White Truffles in Winter: A Novel Read online

  Exasperating. She picked up his cookbook. “And what page would that be on? This spicing essence?”

  “None. A chef without mystery is merely a cook.”

  DELPHINE HAD NOT SEEN ESCOFFIER FOR THREE DAYS, ever since she’d taken a turn for the worse, but she could hear her husband in his room: the shuffle of his feet on the wooden floors, the snap and hum of his radio playing late into the night, all that talk about that man, Hitler, and even the scratch of pen nib on paper. Now that she was completely immobile it was amazing what could be heard. The world around her suddenly was loud and glaring. And garishly fragrant—the sweet scent of tuberose that lingered after her great-grandchildren’s kisses brought her to tears.

  The lives of stones, she thought. How rich they must be.

  Outside her window, the vagueness of night obscured everything, heightened everything. In the narrow winding streets below she could hear the small betrayals of lovers who sat in the cafés along the famous square Place d’Armes. She could smell the food set before them on the domino rows of tables. Most of it was Monégasque, Monaco’s peasant food, a food that she’d come to love so well.

  And so, the time between 4 p.m. and 9 p.m. was marked not by minutes but by course after course: oignons à la Monégasque, the deeply spiced sweet and sour salad of onions and raisins, butter-rich pastries stuffed with pumpkin and rice, and the small hot socca pancakes made from chickpea flour. And grilled prawns, olive oil, thin-skinned lemons, orange water, anise seed, garlic, small black olives—the scent of them twined with the sea breeze, became memory. Delphine was a young wife again, leaning into a soft kiss at the moment of daybreak; a young mother with three small children at her feet, her youngest son, Daniel, was still alive, had not been to war, and Victoria was still Queen. Every Christmas, every New Year, every Easter, and every birthday came back to her. Every moment the sun warmed her skin she relived dish after dish.

  Her nurses claimed they could not smell a thing.

  “And it is impossible to hear anything at Place d’Armes from here; it is too far away,” one said.

  “You are only dreaming,” said the other.

  Delphine knew they were wrong. Even sleep had a dark lavender scent.

  But that night she could not sleep. Indian mangos, the peach-sweet air of them, would not let her rest. When Escoffier was at The Savoy, six cases were delivered to her. The card was, of course, signed “Mr. Boots.”

  “Why would the mysterious Mr. Boots feel I need so many mangos and a side of Scottish beef, the rare Aberdeen-Angus breed, two cases of vintage champagne, and fifty pounds of small yellow butter potatoes from Sweden?”

  “Perhaps he is smitten.”

  “Perhaps he is.”

  The food was always so lush, so extravagant, and somehow so intimate—erotic in its excess—her face went hot with the memory.

  And then Escoffier coughed. And even though he was not in the room she could hear him as clearly as if he were standing beside her.

  “Do you remember the mangos?” she asked. She thought she was whispering but the scratching of the pen nib stopped. “You must remember them.”

  She could hear him push the chair away from his desk, slowly stand and then lean against the wall. The floorboards creaked.

  “The mangos?” she said again.

  She could hear him breathing. He cleared his throat and then, quietly, said, “They were sweet, were they not?”

  “It was a sweetness more intense than anything I have ever known.”

  And then the room fell quiet. The two sat listening to the familiar sound of each other’s breath. Without words, there was comfort: a sonata, tone poem of silence and knowing.

  After a time, Escoffier said, “The Hindus believe that mangos are a true sign that perfection is attainable.”

  She thought of the mangos with their smooth marbled skin, the carmine and field grass green of them, and then the flesh itself, that vivid orange, and then, each bite, the juice sliding down her arm.

  “Perfection,” she said. “And yet, after a few days they slowly began to shrivel and turn black. Just one spot, then two, then soon the fragrance shifted from sweet to rancid and the fruits themselves became smaller and smaller with each passing day. It was as if the rain within them was returned back to the heavens, bit by bit, until all the sweetness was gone.”

  “Perhaps,” he said, “the rain slowly abandons all of us.”

  She could hear Escoffier lower himself down onto his chair, that familiar creak of the springs. She waited for him to begin writing again, but he did not. She sat listening for him to say something else. Anything. But he remained silent. Eventually, she closed her eyes and just before she tumbled into the darkness of sleep he said, “Nothing is real except for dreams and love.”

  THE NEXT DAY, LANGOUSTINES WERE THE FIRST TO BE delivered. There was an entire bushel of them—dozens of tiny beasts industriously crawling over and under each other until they made their way out of the basket and onto the kitchen floor. Each slim lobster was the color of hibiscus, an orange pink, with long slender claws and black peppercorn eyes. They snapped at whatever they could, mostly Sabine. It was, after all, her fault that they were there.

  “The old man has not a single sou and dozens to feed,” Sabine told the butcher when she brought him the tomato sauce in exchange for the chickens. The butcher then told the greengrocer who told the dry grocer who told his cousins who worked at the Grand Hôtel and the cousins told the directeur Bobo.

  “That will not do,” Bobo said and paid the fishmonger from his own pocket and the langoustines arrived. Pinching.

  “Devil bugs,” Sabine called them as they pinched at her hands, her red ankle-strapped shoes, and grabbed onto the hem of her starched white apron.

  The fishmonger had once worked for Escoffier at The Savoy in London. It was his job to wrap the leftover food for Papa to give to the Petites Soeurs des Pauvres, the Little Sisters of the Poor, so that they could feed the destitute. And so, he pulled the langoustines from the boat himself and delivered them to Sabine along with several bottles of chilled champagne, the national drink of Monaco.

  “The rich are no longer hungry. Papa is.”

  As is Sabine, she thought.

  After the fishmonger left, Sabine popped open a bottle of champagne; it overflowed onto the floor and onto the langoustines and their snapping pink claws. She poured a teacup full, pulled Le Guide Culinaire from the shelf and sat. Lit a cigarette. The insidious creatures crawled over her shoes.

  “Go ahead. Enjoy yourself,” she said. “In a moment, I am going to kill you all.”

  Sabine felt only a slight tug of remorse. She had had enough with this household. First there were tomatoes everywhere and then the insistent flies and now this. She wished she had never heard the name Escoffier.

  Sabine took a long drink of champagne. The house was quiet in a way that made it feel abandoned or perhaps merely exhausted. Madame Escoffier had been ill for so long, more than four years. Death had lost its exotic sheen. It was no longer a stranger who arrives unexpectedly speaking a new language, changing schedules, and shifting plans. It had overstayed. Sorrow had become routine. The family was bored by it. After all, there are only so many times a person can say goodbye, and so many tears that can be shed with sincerity. Now no one knew what to say.

  “Au revoir!”

  “À bientôt!”

  “Adieu!”

  “Salut!”

  “Ciao, arrière-grand-mère!”

  It was embarrassing.

  And so slowly the family had taken their leave. Sabine hadn’t even noticed. That morning, as usual, she’d set the dining room table for breakfast. She’d filled the sideboard with what little they had—a few soft-poached eggs sprinkled with chives, stacks of toasted oat bread, a squat jar of wild plum jam, and a pot of
chicory coffee—but no one came to eat. Even the tray that was delivered to Madame Escoffier was brought back untouched. At midday, Sabine warmed the poached eggs in butter until they were hardboiled and then pounded them into a smooth paste seasoned with anchovies and mustard and spread them on the leftover toast. Again, no one came.

  By the time the langoustines arrived that day, it was clear to Sabine that everyone had left except for Escoffier, Delphine, and the two nurses—she could hear them all moving on the floor above her. Everyone else was gone. For how long was uncertain. No one bothered to tell her anything. No matter. Sabine topped off her teacup with more champagne and opened Escoffier’s cookbook to the “Fish and Seafood” section while the langoustines snapped.

  “Are you crayfish or lobsters?” she asked. The shellfish were silent on that matter. Sabine decided that they could be lobsters for her purposes. They looked just like them. After taking the size difference into account, with just a few adjustments to the recipe, dinner would be, finally, a decent meal. It would be the type of meal one would expect in the house of Escoffier.

  “I must advise all of you to take a moment to consider your eternal soul,” she said to the assembled crustaceans and her stomach growled.

  The first recipe in the lobster section was for Homard à l’Américaine. Since Sabine was wearing her red high heels that looked like the dancing shoes of that American Ginger Rogers, she decided that American-style devil bugs were fitting. It began:

  “The first essential condition is that the lobster should be alive. Sever and slightly crush claws, cut the tail into sections, split the shell lengthwise. Put aside the intestines and the coral.”

  Alive?

  Even for Sabine that seemed a bit cruel. Yes, the langoustines were both annoying and delicious but tearing them apart was unseemly. Her grandmother usually made a Monégasque dish of them. It was peasant food, and not suitable for the likes of Escoffier, but it was so delicious it was known to bring tears to her father’s eyes. Sabine could not remember how the shellfish were disposed of, probably with a prayer or two, but was sure that her frail grandmother did not hack devil bugs apart with a cleaver. Sabine took a hard drag from her cigarette and blew the smoke into tiny rings. The champagne made her feel exotic.

  The next recipe began, “Section the live lobster as directed above.”

  It was disheartening. Over and over again, each dish began with the chopping apart of live lobsters. Crayfish met with only a slightly better fate, often being boiled alive.

  Sabine poured herself another teacup of champagne. Escoffier stepped into the kitchen and stopped. With her wild hair twisted upon her head, the champagne bottle in one hand and the langoustines at her feet, the sight of her took his breath away. She stood quickly, jostled the champagne.

  “I thought there would be no harm . . . ”

  “Life is not worth living if one cannot break rules. True?”

  Her father told her that Escoffier was notorious, and it wasn’t difficult to believe.

  “Now, tell me, you are wearing the shoes of a fashionable young woman and yet with your hair done in this manner you seem to be from another generation. This was your father’s idea, was it not? He believes that I am in the throes of dementia?”

  “Of course.”

  “What did he tell you about Miss Bernhardt?”

  “That every year for decades you created private dinners for her birthday and you were the only guest in attendance. You were quite obviously lovers.”

  “And how does he know this?”

  “He says that everyone knows this.”

  “And do you believe this gossip?”

  “Of course.”

  Escoffier leaned over and put out her cigarette. “Your father has told you a great many things but, apparently, nothing about the humility of servants.”

  “No. He mentioned it. Demanded it, in fact. But it is not an idea that I am willing to embrace.”

  “Understandable. What else do you know of Miss Bernhardt?”

  “She was famous for being famous.”

  That was all Sabine knew. She was ten years old when Sarah died. Like many, her family traveled to Paris to mourn her. She could still remember the crowded streets, the smell of sweat and tobacco pressed in on her, and the line of horse-drawn carriages draped in velvet and roses. She remembered waiting for hours squeezed between rough wool and quick hearts and when the doors of Sarah’s house were finally thrown open the cheer of the crowd shook her bones. She remembered the crush of bodies as thousands poured in through the front doors and into the darkened parlor filled with flowers and lit by hundreds of candles. And Sarah. She remembered Sarah lying in state in the coffin that she claimed to have slept in most of her life. Her long hair dyed bright copper. Her lips and cheeks painted pink. In the dim light, she looked more like a child than a woman of nearly eighty.

  She looked like Sabine and it frightened the girl.

  Around Sarah’s neck was the cross and ribbon of the Legion of Honor, which Sabine’s father explained was the highest honor France had to bestow.

  “And she was rich, too,” he said.

  Money. Always money.

  Escoffier poured Sabine a bit more champagne.

  “So if I call you Sarah when no one is around?”

  “Sabine.”

  He patted her on the hand and smiled. “You must hate your father so.”

  She took a drink. “It has been said. Yes.”

  Escoffier picked up a langoustine that had crawled onto the chair, placed it gently on the table, straightened the crease in his pants and sat across from her. “I must tell you that I knew the very moment I saw you in the kitchen with the tomatoes why you were sent here but that does not mean that I do not enjoy the deception.”

  “Still. Sabine.”

  “Very well.”

  Above their heads the voices grew louder. Escoffier picked up the tiny lobster. “Your new friends are?”

  “A gift from Adrien, the fishmonger. At least, that is what he said. It seems to me, however, that he was not the type of man to give a gift like this. I think someone else paid for it. But, he claimed it was from him. A gift.”

  “A gift?”

  The irony did not escape him. After spending his life giving to, defending, and raising money for the poor he was penniless himself.

  Escoffier looked out the window. He couldn’t see the cobalt sea; fog veiled the sun. All he could see were crows: oil black and screeching as they fought over the scraps of the uneaten sandwiches that Sabine had left out for the cats.

  “Did you know that in English a group of crows is called a ‘murder’? I believe that is the only bit of poetry in the entire language although I cannot be sure. I only know a few words and never learned to speak it. To speak English would be to think in English and thereby to cook in English. I would have been ruined forever.

  “French. Always French.”

  He held his hand over his heart, as if saluting the flag.

  Sabine took a champagne glass from the pantry and poured him a drink.

  Escoffier watched the perfect bubbles rise in the glass and then picked up a langoustine and placed it headfirst into the wine. He did this without malice. It was a simple natural movement, like a wave of a hand or a kiss. The small lobster struggled, slapping its tail against the sides of the crystal. Sabine made the sign of the cross.

  “The champagne is for them,” he said. “It is the most humane way. The alcohol slows them.”

  “That is not in Le Guide Culinaire.”

  “The editor removed it. ‘Who would waste good champagne?’ he said. “But he is dead now, so it will appear in my new book. There are some benefits to longevity.”

  Overhead, the floorboards in the hallway outside of Madame Escoffier’s room creaked. And the
n, quite clearly, the old woman began crying. The sound seemed to catch in Escoffier’s throat. He coughed until there were tears in his eyes. He wiped them away quickly. He seemed smaller, diminished. The langoustine stopped struggling.

  Sabine poured him a glass of water. His hand shook while he drank.

  “They are not like us, these creatures,” he said. “They have no brain. No vocal cords with which to scream. They have no sensitivity to pain. They live. They die. For them it is that simple.”

  He took the creature out of the glass. “A bowl.”

  Sabine took two large glass bowls from the sideboard and placed them on the table in front of Escoffier. She filled them both with champagne, and then langoustines. They watched as the small lobsters frantically struggled and then, one by one, began to slow down. Quiet.

  “Is it true that when you name a dish for someone they become immortal?”

  “If the dish is very good and can be made by an unskilled chef it will live on.”

  “So even I could make it?”

  “If only I can make it, it will die with me.”

  “But if I—”

  “If you could make it, it would be a miracle.”

  “True.”

  Above them Madame Escoffier’s sobs settled into a rhythm. Sabine picked up the cookbook again. “Are they lobsters or crayfish?”

  Escoffier closed the book. “Put the Windsor pan on the front burner and add to it equal parts of butter and olive oil, just enough to sauté.”

  He took a large chef’s knife from the rack above the kitchen sink and began to pierce and then chop the drunken langoustines into small pieces with a singular focus. The blade moved quickly through the head, then shells. He had no remorse. Sabine could see that her devil bugs did not cry out or even react. They were severed cleanly. The claws and tail moved a bit, and then nothing.

  She filled the bottom of the pan with oil and butter.