Elin Hilderbrand - The Love Season

Down the street, still within shouting distance of the movie theater, on the opposite side of Oak Street from the police station, was a shingled building with a charming hand-painted sign of a golden retriever under a big black umbrella. THE UMBRELLA SHOP, the sign said. FINE GIFTS. Marguerite’s heart faltered. She ascended three brick steps, opened the door, and stepped in.

If what the girl wanted was the whole story, the unabridged version of her mother’s adult life and death and how it intersected with Marguerite’s life and how they both ended up on Nantucket-if that was indeed the point of tonight-then Marguerite would have to go all the way back to Paris, 1975. Marguerite was thirty-two years old, and in the nine years since she’d graduated from the Culinary Institute she had been doing what was known in the restaurant business as paying her dues. There had been the special hell of her first two years out when she worked as garde manger at Les Trois Canards in northern Virginia. It was French food for American congressmen and lobbyists. The chef, Gerard de Luc, was a classicist in all things, including chauvinism. He hated the mere idea of a woman in his kitchen, but it was the summer of 1967 and he’d lost so many men to Vietnam that, quite frankly, he had to hire Marguerite. She had been, if judged by today’s standards, egregiously harassed. The rest of the kitchen staff was male except for Gerard’s mother, known only as Mère , an eighty-year-old woman who made desserts in a cool enclave behind the kitchen. Initially, Marguerite had thought that Mère ’s presence might help ameliorate Gerard’s wrath, his demeaning tirades, and his offensive language. (The worst of it was in French, but there were constant references to the sexual favors he would force Marguerite to perform if every strand of her hair wasn’t caught up in the hair net, if the salad greens weren’t bone-dry.) But after the second day, Marguerite deduced that Mère was deaf. Gerard de Luc was a fascist, an ogre-and a genius. Marguerite hated him, though she had to concede his plates were the most impeccable she had ever seen. He made her instructors at the CIA seem slack. He knew the pedigree of every ingredient that entered his kitchen-which farm the vegetables were grown on, which waters the fish were pulled from. Fresh! he would scream. Clean! He inspected their knives every morning. Once, when he found Marguerite with a dull blade, he threw her mise-en-place into the trash. Start over , he said. With a sharp knife . Marguerite had been close to tears, but she knew if she cried, she would be fired or ridiculed so horribly that she’d be forced to quit. She imagined the dull blade slicing off Gerard de Luc’s testicles. Yes, Chef , she said.

Sometimes, staying in a less-than-optimal-or in this case a savage and unsafe-situation was worth it because of what one could learn on the job. In the case of Les Trois Canards, Marguerite became tough; any other woman, one of the cooks told her, would have left the first time Gerard pinched her ass. Marguerite’s tolerance for pain was high.

She left Les Trois Canards after two years, feeling seasoned and ready for anything, and so she moved to restaurant Mecca: Manhattan. During the summer of 1969, she worked as poissonier at a short-lived venture in Greenwich Village called Vite , which served French food done as fast food. It folded after three months, but the sous chef liked Marguerite and took her with him down a golden path that led into the kitchen at La Grenouille. Marguerite worked all of the stations on the hot line, covering the other cooks’ days off, for three magical years. The job was a dream; again, the staff were mostly Frenchmen, but they were civilized. The kitchen was silent most of the time, and when things were going smoothly Marguerite felt like a gear inside a Swiss watch. But the lifestyle of a chef started to wear on her. She arrived at work at nine in the morning to check deliveries, and many nights she didn’t leave until one in the morning. The rest of the staff often went out to disco, but it was all Marguerite could do to get uptown to her studio apartment on East End Avenue, where she crashed on a mattress on the floor. In three years she never found time to assemble her bed frame or shop for a box spring. She never ate at home, she had no friends other than the people she worked with at La Grenouille, and she never dated.

Marguerite left Manhattan in 1972 for a sous chef position at Le Ferme, a farmhouse restaurant in the Leatherstocking District of New York. The restaurant was owned by two chefs, a married couple; they hired Marguerite when the woman, Annalee, gave birth to a daughter with Down’s syndrome. For the three years that Marguerite worked at Le Ferme, the chefs were largely absent. They gave Marguerite carte blanche with the menu; she did all the ordering, and she ventured out into the community in search of the best local ingredients. It was as ideal a situation as Marguerite could ask for, but Le Ferme was busy only on the weekends; people in that part of New York weren’t ready for a restaurant of Le Ferme’s caliber. Marguerite even did her own PR work, enticing a critic she knew in the city to come up to review the restaurant-which he did, quite favorably-but it didn’t do much to help. The restaurant was sold in 1975, and Marguerite was left to twist in the wind.

She considered returning home to northern Michigan. Marguerite’s father had emphysema and probably lung cancer, and Marguerite’s mother needed help. Marguerite could live in her old room, bide her time, wait to see if any opportunities arose. But when she called her mother to suggest this, her mother said, “Don’t you dare come back here, darling. Don’t. You. Dare.”

Diana Beale wasn’t being cruel; she had just raised Marguerite for something bigger and better than cooking at the country club or the new retirement community. What were the ballet lessons for, the French tutor, the four years of expensive cooking school?

I’m sending you money , Diana Beale said. She didn’t explain where the money came from, and Marguerite didn’t ask. Marguerite’s father had worked his whole life for the state government, and yet all through Marguerite’s growing up Diana Beale had magically conjured money with which to spoil Marguerite: weekend trips to Montreal (they had bought the grandfather clock on one trip; Diana Beale spotted it in an antique store and paid for it with cash), silk scarves, trips to the beauty parlor to shape Marguerite’s long hair. Diana Beale had wanted Marguerite to feel glamorous even though as a child she’d been plain. She wanted Marguerite to distinguish herself from the girls she grew up with in Cheboygan, who taught school and married men with factory jobs. And so the mystery money. Only then, at the age of thirty-two, did Marguerite suspect her mother had a wealthy lover, had had one for some time.

What should I do with the money? Marguerite asked. She knew it was being given to her for a reason.

Go to Europe , her mother said. That’s where you belong .

Marguerite could barely remember the person she had been before April 23, 1975, which was the day she stepped into Le Musée du Jeu de Paume in Paris and found Porter fast asleep on a bench in front of Auguste Renoir’s Les Parapluies . She could remember the facts of her life-the long hours working, the exhaustion that followed her everywhere like a bad smell-but she couldn’t recall what had occupied her everyday thoughts. Had she been worried about the stalling of her career? Had she been concerned that at thirty-two she was still unmarried? Had she been lonely? Marguerite couldn’t remember. She had walked across the museum’s parquet floor-it was noon on a Tuesday, the museum was deserted, and the decent had let her in for free-and she’d found Porter asleep. Snoring softly. He was wearing a striped turtleneck and lovely moss-colored linen trousers; he was in his stocking feet. He was so young then, though already losing his hair. Marguerite took one look at him, at his hands tucked under his chin, at his worn leather watchband, and thought, I am going to stay right here until he wakes up .