Comfort Me with Apples and Tender at the Bone: Two Culinary Treasures

Mrs. Peavey went downstairs every night carrying a huge silver goblet of ice water. The moisture pearled and beaded on the outside of the sterling, which she set on the tile floor next to her bed. My mother, in one of her Ozzie and Harriet moments, had put red and green ticktacktoe linoleum on the basement floor of our summer house; after that she insisted on calling it the rec room. When Mrs. Peavey came to live with us, the rec room became her bedroom, and she always set the goblet right in the middle of the center square.

Unlike Louvinia or Winnie, who preceded her as the family maid, Mrs. Peavey was never called by her first name. And unlike them, my mother did not refer to her as “the girl.”

My mother loved telling Mrs. Peavey stories, even the ones that showed her off to disadvantage. Like the time she asked Mrs. Peavey to make a sweet-potato casserole topped with marshmallows for Thanksgiving dinner and Mrs. Peavey replied that she wouldn’t dream of it. “A horrid middle-class concoction,” she said firmly.

Once Mrs. Peavey insisted on ironing the sheets when my grandmother came to visit. “But we don’t iron our sheets!” my mother protested. “Just because we live like animals,” Mrs. Peavey replied, implacably moving the iron across the smooth white cotton, “is no reason for us to impose our habits on others. A guest is a guest!”

And of course my mother loved complaining about Mrs. Peavey’s habit of turning her day off into a week. Mom’s voice always went down to a whisper when she talked about that. She’d glance in my direction and put a finger to her lips; I understood that whatever Mrs. Peavey did, it was terrible. I couldn’t imagine what it might be. The next time my mother’s voice became audible she was always saying, “And of course that’s why she’s reduced to being a maid.” And then she’d laugh a little bitterly and add, “And my maid at that. Who else would put up with it?”

But the most famous story didn’t involve my mother at all; it was about the time Mrs. Peavey’s three sons came to visit in a chauffeured limousine. It was summer and we were in the country when the long black car came gliding up our driveway. “She knew right away who it was!” my mother always told her rapt audience. “And she asked Ruthie to go out and tell them to go away!”

I saw my reflection in the shiny window of the car, a serious eight-year-old with brown eyes, dirt on both cheeks, clutching a scrawny orange kitten. There was a big square patch on one knee where I had scraped it falling off my bike, and my curly hair was wild. I could see my pot belly sticking out beneath my torn “Singing Oaks” T-shirt and I sucked in my breath as the window silently disappeared.

I peered into the cool darkness where the glass had been. “We promise to only keep her for a minute,” said a voice inside the car. It had come from the man nearest the window. His long sad face looked very old to me, and as he raked his bony fingers through receding gray hair I retreated. “I’ll tell her,” I said, turning so fast that the gravel scrunching beneath my feet flew up and hit the shiny silver hubcaps. I hugged Marmalade as I walked across the driveway and up the flagstone path. Banging the screen door behind me, I went into the narrow pine-paneled kitchen, where Mrs. Peavey was pulling a blackberry pie out of the ancient oven.

“No,” she said. “No, no, no.”

I went back to tell them. The sons were still sitting morosely in the limousine but this time a different one spoke. He had a solid, self-satisfied face and shining silvery hair. Handing a silver dollar out the window he said, “I’ll give you five more if you can get her to just come out here.”

When I showed Mrs. Peavey the money she looked down at her swollen ankles puffing out of her sensible shoes, looked at me, and said, “I see Palmer hasn’t changed.” Her face puckered as if she had eaten a lemon. “If I were you, I wouldn’t take his money. Tell him that he should be ashamed of himself. Tell him I wouldn’t come out for all the tea in China.”

I gave him the message, but I couldn’t bring myself to give him the dollar back. I squeezed the coin hard, pressing it against the inside of my palm. Then the third son gave it a try. The best-looking of the three, he had rosy cheeks, black hair, and deep blue eyes that he fixed on me. “Is she in the kitchen?” he asked. I nodded solemnly. “Does she still make the world’s best brownies?” I nodded again. “I used to be her best helper,” he went on. “I bet you’re her best helper now.” He smiled, showing all his teeth, and said pleadingly, “Don’t you think a mother ought to talk to her children? Tell my mother I miss her. Give her a kiss for me.”

Mrs. Peavey looked sad when I planted the kiss on her papery white cheek. I threw my arms around her solid body and inhaled her powdery scent. “Tell Potter I miss him too,” she said. “Tell him I love him. And tell him I certainly won’t see any of them!” Then she untied her apron, threw it on the counter, and went down to the basement.

The three sons murmured, “What do we do now?” when they heard her final message. Then the window rose, silently and majestically cutting off my view. The chauffeur turned the large black car around. I stood watching for a long time as it disappeared into the trees that edged our narrow, twisting driveway.

The next morning Mrs. Peavey left for her day off. Our house was less than fifty miles from New York but Mrs. Peavey always insisted on going “back to civilization,” making her disdain for our shabby summer house in the Connecticut woods very clear. My mother drove Mrs. Peavey to the station and watched with a worried look as she laboriously hauled herself up the steps of the New York Central train.

“I hope she’s coming back,” my mother said quietly as we climbed back into our old Ford station wagon.

“Did you have a fight?” I asked.

“No,” said Mom.

“Then why are you worried?” I asked. My mother refused to say.

Mrs. Peavey didn’t come back the next day, or the next, or the day after that. My mother banged around the kitchen, serving bloody roast beef, hard potatoes, and peas that were still frozen in the middle. As she vacuumed she murmured imprecations, swearing that this was absolutely it. But when a taxi pulled into the driveway my mother watched silently as Mrs. Peavey came through the living room and walked down the stairs to the rec room. When she came back up wearing her white uniform, Mrs. Peavey polished the candlesticks, made cold poached salmon with dill sauce for my mother and a Schwarzwalder Kirschtorte for my father. Then she read me four stories in French about Bécassine, the foolish peasant. And nobody said anything about anyone being fired.

Summer ended and we went back to New York. I liked it better there. Mrs. Peavey and I shared a bedroom, our twin beds placed toe to toe. Some nights after the lights were out and the cars eleven stories below us were sending shadows racing across the pink ceiling Mrs. Peavey told me stories about her childhood in Baltimore. As I listened I imagined a miniature Mrs. Peavey with long golden ringlets visiting the stables and going to sea in her father’s yacht. I could smell the entrance to the pillared house with its waxed wooden floors and bowls of roses. I could see the blue satin sash on Mrs. Peavey’s pale dress as she danced around a candle-covered Christmas tree. And I could hear the string quartet that came every Sunday to play in the music room.

But I especially loved it when she talked about her wedding.

Mrs. Peavey wore a dress of pale white silk and a veil of lace made by silent French nuns. Her satin train was eight feet long, her carriage was drawn to church by six snow-white horses, and ten men with silver trumpets played as she walked down the aisle. Afterward the guests dined in pink tents on a green lawn and danced in a pavilion at the edge of the bay. “And then,” said Mrs. Peavey, “we cruised off to visit England, France, and Germany.”

Before that summer all the stories ended with the sun setting over a European sea, but in the fall Mrs. Peavey began including Carter, Palmer, and Potter Peavey in her stories. I liked Potter best: he was the one who snuck into the kitchen to help Mrs. Peavey kick out the cook. “Mr. Peavey thought it was slightly eccentric when I started taking cooking lessons,” said Mrs. Peavey. “But he wouldn’t hear of my actually cooking. It just wasn’t done. So Potter and I devised other methods.”

I could see the two of them hustling the cook out the door and dancing around the huge tiled kitchen. “It was such fun!” said Mrs. Peavey. “Before long I became known for having the best cook in Baltimore, and people clamored for invitations.”

When she talked about her kitchen escapades, Mrs. Peavey’s voice always grew younger. “Once the British ambassador came from Washington to dinner,” she said dreamily. “We were only twelve at dinner that night so we decided to honor him by cooking dishes from Queen Victoria’s wedding dinner.”

I watched jealously as she and Potter constructed complicated dishes. I loved the words: galantine, forcemeat, aspic, florentine … I saw them building the iced sweet pudding that was the dessert for the evening, holding my breath as the cherry- and almond-filled creation came tumbling precariously out of its old-fashioned mold. “I was so worried that the cook would spoil it,” Mrs. Peavey admitted, “that I asked the governess to feed the children in the kitchen. I knew Potter could fix anything that went wrong.”

“The cook,” she added darkly, “was always the problem. But the night of the British ambassador went very smoothly. The truth is, she wasn’t much of a cook. She even asked me to teach her French cuisine. I tried,” said Mrs. Peavey, sadly shaking her head, “but she just didn’t have much imagination.”

Watching Mrs. Peavey making gougère in the kitchen, I wondered what imagination had to do with it. Cooking, it seemed to me, was mostly a matter of organization. “Ah,” she said, “it is only because you have imagination that you say that.”

She stirred eggs and cheese into the batter and bent to light the oven. “Be careful!” I called, remembering the time my mother set her hair on fire. Mrs. Peavey straightened up and looked directly at me. “I am not your mother,” she said succinctly. “I do not turn on the gas and then go into the living room looking for matches. Normal people do not set themselves on fire.”

And then, as she leaned into the oven to put the gougère on the rack, she added, “And normal people do not allow eight-year-olds to baby-sit for themselves.”

Mrs. Peavey did not approve of the way my mother had solved her baby-sitter problem. “I just pay Ruthie to take care of herself on the maid’s nights off,” my mother bragged to her friends. “She’s so grown-up.”

I certainly didn’t want to disappoint my mother. So I never said a word as I watched my mother and father dressing for dinner, just held my breath and listened to their usual going-out-to-dinner ritual, wishing that just this once Mom would win.

The ritual went like this. As she looked at the black dress hanging in the closet, Mom would say, “You know, dear, I don’t really feel very well. Why don’t you go without me?”

And Dad would look concerned and tell her how dreary the evening would be without her. “It won’t be any fun without you, darling,” he’d say, urging her to come, for him. I would hang on every word, willing them not to leave. But in the end, no matter how hard I hoped, my mother always allowed herself to be persuaded.

“Don’t go to bed too late, Pussycat,” she’d say gaily, walking out the door in a cloud of perfume. As soon as they were gone I would begin running frantically around the house, much too scared to go to sleep, looking nervously in all the closets and underneath the beds.

One night the doorbell rang as I was doing this and I jumped as if someone had snuck up and touched my shoulder. Who could it be? Walking stealthily to the door, I shouted, “Who’s there?” in a very deep voice; I didn’t want the person on the other side to think I was a kid.

“It’s me, Ruthie,” said a voice I didn’t recognize.

“Who’s me?” I asked, wondering how to handle this. It would be embarrassing to turn the person away, frightening to let her in.

“Mrs. Peavey!” she replied in a buoyant tone.

I wasn’t tall enough to reach the peephole so I opened the door a crack. Sure enough, it was Mrs. Peavey, with a tall gaunt man dressed entirely in black who was “My friend Mr. Holly.”

I was relieved to see a familiar grown-up. Mrs. Peavey and Mr. Holly settled themselves in the living room. Mr. Holly admired my mother’s tree and peered at the fading fall leaves my mother had wired to its branches. I listened to them making small talk, happy to have their company and too young to wonder what they were doing there. But even I could tell that Mrs. Peavey was not quite herself. Her pale skin was flushed and she was talking more animatedly than usual. Then she asked if I would like to come out with them for a little while.

I instantly understood that my parents were not to know about this excursion. It was a school night. More than that, I knew that wherever we were going was not a place my parents would approve of. As we were walking to the door Mrs. Peavey stopped and asked, as if it were an afterthought, “Do you have any money in your piggy bank?”

I checked; there was $7.27 in dimes, pennies, and quarters, and the silver dollar I had gotten from Palmer.

“Bring it along,” said Mrs. Peavey gaily. As I handed her the money she said, “I’ll pay you back next week.” She smelled like peppermint LifeSavers.

It was a dark, chilly night. We walked west on Tenth Street to Sixth Avenue and made a left. Just across from the Women’s House of Detention was a sign that said GOOGIE’S beneath a huge pair of red neon spectacles.

“We’re going to a bar?” I asked.

“Why not?” asked Mrs. Peavey. I could have offered any number of reasons, but decided not to. We went in and Mr. Holly lifted me up to one of the tall, Naugahyde-covered barstools. He ordered Perfect Manhattans for them and a Shirley Temple for me.

The air was cool, smoky, and dusty blue. Mrs. Peavey was so jolly it seemed as if she had put on a new personality. When she excused herself to go to the bathroom she went down the length of the bar with a word and a smile for everybody along the way. Watching her, Mr. Holly leaned over and said, “What a wonderful woman!”

I could smell the sweet liquor on his breath, mingled faintly with aftershave and cigarettes. I nodded. “I tell her that I’m not good enough for her,” he said mournfully, looking more skeletal than ever, “but she says that she has had enough of being rich to last her a lifetime.”

I kept very still, thinking that perhaps if I didn’t say anything he might keep talking.

“Imagine that husband of hers leaving all the money to the boys!” mused Mr. Holly, almost to himself. “He was going to be so smart, avoiding the taxes. And then those little pricks thought they could tell her how to live! Why—”

He stopped abruptly as Mrs. Peavey returned. “One more drink,” she said cheerfully, “and then I think it’s time to take Ruthie home. She has school tomorrow.”

The bartender draped half a dozen cherries around the rim of my Shirley Temple and I sipped it slowly, wishing Mrs. Peavey would go back to the bathroom. It had never occurred to me to ask if Mr. Peavey was still alive, or wonder how he had died. But I got no more information that evening.

Mrs. Peavey did not come back the next day. Or the next. For almost a week I came home from school every day, put my key into the lock, and wondered what I would find on the other side of the door. I’d stick my nose in first and sniff hopefully, wishing for the smell of cooking. Instead it was just my increasingly irritable mother with a long list of errands for me to do and lamb chops, again, for dinner.

On the third day I ran to Mrs. Peavey’s closet to make sure her dresses were still there. I put my face against the sagging cotton shapes with their pale tiny flowers and inhaled the reassuring smell. Then I went into the bedroom, where my mother was polishing her short nails with blue-red polish, and asked if I could make dinner.

“You?” she asked, waving her hands in the air so her fingernails would dry. “What will you make?”

“Wiener schnitzel,” I said boldly. “And green salad. And brownies for dessert.”

My mother looked amused. “Why not?” she said. I held my hand out for the money and she nodded toward her nails and told me to take what I needed from her wallet.

I pulled out a twenty-dollar bill and walked up the street to the Daitch Supermarket on University Place. As I walked through the store I experienced a delicious moment of freedom. I felt very grown-up as I wandered the aisles. I strolled past the meat counter and found some pale, pearly scallops of veal. I bought bread crumbs and a lemon; I was going to impress my father by making his favorite dish.

But walking home, the bag of groceries banging against my leg, I panicked. I had forgotten to ask the butcher to pound the meat, and I didn’t know how to do it myself. And how was I going to make the bread crumbs stick? My mother would be no help. I needed Mrs. Peavey.

Amazingly, when I got home, she was there. The air in the apartment was heavy and it crackled as it swirled around my mother and Mrs. Peavey, but I had missed the storm. When I walked into the kitchen Mrs. Peavey lifted the bag of groceries out of my arms and said simply, “What are we going to make for dinner?”

“I’m going out,” my mother called from the hall. Mrs. Peavey did not answer. My mother slammed the door.

“Wiener schnitzel,” I said.

“Ah,” said Mrs. Peavey, “the secret is getting the veal thin and the oil hot. The Viennese are really wonderful cooks.” As she moved around the kitchen she hummed a German children’s song about a horse and rider.

“Where were you?” I asked. “Why didn’t you come back?”

Mrs. Peavey took the big iron skillet out of the cupboard and unwrapped the meat. “Get some waxed paper,” she ordered. She tore off a large piece of the paper and laid it on the counter. She put the meat on it and placed another layer of paper on top. “Now watch,” she commanded.

She lifted the skillet above her head and brought it crashing down on the meat. The sound reverberated throughout the small kitchen. She picked up the skillet and showed me how thin the meat was. “You have to do it a couple of times to get the meat really, really thin,” she said. “That’s all there is to it.” She lifted the skillet again and brought it down on the paper; the meat had become even thinner.

When all the veal had been pounded, she got a platter and three large soup dishes out of the cupboard. She filled one dish with flour, one with bread crumbs, and broke an egg into the third. Seasoning each dish with salt and pepper, she dredged the cutlets in the flour and then dipped each one in the beaten egg. She handed me the first cutlet and said, “You do the bread crumbs.” I carefully rolled the sticky piece of meat in crumbs and laid it on the platter.

When all the meat had been breaded, Mrs. Peavey put the platter in the refrigerator. “It’s much better if you let the meat rest before you cook it,” she said, rinsing her hands and patting them on her apron. “Don’t forget that. This is your father’s favorite dish and somebody in the house should know how to make it properly. Here, I’ll write the recipe down for you.”

I didn’t like the sound of that and I sat down in one of the rickety metal chairs and watched sadly as she wrote.

When she was done, Mrs. Peavey poured me a glass of cranberry juice, filled her silver goblet with ice and water, and sat down at the kitchen table. “I thought I’d have longer to explain,” she said at last. “But it’s not your mother’s fault.”

“Explain what?” I asked.

“Why I’m here,” she said simply. “Why I’m leaving.”

Something inside me had known that she had not come back for good. “Don’t leave me,” I wanted to say, but I couldn’t. I just looked at her dumbly. “I can’t be a maid,” she said. “I just can’t. It is time for me to make a change.”

“What will you do?” I asked.

She took a deep breath and looked straight at me. “I am going to do what I should have done when Mr. Peavey died. I am going to be a cook.”

She looked proud and noble as she said it. I believed that she could. “What about Mr. Holly?” I asked.

“He is not part of my plan,” she said softly. “I will have to change other aspects of my life as well.”

I wasn’t sure what she meant by that, but I pictured Mr. Holly in the permanent midnight of Googie’s. Then I pictured Mrs. Peavey in the big tiled kitchen in Baltimore. They did not go together.

“You mean you won’t be going to Googie’s anymore?” I asked.

“I will not,” she said. She hugged me. “I’ve joined an organization that will help me keep my resolution.” She sat up straight, as if someone had just told her to pay attention to her posture. She folded her hands on the table.

“Now,” she said, “there are three things I want to tell you before I leave. The first is not to let other people tell you how to live your life.”

“You mean,” I asked, “that you should not have pretended that the cook was doing the cooking?”

“Something like that,” she replied. “The second is that you have to look out for yourself.” I thought of her three sons in their big limousine.

“And the third?” I asked.

“Don’t forget the extra pastry when you make beef Wellington.” She reached out and hugged me. The she picked up her silver goblet and clinked it hard against my glass of juice. The sound was pure and lovely.

MRS. PEAVEY