John Gardner - The Art of Living - And Other Stories

The following night, when everyone knew Uncle Charley was dead, though no one was admitting it was suicide (they never did admit that), Uncle Ed’s livingroom was filled with people. All the chairs were occupied, even the arms of them, where boys or young women sat, most of them cousins, and there were people on the chairs my father had brought in from the diningroom and kitchen, too. The people were all talking in low voices and sniffling, their eyes wet and red. I sat on one of my father’s legs, watching.

They talked of the singer Uncle Charley had been; the festivals would never be the same without him. They spoke of what a shame it was that he’d never had a wife and children; it would have made all the difference. Then for a while, since sad talk made them ill at ease, they talked about other things — crops and the weather, marriages, politics. Sometimes they talked now in groups of three or four, sometimes all as one group. Aunt Kate served tea. Some of the men had whiskey with them, which Aunt Kate didn’t approve of, but she looked at the carpet and said nothing. The clock on the mahogany desk ticked on and on, but neither in the darkness outside nor in the dimly lit livingroom was anything changing. People stirred a little, now and then, shifting position, moving just an arm or a foot, sometimes blowing their noses, but no one got up yet, no one left for home. Slowly the whole conversation died out like embers in a fireplace, and as the stillness deepened, settling in like winter or an old magic spell, it began to seem that the silence was unbreakable, our final say.

Then an old farmer named Sy Thomas, sitting in the corner with his hands folded, twine around his pants cuffs, cleared his throat, pushed his chin out, face reddening, eyes evasive, and began to sing. Tentatively, then more boldly, others joined in with him. Aunt Kate, with an expression half timid, half cunning, went to the piano and, after a minute, sat down, took off her glasses, and began to play. They were singing in parts now, their heads slightly lifted. On the carpet, one after another, as if coming to life, their shoes began to move.

There used to be a cook in our town, a “chef” he was called in the restaurant where he worked — one of those big, dark Italian places with red fake-leather seat cushions, fake paintings on the walls, and on every table a Chianti bottle with a candle in it — but he preferred to think of himself as simply a cook, since he’d never been comfortable with high-falutin pretense, or so he claimed, though heaven knew the world was full of it, and since, whereas he knew what cooking was, all he knew for sure about chefs, he said, was that they wore those big, obscene-looking hats, which he himself wouldn’t be caught dead in. In all this he was a little disingenuous, not to mention out of date, since everybody knew that, in the second-floor apartment over Custus’s Sweet Shop, Newsstand, & Drugstore, where he and his family lived, he had hundreds of books and magazines about cooking, as well as books and magazines about everything else, even a couple of those San Francisco comic books, and all his talk about being an ordinary cook, not a chef, was just another pretense, in this case low-falutin, an attempt to seem what he would never be in a hundred years, just one of the folks. His talk about chefs’ hats was just empty chatter, maybe something he’d thought up years ago and had never thought better of. He did a lot of empty chattering, especially after his son died in the war. He could get all emotional about things not even locked-up crazy people cared about. At the time of this story there weren’t many chefs’ hats in the town where I lived, up in the northern part of New York State, but they were standard garb in the pancake houses, hamburger islands, and diners of the larger cities, like Rome or Utica. The cook’s name, I forgot to mention, was Arnold Deller.

Cooks are notoriously cranky people, but Arnold was an exception. Why he should have been so even-tempered seems a mystery, now that I think about it — especially given his fondness for rant and given the fact that, as we all found out, he was as full of pent-up violence as anybody else at that time. Nevertheless, even-tempered he was. Sometimes when certain kinds of subjects came up, his eyes would fill with tears; but he never swore, or hardly ever, never hit anybody, never quit his job in a huff.

He had it easy, I suppose, in some ways at least. He’d worked in the same place for twenty-some years, almost one of the family, and the working conditions weren’t bad, as such things go. The place was respectable. If you got out a joint, just held it between your fingers, the next thing you knew you were out in the alley on your back, looking up at garbage cans and waste bins. And the kitchen he worked in was large and sufficiently well designed that he didn’t have to run his fat legs off all the time. He’d gotten them to copy it from a restaurant he’d seen in San Francisco or someplace, some convention he’d gone to on saving the endangered species. He and his daughters were big on things like that, also politics and the Threat of Drug Abuse, the same things everybody else was into, except that Arnold and his daughters were more serious. When people wore fur coats, Arnold’s daughters would practically cry. Arnold’s wife mostly slept and watched TV. After their son’s death, she hardly ever left the apartment.

As I say, it was a good job for Arnold. He had a helper, part cook, part dishwasher, a half-Indian, half-Italian kid named Ellis. And all across one wall of the kitchen there were windows, which Arnold and Ellis could open if they wanted to, summer or winter, so the heat was only slightly worse than elsewhere. But above all, the job was ideal for a person of Arnold’s inclination and temperament because the owner, an old man named Frank Dellapicallo — a gray-headed, gloomy man we hardly ever saw — would let Arnold cook anything he wanted, so long as the ingredients could be found and weren’t wildly expensive and the customers would eat it so the old man, Dellapicallo himself, didn’t have to. All he ever ate was spaghetti.

Granting Arnold Deller this freedom was no big risk on Dellapicallo’s part. Though he could talk like a congressman or a holy-roller preacher, Arnold was never outrageous when it came to cuisine — or anyway almost never. It had all started a long time ago, when he’d gone to Paris as a soldier at the end of World War II — he was an army cook — and had eaten in a couple of relatively fancy restaurants (considering the times), which he’d enjoyed a good deal and could still talk about in tiresome detail to anyone who’d listen. Since then, of course, he’d visited other good restaurants. It wasn’t that, discovering fine food, he’d lost all perspective. The first times, in Paris, had taught him that food could be “art,” a fact he never tired of mentioning; but it hadn’t turned his heart to exotic dishes, in spite of what you may think when I come to the event this story must eventually lead to. What he’d ordered in Paris, both times, was steak, which turned out to be bifteck au poivre, and it had taught him that food should be wonderful, not necessarily outlandish. Both times, he said, he’d praised the food, the waiter, and the chef so lavishly that in the end they’d insisted he had to be Canadian. That too was a revelation, that food made peace between nations.

So now, every other week or so, Arnold would come up with a new “Friday night chef’s special”—Peking duck, beef Wellington, rack of lamb, salmon mousse — which always ran out before the evening was half over and which gradually made Dellapicallo’s restaurant somewhat famous in and around our town, so that if somebody came home from Viet Nam, or cousins came in from Syracuse or somewhere, or a bunch of old ladies wanted a nice place to go, Dellapicallo’s was the first place they thought of.