Gail Bowen - The Nesting Dolls

“Anything happening around here?” I said.

Sheila leaned back in her chair and sighed contentedly. “Not a thing. All is calm. All is bright.”

“Let’s keep it that way,” I said.

I picked up my mail and headed for my office. The message light on my phone was blinking. I pressed the message retrieval button and heard Myra Brokaw’s voice. “Good morning, Joanne. Just a gentle reminder that Theo and I are expecting you for tea today at two-thirty. There are no names on the security panel of our building, so I wanted to make sure you had our code. It’s 201. We’re very much looking forward to seeing you.” I deleted the message, uttered Zack’s second-favourite expletive, wrote down the Brokaws’ apartment security code, and moved a stack of essays from the side of my desk to the middle. It was going to be a long day.

By eleven o’clock I’d made a large enough dent in the essay pile that I felt I could take a break and get something to eat. I went downstairs to the cafeteria, filled my mug with tea, and selected a Granny Smith apple. When I got back to my office, I stared at my essays and decided I needed a change of pace. I opened my laptop and found a file I’d started when I was considering Theo Brokaw as the audience’s guide to the workings of the Supreme Court. There had been plenty of sources to mine for nuggets about Theo’s philosophy of law, but very little biographical material, and most of what I’d found was without value. However, when I’d been seated at a dinner party with Nicholas Zaba, a man who’d grown up with Theo, I hit the mother lode. The two men had remained close, and my dinner companion had drunk just enough to make him an indiscreet and utterly charming raconteur.

The next morning when I’d written up Nick’s memories of Mr. Justice Brokaw, I began as Nick had begun. “Theo owes everything he has to women,” he’d said, refilling my glass with a very fine Shiraz. “His genius is that he makes the women in his life feel as if they owe everything to him.”

In Nick’s telling, Theo led a charmed life. He was the only son of hard-working, proud, first-generation Canadians who lived over the bakery they owned in Regina in the solid working-class area of Broders Annex. The Brokaws’ dreams for their four daughters were modest: they wanted the girls to grow into industrious and pious women who would marry good men and give them grandchildren. The girls were clever, but they were also dutiful, and so after they graduated high school, they worked in Brokaw’s Bakery, expanded to include delivery service, and in the butcher’s shop that the family had purchased, renovated, and transformed into Brokaw’s Market, a business with a generic name and an impressive ability to ferret out and supply the needs of the neighbourhood’s Eastern European population. The shops prospered, but the family’s most extravagant dreams were vested in their only son.

Theo not only complied with their expectations; he excelled. After graduating from the College of Law, he articled for a respected Saskatoon law firm, decided that his real passion was not practising law but research and teaching, completed an L.L.M., discovered a talent for critical legal theory and analytical jurisprudence, taught law at the University of Saskatchewan, married the daughter of a distinguished jurist, was appointed to the province’s Court of Appeals, and found himself, at forty-five, appointed to the highest court in the land.

His rise had been meteoric, fuelled by his powerful father-in-law and by his wife who knew how the game was played. As Nick Zaba wryly noted, the equation was simple: Myra’s father loved Myra, Myra loved Theo, and Theo loved Theo. The marriage was a happy one. Until they retired from the family business, Theo’s sisters regularly wrapped and shipped his favourites from the bakery: the poppy seed cake; the thick black bread that his father credited with giving him the brains to become a judge; the special Christmas baking that Theo’s sisters knew, without asking, Myra would never think to make him. But Myra was, they hastened to add, the perfect wife for a professional man.

When I finished reading I packed up the unmarked essays, put on my coat and boots, told Sheila that if any students wanted to get in touch with me, they had my e-mail address, and drove to Broders Annex. It wasn’t hard to justify my visit to Brokaw’s. Loaves of the elaborately twisted and braided Ukrainian Christmas bread were always on the table at our family’s Christmas Day open house and it was time to place my order. Besides, anything beat reading another paper on Canada’s involvement in Afghanistan.

On a day in which all colour and warmth seemed to have been leached from the world, the bakery, bright, warm, and redolent of fresh baking, was a welcome destination. Except for Christmas and Easter and an occasional impulse buy if I was in the neighbourhood, I wasn’t a regular customer, and so it was a surprise but not a shock when a young couple who introduced themselves as Tony and Rose Nguyen said they were the bakery’s new owners.

I looked at the metal shelves of bread – whole wheat, multigrain, dense dark pumpernickel, sour rye, hearth loaves, and egg bread – and at the glass case of turnovers, doughnuts, strudel, poppy seed rolls, honey cake, sweet buns, and tarts. “Everything looks the same as it was,” I said.

“Everything is the same,” Tony Nguyen said. He spoke with the care of someone for whom English is a second language. “We bought the bakery lock, stock, and barrel and that included the recipes. We follow them to the letter.”

“Good,” I said. “I’ll have a loaf of the dark pumpernickel, an apple strudel, and three gingerbread girls. And I’d like to place my Christmas order: four dozen cinnamon rolls, half without raisins, and three loaves of Ukrainian Christmas bread.”

“Kolach,” Tony Nguyen said, and he wrote my order in a small ringed notebook. “And your name?”

“Joanne Shreve,” I said. I gave him my address and phone number and said I’d pick up the baking on December 24. “Are the Brokaws still in Regina?”

“They moved to Victoria,” Tony Nguyen said. “They sought more pleasant winters.”

His wife boxed the strudel. “They worked hard all their lives,” she said softly. “Now this is our dream.”

“I’m sure you’ll have great success,” I said. “You seem to be doing all the right things.” I paid my bill; Rose Nguyen handed me my purchases, and I dropped them in my shopping bag.

“My brother, Phuoc Huu, bought the grocery store,” Tony said. “His borscht is very good with pumpernickel.”

I glanced outside. The grey was oppressive. “It looks like a perfect day for borscht,” I said. “Thanks for the suggestion.”

Like the Brokaw’s Bakery, the Brokaw’s Market was unchanged: the refrigerated display cases were filled with fresh and deli meats and an impressive variety of sausages. The freezers held cabbage rolls, perogies of every permutation or combination, and borscht – vegetarian and meat. Even the aisle that displayed Ukrainian gifts and cards was the same. I considered a pretty embroidered cloth, then, remembering that I had thirty-five years’ worth of tablecloths at home, put it back. There was a glass shelf of Russian nesting dolls. They had fascinated my own children when they were little. Their dolls had long since gone the way of all toys with moveable parts, but looking at twin Natasha dolls, one with black painted hair, one blonde, I knew they’d be a hit in Madeleine’s and Lena’s stockings and I placed them in my basket. There was a larger matryoshka nesting doll, dark-haired, pink-cheeked, and very pretty. I wouldn’t have minded finding her in my own stocking, but the price tag was $37.50, so I left her behind and went off in search of borscht and sausage.