Cooking for Picasso (7 page)

M
Y MOTHER WAITED UNTIL
I
was thirty to tell me about Grandmother Ondine and Picasso. It was Christmas Eve, and I'd just flown in from Los Angeles to spend the holiday with her at her house in Westchester—one of those venerable old colonials with large, elegant windows, bordered by carefully pruned shrubbery and situated on a spacious, neat lawn dotted with ancient oak and maple trees.

It was snowing lightly when my taxi dropped me at the driveway. Mom must have been watching from a window, because the front door opened before I even got near it, and she came down the walkway without a coat over her cherry-red wool dress. She always dressed impeccably in finely made suits or dresses, pretty silk scarves and subtle, discreet jewelry; and her skin appeared youthfully radiant.

I instantly admired how good she looked and how she single-handedly maintained a modest, genuine spirit of
joie de vivre
. Yet the sight of her small figure and bright face coming down the walkway also evoked a protective instinct I've often had for her, almost as if she were the child and I her guardian. For, although Mom possessed French good taste, she wasn't haughty about it; she had a shy, meek demeanor, due to some mysterious trauma from her childhood which she once alluded to but refused to fully explain, saying only, “Grandmother Ondine and I went through some bad times before I got married. But one must take the bitter with the better.” I could never get her to say anything more.

Today though, Mom was especially happy and animated. “Céline, you made it! How lovely you look with your California suntan!” she exclaimed approvingly, kissing me on first one cheek, then the other. I stooped to meet her halfway, because I was so much taller. Her eyes were dark while mine were blue; in fact all I inherited from her was her auburn-colored hair—I wore mine in a waist-length braid, while hers was cut chic and short. I liked the familiar scent of her face powder; the warmth of her soft cheeks. As we hugged, her tiny frame felt a little more delicate now, for she was in her mid-seventies.

I took off my coat and threw it around her shoulders as she said, “Oh, look at the snow! Now we'll have a white Christmas, isn't that nice? It's like powdered sugar on everything. Come in,
chérie,
let's get you some
chocolat chaud
!” Although she cooked like the Frenchwoman she was, Mom felt immensely proud of being what she considered a modern American homemaker
typique
. I was actually born in France, but my parents immediately whisked me off to New York so I'd have a thoroughly American childhood.

“Hello, Julie! Merry Christmas,” called out a new neighbor from across the road, who'd just come down her own driveway to collect her mail, and perhaps to look me over, because we hadn't met.

“Merry Christmas!” Mom said, then added with pride, “This is my daughter, Céline. I told you about her—she's a makeup artist in Hollywood. This year she was nominated for an Oscar award!”

“My
team
was nominated, Mom,” I muttered, embarrassed.

“Ah, at last I get to meet Céline, ‘the missing link'!” the woman said, bustling across the street.

I supposed I'd been called worse. All my life I was known as the “accident”, a child conceived late when nobody expected it. My mother was thrilled though, because I was her only child after two miscarriages. I had older step-siblings, Danny and Deirdre, twins from my father's first marriage. Sandy-haired and freckled, they were dead ringers for Dad. Because they were older and very mysterious as only twins can be, I worshipped them wistfully as a kid, but they viewed me as a “Frenchie” like Mom.

“How's Arthur?” the neighbor asked, and she and Mom nattered on a bit about Dad's surgery. Since I'd just been on an airplane for six hours, all I wanted to do was go inside and unwind, not stand here in cold weather that my blood wasn't used to. When my mother tried to give me back my coat, I dug into my carry-on bag for a wool jacket instead, then I waited as patiently as I could until Mom was finally able to make her excuses, and at last we went into the warm house all aglow with holiday lights.

“Mmm, it smells like Christmas in here,” I said as we entered, enjoying the mingled scents of nutmeg, orange, cloves, French mulled wine, and desserts baked with sweet European butter.

Mom's place was always perfectly neat in a way that I knew my apartment would never be. For the holidays, the rooms were decorated with pine branches and maroon-and-gold ribbon; the parlor had a big tree winking with lights and
baubels
and wrapped gifts shining beneath it; and, in her large, beautiful kitchen, almost every table and countertop was laden with home-baked desserts.

“You made
Les Treize Desserts de No
ë
l
!” I exclaimed, thrilled at the charming sight of this ancient, traditional series of Provençal home-baked sweets. Delighted by my enthusiasm, Mom proudly gave me a tour of the Thirteen Desserts of Christmas. Here was the dish of dried fruits and nuts called the “Four Beggars” to represent the four orders of monks; then a sweet,
brioche
-like cake made with orange flower water and olive oil; various meringue and candied citrus and melon confections; two kinds of nougats with pistachio and almond; also the thin, waffle-like
oreillettes,
cookies dusted with powdered sugar like the snow sifting outside; and of course, the spectacular
bûche
de No
ë
l
—a Yule Log of rolled chocolate cake with a caramel cream filling, and dark chocolate frosting which had been scraped by a fork's tines to make it resemble a hunter's newly chopped log from the forest. There was even a tiny candy Santa Claus carrying a hunter's axe poised atop this beautiful Yule Log.

“Wow, Mom, you must be exhausted!” I said, impulsively giving her a big hug of congratulations for her beautiful presentation. She purred with pleasure, stroking my cheek and then patting my back.

“Pas du tout,”
she said modestly with an airy wave of her hand. And suddenly I realized what was different about Mom today; she possessed the calm, confident demeanor of someone who'd been home alone peacefully cooking all week while Dad was in the hospital recuperating. Even though she loved catering to him, I could see that not having Dad at home had somehow released her, making her both relaxed and buoyant; and it looked as if she'd been secretly enjoying her newfound independence.

“Leave your suitcase in the front hall, we'll get you settled in later,” she said, eagerly taking my hand and leading me to the kitchen table. She sat me down there and then poured us some hot chocolate, which she'd timed perfectly for my arrival, along with a plate of fresh apricot butter biscuits.

“Mmm, so good,” I said, sipping gratefully. “Now it really
tastes
like Christmas.”

She'd been beaming with the instinctive physical delight that mothers have when their children are near, but now as Mom sat beside me, her expression became more sober. “Céline,” she began rather tentatively, “your father has healed from his prostate surgery, but the doctors are saying that he's still got a lot of other serious health problems with his heart and his lungs. So this got him to thinking, and he decided that we ought to update our wills. There was so much paperwork to sign! You know I'm no good with such business and legal things. But thank heavens it's all taken care of now.”

This conversation was highly unusual; my mother rarely talked about money. She left the family finances entirely up to Dad and his accountants. She shopped, she had credit cards of course, but as far as I knew, she'd never in her life had to balance a checkbook, pay a bill or do her taxes.

Now she took a deep breath. And then she lowered the boom. “Your brother has been helping Dad with all the complicated insurance paperwork, so they've put everything in trust to Danny, because he understands what Dad wants and can continue taking care of it all when your father isn't around to do so anymore. Is that okay with you?” I detected a guilty tinge to her voice as she said all this in a rush, as if to get the whole thing over with as quickly as possible.

Still, it took me a moment to grasp the significance of what she was saying. “Danny's going to get
all
the money? Even what you inherited from your mom?” I said. She nodded with such a stricken look that I saw it had not been an easy thing for her to agree to, yet she hastily tried to reassure me.

“But Danny won't keep the money all for himself. He'll manage it for me and then when I'm gone, he'll take care of
all
of you; it will be divided up equally. Daddy says men have more access to information for making better business and investment decisions. ‘Men trust men', he says.”

My hot chocolate had gone cold right there in my cup. I'd stopped sipping it. “And what do
you
say, Mom?” I asked quietly. I knew that nobody else in the family was going to ask her this.

She looked relieved and grateful, as if I'd given her permission to voice her own opinion, and I found this painfully touching. “I thought all three of you should be in charge—with the trust split three ways. I told your father that,” she admitted. “But he kept saying, ‘Too many cooks in the kitchen spoil the broth.' Deirdre says she's fine with Danny being in charge, so I thought it must be all right, don't you think?” she said pleadingly. Her self-doubt was so pitiful to see but I had to answer her truthfully.

“No, I don't agree. Deirdre
would
say it's fine; the twins are always thick as thieves.” In fact as a kid Danny
had
been a thief, utterly unrepentant when caught cheating in school or stealing from his own family. What bothered me most was the sneaky way he did it, skulking around the house; he just wasn't the kind of boy you turned your back on. I never understood why Mom didn't use a firmer hand with him. Nor could I let my father's sexist excuse pass. “Dad's living in the Dark Ages. These days there's a whole world full of women who run companies, make investments, do everything!” I reminded her.

My mother got that look on her face—the one she wore whenever she wanted to dodge any conflict, large or small. “Oh, he's always been a good husband and a good father, and you know he loves
all
of us!” she said hastily. “Don't worry, the will says everything will be done fairly.”

“Let's hope so, Mom,” I sighed. I didn't want to add to her stress, and I couldn't expect her to confront Dad now. She'd been thirty when she met my father—a tall, good-looking forty-year-old at the time, whose first wife had recently died of cancer, and he was dealing with a succession of nannies who'd all quit, saying that the twins were mean and “a pair of holy terrors”.

I'd heard this from Aunt Matilda, Dad's younger sister, a retired art teacher whom he derisively called “the spinster”. Aunt Matilda said he was attracted to my mother because he wanted “an old-fashioned girl, fashioned from his own rib”.

But Mom described being courted by a man smitten with love-at-first-sight, and surely this was true; Dad never cheated on her or even flirted with other women, and he made certain that his wife lived the good life, always able to have whatever fine things she loved. He was a “killer” lawyer at a prestigious firm, who could also be charming, gregarious and even appear modest when the situation warranted it. Mom claimed that Dad was just like the hero of her favorite movie,
The Sound of Music
—a sort of Captain von Trapp whose stern, somewhat sinister-looking handsomeness masked the heart of a good man.

I always wanted to believe so, for when Dad was in a good mood he was affectionate to us all, scooping his special ice cream sundaes, flipping Saturday-morning pancakes, singing to us on long car drives, teaching us kids to play sports and games. He liked to tell jokes, and, among his adult friends he was considered the life of the party. People mistook his jocular act for the hallmark of a contented soul.