked me in the eye and said, “You should have
twenty-five words done by now, Todd. I want to see forty-five words done by the
end of next week when I check your binder again.”
In spurts on the bus to
school in the morning, I managed to get about thirty words done by her next
check, and I had not done them well. She wagged her finger at me and said,
“Come on, Todd, buckle down here.”
But I did not buckle down, and my not buckling
down coincided with her ceasing to check our progress for many subsequent weeks,
though every day she would write five new words on the chalkboard and remind
us, “Now be sure to do your five words after school today.”
Then suddenly there came a
Friday when she informed us our vocabulary binders were due the following
Monday. Three hundred words were supposed to have been looked up, their
definitions written down, and each word used properly in a sentence. I had done
a total of forty words. Maybe. So did I buckle down and sacrifice the weekend
in a valiant attempt to do three months of work in two days? No. I waited until
Sunday afternoon and managed to do about thirty more words by the next day, and
I did them poorly.
What I remember most
vividly about Mrs. Davenport’s reaction to my disgraceful vocabulary binder was
the pained look on her face, her genuine anguish at my betrayal of her trust in
me.
My dismal performance
prompted Mrs. Davenport to have a meeting with my mother, after which I was
chastised by my parents and for a few weeks made to sit at the dining table before
supper every night to do my homework, except I rarely had any homework after the vocabulary binder debacle, which binder,
for some reason, I was not made to complete.
Mrs. Davenport soon forgave
me and life went on. I continued to adore her and she continued to be her
charming self and send me running to the oak tree and back a couple times most
every day. She continued to smoke cigarettes on her breaks, I soon forgot about
my vocabulary binder failure, and my mother stopped making me sit at the table
before supper to do homework I rarely had.
I remember one especially
exciting day that year when Mrs. Davenport and another woman teacher intervened
in a fight between two big Eighth Graders, the two toughest scariest guys at
our school. I was not an eyewitness to the fight, but I heard many stirring
accounts of the fight from those who claimed to have seen the bloody drama
unfold.
The two big guys were
having a slugfest and Mrs. Davenport waded in between them to break up the
fight. One of the boys, swinging wildly, struck Mrs. Davenport on the cheek
under her eye. She tackled him and threw him to the ground before more teachers
arrived to help contain the brawlers. For a couple weeks after she broke up
that fight, she sported a big bruise under her eye, and I thought she was the
bravest person in the world.
Those were the days, the
1950s in northern California, when school was not pre-formatted. Every teacher
had his or her own way of doing things and covering the subjects they were
supposed to cover in that year. Mrs. Davenport had a way of teaching that was
ideal for eight-year-olds. I liken her methods to kindergarten for older kids.
That is to say, along with sometimes
sitting at our desks learning arithmetic together and listening to her read
stories and collective things like that, we were very often not all doing the same thing, the
classroom more like a big artists’ workshop. A group of kids might be working
on a mural about California Indians, some kids might be drawing pictures, some
writing stories, and some reading.
And at recess a couple
times a week, for those kids who didn’t want to go out on the playground, Mrs.
Davenport would sit with the Fireside Book
of Folk Songs open in front of her, singing in her gorgeous voice, and four
or seven or ten of us stood around her singing with her.
She understood that more
than facts of dubious value, kids need experiences that challenge the mind and
inspire creative thinking. Or at least that’s how I choose to remember how I
learned and grew under her guidance sixty-three years ago when she was my
teacher and I had a big crush on her.
I was one of the “smart” kids in my Las Lomitas elementary school classes, learned the minimal info we had to learn with ease, and when in Third Grade we started having homework, I always did mine at the last minute, often sloppily, and my teachers, until Eighth Grade, didn’t require more from me because I was still “ahead” of most of my classmates.
My main teacher in Eighth Grade at La Entrada junior high was Miss Imbach. She was in her early twenties, educated at Stanford and Harvard, and she was brilliant. Within minutes of sitting down in her classroom, I was keenly aware she was a different species than my previous teachers. She spoke to us as if we were intelligent adults and she didn’t seem to care if we immediately liked her or not.
She taught us the art of
outlining, and not in a cursory way. In learning to outline, we diligently practiced
distinguishing layers of specificity, which taught us critical thinking, among
other things. We outlined everything, and constantly. No one-week course in
outlining with Miss Imbach. We practiced outlining for the entire year. This
was also true for diagramming sentences and rewriting sentences and paragraphs.
But a couple weeks into
that school year, before we learned
to outline and rewrite, I turned in my first essay, most of which I’d written
on the twenty-minute bus ride to school. Miss Imbach glanced at my hastily
scrawled pages, handed them back to me and said, “See me after class.”
As I stood before her in
the empty classroom, the other kids having rushed out for recess, she said,
“Explain, please.”
“Explain…?”
She gazed at me
steadfastly.
“It’s what I wrote,” I said
stupidly.
“I’ll give you another day
to write it again. We both know you can do better than this. I want to see your
rough draft and second draft and third draft.”
I was in shock. I’d never rewritten anything. I had no concept of
second drafts, let alone third drafts. In fact, I had no concept of taking time
to write anything. I always just quickly
wrote something related to what we were supposed to write about, turned in what
I’d written, and gotten an A or a B.
Thus at the age of twelve,
for the first time in my life, I sat down to thoughtfully write a few pages
about something, I don’t remember what, and when I’d written those pages, I
read them, which was another first for me. I was horrified. And the fact was, I
didn’t know how to rewrite. I had no
experience of rewriting, nor had any
teacher ever taught me how to even begin
to do that.
I didn’t dare ask my father
for help. He would, I knew, use this as an opportunity to prove how smart he
was and how stupid I was, and it never occurred to me to ask my mother. So I
resorted to my older sister Kathy, a fastidious straight-A scholar, by then a
sophomore in high school.
She read my rough draft and
said, “Gag me with a spoon,” a popular expression of distaste in those days.
She showed me a few tricks, which I applied to my essay in making a second
draft. I read this second draft and thought it better than the first draft, but
still dreadful. My sister agreed, showed me how to eliminate a few obvious
redundancies and how to say a few things more clearly, and I created a third
draft.
This all took me hours! I’d never spent even one hour on homework. Ever.
When I turned in my three
drafts to Miss Imbach the next day, she nodded and resumed her conversation
with another student. What? No ticker tape parade? No trophy? No effusive thank
you and congratulations and an A+? Nothing. And two days later when we got our
essays back, my grade was a C-.
To make a long story short,
I became devoted to Miss Imbach, so much so I attended her wedding mid-year
when she became Mrs. McConnell. I loved her as I have never loved another
teacher. She taught me to write, to think, to argue cogently, and to tear
sentences and paragraphs apart and put them back together so they became clear
and pleasing; and we had many fabulous laughing sessions as a class, our senses
of humor lifted by her teaching out of the potty into realms of relative
sophistication.
Indeed, high school for me,
after having Mrs. McConnell for my teacher, was a colossal bore and a waste of
four golden years. I learned nothing
new in four years of Advanced English, and backslid because I could turn in
crap again and get A’s and B’s.
Yet perhaps the most
miraculous thing Mrs. McConnell did for me in that life-changing year was to
pair me with Cyd Jasmin as editors of each other’s writing. That is, Mrs.
McConnell created dyads in our English class, and when we wrote essays and
stories we would exchange drafts with our partners who would then make editing
suggestions prior to our writing our final drafts.
When the dyads were
announced in class a couple months into the school year, I froze in disbelief when
Miss Imbach said, “Cyd and Todd.” Why disbelief? Because ever since Third Grade,
Cyd had been the king bully of our school along with a couple other brutes. I’d
never before been in a class with Cyd, and he had never spoken to me except to
threaten me with bodily harm. And on a few occasions he had inflicted that harm.
Hence, I was terrified of him. Besides, I was one of the “smart” kids and he
couldn’t be smart, right?
Wrong. The first time we
traded papers, our autobiographies, Cyd gave me a typed twelve-page opus that
was so good, so sophisticated and nuanced, I felt like an idiot for giving him
my childish five-page summation of my comparatively silly life.
I could find no flaw in
Cyd’s writing, and his autobiography revealed so much about him and his life, I
understood why he’d become the school
bully and chose to consort with the local toughs.
When I gave him back his
autobiography the next day and effused about how good I thought it was, he
beamed at me and responded in a most un-Cyd-like way, saying he’d really
enjoyed my autobiography, too, and had only made a few suggestions which he’d
written on the last page.
And for the rest of Eighth
Grade and through high school, Cyd and I liked each other. We didn’t become
good friends, but we were always glad to see each other, having for several
months vetted each other’s essays before we rewrote them for our beloved Miss
Imbach-McConnell.
Twenty-five years ago, when I was forty-seven and living in Berkeley, I had a three-month relationship with a woman who lived in Los Angeles. In the course of our brief liaison, I made two trips to LA and she made a few trips to Berkeley, and at some point I asked her, “Have you ever been in therapy?”
“I have three good friends
who are therapists who talk to me
about their problems,” she replied, “so I’m not drawn to therapy. But I do go
to a psychic and he’s incredibly helpful in that way.”
“In the way of therapy?” I asked,
doubtfully.
“Yes,” she said. “He’s
great. In fact, you should have a session with him.”
Never having gone to a
psychic, the next time I was in Los Angeles I went to see the guy. I was
expecting a smooth operator, either a shyster or a wannabe shaman. His house
was in a woodsy neighborhood in the middle of the LA sprawl. When I arrived at
his place there was a hawk circling above his beautiful adobe house, keening. What
was the raptor trying to tell me? Get the
hell outta here?Welcome to the
mystic?
I’d been instructed to go
into the adjoining studio and wait for the guy, so I did. The place was
gorgeous, white walls, an old table center room, a well-used Rider-Waite tarot
deck on the table, two chairs, arch-topped windows built into the adobe, and
several shelves of fantastic crystals. Seeing all this, I expected the guy to
have long brown hair and a deep voice and a hawk feather in a psychedelic
headband.
Instead, in comes a wiry
guy in an old sweatshirt and baggy trousers, short gray hair, barefoot, brusque,
Brooklyn accent.
“Hey,” he says, shaking my
hand. “Todd, right?”
“Yes.”
“Larry. Sit down.”
“I’m a friend of Renee’s.”
He nods. “So… you here about
anything in particular?”
“No. I’ve never been to a
psychic and Renee said you were great, so…”
“Good,” he says, nodding.
We sit across from each
other at the table and he gives me a long look, and while he’s looking I say, “Gorgeous
crystals.”
He glances at the shelves.
“Yeah, people gave me those. I was never into rocks, but one client brought me
that big amethyst chunk and another client saw it and brought me that giant
quartz crystal and the rest followed.”
“I carry rocks,” I say,
liking him despite his tough guy persona. “Have since I was a little kid.”
“Oh yeah?” he says, his
eyes twinkling. “You got one on you?”
“Always,” I say, taking the
two rocks out of my pockets.
I hand him the rocks and he
looks them over, hands one back to me and keeps the round one, white quartz in
gray stone.
“I can do the reading from
this one,” he says, studying the rock. “Or we can use the cards. They’ll both
get us to the same place.”
“Oh then from the rock,” I
say, amused and curious.
He holds the rock for a
moment, sets it on top of the tarot deck and closes his eyes. “When you were
five? Four? Five. Your mother placed you as a shield between her and your
father. She wanted you to protect her from him, and she kept you there… “ He
opens his eyes. “A long time.”
I gasped, not because he
had reiterated something I’d learned in therapy, but because he’d given me a
hugely important missing puzzle piece in the story of my entanglement with my
mother and my father’s extreme antipathy toward me.
“Of course that was way too
much to ask of a little kid, to protect his mother from his father, but that’s
what she asked you to do. And you did the best you could, but of course it was
impossible, and the impossibility shaped your life.”
I ceased to doubt him and
listened in amazement to his remarkably accurate description of me in the
world, though he never asked for any information about me. Near the end of the hour-long
reading, he handed me my rock and spread the tarot deck face down in a fan on
the table. “Pick a card.”
I picked The Magician.
“So this is you,” he says,
looking at the card and nodding, “which is not surprising. I knew when I walked
in here you were psychic. Are you aware of this?”
“No. I’m aware of being
intuitive, but…”
“This is not guessing, this
is knowing,” he says simply. “You’ll be with people and without knowing how you
know, you’ll know things about them they aren’t aware of or are keeping secret.
Ring a bell?”
“Kind of,” I say, thinking
of times when this might have been true. “And I’m a writer. The stories come to
me unbidden. I don’t make them up. Not consciously.”
“That’s different, though it’s
probably related. I don’t know. And now our time is almost up. Anything you
want to ask me?”
“Yeah, this tarot card. The
Magician. How is he me? Or how am I him?”
“You’re a powerful person.
You have unlimited potential, and your work in this lifetime could be some kind of connecting the
physical world, so-called reality, with the spiritual world. And my guess is
you’re mostly unaware of this unless…” He squints at me. “You a musician?”
“Yes.”
“So maybe you know a little
about it from that.”
“And how does one… how do I
access my power and potential?”
“I don’t know,” he shrugs.
“I’m not a therapist. I just tell you what I see.”
“Can you tell me,” asks Sweeney, handing the teapot to McDougall, “what this is worth?”
McDougall, a portly man with a gray handlebar
moustache, takes the little pearly white teapot in his big fleshy hands and
nods slowly. “Baleek,” he says quietly. “Irish porcelain. Late eighteen
hundreds. Extremely rare. I’ll have to examine her with a magnifying glass, but
if this is the original glaze, and she’s flawless, I’d say she’s worth ten
thousand dollars. Possibly more. And I’ll tell you right now, I want her.”
Sweeney, a slender man with brown hair turning gray, had hoped to get thirty or forty dollars for the old thing. Desperate for money, he had finally done what he’d been avoiding for three years. He’d gone through the two boxes of stuff left to him by his mother. In the first of the boxes he found only memorabilia—pictures and letters. But the second box contained the teapot, six matching cups and saucers, and a matching sugar bowl and creamer.
“That much?” he says, trying not to show too much astonishment at McDougall’s estimate of the teapot’s worth. “And what if I had the matching cups and saucers and things?”
McDougall gazes thoughtfully at Sweeney, his right eyebrow rising dramatically. “Six cups and saucers?”
“Yes,” says Sweeney, holding his breath. “And a sugar bowl and creamer.”
McDougall carefully sets the teapot down on the table between them. “A complete set of this Baleek, circa 1870, in excellent condition, would be worth at least fifty thousand dollars, and possibly a great deal more.”
“Why so much?” asks Sweeney, staggered by the sum.
“Well, first of all we’re talking about extremely rare and fragile ceramics that are nearly a hundred and fifty years old. A complete, original set outside of a museum is virtually unheard of in this day and age.” He pauses. “Handles intact?”
“Yes,” says Sweeney, turning to go. “I’ll be back with them in twenty minutes.”
“No, no, no!” cries McDougall, emphatically shaking his head. “I will bring my padded carrying case and come with you.”
*
“Excuse the mess,” says Sweeney, unlocking the door to his apartment.
“I’m used to messes,” says McDougall, following Sweeney into the cramped little room. “In the mud lie the nuggets.”
The place smells sour, the sink full of dirty dishes, clothes strewn about the floor, the squalid bed unmade. On a rickety table by the only window, six cups on six saucers surround a sugar bowl and creamer, each piece the same pearly white as the teapot. McDougall reverently approaches this still life, his eyes wide with wonder. When he is satisfied that the pieces are immaculate, he turns to Sweeney and says, “I will be happy to write you a check for fifty thousand dollars.”
“And I will be happy to accept it,” says Sweeney, his tired eyes filling with tears.
When the rare and delicate tea set is safely packed
away, the padded case closed and locked, McDougall says, “Now, if you don’t
mind, could you tell me what you know about the set and where your mother got
it?”
“I don’t know anything about it except that my
mother’s mother was British, so maybe it was hers.”
“You don’t remember your mother using it?”
“No,” says Sweeney, his voice full of disdain, “but
then I don’t remember much of anything about her.”
“When did she die?”
“Three years ago.”
“You were her only heir?”
He nods. “She didn’t leave me anything except a box
of photographs and the tea things.”
“Would it be a terrible imposition if I looked
through those photographs?”
“No, not at all.” Sweeney hands him a well-worn
cardboard box. “In fact, you can have them if you want.”
McDougall takes the box from him. “Have you looked
at these?”
“No,” says Sweeney, shaking his head. “My mother hated me. She used to call me her big mistake. These wouldn’t mean anything to me. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I want to get to the bank before it closes.”
*
With the Baleek safely installed in his vault,
McDougall makes a strong pot of black tea and sits down to examine the
photographic legacy of Sweeney’s mother. There are hundreds of photos, and on
the back of each is a note to Sweeney. The largest picture is of Sweeney as a
boy of seven or eight having a tea party with his mother. They are using the
Baleek set. On the back of the photograph Sweeney’s mother has written
Here we are acting out the Mad Hatter’s tea party from Alice in Wonderland. That’s my mother’s old Baleek tea set, which she got from her mother who got it as a wedding gift in 1872. Amazing none of the pieces ever broke or even chipped a little. In fact, you and I had many tea parties with this set, remember? You even had tea parties with your friends Raymond and Cecily, but nothing ever broke. Proof of angels, if you ask me.
You know, Dearie, I wish I could have left you buckets of money, but all I have is this tea set. I hope it brings you joy. Perhaps someday you’ll pass it along to someone who will appreciate it as much as we did.
Marcia and I are thinking of getting a new rug for the living room, our ten-year-old, four-hundred-dollar Cost Plus rug from India badly frayed from constant heavy use. Marcia has begun shopping around online and I am reminded of my last search for a rug twenty-six years ago.
*
I moved to Berkeley from Sacramento in 1995. Recently divorced and hoping to revive my writing career and my emotional life, too, I was off to a good start with the sale of my novel Ruby & Spear and a movie option on my novel Forgotten Impulses.
Having a little jingle
in my pocket for the first time in many years, I thought I’d buy a beautiful
rug for the living room of the house I was renting on Evelyn Avenue. To that
end, I enlisted my friend Mindy to accompany me to a Persian Rug store on
Solano Avenue, a store I’d walked by countless times, the rugs displayed in the
window ever-changing and always enticing.
A handsome Persian
fellow sitting at a desk at the back of the shop looked up as we entered. “May
I help you?” he asked, and I said Yes.
When he joined us, I informed him I was looking for a six-foot by eight-foot
rug in the thousand-dollar range.
He smiled faintly and
led us to a stack of rugs. With the help of an assistant he removed the top rug
to show us the next one down and so forth until he came to a rug that elicited
an interested Hmm from me.
“How much for this one?”
I asked hopefully.
“Nineteen hundred
dollars,” he said, smiling politely.
Ah,” I said, the sum
petrifying. “I was thinking of something closer to a thousand.”
“I’m very sorry to tell
you this, sir,” he said, no longer smiling, “but our store is not for you
unless you are looking for a much smaller rug.”
This piqued me and I decided
I could spend as much as fifteen hundred if he showed me something I really loved.
I told him so and he sighed. “I have a few flawed rugs I can show you, but they
are only four by six or three by five. I don’t think you’ll like them.”
At which moment another
handsome Persian fellow emerged from the back of the store, he and the first
fellow had a brief conversation in Farsi, the second fellow gave me a
penetrating look and asked, “Are you an artist?”
I said I was a writer
and a musician.
He nodded graciously and
beckoned us to follow him to another stack of rugs, much finer rugs than those in
the first stack. He and the assistant slowly removed the top rug, allowed us a
few moments to contemplate the newly exposed rug, and so on until four rugs
down they uncovered the most beautiful rug I’d ever seen. Or I should say they
uncovered a rug that sang to me, “I’m the one, baby. You know I am.”
“You were meant to have
this rug,” said the salesman, gazing at me knowingly. “This rug was made for you.”
“How much?” I asked
breathlessly.
“Because I very much want
you to have this rug,” he said, pausing momentously, “I will give it to you for
3400 dollars.”
“That’s way beyond what
I can spare,” I said, which was true in one sense, but in another sense – the
spiritual truth – I could have spared that much.
“You need to buy this
rug,” he said, gazing intently at me. “It will change your life. This rug has
been waiting for you.”
*
I did not buy the rug and my fortunes quickly waned. A year later my savings were gone and I was barely making enough to cover my rent and pay for groceries. And every time I walked by that rug shop on Solano Avenue I would think about my beautiful rug and regret I hadn’t been brave enough to take the beauty home with me.
A few days ago the Ziggurat Farm
stories ceased to materialize, which means From
Whence is the final story of the saga that began with the first Nathan and
Del story thirty-five episodes ago.
Over the months of writing and
posting the Ziggurat Farm stories I received word from a handful of readers letting
me know they were enjoying the saga. These communiqués made writing the saga
all the more enjoyable.
In the early morning of December twentieth in their little house on the outskirts of the northern California coastal town of Mercy, the resident trio of Delilah, Nathan, and Celia sit at the dining table listening to heavy rain drumming on the roof, Nathan having green tea, Celia and Delilah coffee.
Nathan is eighty-eight and feeling
chipper this morning after a good night’s sleep. Dressed in old brown corduroy
trousers and a black long-sleeved T-shirt, his hair snow white, he’s thinking
of taking the mutts Chico and Gypsy for a walk once the rain lets up, which he
guesses will be in the early afternoon. After fifty-eight years of living in
Mercy, Nathan’s guesses about the weather are rarely wrong.
Celia is Nathan’s wife. She is eighty-two
and was a nurse for forty-five years until she retired simultaneously with
Delilah coming to live with them fifteen years ago. She is still in her nightgown
and bathrobe, her long black hair full of gray, her winter days filled with
cooking and reading and spending time with Nathan and Delilah and their
friends, her hopes of late pinned on Delilah marrying Gabriel Fernandez, a
charming fellow and good friend of their family.
Delilah is twenty-eight and the only
child of movie star Margot Cunningham who died eight years ago. Unmistakably
the daughter of her famously beautiful mother, Delilah is also still in her nightgown
and bathrobe, her brown hair longer than it has been in several years, though only
a boyish bob. This morning, after a lifetime of wondering, she is both excited
and fearful about the possibility of finally discovering who her father is.
Last night Delilah and Nathan and
Celia went with Gabriel to a party at the home of the very British Constance
and Joseph Richardson next door to Ziggurat Farm where Delilah is the main home
school teacher and Nathan and Celia are the honorary farm elders. Gabriel and
Delilah are not yet lovers, though they are wildly attracted to each other and love
spending time together.
At the party, Raul Neves, chef and
owner of Ocelot, a renowned
restaurant in Mercy, and his wife Caroline, Delilah’s close friend and the
manager of Ocelot, gave a slide show
of their recent honeymoon in England and Portugal. One of the slides was of Raul’s
deceased mother Beatrice. In the photo, which was taken when Beatrice was
thirty-five, her resemblance to Delilah is exact down to the finest details.
And because Delilah knows Raul met her
mother Margot on a few occasions twenty-nine years ago, now that she’s seen
this photo of Beatrice she is convinced Raul is her father.
“Fortunately,” says Nathan, going to
put a log on the fire, “Raul is a wonderful person and you like him and he
likes you. Much better than discovering your father is some obnoxious lout you
can’t stand.”
“You would think so,” says Delilah,
groggy from lack of sleep because her mind won’t stop gnawing on the possibility
of Raul being her father, “except how will Caroline feel if I ask Raul to have
a DNA test to see if he’s my father? They just got married and she’s pregnant
with his child. She might be devastated.”
“Caroline loves you,” says Celia, getting
up to make more coffee. “She’ll want to know the truth as much as you. So will
Raul. They’re both strong people. Don’t worry.”
“Life is far more mysterious and
fantastic than we could ever imagine,” says Nathan, gazing into the flames. “Raul
and Caroline must have noticed how much you resemble his mother and done the
math. They’re probably wondering the same thing. And if he’s not your father,
oh well.”
“So do I just call him up and say,
‘Hi Raul. Delilah here. Shall we go have a DNA test and see if you’re my father?’”
“Would you like me to call him?”
asks Nathan, returning to the table. “I’d be happy to.”
“Would you?” says Delilah, feeling childish
and overwhelmed.
“Of course,” says Nathan, going to
the phone. “Why else did I reincarnate?”
*
A half-hour later, Raul and Caroline arrive with a day-old pumpkin pie.
Fresh coffee is made.
After everyone expresses joy over
the much-needed rain and the deliciousness of Raul’s pie, Caroline, tall and
lovely and married and pregnant for the first time in her life, cuts to the
chase.
“The first thing I said when I saw
that picture of Beatrice was how much she looked like Delilah. And Raul…” She turns
to her husband. “You tell.”
“When I first looked at that old
photo,” says Raul, ruggedly handsome, his hair a tangle of gray, “I couldn’t see
what Caroline was seeing. The photo is very small and the images I have in my
mind of my mother are from much later in her life, so it never occurred to me
she looked like Delilah. But when I saw the picture projected on the big screen,
it was obvious.”
“So…” says Delilah, feeling incredibly
shy around Raul, “will you… would you… can we have a DNA test and see?”
“If you’d like,” he says, smiling warmly
at her. “But I know you’re my daughter. And it makes me happy in a way I never
knew I could be happy.”
*
Twenty minutes later, Raul and
Delilah are sitting side-by-side in the otherwise empty waiting room of the Mercy
Hospital lab, Delilah feeling six-years-old, Raul feeling pleasantly ancient.
“Did my mother seduce you?” asks
Delilah, innocently. “Or did you seduce her?”
Raul ponders the question and says,
“When we’re done giving our blood, I’ll tell you what I remember. But not
here.”
“Raul Neves?” says a young woman in
blue scrubs calling from the lab entrance. “Ready for you now.”
“Can we come in together?” asks
Raul, smiling at the young woman. “We’re finding out if I’m her father.”
“Oh,” says the young woman, pleased
by Raul’s frankness. “Sure.”
*
Driving back to Nathan and Celia’s house from the lab, they stop at a vista point to watch the parade of storm-driven waves rolling into Mercy Bay.
“Your mother summoned me to her
hotel room,” says Raul, striving to remember his tryst with Margot. “It was the
night of the last time she came to my restaurant. Each of those times, there
were three or four, I came out of the kitchen and spoke to her at her table,
something I don’t often do, but your mother was a big star and so very
beautiful and I was thirty and full of myself and had a faint hope of adding
her to my trophy list. You do resemble her, you know, though not as much as you
resemble my mother when she was your age.”
“Did you like my mother?” asks
Delilah, who found Margot emotionally impenetrable.
“I was hypnotized by her,” he says
simply. “But I didn’t know her. She was fantastically alluring, but not warm,
not effusive. In our chit-chat at her table we discovered we were both thirty,
so maybe that was a bond.”
“So you went to her hotel room. More
than once?”
“Just one time,” he says, closing
his eyes to remember.
“You don’t have to tell me more if
you don’t want to,” she says softly.
“I don’t mind,” he says, opening his
eyes and smiling at her. “I understand why you want to know. I would like to
know how it was when my father and mother made me. And now that I have opened
this page of my memory I remember when your mother opened the door of her suite
I was pleased to see she had changed out of her fancy clothes and was wearing a
sleeveless black top with spaghetti straps showing off her beautiful shoulders
and arms, and a short red skirt showing off her beautiful legs, and her hair was
down and she was barefoot, her toenails painted red, and she was impossibly
beautiful. We sat together on the sofa and she drank hard liquor and I had wine.
I don’t recall what we talked about. My restaurant, I suppose, or the movie she
was making. I don’t remember, but I know we spoke for quite some time and she
had a beautiful deep voice, as deep as Caroline’s. Then she told me…” He
hesitates. “I don’t know if I should tell you this. I’m only just now
remembering what happened.”
“You don’t have to,” says Delilah,
though she wants him to.
“No, I’ll tell you. Maybe it will
help you understand her. I don’t know.”
“Whatever you want,” says Delilah,
closing her eyes.
“She told me she wanted me to pursue
her and she would try to elude me. She said when I caught her she would fight to
get away, even though she wanted me. I remember she said, ‘I hit hard. So be
ready.’”
Now he remembers everything.
“She said, ‘I want you to overwhelm me
until I have no choice but to surrender.’ I said, ‘But this is not my way. I
would never force a woman to have sex with me.’ And she said, ‘Then you should go.’
So I said, ‘Okay.’ But then I looked at her and saw how sad she was, so lonely,
and I said, ‘Or maybe you will let me be gentle with you, and also strong.
Maybe you will like that, too.’ She looked away and said, ‘No. Gentle doesn’t
work for me. Just go.’ So I got up and bowed to her like a monk bowing low to a
statue of his god. I don’t why I did that, but I remember it felt good to bow
to her like that. And then I told her it was a pleasure meeting her, which in a
strange way it was, and then I walked to the door and she came running after me
and wrapped her arms around me and we kissed, and then she took me to her bed.”
*
Early the next morning, a Thursday, Raul and Caroline lie abed talking about the myriad things they need to do today before they open Ocelot at five this afternoon.
“I wish Andrew was not so dour,”
says Raul, speaking of the new cook in the kitchen. “I keep thinking he’ll
lighten up as he gets more familiar with everything, but he remains so deadly serious,
and deadly seriousness does not work well in my kitchen.”
“Shall I resume the hunt for another
cook?” asks Caroline, wishing they didn’t have to get up just yet, the day cold
and dreary.
“I suppose so,” says Raul, tired of
breaking in new employees, life in the hinterlands a difficult fit for many
professional cooks accustomed to city living. “And I’ll speak to Andrew. I keep
waiting for him to relax, but maybe he needs a little prompting.”
“I hate to say this, but I think
he’s intimidated by Maurice,” says Caroline, speaking of Raul’s longtime sous
chef and assistant.
Raul sighs. “Maybe so. Maurice has
become a mean old man, and that won’t work in my kitchen either.”
“I can’t imagine your kitchen
without Maurice,” says Caroline, who has never been intimidated by Maurice because
no one intimidates her. “Can you?”
“I can,” says Raul, getting out of
bed. “Whenever he goes away for a vacation now the kitchen is much happier. But
what can I do? He’s been with me for twenty years.”
“Yes, but if he’s the problem…”
“He’ll have to change or go,” says Raul,
putting on his bathrobe. “I’m making breakfast. Stay in bed my darling. I’ll
call when the coffee is ready.”
“I don’t want to be apart from you,”
she says, getting out of bed and embracing him. “I’ll come with you.”
“Before we found each other,” he
says, looking into her eyes, “I couldn’t imagine letting Maurice go, but now I
can because I have you and our baby and Delilah and all our friends I never had
before.”
*
Seven days later, the twenty-eighth of December, Delilah and Celia and Nathan give lunch to Constance and Joseph Richardson and Daisy and Michael Darling and their almost-two-year-old daughter Jenna. Michael is Caroline’s older brother, an ornithologist, Daisy is the author of a novella entitled Women Farm that Delilah has illustrated with exquisite pen and ink drawings, Joseph is a landscape painter, and Constance is a writer of bestselling murder mysteries; and they are all members of the Ziggurat Farm collective.
When Celia’s incomparable chicken
enchiladas have been devoured, everyone deploys in the living room with pie and
coffee, Celia sitting in the rocking chair with Jenna on her lap, a fire
crackling in the hearth.
Constance taps her mug with her fork.
“We have news.”
“Momentous
news,” says Joseph, nodding in agreement with the adjective.
“So do I,” says Delilah, bouncing
her eyebrows. “You go first.”
“Arnold Winfield called from London
yesterday,” says Constance, gazing intently at Daisy, “to tell us he is head
over heels in love with Women Farm
and wants to bring out a lavish clothbound edition in September and hopes very
much that you and Delilah will come to England for a couple weeks of publishing-related
events.”
“Including,” says Joseph, raising a
declarative finger, “a show of Delilah’s original drawings at the Onyx Gallery
in London, which is a coup of epic proportions, the Onyx an apex gallery. I can
only dream of my paintings hanging
there.”
“Oh my God,” says Daisy, bursting
into tears. “I can’t believe it.”
“Congratulations, honey,” says Michael,
hugging Daisy. “England here we come.”
“Mama cwy,” says Jenna, pouting.
“Dome cwy Mama.”
“She’s happy,” says Celia, bouncing
the little girl. “Happy tears.”
“Arnold’s initial offer was 10,000 pounds with
80% to Daisy and 20% to Delilah,” says Constance, beaming at author and
illustrator, “but I jiggled him up to 20,000 pounds. You can arrange the split
however you like. That’s entirely up to you.”
“Thank you so much, Connie,” says Daisy, going to Constance and hugging her.
“Thank you, dear, for writing such a masterpiece and allowing us to show
it Arnold,” says Connie, delighted to be the agent of such a fortuitous collision
of writer and publisher. “A match made in heaven.”
“And what is your momentous news, Delilah?” asks Joseph, feeling certain she can’t
possibly top Arnold Winfield publishing Women
Farm.
“Well,” says Delilah, standing with
her back to the fire, “I’m sure you all remember the picture of Raul’s mother
from the honeymoon slideshow.”
“Gorgeous woman,” says Joseph, remembering
the shimmery green dress clinging to those admirable curves.
“I thought she looked like you,” says Michael, who finds Delilah
surpassingly lovely.
“I thought she was you at first,” says Daisy, still breathless from the news of
her novella finding a publisher, never having published anything before.
“So… what about Raul’s mother?” asks
Constance, smiling curiously at Delilah.
“Well it turns out,” says Delilah,
looking at Celia for courage, “and we just got the results a few days ago, that
I resemble Raul’s mother because… she’s my grandmother.”
“Raul is your father?” says Daisy,
mouth agape.
Delilah nods. “He is.”
“Dear God,” says Constance, placing
a hand on her heart. “How is this possible?”
“Well,” says Delilah, laughing
through her tears, “when Raul was thirty and had just opened his restaurant in
San Francisco, my mother dined there a few times and they had a fling, the
result of which was me, though Raul never knew, nor did my mother know who the
father was because she was quite promiscuous at the time. And though I knew
Raul had met my mother long ago, it never occurred to me they might have been
lovers until I saw that picture of Beatrice.”
“Raul never suspected?” says Joseph,
staggered by this astonishing turn of events. “Never saw the resemblance?”
“Not until he saw that picture of
his mother projected on the screen,” says Nathan, gazing fondly at Delilah. “Then
he knew.”
“So the morning after the slide
show,” says Delilah, continuing the story, “Nathan called Raul and he and
Caroline came over, and then Raul and I went to the hospital lab and got our blood
drawn, and five days later… voila.”
“Have you told the farm folks?” asks
Constance, in shock—Raul a god to her and Delilah her favorite person in the
world right after Joseph.
“Raul and Caroline are telling them even
as we speak,” says Delilah, smiling at the thought of her dear friends gasping
in amazement.
“So now what?” asks Michael, dazzled
by the unfathomable workings of the universe.
“So now I’m going to change my last
name to Neves,” says Delilah, giving Constance a hug. “And my middle name to
Beatrice.”
*
On a cold clear night in January, Delilah and Gabriel are necking in the living room—Nathan and Celia long gone to bed—when Delilah stops the kissing and says, “Make love to me?”
“Shall we go to a motel?” asks
Gabriel, eager to please his beloved. “I would take you home, but my mother and
sister are there.”
“No, my love,” she says, getting up
and holding out her hand to him. “Here. In my bed.”
“But we might wake Celia and
Nathan,” he whispers, taking her hand.
“If we do,” she says, leading him to
her bedroom, “I assure you they will be delighted.”
On a rainy Monday morning in mid-December on Ziggurat Farm, two miles inland from the northern California coastal town of Mercy, Vivienne and Andrea are working together in the farm office, one of the five rooms in the cottage where Andrea lives with her husband Marcel and their son Henri, a stone’s throw from the farmhouse where Vivienne lives with her parents Lisa and Philip and her brother Arturo.
Vivienne turned twelve in October
and has been Andrea’s office assistant since June when she chose Andrea, the
farm manager, to be her Main Study mentor for home school summer session. Farm
management, gardening, and computer skills were the main focus of Vivienne’s summer
studies, and she proved so helpful to Andrea, so adept at using the computer for
business correspondence and keeping track of sales and inventory, and such a
whiz with the bookkeeping software that has bedeviled Andrea for years, Andrea
now employs Vivienne in the office two afternoons a week at double the wage she
pays the kids for gardening work.
Passionate, meticulous, tenacious,
and seemingly inexhaustible, Andrea was born in Germany fifty-seven years ago, her
German accent now barely detectable after thirty-three years in America. Five-foot-seven,
formidably strong, with long black hair only recently beginning to show signs
of gray, Andrea is fiercely devoted to her friends and overjoyed that Vivienne says
she wants to one day assume the role of farm manager.
Vivienne, olive skinned and slender
with shoulder-length dark brown hair, has recently attained the height of
five-foot-three in the midst a growth spurt she hopes will eventually make her
as tall as her best friend Irenia, who is three years older than Vivienne and
five-foot-nine. Vivienne’s father is a handsome blend of Italian and French,
her mother a pleasing mix of Brazilian Indio, African, and Ashkenazi Jew, and
Vivienne resembles both of them, her girlish cuteness fast giving way to
womanly beauty.
With Ziggurat Farm Home School on
hiatus until mid-January, Andrea is availing herself of Vivienne’s greater
availability to catch up on long neglected farm business, and this cold rainy
day finds Vivienne and Andrea sitting across from each other at the big table
that serves as the farm office desk, Vivienne manning the computer while Andrea
organizes a big pile of October and November invoices for Vivienne to log.
“How interesting. We just received a
notice from Primero Press,” says Vivienne, gazing at the computer
screen—Primero Press the company handling the printing and distribution of
Philip’s two cookbooks and a volume of Nathan’s poetry, Nathan a dear friend of
the farm and the unofficial poet laureate of Mercy. “They are informing us of a
tidy sum they just deposited into our account at Mercy Savings.”
“For how much?” asks Andrea, looking
up from the clutter of invoices.
“Nine thousand two hundred and
seventy-three dollars and forty-one cents.” She frowns at Andrea. “I wonder if
this could be, to quote my favorite Monopoly
card, a bank error in our favor? Beats the previous monthly record by almost six
thousand dollars. Then again, maybe that sum is correct. The accompanying sales figures for September say we
sold 1723 copies of Philip’s Kitchen
and 1268 copies of Delicious Meals for
the Somewhat Ambitious Cook and 47 copies of Nathan’s book of poems.”
“Impossible,” says Andrea, coming to
look over Vivienne’s shoulder at the screen. “Send Primero an email to confirm
the amount and those totals, and ask if they’ve got estimated sales for October
and November.”
“Shall I read the email to you
before I send?” says Vivienne, quickly composing the missive.
“Yes, please,” says Andrea, sitting
down to listen.
“‘Dear Wonderful Primero Press.
Andrea here at Ziggurat Farm Productions. Surprised by apparent large increases
in sales in September. Please verify accuracy of numbers. Curious if you have
October and November sales figures yet. Many Thanks, Andrea.’”
“Fine,” says Andrea, smiling at
Vivienne. “Now back to reality.”
“Oh but what if it’s true?” says
Vivienne, gazing at the $9,273.41. “Wouldn’t Papa be so happy to know people
are buying his books?”
“If it’s true and continues,” says
Andrea, resuming her sorting of invoices, “your father can finally stop working
at Ocelot.”
“He does dread waiting tables these
days and traveling to and fro on these cold winter nights,” says Vivienne,
composing an email to Hortensio’s Market in Mercy asking them to please pay for
vegetables and fruit they purchased in September, October, and November. “Though he says it’s more of a psychic strain than
physically difficult. Hmm. Interesting how psychic
and physic are composed of the same
letters in different orders. I’ll track down those word origins later on my own
time.”
“We have enough money in the bank
for him to quit now, but he doesn’t want to draw on our reserves,” says Andrea,
handing a stack of invoices to Vivienne. “When you get these entered, we’ll be
done for the day.”
“Well, well, well,” says Vivienne, gazing
wide-eyed at the screen. “This just in from the very prompt Primero. Maybe Papa
will be able to quit working at Ocelot without drawing on our reserves.”
“Tell me,” says Andrea, closing her
eyes and praying those sales figures were true.
“In October Philip’s Kitchen sold 3244 copies, and in November 5225, and that’s
only a partial total for November, with similar numbers for Delicious Ambitious. Which means, if my
calculations are correct, 50,000 dollars will soon be arriving in our bank
account. And who knows what the
totals will be for December when all those frenzied Christmas shoppers get done
snatching up copies.”
“Never mind the invoices,” says
Andrea, leaping to her feet. “Let’s go tell your father.”
*
On this same rainy December day, Marcel, the wine master of Ziggurat Farms, and Philip, Marcel’s accomplice in wine, invite Raul the famous chef and Boris the wonderfully strong father of Irenia to join them in the gigantic old redwood barn and help stir the yeast in the seventy barrels of wine that have been fermenting since September, to be followed by tasting wine from six test barrels to determine if last year’s wine is ready for bottling after fourteen months of fermentation.
Raul has been longing for such an
invitation because he considers Marcel’s pinot noirs and cabernets among the
best he has ever tasted, and he has tasted the best in the world. Yet he knows Marcel
buys his pinot noir and cabernet grapes from three inland vineyards owned by three
wineries producing wine Raul would never
serve in his restaurant in Mercy where customers pay hundreds of dollars for a
bottle of wine and expect nothing less than world class, which Marcel’s wine is.
And now more and more wine aficionados,
many of whom first tasted Marcel’s wine at Raul’s restaurant, greatly covet Ziggurat
Farm’s incomparable pinot noir and cabernet that Andrea sells for twelve hundred
dollars a case and could reasonably ask twice that. How, Raul wonders, does
Marcel evoke such greatness from the same grapes that supposedly expert
vintners can only rouse to mediocrity?
When all the barrels of fermenting wine
have been stirred for the second time today, the tasting of the previous year’s
wine begins.
“As you can see there is no more
sediment,” says Marcel, dipping wine from the first of the six test barrels, his
ladle made of sturdy glass. “My nose is pleased, the color is good, and the
wine has been transforming for nearly fifteen months, so perhaps this pinot is
ready for the bottle.”
Marcel pours the dark purple wine
into each man’s glass, and Philip says, “May Bacchus be with us.”
“Dionysus say the Greeks,” says
Marcel, raising his glass.
“In Russia we say the wine god is Kvasura,”
says Boris, raising his glass, too.
“In Portugal we call him Lusus, son
of Bacchus,” says Raul, touching his glass to the others.
Now they taste and swallow.
“I know little about wine except
what you teach me, Marcel,” says Boris, having downed his wine in a single gulp,
“but I know this is delicious. No trace of bitterness.”
“Oui,” says Marcel, nodding. “I like
it.”
“I love it,” says Philip, grinning at Marcel. “You’ve done it again.”
“It’s magnificent,” says Raul,
shaking his head in wonder. “How do you do it? Why can’t the growers of your
grapes make wine like this? Or even close to this?”
“Our secret,” says Marcel,
matter-of-factly. “Maybe you’ll find us out as we taste.”
Marcel jots a few things in a small
notebook, they rinse their glasses, and he ladles out wine from the next
barrel.
“This is also a pinot?” asks Raul,
holding his glass up to the light and noting the wine is perhaps slightly darker
than the first one they tasted. “From the same grapes?”
“Oui,” says Marcel, tasting.
“Ah,” says Boris, nodding. “This is
maybe just a little sweet. Yes?”
“You have good taste buds, Boris,”
says Marcel, nodding. “And I think the oak comes through a bit more in this
one.”
“I like this even better than the
first,” says Raul, frowning. “But it’s the same grapes. Correct?”
“Oui,” says Marcel, winking at
Philip. “Now we taste the third pinot from those same grapes.”
They rinse their glasses and Marcel
ladles out the wine.
“This is the darkest yet,” says
Raul, tasting the wine. “And maybe the best. I’m not sure. In any case I want forty
cases, whatever your price. Tell Andrea.”
“We shall,” says Philip, clinking
glasses with Marcel.
“We begin bottling tomorrow,” says
Marcel, jotting a few more thing in his notebook, “should either of you want to
help me and Philip and Lisa and Henri and Vivienne and Irenia, and with any
luck Arturo. Now let us taste the cabernet.”
“One moment, my friend,” says Raul, raising
his hand to forestall Marcel. “These three pinots are subtly different from
each other in color and taste, though you say they are made from the same
grapes and spent exactly the same amount of time fermenting in the same barrels
in the same old barn two miles from the same ocean. How can they be the same grapes? And why can’t those wineries make
better wine from these same grapes when you can make this nectar of the gods?”
“You promise to tell no one?” says
Marcel, smiling at Raul.
“I promise,” says Raul, nodding solemnly.
“We buy from three vineyards we have
chosen after some years of tasting the grapes at many vineyards. In each of
these vineyards we have found what Lisa calls sweet spots, groups of vines
producing grapes that taste especially delicious to us and are far superior to
the other grapes in that vineyard. Who knows why? More water? Better soil? We
don’t know, but we visit these sweet spots every day in the last week when the
grapes are approaching ripeness, and when the grapes taste perfect to us, we
pay extra for those particular vines to be picked just for us.”
“And those vintners haven’t
discovered your secret?” asks Raul, frowning. “How could they not?”
“Not only have they not discovered
our secret,” says Marcel, chuckling, “but they say we only imagine these grapes taste different than the others. Yet to us
there is no comparison.”
“They’re fools,” says Raul, having
known countless fools masquerading as experts. “But even so they must have tried
your wine and tasted the difference.”
“Not that we’re aware of,” says
Marcel, shaking his head. “They think we are silly amateurs.”
“They snicker when we come to claim
our grapes,” says Philip, shrugging in acceptance of the fact. “Each to his
own.”
“Then they are more than fools,”
says Raul, shaking his head. “They’re idiots.”
“But enough about them,” says
Philip, rinsing his glass. “Let’s taste the cabernet.”
Marcel ladles the first of the cabs.
“This is more, how do you say it…
earthy,” says Boris, feeling a little drunk. “I like it very much.”
“This is the best cabernet I’ve ever
had,” says Raul, also drunk. “I want forty cases of this, too. So… your grapes
are the best ones grown in those vineyards.”
“The best for my taste and for
Philip and Lisa,” says Marcel, rinsing his glass. “They are my co-tasters in
the vineyards.”
“So you buy these special pinot
grapes and special cabernet grapes from those three vineyards,” says Raul,
awareness dawning. “And you mix the three pinots together? And the three
cabernets?”
“We do,” says Marcel, ladling out
the second cabernet. “But we mix them in three or four different proportions to
each other, this year three. Each mixture has a different proportion of each
grape to create subtly different flavors and sometimes slightly different
colors.”
“You create these proportions by
tasting the grapes in various proportions,”
says Raul, nodding in understanding.
“Yes,” says Marcel, delighted with
the taste of the second cabernet. “We sit around the table with our mouths full
of various combinations of grapes, the kids, too, and we write down our
reactions, and eventually we discover the proportions we like best. Then we
crush the grapes from each vineyard separately, and when we know exactly how
much juice of each grape we have, we figure out how to distribute all the juice
to create these proportions in the barrels. Then Philip and I and Henri worry
over the wine every day like mothers worrying over their first babies, we stir
the yeast two and three and sometimes four times a day, and we baby the wine as
no big winery could ever afford to baby a wine, and the fermentation takes
place in this old redwood barn with the ocean breezes keeping the air sweet and
cool, and… here we are.”
At which moment, Andrea and Vivienne
rush in with the news of Philip’s cookbooks selling like hotcakes.
*
A few days later, Lisa and Andrea and Vivienne go for a bathe after supper in the big soaking tub in the bathhouse, the water a delicious ninety-nine degrees.
“I wish Irenia had spent the night
tonight,” says Vivienne slipping into the warm water. “She loves it when all the
women bathe together.”
“Tonight we wanted it to be just the
three of us,” says Lisa, smiling at her daughter, “because we want to tell you
something we’ve been waiting to tell you until you turned twelve.”
“Is this about sex?” asks Vivienne, excitedly.
“Because you know, Mama, I do know
how all that works, even before
Caroline gave us an excellent lecture on mammalian reproduction.”
Andrea laughs. “This is not about
sex, sweetheart, though it is somewhat related.”
“Then why did you wait until I was twelve?”
asks Vivienne, frowning.
“We chose the age a long time ago,”
says Lisa, moving across the tub so she’s sitting next to Vivienne. “We almost
told you a few other times, but then we didn’t. And now we want to. It’s
nothing bad. Don’t worry.”
Vivienne gasps in her dramatic way.
“Was I adopted?”
“No,” says Lisa, putting her arm
around her daughter. “You came out of my womb, and Philip is your father.”
“Then what could it possibly be?” asks Vivienne, perplexed.
“When Arturo was thirteen months
old,” says Lisa, speaking quietly, “I stopped making milk and could no longer
breastfeed him. He was almost ready to stop, so it wasn’t hard for him to
switch to goat’s milk, and by the time you were born fifteen months later, my
milk was renewed and I breastfed you until you were three months old and then
my milk began to wane again.”
“Because you were forty-four?” ask
Vivienne, nodding sympathetically. “And that’s a little old for being a
mother?”
“That was maybe part of the reason,”
says Lisa, looking at Andrea, “but mostly I couldn’t make milk because I lost so
much weight after Arturo was born and couldn’t gain it back, so I had very
little body fat, which a woman needs to get pregnant and to make milk. In fact,
we didn’t think I could get pregnant again after Arturo was born, but luckily I
could and you were born.”
“But you were too skinny to make
enough milk for me,” says Vivienne, nodding in understanding. “So then did you
give me goat’s milk? Is that what you’ve been waiting to tell me? Because I
love goats, Mama. I do.”
“We didn’t give you goat’s milk,”
says Andrea, smiling fondly at Vivienne. “We gave you my milk.”
“You
breastfed me?” says Vivienne, gazing in wonder at Andrea.
“I did,” says Andrea, crying. “From
when you were three months old until you were almost two. Henri was
fourteen-months-old when you were born and I had plenty of milk for both of you.
And then he weaned himself at eighteen months, and I continued nursing you for
another year.”
“Did Mama ask you to?” whispers
Vivienne, starting to cry.
“No,” says Andrea, coming to sit
with Vivienne and Lisa. “One morning I was holding you and you were fussing
because you wanted to suckle. I rocked you and sang to you, but you would not
be appeased, so I gave you my breast and then you were happy, and so was I.”
“I don’t remember,” says Vivienne, embracing
Andrea, “but I’ve always thought of you as my other mother, and it turns out
you were.”
*
In the early evening a few days before Christmas, Gabriel Fernandez comes to Nathan and Celia and Delilah’s little house on the outskirts of Mercy to drive the four of them to a dinner party at the new home of Joseph and Constance next door to Ziggurat Farm.
Gabriel is thirty-four, a Mercy
native and backhoe operator. Nathan is eighty-eight, a retired arborist and
poet. Celia is eighty-two, a former nurse now gardener and cook, and Delilah is
twenty-eight, a musician, artist, and the main teacher at Ziggurat Farm Home School.
Nathan and Celia became Delilah’s
guardians when she was thirteen, her movie star mother, the late Margot
Cunningham, having brought Delilah to Mercy hoping to establish a better life
for her daughter far from the insatiable celebrity hounds, and Margot’s hope
was realized when Delilah moved in with Nathan and Celia.
Margot died when Delilah was twenty,
Delilah’s father unknown even to Margot, because, as Margot confided to Nathan,
any of several men might have impregnated her around the time Delilah was
conceived.
Delilah and Gabriel have been dating
for two months and have yet to become lovers, both of them wary of rushing into
a sexual relationship and possibly wrecking their lovely friendship.
Nathan and Celia sit in the backseat
of Gabriel’s new electric car and Delilah sits up front with Gabriel.
“I thought for sure we’d get one of
these,” says Nathan, who rarely drives nowadays and is thinking of selling his
old pickup truck. “But we hardly go anywhere and Celia’s little old Toyota
still runs, so we probably won’t get one. Not in this lifetime anyway.”
“I went to a tractor show in Santa
Rosa last year and tested some amazing electric ones,” says Gabriel, who reveres
Nathan and Celia. “I couldn’t believe how quiet they were, but I just bought a
new tractor and backhoe two years ago and the best electric ones are incredibly
expensive, so… not for a few years.”
“This car is so comfortable,” says
Celia, resting against Nathan. “I could go to sleep.”
“Mi madre says the same thing,” says
Gabriel, driving slowly up the curving road through the redwood forest to
Joseph and Constance’s house. “By the way, she says hello and wants to know
what we can bring bring for supper on Saturday.”
“Nada,” says Celia, who makes a
prayer every morning and every evening that Delilah and Gabriel will marry
before Nathan dies. “Just your wonderful selves.”
*
Following the lavish supper in Joseph and Constance’s gorgeous new house, the twenty guests move into the living room where Raul and Caroline give a slide show on an enormous television screen—photos from their October honeymoon in England and Portugal.
After several pictures of the two of
them visiting Raul’s old haunts in London where he became a culinary superstar when
he was in his twenties, the pictures change to the city of Aveiro in Portugal where
Raul was born and lived until he was a young man.
“My mother’s name was Beatrice,” says Raul, narrating. “This is her grave in Aveiro.”
A picture appears of his mother’s large
gray marble headstone standing in an old cemetery.
“She was seventy-four when she died,”
he says, the picture changing to one of a small house in a neighborhood of older
homes with tile roofs. “This is where she lived for the last thirty years of
her life. Caroline wanted to know what my mother looked like, but because my
mother refused to have her picture taken after she was forty, the most recent one
I have of her is when she was thirty-five.”
Everyone oohs at the photo of a
strikingly beautiful brunette in a shimmering green dress showing off her
splendid figure as she kisses the air in the direction of the camera, an
amorous look in her eyes.
Now the next slide appears – Caroline
in sunhat and shorts and a sleeveless shirt, walking on a pier in Aveiro,
several men ogling her as she goes by.
“My beautiful bride turned many
heads in Aveiro,” says Raul, laughing. “The men there have very good taste in
women.”
Another picture appears – Caroline
standing at the end of the pier looking out to sea.
“I used to fish here when I was five
and six-years-old,” says Raul, on the verge of tears. “I would come with my
grandfather, my mother’s father. My father was a fisherman and I liked to come
here and fish while we waited for his boat to come in. He died in a storm at
sea when I was seven. Here is the only picture I have of him.”
The next slide appears – a handsome
man with curly brown hair playing a guitar.
“His name was Goncalo. Besides being
a fisherman, he played the guitar and also the trumpet and the violin, and he sang
like an angel, or so I thought when I was a boy.”
They show many more pictures, the
last one taken just a few days ago—Caroline and Raul holding hands on the beach
at the mouth of the Mercy River.
“Though you can’t tell from this
picture,” says Caroline, her voice shaking with emotion, “we have it on good
authority that I am pregnant, and assuming all goes well our baby will be born
in July.”
“Hallelujah!” cries Joseph, turning
on the lights, everyone rushing to congratulate Caroline and Raul, everyone
except Delilah and Gabriel, Delilah still in shock from seeing the picture of
Raul’s mother, which very well could have been a picture of Delilah.
“Que paso?” asks Gabriel, gently putting
his arm around Delilah. “Are you okay?”
“I’m… do you think I look like Raul’s
mother?” she whispers.
“Yes, very much,” he says quietly. “And
I’d love to see you in a dress like the one she was wearing.”
“Well,” says Delilah, still
whispering, “Raul once mentioned to me that he met my mother a few times when she
dined at his restaurant in San Francisco. Twenty-nine years ago. He didn’t say
anything about them being lovers, but it’s possible they were. She was prolific
in that regard, as was he, and as I told you, she had no idea who my father
was.”
“I see,” says Gabriel, looking
across the room at Raul surrounded by jubilant friends. “So you think maybe
Raul is your father?”
“Now that I’ve seen his mother,” says
Delilah, gazing at Raul, “I think maybe so.”