Mme Proust and the Kosher Kitchen (33 page)

Dick is full of stories from the hospital. He is wonderfully happy to be working on real patients. I was saying he must find them rather unsavoury, since only those who cannot afford their own doctor turn up
there, but he just laughed and said any living soul was more savoury than a cadaver. It is surely true: when we were first married, Adrien used to tell me that the cadavers at the faculty were the bodies of old tramps they had found dead under the bridges, with rotting teeth and decaying innards. I do not imagine the source of bodies has changed, it is just that as I have grown older both the doctor and Dick seem to feel I must be spared these details. Unnecessary, really, it is not as though anyone were asking me to actually look at the cadavers. When Papa died he just looked like he was sleeping, and Maman looked quite beautiful, I recall, so peaceful, and healthy again somehow.

I do not like to complain to Adrien, but I do hope we can make a move before the winter. We looked at two apartments this week. Neither will do, unfortunately. The Rue de Longchamp is just too small and really too far out for Adrien, although I would appreciate being nearer the Bois. On the other hand, the Rue de la Boétie is a lovely apartment but the street not quiet enough, I fear. There is no point going to all the trouble of a move to improve one’s conditions only by a small percentage. We really need a place that is airier and where the heating is more modern. This rheumatism wears me horribly. Perhaps one cannot expect one’s good health to continue much beyond fifty, and I have certainly slowed up since my birthday last year and the change of life, although the doctor is fifteen years older than me and continues as vigorous as
ever. We have both grown stout, of course, but his age never stops him from working. I, on the other hand, have barely been out of bed all weekend.

Adrien is very pleased with himself because he made an inquiry of Dr. Pozzi and discovered there is an apartment on the Boulevard Haussmann that might just do, owned by the Marquis des Réaulx. From the descriptions, it is large enough. Adrien and I will go and take a look at it tomorrow.

Marcel has resigned from the library, which seemed the only sensible solution to the question. I suppose there is not much to regret; he never set foot in the place after his interview. He continues his Ruskinian correspondence with Marie in Manchester, but we have yet to settle on a text for our proposed translation.

Georges and Emilie came for lunch yesterday. He was telling us all about an engineer he met who is working on the new Métropolitan line, and is very enthusiastic about the thing, although I must say they seem to have been building it forever, and I wonder if it will ever open. But from all accounts, the one in London is most useful, so we must have one too.

Marcel has been writing to one of the Marquis’s associates whom he knows, patiently explaining that Adrien really does not receive patients at home very
often. Apparently, the Marquis thinks a professional person will create too many comings and goings in the building. We have tried explaining to his agent that it simply is not the case; the doctor’s work is almost entirely his research and teaching at the Faculty. It has been years since he has regularly taken private patients. I am certain we are simply being snubbed, and that the Marquis does not really understand who Adrien is nor his position at the university. These aristocrats who do no work themselves will fail to recognize the value of a tireless worker who has, along with his colleagues, surely saved half of Europe from cholera. If Adrien had been elected to the Academy, we would not have been treated this way. I suggested writing to the man directly, but Adrien will not hear of it and says we are better to wait until his return from abroad and look again in the new year. So disappointing, as it seemed like a swift solution to our housing woes.

A great row erupted in the kitchen yesterday because Suzanne had bought a tin of peas, insisting we might at least try them. Félicie would have none of it, and Jean called me in to mediate. I said we might each have a spoonful to taste, but could not coax Félicie into trying them at all. I thought the flavour was poor, but Jean pronounced them rather good and said he likes his peas a bit mushy. After all that, Suzanne was unimpressed and told Félicie she would use tinned goods only if they could match the flavour of fresh, which mollified her somewhat. However, Suzanne has also been researching these new stoves and dreams of the day we will buy one. I would be firmer with her if I did not believe that she has real talent and knows how to
combine the new with the old. While Félicie decries the death of gastronomy, I notice that Suzanne not only studies the new machines but has carefully observed how Félicie lets her
boeuf en daube
cook overnight.

We have signed the lease on the Rue de Courcelles and will move in February. The task ahead is intimidating, but the relief at having found the right place is huge. So glad we never reached an agreement with the Marquis in the end, because really this apartment is the pleasanter, spacious and bright, with the electricity very tidily installed throughout since it was designed with that in mind, none of the odd bits of wire that we have here. They really do a wonderful job of that now, compared to how messy it all was when they first brought it in. The only gas left is in the kitchen, for the stove! Indeed, there has never been gas in the place, so the walls are beautifully bright and clean, with none of those marks that Jean is always scrubbing at to no avail. The elevator is a marvel, smooth and quiet, one is barely aware it is moving, and Adrien says we might even have the telephone installed before we move in.

He and I are to have connecting rooms. This seemed like a good opportunity to come to a sensible arrangement. I toss and turn so much with my rheumatism that I keep him awake. The two rooms will work better, though it will be sad, after so many years, not sharing our bed. I have missed its fierce joys for some time but shall now be deprived of its gentler comforts too, the simple reassurance of a sleeping man
at my side. Thus, we give things up to age, without protest but not without regret.

Marcel is uneasy and worries about the disruption of the move, but the doctor is well pleased that he has settled the issue and can now return to his work.

All that fuss—what noise last night!—and to tell the truth the world does not look much different this morning. Not that it should, but it is just like waking up on one’s birthday as a child and somehow feeling that being ten should be different from being nine, as if one’s eyes should have changed colour or one should have grown an extra finger in the night. But no, one is the same. When change comes, it is imperceptible at first and, once it can be perceived, irreversible, like my grey hairs.

Dick is still arguing the government’s position, that the century does not actually begin until next January 1, this debate about zeros that I can never quite grasp. No more can most Parisians, for they were celebrating in the streets, zeros and government ordinances notwithstanding.

Hugo said if the nineteenth century was great, the twentieth would be happy. The doctor believes it, that we will cure our ills and speak on the telephone every day. Yet it seems to me our hearts remain the same, as capable of joy, love, altruism, and grace as they are of hatred, envy, contempt, and bitterness, as prone to smallness and to greatness as they have ever been.

A
T SOME POINT IN
their lives of particular optimism and wealth—New Year’s Eve, 1989? No, it must have been earlier, a Christmas in the boom years of ’87 or ’88, perhaps—my parents throw a large party. The door of our house in Westmount is opened to receive old friends, new connections, valued clients, and reliable family members, who burst into our spacious hallway, bringing with them little gusts of cold wind and the particular wintertime energy produced by joyful anticipation and frigid air. They retire to the vestibule to remove their outdoor things, awkwardly bending over to slip off rubbers or unzip boots, slowed by their layers of heavy clothing, hurried by their desire to join the party. They greet my parents with cries of cheer and delight, presenting little gifts of food and wine, boxes of shortbread, homemade jellies, a special vintage, a scented candle.

Standing in the hallway, my mother looks over-whelmed—by the grand occasion, by the ostentatious red evening dress that she is wearing, by my father’s much larger presence at her side. She smiles tightly; he beams. I am in my twenties now, old enough to know that I’m not fair to her. She has never been permitted to live in her own country. She never really knows where she is.

“Danzer. How are ya?” My father is in his element. “Darling, you remember Michael…
Bonsoir, bonsoir… Cherie, enfin… Marie, viens ici.”

He draws me towards the most recent arrivals. He hopes some day I will take over his business and wants to introduce me to his professional circle. Or perhaps, on this expansive night, he just wants to share his good fortune, display family to friends and vice versa.
Grand-mère
is also in attendance, presiding graciously over the evening from a
wingback chair by the fire in the living room, regally greeting those who approach her to chat, smiling so benignly when she is alone that she removes all awkwardness from such moments. Max is about somewhere, hovering at my elbow—“Can I do anything?”—then disappearing into the crowd to find our McGill friends.

The evening is glowing, candlelit, Dickensian in its warmth.

Towards the end of it all, I am standing in the vestibule, part of a laughing party that is helping a very pregnant woman look for her boots amongst a chaotic collection of gear. My mother has forgotten to remove the family’s own things so that the narrow little space is full to bursting with both our guests’ coats, furs, and winter boots and our own macintoshes, umbrellas, running shoes, and tennis rackets.

“They were black, high ones, like almost knee-high…” She cannot really bend over herself, so she stands above us issuing instructions as we grovel about at her feet.

“These, honey?” Her rambunctious husband holds up a pair of men’s rubber galoshes and we all laugh.

Just when the moment has lasted too long to still be funny, just when I am starting to organize all the shoes and boots into rows in an attempt to fend off true desperation, the pregnant woman, momentarily forgetting her girth, pounces: “Oh, I forgot. I wore my brown ones.”

We have all been looking for the wrong pair of boots. We laugh and laugh, and as the couple take their leave with the brown boots firmly in place, we remain in the vestibule, as though to stay a little longer in this amusing place.

There is an umbrella stand in one corner of the room, one of those great china cylinders with an orange dragon curling
itself around the side. Max spies it and, on some whim, with some desire to find a reason to prolong our presence here, pulls out a bamboo cane, brandishing it aloft in the narrow room. It is my father’s, an object that has been in our house as long as I can remember, in the apartment in Paris before that, so little used and yet so ever present that I have always taken it for granted and never much considered its worth. But as Max pretends to fence with it, crying
“En garde!”
it occurs to me that it might actually be, knowing both my father’s trade and his passions, a rather valuable antique.

“Max. Careful. That’s my dad’s.”

But Max isn’t listening much, and continues to fence, backing me towards the end of the room. He lowers the cane now, dodging it about my feet, as though fending off a snapping dog. Then he tries to manoeuvre it between my ankles, as if to lift my long skirt with it, and each time I dart away, giggling, he persists, insisting that he will place the stick between my legs. The atmosphere has gone queer now; the hilarity evaporated. The meaning of his gesture is too apparent to be ignored. As my giggles choke me and a gasping sound comes from my throat, I am suddenly and completely aware that there is embarrassment rippling through the few observers left in the room and also, simultaneously, I remind myself of Susan, she of the astonishingly round eyes.

I realize what Max is doing, and the word, in the context of our earnest friendship, takes me by surprise. Max is flirting. With me.

I push past him, back into the hall.

“Let’s get something to drink.”

The household is in an uproar as we prepare our valises for Venice; it is all rushed but actually great fun. Marcel suddenly decided that the trip must be this spring with Reynaldo in Rome, ready to join us there, and Marie already visiting with her aunt.

Adrien is ignoring it all, and has retired to his study to do his last revisions, so neglected with the move and his negotiations this winter. He says the manuscript should be off to the publisher next month by the latest and is well pleased with his progress. I suppose I should try and read his book when it comes out, even though it will be incomprehensible to me. I skimmed the last one, as I recall. He always just laughs and says it does not matter that I do not read his research, he would not expect a layperson to follow it, but nonetheless wifely duty would seem to demand one at least have some idea of what the work entailed.

Dick promises me that he will take me to the Exposition when we get back. There have been the most intriguing pictures in the papers, and all sorts of dignitaries including the Prince of Wales himself.